THE CABINET: In the Tradition

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Although experts were disposed to minimize the effects of the protest, joint Pan American action on such a scale looked impressive. To opponents of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration, it looked like one of those moves that Statesman Elihu Root described as "first shaking one's fist and then shaking one's finger." The finger shake: a threat to deny the use of American ports to ships which fight in the safety zone. Best argument put forward by opponents was Walter Lippmann's: The 21 Republics are in a position of having asserted a right which they have failed to enforce. Belligerents cannot be persuaded to respect the zone. To enforce it would require a formidable fleet, would mean driving out all warships, protecting all merchant ships, arresting all supply ships that act as naval auxiliaries. Far simpler, said Mr. Lippmann, to enforce the traditional code of neutrals and let the Allies deal with the raiders, realize the ideal of the Declaration of Panama without abandoning American neutrality.

Until last week, plain readers had no rapid up-to-the-minute survey of U. S. diplomatic history to place such moves in historical perspective.* Last week Stanford Professor Thomas Bailey brought out A Diplomatic History of the American People. It begins with an account of colonial foreign policy and ends, 766 pages later, with President Roosevelt's Neutrality Proclamation and a retrospect and prospect. But its best feature is that it makes diplomatic history lively reading.

Samples:

> On July 8, 1853, Japanese on the Bay of Yedo saw Perry's flagship belching black smoke, moving up the Bay against a headwind, recalled a folk song in consternation:

Thro' a black night of cloud and rain,

The Black Ship plies her way—

An alien thing of evil mien—

Across the waters gray.

Professor Bailey believes that in his mission to open up Japan Perry was diplomatically shrewd in secluding himself and refusing to deal with any except the highest officials. But after Perry's show of force and dignity, the treaty he made was disappointing, and Author Bailey agrees with Finley Peter Dunne (in effect): "When we knocked at the door, we didn't go in, they came out."

> U. S. feelings have always been passionate on foreign affairs. Virginians drank "a speedy death to General Washington" for approving Jay's treaty ending the immediate trouble with Britain without settling the underlying questions. A Boston friend of Jay's found written on his fence: "Damn John Jay! Damn everyone that won't damn John Jay! Damn everyone that won't put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!"

> U. S. foreign policy has been on the whole so successful that a big question is what it might have accomplished had its minor personnel been better. One such was Congressman "Beast" Butler's nephew, who got a post in Egypt, "where he caused a minor scandal by drunkenness, brawling, a shooting affray and the purchase of dancing girls."