600 Strikers Listen to Anti-War Spokesmen

While interventionists picketed outside, more than 600 Radcliffe and Harvard students gathered for a "peace strike" meeting in Sanders Theatre yesterday morning and heard a group of Faculty and undergraduate speakers urge this country to stay out of war and to block the use of American ships to convey goods to England.

From the mixture of cheers and catcalls which greeted the first of the speakers, no one could tell whether the majority of the audience was there to "strike" for peace or to heckle. As the meeting got under way, however, the speakers received close attention, despite a one-man rowdy section led by Robert J. Donahue '44, of Massachusetts Hall and Jamaica Plain.

Leading off the program, Professor Frank Hankins, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Smith College, charged that there is "a conspiracy on the part of a very small group of people to get us into war."

Professor Hankins reminded his audience of President Roosevelt's pre-election promises not to send any American troops abroad. "No sooner was the election over than American people began to receive barrage after barrage of very subtle propaganda," he said, reciting the repeal of the Neutrality Act, the destroyer deal, and the Lease-Lend Bill as steps towards war.

"The Administration is trying to whip up hysteria in favor of conveying goods to England," asserted Professor Hankins, who believes that "convoys mean doughboys."

"The President may well have had in mind, in opening the Red Sea to American shipping, the creation of an incident to drag us into the war," Professor Hankins charged.

A later speaker, Spencer Klaw '41, former president of the CRIMSON, warned the peace strikers that "we must not be sold on a program for beating the imperialists at their own game on a slogan of making the world safe for democracy."

Klaw claimed that at most only 10 per cent of the United States trade is with foreign nations. Interventionists have to find catch slogans, Klaw said, because they can not ask people to "get out and fight for that 10 per cent."

Teachers Union President F. O. Matthiessen, associate professor of History and Literature, was the one member of the Harvard Faculty to speak. Although he wants to stay out of the war, Professor Matthiessen said that he would be willing to give his life for his country if the people demanded it.

"I do not and will not accept the war as inevitable," he said, "unless the whole united people demand it. They obviously do not demand it."

Other speakers were Tudor Gardiner '40 1L, David P. Bennett '41, Miss Louise Sullivan, president-elect of the Radcliffe Student Government, and Robert G. Davis '29, Briggs-Copeland Instructor in English. Miss Jane T. Pike, Radcliffe '41, presided.