Word: neutral
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Today America wishes to remain neutral. Tomorrow she may not. Today America has a holy resolve to stay out of war--a resolve such as she never had in 1916. It is born of twenty-five years of clever peaceways advertising; it is born of the opinion that these United States were badly used in the last war, of the feeling that European quarrels can and should remain...
This is the reason why America must do everything within her power--"measures short of war"--to aid the Allies. It is a very simple and a very selfish reason: the best chance of our remaining neutral is the success of Allied arms. It is sufficient reason for the immediate lifting of the arms embargo and a willingness to send the Allies all the munitions and raw materials which they can purchase. All this, of course, within the limits of cash and carry, the loan embargo, and control of American citizens or shipping...
Some papers, like the Nashville Tennesseean, went shouting out into the street at the sinking of the Athenia: "German frightfulness . . . again roams the seas. . . . This nation wants no war, but there is no question where its sentiments lie." Others, like the Baltimore Evening Sun, remained stiffly in the parlor: "Neutral, as a nation, we are. And neutral we must be. A nation cannot afford the luxury of living-room emotions...
...matter." London's own newspapers, galled by the censorship yoke, were loudly critical. The London Times blamed the Ministry for "a series of muddles and blunders" which, said the Times, the Prime Minister did not deny. Said the News Chronicle: "News is flooding out of Berlin into all neutral countries, and the press of those countries is almost without news from London...
Enid Starkie has tried to separate some of the sheepish facts from the goatish fictions, to lift some of the fogs, prune some of the poison ivy out of the laurels. With unhurried, neutral efficiency she shows how this sensitive son of an army captain and a penny-pinching peasant became first a debauched child poet, then a "wild boy" whose Russia was all Europe, then a castaway...