"Enemy of Peace"

Nothing could have delighted the European democracies more and nothing could have been less pleasing to the dictatorships than the report last week that President Roosevelt had told a Senate Committee that the U. S. defense frontiers were in France (see p. 12). The French and British press shouted with joy, while the totalitarian press of Germany and Italy outdid all previous efforts in denouncing Mr. Roosevelt and all he stood for.

The French Chamber of Deputies echoed with cries of "Long Live Roosevelt!" and "Vive I'Amerique!" after Air Minister Guy La Chambre, explaining the recent purchase of 600 warplanes in the U. S., paid this tribute: "I take this opportunity of thanking the great American democracy and its leader, President Roosevelt, who has realized that in serving France he is serving peace."

Wary British officials declined comment until the President's reported words were confirmed (which they emphatically were not). There were suspicions that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Government, still bent on appeasing the dictators, welcomed U. S. bolstering less enthusiastically than France.

In the controlled dictator press which, like France, did not wait to find out if Mr. Roosevelt had really said what he was said to have said, President Roosevelt was pictured as an "enemy of peace," "AntiFascist No. 1." Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels sicked the entire German press on the President, but nothing out of Germany last week compared in vitriol, scorn, ridicule and invective to what was being written in Italy. There, Virginio Gayda, Dictator Benito Mussolini's journalistic mouthpiece, declared in Giornale d'ltalia that the President's words were an "open provocation to war," that President Roosevelt "himself plans and welcomes armed conflict." Since the U. S. frontiers are now the Rhine, Signor Gayda said, Italy's and Germany's frontiers should now be extended to the Panama Canal.

What apparently hurt Italy's feelings most, however, was the sale of U.S. planes to France. Popolo di Roma denounced the "scandalous supply of planes to France" and expressed belief that this was a violation of the U. S. Constitution, which it is not. Warning France not to believe that U. S. help would be forthcoming in a war, Popolo d'ltalia said: "This is one of the most colossal delusions into which France has ever fallen. Because, if despite the efforts of the totalitarian states to insure a just peace, war should break out, before the U. S. could say 'Oh!' the French frontier would be smashed to bits."

The President's physical infirmity was reviewed in Tevere, with this conclusion: "One can understand why Roosevelt pushes his country toward war. He is a man of catastrophe, he is a man of ill luck, and he wants to bring ill luck to America." To U. S. Ambassador William Phillips this seemed a bit too much. He protested to Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano. Result: continued front-page anti-U. S. editorials in almost every Italian newspaper.

The playing field of the international crisis series had moved across the Atlantic, if for only a few days.

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