The Great Fugue

Like piling thunderheads blanketing the whole horizon, last week a Great Debate took shape over the U. S. Could the U. S. keep out of Europe's war? Not for 20 years had U. S. citizens heard such ominous rumbling, not for 20 years had they searched the political skies with such anxiety. For they knew that, unless providentially the storm moved harmlessly on, the lightning issues of that debate would strike home to every man and woman in the nation.

Under that sky, political lineups went by the board. The battle lines were drawn around a confused, mishandled, four-year-old Neutrality Act. To Washington the President summoned the Congress to meet on September 21 in special session. He prepared to ask them to repeal the major section of that act--the provision compelling him to declare absolute embargoes on the sale and shipment of arms and munitions to all countries at war.

Last week, before Congress met, up rose the ancient of the Senate, William Edgar Borah, to thwart the Presidential will. The knife-witted old (74) Lion of Idaho, symbol of romantic Lost Causes, took to the radio to tell the U. S. that repeal of the embargo meant taking sides in Europe, therefore intervention, therefore U. S. involvement in war.

Borah stood for the Isolationist "peace bloc" who see only one means to stay out --retention of the embargo. Next night the nation listened to Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh (see p. 14) who represented nobody, yet everybody, in a simple monosyllabic address whose refrain was only: "Stay out."

Against Borah stood the Administration viewpoint: 1) This is 1939, not 1918; the U. S. embargo on arms to all belligerents gives Adolf Hitler almost the equivalent of an Atlantic fleet, because Great Britain and France can get no arms from the U. S. 2) Britain and France are fighting the fight of democracy against world revolution, are not just engaged in another imperialistic quarrel.

To the side of the thinning-maned Lion came a wide variety of men. notable examples of how the great debate crossed party lines. To lead the group on the floor came Missouri's Bennett Clark, still remembering how his father, Speaker Champ Clark, fought and distrusted another World War President; Wisconsin's La Follette, North Dakota's Nye and Frazier,. Michigan's Vandenberg, Idaho's Clark, West Virginia's Holt, Washington's Bone, North Carolina's Reynolds, California's historic Isolationist Hiram Johnson.

These were the men who had gone beyond the turning-back, who had forcefully sworn their belief that repeal of the arms embargo was the first fateful footstep on a one-way road to war. Their votes and influence only two months ago had balked a then-irritable and often angry Franklin Roosevelt as he sought the embargo's repeal. They had forced adjournment without new neutrality legislation. And Borah had been their spokesman, as he quietly insisted in a White House night conference that he knew there would be no war--his sources of information were "better than" Secretary Hull's.

Last week the Senate's Great Inconsistent strolled daily from his ground-floor office in the Senate Office Building to his bare workroom hideaway in the Capitol, his shadow falling black on the worn paving.

Borah's shadow, and the threat it represented, had caused Franklin Roosevelt to change his mood and tactics. Suddenly honey-sweet to the press he had often lambasted, Franklin Roosevelt now turned his full charm on his opponents: solicitously he consulted Republican leaders about a special session; then on the dissident Democrats. Twice he called the Mississippi fox, Pat Harrison, by long-distance telephone. He condoled Georgia's Walter George on an eye-operation (13 months ago he strove to end George's career). He appointed James Elliott Heath (a close crony of Virginia's Carter Glass for 30 years) as Norfolk customs collector.

Harrison announced himself 100% behind the President; rumors continued that George had shifted to the Administration side; Carter Glass said, out of the right side of his mouth: "Naturally, I would prefer to be on friendly terms with the White House."

Most significant of all in the political battle to come was the undenied report that South Carolina's Jimmy Byrnes would manage the Administration's floor fight for repeal of the embargo. After two years' agonized observation of Senate Leader Alben Barkley's dazed fumbling with New Deal legislation, Franklin Roosevelt was apparently turning to the slickest, most persuasive man in the Senate for leadership to combat an isolationist filibuster.

The Issue. Other Senators believe Jimmy Byrnes could charm snakes without a flute and with his eyes closed. That talent he needed now. For no man on the other side can orate with the power and clarity and command of Borah; no one on the other side is as agile and knowing a parliamentarian as Bennett Clark.

While a half-dozen Senators can prolong debate, in practice a real filibuster needs 15 men.*Last week Washington observers gave the Borah anti-repeal forces a minimum of 25 men, a maximum of 40. Therefore Jimmy Byrnes knew he had the most important thing--the votes--in the bag. But well he knew that only such a magnificent optimist as Franklin Roosevelt could seriously believe that 435 brass-tongued, leather-lunged Congressmen would meekly report to Washington, legislate one bill, then go quietly home in a time of crisis. Byrnes said nothing, silently agreed with Bennett Clark that the Congress, once called, would stay for the duration of World War II.

In his radio speech, old Senator Borah served notice that Franklin Roosevelt could expect no Blitzkrieg victory over Congress: "The only matter of difference ... is the sole question of whether we shall sell arms or not sell arms." Quickly Clark and Vandenberg followed this line, insisting it would be unneutral now, with war under way, to revise U. S. law to favor one set of belligerents against another. It was obvious that one serious display of over-caginess on the President's part could ruin his chances of success.

The strength of the Borah men lay in their power to rouse and rally emotional opinion. Yet such good Republicans as Frank Knox, Alf M. Landon (both of whom this week were called to the White House), Nicholas Murray Butler. Henry Lewis Stimson, were all for embargo repeal. Editorially, the U. S. press was almost unanimous behind him. Out of Washington came the reminiscent cry "a little block of willful men. . . ."

1917. One of the President's supporters could well smile wryly at the sound of those words. For George William Norris of Nebraska is the only living member of the Senate who voted with the "willful six" against the entry of the U. S. into the World War, who filibustered mightily (and successfully) night and day in the 64th Congress against President Wilson's "must"--a bill permitting U. S. merchant ships to arm themselves against submarines. No men in U. S. history have been more bitterly denounced, more thoroughly vilified than that group. George Norris still remembers how people would get up and leave a streetcar when he got on.

The Senate group now eager for such martyrdom, yet unlikely to attain it, received their present conviction partly by inheritance, partly by the investigations into the sources of World War I. Young Bob La Follette knows how his willful father suffered; Clark, Vandenberg, Nye and Bone are convinced that the munitions-makers and J. P. Morgan & Co. dragged the U. S. into the last war; Frazier and Clark are isolationists by political instinct, Johnson by nature; Rush Holt is against embargo repeal because the President wants it; Bob Reynolds (who last week zigzagged home from Europe on a submarine-leary Washington) did not begin spouting "I will never vote to send our boys to war" till last year.

Blockade. The frightened gyrations of ships across the Atlantic last week pointed up another problem that will confront patient Secretary of State Cordell Hull even if the Congress revises the Neutrality Act. Last week one U. S. merchant vessel, the Waterman Steamship Corp.'s Wacosta, was halted, searched, allowed to proceed after three hours by a German submarine. The Black Diamond Lines' Black Osprey, bound for Rotterdam with a general cargo, was seized by the British, diverted to Weymouth. held there. The Waterman Corp.'s Warrior, bound for Hamburg with a cargo of resin, was held up by the British.

Sad-eyed Mr. Hull pondered the situation, stated later that the U. S. would insist on its rights under international law, then admitted that certain rights had been waived for the present. The British, well remembering how close was war with the U. S. in 1915-16 over just such incidents, could only read into the Hull statement a final abandonment of the freedom-of-the-seas tradition that strained relations in 1861-65, brought war in 1812.

This time on the argument over blockade the British put the U. S. at a neat disadvantage. The list of absolute contraband which the British published last week--cargoes subject to seizure without reparation if bound for Germany--was almost the identical list set up by President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing in 1917. Between the British Government and its fleet, the Reich and its submarines, it appeared that the U. S. could in practice expect little freedom of the seas. Realistically, the U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Joseph P. Kennedy, warned indignant

American passengers on the British Aquitania that they might be sunk without warning--as travelers on a convoyed belligerent ship--that the U. S. Government could take no responsibility for their safety. Behind these gathering events, crowding arguments, confusing maneuvers that made up the Great Debate on U. S. neutrality, every U. S. citizen last week could feel, if he could not see, the vital, life-&-death issue: peace or war. To the great oratorical fugue about to start in the Capitol, never had there been a more unanimously attentive audience. The man who will play the counterpoint in that fugue, his eyebrows now white with time, sat brooding in his hideaway, now and then napping on a creaking old black-leather couch. Borah was ready for the fight of his life. The odds were against him but no man could yet say that he had lost it.

*Senator Borah never "filibusters," hates the term and practice. This has not prevented him from talking extensively, day after day, on the same subject, if he saw fit. To kill time, filibusterers read cookbooks, tracts into the Congressional Record.

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