NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 89, 11 October 1941, Page 10

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

AMERICA'S PART

OBSTACLE TO ACTION

MIDDLE WEST OPINION

The latest news from the Russian front, together with the opinions of members of the British and American missions to the Moscow Conference, given on their return to London, tend towards a more hopeful outlook on the great struggle in Russia than seemed possible yesterday. German progress in the vital central sector seems to have slowed down, but German possession of places on the shores of the Sea of Azov, threatening the Crimea and the Don Basin, is confirmed. In the meantime the attitude of the United States disclosed | in the debate on the Neutrality Act in the Senate illustrates the President's difficulties. . Many people will be disappointed with the President's declaration that the revisions suggested in the . Neutrality Act do not call for a declara- t , tion of war any more, he said, than the Lease-Lend Act did, but the.President cannot well move faster than public opinion in the United States. How far this public opinion, especially in the Middle West, has to go before it backs President Roosevelt to theextent of war can be seen from the files of a typical Middle West small city newspaper just to hand from • a correspondent. This paper, the "Zanesville News," of Zanesville, Ohio, a town of under 40,000 inhabitants, gives comparatively little space to the war news, which it publishes from both sides* with impartial neutrality. It also publishes syndicated columns by well-known columnists, such as Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann, George Sokolsky, and Ernest Lihdley, on world affairs, from the American point of view, again giving both sides. Each writer, of course, expresses his own opinion, but the opinions are frequently critical of the Allies, as well as of the Nazis. More important, perhaps, is a comment by a travelling correspondent on public opinion in the Middle West after a motor trip across the Continent. The situation, he says, is far different from what it appears to the "war-minded East:" This is what he says: Mid-West Apathy. "It- is highly debatable whether the majority of the people -of this country are in favour of an all-out policy in Britain's favour. The insiders at Washington must know the problem of keeping the morale high in the ranks of the so-called 'army behind the 'army' is crucial. The insiders also know this problem of the people behind the army means the difference between; a collapsing France arid a grimly fighting Soviet Russia. There is no use beating around the bush about where the problem is to be »- found. Its roots are deep in the heart of an 'It-cant-happen-here America. "This is the America between the two coasts. These mid-Westerners north of the traditionally war-minded sons of Dixieland stand in what seems to them as* secure aloofness from the phony perils of the Atlantic and Pacific. They simply see the edges of the United States have a bad case of jitters aveiuHitler,, arid Hirohito.: This. struck me irt the ; apparent absence ?of alien influences between the Appalachian Mountains and. the Rockies.' Nevertheless, one senses that .subtle undercover forces have been at work without an overt act to. brand their activities. There is none of the noto- < riety that marked the Bundist- thuggery . on the Atlantic seaboard. I. began to wonder in the middle of lowa if the brown shirts and the disciplinary belts paraded in New York and New Jersey have not been a Nazi design to-divert us from the real situation in the Middle West. ■""■"" . r Heart of America. "Something has happened, possibly still is going to happen, but here in the heart of America. There is something deadly in a danger which has no plot which the F. 8.1. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) can uncover —nothing even in the nature of a political time-bomb which will explode public opinion. Tp one who, like myself, has watched Czech o-Slovakia disintegrate, the absence of any dramatic opposition outside the salvos of the solons in Washington is ominous. "A vicious alien-cultivated bacillus has been introduced into Mid-Western politics. It is the deadly, virus of inaction, the plague of indecision which anyone on the. spot knows' has sickened European, democracies and left them the prey of Fascism. This is the sapping disease which has infected its victims before the army prophylaxis ever begins." ; . Wilson's Problem Too. With due . allowance for,, personal idiosyncrasies and their method of expression these observations on Middle West public opinion, or rather apathy, confirm the impression, derived from other sources, of the attitude of \ the . Middle West. It has always been the tough nucleus of American isolation depicted in many novels, notably.those of Sinclair Lewis. It was President Wilson's problem in the last war and it is President Roosevelt's in this. In the central States around the Great Lakes—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin —and in the further west States of Minnesota, lowa, Missouri, and Kansas, is America's most cosmopolitan population—that is, cosmopolitan in ancestry. In Ohio and Wisconsin there are particularly large German elements, whose sympathies are inevitably for neutrality and., isolation, if not for the Nazis:. Tn Chicago there is a large Italian colony. Minnesota and lowa have numerous; settlers of Scandinavian descent. St. Louis again has a strong section of German descent. With these are mixed "considerable numbers whose, ancestral origin was in Europe before it came under the Axis. On all these elements the isolationists play with the support of Nazi sympathisers. Happy Hunting- Ground. This is the happy hunting ground of Lindbergh, Senator Wheeler, and the America First Committee. *It has always been indifferent to foreign affairs, compared with the' Atlantic and Pacific coastal States. The armament boom has tended rather to increase this tendency to isolationism than to end it, for it has restored to prosperity a great industrial and agricultural area that had suffered severely by the depression of the thirties. The tendency has been to "cash in" on the business boom, and that has greatly hindered the production: of munitions by encouraging the production of consumer goods to meet the'demand created" by the expenditure of the vast sums yoted by Congress. This internal situation in the manufacturing Middle West is the President's greatest problem today, and it bears on the whole war and the part America is called on to play in it