WAR & PEACE: Exquisite Befuddlement

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U. S. citizens were still arguing last week over what the war was about, and what the U. S. should do about it. Nearly everybody, it seemed, wanted to aid Britain, but nearly everybody also wanted to stay out of war. (According to Pollster Gallup's figures, 60% of U. S. voters now want to aid Britain even at risk of war. Only 12% wanted to go to war deliberately.)

This was the uneasy background against which, this week, President Roosevelt spoke to the nation. Because he also spoke for the nation, his words had the effect of lessening the tumult. But before the President said his say, many an earnest, angry or just plain balled-up citizen said his:

> Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald Tribune, urbane dean of Washington columnists, saw the situation as a case of national split-personality—mass schizophrenia. Even this metaphorical complexity was too simple. Public opinion was not so much like a river that flows in one direction, but divides on the rock of a principle, as it was like a maelstrom. Men who wanted with all their minds to give all aid to England wanted also with all their hearts to feed Europe—which would break England's blockade. Men who wanted to stay out of war with Germany also wanted to send the U. S. Navy to convoy shipments of war materials to England.

Labels were all mixed up. The New York Daily News went to Webster for a definition of "that shameful word, 'appeasement,' " found in Webster no shade of the shame of Munich. Since Hitler and Stalin's alliance in 1939 had set the style, there had been so many cases of ideologically strange bedfellows that the only strange thing left would be the discovery of two ideas that hadn't slept together.

Last week brought some perfect examples of confusion twice confounded:

> William Allen White, so-called interventionist-warmonger, chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, mildly defined his aims: to aid England, but not to the extent of involving the U. S. in war, not to repeal the Johnson Act, not to convoy supplies to England. Shocked at this lukewarmth, several of his committee members immediately branded his words as a shameful retreat toward isolation. Major General John F. O'Ryan resigned from the committee. In effect, the interventionist committee seemed too isolationist.

> General Robert E. Wood, so-called iso-lationist-appeaser, of the America First Committee, hailed White's statement as sound stuff. So did Charles A. Lindbergh, who to many Americans symbolizes the narrowest isolation, the broadest appeasement. Immediately protests went up; several members resigned, complaining that the isolationist committee was getting too interventionist.