National Disunity

The two young toughs just emerging from a Boston America First meeting glanced across the street at the picket line which was carrying signs, "Wheeler Is Hitler's Stooge," and "Don't Make America Next." "Look at the collegeboys," sneered one of them. "We ought to get them down our way some time." "Never mind," the other comforted him. "We will, one of these days."

Toughs from the slums getting ready to fight the collegeboys; middlewesterners talking about secession from "that British colony in the East"; Lindbergh haranguing the crowds about "new leadership"; everywhere the lines are being drawn more sharply, and the gap between isolationist and interventionist is steadily and alarmingly widening. Max Lerner, who is usually pretty well up on those things, has estimated that 25 per cent of the people are rabid interventionists, 25 per cent are steadfast isolationists, and 50 per cent are in the middle, but following the main trends of the Roosevelt foreign policy.

Up to now the America First Committee has concentrated on its own 25 per cent, using every method, fair and foul, to make them as emotional and intransigent a minority as this country has ever seen, while its interventionist counterparts, the Committee to Defend America, and the Fight For Freedom Committee, have spent the greater part of their energies in swinging their already convinced quarter of the population further and further towards war. There is no reason to believe that America First will abandon its dignifying tactics. If this country is to be saved from civil strife, the interventionists will have to pay more attention to that entire 75 per cent.