To Arms, Citizens!

William C. Bullitt, this week, spoke the President's mind.

The occasion was managed with historical care. In 1789 Thomas Jefferson, Minister to France, addressed his fellow Americans from the steps of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. He had just returned from Paris, where he had witnessed the first determined steps towards a French Republic. This week, another envoy to France, William Christian Bullitt, also recently returned from Paris, stood on the same steps (under the auspices of the same American Philosophical Society which had sponsored Jefferson) and declared: "I have seen the French Republic destroyed."

As well qualified as any expert observer to explain how it had happened was elegant, wealthy, bald-headed Mr. Bullitt, who had seen Paris fall. No one doubted that his words had first been well weighed by Mr. Roosevelt. But never before had a U. S. Ambassador, a member of the Administration, been permitted to talk on international affairs with such undiplomatic, brutal bluntness. Mr. Bullitt minced no monosyllables. What he saw was the need for desperate haste. He quoted Hitler's handwriting on the democracies' wall: Each country will imagine that it alone will escape. I shall not even need to destroy them one by one. Selfishness and lack of foresight will prevent each one fighting until it is too late.

Said Mr. Bullitt: "The strategy of destruction by which the free nation of France was overthrown is the strategy of destruction by which the enemies of freedom hope to overthrow liberty in this, the greatest of the nations that freedom has created. . . . The United States is in as great peril today as was France a year ago. And I believe that unless we act now, decisively, to meet the threat we shall be too late.

"The strategy of destruction" was based, he said, on the fact that democratic governments were under the control of public opinion. "To prepare the way for military attack on a democracy they [the dictators] employ every possible variety of agent and propaganda to befuddle the public so that the democracy will not prepare in time. . . .

"They are not yet in a position to attack America by military means; but their campaign of befuddlement, their preparatory assault, is following the same lines in America that it followed in France. . . . How many Americans today are playing the dictators' game without knowing it?"

In France, said Mr. Bullitt, there had been many honest pacifists, as now in the U. S. There had been many who believed the German propagandists who told them they could buy peace with Germany. There had been those who believed that Hitler would be satisfied after the occupation of the Saar, after Austria, after Czecho-Slovakia. "There are also Americans who argue that if Hitler should conquer Great Britain he would be content to stop there, and that the United States would be able to cooperate happily with the Hitler Empire of Europe. To believe this is to misunderstand the entire nature of the Nazi system. . . . Were Germany to try to resume the ways of peace, the military discipline which is the very foundation of the Nazi hierarchy would crumble. In order to continue in power that hierarchy must continue to lead Germany on new predatory adventures. . . .

"The men and women who tell you that the dictators will not attack the Western Hemisphere may be honest, wishful thinkers or they may be agents of the dictators ; but in either case . . . they are keeping the way clear for an assault on America by the dictators."

They had heard the appeals of General Pershing, Admiral Standley, William Allen White for aid to the British, he reminded his listeners. "If you let those appeals go unanswered and the British Fleet goes under, do you realize what that would mean to you, to all of the people of this country?" Black was the picture Mr. Bullitt sketched of an economic Europe controlled by the Nazis, isolating and impoverishing the U. S.. of military invasion -- across "the Atlantic [that] has become a broad highway for the invasion of the Americas."

The way was already being cleared by the agents of the dictators, said he. "In France much of the most terrible and traitorous work was done by the Fascists and Communists working together." Not until too late did honest French liberals discover that "the Communists were traitors who were claiming the protection of the State which they intended to destroy only in order the better to prepare for its destruction. . . . Do you believe that there are no Nazi and Communist agents of this sort in America?" demanded Mr. Bullitt. "Why are we sleeping, Americans? When are we going to wake up? When are we going to give the lie to those who say that the people of the United States . . . look on the United States just as a trough into which to get their snouts and not as the greatest adventure in human freedom that this earth has known?

"When are we going to let legislators in Washington know that we don't want any more politicians who are afraid of the next election and scared to ask us to make the sacrifices that we know are necessary? . . . Do you want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun of the Liberty Bell? NO! ... I ask you and all other Americans who hear my voice tonight to join in the fight to keep our country free. . . . Demand the privilege of being called into the service of the nation. Tell them [Senators and Representatives] that we want conscription. Tell them that we back up General Pershing."

Mr. Bullitt's address was not only an impassioned plea for conscription; it seemed to end any possibility of Mr. Bullitt's going back to Nazi-occupied France.

A colleague of Mr. Bullitt's in the diplomatic corps who also made news last week was horse-loving, Irish John Cudahy, U. S. Ambassador to Belgium. Slapped down by Acting Secretary Sumner Welles for reportedly suggesting that Britain relax her blockade, and recalled to Washington (TIME, Aug. 19), tired, haggard Mr. Cudahy went up on the carpet before his boss. After two hours with the President he emerged all smiles, told newsmen: "I am authorized to say there has been no rebuke administered to me, and I have no intention of resigning from the diplomatic service." Across the street, at the Department of State, Mr. Welles greeted him with a cheery "Hello, John, I am delighted to see you," announced later that Mr. Cudahy had been exonerated. Mr. Cudahy prepared to depart for Wisconsin.

He did not get out of Washington with out a nick. Last year he wagered 3-to-2 with General Edwin Martin Watson, military aide to the President, that F. D. R. would not be renominated. "Pa" Watson collected three fresh $100 Cudahy bills, waved them over his head.

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