Revival

When I dip into the future, jar as human eye can see, .

I behold a world as selfish, just as selfish as can be. . . .

With this squint-eyed rewrite of Tennyson, rabble-rousing Senator Gerald P. Nye last week keynoted the New Isolationism.

Until last week, Gerald Nye had not harangued a big isolationist audience with a big isolationist speech since the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, in Pittsburgh, when he sweatily, stubbornly refused for hours to believe that the Japs had really attacked Pearl Harbor.

All the old, familiar America-Firstish faces were there in the Mural Room of Chicago's Hotel Morrison: the furtive, snickering little women who pass around anti-Semitic postcards; the Coughlinites; the pinch-lipped, waspish old couples with gleaming eyes; the Patrick Henry Forumites; the overcorseted We the Mothers; the fanatical ragtag & bobtail of a 100% star-spangled movement.

There was the handsome ex-Yorkville Jew-baiter, Joe McWilliams, resplendent in a red-white-&-blue necktie. McWilliams, the Great Profile of the American soapbox, is now the self-appointed leader of the bonus army of World War II. (He is agitating for a $7,800 government bonus for every World War II veteran.) His new backer, blonde, young, black-gowned Socialite Mrs. Alexis de Tarnowsky, accompanied him. Altogether, there were more than 1,000 of them (the Chicago Tribune puffed it to 2,000).

Each time Gerald Nye belittled United Nations strategy, postwar planning, Roosevelt, Willkie, Churchill, Stalin, or Chiang Kaishek, the catcalls and clapping rocked the chandeliers, quivered against the black-and-jade glass murals.

Nye wanted to "win this war . . . quickly . . . and with as little cost in lives as is possible." But it seemed to him that an equally urgent job was "completely overwhelming and smothering the Willkie-Roosevelt-Carnegie Foundation kind of leadership." He proposed action: "Let us abandon silence . . . use such weapons as are at our command . . . and strike down this thing."

Billed as a "Republican Revival" (which struck many a GOPster as libelous), the meeting was engineered by smooth, stocky Chicago lawyer William J. Grace, chairman of an organization now called the Citizens' U.S.A. Committee (formerly the Citizens' Keep America Out of War Committee). But Illinois' top-drawer Republicans, although mainly anti-Willkie, shunned the Mural Room, looked prim and pained. The Great Revival was off to a weak start.

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