National Affairs: War: Must over May

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Early last week U. S. headlines, which for months had been mumbling darkly about the prospect of a distant war, suddenly shrilled a new and alarming note: ETHIOPIA PARLEY COLLAPSES. ITALY BARS ALL PEACE TALK. BRITAIN TO ASK U. S. TO HELP CURB WAR. U. S. Charge d'Affaires Ray Atherton had been closeted with British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare in London. "Friendly but powerful pressure," wrote a New York Times Paris correspondent, "will come from Great Britain, working through diplomatic, political and press channels to win the U. S. to her side in the coming conflict over Ethiopia."

Such news started rolling across the U. S. a wave of fear, of indignation, of determination to avoid war at all costs. With a mighty splash the wave broke over a jittery Congress, sweeping to passage the first neutrality law in U. S. history designed, not to observe international amenities, but to keep the nation out of war.

When the War began in 1914, the U. S. had no statute to help it avoid entanglement in other nations' armed conflicts. After proclaiming U. S. neutrality exactly as President Washington had done in 1793. President Wilson could only plead with the nation to be neutral "in fact as well as in name ... in thought as well as in action." Any such neutrality, it soon appeared, was clearly impossible. Because the flag followed them wherever they went, U. S. citizens were free to risk not only their own but their nation's safety by traveling through war zones on belligerent ships. With its great navy, Britain blocked U. S. trade with Germany by search & seizure, took no U. S. lives in the process. U. S. vexation was largely assuaged by the fat profits rolling in from Allied buying. Attempting to meet blockade with blockade. Germany resorted to submarines, unavoidably drowned a few hundred U. S. citizens, gave the U. S. a legal pretext to go to War.

In 1927 Ohio's Representative Theodore E. Burton introduced a resolution to empower the President to prohibit at his discretion export of arms & munitions to the aggressor in any war. Then & there arose the issue which has divided U. S. neutrality-seekers ever since, setting the Senate implacably against the President and State Department. Unwilling to let the President pick sides in a war by naming the aggressor, isolationist Senators asserted that an arms embargo should apply automatically to all belligerents. Otherwise, they argued, the embargoed nation would be certain to strike back exactly as Germany had struck. Firmly the State Department held that the President should be allowed to decide when and against whom he would lay an arms embargo. Only by holding that threat in reserve, it was argued, could the U. S. cooperate with other nations in exerting its "moral influence" to sober an aggressor, forestall a conflict.