Timetables

The prevailing mood in Washington was gloom. Apprehensively the country read the Washington columnists, whose reports of U. S. defense preparations read last week like the opening chapters of so many ghost stories. "We are in a pause," gloomed Columnist Ray Clapper (Scripps-Howard). "Slump," wailed Columnist Dorothy Thompson (New York Herald Tribune), who printed reports that the President is in a "down" mood. Even Franklin Roosevelt's closest adherents questioned his two-week cruise; wondered how he dared leave. Washington seemed to be sinking back into the swamp whence it was reclaimed.

Yet the U. S. boomed with work; coming out of Washington was like leaving the quiet of an office to walk into the crashing roar of a factory. More men & women were working than at any time in eleven years--more than at any time in U. S. history except for six months in boom 1929.* By December 1941, 6,000,000 more men will be working, said the Defense Commission. Business hummed toward record activity (see p. 80). The U. S. was rapidly moving through the first phase of rearmament: total mobilization of the national economy into one vast productive effort.

But it was precisely this effort that Washington was gloomy about. Tremendous as the speed of the upturn was, that speed did not seem fast enough. The U. S. under Franklin Roosevelt had one policy, one only, to which all others were subordinate: arm for the defense of democracy --including Great Britain, Greece, China.

Lifting censorship revealed England harder-hit than most had realized. Reports came, true or false, that Nazi Germany's war-making capacity was actually increasing, and increasing faster than that of Great Britain and the U. S. put together. Japan teetered at the edge of a war plunge into the rich islands of the Western Pacific. England was running out of merchant ships, its very life line to the food, supplies, war materials of the U. S.; England still needed destroyers.

A sense of frantic frustration was in Washington: men wanted to send whole fleets of planes to aid the Greeks, to help knock Italy out of the war. China actually begged for old U. S. trainer planes--anything, almost, that would fly.

When would U. S. capacity be great enough to meet any defense task? The soonest possible date was late autumn 1941--ten months. Many men believed Hitler would try for a knockout of England in April. Between Hitler's April and America's October stretched a hell-to-pay period that no man could foresee, and that few cared to contemplate.

There could be little question that Franklin Roosevelt was operating on his own timetable, and that his schedule was considerably longer and later than Adolf Hitler's. Perhaps he knew what he was doing. Better than anyone else he knew that, while the U. S. now had no usable military or diplomatic weapons, it had one still-powerful force: gold. What he was up to became clearer after China got $100,000,000 ($50,000,000 to balance the Chinese dollar, $50,000,000 in war credits). Last week to Argentina went $50,000,000--a loan observers agreed would go chiefly to aid Britain. Talk was heard that the U. S. should buy or seize the 80-odd refugee ships now rotting in U. S. harbors, sell them to England, perhaps also sell the 88 old World War I merchant hulks (see p. 86).

Nation of Shopkeepers? To Washington came suave, balding Sir Frederick Phillips, British Treasury Under Secretary, m his brief case a trial balance of British finances, a survey of British holdings in the U. S. Day Sir Frederick landed,

RFC Chairman Jesse H. Jones laconically said: "Britain is a good risk for a loan." ("Nonsense!" exclaimed Ohio's Senator Robert Taft.) Two days later Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. agreed with Jones, conferred with Sir Frederick.

The U. S. press roared indignation--but not at a loan to England. The anger was for Financier Jones's treatment of the cause of democracy as a financial matter. The Washington Star complained of "sugarcoated" words, said England was not a good financial risk, but that the cause of democracy was. The Christian Science Monitor said the U. S. must not think in terms of risk. Scripps-Howard papers barked: "For God's sake, let's be realistic!"

Said James S. Pope, managing editor of the Louisville Courier Journal:

"The phrase of the moment is 'Aid to England.' I, for one, am sick of it. Dr. Gallup says practically all Americans favor 'aid to England.' . . . Columnists speak learnedly of the 'aid' we already are giving Britain. Our President delivers himself of the odd observation that our 'aid to England' has reached its peak. . . .

"In heaven's high name, how have we aided England? When? Whose sacrifice produced the aid? . . .

"We have sold England an indeterminate number of military airplanes. She has paid cash. She has come and got them.

"We have sold England, I understand, some old rifles and various shipments of ammunition. She paid cash. She came and got them. . . .

"Finally, in a moment of benign generosity, we traded England some rotting destroyers for some air and naval bases so valuable to our defense that even Mr. Churchill had difficulty justifying the deal to his Parliament.

"We are going to sell her more and more planes, if our factories will just decide to produce them fast enough.

"We are going to sell England practically anything she wants--if we don't want it first. . . .

"And Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers!

"Oh, America, thou valiant, thou strong.

Land of freedom. Eternal foe of cruelty and oppression, defender of men's minds and men's properties--of men's 'rights.'

"What an inspiration we are. . . . We are opening our hearts. We are opening our order books. . . .

"We are in the throes of a pleasant national orgy of 'aid to England.'

"Ain't it wonderful?"

Guns and Butter? In such a mood of bitter self-examination, of no less bitter doubt, Americans were entering another crucial period. Anxious, edgy and uncertain, the U. S. saw ahead a world full of battlefields, an era of great controversies--controversies that must be settled decisively by decisions of major historic significance. The whole web of U. S. life, thought and conviction was involved.

One such battle shaped directly ahead: the feeding of Nazi-conquered Europe. Not only such intelligent and humane Quaker isolationists as Herbert Hoover sponsored European relief; not only such intelligent and humane interventionists as Playwright Robert E. Sherwood opposed it. The clergy, press and public were split: to let good people die when your own larder overflows has always been dishonorable. But as the New York Herald Tribune said: "Food is war, today, just as are bombs." The decision was difficult, dangerous, far-reaching.

The range of political battles ahead stretched from that looming over the St. Lawrence Seaway (see p. ig) to fiscal policy. Some time this very winter the Administration must choose between the two contrasting fiscal policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau--with perhaps U. S. financial stability at stake. That argument was on. Mr. Eccles wanted to slash the total of idle money in the country, to take away some Treasury money powers, to end the era of "cheap money" in the U. S. He would make interest rates higher, would lower prices of Treasury obligations to a point where individuals would buy them. This might keep idle bank funds from starting a runaway inflationary boom. Secretary Morgenthau's position was equally plain: a drastic anti-inflation move now might put brakes on the business boom just as the Administration was getting industrial wheels to roll; and a sharp interest-rate might boggle the whole Treasury borrowing program, whereas cheap money will tend to keep down the cost of defense.

Was it to be guns or butter, or guns and butter?

Franklin Roosevelt, his face reddening in the Caribbean sunshine, was committed to the policy of guns and butter both. Unlike Winston Churchill, he had not offered Americans "blood, toil, tears and sweat." As plainly, if not as eloquently as Churchill, he had promised no bloodshed, a sweatless, five-day, 40-hour week, no tears --except perhaps from recalcitrant profiteers. He and his supporters held that Hitler's rearmament program had given Germans not just more guns but more butter; his Administration proposed to do likewise. But there was a difference in the timetables: Hitler had had six years to prepare; the V. S. might have only months.

Aboard the U. S. S. Tnscaloosa, off Martinique, the President, in shirtsleeves, read his mail. Abroad, Greeks, Italians, Germans, Englishmen, Chinese, Japanese were dying in battle. In the U. S. the citizenry danced, dined, collected funds, designed posters for the benefit of those whose turn to die might soon come.

The kaleidoscope whirled: one new U. S. warship every twelve days; repeal the Johnson Act; Josephus Daniels to resign as Ambassador to Mexico; German radio increasingly hostile to U. S.; Ace Eddie Rickenbacker says it's a 30 Years' War; U. S. Army & Navy lets $47,000.000 worth of contracts in one day; Senator Gerald Nye says that loans to England mean U. S. convoys, which mean war; Senator Walter George (who opposed a loan to Finland) now says "The President has his feet on the ground"; "Give England the money," says Henry Ford; Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco will keep Spain out of the war for a $100,000,000 U. S. loan.

Long ago Franklin Roosevelt developed an almost timeless patience. Perhaps, on the Tuscaloosa, he was spending quiet hours outlining a clear-cut pattern of action: a revised Cabinet: legislation, acts, appointments, policies: perhaps even a program as packed with dramatic action as the 100 Days of 1933. when he was inaugurated at a similar moment of gloom, confusion, depression--another time when the vitality of democracy was seriously questioned. Soon, one evening, his red-tanned face would shine through the gloomy fog of Washington's Union Station, and the answers might begin.

* American Federation of Labor estimates: October 1940, 46,063,000 workers; May-to-November 1929, 47,600,000.

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