Monday, May. 23, 1938
On Spain
To Secretary Hull last fortnight went a copy of a Senate Resolution introduced by North Dakota's Nye, proposing to end the embargo on arms shipments to the Spanish Government. Last week, after conferring with Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Hull sent the Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Key Pittman his reply. This was a terse note to the effect that having adopted a policy of "strict noninterference" the U. S. could not now consistently alter it; and that "even if the legislation applied to both parties, its enactment would still subject us to unnecessary risks we have so far avoided." Furthermore, wrote Secretary Hull, if Congress wanted to revise the Neutrality Act, it should not do so "piecemeal, in relation to a particular situation."
Read to the Committee, the Hull letter caused that body a few minutes later to vote 17-to-1 that consideration of the Nye Resolution be indefinitely postponed. Mr. Pittman symbolically tucked a copy of it away on a shelf for Capital cameramen (see cut).
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