WAR & PEACE
(See Cover)
The most articulate isolationist group in the U.S. last week faced a crisis. The America First Committee had touched the pitch of antiSemitism, and its fingers were tarred. It had failed in its specific purpose of halting U.S. progress toward a shooting war. It could show its adherents nothing but the record of a campaign, fought bitterly, spectacularly and with plenty of money, but without success.
In Chicago, harassed Committee heads gathered with Charles Lindbergh, who fortnight before had blurted the Jewish issue into their campaign. They had already delayed so long taking a stand on his remarks about Jewish influence as a danger to the U.S. that nothing short of drastic action would mean anything. And drastic action would have meant a public repudiation of Lindbergh, their star performer. They decided to do nothing drastic. Instead, they issued an unsigned statement:
". . . Colonel Lindbergh and his fellow members of the America First Committee are not antiSemitic. We deplore the injection of the race issue into the discussion of war or peace. It is the interventionists who have done this. . . ."
America First was not in a happy spot. In the unhappiest spot of all was elderly, vehement Robert Elkington Wood, Brigadier General of the U.S. Army (retired), holder of the Distinguished Service Medal, Companion of the British Order of St. Michael and St. George, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, Chairman of the Board of Sears, Roebuck & Co., boss of America First.
Had the General, long one of Chicago's most respected citizens, been sold a bill of goods? By all the evidence, he had gone into his hot spot with his eyes wide open, an earnest and sincere man, convinced of the worth of his cause.
Call in the Wilds. In the fall of 1939, General Wood and three friends were on a hunting trip in Canada when word was brought to them by an Indian runner that war had started in Europe. The message came from Edward Stettinius, chairman of the War Resources Board newly appointed by the President, and it summoned General Wood to Washington, back to duty as a member of that Board.
Bob Wood packed a copy of Mein Kampf, which he had been reading during his vacation, and started off with the others. After a weary four-day trek through the wilderness, a flight by plane to Juneau, a trip down the coast by revenue cutter to Seattle and a transcontinental hop, he reported in Washington. He need not have been in such a hurry. The Board's plan for mobilizing the U.S. in a defense program was later submitted to the President, never saw the light of day. The Board was dissolved, and Wood went back to his Highland Park home outside Chicago, with good cause to frown over New Deal mismanagement.