President & Peace

THE PRESIDENCY President & Peace

It cannot be a real peace if it fails to recognize brotherhood. It cannot be a lasting peace if the fruit of it is oppression. . . . It cannot be a sound peace if small nations must live in fear of powerful neighbors. It cannot be a moral peace if freedom from invasion is sold for tribute. . . . It cannot be a righteous peace if worship of God is denied.

In those terms last week President Roosevelt defined a good peace. He spoke in a week in which, in Finland, peace had been made that U. S. opinion condemned as bad. It was a week when a hearty and smiling Mussolini conferred with a pale Adolf Hitler in a village in the foothills of the Alps, when from Berlin came stories that Russia would join the Axis, and when the shape of some vast peace move--a super-Munich that would be for all Europe what Munich was for Czecho-Slovakia--loomed in the background of dispatches.

It was a week in which U. S. citizens could measure, more clearly than at any time since World War II began, the distance between the peaceful world that President Roosevelt visualized and the aims of Nazi Germany as Propaganda Minister Goebbels once defined them: "To unchain volcanic passions, to cause outbreaks of fury, to set masses of men on the march, to organize hate and suspicion with ice-cold calculation." It was a week, too, in which the President's picture of a good peace was measured against World Revolution as Lenin once presented its tasks--destroying the old order from top to bottom, uprooting the old beliefs, shattering the old traditions, the old moralities, the old customs, atomizing the old system lest its institutions become rallying-points for people who do not like the new.

Last week U. S. citizens could contemplate those concepts of the world as it should be. There was nothing melodramatic about President Roosevelt's statement of the U. S. view--an international broadcast delivered on the occasion of a meeting of foreign missions. But behind his statement lay a week of darkened counsel that began as over the U. S. swept a knowledge of what the Finnish peace meant, and pointed the paradox of U. S. desire for peace, U. S. determination to stay out of Europe.

Super-Munich? No Allied spokesman could admit that such a peace as President Roosevelt envisioned could be gained without an Allied victory. No foreign correspondent cabling speculations about Sumner Welles, Rome reports of Hitler's peace plan, London reports that peace depended on U. S. willingness to guarantee the settlement, could doubt that peace offers of some sort were under way. No student of the contending countries, the warring philosophies, the embattled economies, could believe that the chasm between them could be bridged, and peace established, unless some third party arranged it. No admirer of Benito Mussolini, go-between for the Pact of Munich, publicly held up Il Duce as powerful enough to bend the vastly greater forces of the immeasurably greater Munich that a new peace might involve. No citizen who had lived through the Munich settlement and its aftermath could believe that Europe's small nations would not "live in fear of powerful neighbors" unless the new frontiers were guaranteed-- and more powerfully than after Munich. But no U. S. editorial writer who said Amen to the President's definition of a good peace believed that the U. S. would guarantee the new frontiers of a new European settlement; up to last week no leader of either party had seriously proposed that the U. S. became the guarantor of a peace in Europe; there had been no preparation of the public mind if peace talk and peace aims were to be more than words.

Prelude. Paradox of the U. S. desire for peace, the U. S. determination to stay out of Europe made more remarkable last week's outburst on the peace of Finland. It began with a recognition that the Finnish peace was an Allied defeat, swept swiftly to a conviction that it was a disaster for the Scandinavian countries, plunged down here & there to belief that the Allies had lost the war. It swept up from Washington, where Finnish Minister Hjalmar Procope stood in the draughty Finnish Legation and in a shaky voice told subdued reporters what Finland had lost --dead, wounded, territory--but, denying that Finland had suffered a military defeat, said she had proved herself "a tough piece to attack." It showed in Finnish Relief headquarters, where contributions reached a new high on the day peace terms were announced. But it emerged most strongly in condemnation of President Roosevelt's brief statement (which public opinion considered an understatement) condemning Russia for her attack.

Blunter than most Presidential comments was the President's memorandum, but it nevertheless ranged behind U. S. opinion. Wrote the President: "The people of Finland, by their unexcelled valor . . . have won the moral right to live in everlasting peace and independence in the land they have so bravely defended." (Washington Post: "They had that moral right already." Detroit News: "Finland's glory is all her own, and her plight a reproach to an age that lets such things happen to such a people.")

President: . . . "Even though it is clear that by virtue of an attack by a neighbor many times stronger, they have been compelled to yield territory, and to accept a material weakening of their own future defense of their independence. ..." (Newark Evening News: "Pious platitudes.")

President: "The ending of this war does not yet clarify the inherent right of small nations to the maintenance of their integrity against attack by superior force." (Dorothy Thompson: "This column differs with the President. . . . The position of small nations in the world as it is at present is clarified. They have no position.")

So last week's peace brought in its wake gloom, mutual accusations, bitterness, savage resentment, failure, foreboding, recrimination, renewed hostility, new fears and new preparations, new hatreds and new defiances. It was a week of democratic frustration in which Finland blamed Sweden for not permitting Allied aid , Sweden accused Britain and France of wanting to make Scandinavia a battleground, the French blamed the British for not pressing aid to Finland, the British blamed the Swedes, the small nations of Europe accused the Allies of too nice an observance of neutral rights, Dorothy Thompson blamed the U. S. Senate, the Senators blamed Europe, and wrangling, dissension, bickering and looking for reasons for failure marked the reactions to a peace that few called good. No one could say with certainty that some super-Munich was in the making. But if it were, U. S. reaction to peace in Finland served as a prelude to the mighty discord that would arise when it was made.

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