Under Strain

Last week staggering events and mighty pressures brought out the strength and weaknesses of the U. S. character. Signs of weakness there were aplenty. The most mechanically-minded people on earth--the builders of 166,794 factories, of 65% of the world's automobiles--learned to their dismay that they did not have enough airplanes to fight the kind of war Hitler had loosed on the world, did not have enough trained men to build the plants that could create them. In a fury of frustration they jumped on each other, developed morbid fears of invisible enemies, chased ghosts and phantoms, looked backward to bemoan old mistakes and ancient blunders. Greater sign of weakness was that--though no longer was a crisis doubted--no great national program came into being that could give each man his place in a giant effort, give a creative release to pent-up emotions.

Plentiful were signs of strength:

> Strong was the approval of President Roosevelt's recommendations for defense, of the speed of Congress in appropriating $3,297,000,000. Few were complaints about the cost (although complaints about what had been done with $7,100,000,000 spent in the last seven years flourished despite the President's explanation in his fireside talk); unanimous was the realization that a Hitler triumph demanded sacrifice.

> But defense corps and rifle clubs that popped up all over the U. S. made it plain that no mere appropriation of money could give the U. S. a sense of security, satisfy the U. S. demand for action. Springing from hysteria, an itch for publicity, a deep-seated fear that official defense measures might be botched, or a resurgence of the old backwoods instinct that nothing so calms a man's nerves as polishing a rifle, defense organizations flourished so widely last week that they belonged, as did fifth-column talk, in the category of a national phenomenon. In Manhattan leaders of the National Legion of Mothers of America organized the Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion, pledged to target practice once a week. Purpose: to pick off descending parachute troops, when and if.

In California the legislature approved a plan to organize Citizen Guards units patterned after the Swiss Home Guards. In Chicago, 300 crack shots of the Illinois Skeet Association, the American Police Revolver League, etc., formed the Sports men's Defense Reserve, pledged to organize the 7,000,000 members of U. S. shooting and rifle clubs into "a civilian army of modern minute men. . . ."

Aid to the Allies. There was strength in the U. S.'s final acceptance of the fact that whatever policy the U. S. followed meant risk. In Emporia, Kans., Editor William Allen White did what few observers of Midwest sentiment believed possible a fortnight ago: organized a Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Editor White's program: all possible legal aid short of armed force.

Relief. Strong were reactions to aid for the victims of war. Besides polishing their rifles and plumping for aid to the Allies, U. S. citizens also:

> Doubled their relief for Hitler's victims, as fear of Hitler came home to them.

> Began raising $3,000,000 for Netherlands refugees.

> Raised $2,700,000 of a $10,000,000 Red Cross war relief fund; heard that Poland faced famine by June, that 5,000,000 Belgian, French, Dutch, Luxembourg refugees streaming over the roads of France were in a plight so tragic that "if we fail the American Red Cross must haul down its banner and humanity is blacked out."

> Learned that even war relief means risk. Off to Galway, Eire, sailed the President Roosevelt, to pick up some 1,000 U. S. refugees. The State Department warned belligerents 1) that she would sail the Great Circle route; 2) would be unarmed; 3) would fly the U. S. flag; 4) would be fully lighted at night; 5) would have no convoy and 6) would carry no cargo. When the President Roosevelt was three days out of New York, D. N. B., official German news agency, reported that it had learned on good authority that the ship "might be subjected to an attack by the British in a trick to involve the United States in war.

In view of Hitler's demonstrated ruthlessness toward neutrals and self-avowed indifference to morals in international affairs, this announcement was ominous. It opened the possibility that in hope of stirring up ill will against Britain, Germany might deliberately attempt to sink the President Roosevelt.

Plain Speaking. Strong were words of astringent criticism. To Pundit Walter Lippmann the deep sense of frustration that spread over the U. S. last week was a moral crisis: "Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western World is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which men . . . forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice. . . . They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties . . . they thought it clever to be cynical, and enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft. . . ."

To most U. S. citizens the alarming situation was somehow connected with the mysterious, elusive, all-pervasive fifth column. From Baton Rouge, La. to Lake George, N. Y., tales of spies and saboteurs floated wraithlike but menacing in the troubled air: in Atlanta a 54-year-old German-American was questioned about his sketches of highways, railroads, gaslines; in Rochester, N. Y., two young Germans paddling kayaks in Lake Ontario were questioned by immigration authorities because of their photographs of bridge abutments, spans and industrial plants along the Hudson River and the Barge Canal. The bag of suspects was smail compared to the rumors. It was smaller still compared to the organizations which, formed to combat the fifth column, seemed adequate to suppress a revolution: in Pennsylvania it was announced that 2,500 voluntary agents, mostly American Legionnaires, were on guard at industrial plants to prevent sabotage; in many a county aliens were dropped from relief rolls; the House of Representatives banned WPA to Communists and Bundsmen.

Weakness. Like a patient submitting to an artificial fever treatment, the U. S. plunged into a period of acute suspicion, and here & there pent-up emotions exploded.

> At Times Beach on the Meramec River near St. Louis, the roomy clubhouse of the German-American Sports Club was burned to the ground; anti-Nazi signs were painted on the building of a German-language newspaper; swastikas were painted on the sidewalk before homes of St. Louis Bundsmen and German consular employes.

> In Pekin, Ill. (pop. 16,129) eight men and two women handed Communist pamphlets to Saturday afternoon shoppers and farmers in town for the day, were badly mauled and manhandled, raced for the grey stone courthouse in the centre of town, begged the sheriff for protection. He locked the doors, spirited the Communists to the Tazewell County jail, put them on a Chicago-bound train early next morning, after the threatening mob had dwindled from 500 to 75.

> In Grand Rapids, Mich. a 50-year-old foundry worker told police he had shot and killed his 24-year-old neighbor, because he believed his neighbor belonged to the fifth column.

Confusing fifth-column talk was the attitude of the New Deal toward the Communists. Veterans in the Pacific Northwest were angered that, during talk of a U. S. shortage of plane-manufacturing equipment, three trainloads of precision tools, dies, and machines for making airplane motors passed through Washington, Russia-bound. Equally confusing was it that, after 3,500 American Youth Congress members in their New York convention had booed President Roosevelt's defense program, Mrs. Roosevelt addressed the brattish assembly, with kindly reproof. Snorted testy Columnist Frank Kent: "In view of the striking record of hostility toward the Dies Committee of the Department of Justice, the President and the President's wife, to say nothing of the extraordinary White House coddling of such Communist-saturated organizations as the American Youth Congress and the Workers Alliance--in view of this it would be especially encouraging if some action could be made . . . that would indicate to the people that this Administration is alive to the fifth-column danger in America, determined to control it, and not just soggily sentimental about it."

The President asked Congress to move the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice as a measure of alien control. Said Attorney General Jackson, as the FBI added 100 agents and public opinion dumped the fifth-column problem in his lap: "Citizens may be helpful to the Government. They may aid by reporting to the FBI acts, threats, or evidences of sabotage, espionage." To a citizenry determined to act if the Government did not, he added, "The greatest help to the Government that citizens can render is to keep cool and not become frightened."

Mood. To many an observer last week's reactions seemed marked less by fear of Hitler or the fifth column than by fear that official U. S. efforts would prove too late, and too limited. But it was plain that peace-loving U. S. citizens had begun to learn what citizens of Europe had known after Munich--that life in a fear-dominated world could become intolerable to the point that war might seem preferable. In its swift reaction to mighty events and its fumbling, half-pathetic, half-menacing attempts to act on its own initiative, the U. S. public was plainly in no mood to be talked down to, told that it was susceptible to cowardice, or to let action be taken in which it had no part. Somewhere between awareness and determination it seemed to have halted, like an army that has caught up with its advance elements but has not yet come in contact with its enemy. And as the week's reaction spread over the country, these alternatives loomed: the U. S. could go on struggling with ghosts and enemies that it could not see, in increasing frustration and fear, or it could find a release for its emotion and its energy in recreating a fearless country.

Said the New York Herald Tribune:

"Once again, after countless rancors and fomented cleavages, the American people are canceling grudges and closing ranks behind their ideals and their achievements as a nation. . . . The hour has struck when all those wrangles and disagreements have been overborne. . . . The question today is not what any citizen has thought in the past, but what he accepts and is resolved to act upon now. . . . There are forces still left in the nation which are working for disunity. . . . But the nation is on the march. . . ."

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