Now we know what Roosevelt meant when, bidding his Georgia friends farewell last spring, he uttered the startling and cryptic "I'll be back in the fall if we don't have war". By telephone he had learned from Kennedy England would be ready for war late in the summer.(1)
Since that time it has been the part of our administration, working with the British propagandists to prepare American opinion to bring every aid and comfort to Great Britain by "measures short of war",-- the same measures which gradually, inadvertently, unintentionally brought us into the last war. Not entirely successful with his policies in this country, Roosevelt has turned his attention to foreign power politics, which wrecked Wilson.(2)
It was in March, after Stalin in his speech before the Soviet Congress laughed at the Tory plan of embroiling Germany and Russia,(3) that Chamberlain's appeasement policy was abandoned. The Tory group that runs England had been strengthening Hitler hoping he would weaken Stalin. British policy since 1919 has been to destroy the growing strength of Russia.
The "Influence and Power of the English Upper Classes" and those who control imperialist foreign policy are revealed by Karl H. Abshagen in his "King, Lords and Gentlemen", ( Heinemann, London, 1939). Intimate sketches of the imperialists and propagandists, Lothian, Lloyd, Vansittart, are here given for the first time in print.
British propaganda under Vansittart has used the best brains and unlimited money, and every articulate hater that can be enlisted. For two years it has been directed toward arousing our emotions, our sense of righteousness. Roosevelt has come to the British point of view more rapidly than Wilson. His ambassadors, Kennedy and Bullitt, have worked more effectively for the British and French than Wilson's Page and Bacon.
H. G. Wells in "The Fate of Homo Sapiens", just published, doubts if "the President and Mrs. Roosevelt . . . these two fine, active minds have ever inquired how it is they know what they know and think as they do.