The Peace Strike

Representatives of organizations ranging from a fly-by-night radical committee through the neutral respectability of the Radcliffe Student Government to the most representative and conservative of keep-out-of-war groups are backing the seventh annual Peace Strike in Memorial Hall this morning. The speakers vary from a Student Union president to an important professor at Smith College. The chair will be occupied by a beauteous red-head, placed there, perhaps, to discourage ungentlemanly conduct among the heckling spectators.

But more important than its organization and its organizations are the aims and purposes of the Strike. Despite the predominance among its sponsors and speakers of some of the bitterest and most complete of Harvard isolationists, it has been advertised that the meeting this morning is to be conducted not as a protest against any form of aid to England but rather as a fight against the imminent adoption of convoy service by the U. S. Navy, a move which would be certain to drag this country into the war. With this aim any person desiring peace for the United States must be forced to agree.

Yet despite the fact that half of the College student body has expressed its opinion as opposed to military intervention and despite the dozen Radcliffe pickets who spent yesterday serving as living enticements, the Peace Strike still seems to be running into the customary apathy and antipathy of the local student body. To those who wish the country to get into war, the Strike has no appeal. To those who agree with its aims and desires but who feel that a mass meeting is no way of securing those aims, the need for impressing the Government with the true state of active public opinion must be pointed out.

A third group, which holds the success or failure of the strike in the balance, feels that the aims endorsed by the Strike Committee are merely a cover-up for a suppressed desire to go back on aid to England entirely. This party is represented most vociferously by the Liberal Union, would-be saboteurs of the Peace Strike, an organization which has never been able to make up its collective mind whether it wants to go to war or not. Against this group the Strike has the defense only of its representation. Many of its sponsors do oppose sending aid, believing that any help to England means and always has meant involvement of this country. But they do not make up the entire list of sponsors, a large percentage of whom sincerely believe in the concept of America as "the arsenal of democracy" but who believe even more strongly in fighting for peace. For today, at least, the isolationists have cast off their personal prejudices to join in a fight directed solely against convoys and an A. E. F. They are sincere in their promise not to drag isolationism into the agenda.

It is for these reasons that the Peace Strike will provide a chance for all the believers in peace for this country, whether it be a peace of isolation or one of all material aid, to do their part towards a preservation of their ideals.