Scorn for Stimson

Mrs. Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, wife of the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, is English, forthright, tart-tongued. She has never met President Herbert Hoover nor Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson. But at Geneva last spring she beheld the dapper gentleman they sent to tell the League of Nations and the world for the first time about the President's disarmament plans--Hugh Simons Gibson, U. S. Ambassador to Belgium.

"I shoul d call Gibson a contemptible little bounder," drawled English Mrs. Litvinov not long afterward, and she had a great many things in mind. They bear importantly on the strained relations between Washington and Moscow, relations which creaked last week when Statesman Stimson politely reminded Russia and China in identic notes of their obligation under the Kellogg Pact not to fight, only to be told by Comrade Litvinov with blazing scorn to mind his business.

Ambassador Gibson arrived in Geneva last spring, heard Comrade Litvinov expound to the great powers his cherished scheme of disarmament on which he had labored many a year. It so happened that the Hoover plan--which Mr. Gibson had in his pocket--paralleled almost exactly in its two most important aspects the Litvinov scheme,* though no one present knew that then except Mr. Gibson. Plan in pocket, he let Litvinov talk, declined to comment in open meeting, told correspondents privately that the Soviet scheme was not worthy of comment or consideration, suggested that Comrade Litvinov had presented it in bad faith.

Later, when Ambassador Gibson offered to the world in the name of President Hoover and Secretary Stimson what seemed to Mrs. Litvinov basically her husband's plan, she made up her mind that "contemptible" was the right adjective, "bounder" the right noun.

"Good faith indeed!" she has said with honest English ire. "My husband is deeply, passionately sincere. He believes in his disarmament plan, and he offered it with all his heart."

Battle Plane Prejudice. To the desk of Comrade Litvinov in the Kremlin came intelligence, last week, that a ship had just cleared from New York, bearing to the Chinese Government the second consignment of a $1,000,000 order for battle planes of the Vought Corsair type used by the U. S. Navy, built at Long Island City. Soon these planes might be bombing Soviet villages near the Sino-Russian frontier. Naturally the U. S. State Department was not responsible for the shipment, but it may have prejudiced Comrade Litvinov as he ruffled his copy of Statesman Stimson's note, pondered its powerful conclusion:

"The American Government feels that the respect with which China and Russia will hereafter be held in the good opinion of the world will necessarily in great measure depend upon the way in which they carry out [their] most sacred promises [as signatories of the Kellogg Pact]."

Unfriendly Act? As was later admitted to Washington correspondents, the Stimson notes were drafted when their author did not know whether to believe conflicting reports that China and Russia were even then patching up their differences at a peace parley near Vladivostok. Other reports convinced Mr. Stimson that Soviet planes were bombing Chinese villages. He meant well, meant to stop any possibility of slaughter. But to Comrade Litvinov, who knew from his direct wire to the peace parley that China was yielding and Russia winning peace on her own terms, the U. S. note seemed at best an intrusion. His note in reply said: ". . . the [Stimson] declaration cannot but be considered unjustifiable pressure on the [Sino-Russian] negotiations, and cannot therefore be taken as a friendly act. . . . The Soviet Government cannot forbear expressing amazement that the Government of the U. S., which by its own will has no official relations with the Soviet, deems it possible to apply to it with advice and counsel."

Lack of official relations forced Comrade Litvinov to send his reply through the same slow grapevine via which he received the U. S. note, namely the French Embassy at Moscow. Correspondents cabled it direct, caused Statesman Stimson's acute embarrassment, placed him in a position where he found it necessary to break a state department rule and comment on a communication from a foreign power before he actually received it.

Ha, Ha, Ha! Comrade Litvinov's real reply to Statesman Stimson came not by note, but in a gala speech before the Soviet central executive committee, to which he invited the whole Moscow diplomatic corps. Such a chance to make game of Messrs. Hoover and Stimson, whose Gibson had humiliated him last spring, might not soon come again, and Comrade Litvinov made the most of it. Stomachs quaked with mirth as he told in droll fashion how Statesman Stimson had called on all the 53 Kellogg Treaty nations to second his note, and concluded amid guffaws: ''I have just received a cablegram saying that Panama--even great Panama--stands with Mr. Stimson."*

In his less humorous passages Comrade Litvinov made three points:

1) The U. S.. Britain and France keep thousands of troops permanently stationed at strategic points throughout China/- and war boats anchored off her principal ports;

2) Soviet Russia has staged one major punitive raid into one Chinese province (Manchuria) and then withdrawn all her troops (TIME, Dec. 9).

3) "A genuine desire for peace [on the part of Mr. Stimson] might have prompted him [to act] much earlier, even the first week after the Chinese broke the letter and the spirit of the Kellogg Pact by violent and unauthorized seizure of the Chinese Eastern Railway and arbitrary measures against Soviet citizens" (TIME, July 22, et seq.).

Poll Parrot of Peace. Unquestionably Comrade Litvinov lost more than he gained by what seemed to most U. S. citizens wanton impudence. But the U. S. press rallied surprisingly, not in Litvinov's support, but against Statesman Stimson as a Meddlesome Mattie. Said the New York Herald Tribune, staunchest administration organ: "The virtue of this action is rather difficult to see. . . . Japan . . . has wisely disassociated herself from any American note. . . . The situation was and is extremely murky. But at least it appeared to be none of our business."

Boisterously rampant, Hearst sheets screeched across an entire page IN FIRST REAL TEST, KELLOGG 'PEACE' PACT PROVES PEACE DISTURBER, followed up with a cartoon in which a terrified Poll Parrot of Peace was shown in a gilded cage hitched to a balloon labeled "Kellogg Peace Pact" which was being punctured by Litvinov's quill pen (actually he uses a Waterman).

*Both statesmen called for: 1) reduction, not limitation, of armaments; 2) reduction according to a mathematical formula, in the President's case the famed "Hoover Yardstick."

*Britain, France, Italy, were among other seconders; Japan and Germany refused to second.

/-In his message to Congress the President said that 2,650 U. S. troops are now stationed in China.

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