Historic Sentence?

Senator Claude Benson Pepper of Florida, who looks like a backwoods Noel Coward, is a zealous supporter of the President, and enjoys the confidences of some White House Janizaries. For that reason, what young Senator Pepper did and said last week had a special significance. First, he proposed to the Senate that the U. S. sell its Army and Navy planes to the Allies (when in the President's judgment these sales do not imperil U. S. defense). The proposal was shelved by a Foreign Relations Committee vote of twelve to one. Mr. Pepper voting alone.

A few days later, Claude Pepper rose on the Senate floor, and with black hair plastered to his skull, long nose lifted, his slightly whining, heavily earnest voice raised above the undercurrent of whispering in the chamber, cried: "If our people had an opportunity to speak on this floor I believe they would favor doing something affirmative in Europe. . . . Now we can turn the scale of battle by goods, and by money and by airplanes, and perhaps even more . . . by a straightforward, manly declaration that we have enough self-respect and enough affection for the institutions of democracy to tell Hitler and Hitlerism that we are his eternal and mortal enemy, and that it is our will that as a political power he shall be destroyed from the face of the earth, and that every item of our strength and every bit of our courage and all of our resources we dedicate to the honorable cause of his destruction as the arch foe of decent men."

Commented Columnist Raymond Clapper two days later: "That is a long sentence. But it would become a historic one should we get into this war, for it is the most aggressive call that has echoed from any official source since the last war ended. . . . He stopped just short of calling for a declaration of war against Germany."

When Senator Pepper had finished, the galleries, against the rules, broke into applause. As if nothing had happened, the Senate adjourned. Next day, still undiscouraged, Mr. Pepper introduced a resolution authorizing the President "to give aid short of war" to the Allies. The Senate was apathetic, referred the resolution to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Observers were left to wonder how far Claude Pepper was ahead of U. S. public opinion, how far the bumbling Senate was behind.

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