AMERICANS AND THE ALLIES
By PROF. D. W. BROGAN
IN the great debate over American foreign policy that is raging in America, an increasingly prominent role is being played by the Committee for Aid to the Allies, commonly called, from the name of its chairman, the " William Allen White Com- mittee." Mr. White is the editor of The Emporia Gazette, and the most famous and respected of American editors—indeed, almost the only survivor of the days when a paper ranked according to the weight of its editorial opinion. His Com- mittee has enlisted the aid of Americans of all ranks, and the case they make in books, advertisements, tracts, enables us to understand the obstacles which face any American administra- tion which has both to consider the internal political situation and the international crisis. It is difficult for us to be patient and understanding, as we ourselves face totalitarian war but notice that in America every move to help us, " short of war," is vigilantly watched and bitterly opposed.
Yet it is most important to remember how much ground we have given Americans for regarding us as involuntary and belated defenders of liberty. So many things were said and suggested in the appeasement epoch which now return to plague us! There is no use blinking the fact that among the other costs of Munich was a serious shrinking in our American assets. In one of the most important tracts issued by the White Committee, a general warning against the Fifth Column has as its punch-line " So spoke Chamberlain at Munich. So spoke Baldwin before Abyssinia fell." Our friends in America, that is, cannot simply represent us as crusaders deserving help on Purely moral grounds. They must show that the United States is an interested party.
If this be not so, the United States has no business to inter- fere, although the American people may be " sorry" for us as We were sorry for Abyssinians, Czechs, &c. So the White Committee's basic thesis is that " for the first time in 15o years the American way of life is in jeopardy." In 1917, America Was in a crusading mood, to " make the world safe for democracy " ; from that fitful fever she has completely recovered. But what is now at stake is not, so the White Committee assert, the salvaging of world democracy, but the safety of the American way of life, of which democracy, is an aspect or a fruit. " This Committee aggres- sively supports the American way of life as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." But it is not merely the legalistic guarantee of the Bill of Rights but the fundamental Philosophy of the Declaration of Independence that is in question—" Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
The general thesis of the Committee is expounded in Defense for America*, a book in which a number of very eminent *Macmillan, 5s. Americans set forth their reasons for believing that we, the British people and armed forces, are the bulwark behind which the United States is being given time to prepare to defend its great inheritance, not merely of tradition, but of those tangible assets which the Dictators covet as much as they detest liberty. The argument is fairly simple, and there is a necessary repetition in this book of the same basic truths. But there arc original and highly personal points of view, too, and the attention of the readers of The Spectator who have been reading the Dean of St. Paul's on the alleged confusion of thought in the attitude of their Graces of Canterbury and York to Anglican pacificism may be especially directed to the acute and severe analysis of the problem written by one of the most eminent American Catholic divines, Dr. John Ryan.
The White Committee ranks in its membership eminent Americans of all creeds and types, but its most important figure is undoubtedly William Allen White himself. That the most famous of American editors in the most central of American States should be so passionately convinced that the interests of the people of Emporia, Kansas, and the United States, are pro- foundly involved in our fate is a matter of significance. In one of the most effective leaflets, three diagrams in the manner of Mr. Horrabin show the present naval position with twelve American units against ten Japanese in the Pacific, with three American units in the Atlantic. The second diagram pictures the situation, " If the British Fleet is destroyed or scuttled " ; seven American units face ten Japanese in the Pacific, and eight American units face eleven " Dictators' " units in the Atlantic. The third diagram illustrates the situation " If the British Fleet falls under German control." In the Pacific, the situation is unchanged, but in the Atlantic the United States Navy has to face twenty-seven " Dictator " units. Even if the whole American Fleet were moved into the Atlantic it would still be hopelessly outnumbered. It is with justice that the leaflet bears the tide Why Aid Britain—Battleships Tell Why.
It is noteworthy that Mr. White comes from one of the physically driest States in the Union, and that in his home town. of Emporia long droughts and dust-storm siltings have killed the bass in the river and threaten to kill the trees! But the salt water, fifteen hundred miles away on each side of Emporia, is the guarantee, under its present rulers, of the possibility of the continuance of the way of life of small-town America, of which Mr. White himself is so notable an exemplar. An America fighting for her free existence against a totalitarian world would not have the chance to breed William Allen Whites or such misguided Kansas characters as ex-Secretary of War Harry Woodring. Mr. Woodring, in terms familiar to us, talked as if all that was at issue was a dislike of a nation because it " chooses one form of Government over another." Against this simple view, the Sage of Emporia does not rage—he never rages—but he protests.
An America squeezed between a totalitarian Asia And a totalitarian Europe, unable to prevent the control of South America by the Axis, not only could not produce William Allen Whites, Woodrings, Ed Howes, Clyde Reeds, Hockadays or the other rich varieties of human fauna that make Kansas notable, it could not produce such specimens of the New England scientist as President Conant. He has defied student opinion in Harvard by his open advocacy of aid to the Allies. The Third Reich, unlike the First Republic, has a use for chemists, but not for chemists of the Conant stamp. That much of this argument should be necessary, that men genuinely devoted to the " American Way " should not see what is at issue, is hard to accept here. But the arguments of the White Committee directed to this problem should be understandable by any one who can remember 1938. And knowledge of the problem should make it easier for us to resist the temptation to regard the American people as a priest or levite instead of the Good Samaritan of American tradition.
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