China and Japan.
To Hull, this would be a condonation of further Japanese aggression and the
abandonment not only of China but also of the cherished principles of the Nine-
Power Pact. Hull replied with his proposals of November 26, 1941: that Japan abide
by the U.S. principles, agree to a nonaggression pact in the Far East, and withdraw its
forces from China and Indo-China. He must have known that these proposals were
10 Last Sunday at Peace: November 30, 1941
nonstarters with Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo. It was these proposals to which Hull
was awaiting a reply, as The New York Times reported in its Sunday, November 30, 1941, edition in its front-page summary of “The International Situation.”
A Nation at Peace: Spiritual Counsels
Since the opening of hostilities with the German attack on Poland on Septem-
ber 1, 1939, bombs had rained down on great cities: Warsaw, Rotterdam, and
London. They did not spare famous houses of worship. In Coventry, England,
the cathedral stood in ruins. Christopher Wren’s great London churches suffered
grave damage. One of the most moving images of the London Blitz was the great
dome of St. Paul wreathed in smoke and f lame. But America was still at peace,
and in New York City a throng of 10,000 gathered on this Sunday to see for the
first time the great altar of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Its cornerstone
had been laid in 1892, and the work was ongoing, prompting the irreverent label
“St. John the Unfinished.” On this first Sunday in Advent, when the curtains
were parted, for the first time the audience could see the 600-foot-long nave
stretching from the great bronze doors to the richly decorated altar illuminated
by the light of six f lickering candles.
A host of dignitaries attended the event. They included New York Governor
Herbert Lehman and, tellingly, Major General Irving J. Philipson, commander
of the Army’s Second Corps Area, and Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews of the
Third Naval District. They were accompanied by a host of visiting bishops and
clergymen. There were messages from the Right Reverend Henry St. George
Tucker, the presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and also from
the seemingly ubiquitous President Franklin D. Roosevelt who had been for thirty
years a trustee of the cathedral.
In his message, FDR wrote that “In this time of world crisis,” America’s faith in
the eternal verities of religion remained unshaken.
From 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. there was an organ recital and then a Service of Many
Witnesses with representatives of the conquered countries of Europe carrying
their flags. The morning service opened with a stately procession of 500 led by
Bishop Manning. In his sermon he spoke of “an outbreak of almost incredible
evil, a return to sheer barbarism, and to unbelievable cruelties, an assault upon all
the basic principles of Christian and civilized life.” The historic cathedrals of the
United Kingdom, he said, were in daily peril. He had a message to his brethren in
Great Britain and to all those struggling under the yoke of tyranny and aggression:
That America is with them, that although, like other nations, we have
been slow to realize that such evil could be real, we were now acting, we
were now taking our place, and we shall give our whole strength in this
day of crisis for the world, for our own land and for humanity. 1
But what did giving “our whole strength in this day of crisis for the world, for
our own land, and for humanity” mean?
A World at War, a Nation at Peace 11
Not all churches and not all clergymen associated themselves with the bishop’s
forthright pronouncements. Indeed, there was heated controversy as both isola-
tionists and interventionists sought to bend the churches to their cause, thereby
raising the eternal issue of where God stood on the matter. To address these issues,
the American Institute of Public Opinion had conducted a nationwide poll inter-
viewing men and women representing all churches in proportion to their mem-
bership. The question: should American participation in the war be discussed
from the pulpit? The result: a majority of those polled said “no,” and this response
was uniform among both church members and nonmembers.
Those polls gave as their primary reason for such an attitude that they saw the
church as a place of “spiritual escape” and a place for “peace and comfort.” To
put it another way, the respondents didn’t want to hear on Sunday what they had
been reading about in their newspapers and hearing on their radios from Monday
through Saturday.
But what of those who thought that the questions of war and peace should be
discussed from the pulpit? Their attitude, the institute reported, was similar to the
attitude of the country as a whole. That is to say a large majority was opposed
to “official American entrance” into an all-out war. On this issue, 34 percent of
respondents voted in favor of American participation but a clear majority, 55 per-
cent, voted “no,” with 11 percent expressing no opinion.
Those who voted for discussion from the pulpit were then asked what indeed the
clergy should say. The results illustrated the wide spread of opinions then current:
Twenty percent thought the appropriate message was to stay out of war
versus twelve percent for direct participation. Another eleven percent
wanted discussion of the kind of peace that should follow the war. Ten
percent stressed national defense and national unity while five percent
wanted the clergy to say openly and frankly what they believed. The larg-
est segment of opinion was categorized in the report as “other.” 2
Clearly, at this point, no loud and clear blast of Gideon’s trumpet would issue
from the national pulpit.
*
Detachment, however, was not the universal mood. There was no division of
opinion among those who on Friday, November 28, had come to Washing-
ton’s Epiphany Episcopal Church to join in a seven-day, twenty-four-hour Peace
Vigil. They came late at night, they came at midnight, they came in the small
hours of the morning. Some prayed silently while others prayed audibly and
sang hymns. Among those attending late Friday night were Mrs. Burton K.
Wheeler, wife of Senator Wheeler of Montana; Representative Clare Hoffman, a
Republican of Michigan; and Mrs. Cecil Norton Broy, whose husband had been
American Consul at Brussels.
The time had come for individuals to take their stand. In an announcement
sure to gain widespread notice, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, mother-in-law of Charles
12 Last Sunday at Peace: November 30, 1941
A. Lindbergh, sternly opposed her famous son-in-law’s ardent isolationism. She
announced the appointment of these well-known public figures to the Women’s
Division of Fight For Freedom: Mrs. Wendell Willkie, wife of the 1940 Repub-
lican candidate for president; Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, widow of the late president;
Miss Helen Hayes, reigning queen of the American stage; poet Edna St. Vincent
Millay; Mrs. Dwight Davis; and the actress Miss Helen Gahagan.
The Threat of War: “How the Nation’s Youth Feels”
If war were t
o come, the heaviest burdens and the gravest hazards would be
borne not by the diplomats and policy makers, not by the bankers who would
finance, and not by the manufacturers and industrialists who would produce the
weapons of war. They would be borne by the youth, the male youth especially,
who would carry the rif les, man the ships and planes, and pay the price for what-
ever the end result might be. Tommy Riggs, Jr., was a Princeton undergraduate,
the son of a former governor of Alaska. In the antic spirit of college humor, he
founded the Veterans of Future Wars, demanding a $1,000 bonus in advance
for any service in a new war. The organization mimicked Adolf Hitler’s famed
salute—a right arm extended upward but with the palm “upturned and expect-
ant.” Riggs, as National Treasurer, made a well-publicized visit to Washington
to lobby for a $2.5 billion bonus. His timing was impeccable—April Fool’s Day.
The girls at Vassar College did not lag behind Princeton. The first chapter of its
Home Fires Division of the Veterans of Future Wars there was dubbed the Associa-
tion of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans. This aroused accusations of disrespect
and the name was changed to Ladies Auxiliary of the Veterans of Future Wars. Vet-
erans’ organizations responded with anger and in violent language. But Washington,
D.C. Victory Post No. 4 of the American Legion preferred wit to blunt instruments,
and over the radio its members gently chastised the college humorists, singing:
Let’s be wise, let’s be prudent,
Sings the modern college student,
We will never fight the foe,
Unless we’re paid before we go. 3
This essay at college humor recalled what Henry Lee Staples and Samuel
A. Schriner, Jr., called in The Washington Post “the violent opposition to foreign wars” of college students little more than a year ago. Then, they wrote,
students had endorsed a stubborn isolationism exhibited in slogans and rallies
and summed up in the defiant shout: “The Yanks are not coming.” Now, times
and tides were shifting. The Wisconsin Daily Cardinal editorialized that the time for quibbling had passed. It claimed that the United States was at war, whether
declared or not, that the matter was beyond argument and that the United States
must be in it to win.
At Princeton, John Brooks, Jr., said that though they might still raise their
voices in protest, only a small minority failed to realize that the issue had already
been decided.
A World at War, a Nation at Peace 13
To Charles P. Gyllenhaal of the University of Pennsylvania, nothing could be
more important to American youth than the defeat of Hitler. A year ago, he said,
he would have not have dared to make that statement.
Loren Hickerson of the University of Iowa called for action: “We are in this
war now. The United States is pitted against the Nazi philosophy in a death
struggle. Immediate action is vital—wherever America can strike.”
Still, only 21 percent of students at Yale and Harvard voted in favor of immedi-
ate entry into the war, though this was up from 6 percent a year before. Columbia
was 22 percent in favor of immediate entry against 12 percent in April 1941. And
a national survey of college newspapers by the Nassau Sovereign found that slightly less than one-fifth of the students polled wanted war now. If there was strong
opposition to another American Expeditionary Force like that of 1917–18, there
was also strong support for naval aid to Britain.
The reporters observed that college students were beginning to see some form
of intervention as inevitable, but like the man from Missouri they wanted to be
shown. They were not impressed by phrases like “a war to end all wars” or “mak-
ing the world safe for democracy.” Such maxims may have inspired their parents’
generation, but tended to leave these modern students cold. Edward T. Folliard, in
his Washington Post report on the Veterans of Future Wars, concluded that the jest had played out a long time ago—three years ago when Hitler had snatched Austria
and three and a half years before he stormed into Poland: “A lot of people have
had to eat a lot of words since then.”
A poll of 216 college newspapers published by The Commerce Bulletin , the
undergraduate paper of the Columbia School of Commerce, found that whatever
may have been the move away from isolationism and toward interventionism,
the opinions of college students were still decidedly mixed. Thirty-four percent
called for unlimited aid to Great Britain, even if it meant war. Another 35 percent
backed all aid short of war. Twenty-one percent espoused a cash-and-carry policy,
while only 9 percent eschewed all aid. This was interpreted as an interventionist
sentiment by the editors, who took it to mean that U.S. entry into the war was
“imminent.” But there was no call for immediate entry into the war.
On the overall issue of U.S. foreign policy, 58 percent approved and 19.5 per-
cent disapproved. This left a substantial undecided bloc, and left open the more
important question of what the “foreign policy” may have been to which the
respondents responded.
If the editors made no claim of scientific accuracy, they did contend that the
poll was “a fairly accurate indication of how the nation’s youth feels about the
foreign situation.”
America’s Role: Dispatches from the Op-Ed Wars
Chicago, the erstwhile Gem of the Prairie, was the financial and commercial
capital of a vast hinterland stretching from old Ohio River towns across the
river from Pennsylvania to the seemingly endless prairies of Nebraska and the
Dakotas. It was natural that its citizens should look inward over this vast domain,
just as it came more naturally for residents of the East and West Coasts to look
14 Last Sunday at Peace: November 30, 1941
outward to Europe and to Asia. It was easy to understand why, in December
1941, Chicago was also the capital of American isolationism. Its principal news-
paper, the Chicago Tribune , took strong stands against intervention in European and Asiatic wars, notwithstanding the gallant performance of its owner, Col.
Robert R. McCormick, on the battlefields of the First World War.
Chicago’s isolationist credentials were of long standing. In a warmly appreci-
ated incident, the mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, had once promised that
if ever the King of England came to Chicago, he would punch him in the nose.
The Tribune ’s message to its readers on Sunday, November 30, 1941, was stark. It showed the dome of the Capitol and a distorted Washington Monument floating
in a sea of “Fog over Washington,” and superimposed upon this sinister scene was
the following message:
BEWARE—
OF FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS!
STOP! LOOK! LISTEN! THINK!
THE PORTENTS ARE NOT GOOD!
YOU ARE EDGING AN
UNWILLING PEOPLE INTO
AN UNPOPULAR, UNCONSECRATED
WAR IN EUROPE AND ASIA IN
BEHALF OF OTHER NATIONS IN
ANOTHER HEMISPHERE, THE
CONSEQUENCES OF WHICH, EITHER
WIN OR LOSE, WILL BE OVERWHELMING.
THESE ALIEN WARS ARE NOT
OUR WARS, BUT OUR PRESIDENT
IS DETERMINED
THIS IS NOT THE AMERICAN
WAY OF LIFE
AND NEVER HAS
BEEN. 4
The Tribune ’s gloomy forebodings were not confined to the front page. Chi-
cago’s premier newspaper fulminated at length on its editorial page against the
New Deal, which, it said, had for eight years been trying to substitute a planned
society for the sturdy individualism once characteristic of the nation. It was, it said,
a serious phenomenon when those who had benefited from the American political,
social, and economic system looked favorably upon the methods of the totalitarian
state. This was, it said, a whitewash of Stalin by a fifth column of “collectivists” who had been pushing their schemes and plots during all of Mr. Roosevelt’s administration and with his approval. All this, it thundered, was strong wine for those business
leaders who had come to Washington to assume autocratic positions of power.
Who were they? One was Donald M. Nelson of Sears Roebuck, now Chief of the
Priorities and Allocation Board of the Office of Production Management. Another
A World at War, a Nation at Peace 15
was Floyd Odlum of Atlas Corporation. It seemed to the Chicago Tribune that these interlopers had captured the inner citadel of the American system.
*
There was a greater variety of opinion among readers of the Sunday Denver Post .
Frank Roberton warned that no naval force could prevent a German airborne army
from establishing bases on the eastern coast of South America. He cited as evidence
German success in Crete. Bombers and fighter planes could defend such bases; and
Hitler, he wrote, having succeeded in this operation, could easily subjugate one or
more of the southern republics, duplicating his “one-at-a-time” conquest of Europe.
Vera Flory asked: “Why should we go to war with Japan?” Certainly not, she
observed, because Japan was guilty of aggression against Chinese “democracy.”
She had no wish to see American blood shed to protect China. She was not alone
in opining that there was no legitimate cause for a war with Japan. She wrote
what many Americans of that day believed: that Great Britain wanted the United
States to become involved in the war to protect Britain’s interests in China, open-
ing a backdoor entrance into Britain’s war in which the United States would do
Crucible of a Generation Page 3