Crafty Scheme?

Their sympathies aroused by the removal of 4,000 Basque refugee children from Bilbao to England last fortnight (TIME, May 31), a group of U. S. liberals revealed last week that they had formed an American Board of Guardians for Basque Refugee Children and were planning to import 500 young Basques to the U. S. Leaders in this movement of mercy were onetime New Dealer Gardner Jackson, New York's representative Caroline O'Day, Retiring President Mary Emma Woolley of Mt. Holyoke College, Professor James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University. A French ship was reported on its way to Bilbao to collect the young Basques. The U. S. Consulate General in Paris was being asked for 500 temporary visitors' visas. Offers of more than 2,700 homes for the young Basques had been received from U. S. sympathizers.

In England, Laborites and Protestant churchmen had been surprised and irritated by Roman Catholics who suggested that the 4,000 youngsters arriving at Southampton from Bilbao should be placed in Catholic homes, on the ground that most Basques are Catholic. In the U. S. last week, a different Catholic reaction met the O'Day-Woolley-Shotwell project. The U. S. hierarchy and Catholic press have had trouble enough explaining away the alliance between the Catholic Basques and the Godless "Reds" of Madrid. Making a fuss over 500 young Basques in the U. S. would, said U. S. Catholics, curry favor for the Leftist (Godless) cause in Spain. The secretary of the Massachusetts State Council of Knights of Columbus wrote to President Roosevelt:

"This rash and foolish plan [is] a real danger to the established neutrality policy of this nation. The unfortunate war victims . . . might easily be used for propaganda purposes by groups actively seeking sympathy for the Communist-Socialist regime of the Madrid-Valencia government. This crafty scheme is clearly an attempt to becloud an issue the truth of which Americans are at last learning, namely, that the Soviet-supported 'Loyalist' regime, in order to deceive the world of its real anti-Christian objective, is trying to make out that Franco's government is anti-Catholic because the Rebels are seeking to break up the unnatural and tragic alliance of the Basques with the Madrid Leftists."

Spokesmen for Boston's William Henry Cardinal O'Connell said he was against this "illadvised" plan and Massachusetts' politically sagacious young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. told the Catholic Order of Foresters in his constituency that he would voice his opposition to the U. S. State Department. That cautious office, in reply to a letter from the Basque Guardians, had already expressed its sympathies but pointed to certain immigration regulations; for example, the law that aliens whose passage is paid by an association or corporation are inadmissible to the U. S. While the Boston Catholics fumed and the Basque children waited, officialdom let the issue cool over the long Memorial Day week end.

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