AMERICA’S LEADER

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21185, 7 August 1940, Page 4

AMERICA’S LEADER

GENIUS OF ROOSEVELT CONFIDENCE OF DEMOCRATS “If peace is possible, he can, and will, preserve it. If war is inevitable, he will win it for us.” Said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the hour of his nomination by the Democratic Convention at Chicago for his third term as President, those words provide the key to the future of this extraordinary person and to the impending destiny of his country, writes H.J.C, in the Sydney Sun. Woodrow Wilson, last of the great Liberals before Roosevelt, was elected in November, 1916, “to keep America out of the war." He took office in March, 1917. One month later America entered the war—under Wilson. History Repeats Itself History is repeating itself with shattering persistence. Then, as now, Europe was tom by war and America was in it in spirit but out of its devastation, while being hamstrung at all points by its tentacle effects. Then, as now, the country was totally unprepared for a war beyond its shores of the magnitude of the one then raging. Then, as now, it was shipping to the Allies every gun and plane and bomb and gallon of petrol it could spare to keep the Germans in bounds until its own people were of a mind to go in, boots and all, and until it could hammer its own armed forces into battle shape for sterner tasks than home duties.

Then, as now, a blitzkrieg was going forward and if the motive power was only horse-power—four-legged horse-power—it was fast enough and plenty for the times and, as now, was sweeping all before it.

Back home in the States another force was also sweeping all opponents out of the way—an inspired Liberal who had been one year in office when the lightning struck. He also was preaching to his countrymen that better way of life which Roosevelt, since the insane depression year of 1933, has been dinning into American and world ears with a persistence which ultimately will be viewed as moral and social and political preparedness for the war that he knew was not far away. By their bootstraps, by the seat of their pants, by the scruff of thennecks, with a nudge here, a laugh there and a shove somewhere else, this man who ought to have died years ago from infantile paralysis but who fought and beat it because he is like that, has carried his people out of black depression, into and out of a dozen alarms which threatened war and his own downfall, to the verge of the mightiest task that ever faced any nation—that of saving the world. He can do it. Cleverest politician that history has ever thrown on the screen, he has been able, on The very eve of his going out of office and with not even his intimates knowing for certain whether he would stand for (another to get Congress approval of an arms vote so vast as to catch the breath but which will make his country the supreme military power of all time. Too Much For Ludendorff

The thought of the thousands of planes, guns and ships that America could, and ultimately did, throw into the last war, was too much for Ludendorff’s generals who, from that moment, tried desperately to win in a hurry and, in trying, lost everything. Do you suppose that nobody at Berlin today is pondering that same thought? And do you suppose that nobody at Washington knows that? If never a cent is spent of the ten thousand million dollars programme which he has drawn up, the Roosevelt strategy of hurling it into the balance when things looked black for Britain will have been generalship of the highest order. Little souls who suck straws and call them rumpsteaks are pretending to themselves that his hands are tied by an isolationist plank in the newlyadopted Party platform which debars the United States from participation in foreign wars. The Neutrality Act was a law of the land and not a Party plank, and it forbade the shipment of arms and other forms of war material to a belligerent. It required months of wrangling, shoving and ducking to get it into law, but where is it today? It was amended, and legally, in less time than it takes a hen to cross the road with the wind astern, and all the things that were forbidden are now O.K.

Roosevelt did that, and to suppose that if the interests of his country called for a slap at Hitler, or anyone else, he couldn’t get over such a hurdle, is to credit him with the political intelligence of a moron. He had the country against him, and Congress mad for his blood, when he tried to reform the Supreme Court by legislative enactment. The Bill was smashed and he was chopped to pieces by the editorial writers but has anyone noticed that a lot of old gentlemen about the same time found it convenient to retire from the bench and make way for younger gentlemen whom the President was pleased to nominate? As shrewd as eight money-lenders fingering the tiara of a dead’ duchess, his capacity to think several jumps ahead of potential enemies fits him to deal with the most unscrupulous of potential enemies and to arm his people in advance, morally, psychologically, socially and militarily. Thinks Ahead He thinks ahead of his people always, but scarcely ever tries to forge

them to that peak in advance of their readiness to reach it, but proceeds to transmit his thoughts and to nurse them along until it is they who are demanding action which he has known from the beginning to be inevitable. Two months age Turner Catledge wrote in the New York Times: “By keeping his personal intentions a mystery (as to the Presidency) the President daily increases his chances to control the forthcoming convention. Every day he withholds his decision from the public he decreases the independent chances of the other aspirants for the nomination; he hampers their pre-convention campaigns. “II he should go to the extent of allowing the convention actually to offer him the honour, he would be in a position then to accept it.” He did just that—kept the Garners, the Farleys and other wheelhorses out at grass and guessing until the convention offered him the honour by such a majority that the

others might more profitably have remained at their grazing. Born into polities, as fu't' of surprises as a defective poker-machine, he makes people near him' love him greatly or hate him savagely, but in a wor'd of highwaymen most Americans are pretty well content to have him round the place.