1955-2000 Elmer Davis And The News

WJSB, W. Washington. 8.55 p.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time, and Columbia and its affiliated stations present Elmer Davis and the News. On this 21st day of the war, the talking was more important than the shooting, with the exception of the shots that killed Prime Minister Kalonescu of Romania.

President Roosevelt addressed Congress, convened in special session, and asked it to repeal the embargo provisions of the neutrality law, which he regarded as vitally dangerous to American neutrality, American security, and American peace. Premier De La Gier of France and a broadcast accused the Germans of planning to dismember France as they have dismembert Poland, and devoted so much of his speech to combating

assertions of German propaganda that France has been dragged in by England that the suspicion rises that this talk may possibly have had some effect. We must be finished once and for all, he said, with the reign of force.

Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister, told the House of Lords that it would be wise to hold our judgment in suspense about Russia. Mr. Roosevelt's speech failed to move the isolationist senators, 24 of whom met afterward, and said that they would go on fighting repeal.

They hoped to add at least 10 or 12 other senators to their group. Much of the President's speech was devoted to an ironic comparison of the prohibition of exports of implements of war in the present law and the legality of the export of raw materials and semi-finished products which could be very useful to belligerents.

If those who ought to retain the embargo were consistent," he said, they would extend it to cut off cotton, copper, and wheat as well. But as some of you may have heard Mr. Colton born reporting earlier this evening, Senator Nye's apparently the only isolationist who wants to go that far.