Extend? Revise? Junk?

George Washington in his last, pastoral years at Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, founded a U. S. tradition: that public men, having held the highest offices, continued to serve afterward as Elder Statesmen. Presumably but some times not actually remote from politics, they were supposed to possess a degree and kind of wisdom not given to their partisan juniors.

Last man to hold and deserve this emeritus distinction was Elihu Root, who was Secretary of War under McKinley and Roosevelt I, then the latter's Secretary of State and died (aged 91) in 1937. Now, as in no other period of U. S. history, there is a dearth of Elders. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes's job disqualifies him. Ex-President Herbert Hoover remains too closely identified with his wing of the Republican Party to seem Olympian when he sounds off. His Cabinet as a whole are out of public sight and mind.

A notable exception is Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State. Last week Col. Henry Lewis Stimson, 71, suddenly reappeared in the public eye in a way which clearly rated him the one real Elder Statesman now on the U. S. scene.

His was no resurrection, for he had not been buried. Thanks partly to his patron and law partner, the late Elder Statesman Root, Colonel Stimson had been in & out of appointive office (as Taft's Secretary of War, Coolidge's Governor General of the Philippines) long before he went in & out with Herbert Hoover. People born in the late 19th Century remember him as a baggy, slightly fuzzy graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School in the fuzzy role which Secretaries of State occupied during years when U. S. foreign policy consisted of having almost no policy. Secretary Stimson, rigid legalist that he is, in fact had a policy. When Japan in 1931 revived undeclared war as an international blackjack, he proposed to resist aggressors by all peaceful means. But in a war-shy, depression-hit world, Britain's statesmen would not back him up. He could do little more in public than denounce treaty-smashers as pungently as diplomatic usage permitted. Before leaving office he visited Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, indelibly impressed him. In the past six years, Colonel Stimson and Cordell Hull have become great cronies behind the scenes.

Last week, just 22 years after the U. S. last declared war, Colonel Stimson had the honor of being called as witness No. 1 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sitting to consider extension, revision or junking of the present so-called Neutrality Act, important provisions of which expire May 1. To hear the Elder Statesman all but two of the 23 committeemen turned out.* Also present, though no committeeman, was North Dakota's Senator Gerald P. ("Neutrality") Nye, who took copious notes.

Extension was the treatment the Senators were least likely to give to a law which requires the President of the U. S. to embargo war goods to combatants between whom he discerns a "state of war," and to put all other exports to them on a cash & carry basis.

Revision was the treatment recommended by Elder Statesman Stimson. He urged the Senators to make the President identify "aggressors," then punish them by embargoes and other economic sanctions. British statesmen of today, well knowing their nation is not soon likely to seem "aggressive" in U. S. eyes, and with trouble much nearer home than Manchuria, rejoiced to read these consistent Stimsonisms, which were delivered with more force and sparkle than Colonel Stimson exhibited while in office:

> "I am a Republican and the present Administration is Democratic, but I have always tried to limit my partisanship in the zone of foreign affairs. . . . I am not impressed with the fear that in that zone Presidential discretion will be abused."

> "I weigh my words when I say that I believe that our present Caucasian civilization is threatened by the gravest danger with which it has been confronted for four centuries."

> "In the former world . . . we could entirely disregard the question of aggression and treat both sides with perfect impartiality without trying to make any inquiry into the rights and wrongs. . . . But today the fact of systematized aggression stares us in the face and we know only too well who the aggressors are. . . . We only have to read about some of the occurrences to the South of us to realize that even we are within the zone of their orbit."

> "Shall we be content to sit idly . . . or shall we use [our] great advantages carefully, moderately but firmly and above all intelligently to help protect the world, which includes ourselves, from its imminent and continuing danger?"

> "For myself, I agree with the President that there are methods which are 'short of war but stronger and more effective than mere words'. . . . Economic action [by embargo] . . . has the possibility of most effective restraint. . . ."

Junking. After Elder Stimson, Chairman Pittman next called Financier Bernard Mannes Baruch, who served 21 years ago as chairman of the War Industries Board. His terse war sales formula has long been: "Come and get it." To Mr. Stimson's suggestion of discriminatory, perhaps embroiling embargoes, he answered: "If our economic war fails, we will be in military war. . . . If we make economic war, that conclusion is inevitable. . . . If we believe we can defend this hemisphere, then the whole argument for now waging economic war weakens." He would not even make war-selling a crime, but an affair strictly at the seller's peril. This policy could be achieved by simply repealing the present Neutrality Act, enacting nothing new, putting U. S. exporters on notice by simple executive warning as occasion may arise.

Franklin Roosevelt is for junking Neutrality, too, but in a different way and for different reasons than Witness Baruch. The President wants a hand entirely free to wage economic war on the Dictators. In this desire he has the backing of such politically opposed authorities as the Baltimore Sun and New York Herald Tribune. But for political convenience, the President is willing to accept simple extension of the cash & carry clause, so long as he is not straitjacketed by any clauses making his actions mandatory.

* Absent: Indiana's Van Nuys (ill), Illinois' Lewis (traveling). Four days later, Lewis was dead (sec p. 64).

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