Second only to the President among public figures, Charles A. Lindbergh could command the largest radio audience. “We must not be misguided by this foreign propaganda that our frontiers lie in Europe,” he said. “What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east, the Pacific on the west? An ocean is a formidable barrier, even for modern aircraft.” Later he would put his case more strongly. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg swore never to send American boys to war under any circumstances. Earl Browder, speaking at the summer Institute of Politics at the University of Virginia, was asked whether Stalin might form an alliance with Hitler; as Browder later recalled, “I replied that I could easier imagine myself being elected president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” Fritz Kuhn was convicted of forgery and theft; his German-American Bund called him Roosevelt’s first political prisoner. Hitler issued his first demand for Danzig on August 20, and when Berlin and Moscow jointly announced their nonaggression pact on August 21 the Poles were doomed. Yet military analysts kept talking about Poland’s bad roads and “General Mud,” as though World War II might be called off because of bad weather.
America’s yearning for simplism prevented any rational debate over foreign policy and the threat to national security. Chamberlain hadn’t understood why British lives depended upon Czech fortifications in the Sudetenland, and U.S. public opinion couldn’t see beyond the fastness of its seascapes. But Roosevelt and Hull realized that the British Empire was no longer the world’s great stabilizing force; Munich had exposed its flabby muscle. H.M.’s fleet remained intact, but if France fell and the English were cornered on their island, the center of geopolitical gravity would inevitably move westward. Hitler had declared that his ultimate goal was “die ganze Welt” (the whole world), and already German agents were active in Argentina. Roosevelt believed that he could buy peace for his generation, but he knew the price; the next generation of Americans would have to fight alone, against overwhelming odds. Lincoln had said that you could do anything with public opinion, and nothing without it. What was the public’s opinion now? Dr. Gallup reported that 65 percent of his pollees favored boycotting Germany, 57 percent wanted neutrality legislation revised, 51 percent expected war in Europe in 1939, 58 percent believed the United States would be drawn into it, 90 percent said they would fight if America were invaded, and 10 percent said they would fight if America were not invaded.
Anything approaching a declaration of war, then, would be an invitation to insurrection. The President had to cut his cloth to fit the public mood. That boxed him in. But he could make two important moves now: keep the congressional leadership informed and strengthen the armed forces, which were, that summer, weaker than Poland’s. The President did not know—or could not prove—that Hitler had decided in May to destroy Poland and then move on England and France. His intelligence services were quite good, however; a mountain of data could admit of but one conclusion: that the Wehrmacht was preparing to rupture the borders of the Reich.
In the last week of July the President invited the leaders of Capitol Hill to his second-floor oval study. With Hull at his elbow, he reviewed the evidence of Hitler’s intentions, estimated that the Allies had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, and asked for neutrality revision. Hitler had acknowledged to Roosevelt that the one American force which impressed him was “the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your nation.” Why not intimidate him with it? Under the neutrality law’s present working, the United States was required to withhold sales of arms to aggressors and victims alike. Revision now might deter the Nazi dictator and so save the peace. To his guests the President said, “I’ve fired my last shot. I think I ought to have another round in my belt.”
He was really talking to one man, Borah, who could carry the Senate if he would. He wouldn’t. “There’s not going to be any war this year,” he said. “All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial.”
In despair Hull said, “I wish the senator would come down to my office and read the cables.”
Borah said impassively, “I have sources of information in Europe that I regard as more reliable than those of the State Department.” He explained what he meant: foreign newspapers.
With Hull near tears, Garner polled the room on embargo repeal. To the President he said, “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.”
Roosevelt remarked quietly to the leadership that the responsibility was theirs and bade them good evening.
There remained for him the state of national defense. For the first time in five years the U.S. Navy was maneuvering in the Atlantic—the excuse was a ceremonial visit to Mad Meadow—but that was about all that could be said for American naval might; the most memorable naval event of 1939 was the inexplicable sinking of the submarine Squalus off Portsmouth in 240 feet of water. The House had authorized $499,857,936 for the Army, including $50,000,000 to increase the Air Corps from 5,500 to 6,000 planes. “Bluff and jitterism,” snorted Borah, and this time he was right. None of the aircraft belonged in the same sky with the British Spitfire, the French Nieuport, or the German ME-109. Even the new P-40s which were beginning to appear on American bases carried only machine guns synchronized to fire through the propellers—as in 1918—and these planes had just reached the experimental stage.
In May the President had once more demonstrated his skill in picking men by choosing as his new chief of staff Brigadier General George C. Marshall (who was to be sworn in the same day that Germany invaded Poland). Marshall had 227,000 soldiers but equipment for only 75,000: Garand and Springfield rifles, twenty-year-old machine guns, and a few French 75s brought home after the Armistice in 1918. In August Lieutenant General Hugh Drum assembled his First Army for maneuvers and reported with a straight face that he was short of combat strength by 246,000 men, 3,063 machine guns, 348 howitzers, and 180 field guns. In European terms, Time wrote, “the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.” Dean Acheson quoted the old chestnut about America’s lack of military preparedness: “God looks after children, drunkards, and the United States.” J. P. Morgan capsulated the country’s myopia when, upon sailing for Scotland to shoot grouse, he said, “If they start war, my shooting will be interrupted.”
They started it at 5:20 A.M. Polish time, September 1, when a German warplane bombed Puck, a fishing village and air base on the northwest coast of the Gulf of Danzig. At 5:45 A.M. the German ship Schleswig-Holstein fired the opening shell, a direct hit on a Polish ammunition dump at Westerplatte. Then the first Wehrmacht infantry attack went in through a gentle rain, under gray skies. Four hours later, at 2:30 A.M. Washington time, the telephone beside the President’s bed rang. It was his ambassador in Paris. “This is Bill Bullitt, Mr. President.”
“Yes, Bill.”
“Tony Biddle has just got through from Warsaw, Mr. President. Several German divisions are deep in Polish territory, and fighting is heavy. Tony said there were reports of bombers over the city. Then he was cut off….”
“Well, Bill, it’s come at last. God help us all.”
***
In the beginning the war went swiftly. The German General Staff had calculated that it needed a month to conquer Poland. After eleven days essentially all was over but the screaming in Himmler’s new concentration camps. In its September 25 issue Time introduced its readers to a new word: “This was no war of occupation, but a war of quick penetration and obliteration—Blitzkrieg, lightning war.” Every thirty seconds Americans tuned to shortwave could hear eleven stirring notes—the opening of a Chopin polonaise—a sign that although the rest of the country had been overrun, Radio Warsaw was still free. Then, at 4 A.M. on September 17, the Russians burst into Poland through the back door. Radio Warsaw fell silent. When next heard from it burst into a triumphant “Deutschland über Alles.”
Kenneth Crawford rhetorically inquired for the Nation, “Is the Roosevelt Administration neutral? Certainly not. Is there any chance for the United States to
stay out of another world war? Practically none.” That was not the line the White House was taking, however. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” Roosevelt announced in a fireside chat on September 3, “but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.” At the President’s first wartime press conference, Phelps Adams of the New York Sun asked, “Can we stay out of it?” After a pause FDR answered slowly, “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and every effort will be made by this administration to do so.” Shoring up Latin America, he suggested that the Inter-American Conference warn warships to avoid naval action in the western hemisphere south of Canada, and in a declaration from Panama it did so. At a second press conference he was asked how far U.S. territorial waters extended toward Europe. He said evasively, “As far as U.S. interests require them to go.” The reporter inquired, “Does that reach the Rhine, Mr. President?” The President laughed. He was, he explained “talking only about salt water.”
He was thinking about it, too. The only place Americans might encounter Germans in force was on the high seas. Already a U-boat had sunk the S.S. Athenia, and in England furious U.S. survivors had been interviewed by Ambassador Kennedy’s twenty-two-year-old son Jack. Young Kennedy’s words to them—“We are still neutral and the Neutrality Act still holds”—had satisfied few. That viewpoint didn’t satisfy Roosevelt, either. Now that war had begun, his policy was changing. Neutrality, in his rather unusual definition, was now defined as meaning no American soldiers shooting at German soldiers. It did not preclude helping the Allies exploit their command of the sea. He therefore closed U.S. waters to “belligerent submarines” (subs, of course, were Nazi vessels) and called Congress into special session, asking that foreign powers be permitted to buy American munitions on a “cash-and-carry” basis. In her column Mrs. Roosevelt had concluded that “much as we may dislike to do it, it may be necessary to use the forces of this world in the hope of keeping civilization going until spiritual forces gain sufficient strength everywhere to make an acceptance of disarmament possible.” That is what her husband really meant by neutrality.
But it wasn’t what Lindbergh meant, or Borah, or Vandenberg, or Wheeler, or even—at first—a majority of newspaper editors. Thus cash-and-carry became America’s first wartime issue. It marked the emergence of a new Lindbergh. In a radio speech on September 15 he said, “This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion”; this was “a quarrel arising from the errors of the last war.” His wife Anne had just finished a book, The Wave of the Future, which seemed to argue that a worldwide Nazi victory was inevitable. But Anne’s mother was working on a William Allen White committee supporting cash-and-carry. It was a time of divided families, divided loyalties, and hard words. Harold Ickes asked publicly, “How can any American accept a decoration at the hand of a brutal dictator who, with that same hand, is robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings? Perhaps Henry Ford and Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh”—both decorated by Hitler in 1938—“will be willing to answer.”
The German chargé d’affaires protested Ickes’s remarks, Sumner Welles coldly rejected the protest, and suddenly the issue wasn’t just neutrality revision; it had become one of patriotism. Roosevelt proclaimed an unprecedented “limited national emergency.” Lawyers and scholars asked one another what a limited national emergency was. It wasn’t anything; it was just FDR’s way of showing the flag. The only people in the country who tried to honor the vague proclamation were the managers of movie theaters, where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the end of each evening’s performance (a practice which was to continue for nearly six years). In the sharp exchange with the isolationist bloc, the President won. The captain had the votes now. Both houses passed the cash-and-carry amendment, and arriving British merchantmen began picking up harbor pilots on November 3.
In the subsequent legislative lull, Americans noticed something, or, to be more precise, the absence of something. Wasn’t there supposed to be a war in Europe? There was, but the only bellicose sounds came from London’s music halls, where Cockney harpies were breaking up audiences with a dreadful ballad called “We’ll Hang Our Washing on the Siegfried Line.” There was some action at sea, where the British held the initiative. On the Western front, however, Hitler was playing a waiting game, letting French morale drop ever lower. On the Maginot Line the cooped-up French Army squatted and grew flabby—“the strongest army in the world,” as a British general would put it, “facing no more than twenty-six divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete.” German civilians were calling it Sitzkrieg, “sit-down war.” “This so-called war,” said Senator Vandenberg, “is nothing but about twenty-five people and propaganda.” Senator Borah called it the “phony war,” and the epithet stuck.
Thus the 1930s, which had begun with a cry for bread, ended with a yawn. There was no Battle of the Marne this time, nor even a sizable border skirmish. It was a period in American history when international challenges were about to replace domestic problems, but it was marked in little ways. Granville Hicks resigned from the Communist party because of the Hitler-Stalin pact; hardly anyone noticed. Tyrone Power and his wife Annabella flew home from Lisbon. Rhodes Scholars were recalled—Byron White entered Yale Law School—and then they all felt rather foolish; they had run away from nothing but a silent confrontation. In the first days of the war grocers were selling sugar in hundred-pound sacks, canned goods by the case, flour in fifty-pound bags. Presently the squirrelers too felt silly; there were no food shortages.
For a while there was a shortage of pins with colored heads for armchair strategists, and Rand McNally & Company was briefly sold out of large-scale European maps. New York’s Transportation Board announced that subways would make excellent bomb shelters. A Standard Oil subsidiary at Bayonne, New Jersey, replaced German natives on its tanker crews with American-born seamen, and a rug manufacturer changed the name of his most popular line, Dictator Carpets, to Liberty Carpets. But when boredom set in, the early, impulsive gestures were regretted. By Christmas, European maps were a glut on the seasonal market. Elmo Roper found that 67.4 percent of the people wanted no part of the war. And by New Year’s Day 1940, the country was much more interested in whether a scrappy, lightweight Tennessee team could dance its way around Southern California’s musclemen in the Rose Bowl. (They couldn’t; USC won, 14–0.) Jukeboxes were announcing that “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Any More,” and Bonnie Baker’s Lolita lisp was describing the assets of her steady with “Oh, Johnny!” At the University of Illinois a member of the Pi Kappa Phi house wrapped five baby white mice in lettuce and swallowed the lot. People were lining up under marquees to see Bette Davis in Dark Victory and James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. President Roosevelt sent a final conciliatory message to Hitler and was informed that the Führer was asleep. He did not, however, sleep long.
Portrait of an American
NORMAN THOMAS
He was the American Isaiah,
the nation’s conscience,
the voice of the mute,
the advocate of the dispossessed,
the patrician rebel,
the prophet who spoke out when others fled into silence.
He ran for the Presidency six times and never came close to a single electoral vote. Yet he refused to yield his idealism to despair, declined to quit the system, and in the end he found he had won as much as the winners—and without the loss of integrity.
Norman Thomas was an evangelist. It was in his blood, in the bone of his bone. His father and both his grandfathers had been Presbyterian ministers, and as a boy in Ohio, delivering copies of the Marion Star, owned by Warren G. Harding, he practiced intonation alone until he had developed the spellbinding delivery of a Bryan, a Debs, a Theodore Roosevelt.
He had the style. What he needed now was something to say. A trip around the world after leaving Princeton—he was class valedictorian—persuaded him that colonialis
m was evil. Back in New York, he became a social worker in Manhattan’s blighted Spring Street neighborhood. The misery and want there tore at him, he looked for answers, and found some from Walter Rauschenbusch at the Union Theological Seminary. Later he said: “Life and work in a wretchedly poor district in New York City drove me steadily toward Socialism, and the coming of the war completed the process. In it there was a large element of ethical compulsion.”
That war came in 1917. He campaigned against it, was stoned, and founded with Roger N. Baldwin the American Civil Liberties Bureau, later League. In 1918 he wrote Gene Debs:
I am sending you an application for membership in the Socialist party. I am doing this because I think these are the days when radicals ought to stand up and be counted. I believe in the necessity of establishing a cooperative commonwealth and the abolition of our present unjust economic institutions and class distinctions based thereon.
He was moved by:
…grotesque inequalities, conspicuous waste, gross exploitation and unnecessary poverty all around me.
Debs died in 1926; Thomas became the party’s new leader. He was now forty-two, six-foot-two, 185 pounds, with merry blue eyes—a gentle moralist, a good-humored Puritan. His health was oddly affected by the human condition. If the world was peaceful and prosperous, he glowed with vitality; if world conditions deteriorated, so did he. But he never let illnesses stop him.
In 1932 he knew he could not be elected, and warned his young followers to prepare for defeat. But, “Vote your hopes and not your fears,” he told them, and, “Don’t vote for what you won’t want and get it.”
The planks in his presidential platform were public works, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, low-cost housing, slum clearance, the five-day week, abolition of child labor, health insurance for the aged, anti-Communism, civil liberties, civil rights for Negroes, and old age pensions. Nearly every one of these proposals was then considered radical.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 31