Pacifist’s Progress

For the Record, by Felix Morley. Regnery-Gateway Inc., 472 pp., $15.00.

In June of 1915 at age 21, Felix Morley made a major decision of his life. Promptly upon graduation from tiny Quaker Haverford College he sailed for England to join a Friends Ambulance Unit bound for the French front. During the ensuing eleven months of service behind the battle lines much of his work was on ambulance trains carrying the thousands of badly wounded men to base hospitals. “The stream of broken bodies seemed endless,” he recalls, and adds, “While some of the experiences had been gruesome, the horrors of war disturbed me less than its insensate stupidity.”

While completely undistinguished, the work I had been doing was the more satisfying because purely humanitarian and unaffected by any alloy of narrow patriotism. I had no feeling of duty to the Allied Cause, no hostility towards Germany, and was indeed now certain that the war was for all a horrible blunder. European civilization focused in Britain, France and Germany—three countries with the language, literature and history of which I was at least fairly familiar. These three belligerents had close economic, financial and cultural ties, yet nationalism had driven them into a basically suicidal conflict in which all, except in a meaningless military sense, must necessarily be losers. The best solution of the mess would be a negotiated peace. That was what I intended to argue when I got home.

But when, in that summer of 1916, idealist Morley arrived home, he soon discovered that America’s former pro-neutral stand had made a dramatic shift to pro-Ally sentiment. Some 200 American lives had been lost on merchantmen sunk by U-boats. Moreover, Morley felt that the Allied loans floated in the U.S. would alone cause us to come into the war. He foresaw that the Allies had to emerge from the war victorious or the huge bills they had run up would become just so much wastepaper to greedy creditors in the “Arsenal of Democracy.” He was shocked to find that even his Quaker mother believed the tales spread by Allied agents that the Germans were cutting off the hands of male babies in Belgium.

After a stint of lecturing to raise funds for what was to become the American Friends Service Committee Morley landed his first newspaper job — as a reporter on the Philadelphia Ledger. At war’s end, married, he entered Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship Award which had been deferred during the hostilities. Back in America again after Oxford, he joined the staff of The Baltimore Sun to pursue a long career in his chosen profession. Morley reached the apogee of his career when the new owner of the Washington Post, Eugene Meyer, appointed him editor, a post he filled from 1933 to 1940.

Eugene Meyer, who had served as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board under President Hoover, was admittedly a novice in the newspaper business — but he embraced the ambitious aim that his paper was to achieve national significance. The new editor had an even wider aim. He had the “secret ambition” to make the paper an American version of the Manchester Guardian: “That is to say its outlook should be international; its philosophy independent and liberal in the classical sense — its adherence to strictly Constitutional government unquestionable.” A series of Morley editorials advocating a sane and equitable approach to foreign policy attracted widespread attention, as well as profuse congratulations from Publisher Meyer when a Pulitzer Prize was conferred upon his editor.

It was during the late 1930s, as Morley studied the inner workings of the New Deal, that he became totally disillusioned with, and distrustful of, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He foresaw the coming struggle for mastery over Central Europe and was fearful that FDR would so maneuver the great power of the United States as to tip the balance in favor of Russia — and the spread of Communism. By early 1940 he could also foresee that nothing sharply critical of governmental decree would be possible with an inevitable wartime censorship on the horizon. Once hostilities were joined his role would be “all too close to intellectual prostitution.” After not much soul searching he resigned his position on the Post and accepted a long-standing offer to return to the campus of Haverford College as president. The return to the campus had a strong sentimental attraction for him. His father had held the Chair of Mathematics at Haverford for many years; there he had been born and there his parents had died and were buried.

The Haverford Board of Managers, dovish on U.S. participation in the war, had made it clear to the new president that they hoped he would alert the campus dispassionately to the momentous events evolving. He soon found to his surprise that a small minority of his professors were anything but dispassionate on the European war. The leader of the group, Canadian-born Professor of English Literature Dr. Leslie Hotsun, was an ardent Bundles for Britain enthusiast and was actively engaged in sending messages on Haverford stationery to Congressmen and Senators, plugging for Lend-Lease. When Pennsylvania Senator James J. Davis sent a wire to Morley asking, “Is this an illustration of Quaker Pacifism?” the president placed it on the college bulletin board for all to see — and Hotsun indignantly resigned from the faculty. On the night following the resignation an enormous banner of bedsheets covered the front of the largest dormitory spelling out the words “Bundle Leslie back to Britain.”

Thanks to his long tenure as Post editor Morley had access to almost anyone of importance in Washington, and often called at the State Department. When he learned through a news leak that there was a secret “Roosevelt Plan” of April 1941 to recruit U.S. Army and Navy pilots as mercenaries to serve with Chinese Nationalist forces against Japan — and through a dummy organization receive a bonus of $500.00 for each Japanese plane shot down, he was astounded by the “outright violation of U.S. neutrality” such a proposal involved. He forthwith arranged a visit with his long-time acquaintance, Ambassador Admiral Nomura.

Following a long talk at the Japanese Embassy he immediately called on Secretary of State Cordell Hull and relayed the gist of Nomura’s views, which added up to the hope that all matters of dispute with the U.S. could be peacefully reconciled if reasonably discussed on the highest levels.

Morley’s session with Hull on the subject was brief. The Secretary was too preoccupied with other affairs to do more than listen, and put Morley’s notes in his file-and-forget drawer. Sadly, Morley jotted in his journal that from this moment on he realized that war with Japan was certain. He was not surprised on December 7, 1941.

With war declared he felt that despite its strong pacifist convictions Haverford College, as a tax exempt institution, must dutifully accept facts and join in the common effort. The many contacts Morley maintained in Washington were now useful in helping him seek peaceful opportunities for the college to serve. One non-combat assignment filled by many Haverford draftees was entry into the soon very hazardous service on merchant shipping lines.

Haverford’s president could point with pride to the fact that the college survived the war years with a surplus of money in the bank and a high spirit of morale enjoyed by Board Managers and faculty. And now he had once again become restless for a change. After several unsolicited offers came to Morley’s attention during a single year he noted in his diary, “It is not my ambition, nor would it help Haverford for me to sink into old age here.”

Two possibilities seemed most attractive. He could serve as diplomatic correspondent in Washington for the Wall Street Journal, writing signed articles and an occasional editorial. Or he could join his friend Frank C. Hanighen in launching, editing and publishing an outspoken weekly newsletter with special appeal for advocates of a reasonable, non-punitive and lasting peace. He chose the latter and named the paper Human Events after the resounding words in the opening of the Declaration of Independence.

During his distinguished career in journalism and as an academician Felix Morley maintained a continuing close friendship with Herbert Hoover. He and the former president had watched with anxiety as country after country around the world put Marxist theory into practice. Both Hoover and Morley foresaw, as did men of vision in all the Western Democracies, that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s all-out tilt toward Stalinist Russia in June of 1941 started America on a long rough road — with the end so far out of sight as still to be invisible today.

It is to be hoped that this revealing and fascinating autobiography will be made available in college libraries throughout America.

George T. Eggleston is a former editor of Life and Reader’s Digest. His most recent book is Roosevelt, Churchill, and the World War II Opposition (Devin-Adair, 1979).