The Great Debate

Last autumn the U. S. Congress met in special session to debate repeal of the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act--a session solemnly heralded as "The Great Debate." But Session II of the 76th Congress went through the motions in a curious air of unreality: the Great Debate didn't come off; the President talked boldly, the Senate debated boldly, on all the secondary points--nowhere could the press or the public find candor, willingness to face or seek facts. The embargo was repealed, Congress went home, Mr. Roosevelt went to Warm Springs--in an atmosphere of somnolent fantasy that seemed almost grotesquely irrelevant in a world at war.

Specifically both parties pledged their efforts to keep the U. S. out of World War II; isolationists in both parties went further, said: "This war is none of our business." But through the winter the U. S. watched Finland fight; now in the spring saw Denmark and Norway swallowed up in new aggressions. By last week the Great Debate was really under way. No newspaper was too small, no hamlet too remote, no group of citizens too insensitive to be untouched. The question under debate was, broadly: "Is this war our concern?" and while the negative-takers still dominated the argument, the affirmers daily spoke more bluntly, openly.

Business. In Washington 2,200 of the most representative businessmen in the U. S. met in the 28th annual session of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce (see p. 83). Reporters noted that underlying all the routine denunciations of the New Deal was evident alarm at the course of the war, a concern coupled with a gloomy, fatalistic belief, expressed only off the record, that inevitably, eventually, the U. S. will get into the war.

First major speaker, Dr. Paul van Zeeland, former Premier of Belgium, warned: "No country, no matter how large, can believe itself safe from disorder, if disorder should spread out over the rest of the world. The shadow of war finds the oceans no barriers. . . ." Last major speaker, Lewis W. Douglas, president, Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York, warned that continuance of U. S. democracy depends on an Allied victory in Europe, said:

"This is not merely another European war. This is a struggle between two wholly contradictory, two clashing ways of life. We cannot escape the consequences of its outcome. There are some who may hold the opinion that we can isolate ourselves from world events, crawl into our economic and political cyclone cellar, draw in the trap door after us, and thus preserve the essential elements of the American experiment. ... To retreat to the cyclone cellar here means, ultimately, to establish a totalitarian state at home."

U. S. at Munich? It looked last week as if U. S. opinion was on a day-to-day basis about the war. Lanky (6 ft. 6 in.) Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood (Reunion in Vienna, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) tuned in on a Finn-Russian war broadcast last Christmas Day, got so excited he wrote a play in January which Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne tried out in March and opened last week in New York City: "There Shall Be No Night" (see p. 52). Columnist Raymond Clapper viewed with alarm:

"An incident of first-rate national meaning. . . . Sometimes plays are more potent than statesmen. . . . This play, depicting the tragedy of Finland, seemed to me a rank, inflammatory job, pleading for intervention, sneering at our reluctance to go in. America, still hesitant to plunge into the burning ruins of Europe, was compared to Pontius Pilate, callous and cowardly, evading a responsibility. ... It played to capacity audiences, which are traditionally undemonstrative here [Washington], and sent them away moist-eyed. Most . . . were swept off their feet."

In Manhattan Playwright Sherwood said: "There's a frightful conspiracy of silence that is turning Washington into an orgy of unreality. . . . It is a 'peace hysteria' clouding all attempts at intelligent thought about the war. Congress is one mass of Chamberlains. The United States is in exactly the same ostrich-escapism as England up to the insanity of Munich."

The London Economist called the U. S. mood "deliberately myopic ..." a mood that "should be very familiar to Englishmen, for it is almost exactly similar to that in which we spent the year 1938." The Economist cited Radioracle Raymond Gram Swing: "Just now we appear to be passing out of our Baldwin era and approaching our Munich era. We are entitled to the patient understanding of any Englishmen who can recall their own recent evolution."

The Rising Chorus. The Chicago Tribune'?, New York correspondent, imperturbable William Fulton, collected an impressive bouquet of scallions thrown at isolationists by former Diplomat Nicholas Roosevelt; Right Rev. William Lawrence, Episcopal bishop emeritus of Massachusetts; Colonel John Stilwell, president, National Safety Council; Frederic R. Coudert, Lawrence Hunt, Henry Breckinridge, lawyers; Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning, New York; Anne Morgan, sister of J. P. Morgan. Miss Morgan said dryly: "Americans must get away from that terrible word 'security.' "

>In many newspapers letters denounced the President and Presidential candidates for lack of candor about the war.

>Minnesota's behemoth Governor Harold Stassen, scouting in Washington for tips for his coming G. 0. P. keynote speech, emphasized his address would demand a real isolation policy.

>American Legion National Commander Raymond J. Kelly, in an Indianapolis speech denouncing the Administration, saw the U. S. drifting along a path toward "active participation in the war."

>Major General Smedley Butler, U. S. M. C. retired, said the Allies must drive the Nazis out of Norway in 90 days or lose the war "unless the United States jumps in and saves them."

>Said H. L. Mencken, sage of Baltimore: ". . . The Hon. Mr. Roosevelt and his associated wizards are itching to horn into the great crusade to save humanity. . . ."

^Thrice weekly Pundit Walter Lippmann continued applying the cold lash of his reason to the isolationists' arguments, arguing not so much that the U. S. must intervene as that the U. S. must realize: "This war is our concern."

Columnist Westbrook Pegler, reporting the thoughts of his General Public character, George Spelvin, American, put the worry clearly: "He is glad he will not be the next President of the United States."

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