Blast

From an island in the St. Lawrence River, near Alexandria Bay, N.Y., where Frank Orren Lowden, 80, has his palatial summer home, came a statement of clear, unqualified opposition to the nation's policy in a world at war. GOPatriarch Lowden, who was a great Governor of Illinois and missed the Presidency by a hair in 1920, was a name to conjure with in days gone by. To go along with him on the statement, 14 other potent signatures of a slightly younger vintage were rounded up. Then Patriarch Lowden, who once was a brave Midwestern anti-isolationist, handed out an isolationist blast saying:

"The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war. . . . Exceeding its expressed purpose, the Lease-Lend bill has been followed by naval action, by military occupation of bases outside the Western Hemisphere, by promise of unauthorized aid to Russia and by other belligerent moves. . . .

"We have gone as far as is consistent either with law, with sentiment or with security. ... It [the war] is not purely a world conflict between tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion. . . .

"Few people honestly believe that the Axis is now, or will in the future, be in a position to threaten the independence of any part of this Hemisphere if our defenses are properly prepared.

"Freedom in America does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations."

Other signers: Herbert Hoover; Felix Muskett Morley, for three years a League of Nations employe, until recently editor of the Washington Post, now president of Haverford College; Joshua Reuben Clark, Herbert Hoover's Ambassador to Mexico, and now, in effect, business manager of Mormon affairs with vast powers throughout the church's Rocky Mountain territory and national holdings; Alfred Mossman London; Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Hoover's Interior Secretary, president of Stanford University; Hoover's Minister to Canada, Hanford MacNider of Iowa; Hoover's Ambassador to Italy, Henry Prather Fletcher; Robert Maynard Hutchins, precocious president of the University of Chicago; John L. Lewis, still ambitious to be all labor's boss (see p. 14); ex-Vice President Charles Gates Dawes ("Hell'n Maria"); Philadelphia Industrialist Joseph Henry Scattergood, Quaker; and an oldtime opera star, Soprano Geraldine Farrar, now 59, in her youth a favorite of Germany's Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (she was once called "The Darling of the Heir").

The effect of the isolationist blast on the entire nation was difficult to measure. The blast did have an immediate and deep effect on the Republican Party itself where the rank & file are now divided in two great masses--one moving toward Wendell Willkie and "loyal opposition," and the other toward the throttling kind of isolationism of the statement. The Alexandria Bay manifesto was read aloud to a formal caucus of the Republican members of the House. The caucus, organized at the instigation of a group of the most isolationist G.O.P. Congressmen, headed by New York's arch-Ostrich Hamilton Fish, had met for two reasons: 1) to condemn Wendell Willkie for his support of the Administration's foreign policy; 2) to outline a guiding GOPolicy on the draft-extension bill. Instead, after a session of denunciations of the President and Willkie, the caucus produced a declaration of policy on which all could agree: "We reaffirm the pledge of our 1940 Party platform : 'The Republican Party is firmly opposed to involving this Nation in foreign war.' We approve the restatement of this principle subsequently written into the 1940 Democratic Party platform : 'We will not participate in foreign wars, and we will not send our Army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack.' We demand the fulfillment of these pledges. . . .

"We reaffirm the declaration of our Party platform, as follows: 'Our national defense must be so strong that no unfriendly power shall ever set foot on American soil. To assure this strength our national economy, the true basis of America's defense, must be free of unwarranted government interference.'

"The 'lend-lease' policy was presented to the American people as a measure short of war. We insist that it be administered as a short of war measure. . . "

The Republicans were not sure of the effect of this declaration; it was the most minimum possible statement, a least common denominator of opinion.

But this week a foreign correspondent returned to the U.S. after a two-year stay abroad, chiefly in Italy and Germany. Able Newshawk John T. Whitaker, of the Chicago Daily News, clearly stated the effect of such statements abroad. Whitaker said that such people as the isolationist leaders "ought to be in German uniforms because they are winning more battles for Germany than German generals."

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