Reactions to Roosevelt

Not since the days of Woodrow Wilson has a speech by a U. S. President received such attention abroad as President Roosevelt's hard-hitting, anti-dictator message to Congress last week.

Most sympathetic foreign reaction to the Roosevelt message came from Britain. British Broadcasting Corp. aired the full text for its own listeners. Salient passages were also sent into Germany, Italy and France during the nightly "straight news" period from the powerful Daventry transmitter. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who has been soundly scored for months by many Britons for not saying what Mr. Roosevelt did, jumped on the Washington speech for a political free ride. He adopted the Roosevelt sentiments about the aggressor nations as his own.

The press of other nations, varying with the degrees of Government control over them, carried the speech complete, summarized or emasculated. German news-sheets professed to be astonished at Mr. Chamberlain's endorsement of the Roosevelt attack, concluded that the British Prime Minister is now taking orders from Washington. "President Roosevelt apparently expects every Englishman to do his duty," gibed the Berliner Boersen-Zeitung. One German leader to take public note of the fact that the U. S. is now one of the Nazis' chief opponents was Karl Kaufmann, political leader of Hamburg, who warned that the U. S., along with Soviet Russia, Nazidom's longtime foe, is "the power centre of hostility against Germany."

At Burgos, capital of Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Insurgent Spain, the press blithely ducked Mr. Roosevelt's condemnation of aggressors and his recommendation that the U. S. neutrality law be revised to forestall them. "The shoe," remarked the Insurgent newsorgan, Voz de Espana, "does not fit Burgos."

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