Turning Point

Twenty years ago the U. S. deliberately turned its back on a world made safe for Democracy, elected Ohio's Warren Gamaliel Harding President, sang How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On the Farm and swore by the Founding Fathers: never again.

That oath, sworn in a memorv of sac rifice and bloodshed, gradually soured into a disgusted resolve. The Allies didn't pay their war debts, Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock, the country heard that the holy crusade had been waged to make good J. P. Morgan's loans, that Our Buddies were the pawns of the munitions-makers, that the Road to War was paved with baloney; the blood had been shed not by heroes, but by suckers.

Everybody was an Isolationist, regardless of party. The first New Dealers who went to Washington with Franklin Roosevelt were the New Isolationists, intent on a Brave New World. Raymond Moley, impatient with the fuddy-duddy, international-cooperation ideas of Tennessee's Cordell Hull, was horrified at the President's willingness to consult with Herbert Hoover's world-minded Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson. "Three thousand miles of good green water" on each coast seemed an ample guaranty of security forever.

A few patient voices droned on about the moribund League of Nations, international trade, U. S. responsibility. As the tempo quickened, and bombers roared over Ethiopia, Spain, China, the U. S.

stirred like a man trying not to wake from a pleasant dream. Isolationism grew more vocal than ever; Congress passed, tightened up, a Neutrality Act which abandoned the freedom of the seas.

Franklin Roosevelt, reading the cables day after day, saw something coming.

Austria went down, then Czecho-Slovakia.

As Munichtime dragged away, voices joined the old chorus, saying this is a small world. The wheels rolled faster, Berlin and Moscow joined hands, Poland vanished in a clap of thunder. World War II crystallized Isolation as the dominant U. S. mood.

Finland's turn came; then Denmark, Norway. Isolationists might dispute the trend, but signs multiplied that public sentiment had grown by leaps & bounds in favor of the President's policy (still unannounced) of giving the Allies every aid short of war.

Last week, as Hitler struck into The Netherlands and Belgium, Isolationists fell almost mute. And in the momentary silence U. S. public opinion began to find tongue.

P: In New York City's Times Square 15 patrolmen, three mounted police herded cars through a great crowd that spilled into the streets, attentive, grim, unusually silent, under the bulletins racing across the Times Annex.

P: The press showed anger and alarm.

Once-isolationist newspapers demanded preparedness on a scale unthinkable two months ago. The Chicago Tribune denounced Army & Navy bureaucrats, called the Navy obsolete, insisted on a mammoth air force.

Wrote the New York Times: "Aggression run mad . . . Germany's insanity . . . brutal . . . murder in cold blood. . . .

[Hitler] has staked everything on a gigantic gamble which, if he wins, will mean the end of freedom and democracy and culture throughout all Europe in our time. ..." Colonel Frank Knox wrote some 1,500 scorching words in the Chicago Daily News, exhorting preparedness, demanding the U. S. "help in every way short of war itself, those who are now fighting the bestial monster that is making a shambles of Europe." P:Words of the late General Billy Mitchell, U. S. Air Chief in World War I, who was demoted, court-martialed by the U. S.

Army in 1925 for accusing the high command of incompetence, were dug up by Scripps-Howard Reporter Ruth Finney: "In future wars it will be too late to organize an air force after the contest begins." P: In Congress, rabid Isolationist Hamilton Fish stunned the House by voicing a solemn hope for non-partisan harmony in the crisis, a hope that "at least for the time being no effort will be made to criticize the Administration. . . ." P:The American Red Cross ordered 50 more air-conditioned ambulances, 100 auxiliary hospital trucks, ten field hospitals, quantities of surgical instruments; drove for another $10.000,000.

P:Chicago Osteopath Dr. Walter Donald Craske told an Illinois Osteopaths Convention that the war, and fears of U. S. involvement, were giving millions of cit;zens high blood pressure.

P: In Manhattan's Ritz-Carlton, 15 sumptuous gowns specially designed by ranking French couturiers, and worn by debutantes and young matrons, were auctioned for the benefit of the French. Top price: $700.

For $375 a fashion designer bought a short-length Bruyere creation in black net with taffeta inserts (modeled by Barbara Gushing, sister of the President's ex-daughter-in-law, Mrs. James Roosevelt).

As the stockmarket plummeted, U. S. business took sharp stock of the fact that spreading war had wiped out at least half of a $161,125,000 yearly market (see p.

78), of the fact that if the U. S. should find itself at war with Japan in the Far East it will be cut off from the Indies, and other Eastern areas, which produce 90% of the world's rubber, 50% of the world's tin, tungsten (21%), manganese (27%), quinine (95%), Manila fibre (100%).

Such were the odds & ends, the tags of U. S. reaction to affairs abroad. But something deeper, broader, more important was happening. The fiddlestrung nerve-tension of the cable-readers and policy-makers spread from Washington across the land, jumped out of loudspeakers and off blocks of black Gothic-type headlines. Still clinging to its original determinations to stay out of World War II, the U. S. was acquiring another--to prevent by other means a Nazi victory. To get additional evidence of the trend of feeling TIME asked many of its correspondents to report on local sentiment. Most striking fact: local variations normally expected from such an impressionistic poll were practically nonexistent. Typical reports: P: Columnist Ralph McGill wrote a piece in the Atlanta Constitution on British slowness; his phone rang all one morning with agreements from Constitution readers. Observers found steadily firming sentiment for U. S. intervention; a banker told his directors "Now is the time to intervene." Distinct and widespread was sentiment for immediate increase in national defense measures.

^ In Massachusetts, crowds stood on Boston's Washington Street watching news bulletins posted, grudgingly admiring Nazi efficiency, grim at the prospect of Nazi victory. Said many: "We'll be in it if it keeps up six months." P: The Portland Oregonian's Pulitzer Prize associate editor, Ronald G. Callvert, said Franklin Roosevelt's speech (see p.

16) "expressed the feelings of the American people." P: Many Californians talked of U. S. naval participation in the war; and a feeling of inevitability was widespread. P:Isolation is impossible, U. S. entry inevitable, said Louisianians fatalistically, as they concentrated on the more immediate business of eating 1,000 steers in a barbecue celebrating the end of the late Dictator Huey Long's machine.

P: In Chicago, "I hope they send you first," was a common gag.

P: A frequent remark in Omaha: "It looks like we can't keep out." For weeks flights of bombers, throbbing overhead in the dawn, en route from California to the Allies, have awakened Nebraskans, who went back to sleep uneasily. Two State Republican leaders said privately they could now calmly contemplate Term III for Franklin Roosevelt.

This nationwide surge of indignant public opinion was the U. S. news of the week.

P:In Washington, lean-jibbed Harry Hopkins, Secretary of Commerce, brought together business advisers, economists, trade experts, canvassed the problem: how to acquire and conserve stocks of strategic materials if the Indies' supply sources are impaired. Rolling up on all sides was a flood of criticism of a Congress which has consistently refused to take Franklin Roosevelt's tip and appropriate many millions of dollars to purchase stocks of strategic materials.

P: At the Treasury bald, solemn Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. went down at dawn to throw the switches freezing Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg bank balances so that Nazi plunder may not include approximately $1,076,000,000 Dutch, $296,000,000 Belgian, and $14,-000,000 Luxembourger investments in the U. S.

P:Congress stirred to a bigger issue: Kentucky's leathery Representative Andrew May, chairman, House Military Affairs Committee, called for repeal of the hitherto inviolable Johnson Act, banning all U. S. loans and credits to any defaulting debtor nation which blocks loans to the Allies. The Act's author, old World War I Isolationist Hiram Johnson of California, cried indignantly ". . . road to war." > What stand, if any, should the G. O. P.

take on foreign affairs? 15J"on-conformist Republican Wendell L. Willkie slugged that question at his own party's keynoter, Isolationist Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota. Speaking in Minneapolis, heart of supposedly Isolation country, Mr.

Willkie snapped: "I say to him, in all seriousness, that if he, as keynoter of the Republican Party, attempts to put the Republican Party on record as saying what is going on in Europe is none of our busi ness, then we might as well fold up." Minnesota's Republicans forthwith presented Mr. Willkie with his first delegates. ^ Wrote Editor Felix Morley in the Washington Post: "Neutrality has no meaning when such a merciless military machine is in full operation. . . . No country can possibly be indifferent ... all those not actually at war, or poised to strike at the strategic moment, are preparing to fight for their independence.

"Nor can it be said realistically that the U. S. is any longer neutral."

As if to echo these sentiments, in Buenos Aires Argentine Foreign Minister Jose Maria Cantilo, after conferring with U. S. Ambassador Norman Armour, proposed that the Americas make a new declaration of solidarity, stronger than any heretofore. Neutrality, said Minister Cantilo, is a "fiction," a "dead conception." The Americas should adopt an attitude of "nonbelligerency," like Italy's: wholly sympathetic with one belligerent.

Toward this position, un-neutral but not yet belligerent, it appeared that the U. S. was moving, if not in theory, in fact.

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