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Fence Jumpers. Americans have frequently made sarcastic cracks at Sir John Simon's refusal to act in the Manchurian crisis of 1931, at Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" policy. But Britain's foreign policy, which is never to fight a war now that can by some devious maneuver be postponed to the morrow, is, in many respects, very similar to the U. S. feeling. (Said Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia: "How horrible ... it is that we should be digging trenches here . . . because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.") U. S. schools—"sanctionist," isolationist and historic neutral—all share this feeling (each is sure it has the one method to keep the U. S. out of war). So individuals easily jump from one to the other depending on tactical circumstances.
Biggest jumper of them all is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was apparently on the isolationist side during his first administration when many of his advisers were planning to lick the depression with nationalist economic measures. Roosevelt had been a strong Wilsonian during the war years; but in some of his 1932 campaign speeches he ruminated on the folly of trying to finance wars and post-war reconstruction for European nations. After the Nye Munitions investigation he denounced the armament makers as wartime traffickers in "blood money." His Chautauqua speech of August 14, 1936 ("I hate war") was a ringing statement of a position more or less acceptable both to isolationists of the Nye school and the historic neutrals of the Moore-Borchard school.
A year later, however, the President abruptly reversed himself; at Chicago, on October 5, 1937, he spoke of "quarantining" aggressors. Cynics commented that he was creating a diversion to get the public's mind off the fact that Mr. Justice Hugo Black had once been a Ku Kluxer. More important probably was Administration sympathy for China in the new Sino-Japanese war, which had broken out in July.
The State Department. Never at any time was Franklin Roosevelt's State Department interested in mandatory arms embargoes. When London wiseacres were singing "Moley, Moley, Moley, Lord God Almighty" at the abortive World Economic Conference of 1933, the patient, sad-eyed Mr. Hull was biding his internationalist time. Hull of Tennessee has an oldtime cotton-Stater's interest in a low-tariff world. He is therefore for a world organization that will respect treaties and contracts, refrain from economic nationalism; against Hitler and Mussolini. So he would not willingly refuse to sell arms to Britain and France should war come.
Curiously, Cordell Hull has very close relations with his predecessor, Herbert Hoover's Stimson. Colonel Stimson testified for Mr. Hull's own proposed neutrality bill when the Senate Committee began its hearings. Cordell Hull has privately said to Congressmen: "Hitler will march in September—unless we pass this legislation."