(2 of 3)
In five swift hours freezing orders crackled in from all parts of the Anglo-Saxon world. Now no Japanese could spend a dollar more than $500 monthly per person in the U.S., move a ship out, sell a pound of silk—without a specific Treasury license. Importers Mitsui, for instance, could still buy oil from Standard Oil on dollar credits exchanged through the South American branches of National City Bank, for instance—but only with a license. Hints came down that the license business at the Treasury would be as indefatigably polite as Japanese statesmanship, but also just as reluctant to redress wrongs.
A sample of U.S. politeness had already been given. The Panama Canal had been closed to Japanese ships. Ten Japanese freighters heading for the Canal's Caribbean entrance hove to offshore, hung idly in the thick July heat. Other ships went through but their turn never came. To protests the War Department said: so sorry (taking no chances on one of them blowing up in a lock), but the Canal was undergoing repairs. Finally the Japanese freighters gave up, plowed south on the 19,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn.
The new U.S. attitude gave the Japanese the same dreadful kind of surprise that Adolf Hitler felt when the British decided to fight if he moved on Poland. Poland was the last straw— to the British; French Indo-China looked like the next-to-last straw to the U.S. The impact on Japan was immense (see p. 21).
The impact on U.S. business was not so marked (see p. 61). The U.S. woman, it appeared, by 1941's end would have a choice of 1) going barelegged, 2) buying Nylon stockings which might be unprocurable, or 3) wearing cotton stockings.
But with unusual unanimity the press and the public upheld the President's act, illustrating several facets of the U.S. feeling about foreign policy: 1) the U.S. can probably lick the Japanese; 2) this would be a Navy job primarily, and the U.S. is prouder and surer of its powerful Navy than of its half-equipped Army; 3) many isolationists are rabidly anti-Japanese. Even Montana's acidulous, 100% critic Burton K. Wheeler said: "I think the President did the right thing. You may say for me that I agree with him—for the first time."
Forty Japanese ships, radios blacked out, hove to in the Pacific, well offshore, awaited developments. In San Francisco's and Los Angeles' Japtowns there was no excitement; press photographers had to cajole Japanese into posing in groups around bulletin boards. The switchboards of Japanese newspapers and banks jammed with calls, but they were mostly from U.S. newshawks asking whether anything was cooking.