Mobilization for Defense

On the newspaper maps, day by day, the grey shadow bulged down swiftly, erupted in a black spearhead that raced past the ancient, memorable place names --Amiens, Arras, Abbeville--turned and hooked northward up the coast. Claws thrust out, curving, into the pocketed white space. On these daily map-pictures the U. S. watched the Allies thrashing as desperately as a fat bird in a falcon's talons.

The U. S. had passed the first shocked realization that perhaps soon nothing but a shrunken ocean would lie between Adolf Hitler and America. Last fortnight the nation had agreed on the imperative necessity of arming. Last week, as little seemed to come out of Washington but newsreel pep talks, the cry changed to Action--no time now for diddling around, for chitchat, for political guff.

There was sympathy for the fatigue lines under Franklin Roosevelt's eyes, but the nation also wanted action on the dramatic scale of the 100 days of 1933. Only a few people expected anti-aircraft guns to sprout from every rooftop, but the U. S. as a whole wanted assurance that industry, finance, labor, politicians would all fuse in a national mobilization for defense.

Everyone wanted to help. Hundreds of gossips wrote the Federal Bureau of Investigation volunteering to spy on their neighbors. To Washington flocked businessmen, big & small, proffering services. The President ordered memos drafted by all of his aides, their ideas to be boiled into a page. The Capitol combined the worried gloom of the last Hoover days with the rampant confusion of NRA Blue Eagle times.

Gradually the picture cleared. The President had been repeatedly advised to form a Defense Council, or War Industries Board, to mobilize the nation's sprawling economy. Mr. Roosevelt moved slowly, carefully. Only last fall his embryo War Resources Board had been quickly dynamited out of existence by Brainmen Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen, who insisted that Big Business could not be trusted to run a war. Now the President, at least for the time being, placed the aircraft procurement program under Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.; the industrial mobilization program under the man who is closest to him of all men--Harry Hopkins, Secretary of Commerce, who moved into the First Secretary's Office in the White House. Long-legged Mr. Hopkins, whose slouching ease masks the electric speed of his mind, called in business bigshots, squared away at the country's biggest task.

In the brief struggle within the Inner Circle for control of the aircraft program, Tommy the Cork had backed Federal Lender Jones against Secretary Morgen thau, who hates The Cork's guts. Messrs, Jones & Corcoran had sought control through vast RFC loans to the air industry; Mr. Morgenthau contended there were no bottlenecks within the industry, there was no bottle. He wanted a new aviation industry, set up on a mammoth scale, and the President agreed with him.

The press roared criticism: Mr. Morgenthau was no airman, Mr. Hopkins no production man. The press roared on: throw out Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, War Secretary Harry Woodring; replace retiring Navy Secretary Charles Edison with a first-rate man; strip the desks for action. But Franklin Roosevelt remained tolerant of those who are loyal--whether they are competent or not. Still he moved slowly. Many big men had come to help; but thus far he had called in only one man --cool, steady Admiral William Daniel Leahy, Governor of Puerto Rico. Admiral Leahy, paunchless, wind-seared, whose 65 years look like 50, was believed certain to figure somewhere in the President's defense setup. This week Leahy proposed a "friendly acquisition" of West Indies islands as defense essentials.

Names poured in: for War, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City; for Chief Coordinator, Bernard Mannes Baruch, World War (I) Industries Boardsman, or Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Ambassador to Great Britain; for Navy, Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News; for special aides (perhaps the three unfilled posts as Presidential assistants "with a passion for anonymity") Admiral Leahy, General Motors' Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen, and James V. Forrestal, of Wall Street's Dillon, Read & Co.

One small incident illustrated the backbiting behind the scenes in the Administration. After a Cabinet meeting last week the members came out in groups of two & three. Finally out stalked bald, bustling little Harry Woodring, behind him a White House aide. Just as Mr. Woodring reached the outside door the aide turned to clustering reporters, bellowed clearly: "Has Woodring resigned yet?" Reporters disagreed whether Mr. Woodring, halted by the door, snarled "No," or just walked out.

In the tension of Washington, Franklin Roosevelt showed no noticeable inclination to lead the apparently growing public desire to lend all aid short of war to the Allies, to acknowledge that France and Britain were fighting the U. S. battle, or to agree that the U. S. should fight Adolf Hitler to the last Frenchman and Briton, if no farther.

In his 14th fireside chat, first since Sept. 3, 1939, the President finally spoke to the nation. He added nothing to his rearmament message before Congress (TIME, May 27), merely reassured the nation that its billions of dollars for defense had been and would be wisely spent. Calling for an end to illusions, he demanded also an end to fears, to calamity howling; warning against fifth columnists, he pleaded for sanity, for unity, for a prayerful approach to whatever dark days lie ahead.

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