The Enormous Thing

"The thing's grown to something quite enormous," said white-haired, spinsterish Kingsley Martin, editor of London's socialist New Statesman and Nation.

Some months ago, when Henry Wallace had taken over the editorship of the New Republic, Kingsley Martin had sent a routine congratulatory note and asked Wallace to come to England some time as his guest. When Wallace accepted, the "thing" had begun to grow. Martin had to turn over his own secretary to cope with the invitations for speeches; he assigned a special man to press relations.

Socialist Britain had been fully warned that Wallace would be speaking for himself alone. Wrote Denis W. Brogan, an acute observer of U.S. affairs: "Britain will be welcoming not the leader of a great mass movement, much less the leader of a great national party, but a distinguished plant geneticist, a former vice president, and the editor of ... a weekly review."

If the Left heard, it gave no sign. Loudly, it proclaimed the coming of "a Messiah from the West." Retorted the Tory right: "That windbag of a Methodist* preacher of politics."

Like Two Dogs. Last week the Messianic windbag stepped out of a plane at London Airport into a blustery English gale. Ducking his head against stinging hail, he shook hands with Kingsley Martin and greeted the waiting newsmen.

His first concern was for his eggs, of which he had brought ten dozen for British poultry researchers. "You take three inbred Leghorn whites and three Rhode Island reds, crossbreed them, and you have excellent eggs," he explained with a cackle. He added: "I am accused of being a mystic, but not about chickens."

Then he whisked off to the swank Savoy Hotel and the first of a dizzy round of lunches, parties and talks with England's tweedy intellectuals. He latched on to many a new idea, spent much time in his second-floor suite redrafting his speeches in the light of what he had heard. At a second press conference he gave his own simplified version of U.S.-Russian relations. He likened the two countries to two big dogs facing each other: "For a long time they smell each other--when they're satisfied, they usually don't want to fight." "Chaperoned" by U.S. Ambassador Lewis W. Douglas, he lunched with Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

One-Way Road. By week's end, he was ready for the public. In Westminster's Central Hall, he delivered himself of the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime and of four days in Britain. The Truman Doctrine, he declared, is a "one-way road to war"; Britain's destiny is to "save the world" by refusing to support the Truman Doctrine, by refusing to side with the U.S. against Russia.

Then he took the sleeper for Blackpool, his first stop in a tour of Lancashire and England's industrial Midlands. He made for Freckleton, where 61 people were killed in 1944 when a U.S. bomber crashed on the village. He chatted with the mothers of the dead children, helped shove toddlers down the playground slides, visited the communal graveyard.

After lunch in Manchester, he spoke to 5,000 unionists in the Bellevue Stadium. The U.S., he cried, has embarked on a course of "ruthless imperialism"; President Truman was rushing to the aid of "every dictator that hoisted the anti-Communist skull and bones."

Britons received this pronouncement calmly. After five days' close acquaintance, they had discovered that there was little solid fare beneath the fervid preaching and the tousled charm. Personally, they liked him. But they failed to see why he should cause such excitement.

Said the moderate Manchester Guardian: "The oversimplifications Mr. Wallace indulges in are dangerous because they delude people into thinking there is some magic way of getting world peace. ... It would be a change if he could forget his apocalyptic rhetoric a bit and get down to the level of mundane facts and figures with which statesmen have to deal."

But in Washington indignation mounted. Arkansas' scholarly Senator Fulbright declared: "His speech sounded just as though it had been written in the Kremlin." And Foreign Relations Chairman Arthur Vandenberg cried: "It is a shocking thing when an American citizen goes abroad to speak against his own government. The important question is not what Mr. Wallace will do in 1948, but what he is doing in 1947."

* Wrong. Henry Wallace is an Episcopalian.

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