War: Must over May

Early last week U. S. headlines, which for months had been mumbling darkly about the prospect of a distant war, suddenly shrilled a new and alarming note: ETHIOPIA PARLEY COLLAPSES. ITALY BARS ALL PEACE TALK. BRITAIN TO ASK U. S. TO HELP CURB WAR. U. S. Charge d'Affaires Ray Atherton had been closeted with British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare in London. "Friendly but powerful pressure," wrote a New York Times Paris correspondent, "will come from Great Britain, working through diplomatic, political and press channels to win the U. S. to her side in the coming conflict over Ethiopia."

Such news started rolling across the U. S. a wave of fear, of indignation, of determination to avoid war at all costs. With a mighty splash the wave broke over a jittery Congress, sweeping to passage the first neutrality law in U. S. history designed, not to observe international amenities, but to keep the nation out of war.

When the War began in 1914, the U. S. had no statute to help it avoid entanglement in other nations' armed conflicts. After proclaiming U. S. neutrality exactly as President Washington had done in 1793. President Wilson could only plead with the nation to be neutral "in fact as well as in name ... in thought as well as in action." Any such neutrality, it soon appeared, was clearly impossible. Because the flag followed them wherever they went, U. S. citizens were free to risk not only their own but their nation's safety by traveling through war zones on belligerent ships. With its great navy, Britain blocked U. S. trade with Germany by search & seizure, took no U. S. lives in the process. U. S. vexation was largely assuaged by the fat profits rolling in from Allied buying. Attempting to meet blockade with blockade. Germany resorted to submarines, unavoidably drowned a few hundred U. S. citizens, gave the U. S. a legal pretext to go to War.

In 1927 Ohio's Representative Theodore E. Burton introduced a resolution to empower the President to prohibit at his discretion export of arms & munitions to the aggressor in any war. Then & there arose the issue which has divided U. S. neutrality-seekers ever since, setting the Senate implacably against the President and State Department. Unwilling to let the President pick sides in a war by naming the aggressor, isolationist Senators asserted that an arms embargo should apply automatically to all belligerents. Otherwise, they argued, the embargoed nation would be certain to strike back exactly as Germany had struck. Firmly the State Department held that the President should be allowed to decide when and against whom he would lay an arms embargo. Only by holding that threat in reserve, it was argued, could the U. S. cooperate with other nations in exerting its "moral influence" to sober an aggressor, forestall a conflict.

Last December, President Roosevelt announced that State Department studies of neutrality legislation might soon give him something to say on the subject. Four months later the State Department was rudely roused from its studies when Senators Gerald Nye, Bennett Clark & friends, fired with a passion for peace as a result of their investigation of the pipsqueak U. S. munitions business, popped out proposals for mandatory, two-sided embargoes on arms, loans, credits. Panting from White House to Capitol, Secretary of State Hull persuaded President Roosevelt to take a firm stand for discretionary legislation, persuaded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to snatch back its partial approval of the drastic Nye-Clark proposals. Thereafter State Department experts and Ambassador-at-Large Norman Davis were left to putter in peace with their own ideas of neutrality bylaw.

As Congress began its stampede toward adjournment last week, Senate Majority Leader Robinson was asked if neutrality legislation might yet be considered at this session.

"There is no chance," said he. But even as he spoke, other Senators were swelling with alarm at the London and Paris dispatches in their morning papers. Twenty years ago, they recalled, President Wilson, the State Department and unofficial Am-bassador-at-Large Edward Mandell House had played Britain's game. Now, they suspected, President Roosevelt, the State Department and Ambassador-at-Large Norman Hezekiah Davis were ready to play that game again.

Leaping to their feet to check the adjournment rush, the Senate peacemen proclaimed themselves ready to filibuster indefinitely until neutrality legislation should be brought to a vote. Not for a moment did anyone believe they were bluffing. Only Missouri's Clark, A. E. F. colonel and a founder of the American Legion, knew anything about war at first hand but his colleagues did not let their ignorance dampen their zeal. Senator Bone led off with a two-and-a-half hour harangue.

"Of what use is it to settle utility issues or anything else, of the like," throbbed he, "when the peace of the world is threatened? I don't want to return to my State of Washington and look into the faces of mothers whose boys may be carrying muskets without adopting this legislation. . . . I have a constitutional right to cross the street if there's a knife-fight going on there, but I'm a silly ass if I do it when I've got my own side to walk on. If people haven't enough sense to stay out of war zones, we should keep them out. . . .

"Everyone has come to realize that the Great War was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all. . . . Senators, the time has come to put an end to that sort of hellborn business if we wish to preserve the Republic. I do not want my boy-- to die to further enrich some American millionaire. . . ."

One by one other Senators took up the cry. "We were sucked into that last war," cried Michigan's Vandenberg, "simply because we had no neutrality policy."

Realistically aware that every war makes its own rules as it progresses, Maryland's Tydings, an A. E. F. Lieutenant Colonel, threw some cold water on his feverish colleagues: "The only way by which we can stay out of war, if this philosophy is sound, is to have no shipping whatsoever. . . . What we do, well intentioned though it is, is apt to degenerate into a set of New Year's resolutions, which will be broken about as soon as war is declared."

But there was no stopping the tide. Already that morning Senator Borah had taken Chairman Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee firmly in hand, in three hours helped him draft a Neutrality Resolution with provision for a mandatory arms embargo. Called up the next day, it went through the Senate with a unanimous roar that left its sponsors blinking.

The Senate resolution provided that on the outbreak of a war (which was left undefined) the President should at once proclaim its existence, forbid shipment of "arms, ammunition & implements of war" (also undefined) to each & every belligerent. To enforce that embargo U. S. munitioneers were to be licensed by a National Munitions Control Board, U. S. ships forbidden to carry munitions direct to belligerent ports, or to neutral ports for transshipment. At his discretion the President could also forbid U. S. citizens to travel on belligerent ships except at their own risk. The Senate, in effect, was issuing a "must" order to the President. That night, gravely dismayed, President Roosevelt summoned Secretary of State Hull, Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, Chairman Sam D. McReynolds of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to a solemn White House conference. Siding with the President and State Department for a "may" embargo, House Chairman McReynolds entered the White House bristling with defiance of the Senate. "They can't jam unsatisfactory neutrality legislation down my throat," he shouted.

Chairman McReynolds left the White House considerably sobered. In his pocket he carried President Roosevelt's surrender to the nation's war scare. Reluctantly the President had written a memorandum accepting a mandatory, all-round arms embargo provided it should be effective only until Feb. 29, 1936.

Chairman McReynolds took with him also a prime trading point to force the Senate peacemen to accept the President's compromise. Ardently did he and a majority of the House desire to lay down an absolute embargo on loans & credits to warring nations. Except for the Nye-Clark bloc, the Senate was flatly opposed to such action. Therefore, threatened Chairman McReynolds, let the Senate peacemen accept the President's compromise or he would write a loans & credits embargo into their resolution, thus killing off neutrality legislation at this session.

The Senators closed the bargain. Swiftly amended by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the resolution sped through the House without a record vote. The Senate accepted it by a thumping 77-to-2.

As he prepared to sign the measure, President Roosevelt had the satisfaction of knowing that he had euchred the Senate peacemen out of committing the U. S. to a permanent neutrality policy. But the Senate peacemen, as they prepared to quit Washington for their homes, also had the satisfaction of knowing that they had tied the President's hands so effectively that he could not meddle in any forthcoming European war before Congress returned for its next session in January.

--Senator Bone has one son, aged 12.

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