Decision

News from Washington last week was news for the whole world (see p. 26). The Lend-Lease Bill had passed the House and the Senate. In 20 minutes it was delivered to the White House. Ten minutes later it had been signed by President Roosevelt, and had become law. Five minutes later the President approved a list of articles --what kind and to what amount he would not say--for immediate shipment abroad. Five minutes later, bright-eyed, tense and in high spirits, he called in the press to tell them that when the supplies were safely landed he would reveal how much had been sent, and where.

So the supplies were on the way. If the U. S. could turn itself into a workshop for democracy, the democracies were now financially able to use what it produced; if U. S. weapons, or U. S. food, could turn events in Europe or Asia, they could now legally be shipped. U. S. flags were broken out in the shattered streets of London. All over the world the news and its import were heard and realized.

The meaning of its own decision was brought home to the U. S., not by a historic scene but by a historic speech. At a crowded dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association, after the heavy-handed political clowning that marks newsmen's gatherings, President Roosevelt spoke for 34 minutes. All the national networks carried his voice. From Boston, short-wave broadcasts repeated it in 14 European languages. The British rebroadcast it and sent translations to the forbidden radios of Germany. Said he:

"I remember, a quarter of a century ago, that in the early days of the first World War the German Government received solemn assurances from their representatives . . . that the people of America were disunited; that they cared more for peace at any price than for the preservation of ideals and freedom; that there would even be riots and revolutions in the United States if this country ever asserted its own interests.

"Let not dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity now."

(The correspondents could remember only one Roosevelt speech like it: at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, when he had said before 100,000 people, on his acceptance of the nomination in 1936, that this generation had a rendezvous with destiny. The correspondent of the official German news agency, courteous Kurt Sell, had telephoned an advance text of the speech to Berlin, quietly left the hall before the President began to deliver it.)

"We know that although Prussian autocracy was bad enough in the first war, Naziism is far worse in this. Nazi forces . . . openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government ... including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.

"Yet these men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order."

Again & again the President was stopped by applause that roared up from these professional non-enthusiasts. It broke spontaneously when he told how the Nazi plan for downing the democracies one by one had been stopped "by the unbeatable defenders of Britain." It rose again when he spoke of the debate on the Lend-Lease Bill--a debate that went on in Congress, in the newspapers, over the radio, over every cracker barrel, and which, though slow, meant that when the decision was made, "it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man, but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt."

But the applause came loudest when the President marked the responsibilities that the U. S. had accepted.

"We shall have to make sacrifices--every one of us. ... Whether you are in the armed services; whether you are a steel worker or a stevedore; a machinist or a housewife; a farmer or a banker . . . --to all of you it will mean sacrifice in behalf of your country and your liberties. . . . You will have to be content with lower profits. . . . You will have to work longer at your bench, or your plow, or your machine or your desk. . . .

"Upon the national will to sacrifice and to work depends the output of our industry and our agriculture. . . .

"Upon that will depends our ability to aid other nations which may determine to offer resistance. ..."

The President outlined the purposes and conditions of a mighty task; he praised the British people and their "brilliant and great leader," Winston Churchill; he made specific the U. S. promise of aid ("The British people and their Grecian allies need ships. From America, they will get ships. They need planes. From America they will get planes. Yes, from America they need food. . . . They will get food."). He ended with a ringing pledge: "When . . . dictatorships disintegrate . . . then our country must continue to play its great part in the period of world reconstruction for the good of humanity. . . . We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood. We believe that the men and women of such nations . . . can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man's security, improve the standards of healthful living, provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every nation can insure its happiness, banish the terror of war, and abandon man's inhumanity to man.

"Never, in all our history . . . have Americans faced a task so well worthwhile. May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children's children rise up and call us blessed."

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