Follow What Leader?

WAR & PEACE

(See Cover)

The most articulate isolationist group in the U.S. last week faced a crisis. The America First Committee had touched the pitch of antiSemitism, and its fingers were tarred. It had failed in its specific purpose of halting U.S. progress toward a shooting war. It could show its adherents nothing but the record of a campaign, fought bitterly, spectacularly and with plenty of money, but without success.

In Chicago, harassed Committee heads gathered with Charles Lindbergh, who fortnight before had blurted the Jewish issue into their campaign. They had already delayed so long taking a stand on his remarks about Jewish influence as a danger to the U.S. that nothing short of drastic action would mean anything. And drastic action would have meant a public repudiation of Lindbergh, their star performer. They decided to do nothing drastic. Instead, they issued an unsigned statement:

". . . Colonel Lindbergh and his fellow members of the America First Committee are not antiSemitic. We deplore the injection of the race issue into the discussion of war or peace. It is the interventionists who have done this. . . ."

America First was not in a happy spot. In the unhappiest spot of all was elderly, vehement Robert Elkington Wood, Brigadier General of the U.S. Army (retired), holder of the Distinguished Service Medal, Companion of the British Order of St. Michael and St. George, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, Chairman of the Board of Sears, Roebuck & Co., boss of America First.

Had the General, long one of Chicago's most respected citizens, been sold a bill of goods? By all the evidence, he had gone into his hot spot with his eyes wide open, an earnest and sincere man, convinced of the worth of his cause.

Call in the Wilds. In the fall of 1939, General Wood and three friends were on a hunting trip in Canada when word was brought to them by an Indian runner that war had started in Europe. The message came from Edward Stettinius, chairman of the War Resources Board newly appointed by the President, and it summoned General Wood to Washington, back to duty as a member of that Board.

Bob Wood packed a copy of Mein Kampf, which he had been reading during his vacation, and started off with the others. After a weary four-day trek through the wilderness, a flight by plane to Juneau, a trip down the coast by revenue cutter to Seattle and a transcontinental hop, he reported in Washington. He need not have been in such a hurry. The Board's plan for mobilizing the U.S. in a defense program was later submitted to the President, never saw the light of day. The Board was dissolved, and Wood went back to his Highland Park home outside Chicago, with good cause to frown over New Deal mismanagement.

The 62-year-old Chicago businessman and onetime soldier was alarmed at the foreign policy of the President who as early as 1937 left no doubt of his opposition to totalitarian aggression. The General believed it was drawing the country into a European war on the side of Britain. He was sure that Hitler could not invade the U.S. across 3,000 miles of ocean. He believed that England could defend herself, and could, if she would, make a negotiated peace with Germany by which she could keep her fleet and colonies and leave to Germany economic control of the Continent. He was confident that the U.S. could hold its own in world trade afterwards. As he figured it, the countries of Europe needed the U.S. more than the U.S. needed them; the U.S. would hold the economic whiphand.

To the question, what price war and what price peace?, the General had an answer:

The interventionists' bargain, as he saw it, was a bad one. To line up with Britain would be "just like a well-organized, money-making business deciding to take a bankrupt firm in as partner." In that "impractical" partnership, the U.S. would squander its treasury and its sons' blood. The strain would be too much for democracy, some form of totalitarianism would have to be set up. The net: turmoil, chaos, revolution.

The isolationists' bargain was better, he was convinced. On the debit side, the U.S. would probably have to trade with a victorious Germany on a barter basis. All exports and imports would have to go under strict Government control. Government would have to lay an even heavier hand on private industry. The U.S. would have to learn to produce as Germany did under Hitler, and figure out a way to keep individual freedom. The U.S. would have to maintain a huge armament program. (But after all, the General told himself: "Hitler ... is mortal and he'll die some day. The way to tame a rebel is to make him rich and then he becomes conservative and settles down.") The net, as the General cast it up: retention of "most of the good things of our way of life and progress as a great nation."

It was tragic, thought the General, that the Administration did not agree with this view. But he was sure that most of his fellow countrymen, certainly most realistic hardheaded businessmen in isolationist Chicago, did agree. The General thought something ought to be done about it.

At that providential point the General heard of a young man with a bright idea. The young man, who had already organized a committee to spread the gospel of nonintervention, was personable Robert ("Bobbie") Douglas Stuart Jr., a Princeton graduate and a student at Yale Law School, son of a wealthy Quaker Oats Co. executive. The name of his committee: The Committee to Defend America First. The General joined immediately.

"Let's Charge." Friends of Bob Wood think so highly of him that once they would have liked to see him President of the U.S., in 1938 even tried to start a boom. The son of a Kansan who had fought with John Brown's raiders, Bob Wood graduated from West Point, served in the Philippines, spent ten years in Panama when the Canal was being built. He survived the discipline of General Goethals, escaped yellow fever, and made a name as chief quartermaster. When the U.S. entered World War I he returned to service, sailed for France as a colonel. His old boss, Goethals, called him back to Washington and made him Acting Quartermaster General and Director of Purchase & Storage.

Again he made a name for himself among the men who knew. The private merchandising business opened up to him like an oyster at war's end. After a time in a job with Montgomery Ward & Co. he went to Sears, Roebuck & Co., whose head was the late Julius Rosenwald, Jewish philanthropist.

It was as an executive of Sears, Roebuck & Co. that Chicago came to know Robert Wood best. In much the same way that he gobbled caramels, sometimes without removing the wrappers, the General gobbled up statistics, grazing through U.S. Census reports and the U.S. Statistical Abstracts like a goat chewing his way through a garden.

Out of these bewildering thickets of information he chewed many a regurgit-able flower of price fluctuations, buying habits, population trends. In 1925, seeing the mail-order business begin to dwindle as car-borne customers started shopping in town, he began putting Sears into the retail-store field. He was immediately successful. Last year the company grossed $749,000,000 of sales, 65% of which were made in its 600 retail stores.

He rose to the presidency. His employes respected him, though they sometimes misconstrued the scowl which masked him as he quick-stepped through his well-disciplined offices. He had a sudden and choleric temper. He was terrifyingly positive. But he was quick to give credit where credit was due, would take back every word when once convinced that he was wrong. The misleading scowl covered his absorption in his own thoughts. He was a friendly man, even a backslapper, and like many another tough U.S. businessman, a sentimentalist.

For years he carried in a pocket of his sloppy, ill-fitting clothes ("off the pile" at Sears) a copy of Kipling's If. His greatest pride is still his large and handsome family, which is being steadily increased by grandchildren, whose births the General always celebrates by presenting each new infant with a block of Sears, Roebuck stock. He takes time out to manage Grandchildren, Inc., a corporation set up with seven of his oldest grandchildren (he now has twelve), serving as president, vice president, etc. Their chief enterprise: caring for a flock of chickens and selling eggs to members of the family, who continue to live near each other in suburban Highland Park.

His favorite relaxation is hunting and fishing trips to Alaska and Canada, where Indian guides call him Captain Ogontz (Ojibway for wall-eyed pike). So far, motherly Mrs. Wood has blocked the General's every attempt to smuggle into his study a stuffed trophy of the chase. Other hobbies: riding his Arabian horse Kebar in the early mornings, driving his Ford sedan to his office at breakneck speed, and playing bridge, a game in which he invariably overbids, and into which he invariably plunges with his favorite expression: "Let's charge!"

At first Bob Wood was sympathetic with the New Deal. He voted for Roose velt twice, approved AAA, SEC, Social Security, many another reform. But he began to part company with the New Deal. He gagged at the Third Term. He gagged at Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. When America First gave him something political to work for, he threw himself into it with a will.

Out of the Ground. The doctrine of U.S. isolationism has a long and honorable past. To be sure American independence was won with the aid of a European ally (France), and several times the U.S. invaded European waters to maintain the freedom of the seas.

Since the turn of the century, however, all ventures outside the bounds of the U.S. had acquired a bad name. By 1939 the imperialism ("Manifest Destiny") of 1898 had been long regarded as a pain in the bowels and conscience of the U.S. The timid internationalism of World War I was a spinster memory, pressed like a dead flower between the forlorn pages of the League of Nations.

In September 1940, when as an America Firster General Wood first wound his horn against U.S. interference in foreigners' affairs, he had every reason to believe that he was embarking on a popular and respectable crusade.

Friends and associates joined him. They were certain that war would knock business for a loop. Hitler was in another country. Practical-minded Chicagoans felt that under certain arms-length circumstances they might even tolerate Hitler, as they had tolerated Capone. As the General put it, they did not think the U.S. should "interfere in the quarrels of Europe and Asia, old, sick and overpopulated continents with ancient rivalries that cannot be healed."

Their crusade was sincere and dignified, their membership select. Into it came men like Lessing Rosenwald (son of Sears, Roebuck's famed president, Julius), intimate with Wood and associated with him at Sears; wealthy, influential, socially prominent Edward Ryerson Jr. (steel); wealthy, bluff Sterling Morton (salt). Eager to speak for its cause was such an impeccably American woman as Kathleen Norris, eminently successful writer of he-she stories for women's magazines, a sincere and emotional pacifist who hates war. For the most part, members confined themselves chiefly to writing to the President, until last January when the Lend-Lease debate began.

Then, like a bean patch under a hot sun, opposition sprouted up & down the country. Feeling blindly for something to fasten to, it clutched and climbed on the solid Chicago organization of General Wood. With sincere isolationists, frightened business and political opportunists, many a political weed twined up: Roosevelt-haters, Bundists, Fascists, Coughlinites. America First chapters sprang up overnight, started their own membership drives. Nickels, dimes, dollars rolled in. From Chicago, it looked breathtaking. The America Firsters in Chicago did not yet realize that their movement had grown out of hand.

White Knight. Isolationist Congressmen, after Lend-Lease went through over their protests, stormed out of the Capital to tour the country for the isolationist cause. Chief among them were Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who hates the President, dreams of riding into the White House on the crest of a post-war isolationist wave; Senator Gerald P. Nye, one of the most detested and distrusted men in the Senate; Representative Hamilton Fish, demagogic, erratic, unstable, who also dreams of being President some day.

The Three Furies of the isolationist press increased their howls. In Chicago, Robert ("Bertie") McCormick's Tribune bombarded the Midwest with isolationist propaganda, screamed: "The 80 per cent of our people who are Americans undefiled by foreign seductions must bring their influence to bear on Congress and the Executive." Cousins Joe Patterson (New York Daily News) and Eleanor Patterson (Washington Times-Herald) ground out their daily gripes at the risks involved in the Administration's policy of trying to stop Hitler.

In April Charles Lindbergh joined the crusade. He wrote his own speeches, said what he believed, submitted to no pre-speech censorship. He became America First's idol and white knight. Along with Mrs. Lindbergh, he became an intimate of Bob Wood and a frequent guest at the Woods' comfortable lakeside house. Often the General and the Colonel, plain men both, sat up talking until midnight, a late hour for Bob Wood, who habitually leaves parties at 9:30.

When Lindbergh made his Des Moines speech charging that the British, the Administration and Jews were pushing the U.S. towards war, America Firsters in Chicago did not immediately realize what havoc his words were to unleash. Neither did Lindbergh. He had believed that the President, warming up for his declaration on freedom of the seas, was about to make a speech which might mean war, and he was determined to get in one last word before it was too late to talk.

General Wood had made up his mind that when the U.S. was really in a shooting war, it was time to quit talking. As a patriotic citizen and an old soldier he felt that duty strongly. Whether he could shut up his Committee, or control the rank undergrowth, was something else.

There was no denying that, before Lindbergh spoke, anti-Semitism was one of the weeds that had already sprung up in America First's lush garden. But until Lindbergh publicly described the Jews as a danger to the U.S., anti-Semitism had not burst into full flower. General Wood and his associates were astonished at the country's reaction to Lindbergh's attack.

Into national headquarters, after the Lindbergh speech, poured a flood of mail, which America Firsters broke down into the "for" and the "against." According to their tally, 93.3% of the letters were in Lindbergh's defense, usually taking the line that a great patriot was being maligned and attacked by interests with ulterior motives. Typical: "We know that the heart of this boy is Pure Gold. We know that in speaking to the American People he gives of his best." One Midwest chapter reported that it had lost three members, gained 60. Other chapters reported similar results.

Something was shooting up. But what? It was not the original, homely bean plant which the General had nurtured. For that reason there was at the same time apparently a trend among some of the Committee's supporters to drop out quietly from the movement. Lessing Rosenwald had already resigned. Whether America First would gain or lose in strength remained to be seen. Last week FORTUNE'S survey reported a 2.3% decrease in national sentiment for bucking Hitler at all costs.

This week, as Lindbergh got ready to speak in Fort Wayne, Ind., the question in most minds was whether he would retract or repeat his Des Moines attack. Best guess was that he would let it lie. Says Lindbergh: "I never compromise."

It was doubtful whether the General realized what had happened as he surveyed his America First garden last week. While he and his advisers had been busily cultivating the young bean shoots of isolationism, the weeds had got out of hand, and threatened to choke the garden--Jew-haters, Roosevelt-haters, England-haters, Coughlinites, politicians, demagogues. The General's followers had run away with their leader. The General's firm, meaty, businesslike points (an impractical partnership . . . a squandering of wealth . . . Hitler will die some day) were still as respectably moot as ever. But the General's beans were being rapidly overshadowed by the rank weeds.

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