Methodists & Businessmen

Ohio's honest, able Representative John Martin Vorys took to the radio last week in Columbus to tell his constituents: "Secret discussions are now going on as to what shall be done with Germany when the Nazis are defeated." Then he demanded that whatever terms are arrived at be made public the moment agreement is reached. Like London's blunt, Europe-wise Observer (TIME, April 17), Vorys believes that the simple Roosevelt-Churchill demand for unconditional surrender plays into the hands of Nazi Goebbels, who is telling the Germans that surrender means annihilation.

John Vorys, a notable member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has a first-hand authority about war & peace which few U.S. Congressmen command. He jumped into World War I as a fighter-pilot of the famed "Yale Unit."* He has roamed China; he watched the Washington Naval Limitations Conference of 1921-22 as assistant secretary of the American delegation, piloted a patrol plane off the Florida coast in the summer of 1942.

Six weeks ago he took off, with New York City's Republican Representative Joseph C. Baldwin, for a quick but intensive look at Britain and North Africa. A short, heavy-set man, he wanted to get into World War II as a flier, but was told he was more valuable in Congress.

Congressman Vorys also reported to his constituents:

Lend-Lease. "In Britain, Lend-Lease and reverse Lend-Lease are so mixed up that I doubt whether there will ever be any complete accounting. As a postwar plan, Lend-Lease is most unsatisfactory. We should be making plans now for arrangements to supersede Lend-Lease even before the fighting stops. . . ."

Anglo-American Relations. "Members of Parliament, including members of the British Cabinet . . . feel that they will not be in a position after this war to carry on alone the job of leadership in policing and financing the world which they have been doing for nearly 200 years. They feel that the Americans and British should work on it together, with or without the Russians. Nobody over there seemed very sure about what the Russians intended to do or whether they would cooperate with anyone.

"I said that we must find ways & means to put our participation on a mutually paying basis for us as well as other countries. . . . The British would agree to this but would say that it was up to us, not to them, to propose ways & means of making our activities pay. ... I believe our diplomats and economic representatives would be interested in working on such plans if they were given authority and directions to do so."

Then Congressman Vorys went home to his tasks as a board member of Columbus' Broad Street Methodist Church, to a stack of letters from businessmen's organizations asking for more information on foreign policy and for speeches about his proposals. He summed them up in a letter to a friend: "We need more Methodists and more businessmen in our foreign affairs, pumping more idealism and common sense into our plans."

*Other members of the Unit: David S. Ingalls, the Navy's No. 1 ace and later U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air, now in the Pacific; Kenneth MacLeish, whose death in battle against eight German fighters was memorialized by brother Archibald MacLeish; F. Trubee Davison, now a colonel in the Army Air Forces; Artemus L. Gates, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air; and Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air.

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