WAR & PEACE: Hot & Bothered & Cold

While debate on the Lend-Lease Bill rolled on last week, many a U. S. citizen raised shrill anti-war cries. Speaking for the leftist majority of the American Youth Congress, Executive Secretary Joseph Cad-den declared: "America's youth have repudiated every attempt on the part of the Administration and its lackeys to put over this war program."

In front of the British Embassy paraded lady members of the Paul Revere Sentinels and Women's Neutrality League, brandishing placards which blared: "Benedict Arnold Helped England, Too," "Move Over, Unknown Soldier." Before they left they hanged a two-faced effigy of Roosevelt and Willkie to the Embassy gate.

Leading a Mothers' Crusade, into Capitol corridors stamped Mrs. Elizabeth Billing, calling for Florida's Senator Claude Pepper. "Pepper is a coward," screeched Mrs. Dilling. "He's just an old scaredy-cat and won't talk to us. How much is he getting to sell this Republic out? I'm hot and bothered. We came here to protest against this dictatorship and war bill. . . . We want other things too. We want warm blankets for the boys in camp who are cold."

Up & down the land went Economist-Writer John T. Flynn, speaking for the America First Committee, charging that President Roosevelt was stirring up fear and hatred, leading the country straight to war. From the pro-Nazi German-American National Alliance came support for Mr. Flynn and for the Citizens Keep America Out of War Committee "in their fight for you." Attacking those who "shout loudest for war," Paul A. F. Warnholtz bellowed, in the Alliance's News Letter: "They are usually old men, sterile biologically, and sterile even of all dreams and memories of life, love and youth, and would deny the right of youth to live. Their senile bodies, their cold, calculating brains, frequently find compensation for their lost youth in hatred and false ambitions for glory and gold. . . ."

The Hearst press blasted the bill. So did the biggest paper in New York City and the biggest paper in Chicago (see p. 46).

As these heated but human cries rent the air, from an old man came a cold, terrible-childlike idea that was as startling as the touch of a dead hand. To the ingenuous mechanic's mind of Henry Ford, the logical course was for the U. S. to help the nations destroy each other.

In a copyrighted interview in the Atlanta Constitution Mr. Ford suggested that the U. S. give both England and the Axis powers "the tools to keep on fighting until they both collapse." Said he: "There is no righteousness in either cause. ... If we can keep both sides fighting long enough, until they cannot fight any more, then maybe the little people will open their eyes. . . . When both nations finally collapse into internal dissolution, then the U. S. can play the role for which it has the strength and the ability."