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Objectives. As more and more citizens became sure that a Nazi victory was a menace to the U. S.'s own existence, they smashed through barricades of political taboos whose strength more often than not proved illusory and whose defenders looked strong only in the minds of those attacking them. But what was the ultimate U. S. objective? And how far was it determined to go? Said General Motors Vice President James David Mooney: "If we intend to go to war, then we ought to publish the conditions that will provoke us into the war. We ought to quit telling the world that we won't fight under any circumstances. . . . Americans have too proud a tradition as fighters to endure a national policy that would brand Americans as men who run away from anything.
... If we are to fight because we crave a more peaceful and more orderly world, what are the conditions on which a peace will be negotiated and what terms of peace will insure this more orderly world?" Last week no U. S. citizen could give a final answer. The Pennsylvania State Federation of Women's Clubs offered one.
Wrangling during its Harrisburg convention on the objectives of national defense, and getting nowhere, 1,100 Pennsylvania clubwomen heard Clarence Streit urge the program of Federal Union. Argued Clarence Streit: The fate of democracy depends on the defeat of Hitler. He cannot probably be defeated without U. S. aid. Military preparedness is not enough; the only force the U. S. can quickly bring to the conflict is a moral and political power. Organizing the democracies in a federal union, with a guarantee that the German people would be admitted to this union when they retired to their frontiers and restored their basic rights as men, would help to upset the German Government from within, and enable the democracies to coordinate their action strongly enough to win against Hitler. Calling
Author Streit back for an ovation, the clubwomen voted, 1,092-10-8, to urge the program of a world-wide federal union as the basic objective of U. S. efforts.