WAR & PEACE: Blast

From an island in the St. Lawrence River, near Alexandria Bay, N.Y., where Frank Orren Lowden, 80, has his palatial summer home, came a statement of clear, unqualified opposition to the nation's policy in a world at war. GOPatriarch Lowden, who was a great Governor of Illinois and missed the Presidency by a hair in 1920, was a name to conjure with in days gone by. To go along with him on the statement, 14 other potent signatures of a slightly younger vintage were rounded up. Then Patriarch Lowden, who once was a brave Midwestern anti-isolationist, handed out an isolationist blast saying:

"The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war. . . . Exceeding its expressed purpose, the Lease-Lend bill has been followed by naval action, by military occupation of bases outside the Western Hemisphere, by promise of unauthorized aid to Russia and by other belligerent moves. . . .

"We have gone as far as is consistent either with law, with sentiment or with security. ... It [the war] is not purely a world conflict between tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion. . . .

"Few people honestly believe that the Axis is now, or will in the future, be in a position to threaten the independence of any part of this Hemisphere if our defenses are properly prepared.

"Freedom in America does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations."

Other signers: Herbert Hoover; Felix Muskett Morley, for three years a League of Nations employe, until recently editor of the Washington Post, now president of Haverford College; Joshua Reuben Clark, Herbert Hoover's Ambassador to Mexico, and now, in effect, business manager of Mormon affairs with vast powers throughout the church's Rocky Mountain territory and national holdings; Alfred Mossman London; Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Hoover's Interior Secretary, president of Stanford University; Hoover's Minister to Canada, Hanford MacNider of Iowa; Hoover's Ambassador to Italy, Henry Prather Fletcher; Robert Maynard Hutchins, precocious president of the University of Chicago; John L. Lewis, still ambitious to be all labor's boss (see p. 14); ex-Vice President Charles Gates Dawes ("Hell'n Maria"); Philadelphia Industrialist Joseph Henry Scattergood, Quaker; and an oldtime opera star, Soprano Geraldine Farrar, now 59, in her youth a favorite of Germany's Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (she was once called "The Darling of the Heir").