INTERNATIONAL: Educational Is the Word

• Share

(2 of 4)

Then three months ago came the quiet visit of young King Leopold of the Belgians to Britain, following the news that Belgium was breaking away from her French and British military commitments (TIME, Oct. 26). The bloc of European neutrals had a new and powerful ally, and a new spokesman in the person of Belgian Premier Paul van Zeeland. Nine weeks ago Premier van Zeeland won world attention by his easy but spectacular election victory over the Rexist Léon Degrelle, self-appointed leader of Belgium's Fascists. Now he will take the spotlight as a spokesman in the U. S. for European democracy.

Princeton Plan. Emotionally, and as a matter of practical domestic politics, President Roosevelt would dearly love to do something to ease the growing tenseness of European politics. The statement last summer by New York Times Correspondent Arthur Krock that President Roosevelt might call an international conference of the world's rulers was a trial balloon (TIME, Sept. 7). There followed President Roosevelt's trip to South America and his affirmation at Buenos Aires of the new "Good Neighbor'' policy of the U. S. Next came the conversations with Walter Runciman, president of the British Board of Trade; then talks with Canada's Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir. Very little has come of all this except a general understanding that the U. S. wants to be helpful. But Britain is embarked on an enormous rearmament campaign, is playing a more & more dangerous role in the Spanish crisis. To U. S. isolationists the little group of Oslo neutrals seem much safer best friends to have in Europe, and good friends to cultivate for a moral effect on England.

Present U. S. Ambassador to Belgium is a socialite Manhattan lawyer, old friend of Franklin Roosevelt, named Dave Hennen Morris. President Hoover's well-known Belgian Ambassador, Career Diplomat Hugh Simons Gibson, has since 1933 been Ambassador to big but remote Brazil. Last December Mr. Gibson welcomed his chief to Rio, then crossed on the Hindenburg for a vacation trip to Brussels. Last month Princeton announced that it was awarding an honorary LL. D. to Belgium's Premier van Zeeland at Princeton's commencement (June 22), and the Belgian Premier was making a special trip to accept it. Never ordinarily does Princeton announce the names of recipients of honorary degrees until Commencement Day. Still secret last week were the names of other men to be honored with Belgium's Premier.

Princeton Man. Most important thing to remember about Paul van Zeeland (pronounced van Zayland) is that of all the Premiers of Europe he is the only one who is by profession and training a banker and an economist.

Forty-three years old and an ardent Catholic (he once sued and collected damages from a Belgian newsorgan that accused him of being a Mason), Paul van Zeeland comes from an upper-class Belgian family, took his law degree in 1914 at swank University of Louvain, went immediately into the Army. Within a few months he had won the Croix de Guerre and become a German prisoner, interned at Soltau near Hannover. Released after the Armistice, he won a graduate scholarship to Princeton University in 1920. Here, with no thought of politics as a career, he studied economics under Professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer, famed "currency doctor."