Reason & Emotion

WAR & PEACE

Germany's fleet plowed past the cliffs of Dover (see p. 23), Benito Mussolini called Franklin Roosevelt a Messianic meddler and Chairman Key Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a convivial vociferator* (see p. 26), but still there was no actual fighting in Europe last week. Meanwhile the U. S. people continued the process of making up their collective mind about War (how to provide against its coming) and Peace (how to preserve it). The process consisted, as it must in a democracy, of sound-offs hither & yon, pro & con. Most notable:

> A poll of the 22 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated a scant plurality of five for Senator Pittman's plan to rewrite the law (part of which expires May 1) on a strict cash & carry basis, permitting sales of any U. S. goods to all comers provided they pay in the U. S., transport in their own bottoms.

> After listening to conversation between Colonel Lindbergh & President Roosevelt at the White House, Rhode Island's Senator Green told friends that he would "advise any one against planning a trip to Europe this summer.''/-

> When Dean Helen Taft Manning of Bryn Mawr College--isolationist sister of Presidentially ambitious Senator Robert A. Taft who last week accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of "ballyhooing" war in order to play politics (see p. 21)--urged the same committee to stiffen the present neutrality law and make it more instead of less inflexible, arch-isolationist Senator Borah demanded: "Haven't the people [of the U. S.] already made up their minds who is right and who is wrong? The world is already at war. Already things have taken place which make other nations look on us as un-neutral. Do you think we can write permanent legislation at this time?"

> Dr. Walter Judd, medical missionary in China, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the adoption of Senator Pittman's plan would be disastrous to China. Said he: "Now we are furnishing Japan 50% of its war materials. One-third of the scrap iron that is being hurled upon civilian populations comes from the United States. Trucks, the most decisive single factor in Japanese advances, are supplied by us."

> Said Upton Close (Josef Washington Hall), author & lecturer on the Orient: "One good isolationist Senator is worth more to Japan than a whole division of soldiers."

> Dapper little Publisher Roy Wilson Howard of the Scripps-Howard chainpapers, fresh home from interviewing bigwigs all over Europe, declared that the greatest menace in Europe was the possibility that the French and English people would finally say: "Dear God, if we've got to fight this war, let's do it and get it over with. . . . Too much emotionalism and too little realism are being evidenced in the U. S. toward the entire European situation."

> Lecturing at Harvard, Park Commissioner Robert Moses of New York City said: "In practice, every American knows that we cannot remain absolutely aloof from another world conflict... we shall be lucky if this aid can be confined to money, materials and munitions as distinguished from men. . . ."

> Chairman Ernest Tener Weir of National Steel Corp. said: "Let us as a people keep our heads. Let us guard particularly against anybody sweeping us into war hysteria. For war, more than anything else, holds danger of actual dictatorship for America. . . ."

> Columnist Hugh Johnson wrote: "It occurred to me that for days and even weeks, I have been writing about all this dangerous business in a shrill high pitch. . . . If Hitler can wait a week, I can wait a day or two." To the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he said that the Roosevelt Administration is "a gambling Government. It has shot craps with Destiny . . . at least five times."

> Said Publisher J. David Stern's excitable Philadelphia Record & New York Post: "There has been a lot of war talk in the papers and we are sorry for it. ... Can't we, in the name of common sense, stop it?"

> The Army & Navy Journal opined that President Roosevelt's reason for sending the Fleet to the Pacific six weeks ahead of schedule was to free Russia's (as well as Britain's) hands for action in Europe. Excerpt: "Russia, knowing that Japan would be compelled to consider an American interruption of her communications with the Asiatic mainland, can now envisage a connection with [Britain & France] which she was indisposed to make so long as Siberia was open to attack." >President Roy A. Cheney of the Underwear Institute announced in Philadelphia: "The underwear industry is prepared and in line in case of war. Several million shirts and drawers would be needed. . . . We will have the same prosperity we did in 1918 and 1919."

>Framed in armor-plated glass, fastened in by invisible glass screws to foil thieves, one of the four original copies of the Magna Charta, basic charter of freemen's rights handed by King John of England to his rebellious barons at Runnymede (A.D. 1215), arrived in Manhattan on the Queen Mary. Delivering the document to Mayor LaGuardia, to be sent to the New York World's Fair grounds, Sir Louis Beale, British commissioner-general to the fair, declared: "It is a treasure beyond price. . . . In this city and in this spot it is in the safest possible hands."

*Interpreters could think of no provocation for Mussolini's sarcastic phrase "convivial vociferation," except the facts: 1) that Senator Pittman sometimes mixes good Bourbon with his statesmanship; 2) in December he abruptly announced:

"1) The people of the U. S. do not like the Government of Japan.

"2) The people of the U. S. do not like the Government of Germany.

"3) The people of the U. S. in my opinion, are against any form of dictatorial government, Communistic or Fascistic."

/- Mrs. Lindbergh & sons Jon (6) and Land (nearly 3) sailed last week from France to summer in the U. S.

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