THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . The Last Column THERE are nights when the Presidential campaign seems to bog down into a querulous conflict on whose crystal ball most clearly foretold the course of coming...
...Even when war was imminent and hostilities only hours or days away, press and radio commentators were bewitching the American people in-to believing that a war with Japan would be little more than a weekend shooting spree...
...Remedy For Hysteria' Nor was this all...
...And it was Mr...
...Or take this one: "Not only has he [Roosevelt] pushed America close to the wars in Europe and Asia...
...In those days, too, the Communists and their fellow-traveling totalitarian liberals were sneering at the war as a "capitalist, imperialist conspiracy...
...23, 1940: "One difference is my determination to stay out of war...
...The record shows that both-major parties were wholeheartedly on both sides of the issues of foreign policy, that they took turns viewing with alarm the approaching peril and then pointing with pride to their determination that America must not become involved...
...Roosevelt, you may remember, who said that "the first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war...
...It was Mr...
...Asked to explain the difference between his and Mr...
...I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again, and again...
...The two men in political life who have been most identified to the public as prophets of inevitable war for America are President Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, and yet there are no two men in America who were more eloquent in assuring the nation of,, peaceful purpose four years ago...
...he now seeks to drag the wars of Europe and Asia into American politics...
...Forbes Magazine blithely predicted, in December, 1941, that "Japan will be overcome within six months...
...Now, most of this, of course, is just sheer rubbish...
...And on the same night, by spinning the dial a bit, you can listen to Democratic tub-thumpers croaking out the charge that the Republicans short-sightedly opposed universal peacetime conscription, that they voted against Lend-Lease in large numbers, and that they were so much the victims of global astigmatism that they could not see the approaching conflict...
...On these nights the Republicans fill the air-waves with ponderous complaints that President Roosevelt long opposed the idea of a two-ocean Navy, that he slashed appropriations for the Army in the years when Hitler was beginning to tear up the Treaty of -Versailles, and that by promising so repeatedly and eloquently not to send American troops abroad, he lulled the nation into a false sense of security...
...To this sage comment I'd like to add a footnote that this memory of the past can also serve as a debunker as you listen to the radio tonight—to Republican and Democratic twaddle-dee-doo about how its horoscope department was better than the other's...
...They know that the loudest protests against any implication of warlike intent came then from men who would like now to be known as the seers —who saw it all coming and tried to get the country primed for war...
...It was the New Republic which assured us one month before Pearl Harbor that six months was "a not unreasonably optimistic estimate" to polish off the Japanese...
...Roosevelt's foreign policy, Willkie said Oct...
...This understanding of the past, the article said, could serve as a "remedy for hysteria" and a reminder that the nation has stood united against the enemy since the outbreak of hostilities...
...I quote,these passages from Republicans, Democrats, Communists, and journalists only because they show that nobody had a monopoly on the truth, nobody's crystal ball was perfect, nobody in public life was advocating that we abandon neutrality, however much they may have argued for "steps short of war...
...Roosevelt who said: "And while I am talking to you, fathers and mothers, I give you one more assurance...
...Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars...
...It was Mr...
...Willkie who recoiled in horror from the President's interventionism...
...The American Mercury told us in November, 1941, that "most of Japan's 5,000 planes are obsolete...
...In a superb article recently, Labor, official publication of the Railroad Brotherhoods, went back over the years to show that "we were all 'isolationists' in the period before we were thrust into the war...
...By his [Roosevelt's] own meddling in international politics, he encouraged the European conflagration...
...I have a real fear that this Administration is heading for war, and I am against our going to war...
...While Republicans,* Democrats, and Progressives in Congress joined unanimously in approving multi-billion dollar appropriation bills for the rebuilding of the nation's armed forces, the sole vote against the bills came always from the lone Communist, New York's Vito Marcantonio...
...It Was only when Hitler turned his Nazi hordes eastward against Russia that the "imperialist war" became a "crusade for humanity...
...M.H.R...
...The Editor Reserves . . The Last Column THERE are nights when the Presidential campaign seems to bog down into a querulous conflict on whose crystal ball most clearly foretold the course of coming events and whose voice was raised the loudest for American involvement in war before war was thrust upon us...
...The F.D.R.-Willkie Promises Most Americans still remember that involvement in war was being engineered under the guise of "steps short of war...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 42
