Last week a Hairy Man, an austere Harvardman, and a cargo of vituperation came down hard and almost snapped the already strained relations between the U. S. and Germany. For the U. S. Government emerged from its diplomatic storm cellar and slapped down Adolf Hitler.
Esau. Next to New York City's spunky, part-Jewish Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, whose manhandling by a disgruntled WPAster was front-page German news last week, the U. S. politician whom Nazis hate most is that spade-is-a-spade "Aryan," Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClair Ickes.
Last spring, to the embarrassment of the State Department, Secretary Ickes refused to permit the export of a promised shipment of helium* for use in German dirigibles. As this act was recalled to Nazi minds last month by the reshipment of 200 empty steel bottles from Houston, Texas to Germany, Secretary Ickes bobbed up again with a speech before the Cleveland Zionist Society. Title: "Esau, the Hairy Man." Excerpts:
"It seems to be all too easy to arouse prejudice and passion against the people who so long ago struggled out of the ford of the Jabbok to meet Esau, the hairy man. . . .* Today the Jew in certain areas is a political eunuch, a social outcast, to be dragged down like a mad dog. . . .
"How can any American . . . accept a decoration at the hand of a brutal dictator who, with that same hand, is robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings? Perhaps Henry Ford and Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh [both decorated by Germany in 1938] will be willing to answer. . . . The bestower of [these tokens] counts that day lost when he can commit no new crime against humanity.
"We have seen free countries deteriorate into dictatorships ruled by the heavy hand of voodoo high priests. ... To seek a true comparison it is necessary to go back into that period of history when man was unlettered, benighted and bestial."
This is Herr Ickes! The German press recently called Britain's venerable Earl Baldwin a "guttersnipe" for expressing far less fiery sentiments. It met the Ickes salute with a fantastic bombardment.
Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: "The Germanophobe Ickes belongs to that group in the Washington Cabinet that . . . seeks to put Roosevelt in the foreground of their dark machinations." Essen National Zeitung: "Ickes . . . official co-sinner of the drug king [Coster-Musica], whose vest is by no means clean!" Dr. Goebbels' Der Angriff (under a photograph of Secretary Ickes slumped, ungainly, in a chair): "THIS IS HERR ICKES. Instead of busying himself with the gigantic corruption scandal at home, which is his duty as Minister of the Interior,† Herr Ickes makes incendiary speeches against Germany."
The implication of these outbursts was that Secretary Ickes did not represent U. S. opinion, would soon be cast into "oblivion." Apparently unaware how much that opinion has changed since the State Department last year apologized for Mayor LaGuardia's onslaught on the Führer as a "gangster," Germany's Foreign Office last week sent bland, blond Charge d'Affaires Thomsen to the State Department with a "sharply worded" demand for another apology.