When World War II began, there were innumerable barricades of the imagination fixed in the U. S. mind. Towering was the first one: the U. S. had no part in Europe's wars. Imposing was the next: bumbling and awkward U. S. democracy could not move so swiftly and efficiently in a crisis as could the totalitarian States. Behind these bastions lay fixed ideas like trenches: the Midwest was forever Isolationist; Labor could never make peace; the unemployed could never be absorbed; the U. S. was running down. Like some great chain of fortifications called impregnable because it had never been attacked, they stretched to the mind's far boundary-and there they ended, in the dull, masochistic conviction that civilization itself was perishing from the earth, and that the lights that were going out in Europe would never be lit again.
Last week there were signs that a new determination had come to the U. S. Its form varied-there was determination to aid the Allies, determination to speed U. S. defense, determination to destroy whoever got in the way. There were casualties: >Dead was the politicos' alibi that "the country" could not grasp the issues of world conflict. Wrote steady-minded Columnist Ray Clapper from Kansas City:
GENERAL PERSHING "They are holding our front line.""This is part of the United States around here too . . . the conversation is no different from what it is in Washington right now-and it is just about as well informed, except about a few matters upon which officials in Washington hesitate to speak frankly because they fear 'the country' wouldn't understand." Dead was the theory that the U. S.
could not act swiftly in a crisis: in seven days the U. S. Government arranged a 50-plane trade-in; resolved that it would not stand for the transfer of any region in the Americas from one non-American power to another; sent a sample plane to Henry Ford for experiments in mass production.
> Dead was the sacred-cow tradition that Congress could pass no new tax laws in an election year (see pg. 16.
>Dead was the fear that Labor peace was impossible, as the powerful I. L. G.
W. U. moved back to A. F. of L., as William Green recommended abolition of the per capita tax for fighting C. I. O. that had been a major obstacle to Labor peace (see p. 17).
> TVad was the assumption that U. S.
ir.austry would be slow to turn its vast plant equipment to arms production see pg. 16.
> Dying was the fear that indispensable moves f o ; U. S. defense were warmongering emotionalism: in Portland, Ore., Republican Presidential Candidate Frank Gannett condemned the present U. S.
state of mind as hysteria created by President Roosevelt; after he finished speaking. 150 protesting phone calls jammed the station switchboard; no calls came to support him.