“In every place,” Tommy reported to Anna, “the audiences have been capacity audiences and the attention and interest excellent. There is no question that your mother is an idol to the people of this country.” Looking over Tommy’s shoulder at this point, Eleanor observed, with a flash of self-deprecatory humor, that instead of saying, “your mother is an idol,” Tommy should say, “your mother isn’t idle.”
• • •
Hundreds of people were standing on the dock at Miami when the president, accompanied by a handful of his closest aides, including Harry Hopkins, Pa Watson, and Dr. Ross McIntire, arrived to board the ship. With a happy smile on his face, he waved his hat to the applauding crowd and stood by the rail while the national anthem was played. Horns began to blow as the ship was cast off and continued until the vessel was out of the harbor and steaming into the Atlantic.
The president spent his days with his white shirtsleeves rolled up over his wrestler’s arms, talking, fishing and basking in the sun. From the beginning of the trip to the end, the newspapermen who followed faithfully behind on a convoy destroyer had no idea where they were going or how long they would be gone. At Guantanamo Bay the cruiser pulled into the dock for an hour’s stop so that a large stock of Cuban cigars could be carried on board. At Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Antigua, the president hosted British colonial officials and their wives at lunch. At Eleuthera Island he was joined by the duke of Windsor. Relaxing evenings were spent on deck cheering boxing matches between black mess attendants, listening to drummer contests between sailors and marines, playing poker, and watching movies—including Tin Pan Alley, starring Betty Grable, and Northwest Mounted Police, with Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard.
At designated points along the way, navy seaplanes circled the presidential flotilla and landed alongside the Tuscaloosa to deliver the White House mail. Several chatty letters from Eleanor arrived. She was enjoying her trip, she told him, though she was growing weary of the Southern voice. “I think of you as sleeping and eating and I hope getting a rest from the world.”
But the world would not go away. From daily news dispatches Roosevelt learned that heavy raids on London had devastated the House of Commons, and that massive bombings of Coventry, Birmingham, and Bristol had so severely damaged dozens of war factories that vital production would be halted for months. At the same time, it was reported that the severity of German submarine sinkings had escalated; in a matter of weeks, seven merchant vessels carrying tons of needed supplies had been sunk. And from Washington came news of the unexpected death of Lord Lothian, British ambassador to the U.S., who had worked unremittingly to strengthen his country’s bond with the United States. A Christian Scientist, Lothian had refused treatment for a simple infection that turned toxic.
On the morning of December 9, a seaplane touched down with a letter from Winston Churchill. Having composed it over a period of weeks, Churchill regarded the letter as “one of the most important” he had ever written. “My dear Mr. President,” Churchill began. “As we reach the end of this year I feel you will expect me to lay before you the prospects for 1941. I do so strongly and confidently.” At the outset, he wanted the president to understand that while Britain could endure “the shattering of our dwellings and the slaughter of our civil population by indiscriminate air attacks,” she was facing “a less sudden and less spectacular but equally deadly danger”—economic strangulation. “Unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island, to import the munitions of all kinds which we need, we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the U.S. to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming.” He went on to catalogue in detail the losses in production and shipping Britain had sustained from the bombing raids and the U-boat attacks. “Only the United States,” he wrote, “could supply the additional shipping capacity so urgently needed as well as the crucial weapons of war.”
Last of all, he came to the knotty problem that was on everyone’s mind—the problem of finances. “The moment approaches where we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost and shrink from no proper sacrifices to make payments across the exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if, at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries . . . .
“You may be assured that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause, and that we glory in being its champions. The rest we leave with confidence to you and to your people, being sure that ways and means will be found which future generations on both sides of the Atlantic will approve and admire.”
Churchill’s letter had a profound effect on the president, though he said little about it at first. “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” Hopkins said later. “But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”
The president’s “whole program,” later to be known as “lend-lease,” was the unconventional idea that the United States could send Britain weapons and supplies without charge and then, after the war, be repaid not in dollars but in kind. How Roosevelt arrived at this ingenious idea, which cut through all the stale debates in Washington about loans and gifts, is not clear. “Nobody that I know of,” White House speechwriter Robert Sherwood has written, “has been able to give any convincing idea” of how the refueling process worked. “He did not seem to talk much about the subject in hand, or to consult the advice of others, or to ‘read up’ on it . . . . One can only say that FDR, a creative artist in politics, had put in his time on this cruise evolving the pattern of a masterpiece.”
Frances Perkins later described the president’s idea for lend-lease as a “flash of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding.” He would have one of these flashes every now and then, she observed, much like those that musicians get when “they see or hear the structure of an entire symphony or opera.” He couldn’t always hold on to it or verbalize it, but when it came, he suddenly understood how all kinds of disparate things fit together. Though Stimson could justly complain that trying to follow the president’s intuitive thought processes as he moved from one idea to the next in no logical order was “very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room,” Roosevelt made up for the defects of an undisciplined mind with a profound ability to integrate a vast multitude of details into a larger pattern that gave shape and direction to the stream of events.
• • •
The president returned to Washington Monday afternoon, December 16, tanned, rested, and in excellent humor. The following day, at his press conference, he puffed hard on his cigarette and then revealed his startling plan. He had heard a great deal of nonsense about finances in the past few days, he began, by people who could think only in traditional terms. Whereas banal minds assumed that either the Neutrality Acts of the late 1930s or the Johnson Act, barring loans to defaulters on World War I debts, would have to be repealed in order to allow loans or gifts to England, he had a much simpler notion in mind—a gentlemen’s agreement that eliminated the foolish dollar sign entirely, and allowed England to make repayment in kind after the war.
“Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor’s home catches on fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to h
im before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.” And if the hose was damaged by the fire, he could simply replace it.
The president’s idea, Frances Perkins observed, “was really based upon very old, primitive and countrified ways of doing things . . . . He could draw very large deductions and large plans from such simple operations which he had observed in his childhood and youth, which were common in the country and seemed natural, like lending hoses or ladders to a neighbor when his house was on fire, and the neighbor would reciprocate when he could.” Even if the ladder burned and the neighbor was unable to repay the actual money it cost, then, “the next potato crop he gets, he comes around with a few barrels of potatoes for you.” The moral of the story was clear: by sending supplies to the British now, the U. S. would be abundantly repaid by the increase to its own security.
• • •
The following week, the president took his argument for lend-lease to the American people in a fireside chat that would later become known as the “arsenal for democracy” speech. A fierce debate over aid to England was engulfing the nation, on street corners and college campuses, in labor halls and country stores, in corporate boardrooms and family living rooms. In September, a powerful noninterventionist organization, the America First Committee, had been formed. Sixty thousand citizens were already on board, and it was said to be gaining members “like a house afire.” America Firsters were convinced that extensive aid to Britain would inevitably drag America into the war. It was important for the president to find the words that would undercut the opposition and set the tone for the congressional debate that would follow the introduction of the lend-lease bill.
The speech went through seven drafts. Speechwriters Sam Rosenman and Robert Sherwood came to live at the White House for the week. It was Harry Hopkins who suggested the key phrase “arsenal of democracy.” Roosevelt, Sherwood recalled, “really enjoyed working on this speech for, with the political campaign over, it was the first chance he had had in months and even years to speak his mind with comparative freedom.”
As the appointed hour of 9 p.m. approached, theater owners in New York noted a decided drop in attendance: thousands of people who would otherwise have gone to the movies stayed home to listen to the president’s speech. Roosevelt began by telling the nation that there was no hope of a negotiated peace with Germany. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” If Britain fell, the “unholy alliance,” which now included Japan as well as Germany and Italy, would continue its drive to conquer the world, and then “all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.”
Next he summoned the American people to become “the great arsenal of democracy” by showing “the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” This job, he emphasized, “cannot be done merely by superimposing on the existing productive facilities the added requirements for defense.” Americans must discard the notion of “business as usual.” He admitted that “there is risk in any course we may take,” but he insisted that there was less chance of getting into war if the U.S. did all it could to support the nations fighting the Axis.
In arguing for aid to Britain as an alternative to war, Roosevelt crystallized what a large number of his fellow citizens were thinking and feeling. A recent Gallup poll revealed that a clear majority of Americans favored military aid to Britain but 88 percent of those polled said they would vote against American entrance into the war. As long as lend-lease was positioned as a substitute for war, it would gather wide support. “I call for this national effort,” the president concluded, “in the name of this nation which we love and honor and which we are privileged and proud to serve. I call upon our people with absolute confidence that our common cause will greatly succeed.”
On the night of the fireside chat, the Germans subjected London to the heaviest bombing attack of the war, hoping to counter the effect that Roosevelt’s words might produce on British morale. A large part of the old city was destroyed. The ancient Guildhall, seat of the city’s municipal government since the days of William the Conqueror, was reduced to a blackened shell, as was the historic house off Fleet Street where Dr. Samuel Johnson had written many of his famous works. Eight Christopher Wren churches and the Central Criminal Court, better known as Old Bailey, were also hit and burned. “The havoc,” one reporter wrote, “was comparable only to that wrought in the Great Fire of 1666.”
“London has nothing to smile about at the moment,” Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, recorded in his diary. The Reichminister was mistaken. At 3:30 a.m., thousands of Londoners were crowded around their radios listening to the president’s broadcast. His words, Churchill told Roosevelt the next day, stirred hope and confidence. “When I visited the still-burning ruins today, the spirit of the Londoners was as high as in the first days of the indiscriminate bombing in September, four months ago.
“I thank you for testifying before all the world that the future safety and greatness of the American Union are intimately concerned with the upholding and the effective arming of that indomitable spirit.”
• • •
Labor leader Walter Reuther, architect of the historic sit-down strikes in Detroit in the mid-thirties, answered the president’s call for an end to “business as usual” with a provocative plan to manufacture war planes in automobile plants. Production of planes, he pointed out, was 30 percent behind schedule and would continue to lag as long as the aircraft industry continued to rely on the “slow and costly methods of hand-tooled custom made production.” Though Detroit had mass-produced four million cars the previous year, the combined production of all the airplane manufacturers in 1939 was eighteen hundred planes. “Conventional methods will never bring results in unconventional warfare,” Reuther argued.
Reuther’s plan was based on the theory that plane- and auto-making were alike at many steps. Instead of building entirely new aircraft plants which could not be put into operation for eighteen months, he proposed adapting existing automotive machinery to aircraft manufacture. “We propose to transform the entire unused capacity of the auto industry into one huge plane production unit.”
The plan called for the president to appoint an aviation production board of nine members, three each representing government, management, and labor. The board would have complete authority to supervise and coordinate the mass production of airplanes in the auto industry. Each auto plant would be asked the make the parts it could best manufacture—Buick might put out the crank shafts, Dodge the cylinders, and Hudson the valves—and then two central plants would be used to assemble the planes.
The announcement of the Reuther plan created a sensation in the press. Columnist Dorothy Thompson called it “the most important event” in weeks, and columnist Walter Lippmann claimed the proposal held historic importance because it represented “the first great plan which organized labor had offered in its status not of a hired man but of the responsible partner.”
Roosevelt’s immediate response was equally positive. “It is well worth our while,” he wrote William Knudsen, “to give a good deal of attention to this program.” But even before a meeting between Knudsen and Reuther was arranged, the attacks from both the aircraft and the automobile industries began. Though planes and autos were alike to a point, the industrialists argued, the higher degree of precision required to produce a delicately balanced plane demanded special skills, special equipment, and hand-held operations. There was some truth to this argument, but the problem was not insurmountable, as was evidenced by the fact that, under contracts let earlier in the year, the Cadillac plant in Detroit was already at w
ork manufacturing the most precise parts of the Allison engine, while Murray & Briggs were stamping wing parts for Douglas bombers. What was insurmountable was the reluctance of the aircraft industry to cheapen production methods and lower prices at a time when the government was prepared to pay any price for the planes it so desperately needed. A similar reluctance affected the auto industry, which was enjoying its most profitable season in years as the reviving economy allowed Americans to buy some of the comforts they had been unable to afford for so long.
Under the weight of industry’s attacks, the excitement about the Reuther plan faded. By the time Knudsen finally sat down to talk with Reuther, the plan was already dead. “Mr. Knudsen and I had met previously on opposite sides of the table,” a bitter Reuther told the press after the fruitless meeting. “I thought on this matter of national defense we might sit on the same side. I was mistaken.”
The hostile reaction to the Reuther plan had deeper roots than the fear of losing profits. “The fear,” correspondent I. F. Stone concluded, “was a fear of losing power, a fear of democracy in industry as instinctive as the fear and hatred kings felt for parliament.” Historian Bruce Catton reached a similar conclusion. The problem, he wrote, was that “labor had grown up and had ideas. This wasn’t going be be like the last war, with the trade associations running industry and [Samuel] Gompers exhorting the boys not to strike . . . . Labor was coming up to the quarter deck just as if it had a right to be there, making suggestions about how the ship ought to be handled.” Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau expressed the same sentiment in more succinct terms: “There is only one thing wrong with this proposal,” he warned Roosevelt. “It comes from the wrong source.”
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