The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [100]
William R. Castle, UnderSecretary of State during the Hoover administration, and General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and national chairman of the America First Committee, two of the country's outstanding and least apologetic appeasers, are among the few prominent citizens with whom the publisher does not admit close acquaintance. “Why, I only met Castle once in my life, and that was about eight years ago on a beach in Hawaii,” Howard recently said. As the Senate debate on the lendlease bill was nearing its close in March, he said, “I wouldn't know General Wood if I saw him.” Nevertheless, Howard wrote a firstpage editorial on the lendlease bill in which he made verbatim use of one of the mailorder General's most narcotic arguments: “If six million men, well trained and well equipped, cannot cross twenty miles of water and conquer 1,500,000, how could they possibly cross three thousand miles and successfully invade the United States?” The first part of this proposition implied that Great Britain was safe from invasion, the second that the larger the expanse of water to be defended by a given force was, the easier the defender's task would be. Howard introduced Wood's doublebarreled paralogism with the casualness of a teacher making an allusion to accepted truth. The editorial was a retreat from Howard's allout opposition to the bill; its thesis was that since the measure was bound to pass anyway, the country should support the President. The WorldTelegram then eased into a campaign of opposition to convoys and reproof to detractors of Charles A. Lindbergh. While Howard has made no frontal attack on aid to Britain in principle, he has fought a continuous delaying action against every concrete proposal of aid. Of the thirtyone members of the America First national committee who first appeared on its letterheads last winter, three—General Hugh S. Johnson, John T. Flynn, and Major Al Williams—were ScrippsHoward columnists. Howard said at the time that it was a coincidence. Feverishly isolationist senators like Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, and Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina are treated with conspicuous respect in the ScrippsHoward press. The collective efforts of this group of senators, so faithfully cheered on by Howard, delayed the passage of the cashandcarry bill of 1939 for two months. They held up the Selective Service Training Act until the end of last summer, which caused a still longer delay in the expansion of the army, since men could not be sent to training camps in fall weather until barracks had been built for them. Howard, however, has never joined forces with the isolationists. He calls his procedure “maintaining detachment.” In a parallel manner, from 1935 through 1937, he called himself a supporter of the President but opposed many of his specific projects and said he hoped Roosevelt wouldn't get a large majority of the electoral vote in 1936 because too much power is bad for anyone. Similarly, last fall, while Howard was in agreement with Wendell L. Willkie in principle, Westbrook Pegler and General Johnson, in their ScrippsHoward columns, seemed to develop a temporary attack of nonpartisanship every time Willkie refused a Howard suggestion about campaign strategy. Whenever Willkie complained, Howard explained that the most effective support was the least obvious.
Howard's position on the country's foreign policy has possibly been influenced by a feeling that the President has never taken him seriously enough. He once related with some indignation part of a conversation with the President at the White