The Wilmington morning star., 1941-01-03
Editorial Comment
SENATOR WHEELER AND MIR. MARSHALL
II N. Y. H~era1d-Tribune

It was a happy accident that put Senator
Wheeler and Verne Marshall, the two-fisted
appeaser from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, simultane-
ously on the same front pages. In this chance
collocation of the sublime and the ridiculous
each serves to illuminate the other. Without
Mr.. MarshalTs opera bouffe one might have
failed to appreciate the grim but fundamental
absurdity of the Senator's talk about "a work
ing basis for a just peace" And without the
Senator's imprisoned solemnity one might not
realize Just how sinister Mr.. Marshalls actlv-
tiles could be were they less grotesque. 1t
seems improbable that Mr.. Marshall himself
will ever be much Of a menace to the state.
But his committee, with its obscure origins
it's carbon-copy documents, its peculiar con-
%nections with amateur secret diplomacy be-
ing conducted by NaZi agents and rich, though
slightly mysterious, oil operators, does not
make a pleasant picture when one remembers
that there are still thousands of sincere people
still living, like Senator Wheeler, in a dream
world.
BY his own showing Mr.. Marshall is GER
tainly called on for a fuller explanation as to
just what he, his anonymous friends and the
elusive Mr.. William Rhodes Davis have been
up to. 1t may be hard to believe that any one
could take the fantastic episode of the Nazi
peace offer,' allegedly conveyed to the Pres
ident by MIR. Davis in October, 1899, as mean
ing anything other than that some Americans
were willing to make themselves the dupes
and messenger boys of Nazi strategy. Yet
here is Senator Wheeler talking with apparent
seriousness in terms more fantastic still, terms
so wildly at variance with all reality that it
seems incredible that any man could keep his
eyes so tightly shut to facts, however I'M
pleasant he might find them.
The Senator calls upon Americans to ere
main at peace and dedicate ourselves to eff
fecting peace for a war-torn world; and then,
as his idea of the just and workable peace
which Americans are to '~'effect, sketches a
settlement in which the Nazis, in return for
their pre-war colonies, would voluntarily re-
linquish virtually every foot of land they have
seized since 1888, including even the Sudeten-
land and Austria! Some people," he sagely
observes, 'stin oppose a European peace"
Some unquestionably do oppose a peace like
Historically the ESQ German divisions, their
mighty air corps and the Nazi gang that
guides them. If the Senator, as he says, ac-
tually wants leach of us, from the President
to the humblest citizen, to exert his every
effort for peace now,' he had better start by
getting out his own uniform and bringing in
a declaration of war tomorrow, because that
is the only way in which Americans or any
body else are ever going to ~"effect' the sort
of peace he is talking about.
A man who can seriously parade such un-
believable fantasies before the American peo-
pie at this desperate hour in their own and
in world history is not a man who is ignorant
of facts; he is a man so stubbornly deter
mined not to see, hear or think about facts
which are shouting at him from every side
that he has ended by simply abolishing them
and retiring into a world of dreams. And it is
because there still are men like that in Ameri-
ca that Mr.. Marshall, with his E. Phillips
oppenheim diplomacy, his mysterious friends,
his tendency to parrot the subtler strains of
Nazi propaganda, does have his disturbing
aspects. /