In a Shoe Store

Nations outside the Americas were invited by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address to Congress last week (see p. 9) to stick out their feet for the purpose of seeing whether the shoes of his oratory would fit them.

Italy. To this challenge Benito Mussolini replied by having the Italian Press omit all portions of the speech fitting his Dictatorship, but Pope Pius XI, accustomed to having his slippered foot kissed by dignitaries, supplied the full text to Italians by displaying it verbatim in the Papal news-organ, Osservatore Romano. The official Italian news agency dispatch from Washington, printed by most Italian news-organs, unemotionally recorded: "Mr. Roosevelt pointed out that the world's desire for peace is blocked by only 10 or 15% of the total population of the world and did not hide his pessimism over the outlook in Europe and Asia, where men that govern the various great peoples possess the temperament and pursue the ends that do not lead to progress for peace and goodwill."

Italy's most acrid editor, Giornale d'Italia's super-Fascist Virginio Gayda, cracked: "The wealth amassed by American Democracy was attained with wars of expansion and conquest during which they exterminated all native races. Nevertheless they have not known how to stamp out gangster crimes, and finally Lindbergh, America's national hero, has been obliged to seek safety for his child in voluntary exile across the Ocean." Terming the President's strictures upon Europe a form of intervention in the Continent's affairs, Signor Gayda ludicrously screeched, "Roosevelt's attempt at American intervention in European affairs establishes a precedent for intervention by Europe or other continents in American affairs!"

Germany. Adolf Hitler cut loose with the whole German Press in fighting acknowledgment that the President's shoe pinches Germany. Sneered the Berliner Tageblat:. "That such commonplaces should be uttered from so exalted a rostrum!" Snapped the Frankfurter Zeitung: "The United States is merging more & more into a politico-moral autarchy which would probably be justified if it were living on a remote and self-sufficient island." The German Foreign Office's semi-official Diplomatische Korrespondenz noted the President's "egoistic wish to avoid any participation in war."

No. 3 Nazi Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels' Angriff angrily announced: "History repudiates all the President's argumentation in toto. . . . History records far more wars begun by Democracies than by Napoleonic adventurers. . . . Adolf Hitler came to power legally with a greater proportion of legal votes behind him than President Roosevelt can ever hope to win!"

In general German papers took time out to blame upon the "peace prating" of Woodrow Wilson the imposition upon Germany of the Treaty of Versailles. Then in various ways German editors announced that "President Roosevelt has now gone Wilsonian!"

Britain. Confusion and contradiction was the editorial reaction throughout Great Britain, where portions of the President's words could not have been found more obscure if he had spoken in all of Ethiopia's five languages at once. News-organs favorable to His Majesty's Government said Mr. Roosevelt had made application of Oil Sanctions to Italy impossible. Those favorable to His Majesty's Loyal Opposition said he had "given a lead to Geneva" to impose Oil Sanctions.

Poland. In Warsaw attempts by Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck to figure out which stand on Sanctions the President had taken gave him such a headache that he abruptly canceled a speech in which he was to have told the Polish Parliament which way Poland stands.

Austria. Leading organs of the Austrian Press approved, as one Vienna news-organ expressed it, the President's "compromise between moral considerations and politics and also between moral considerations and business."

France. Steel-trap "Latin logic" constrained French editors to note that in Washington it was the most autocratic U. S. President in living memory who spoke against autocracy; that it was a capitalist of independent means who spoke against greed; and that it was a breaker of campaign promises who, as the Journal des Debats said "thanks God, like the Pharisees, that he is not as other men."

Paris and Berlin papers got together in taking to pieces those parts of the State of the Union address in which the President enlarged on his statement that "among the nations of the great Western Hemisphere the policy of the good neighbor has happily prevailed." Did it prevail European editors wanted to know, during the bitter Gran Chaco war which has just bled white two nations of the great Western Hemisphere? And what about those good neighbors, the predatory dictators of the banana republics?

Having had their fun picking flaws, most French editors on second thought broadly and soberly concluded that Germany would have won the World War had the White House then been occupied by a President in Mr. Roosevelt's mood of last week. This mood the Journal des Debats defined as "total isolation and complete indifference to good and evil."

Far East. In Japan, clearly high on the list of countries whose feet the President intended his shoes to pinch, patriotism and the fact that Japanese editors were still celebrating New Year's combined to minimize Mr. Roosevelt's words, and there were no explosive Japanese retorts.

Chinese editors, who might have been expected to exult at the President's evident intention to pinch Japan, were far too deep in the heroic cups of the New Year to bother about the speech immediately. From them observations crackling with Chinese wit can be expected too late to be news outside China.

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