General Advance

When World War II began, there were innumerable barricades of the imagination fixed in the U. S. mind. Towering was the first one: the U. S. had no part in Europe's wars. Imposing was the next: bumbling and awkward U. S. democracy could not move so swiftly and efficiently in a crisis as could the totalitarian States. Behind these bastions lay fixed ideas like trenches: the Midwest was forever Isolationist; Labor could never make peace; the unemployed could never be absorbed; the U. S. was running down. Like some great chain of fortifications called impregnable because it had never been attacked, they stretched to the mind's far boundary-and there they ended, in the dull, masochistic conviction that civilization itself was perishing from the earth, and that the lights that were going out in Europe would never be lit again.

Last week there were signs that a new determination had come to the U. S. Its form varied-there was determination to aid the Allies, determination to speed U. S. defense, determination to destroy whoever got in the way. There were casualties: >Dead was the politicos' alibi that "the country" could not grasp the issues of world conflict. Wrote steady-minded Columnist Ray Clapper from Kansas City:

GENERAL PERSHING "They are holding our front line.""This is part of the United States around here too . . . the conversation is no different from what it is in Washington right now-and it is just about as well informed, except about a few matters upon which officials in Washington hesitate to speak frankly because they fear 'the country' wouldn't understand." Dead was the theory that the U. S.

could not act swiftly in a crisis: in seven days the U. S. Government arranged a 50-plane trade-in; resolved that it would not stand for the transfer of any region in the Americas from one non-American power to another; sent a sample plane to Henry Ford for experiments in mass production.

> Dead was the sacred-cow tradition that Congress could pass no new tax laws in an election year (see pg. 16.

>Dead was the fear that Labor peace was impossible, as the powerful I. L. G.

W. U. moved back to A. F. of L., as William Green recommended abolition of the per capita tax for fighting C. I. O. that had been a major obstacle to Labor peace (see p. 17).

> TVad was the assumption that U. S.

ir.austry would be slow to turn its vast plant equipment to arms production see pg. 16.

> Dying was the fear that indispensable moves f o ; U. S. defense were warmongering emotionalism: in Portland, Ore., Republican Presidential Candidate Frank Gannett condemned the present U. S.

state of mind as hysteria created by President Roosevelt; after he finished speaking. 150 protesting phone calls jammed the station switchboard; no calls came to support him.

Aid to the Allies. Last week more & more U. S. citizens were determined that the U. S. should aid the Allies. No longer was it a subject for earnest editorials, for appeals on humanitarian grounds by distinguished educators and Nobel Prizewinners, of Senator Pepper urging action by Congress; it was a matter of citizens ringing doorbells, handing out petitions, joining committees that urged aid, quitting committees that held back. Said piercing-eyed General Pershing, with his jaw firm and his fist clenched: "The Allies are fighting a war for civilization. They are holding our front line. . . . We should send them not only food, clothing and medical supplies, but also arrange to send airplanes, artillery, small arms and ammunition in unlimited quantities. There is no time to lose." Said Mrs. Dwight Morrow, mother-in-law of Isolationist Charles Lindbergh:"I urge immediate aid to the Allies-the sending of munitions and supply.,, food, money, airplanes, ships and everything that could help them in their struggle against Germany. . . . There are some things worse than war. . . . There are some things supreme and noble that are worth fighting for. We have them in our own heritage. We are a great democracy, founded on a belief in personal liberty, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. There is no need to claim the British and French are paragons, but the fact remains that they are fighting to preserve these liberties. . . ." But most action centred around Midwestern William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.

Founded last month, it grew so rapidly that last week its national headquarters did not know how many chapters it included (last count: 125) or how many signatures it had on the 20,000-odd petitions being circulated. But it said it expected over a million.

Typical was its Manhattan headquarters. A onetime business office, it resembled the field headquarters of a revolutionary army. Its windows looked out over green Bryant Park, the great, grey, peaceful bulk of the Public Library, Fifth Avenue that swarmed with crowds under the early summer sun. It was a room of confusion, noise, action, ringing telephones, of wooden desk-tables, of slatted folding chairs bought from a secondhand store, of rented typewriters with ribbons that always stuck, of not enough wastepaper baskets, stamps or paper clips. It teemed with improvised life-with the 30 paid employes running up & down the aisles between shoulder-high stacks of petitions, opening mail, answering mail, calling for somebody else to answer a clamoring phone, with a revolving staff of volunteer workers handing out petitions to some six hundred volunteers ringing doorbells all over Manhattan streets.

Simple and sweeping was the Committee's program:1) release as much U. S.

military equipment to the Allies as, in the Commander in Chief's opinion, could be released without impairing national defense; 2) make available $100,000,000 for the purchase of surplus supplies of food and clothing for French, Dutch and Belgian refugees; 3) stop export of war materials to aggressors; 4) take other measures, short of war, to insure the fullest possible support to the Allies.

Meanwhile a growing list of organizations urged immediate aid to the Allies "Without stint or fear of consequences." The list ranged from the Greater Cleveland Council, Smaller Business of America, Inc. to the Young Women's Republican Club of New York. It included the German-American Congress for Democracy (with 2,000 New York City members to begin with, and branches being organized in six other States), the 66th annual meeting of the American Neurological Association (see pg. 42-the Bronx Chamber of Commerce, Kansas county citizens' defense councils. Governors were for it-Lehman of New York, Stark of Missouri, Murphy of New Hampshire-as well as the leaders of A. F. of L.

War. Resignations and reversals swept the U. S. Liberals Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank quit the New Republic, after 13 years as contributing editors, criticizing the do-nothing policy of the magazine (although the New Republic afterwards plumped for aid to the Allies); Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle resigned from the Lawyers Guild because "It is now obvious that the present management of the Guild is not prepared to take any stand which conflicts with the Communist Party line." There was a greater reversal when 30 educators, writers, lawyers, businessmen joined in a statement urging that the U. S.

declare war on Germany forthwith. "In the German view the American defense program means that the U. S. has already joined with Great Britain and France in opposing the Nazi drive for world dominion-in the American view, Nazi Germany is the mortal enemy of our ideals, our institutions and our way of life. What we have, what we are and what we hope to be can now be most effectively defended on the line in France held by General Weygand. The frontier of our national interest is now on the Somme. Therefore all disposable air, naval, military and material resources of the U. S. should be made available at once to help maintain our common front. . . . For this reason alone, and irrespective of the specific uses of our resources thereafter, the U. S.

should immediately give official recognition to the fact and to the logic of the situation-by declaring that a state of war exists between this country and Germany. Only in this constitutional manner can the energies be massed which are indispensable to the successful prosecution of a program of defense." Signers were not fire-eaters: there was Columnist Frank Kent, Editor George Fort Milton, St. John's College's President Stringfellow Barr. What seemed like the biggest reversal was Walter Millis'. But Mr. Millis, author of the best-selling Road to War that traced the steps to U. S. entry into World War I, had already implied that this war is not like the last war.

Objectives. As more and more citizens became sure that a Nazi victory was a menace to the U. S.'s own existence, they smashed through barricades of political taboos whose strength more often than not proved illusory and whose defenders looked strong only in the minds of those attacking them. But what was the ultimate U. S. objective? And how far was it determined to go? Said General Motors Vice President James David Mooney: "If we intend to go to war, then we ought to publish the conditions that will provoke us into the war. We ought to quit telling the world that we won't fight under any circumstances. . . . Americans have too proud a tradition as fighters to endure a national policy that would brand Americans as men who run away from anything.

... If we are to fight because we crave a more peaceful and more orderly world, what are the conditions on which a peace will be negotiated and what terms of peace will insure this more orderly world?" Last week no U. S. citizen could give a final answer. The Pennsylvania State Federation of Women's Clubs offered one.

Wrangling during its Harrisburg convention on the objectives of national defense, and getting nowhere, 1,100 Pennsylvania clubwomen heard Clarence Streit urge the program of Federal Union. Argued Clarence Streit: The fate of democracy depends on the defeat of Hitler. He cannot probably be defeated without U. S. aid. Military preparedness is not enough; the only force the U. S. can quickly bring to the conflict is a moral and political power. Organizing the democracies in a federal union, with a guarantee that the German people would be admitted to this union when they retired to their frontiers and restored their basic rights as men, would help to upset the German Government from within, and enable the democracies to coordinate their action strongly enough to win against Hitler. Calling

Author Streit back for an ovation, the clubwomen voted, 1,092-10-8, to urge the program of a world-wide federal union as the basic objective of U. S. efforts.

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