YOUTH TALKS BACK

Yesterday there was thunder on the left. Instead of firing from the hip with its usual mimeographed salvo, the Harvard Young Communist League has this time taken careful aim at a weak point in the Rooseveltian armor and discharged a telling blast. The New Deal foreign policy is the target, and a tempting one it is, even though Mr. Glenn Frank, in his comprehensive anti-New Deal program of last week, passed it by, intentionally or otherwise. Thus beset on two flanks at once, the New Deal will find its leftist critics the hardest to answer. Mr. Roosevelt, when he roundly spanked the AYC on his front lawn recently, was wrong in interpreting that hurt look in the eyes of his audience as youthful and impetuous defiance; it was bitter disappointment in the Administration's lukewarm neutrality.

There's little that is revolutionary in the YCL circular. In fact, even such a conservative as Mr. Vandenberg could probably read most of it without a change of pulse. Anyone can watch the stock market reports, and recent activities in some key industries such as steel and machine tools, and comparing these indices with the war news, conclude that American business is flirting with war profits. It doesn't take a clairvoyant, or a Marxist, to see that last September's Neutrality Act fitted in beautifully with the desires of American big business. And a nation taught to recoil squeamishly at the question "Guns or Butter?" will fall in comfortably with the YCL's protest against boosting national defense at the expense of relief, public works, and farm aid. Many liberals in the past few months have been quietly advancing all these views.

The YCL carefully ignores the Finnish question, except to say that America should avoid it. There is no support of Russia's invasion, no condemnation of Finnish "attacks." All the emphasis in this manifesto is upon the dangers of American involvement, the very real imminence of an anti-Soviet crusade. Even though this emphasis may in this case spring from a blind attachment to the Kremlin, the facts assembled are impressive, and serve to show that American idealism, and American big business are following conflicting paths. If the YCL can soft-pedal Finnish "aggression," there may be some hope left for unity in the job of pulling America out of the whirlpool of war.