by Lynne Olson
Sherwood had accepted with alacrity White’s invitation to join his group, and he threw himself into all its activities. But with his growing sense of urgency, he didn’t feel that the committee—or any other organization or individual—was doing enough to convince Americans of the importance of saving Britain. So, with White’s approval, Sherwood designed, wrote, and partially paid for a full-page newspaper advertisement that appeared on June 10 in more than one hundred newspapers across the country.
Topped by a headline proclaiming STOP HITLER NOW!, the ad warned that “if Hitler wins in Europe … the United States will find itself alone in a barbaric world—a world ruled by Nazis,” in which “democracy will be wiped off the face of the earth.” At the bottom was a dramatic appeal to readers to join the pro-aid cause: “In a dictatorship, the government tells the people what to do. But—this is a democracy—we can tell the government what to do. Exercise your right as citizens of a free nation. Tell your president—your senators—your congressmen—that you want them to help the allies to stop Hitler now!”
The day after the ad appeared, more than five hundred volunteers showed up at the White Committee’s New York headquarters, and committee members delivered to the White House pro-aid petitions bearing the signatures of twenty-five thousand persons. At his news conference that day, Roosevelt commended Sherwood for the ad, calling it “a mighty good thing” and “a great piece of work, extremely educational for this country.”
But William Allen White had quite a different view. He had been inundated by a flood of angry letters complaining about one sentence in the ad that claimed anyone who opposed its views was “either an imbecile or a traitor.” Among his correspondents was Oswald Garrison Villard, a former editor of the liberal magazine The Nation and a good friend of White’s. A lifelong pacifist, Villard protested to the Kansas editor that he and millions of others who opposed aid to the Allies were “just as loyal, just as sincere, and just as earnest as Sherwood or anybody else.”
White agreed. In a letter to Sherwood, he wrote that the playwright’s inflammatory statement “has aroused our opponents, and it seems to me quite unnecessary. Of course, there are millions of Americans who honestly believe in the isolationist theory. I don’t; you don’t. But when you call them imbeciles or traitors they rush to the nearest desk and write me letters which often are so intelligent that they have to be answered.” So many complaints had descended on him, White added, that, even with the help of three stenographers, he had not been able to respond to them all.
An apologetic Sherwood replied that the “imbecile” line was meant to apply only “to those who give solemn assurances (specifically Lindbergh) that Hitler is not going to attack the Western Hemisphere.” Years later, the playwright noted that White had scolded him “for having gone too far. But it was not long before such epithets as mine were commonplace.”
TO WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, it was clear that opinion in the country was shifting fast toward sending planes, ships, and weapons to Britain. Late that spring, a government study of the nation’s newspapers showed that although most of them still opposed the idea of America’s armed intervention in the war, the vast majority now backed “immediate and unstinted aid” to the British. In recent polls, more than 70 percent of the American people approved the dispatch of aid as well.
But the president ignored these positive signals from his countrymen and refrained from taking any bold new action to fulfill the pledges he had made at the University of Virginia. A frustrated White told a friend that his committee could be of no use unless it had something substantive to work on: “We are doing the best we can, but the trouble is there is nothing before Congress that we can get behind and boost.” To Roosevelt, White cabled in early June: “My correspondence is heaping up unanimously behind the plan to aid the Allies by anything other than war. As an old friend, let me warn you that maybe you will not be able to lead the American people unless you catch up with them. They are going fast.”
Still Roosevelt hesitated, his fear of the power of congressional isolationists overriding his faith in the public’s support. The specter of Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 humiliation by isolationist senators was always at the back of his mind. If he moved too quickly, he told the British ambassador, “you will get another ‘battalion of death’ in the Senate like Wilson did over the League of Nations—a group which will exploit the natural human reluctance to war, excite the women … and get the Senate so balled up as to produce complete paralysis of action in any direction.” He explained to an aide that “it would have been too encouraging to the Axis, too disheartening to Britain, and too harmful to his own prestige to make this a matter of personal contest with Congress and be defeated.”
But could the British hold out while the president and his administration temporized? On a beautiful spring afternoon in rural Virginia, a group of friends met over lunch to ponder that question. “The sense of impending doom was so strong,” remembered Francis Pickens Miller, a noted foreign policy scholar, who hosted the lunch at his country home. “There was a desperate need in that hour for someone to speak for America. Why should not we? Perhaps if we did, others with more influence might take up the cry.”
Two weeks after the lunch, newspapers across the country carried stories about the creation of a new citizens’ lobbying group—one that spurned the middle ground championed by the White Committee and the administration, to provide all aid short of war. Instead it dared speak the unspeakable: it called on the U.S. government to declare immediate war against Germany. The thirty founding members of the group—“all men of high position,” as one newspaper described them—included Miller, along with a former chief of the U.S. Navy, an Episcopal bishop, editors, publishers, writers, business executives, and lawyers.
Explaining the rationale for such a radical proposal, Herbert Agar, the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and another of the organization’s founders, noted that, while Congress had voted billions of dollars for rearming America, no great economic or industrial mobilization was underway; instead, business as usual prevailed. “We who had asked for war on Germany … had foreseen that the U.S. would never rearm herself, let alone give decisive support to Great Britain, without an economic upheaval in which labor, capital and consumers all agreed to sacrifice for the nation,” Agar wrote. “This does not happen among free people except in time of war.”
In its founding statement, which it called “A Summons to Speak Out,” the group urged “those citizens of the United States who share these views to express them publicly.” But, as its members admitted, such an appeal for action was hardly likely to attract a groundswell of support. While most Americans supported giving aid to Britain and more than half the population felt that the United States probably would be dragged into the war eventually, fewer than 10 percent favored an immediate declaration of war against Germany. As Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, rightly noted, “What a majority of the American people want is to be as unneutral as possible without getting into the war.”
Of the more than 125 individuals who were asked to join the new group, only about 25 percent accepted. Several of those who were approached were violently opposed to the idea, warning that it would create even more friction in a country that desperately needed unity. After newspaper stories appeared about the group’s creation, some of its members received threatening letters.
Unlike the White Committee, this band of radical interventionists would never become a mass-membership, grassroots organization. Nonetheless, despite its tiny core of true believers, it would end up having an extraordinary impact on the battle for America’s future.
CHAPTER 10
“WHY DO WE NOT DEFEND HER?”
Throughout the summer of 1940, a group of men came together for occasional dinners at a stately Italian Renaissance building just off Fifth Avenue in New York City. One by one they slipped through the door, crossed the entrance hall, and entered a small elevator that took them to a private meeting room on the f
ourth floor. As waiters circulated among them with drinks and food, they plotted ways to help Britain and get America into the war.
These well-dressed, well-bred revolutionaries were part of the new citizens’ organization that had jolted the country with its call for immediate belligerency. In the weeks since its creation, it had attracted a small but glittering array of new members—about fifty in all. Movers and shakers in the East Coast’s top journalistic, legal, financial, and intellectual circles, they were collectively known as the Century Group, after the private men’s club where their dinner meetings were held and to which many of them belonged.
Their choice of meeting place was hardly surprising. One of the oldest and most exclusive clubs in New York, the Century Association was the very embodiment of the East Coast old boys’ network. Seven Centurions (as the club’s members called themselves) had occupied the White House, including the current occupant, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Six more had sat on the Supreme Court, while more than thirty had served in the cabinet.
Such statistics were particularly impressive considering the club’s small size and its criteria for membership, which had nothing to do with public service. Founded in 1847 by prominent American artists and writers, it limited its members to “authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts.” Unlike most New York men’s clubs, it was regarded from its inception as a center of the city’s intellectual and literary life, “a gracious place of conviviality and good talk in a smoky rumbling seaport.”
The Century clubhouse, on Forty-third Street in midtown Manhattan, was designed by the eminent architect Stanford White, himself a Centurion, and boasted an extensive library and a distinguished American art collection including works by such noted painters as John LaFarge and Winslow Homer, both of whom were also members. The club’s early membership list reads like an artistic and literary Who’s Who: actor Edwin Booth; architects Richard Morris Hunt and James Renwick; landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted; poet and editor William Cullen Bryant; sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; writer Henry Adams; and book publishers Henry Holt, William Appleton, and Charles Scribner.
Century members liked to think of themselves as bohemians, but that was just a pleasant delusion; the poet Walt Whitman, a true bohemian, was never invited to become a Centurion because members did not regard him as a clubbable man. The Century, for all its artistic spirit, was very much a bastion of the Establishment, a fact that became increasingly obvious by the early twentieth century, when the club began adding more professional men—judges, Wall Street financiers, lawyers, and business executives—under the catchall category of “amateurs of letters and fine arts.” Among them were such titans of industry and finance as Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Andrew Mellon.
Members in good standing of the East Coast’s intellectual and business elite, Centurions prided themselves on their devotion to public service and disdain for the rancor of partisan politics. “When they thought of gentlemen in politics, they thought of each other, and though animated by no vulgar ambition for office, some of them were not unwilling, from time to time, to sacrifice themselves to the public good,” the historian Henry Steele Commager, another Centurion, wryly noted. The writer David Halberstam once described former defense secretary Robert Lovett, also a Century member, as a man with “a sense of country rather than party”—an apt description of the Century ethos.
Within the Century Group, Democrats outnumbered Republicans. But the Republicans who did belong had far more in common with their Democratic counterparts than with their fellow party members in Congress, most of whom were conservative and isolationist. Like their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, many prominent East Coast Republicans favored fiscal prudence but leaned toward liberalism on social issues. While they opposed many of Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policies, they supported a fair number of his New Deal reforms. Above all, they were internationalist and pro-British, many having close personal, social, and commercial ties with England.
A sizable percentage of the Century Group had attended Groton, St. Paul’s, and other New England prep schools that were modeled after English public schools like Eton. (Some of the American schools were so Anglophile in outlook that they substituted cricket for baseball and encouraged students to use British rather than American spelling in their writing.)
After prep school, these young scions of the Eastern establishment went to Ivy League colleges, particularly Harvard and Yale. Once they’d graduated, many studied at British universities or traveled extensively in the British Isles or on the Continent. Following World War I, they did not retreat into isolationism like the majority of Americans; most supported U.S. participation in the League of Nations and World Court, and later opposed passage of the Neutrality acts. Those involved in business and finance, meanwhile, became immersed in the industrial and economic rebuilding of a devastated Europe.
Several men in the Century Group were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the first American think tank to focus on international affairs. The New York–based council was the brainchild of a group of young advisers to the U.S. delegation at the 1919 Paris peace conference. During a series of informal meetings, the Americans and several of their British counterparts decided to form organizations in both countries for the study of international affairs and promotion of Anglo-American understanding and cooperation. The British equivalent of the U.S. group was—and is—the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House.
In the interwar years, the Council on Foreign Relations was an island of internationalism in an isolationist sea, as it tried to awaken the United States to its world responsibilities. In addition to publishing the influential journal Foreign Affairs and sponsoring workshops and meetings for businessmen and foreign affairs professionals, it produced long-range planning papers for the State Department after the European war broke out in September 1939.
Ever since its creation, the council has been seen by its critics as an invisible government, secretly setting the parameters of U.S. foreign policy. But in the years before World War II, distrust of the council was also linked to an antipathy toward Europe—and internationalism in general—that had deep roots in the country. Unlike members of the Century Group, most Americans had never traveled in Britain or on the Continent, and a sizable percentage were not inclined to do so even if they could. There was considerable distrust of Europeans and their ideas, as well as of “rich, overeducated Easterners who still doted on Europe.”
Underlying such suspicions was the enormous gulf of knowledge and understanding between America’s heartland and the East Coast—and in particular the East’s financial and cultural hub, New York City. These intense regional differences were wittily underscored in a play entitled This Is New York, written by Robert Sherwood (also a Century Group member) in the early thirties. Among its leading characters is a South Dakota senator who despises New York as “un-American” and declares that it should be kicked out of the United States and towed across the Atlantic to Europe, where it belongs.
Sherwood, who described the conflict between New York and the rest of the country as “a bloodless civil war,” said he wrote the play because he was tired of “aggressive Americans of the West” who contended that “New York is not America.” Sherwood viewed This Is New York as an homage to the city’s energy and panache, as well as to its liberal atmosphere and the cultural and political stimulation it provided. In his view, New York was the “sole refuge from intolerance, from the Puritan inquisition,” in addition to being “the American spirit in concentrate form.”
Of course, other Americans, especially those living in the rural areas and small towns of Middle America, disagreed. They saw New York and other major American metropolises as corrupt, immoral, chaotic places, lacking in the community, religious, and family values they held dear. To some, big cities were full of dangerous alien influences—radicals, immigrants, labor organizers, and “transplanted Negroes,” all of whom, one rural congres
sman claimed, “have introduced insidious influences into the New Deal.”
Many in the country also resented the power and influence of members of the East Coast elite, who were seen as arrogant and condescending, intent on dominating mainstream America even though they were totally isolated from it. To some degree, the East’s critics were correct in their suspicions. “New York, and to a lesser degree, Boston and Philadelphia felt a right—even a duty—to set a tone for the country,” acknowledged Joseph Alsop, himself part of the Eastern establishment. “There was the feeling [among members of that establishment] that the country was really their country.”
Believing themselves to be society’s guardians, wellborn, well-connected Easterners were often as suspicious of and hostile to the rest of the nation as its inhabitants were to them. They devoured Sinclair Lewis’s novels about the prejudices and closed-mindedness of small-town America and, in the words of the historian Frederick Lewis Allen, were “united in scorn of the great bourgeois majority, which they held responsible for prohibition, censorship, Fundamentalism and other repressions.” The New Yorker, widely considered to be “the humor magazine of [the East’s] ruling class,” made clear what it thought of the American heartland when it announced upon its creation that it was “not for the old lady from Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.”
THE EDITOR OF The New Yorker was not a member of the Century Group, but many other major media figures were. And, as it turned out, they were extremely concerned about the old lady from Dubuque and what she thought of the question of America’s involvement in the war.
While numerous members of the group ended up playing key roles in its pro-war campaign, those with the greatest impact on American public opinion would be the organization’s columnists, editors, radio commentators, and publishers. Their involvement, which blossomed into an unapologetic advocacy for intervention, raised serious questions about journalistic objectivity and balance. With few exceptions, however, they had no second thoughts about what they were doing: this was not, in their view, a time for even-handedness.