Noted Historian Warns of “frightful Emotional Explosion” Here if War Comes to Europe

War in Europe will bring an “emotional explosion” here that will be “immense and frightful,” Prof. Charles A. Beard, noted historian, predicts in the current issue of the American Mercury, first under the editorship of Eugene Lyons, author and former United Press correspondent in Moscow.

Declaring America “should and can” stay out of any European conflict on the grounds that the nations directly concerned have the means and power to check German and Italian domination if they so desire, Prof. Beard writes in an article, “We’re Blundering Into War.”

“If and when war comes in Europe, the emotional explosion in the United States will be immense and frightful. Missionaries and members of the great American boarding house will seek to bend American policy to fit their ideological or national or racial passions. The difficulty of maintaining any reasoned policy will be increased by the fact that Germans and Italians in the United States will be shouting for ‘peace’. “

Prof. Beard also warns that involvement in a war, on the basis of experience during the Wilson administration, “makes it certain as death and taxes that civil liberty would perish in the United States as soon as war is declared.”