Straw in the Wind

In the days before Pearl Harbor, South Dakota's throaty, balding Republican Representative Karl E. Mundt, president of the National Forensic League, made many an oration on behalf of U.S. isolation. Once he urged that Franklin Roosevelt undertake to mediate the war in Europe; once he demanded that Franklin Roosevelt resign.

Fortnight ago Karl Mundt, re-elected last November although his isolationist record was under heavy attack, proposed, in a House resolution, that the U.S. set up a commission now to make a "realistic, bipartisan, non-political study" of postwar foreign and domestic proposals. His hope: "that America and the world can benefit from recommendations worked out in such an atmosphere of serious-minded, non-sensational deliberation."

Karl Mundt's resolution will very probably never get out of committee; he proposed that the commission be appointed by Cordell Hull, Herbert Hoover and Congress. But it was significant for a broader reason: it was a definite break from the isolationist ranks. Said the man who once opposed any foreign intervention: "Neither our foreign policy nor our domestic economy can operate in a vacuum after the war. . . . We must make neither the mistake of fashioning international programs without regard to our American destiny, nor the error of focusing attention upon American problems without regard to their workability in the world in which we live."

The Mundt resolution was more than a significant straw in the wind. It was also a challenge to statesmanship. He also urged all other pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists--among whom there were many of unquestioned sincerity and patriotism--to back his stand.

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