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After a quick crossing made none the less tense because everything had been so quiet, the Queen Mary docked in Manhattan day after Great Britain declared war. Part of the way she had been convoyed by British men-of-war. All the way her ports and windows had remained blackened, her outgoing radio silent. Aboard were $44,000,000 in gold, Banker John Pierpont Morgan, Steelman Myron C. Taylor, Cineman Harry M. Warner, Author Erich Maria Remarque and 2,327 other passengers. Some of them had slept on the floor, some on cots in the public rooms. Mr. Morgan, who usually takes a suite, had occupied a small room containing one small bed. But, said he, it was "the size I always sleep in at home. Really, I don't have a bed half an acre large." Mr. Warner was in a warlike mood, bluntly maintained that "the liberty and freedom we obtained from fighting the British we will now have to fight with them to retain. . . . Isolation is, for us, the destruction of civilization." Author Remarque, whose All Quiet on the Western Front was the most famed novel about World War I, had little to say about World War II. Although he lost his German citizenship last year, has no country, and travels on a Swiss identification card, he had nothing but sympathy for the German people. "Poor Germany," he moaned. "I cannot fight against her."
Elliott Roosevelt, like his father (see p. 13), had his say over the radio: "We haven't been neutral in spirit, because it is impossible for decent human beings to remain neutral in the face of scientific barbarity, but as a unit, as a nation, we will have to make up our minds as to just what our course of action will be as regards this awful destruction. . . ."
Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, one-time tub-thumper for companionate marriage and a Superior Court Justice in Los Angeles, called a halt to a psychopathic hearing in his crowded courtroom, snapped on the radio, announced: "This court will now listen to the greatest madman in the world," tuned in on a rebroadcast of Hitler's Reichstag speech for one-half hour.
To Highgate Police Court from her rooming-house in Hornsey, North London, hied Mrs. Bridget Elizabeth Dowling Hitler, Adolf Hitler's Irish-born sister-in-law, for the second time on a matter of back debts. The first time (last January) it was the rooming-house tax, £9 13s. 10d; this time the electric bill, £1 10d.
As gallery after European gallery did something about hiding its treasures and museum pieces (TIME, Sept. 4), Egypt's National Museum reburied old King Tutankhamen and London's famed Tate let it be known that up to August 31 more than 60% of its 2,600 pictures and 400 pieces of sculpture had been removed to three large country houses, locations unannounced. Already moved were 140 canvases of the late great pre-Impressionist Joseph Mallord William Turner. On the floor near the ladies' lavatory, still waiting their turn for evacuation, were the sculptures of very-much alive Jacob Epstein.
After predicting that A. Hitler would get what he wanted and "then announce that he is willing to negotiate," New York City's big, beefy Bundster Fritz Kuhn declared: "England and France will not declare war."