Questions & Answers

"We have committed ourselves in this world struggle. . . . We cannot allow our goods to be sunk in the Atlantic--we shall be beaten if they do. . . . [This] is our fight." So said Secretary Frank Knox last week to the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

"This policy means, in practical application, that such aid must reach its destination in the shortest of time and in maximum quantity. So ways must be found to do this." So said Secretary Cordell Hull to the American Society of International Law.

Secretary Knox did not say Britain would be beaten. He did not say the democracies would be beaten. He said "we" shall be beaten. Secretary Hull did not say that peaceful ways could be found to get arms to Britain. He simply said "ways."

In one night two official members of President Roosevelt's Cabinet had publicly put the U.S. in the war. A fair inference was that they had spoken for him and his Administration. They had spoken only 24 hours after Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh had roused a big Manhattan rally of the America First Committee by declaring that the great, silent majority of the U.S. people, "who have no newspaper, or newsreel, or radio station at their command," were opposed to U.S. participation in the war.

If Colonel Lindbergh was right, the President was leading the U.S. into a war it did not want.

"England Cannot Win." At the Lindbergh rally was Lawrence Dennis, No. 1 intellectual Fascist in the U.S. Novelist Kathleen Norris, Oldster Jafsie Condon, go-between in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, huge, lumbering Senator David Ignatius Walsh of Massachusetts, and Journalist John T. Flynn, foe of the New Deal and intervention, sat on the platform. There also sat Anne Lindbergh, author of "The Wave of the Future." "Phooey on England!" screamed a woman in the crowd dominated by New York Irish and other anti-British partisans.

Lindbergh, still thin and young-looking, his wavy hair now receding a little, spoke calmly, almost cold-bloodedly, and with evident sincerity. He asserted that:

> The U.S. cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance it sends.

> The U.S. should not enter a war unless it has a reasonable chance of winning.

> The U.S. is no better prepared today than France was.

>It is now obvious that England is losing the war.

> "I have constantly advocated a negotiated peace."

> England hopes to persuade the U.S. to send another A.E.F. to Europe.

> The U.S. Air Force is deplorably lacking in modern fighting planes because they are all sent to England.

> The U.S. has an independent destiny and should keep out of war.

All of these statements were cheered.

Struggle of Opinion. Implicit in Colonel Lindbergh's speech was the acknowledgment that the U.S. at large has already taken sides in the war. His plea was that to fight the war would be a great mistake because Hitler was bound to win. It was basically a plea against fighting as a matter, not of moral or political, but of military opinion.*

As a matter of military opinion no conclusive evidence existed to determine whether he was right. But on Lindbergh's assertion that the President was leading the U.S. to war against the will of its majority, light was shed by last week's reports of the Gallup Poll. Question: Should the U.S. Navy be used to convoy? Answer: Yes, 41%; No, 50%, Undecided, 9%. Further question: Should the U.S. Navy be used to convoy if British defeat seems certain without them? Answer: Yes, 71%; No, 21%, Undecided, 8%.

Another Gallup question followed. If you were asked to vote today on the question of the United States entering the war against Germany and Italy, how would you vote?" Answer: Go in, 19%; Stay out, 81%. Further question: If it appeared certain there was no other way to defeat Germany and Italy except for the United States to go to war against them, would you be in favor of the U.S. going into the war? Answer: Would favor war, 68%; would oppose war, 24%; undecided, 8%.

The inference was obvious: the U.S. did not believe Colonel Lindbergh's assertion that Britain was on the verge of losing. But when and if the U.S. comes to believe it, a majority of the nation will be for convoys and for fighting if necessary.

Roosevelt Comments. After Colonel Lindbergh and Secretaries Knox and Hull had spoken, the President at length dropped a few comments at his press conference. In shirt sleeves, his big hands fumbling as he fitted cigarets in his long holder, he said it was dumb to consider a Nazi victory inevitable. He said that certain people held the idea, which they had not thought through, that there was a new order in the world to which democracy must yield. Out of one side of their mouths, he said, they say they do not like dictatorships, and out of the other, that dictatorships are going to defeat democracy and might as well be accepted. The attitude, he said, was held by a minority in the country. He said he was sorry that people who made such a mistake were in such high places that they could write or talk about it. It was just dumb, he added cheerfully.

A reporter asked why Colonel Lindbergh, although an Army Reserve officer, had not been called to the colors. The President leaned back in his chair, pondered, recalled that during the Civil War numerous foreigners, liberty-loving people, fought on both sides, and that at the same time both sides did not call certain people to service. The people who were thus ignored, he said, were the Vallandighams.

(Clement Laird Vallandigham, of New Lisbon, Ohio, a Congressman from 1858 to 1863, strenuously opposed the Civil War as unnecessary and unconstitutional. Failing of election in 1862, he denounced the Government bitterly, became the most prominent leader of the Copperheads of the North. His extreme opposition led to his arrest by General Ambrose E. Burnside in May 1863. Sentenced to close confinement, he was freed by President Lincoln, banished to the South.)

Mr. Roosevelt had again stated a text. Colonel Lindbergh pondered the text over the weekend, then submitted his resignation from the Army.

The White House had no comment. The President was studying the huge map of the world which he has in his office now in place of smaller maps of the U.S., and the Atlantic Ocean. But actually during the week he had again set himself on record against convoys. Instead, he proclaimed the right of the U.S. Navy to patrol the seven seas. The meaning of this was made specific when, after he had talked to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City, the Mayor told Canadians that the U.S. safety belt stretched 1,000 miles to sea. The U.S. now knew its planes and ships were on far patrol, spotting submarines and raiders and warning British convoys.

* A direct detailed attack on Colonel Lindbergh's military conclusions was made last week by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, famed aviator and aircraft designer, in the American Mercury. His thesis: "The war is shaking down to an epochal contest between two groups of producing nations. One of them, under Nazi control, will be more and more plagued by shortages of critical materials; it will be under continuous and growing attack by enemy aviation, operating with increasingly undernourished labor working in large part sullenly, under coercion. The other, the Anglo-American bloc, its production centers widely scattered over the world, will have access to all materials; it will operate in many regions' under relatively peaceful conditions with labor that is voluntary and well-fed."

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