Reason & Emotion

Monday, May. 01, 1939

Article Tools

Reprints

WAR & PEACE

Germany's fleet plowed past the cliffs of Dover (see p. 23), Benito Mussolini called Franklin Roosevelt a Messianic meddler and Chairman Key Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a convivial vociferator* (see p. 26), but still there was no actual fighting in Europe last week. Meanwhile the U. S. people continued the process of making up their collective mind about War (how to provide against its coming) and Peace (how to preserve it). The process consisted, as it must in a democracy, of sound-offs hither & yon, pro & con. Most notable:

> A poll of the 22 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated a scant plurality of five for Senator Pittman's plan to rewrite the law (part of which expires May 1) on a strict cash & carry basis, permitting sales of any U. S. goods to all comers provided they pay in the U. S., transport in their own bottoms.

> After listening to conversation between Colonel Lindbergh & President Roosevelt at the White House, Rhode Island's Senator Green told friends that he would "advise any one against planning a trip to Europe this summer.''†

> When Dean Helen Taft Manning of Bryn Mawr College—isolationist sister of Presidentially ambitious Senator Robert A. Taft who last week accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of "ballyhooing" war in order to play politics (see p. 21)—urged the same committee to stiffen the present neutrality law and make it more instead of less inflexible, arch-isolationist Senator Borah demanded: "Haven't the people [of the U. S.] already made up their minds who is right and who is wrong? The world is already at war. Already things have taken place which make other nations look on us as un-neutral. Do you think we can write permanent legislation at this time?"

> Dr. Walter Judd, medical missionary in China, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the adoption of Senator Pittman's plan would be disastrous to China. Said he: "Now we are furnishing Japan 50% of its war materials. One-third of the scrap iron that is being hurled upon civilian populations comes from the United States. Trucks, the most decisive single factor in Japanese advances, are supplied by us."

> Said Upton Close (Josef Washington Hall), author & lecturer on the Orient: "One good isolationist Senator is worth more to Japan than a whole division of soldiers."

> Dapper little Publisher Roy Wilson Howard of the Scripps-Howard chainpapers, fresh home from interviewing bigwigs all over Europe, declared that the greatest menace in Europe was the possibility that the French and English people would finally say: "Dear God, if we've got to fight this war, let's do it and get it over with. . . . Too much emotionalism and too little realism are being evidenced in the U. S. toward the entire European situation."

> Lecturing at Harvard, Park Commissioner Robert Moses of New York City said: "In practice, every American knows that we cannot remain absolutely aloof from another world conflict... we shall be lucky if this aid can be confined to money, materials and munitions as distinguished from men. . . ."