THE PRESIDENCY The Last Step Taken

When President Roosevelt cracked down on the Japanese move into Indo-China by freezing credits, he moved far. The whole U.S. accepted his act as a step just short of war. But the U.S. reaction was quiet, solid agreement, in which even most isolationists joined. His second dramatic move, folding the Philippine defense forces into the U.S. Army (see p. 30), left no doubt of how much further he was ready to go. The two acts were more than a warning to the Japanese of war to come--they amounted to a declaration of economic war with military war to follow soon unless the Japanese decided to reverse their course.

That fact could not be mistaken. Day before the freezing order the President had explained why in the simplest vernacular. Talking off the cuff to a group of civilian-defense volunteers he made them a little homily so saltily effective and lucid that the critical Baltimore Sun allowed: "There was a bit of Lincoln in it." Said the President:

". . . One of our efforts, from the very beginning, was to prevent the spread of that world war in certain areas where it hadn't started. One of those areas is a place called the Pacific Ocean--one of the largest areas of the earth. . . . There happened to be a place in the South Pacific where we had to get a lot of things--rubber, tin, and so forth and so on, down in the Dutch Indies, the Straits Settlements and Indo-China. And we had to get the Australian surplus of meat and wheat and corn for England.

"It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was--trying to stop a war from breaking out down there. . . .

"All right, and now here is a nation called Japan. Whether they had at that time aggressive purposes to enlarge their empire southward, they didn't have any oil of their own up in the north. Now, if we cut the oil off, they probably would have gone down into the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war.

"Therefore, there was--you might call --a method in letting this oil go to Japan, with the hope--and it has worked for two years--of keeping war out of the South Pacific for our own good, for the good of the defense of Great Britain and for the freedom of the seas. . . .

This was the frankest, simplest statement on foreign policy that Franklin Roosevelt had ever made--of the foreign policy which the U.S. has now abandoned.

Action. Having spoken, the President went to Hyde Park, read, played with his Scottie, Falla; hashed things over with Mrs. Roosevelt as they sat on the porch at Hyde Park. Behind the diplomatic scenes wheels ground steadily. At the end of a baking-hot day, after the last stock exchange (San Francisco) had closed, the curtain lifted to disclose the President issuing an order freezing all Japanese assets (probably about $131,000,000) in the U.S.

In five swift hours freezing orders crackled in from all parts of the Anglo-Saxon world. Now no Japanese could spend a dollar more than $500 monthly per person in the U.S., move a ship out, sell a pound of silk--without a specific Treasury license. Importers Mitsui, for instance, could still buy oil from Standard Oil on dollar credits exchanged through the South American branches of National City Bank, for instance--but only with a license. Hints came down that the license business at the Treasury would be as indefatigably polite as Japanese statesmanship, but also just as reluctant to redress wrongs.

A sample of U.S. politeness had already been given. The Panama Canal had been closed to Japanese ships. Ten Japanese freighters heading for the Canal's Caribbean entrance hove to offshore, hung idly in the thick July heat. Other ships went through but their turn never came. To protests the War Department said: so sorry (taking no chances on one of them blowing up in a lock), but the Canal was undergoing repairs. Finally the Japanese freighters gave up, plowed south on the 19,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn.

The new U.S. attitude gave the Japanese the same dreadful kind of surprise that Adolf Hitler felt when the British decided to fight if he moved on Poland. Poland was the last straw-- to the British; French Indo-China looked like the next-to-last straw to the U.S. The impact on Japan was immense (see p. 21).

The impact on U.S. business was not so marked (see p. 61). The U.S. woman, it appeared, by 1941's end would have a choice of 1) going barelegged, 2) buying Nylon stockings which might be unprocurable, or 3) wearing cotton stockings.

But with unusual unanimity the press and the public upheld the President's act, illustrating several facets of the U.S. feeling about foreign policy: 1) the U.S. can probably lick the Japanese; 2) this would be a Navy job primarily, and the U.S. is prouder and surer of its powerful Navy than of its half-equipped Army; 3) many isolationists are rabidly anti-Japanese. Even Montana's acidulous, 100% critic Burton K. Wheeler said: "I think the President did the right thing. You may say for me that I agree with him--for the first time."

Forty Japanese ships, radios blacked out, hove to in the Pacific, well offshore, awaited developments. In San Francisco's and Los Angeles' Japtowns there was no excitement; press photographers had to cajole Japanese into posing in groups around bulletin boards. The switchboards of Japanese newspapers and banks jammed with calls, but they were mostly from U.S. newshawks asking whether anything was cooking.

At the specific request of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, the freezing order had included Chinese assets, to prevent their use by Japanese owners, and to facilitate the Chinese exchange problem. Big chore ahead: to close the entire Hemisphere to the Japanese. Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles this week intimated that the U.S. would welcome parallel economic measures by other American nations against Japan. Mexico's President Manuel Avila Camacho warned that an attack on any other American country might lead to Mexico's entry into the war. The Hemisphere was apparently falling into line behind U.S. policy. The U.S. and the Japanese were now face to face at the shortest distance yet. Each had encircled the other in the South Pacific (see p. 20). The next major move on either side would mean war.

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