What of the Night?

Time was running fast last week. The quick winter days flashed by, grey, chill and wet; the disappointment, gloom and confusion of leaderless, floundering Washington had spread over the U. S. The country stirred uneasily. Eminent men made angry speeches. Little men lined up outside reopening factories. The headlines' phantasmagoria whirled on: strikes, battles, production bottlenecks, taxes, airplanes, fleet bases. These were the table talk of the last days of 1940--and desk talk, factory and farm talk.

But the cloudy nationwide feeling built up into one need; as threatening and insistent as an August thunderhead: leadership. All talk, all possible hope of leadership came down to one man: Franklin Roosevelt. In and around and of him, were all the problems. The country wanted to be told, it wanted to be shown, it wanted to know, it wanted to be led. Most U. S. citizens conceded that aid to England, all aid short of a declaration of war, was of primary importance. All U. S. citizens agreed that the Defense Commission was primary above all things. And no one denied that the Defense Commission needed, and badly needed, a fast, tough, wise, sharpshooting chairman. In this particular case, the U. S. looked to the President not for an answer, but an appointment.

The people wanted facts--no matter how hard, cold, disillusioning. In every way they knew how, Americans asked last week--How grave the peril? How great the sacrifices? How heavy the burden? How huge the task? Franklin Roosevelt was the man they wanted the answer from.

As the boatswain piped the President ashore at Charleston, S. C., with four ruffles from the cruiser Tuscaloosa's band and a 21-gun salute, he set foot on a land whose serious mood had deepened immeasurably since his departure a fortnight before. There was disappointment in that mood: the number of airplanes being shipped to England was not 700 a month, as predicted last spring, nor 600, nor 500, nor 400, nor 300. The total was 177 to England, 102 to Canada. The shock to the national pride, if to nothing else, was acute. Men might rage or despair or work furiously, but they couldn't seem to get planes to Britain. Even the 279 planes were 75 more than had been shipped in September. And the President had evidently altered his 50-50 rule-of-thumb policy of division of airplane production between Britain and the U. S. For all production of the best --in fact, the only--pursuit plane made in quantity in the U. S. was last week stopped for the Army, diverted wholly to Britain. Curtiss-Wright's seven P-40s per day now all go abroad until further orders.* The U. S. was giving its all. Its all was little enough, but it was all there was.

What loans could do to shore up the Western Hemisphere's defenses, the U. S. was doing. The U. S. was becoming banker to the world. To Argentina went $60,000,000, to Uruguay $7,500,000. (Argentines and Uruguayans three days later forgot old enmities, got together on a joint defense program-- U. S. engineers swarmed over Bermuda, defense outpost, planning the 510-acre military base that will bring warplanes and battleships to the island of bicycles. The Maritime Commission, launching a merchant ship every seven days, prepared to sell the British 15 of its laid-up fleet of 64 for $3,010,800; asked bids on 24 more. Means were ready for the seizure and sale of the 143 laid-up refugee ships of conquered European nations.

The President had himself toured the new American coastline, 3,850 miles at sea--from the Bahamas down to St. Lucia, inspecting base sites critically. On his desk were a thousand such concrete problems, a thousand less definite answers. Administration aides had not loafed: Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was readying proposals of financial aid to Britain for the asking day. Cabinet members had stacks of memos.

Diplomats, military men, economists, production bosses; capital, labor--all were ready for orders. The night was drawing on; the lights were out. The U. S. was asking Franklin Roosevelt: Watchman, what of the night? Politics was dead as ever politics can be. A dying Congress frittered and fidgeted, eagerly awaiting decent burial and January's rebirth. The U. S. promised Franklin Roosevelt the moon and sixpence, if only--

At Warm Springs on a gloomy, wet Sunday the President ate turkey, shook hands with discombobolated Helen Cothran, 4 (who shifted her sticky candy to her left hand just in time), with Wade Cothran, 3 (who had cake in both hands, put most of it in his mouth and said "Glmph!" to the President), and with 90 other polio patients. In a gay little speech he said deliberately: "I hope to be down here in March, without any question, if the world survives." (In April 1939, he had said deliberately: "I'll be back in the fall --if we don't have a war.")

He had talked nearly an hour with Secretary of State Hull by telephone during the morning. That night he headed north, reached Washington the next chill, drizzly afternoon, at the White House again talked with Mr. Hull. In the rain outside, men & women sloshed up & down Pennsylvania Avenue, now & then looking curiously at the White House. There rested their hopes, their problems, perhaps the shape of their fate. Unimportant, at the moment, were the Logan-Walter Bill that Mr. Roosevelt would veto, the St. Lawrence Seaway that he would promote, the controversies, vexations and misunderstandings of ordinary times. Mr. Roosevelt had asked for the job of dealing with just such a situation, and the U. S. had given him the job. Now the U. S. wanted to know what he was going to do about it.

*P-40s are 1,090 h.p., Allison-engined, 360-m.p.h., low-winged monoplanes, reputedly armed for the British with six machine guns.

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