Reaction

Last week the U. S. felt suddenly defenseless. The hurricane that had struck Europe, the gathering clouds in the Three Easts, had come, with nightmare speed, close, real and threatening. The reaction was profound --broad and deep. As in few times of peace the Nation spoke as a whole and the voice came clear to Congress: Arm. Arm the U. S. for what may come.

There were cool heads. Deeper than the widely reported hysteria was a grim determination to prepare for anything. One tremendous shift was apparent: the rising wind of world events had for a time at least blown away Isolationism. There were still Isolationists in the U. S. but they were themselves isolated from the feeling of the nation as a whole if not from reality.

To many a U. S. citizen, the screaming headlines of the German smash through Belgium and down into France came like an unremitting, seven-day Orson Welles broadcast of an invasion from Mars.

In Jeannette, Pa., a gun club got ready to pot any Nazi parachutists descending from the skies; the Pennsylvania legislature studied ways to protect industrial plants from air raids; in Brooklyn a war-crazed British sailor danced despairingly on a high window ledge; in Manhattan and Seattle, two men killed themselves because of news; in Kirkland, Wash. a lady letter-writer noted approvingly that a coffee shop had changed "hamburger" on the menu to "liberty steak."

Columnist Westbrook Pegler led his column: "Now, just a minute. Wait a minute!" New York City's waddly Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia griped that the U. S. couldn't even protect Coney Island.

General Peyton Conway March called for: "An army of 1,000,000 men. . . . There should be no nonsense about it." City College students paraded in Manhattan, with placards protesting war and the R. O. T. C.; 1,000 Dartmouth students wired the President to keep the U. S. out of war; Temple University's student chiefs telegraphed a plea to calm "war hysteria"; Harvard Professor Roger Merriman criticized a student anti-war petition as failing "to see the moral issue"; Stanford students wired Mr. Roosevelt protests at his Pan-American policies; in Manhattan Author Hendrik Willem Van Loon resigned from the Dutch Treat Club because Author Clarence Budington Kelland remarked: "The fifth column in this country is headed by that fellow in the White House."

AND The New York Herald Tribune's Editorial Writer Walter Millis, author of the Isolationists' Bible, Road to War, wrote in his Yale 20th reunion book: "I would like to see the Nazis get the pants licked off them and the Stalinists sent back to the Kremlin... I hope the U. S. won't have to get into the war, but am not prepared to say that under certain circumstances American military participation would not be necessary and worth it." AND In the House, Ism-eater Martin Dies was lustily applauded for the first time in months when he launched a routine denunciation of isms and the C. I. O. ANDIts mind's eye swimming with "fifth columns," the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee last week took a quick look under the bed. It thought it saw a popeyed man named Harry Bridges. Led by popeyed Congressman A. Leonard Allen of Louisiana, it straightway reported out a bill to save the country by deporting him.

ANDEditorials everywhere said, in effect: O. K., repeal the Johnson Act, give the Allies credit, but the U. S. should demand in return The Netherlands, French & British West Indies. A Gallup Poll showed that U. S. confidence in an Allied victory had faded from 82% to 55%. AND Men argued about the fate of the British Fleet, feared that Conqueror Hitler would line up 10,000 Englishmen in London's streets, swear to shoot them all if the Fleet were not turned over intact to Germany.

--In Atlanta, Governor Eurith Dickinson Rivers, in a proclamation citing "National Emergency," demanded that all aliens in Georgia submit at once to fingerprinting and registration.

ANDHerbert Hoover added Belgian Relief to Finnish and Polish Relief as his concerns; the National Association of Manufacturers declared through President Henning W. Prentis Jr. a policy of "no profit in war."

ANDMen worried about the $19,000,000,000 in gold held in the U. S. Meantime from Switzerland came more fleeing millions.

Said Federal Reserve Board Economist Dr. Emanuel A. Goldenweiser: "Gold is an asset which is of little value now and whose value in the future is unpredictable." AND Men worried about commodities; thrice in the week wheat futures fell the permitted limit (10-c-) in Chicago. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace jumped in to bolster the grain price.

These surface reactions, whirl and eddy as they did, showed how the current flowed: the U. S., profoundly stirred, was moving swiftly to meet a national emergency. Even scattered Isolationist objections, by the promptness and severity with which they were answered, showed the strength of the current. Up from the midst of the current rose the voice of Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh:

"We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America, but because we American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe. . . .

"Our danger in America is an internal danger. We need not fear a foreign invasion unless American peoples bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.

"... Above all, let us stop this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion that has been running rife these last few days.

. . . The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority . . . but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge."

As Lindbergh's voice died away the New York Times retorted: "Colonel Lindbergh ... is an ignorant young man if he trusts his own premise that it makes no difference to us whether we are deprived of the historic defense of British sea power in the Atlantic Ocean. He is a blind young man if he really believes that we can live on terms of equal peace and happiness 'regardless of which side wins this war' in Europe.

"Colonel Lindbergh remains a great flier."

Bluntly the Republican New York Herald Tribune came out and said a thing which only a fortnight before no great paper would have said: "... The least costly solution in both life and welfare would be to declare war on Germany at once."

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