WAR & PEACE
(See Cover) Last week William Allen White sat on the porch of his cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park—as he has almost every summer for the last 30 years—and stared thoughtfully at the vast expanse of Longs Peak that rises in the southern distance.
The weather always comes up on the other side of that mountain. The White cabin stands at 9,000 ft. above sea level; Longs Peak rises in its square-topped majesty 5,255 ft. above that; and north and south the peaks of the Rockies repeat like mirrored reflections in the depthless blue air —the Never Summer Range on the Continental Divide, Mount Alice and Flattop, Estes Cone and Specimen, Thunderbolt, Mummy, Sawtooth and Nimbus—some of the more than 10,000-ft. mountains that lie within the Park and give it the peaceful air of being the top of the world.
The old Kansas editor, wearing the grey tweed suit and grey cap that he always wears in the mountains, looking more than ever like an apple dumpling with a smile carved into its outer crust, beamed on his mountain neighbors. The nights were growing cool. When William Allen White left Emporia with Mrs. White two weeks ago, the thermometer stood at 105° on the bleached Kansas plain; here he needed his topcoat ; the snows of October were on the way. Now elk grazed in the meadow before the house at sundown.
In the entire U. S. there would seem no spot less disturbed by World War II, no site better fitted for a Shangri-La, if one could be found anywhere, than the high, autumnal fortress of Rocky Mountain Park. And if there was one U. S. citizen who seemed entitled to meditate on the mountains, undisturbed by the war, it was the genial, autumnal William Allen White, 72, editor of the Emporia Gazette for 45 years, onetime novelist, commentator, amateur politician but now chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
Last week there were few spots in the U. S. that did not hear the reverberations of the war, few citizens whose lives were not disturbed by it. In his mountain cabin Editor White often pushed his way through the rocking chairs in the front room to the old, buzzing wall telephone —to talk to Committee members in far cities, to consult with some of his 20 advisers on the Committee's next step. Last year during his mountain stay the U. S. waited, alarmed but unbelieving, for Adolf Hitler to plunge into Poland and launch the War. Last week it waited for a blow nearer home—for the full force of the Nazi onslaught to fall on the British Isles. No longer was it necessary last week for William Allen White or the Committee to argue that the U. S. had a vital interest in the way the war turned out. There had never been any doubt that the overwhelming mass of U. S. citizens hoped for a British victory. But there still remained big arguments and deep doubts about what the U. S. as a nation could and should do to help Britain win. In Editor White's view, his Committee functioned to give citizens a chance to speak for the things they wanted done.
Last week the Committee, winding up its first 84 days, had gone far:
>Had 550 chapters throughout the U. S., with over 10,000 active members.