Voices on 1776

Last week answers were given to five Administration spokesmen--Secretaries Hull, Morgenthau, Stimson, Knox and OPM Director General Knudsen--who fortnight ago said on behalf of the Lend-Lease Bill that the U. S. was in imminent danger if Britain fell (TIME, Jan. 27). Summoned by Republican minority members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opponents who did not believe that the U. S. would be greatly endangered if Britain fell paraded in & out of a jampacked committee room, thumping desks, shaking heads, pointing fingers, answering one overstated case with equal overstatements. The committee was prepared to report the bill out. but first it had to hear:

> Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who smilingly took the stand, and filling the room with obfuscation, could not even make up his mind whether he should be called "Mister" or "Ambassador." Said Mr. Kennedy cheerfully: "Whichever way you want me is all right with me." It was the nearest he got to defining his position. Said he, in effect: The U. S. should empower the President to get the job done, but Congress should not surrender all its control.

> Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who was as positive as Mr. Kennedy was evasive. With little to say about the Lend-Lease Bill outside of flatly opposing it, he had much to say about peace and isolation. He saw little danger of a successful invasion of the U. S., if the country were protected by 10,000 modern planes in service, with another 10,000 replacements and trainer planes in reserve. The Colonel believed that the Western Hemisphere could be economically independent. As for his sympathies: "I prefer to see neither side win. I prefer a negotiated peace." On aid to Britain: "Our aid is not going to be sufficient and I believe we have encouraged a war in Europe that is not going to be successful."

> General Hugh Johnson, looking like a tough sirloin, who pounded the table and belligerently told the committee that it could read what he thought in his columns.

What he thought: no man should be given all the powers that H.R. 1776 gave the President. He was for aid to Britain but he was loudly opposed to "humanitarian lollipopping all over the world."

> Norman Thomas, whose right to speak for all U. S. Socialists was challenged by some of his colleagues. Politely bitter, he admitted that he preferred a British victory to a Nazi one, but bespoke his distrust of an "imperialist" Churchill. His objection to H.R. 1776 coincided with Hugh Johnson's: it gave too much power to the President.

> William R. Castle, Under Secretary of State under President Hoover, who agreed with Colonel Lindbergh that the U. S.

was in no danger of invasion, even if the British Fleet should be destroyed or captured. The bill, said Mr. Castle, gave the President too much power over the U. S. and Britain too. "through his control of the supplies flowing out from what he pleases to call 'the arsenal of democracy.' " Other objectors joined the parade through the committee room, others used whatever sounding boards were handy.

President Robert Hutchins of the Uni versity of Chicago made a radio speech against the bill. He was convinced that the country was headed for war. And, said he: "We are morally and intellectually unprepared to execute the moral mission to which the President calls us." He saw the duty of the U. S. : to "show the world a nation clear in purpose, united in action, and sacrificial in spirit. The influence of that example upon suffering humanity everywhere will be more power ful than the combined armies of the Axis." The familiar cries of defeatist, appeaser, isolationist, rose shrilly, just as the cries of warmonger had risen after the testimony of the Cabinet officers the week before. Defenders of the bill--Dorothy Thompson. William Bullitt, Major Gen eral John F. O'Ryan--came in with more arguments, all familiar. Ex-Ambassador Bullitt pointed to one difficulty: "The state of mind here today is about what it was in France a year before they en gaged in war with Germany."

To Mr. Bullitt the reason for the intellectual disorder was simple: the U. S. looked on the ocean as France had looked on the Maginot Line. But in speaking of the U. S. state of mind, he brought something into the open--many a spokesman who thought he was talking about U. S. defense was actually talking about what the U. S. felt and feared.

To more & more citizens, as the hearings ran on, it looked as if both sides and large regiments of the population were deceiving themselves and each other with talk of physical danger and physical safety from war. Only half hidden behind such talk of each side was discernible a moral division between those who felt the U. S. should take an active and those who felt it should take a passive part in the moral remaking of the world now rapidly going on.

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