For Peace & War

Simultaneously last week Congress moved to keep the U. S. out of the Next War, and to prepare it to fight with all its might if it gets in.

Reported out by a House-Senate conference committee, swiftly passed and flown to vacationing President Roosevelt for signing only five hours before expiration of the current temporary statute, was a new. permanent Neutrality Bill. Continued are present mandatory bans on furnishing of loans, credits, arms, munitions and implements of war to belligerents. In addition, U. S. citizens are forbidden to travel on belligerent vessels except as provided by the President, and U. S. merchantmen may not be armed. Contributions of food, clothing and medical aid, such as U. S. liberals are sending to Spam's embattled Loyalists, must have the President's approval.

The bill's prime new feature, down for a two-year try out, is its provision for putting all trade with nations at war on a "cash & carry" basis, i.e., requiring the purchaser to collect and pay for goods in U.S. ports. There the Administration, by packing the conference committee and by getting the report delayed until there was small time left for debate, pulled the teeth of the bill as it was passed by the Senate two months ago (TIME, March 15). Prodded by its four peace-at-any-price men--Nye, Clark, Vandenberg and Bone --the Senate voted in March to put cash & carry trade in force automatically at the beginning of war abroad. The conference, ostensibly on the insistence of the House managers, arranged to let the President decide if & when the rule should take effect.

Author of the cash & carry idea is no Congressman but a great mental as well as fiscal speculator, Bernard Mannes Baruch.

He thinks that shipping, not selling, is what embroiled the U. S. in the War. When the great peace tide set in two years ago and extremists began talking of slamming trade doors tight shut against another war, he suggested cash & carry as an alternative. Contemptuously, brilliant "Bernie" Baruch calls his cash & carry principle "scuttle & run." He wants peace, but his real idea of how to keep it is to have the U. S. so well-prepared to fight that no nation will dare to antagonize it. No man knows better than the onetime chairman of the War Industries Board that the biggest guns in modern war are not military but economic. He struggled heroically to hurl the U. S.'s vast economic power into the War but, forced to improvise methods as he went, his efforts fell short. Ever since 1919 he has been pounding away in speeches and articles for adoption in advance of a plan to mobilize the entire nation when war comes again. In 1935 a bill embodying his ideas was passed by the House, died in the Senate because North Dakota's Nye and his Munitions Committeemen wanted other terms. Last week, day after the House and Senate conferees agreed on the Neutrality Bill, the House Military Affairs Committee put Mr. Baruch's scheme back in circulation by agreeing to report out a new Mobilization Bill.

Best-publicized aim of this and similar measures is to "take the profits out of war." Instead of a flat 95% tax on abnormal war profits as proposed by the American Legion, the House Committee contemplates Government absorption of "all surplus profits" above a "fair, normal return," specific rates to be recommended by the Secretary of the Treasury within 30 days after Congress declares war.

The rest of the bill would make the President a near dictator in wartime. He could marshal under Government control industries, material resources, public services, stock and commodity exchanges. He could license every business except publishing. He could fix prices, wages, salaries, rents.

Men, Money, Materials and Morals are what "Bernie" Baruch wants mobilized for war. The committee virtually deleted one "M." of the fiercely-attacked proposal to let the President draft the nation's entire manpower for service in trench, field and factory, it left only a provision permitting industrial managers to be drafted into the Government's civilian service. But, testifying before the Military Affairs Committee last February, Mr. Baruch quoted with approval the advice once received by Napoleon that "the desire for perfection is the greatest weakness of the human spirit"--and the current bill would go far toward accomplishing his ends.

"Who can believe," cried he to the Committee, "that, had we been ready to fight in 1917, we should have been subjected to English interference and to German insolence that finally made us fight? With a law that would put in automatic operation a mobilization of our vast industrial power, what nation would dare attack us? By enacting such a law as this we shall have written for ourselves the best national peace insurance policy that any country ever had."

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