Voices in a Hush

WAR & PEACE

In the calm that followed Franklin Roosevelt's radio speech, stating the general intentions of the U.S. in World War II (TIME, June 9), voices could again be heard last week engaged in War & Peace debate. Now those voices had begun to sound shrill, small and ominous, like the chittering of sparrows in the moment of hush after the first great gust announcing an approaching storm.

> In Pittsburgh, Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler, leader of the isolationist bloc in Congress, denying that he thought the President "would deliberately lead this nation into . . . war," hammered away at the isolationist theory that Britain is done for. "The American people ... do not want to buy a bankrupt concern. ... If the British Isles . . . are our first line of defense, wouldn't it be sensible to bring about a peace that would save . . . the British fleet?"

> In Milwaukee, Senator Gerald Nye called Mr. Roosevelt's speech "a fire-alarm chat," spoke of "the mad rush of interventionists to frighten the American people into . . . further involvement in the war."

> In Baltimore, Philip La Follette, onetime Governor of Wisconsin, also spoke darkly of the "disintegrating British Empire." No matter who controls Europe, said La Follette, "we can be the cock of the walk for generations to come if we mind our own business. ..."

> Of Charles Lindbergh's ambiguous call for "new policies and a new leadership," caustic Columnist WestbrookPegler wrote: "We can't adopt new policies without a change of leadership and ... we can't repudiate the elected leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . without repudiating the people, and I should like to know how Lindbergh purposes to go about that."

> In Chicago, stronghold of U.S. isolationists, Wendell Willkie, the man who has the most right to challenge Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, faced some 22,000 clamorous citizens who had gathered in the Chicago Stadium (scene of the Democratic Convention last summer) to celebrate Unity Day. It was the first big Chicago rally since September for supporters of the President's foreign policy.

Said Willkie: "The campaign of 1940 is over . . . yet we seem to have a few who are trying to run a kind of out-of-season political campaign of their own. We have lately been informed that this country needs a new leader. That is reckless and misguided talk. We in America do not choose new leaders between elections. We cannot . . . have a new leadership . . . without revolution and destruction. . . ."

Said Willkie (of Lindbergh's charge that Mr. Roosevelt exceeds Hitler in his aggressive designs on other nations): "A man does not wait to be hit before putting up his guard. . . . Our strength will come in facing the facts, however bitter. We cannot shout and drive away the nightmare. We cannot have peace by vote nor a safe America through resolutions or drastic speech. ... If we are to have a share in shaping the world to come, we must act and we must act together. . . .

"Ours is a problem of unity. . . . We have the resources of men, materials and skills. . . . The war lords of Nazi Germany boast that this country ... is divided. . . . But we Americans see a picture they can never see. . . . We see a nation slow to anger and unused to fear. ... It is a peaceful nation, unused to military pomp and circumstance. Strangers may think it soft, divided, ineffectual. What they do not see is . . our common heritage of freedom. And when that freedom is threatened, as it is today, this country will be found . . . not divided, but the United States of America."

But while the debate still went on, it appeared that for the debaters, as for the President, the hour had passed when words still counted. The destiny of the U.S. had become a matter of action.

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