At Stake: A New World

(See Cover)

A stupendous historical drama had been scheduled for last week?there had never been anything like it before, on any stage--but in the acting it proved to be highly undramatic, at least to U.S. spectators. The greatest empire since Rome was offering self-rule to the vast and legendary subcontinent of India?and there was not one quotable line or breathtaking episode.

If history thus refused the spectacular, it was partly because the principal actor, Sir Stafford Cripps, was anything but glamorous. He stretched out the hand of British friendship, begging India to "accept and trust" it, but the proffered hand hung limp and ungrasped in the hot air of New Delhi.

As the drama bogged down in the unreadable "statements" of politicians, it was energized from the wings. Two magnificent prompters were heard: the President of the great republic of the New World sent a personal messenger with a note to "someone" on the Indian stage; and a Chinese soldier, Chiang Kaishek, publicly intervened to advise India to join with the white man's empire to fight for freedom everywhere. Meanwhile, the enemy advanced--a horde of savage fighters from the far-off islands of Japan, and, looming beyond the northwest mountains, Hitler's Legions of Nihilism.

But as this week began, Sir Stafford was still the central actor; he might yet bring off a climax worthy of the times.

After two weeks of brilliant and pains taking labor, the "Red Squire" looked years older. So great had been his confidence in the plan that he had expected to be on his way back to London this week. It was almost inconceivable to him that his beloved Indians would not readily and cheerfully accept his English version of Christian idealism.

But Sir Stafford had fought too many tough legal battles to quit after the first round. And this was the biggest battle of his life. If Sir Stafford succeeded, he might be a hero for all time. If he failed, people might admire him for having undertaken a stupendous task, but his political future might be jeopardized. If he failed, the future of both Britain and India would be dark. If he succeeded, a new and better world might be born of the travail of empire.

All week, in his modest Queen Victoria Road bungalow, the tall, prim-mouthed, high-domed intellectual worked and conferred. He accepted no social engagements. Rising shortly after 7, he donned an ill-fitting suit and high stiff collar, breakfasted lightly at 8, then spent several hours conferring with his staff, writing dispatches, seeing the press. Except for a 25-minute break for lunch, he interviewed Indian leaders from midmorning until 8 p.m. He met them on the porch, led them through the large-pillared hall to his study, offered them cigarets and then got down to business. After dinner and more staff talks, he called on the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, at 10.

Nehru & Gandhi. No sooner had Sir Stafford reached India than rumors spread through the hotels and bazaars that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, spiritual head of the potent Indian National Congress Party, would come to New Delhi to see that the party vetoed Sir Stafford's plan. Sure enough, the wily Saint arrived, in loincloth and carrying a staff, after a 24-hour rail journey from his mud hut in central India. On the way he acted as his own pressagent, handing notes (he did not speak; it was his day of silence) through the train window to newsmen at the stations.

Though Gandhi was not a member of the Congress Working Committee, he attended sessions and dominated all but five of the twelve members, including the Moslem president of the Congress, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. However much Gandhi longed for India's "freedom," he balked at any plan which would involve India more deeply in the war. For two hours Sir Stafford did his Christian-Socialist best to sway the Hindu Saint. The little man with the minxy smile merely kept repeating: "India cannot be conquered by the Japs so long as we do not cooperate with the invaders." After the interview Sir Stafford was tired and exasperated. And presently the Holy Man began worrying about his wife's health and went off home.

But if Sir Stafford Cripps could swing Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, active leader of the party, away from Gandhi, there was still hope of a favorable Congress vote. Nehru's dilemma left him with both feet off the ground. He was fanatically loyal to Gandhi, but he also wished to be India's savior. He saw the point like a practical Westerner, yet he felt as a mystical Hindu. While the horns of the dilemma gored deeper, Nehru, sitting in his cousin's modern mansion, grew hourly more nervous and distraught. Outside in the garden beautiful young sari-clad Indian women sipped sherry.

One night Sir Stafford invited Pandit Nehru to dinner. After dinner they talked for hours, looking out on the rose garden bathed in full moonlight. The two men. both masters of crisp, precise English, made a potentially magnificent team. Both idealists, both intellectuals, both patriots, they were nevertheless separated by the mountainous past and by the cloudy future. Some day Sir Stafford Cripps might be the leader of an empire?or what was left of it. Nehru some day might be the leader of an empire which might be greater. Could those two empires be aspects of the same thing? Sir Stafford thought they could be; Nehru doubted it.

But Sir Stafford's plan was couched in practical terms. His plan stipulated that during the war the British would continue to direct India's defense. As Nehru well knew, the Congress wanted India?defenseless without the British?to "defend" itself, under its own Defense Minister. At week's end Congress President Azad, Pan dit Nehru and the British Commander in Chief in India, Sir Archibald Wavell, met to try to work out a compromise. There was talk that Nehru would be satisfied if he were given a post similar to that of the War Secretary in Britain. It was also reported that the Congress was asking for General Wavell to replace Lord Linlithgow as Viceroy.

Jinnah & Co. Nehru (if he can carry the Indian National Congress away from nonresisting Gandhi) represents only a large minority of Sir Stafford's problem. Another great minority Sir Stafford had to deal with was India's 80,000,000 Moslems.

His proposal for them : the opportunity to form a separate state. This proposal was not misliked by the Moslem League's President Ali Mohamed Jinnah, who fears' nothing so much as the establishment of a Hindu raj, hand-picked by Congress. But it was much misliked by Nehru and other Congress leaders: they feared Moslem secession, cried that Indian unity should not be destroyed.

Jinnah, the leader of the Moslems (in impeccable Savile Row clothes), knew that he was in a strong bargaining position. It seemed unlikely that he would compromise on the secession clause. At week's end Jinnah muezzined to the faithful: "A lot of propaganda has been going on in the press . . . Sir Stafford Cripps is a trained politician. . . . He has been holding press conferences giving explanations which are construed differently in different quarters and might prove harmful. I shall be compelled to explain the position to my people. . . ."

But, as Sir Stafford well knew, Jinnah is not the spokesman for India's Moslems; his League actually represents only a small fraction of them. In the 1937 election the League won only 104 of the 480 seats reserved for Moslems in the eleven Provincial Assemblies; of 7,000,000 Moslem voters, only 300,000 voted the League ticket. Jinnah's importance is that he epitomizes the Moslems' fear of the Hindus?and this religious civil strife is the chief obstacle to Sir Stafford's mission.

India is nothing if not selfconscious: Indians derive both humor and a satisfying sense of tragedy from their hopelessly internecine differences. As Sadhu Singh Dhami, a distinguished Sikh scholar, said last week: "The cow is sacred to the Hindus and pork repulsive to Moslems. . . . The Hindus are rather noisy in their ritual and greet an interesting variety of mute gods with a blare of conch shells and din of gongs, while the Moslems' worship of Allah is austere and silent and includes a bit of healthy physical exercise. The Moslem is circumcised, while the Hindu is not; the Moslem clips his mustache in a certain way, while the Hindu does not. The Hindu wears a wisp of long hair on the top of his head; if he is of high caste, he adorns himself with the 'sacred thread' and a mark on his head; the followers of the Prophet wisely dispense with these accretions."

Sir Stafford, tactfully, paid no attention to such differences, went on with his job.

The Revolution. If neither British nor Indians completely understand the problem of India, certainly one Frenchwoman thought she did. After chic Biographer-Journalist Eve Curie met Sir Stafford Cripps in India last week, she wrote: "I came away . . . with the impression that in New Delhi ... I was not only witnessing the birth of self-government in India but the awakening of a new spirit in England itself?the bold, generous spirit without which neither Great Britain nor any other country can hope to win the war." Mlle. Curie's observation was almost as accurate as it was bold. Sir Stafford had indeed gone to New Delhi with something bigger than just a plan for India. He brought from No. 10 Downing Street an idea vaster than Mlle. Curie's generous, feminine hopes?vaster, even, than Britain's old ideas of empire.

Though Winston Churchill's War Cabinet formulated its present-day version and Sir Stafford Cripps attempted to interpret it to the Indians, neither statesman originated the idea. It was conceived?no man could say when or how?somewhere in the British spirit; it could be interpreted (by Britain's friends) as a marrow-rooted sense of decency, or (by Britain's enemies) as a guilty conscience. Neither interpretation quite explained Sir Stafford Cripp's mission. The rough idea (as British as it was understated) was that people everywhere should have more freedom and more fruits of the earth. Millions of Britons nodded approval when Sir Stafford, in one of his first speeches in Parliament as a member of the War Cabinet, said that Britain could regain and hold her empire only "on condition that we hold it in the interest of the world and of the people who live in those parts."

In the last two years a revolution has been taking place in beleaguered Britain. It has been a thoroughly novel make of revolution: quiet, moderate, nonviolent, for the violence has been directed at the real oppressor, the enemy.

Pursuing individual freedom, the British have survived many forms of government. They believe that their 1918-1939 Government was unworthy to govern. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, they now feel, represented an era in which that individual freedom was made parochial, in which Britain's moral empire was considered less important than world trade. After the Norway fiasco, when Britain was threatened with annihilation, the British turned to Winston Churchill, a desperado whose heart was in the right place, to save them. He did save them, and Britain will never for get it.

But as the war progressed?particularly after the entry of Russia and the U.S.?the British wanted more than a savior. When they saw that they did not face probable death, but probable victory, they began to think about the future again. And they found that they had to think in world terms, in terms of empire. To a people who had not for decades consciously thought in those terms, this attempt was unsettling. Winston Churchill was a godsend to Britons, because he alone revived in them a sense of their historic greatness and the idealism which underlay their mundane pursuits. But he was not prepared to mark out their future for them.

When Singapore fell, when the Imperial troops were thrown back in Libya, when German battleships slipped through the Channel, the British for the first time began to question Churchill's vision. When Sir Stafford Cripps returned from Moscow with a smile on his face, they thought they had found someone more atuned to the revolutionary present and the possible future.

The Coup. Sir Stafford arrived from Moscow at a time when the British were disgruntled with their leaders, and passionately grateful to the Russians. They did not choose to remember that Sir Stafford had never been very popular with the Russians, that it had been Lord Beaverbrook (next to Hitler) who was mainly responsible for the improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations. In good British taste, Sir Stafford took what was coming to him.

At first Churchill tried to handle Sir Stafford by absorbing him. He offered him Lord Beaverbrook's job as Minister of Supply, but without War Cabinet rank. Sir Stafford's refusal made him more popular than ever. When he broadcast three days later about the "lack of urgency" in the British war effort, his audience was almost as big as Churchill's. Letters piled in by the thousands, all demanding: "For God's sake do something!" On his first day in the House of Commons he astonished fellow M.P.s by quietly sitting on the farthest back bench, with ordinary members, instead of on the front Opposition bench.

A week later, Churchill bowed to public pressure, appointed Sir Stafford Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House. Thus was scored one of the outstanding political coups of modern times, by a man about whom the world knew only a little less than the British.

The Man. Sir Stafford Cripps bears a marked resemblance to Woodrow Wilson. He has the same tight, twisted, sickly mouth, the same cold-chisel intellect, the same egotistical integrity. Wilson's ideals were embodied in liberalism at home and in the League of Nations, while Sir Stafford's gravitated to Socialism in Britain and his current crusade to get 352,000,000 Indians to make peace among themselves and accept his offer of freedom.

Stafford Cripps was the youngest son of the late Lord Parmoor, who enjoyed the distinction of being made a knight by a Liberal Government (1908), a Lord by a Coalition Government (1914) and Lord President of the Council by a Labor Government (1924). Stafford's mother, who died when he was only four, was a sister of the eminent Fabian Socialist, Beatrice Webb.

In his youth Stafford leaned more toward science than toward politics. He built underground houses on his father's estate and, when he was 17, invented a glider which, called "Stafford's Folly," crashed the first time he tried to fly it from a hilltop. As a schoolboy at Winchester he wrote an exam which won him a scientific scholarship to Oxford. The paper was so good that it was shown to University College's great Sir William Ramsay, who straightway invited Stafford to study under him.

Two years after he married Isobel Swithinbank, granddaughter of the founder of Eno Fruit Salts Co., Sir Stafford forsook science for the bar, eventually built up a practice as a corporation lawyer which netted him as much as $150,000 a year. In World War I he drove a Red Cross ambulance in France, there contracted colitis, which caused him to become a vegetarian. (He sticks to his diet religiously, never drinks, but smokes his pipe and numerous long black cigars daily.) After eleven months in Flanders the Government recalled him to help build and run a mammoth explosives factory.

Stafford Cripps learned politics from his father, whom he often accompanied on speaking tours, but he did not run for Parliament until 1928. Then 39, he stood unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate for West Woolwich. In 1930, five days after he was knighted, Sir Stafford was appointed Solicitor General in the Labor Government, though he was not yet an M.P. By this time he had become an ardent pacifist (his son* is now a conscientious objector), and the more he studied "domestic ills" the more he became convinced that Socialism was their solution. Britain, however, was not fully aware of his conversion. Stanley Baldwin tipped him as a "future Conservative Prime Minister."

But from the early 1930s onward, Sir Stafford left no one in doubt as to where he stood. He refused Ramsay Macdonald's offer to serve in the National Government, because he would have no truck with the Conservatives. He formed a Socialist League of extreme leftists within the Labor Party, with a program to end the power of the House of Lords. Said he: "If need be, the Constitution as we know it must go by the board." He even committed the unforgivable sin of attacking the Crown: "No doubt we [Socialists] shall have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace. . . ."

In 1939 he organized a Popular Front of Liberals. Laborites and Communists to try to bring down the Chamberlain Government. For this he was ousted from the Labor Party. On the outbreak of war Sir Stafford offered his services to the Government. He was ignored. The next thing Britain knew, he was on a trip around the world, calling on Molotov, Nehru and Roosevelt. Some said that he was on a secret mission for the Chamberlain Government. Others believe that the trip was arranged by the Churchill group. In any case, soon after Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Sir Stafford Ambassador to Moscow.

Sir Stafford has annoyed a good many people?some by his politics, others by his personality. In 1936, Canadian-born, Conservative M.P. Beverley Baxter, then a top Fleet Street journalist, wrote: "In considering the case of Sir Stafford Cripps let me make a frank confession. If we ever are so politically bankrupt that we must choose between Communism and Fascism, I am for Fascism. . . . Sir Stafford Cripps, that political agent provocateur . . . would plunge our people into misery, bloodshed and chaos, and would inevitably bring into existence a dictatorship that would . . . end all personal liberty. . . ."

There are still millions of Britons who cannot stand the sight of Sir Stafford because he is too red. But millions more are beginning to like his coloration?not primarily because they want Communism or Socialism in Britain but because they feel that the leftist leaders are best equipped to win the war and the peace.

Sir Stafford's mission to India is an important milestone in his political career, but even if he fails it will not necessarily be the last milestone. If he succeeds, he will certainly be the No. 1 candidate for the Prime Ministry, should anything happen to Winston Churchill. Even if he fails in India, he might still move from No. 11 Downing Street, his present address, to No. 10. Britons are determined to have a more dynamic, more progressive war policy. They hope Churchill will produce it. So does Sir Stafford. If Churchill fails, the nation will probably ask for Sir Stafford Cripps.

* Sir Stafford also has two adopted sons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.