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Hull's assistant and Lima Conference companion, fox-faced Adolf Berle, now occupies the Stimson Washington mansion of Woodley, where Mr. Hull plays croquet weekly. The mild-mannered Secretary, one of the world's most fluent monotone cussers, addresses his opponent's croquet balls (if people have heard him right), saying: "Hitler, you son-of-a-bitch," and "Mussolini, damn you!" before whanging them into Coventry.
Fourth Try. Congress is now fretting over a fourth Neutrality bill, a fourth attempt to make sense of the U. S. desire for peace. The bill sponsored in the House of Representatives by the Administration called for repeal of the mandatory embargo on arms exports. But isolationist Congressmen amended it to read very much like the 1935-36 Nye legislation. This palpable defeat for Roosevelt and Hull was hailed by verbal fireworks in Rome and Berlin. Fascist glee provoked a tart "I-told-you-so" from the President, who promptly called upon the Senate to reverse the House.
The Administration wants to amend the embargo provision out of the bill—possibly by a cash & carry clause (not to be confused with the last law's cash & carry provision which applied to "nonlethal weapons"—cotton, oil, steel, etc.; this would apply to actual arms). If this should happen Britain and France would be able to count in the event of war on the armament and powder factories of the U. S. as long as they had money with which to buy. They would have enough money for a time. Together, the British and French have about $2,000,000,000 invested in U. S. securities or deposited in U. S. banks.
An embargo limited merely to lethal weapons, would not close U. S. ports to shipments of cotton, copper, steel, wheat to Britain and France. In the last war most of pre-1917 U. S. trade with the Allies was in raw materials. They did most of their own fabrication of guns & powder. There is always Canada, where a vast system of U. S.-owned branch factories would most likely spring up to manufacture armament and airplanes for an anti-Hitler coalition. But an embargo on raw materials would mean the obsolescence of the American merchant marine, or at least its diversion to trade between neutrals in the western hemisphere.
In the event of European war the effect of a mandatory embargo is not difficult to predict. It would improve Hitler's chances for victory in a Blitzkrieg, or lightning war. It might not appreciably hurt the long-term chances of England and France, both of which have rich empires of their own.
Neutrality legislation of the 1936-37 type might have curious effects in the event of a war involving, say, Brazil and the Argentine. If the U.S. were to embargo the shipments of lethal weapons to these countries in the event of war, any interested European nation—say. Germany —could step in and subsidize the sort of victory that seemed best calculated to damage the Monroe Doctrine. The U. S. would thus find its neutrality policy contravening an even older policy and threatening the safety of the Panama Canal, which is vital to the two-ocean effectiveness of the U. S. fleet. For this reason the present bill provides exceptions virtually excusing the U. S. from mandatory neutrality in any Latin-American war.