"What Are We Waiting For?"

Although Franklin Roosevelt had not come to the point of speaking out about using U.S. warships to insure safe delivery of U.S. supplies to Britain, last week others spoke for him and plainly.

>Florida's Senator Claude Pepper, who has been a stalking horse for the Administration before, was the most vociferous. He called for convoying "without another day's delay or dallying." Shouting down all attempts of other Senators to interrupt him, he cried: "Do we want to let millions be crucified later because there is a jeopardy that a few might die an honorable death now?" The U.S., Pepper stormed, should get tough, "occupy the points of vantage from which these monsters are preparing to strike at us ... Greenland, Iceland, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, the Canary Islands, Dakar. . . ." He saw Japan as "ready to assassinate us," suggested that U.S. aviators be permitted to fight with the Chinese Army. ". . . At the controls of some first-class American bombing planes, 50 of them . . . can make a shambles out of Tokyo." Even sympathetic colleagues were abashed at his belligerency. Unsympathetic colleagues saw red. (Isolationist Senator Tobey, picking up a story written by Scripps-Howard Staff Writer Thomas L. Stokes, suggested that Senator Pepper had used his office to get part of a defense contract for a Florida asphalt company, thereby precipitating such a rancorous side battle that the Senate finally expunged the debate from the record.)

If the President could disown Senator Pepper's belligerent cries, he could hardly disown the remarks of three members of his own Cabinet.

^ Said War Secretary Stimson in a radio speech: "We have at our hands a naval instrument prepared and ready.... Right now at this crossroads of history it is within our power, if we choose to use that instrument, to turn the tide. ... If today that Navy should make secure the seas for the delivery of our munitions to Great Britain, it will render as great a service to our country and to the preservation of American freedom as it has ever rendered in all its glorious history."

>Said Navy Secretary Knox to an American Booksellers' Association dinner in Washington: "We are living in fearful danger and the only safety for us is to supplement the forces of Great Britain. . . . Stop and think what it would mean if the bridge of ships were not maintained.

>Said Agriculture Secretary Wickard to a gathering of North Carolina farmers: "It is a cruel and bitter mockery to let the English people believe we are going to make our help effective if we have only halfway measures in mind."

>Said the pro-convoying Los Angeles Times: "The policy outlined is the one which the American people have come to recognize as logically necessary. . . . What are we waiting for?"

>Speaking at a "Freedom Rally" in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, Wendell Willkie cried: "I care not whether you call safe delivery convoying, patrolling, airplane accompaniment or what not. We want those cargoes protected ... at once and with less talk and more action." "More action" could come only from Franklin Roosevelt. Apologists saw the President waiting in the wings for the orchestra to finish its prelude before he stepped out with the Big Act. Critics saw him tiptoeing around, listening at keyholes of public opinion, studying polls, while national support slipped through his fingers.

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