spring and Something Else

Last week, before the President returned from fishing, spring--and something else more ominous than spring--were waiting for him at the White House.

Spring came with all the familiar sights and sounds of peaceful generations. The ten acres of White House lawn turned green overnight; gaspowered, rubber-tired lawn mowers began to whir over the sward's long roll, barbering the Kentucky bluegrass to the regulation two inches. A man painted the tennis-court backstop; other men with shears trimmed the California privet hedges in pyramid style.

Tiny green feathers delicately blurred the heavy black-purple branches of the Japanese fernleaf beech trees near the Executive Office. Tight green buds popped all over what Calvin Coolidge used to call "the south lot." One forsythia shrub, near the office, already sprayed yellow.

But the something else that came to the White House had none of the happy sights or sounds of peacetime. There were newspapers that told of the look in the eyes of women who last week boarded the Magallanes, a Spanish ship bound from New York for Bilbao. Some were in tears, some stolid. They were Germans--142 women, 14 children, 35 men--sailing to the Fatherland in what appeared to be a general evacuation. One woman wrote, desperately: "Hitler has ordered our husbands who are members of the Bund to come back to Germany at once. We had to sell our insurance and take all our money to the consul, who gives us only a piece of paper. God help us, we leave our soul and life in America to go, we know not where, only to leave here before Hitler strikes at New York." Blankly, sadly the women went up the gangplank. Fortnight before, another ship, the Marques de Comillas, had taken 180 Germans. Hitler's people were fleeing before the shadow of events to come.

Nor were Hitler's people the only refugees. Although the fact was not advertised, Washington knew that U. S. reporters were leaving or preparing to leave Berlin, and reporters do not scare easily.

Some insiders even believed that active hostilities between the U. S. and Germany were growing imminent. The sign with which the new week opened was the most suggestive of all.

In Port Newark, N. J., an Italian seaman with no love for Il Duce tipped off a customs official that Italian ships in U. S. ports were being systematically sabotaged by their crews. In a few hours word reached the President. Back came an order from the Potomac: seize all German and Italian ships to prevent their being further damaged; put all Danish ships in protective custody. In Washington, tall, mild, Acting Treasury Secretary Herbert Earle Gaston put his finger on Section I of Title II of the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, authorizing seizure of foreign vessels "to prevent damage or injury to any harbor or waters of the U. S."

The Coast Guard boarding parties, working in perfect liaison with the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, struck suddenly and efficiently in 17 U. S. ports, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Cristobal, Canal Zone. Seized were 28 Italian, two German, 36 Danish ships; total tonnage: 300,000. Twenty of the Italian ships, it was found, had been "put completely out of action." Rods and shafts had been cut with acetylene torches, engines and equipment wrecked with sledge hammers, bearings chiseled, bulwarks pried down with crowbars, boilers burned out, movable equipment dismantled. At Norfolk the blue-jacketed guardsmen caught one Italian in the act of sabotage. (On the same Port Everglades pier as the Potomac, guardsmen boarded the German freighter Arauca shortly after the President, tanned and refreshed, left for Washington.)

A total of 875 officers and crew members were detained, pending deportation proceedings. An apparently concerted plot to scuttle or wreck all Axis ships in U. S. waters, to prevent their eventual seizure by the U. S. for aid-to-Bntain, had been broken. The Stars & Stripes were run up on the Italian and German ships; Coast Guardsmen patrolled docks.

In Costa Rica's port of Puntarenas, one German and one Italian ship were set afire. Seizure of Axis ships in South American ports was expected momently. Belief spread that the President would shortly announce U. S. convoy (at least halfway across the Atlantic). And no one expected Adolf Hitler to endure such measures without reprisal.

Nations do not ordinarily destroy their own vessels, even if locked up in foreign ports, unless they expect that war is close at hand. In Washington the rumor was rife that the Axis was preparing to declare war on the U. S. Yet to many Americans the news of sabotage and seizure seemed not to come as a great shock, or as a fearsome step toward war, but with the feeling "It's about time."

Meanwhile the waiting desk in the White House piled up. Soon the President must, however reluctantly, toughen up Government defense relations with labor. He must recommend greatly increased taxes. He must ordain, for the first time, the first U. S. sacrifices. He must decide how far to go in feeding Europe's noncombatants. He must fit unemployment and agricultural relief plans into the defense program.

Averaging about 60 miles a day, the Presidential yacht Potomac, escorted by the destroyer U.S.S. Benson, slid away from the ship lanes, around Great Isaac Island, Great Stirrup Cay, Mangrove Cay and Grand Bahama, little paradises of white beaches, tropical palms and turquoise water. Adviser Hopkins landed a 4-foot, 25-lb. kingfish; Secretary Stephen T. Early hooked an 80-lb. shark.

Fishing done and seas roughening, at week's end the Potomac put in at Port Everglades, Fla., where the President polished up a short speech, broadcast it that night to the postponed national Jackson Day dinners of the Democrats. The most unpolitical Jackson Day address in history, the speech was a homely little essay on national unity. Said the President: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am sitting in the little cabin of the little ship Potomac, in the harbor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after a day of sunshine out in the Gulf Stream. ... In Washington, as you know, the working day of the Presidency in these times averages about 15 hours. . . . But at sea the radio messages and the occasional pouch of mail reduce official work to not more than two or three hours a day." " there is a chance for a bit of sunshine or a wetted line, or a biography or a detective story or even a nap after lunch. Above all, there is the opportunity for thinking things through. . . . That means that if today the fellow next to you catches a bigger fish than you do, or vice versa, as sometimes happens, you don't lie awake at night thinking about it. ... "You still seek peace of mind and peace of spirit--but you come to realize that you have to work overtime nowadays, and work harder than ever before in your life to make that kind of peace possible later on. It is a fact that we all recognize, that if we sit down now we may get run over later. . . . "And so that is why ... I have become more than ever clear that the time calls for courage and more courage--calls for action and more action." After a dutiful reference to Andrew Jackson, the President repeated the U. S. determination to "help those who block the dictators in their march toward domination of the world," paid high compliment to Republican Wendell Willkie for "rising above partisanship" (his first public mention of the defeated GOPresidential candidate), and denounced the agents and dupes of Naziism who "have represented themselves as pacifists when actually they are serving the most brutal warmongers of all time." Next day the President went ashore, headed north for inspections of Fort Jackson, S. C. and Fort Bragg, N. C., then back to resume his burden at the nerve centre of the world's diplomatic headquarters.

Spring had come while he was away; spring and the hour for action.

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