National Affairs: Dead Hare, Weeping Fox

No sooner had the Senate stopped the President cold on Neutrality last fortnight than Prime Minister Chamberlain announced Britain’s appeasing recognition of the “special requirements” of Japan’s armies in China. This seeming default by the greatest of the Democracies which Mr. Roosevelt wanted to support enabled California’s white-crested, Isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson to crow:

“The people of this country can thank God they have a Congress that hasn’t made the mistake thus far of intervening in present affairs in China or of being the ally of anybody.

“We would be in a hell of a fix if we had followed Mr. Chamberlain. We would be in the same fix we were in as a result of the Stimson incident [1932] when he and Sir John Simon endeavored to halt Japan’s early conquest of North China . . . holding the bag!”

But very shortly Senator Johnson’s chortle died in his throat. Secretary of State Hull emerged from a conference with President Roosevelt to announce, in diplomatic language as placid as its true import was severe, that the U. S. would now follow Britain’s gesture of appeasement with one of menace. Even as the U. S. fleet was moved back to the Pacific at a moment when Britain needed all her available sea power in European waters (TIME, April 24), so now the U. S., as Britain backed up to ease tension in China, stepped forward threatening a thrust that would open Japan’s military jugular if delivered.

After the broad Neutrality debates were finished last month, Chairman Key Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked the State Department whether an embargo on U. S. war materials for Japan would violate the treaty of commerce and navigation which has bound the U. S. and Japan since 1911. The State Department said yes, whereupon alert Republican Senator Vandenberg, well aware of popular sentiment against continued winking at Japan’s war in China (and war against Occidental interests there) offered a resolution to denounce that treaty, giving six months’ notice as provided in its articles. After the six months, an embargo could be voted, based on Japan’s violations of the Nine-Power treaty of 1922 which guaranteed China’s territorial and administrative integrity (and by inference, the Open Door). After a talk with the President last week, Secretary Hull asked Senator Pittman to put the Vandenberg resolution through the Senate, where sentiment for it was hot. Mr. Pittman deplored giving a Republican such a good break so Secretary Hull made the denunciation off the State Department’s own bat, suddenly dramatically, after dinner one evening in time to catch the next morning’s front pages. Immediate foreign effect was to shrink Japan’s swelled head over making Britain knuckle under and to start Japan fuming worriedly about her source of war materials after next January when the U. S. embargoes could be voted.

For the past two years Japan has bought from the U. S. well over half the high-test motor fuel, motors, machinery, scrap metals and scrap rubber essential to her Chinese conquest. Worse, now that the cat of U. S. sentiment was out of the diplomatic bag, the U. S. Treasury would be free at once to curtail purchases of Japanese gold and silver, chief source of the foreign exchange which Japan must nave to stay commercially alive. If a U. S. embargo were laid on imports from Japan as well as exports to her, no Japanese salesman might set foot in the U. S.—Japan’s best customer. Even before such an embargo, the U. S. Treasury might apply prohibitive new tariffs on the ground: 1) that U. S. products are discriminated against by Japan in Japan-ruled parts of China; 2) that certain Japanese products are Government subsidized. Last week, Secretary Morgenthau followed up Secretary Hull’s lead by promising to take a fresh look” at countervailing duties for Japan. Only way Japan might avert these consequences would be to change radically her behavior in China negotiate a new treaty. Last week her Charge d’Affaires in Washington, Yakichiro Suma, boasted that before six months are up Japan will have won her war and the famed “new situation” in China will be accomplished fact.

> Besides Britain’s step backward and Franklin Roosevelt’s political necessity, there were other good reasons for the U. S. to crack down on Japan last week. Ever since the Panay incident for which Japan paid $2,200,000 indemnity plus humble apologies, Japanese soldiers in China have been piling up indignities to U. S. citizens. The U. S. gesture of sending Ambassador Saito’s ashes home on a cruiser apparently lulled Japan into thinking the excesses of her bullyboys were being overlooked, forgiven. But Cordell Hull spoke up sharply last week when, within a few days: a U. S. woman and a boy were slapped by a Japanese sentry in Wuhu; two U. S. Missionaries were assaulted by a Japanese consular policeman in Hangchow; and in Hankow, Warrant Officer R. A. Baker from the U. S. Gunboat Guam (ominous name to Japanese) was roughed up by Japanese soldiers. The new, toughened attitude of the U. S. toward Japan was emphasized by orders to all U. S: consuls in China to compile and report all such Japanese affronts to U. S. nationals. The list was expected to exceed 600 incidents.

>Under the guns of the U. S. S. Augusta in Shanghai harbor last week, Admiral Harry Yarnell, commander of the U. S. Asiatic fleet, 64 come October and due to retire, turned over his duties to his Annapolis classmate, Admiral Thomas C. Hart. In Washington, the U. S. Congress and President Roosevelt signalized this event, and again emphasized their stern feelings toward Japan, by voting and assigning to Admiral Yarnell a Distinguished Service Medal for which the whole consideration was his unfailing success in showing the Japanese-in-China where they got off.

> Foreign Minister Wang Chung-Hui of China gently celebrated the U. S. sequel to Britain’s disappointing move by quoting a Chinese fable: “When the hare [China] is killed, the fox [Britain] weeps” (for that reminds him he is a mortal animal, too).