KEEP THE U.S. OUT OF WAR! read a telegram to the President signed by a thousand Dartmouth students. Having been schooled by isolationist and pacifist teachers since they were children, it was not surprising that undergraduates found it impossible to shift gears on such short notice. Here they split with their faculties. College teachers saw the issues much as Roosevelt did—they were, if anything, impatient with him for not going faster. A few idealistic students crossed into Canada and enlisted; Charles G. “Chuck” Bolte, whose interventionist editorials in the Dartmouth newspaper had offended his classmates, joined the British Army and lost a leg at El Alamein. But most students wanted only to be left alone, as British ambassador Lord Lothian discovered when he spoke at Yale’s commencement in June 1940. The most extreme isolationists saw Hitler satisfied with conquest of the United Kingdom, while the British fleet cheerfully steamed westward to put itself at the disposal of Washington. Lothian tried to confront his audience with reality. Isolation, he declared, was completely impossible. The world would force itself on America as it had on Britain. American wealth and strength would become a magnet to other powers; it would be an irresistible challenge to Hitler or anyone who dreamed of international power. The Yale faculty was enthusiastic. Most of the seniors sat on their hands.
Roosevelt’s thoughts were along Lothian’s lines, and he carried the analogy with Britain a step farther. The keystone in the arch of Whitehall’s foreign policy had always been the principle that no one nation must ever control the continent. That was why Marlborough and Wellington had crossed the Channel, why the Kaiser’s crushing of Belgium had been intolerable in 1914, why England was at war now. In the long cycles of history, Roosevelt believed, the United States must take the same position in the Atlantic community.
The President’s quandary was intensified by the fact that 1940 was an election year, and no President had served more than two terms. Running for a third term wasn’t unconstitutional, but the two-term Presidency was a powerful tradition. He hadn’t planned to flout it. He had expected to retire in January 1941, but he didn’t see how he could now. The country might elect an isolationist President, and that would be a disaster whose limits were beyond imagining. Just helping Britain and at the same time winning the election was going to be quite a trick. To carry it off, he felt—and Hull agreed with him—they would have to drop their policy of being frank with the American people.
A certain deviousness had marked administration conduct from the first days of the war. One of the new top-secret Douglas A-20 bombers had crashed in a test flight, and the Associated Press reported that among the men injured was a M. Chmedelin of the French Air Ministry. The Senate Military Affairs Committee had hit the roof. Again, on FDR’s instructions, the State Department had reached an agreement with the British under which freedom of the seas would be restricted by H.M.’s vessels. Any German goods—made there or destined for there—could be seized at sea, and this policy applied even if a ship was sailing between two neutral countries. The neutrals protested, but Whitehall said that was hard cheese; there was a war on. And after Dunkerque the British Army was not only soaking wet but, worse, disarmed; therefore Roosevelt sent the whole surplus store of new American arms by fast freighters to England.
America at this time was still not even a third-rate military power. The basic machine tool industry had almost vanished since the Crash. The biggest forges in the country could hold only bathtubs and auto frames; howitzers were being turned out on machines made for streetcar axles. On the day the Wehrmacht invaded Holland, Hull told the President he should go before Congress and ask for 50,000 planes a year. Roosevelt gasped, but he did it, and since even the isolationists believed in the Fortress America concept, they voted him the money. “Unbelievable!” Hermann Goring said, but eventually the United States would be turning out 60,000 planes a year.
The President repeatedly spoke out as an enemy of the Axis—when Italy declared war on France, then in her extremity, he said, “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor”—and in the middle of the presidential campaign he gave the British fifty overage U.S. destroyers in exchange for ninety-nine-year leases on British naval and air bases in the western hemisphere. The swap wasn’t even legal, and it made the United States a nonbelligerent ally of Britain. But General Pershing and George Fielding Eliot spoke up for it. Time agreed with the President that it was the most important event in American defense since the Louisiana Purchase, and an isolationist senator said, “Listen, you can’t attack a deal like that…. Roosevelt outsmarted all of us when he tied up the two deals.”
***
Two days after the destroyer swap papers were signed, the largest, richest, and most influential antiwar organization was founded by a Yale law student, R. Douglas Stuart Jr., a son of the first vice president of Quaker Oats. This was the Committee to Defend America First. Its argument was that the country should prepare to fight for the United States, not Britain—thus sacrificing a valuable ally, though America Firsters never put it that way—and its leader became General Robert A. Wood, chairman of the Sears, Roebuck board of directors.
In less than six months they had 60,000 members. Every isolationist on Capitol Hill was enrolled. Novelist Kathleen Norris became the movement’s chief propagandist, Charles Lindbergh its most popular speaker, and Wood, Henry Ford, Robert Young, Sterling Morton, Edward Ryerson Jr., and Lessing Rosenwald its financial sponsors. America First’s war chest seemed inexhaustible. At one point it ran full-page advertisements attacking Roosevelt’s foreign policy in sixty newspapers and then repeated the ad in another seventy-nine. Joseph P. Kennedy, Alice Longworth, and John Foster Dulles made it respectable. Rally after rally was held in Madison Square Garden and in Chicago, where the audience, to Lindbergh’s embarrassment, repeatedly booed Churchill’s name.
William Allen White countered by forming the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which formed its own chapters across the country—its greatest support, significantly, came from the eastern seaboard—and which gathered signatures, mailed pamphlets, and distributed handbills taking the other side. The White committee’s spokesmen included John J. McCloy; writer Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, Lindbergh’s mother-in-law; and the intellectual community, led by Robert Sherwood. The committee was strongly backed by most big newspapers, except the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald.
The depth of feeling became apparent in the debate over the country’s first peacetime draft, perhaps the most controversial issue ever raised by a President campaigning for reelection. Not even George Washington had ever persuaded a Congress at peace to approve conscription. In 1940 only Canada, Cuba, and a few South American countries shared with the United States the lack of compulsory military training. Millions of Americans wanted it to continue that way; to them a draft represented the Europe they had fled. But General Marshall needed the men, and if the nation was to have an effective defense, he needed them at once. Roosevelt first raised the issue in his June 10 speech; he pledged that America would have “the equipment and training equal to the task of every emergency defense.” The operative word was “training,” and legislation to translate it into action went into the House hopper as the Selective Training and Service Bill.
John L. Lewis testified that conscription smacked of “dictatorship and fascism.” Norman Thomas, Oswald Garrison Villard, and the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick said it was immoral—one clergyman predicted it would reduce American youth to “syphilis and slavery”—and Bill Green of the AFL, whose testimony was less than lucid, seemed to be arguing that the draft would be acceptable to him only when an invading army stood on American soil. To the embarrassment of Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Youth Congress, one of her pet projects, vowed that its members would refuse induction. More than a score of Union Theological Seminary students announced they would refuse to register despite the fact that they would be automatically deferred. The Mohawk Indians argued with m
ore persuasive eloquence that they wouldn’t fight because they had never been treated as U.S. citizens.
The peace lobby was luckless. The bill came out of the committee in September, when pictures of Nazi bombers and burning London were on every front page. On June 1 Gallup had reported the public feeling on conscription was running fifty-fifty. After the fall of France conscription had been favored by 67 percent, and now 71 percent were for it. Congress approved a one-year draft requiring registration of all men between twenty-one and thirty-five. Overnight New York’s J. R. Wood & Sons, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of wedding rings, reported a 250 percent increase in business; America was being swept by a wave of beat-the-draft marriages, on the theory that married men would receive permanent deferments. Little did they know their antagonist. As director of the draft Roosevelt appointed an Army officer who had been studying conscription plans since 1926 and knew all the loopholes. His name was Lewis B. Hershey.
Senator Wheeler had been muttering that rather than submit to such slave labor legislation American youth would rise in revolution. They did nothing of the sort. On October 16 over sixteen million men registered. There were no incidents; spirits seemed high. The Secretary of War drew the first numbers on October 29, and presently thousands of mailmen were carrying form letters which began:
Greeting:
Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected…
Living in new pine barracks, the draftees or selectees—it was considered impolite to call them “soldiers”—were soon maneuvering with wooden rifles and cardboard boxes marked “tank.” After a while that became dull. It wasn’t as though the United States were at war. Furthermore, they were dealing with the American peacetime military establishment, always an awkward and uninspiring institution. As the months passed, bored draftees took to studying the calendar. By summertime chalked inscriptions in the camps read OHIO—over the hill in October. Over the hill, in Army cant, means being absent without leave, and when the conscription law expired in October, they would be free. By then it was impossible to release them. War was very near. Yet the House vote on extending the draft eighteen months was 203 to 202—a margin of one vote, an indication of the thinness of the ice on which Roosevelt was skating.
***
Hitler would have preferred another American President, and after the war it was discovered that the German government had, in fact, spent a lot of money on the 1940 election, most of it in vain. The man with the bag was one Hans Thomsen, an attaché in the German embassy. Thomsen repeatedly placed full-page advertisements in the New York Times backing isolationists in both parties, and in his report to the Wilhelmstrasse he took credit for a plank in the Republican platform stressing “Americanism, preparedness, and peace.” He added slyly: “Nothing has leaked out about the assistance we rendered in this.”
It was a doubtful claim; the Democrats had a similar plank, pledging that American troops would not be sent overseas “except in case of attack.” The key to the campaign was the Republican candidate, and friends of Britain could hardly have picked a better man. Racketbuster Thomas E. Dewey of New York had won all the primaries, and Taft had set up headquarters with the confident phone number ME-1940, but this was one convention in which the politicians lost control. The delegates desperately wanted a winner; they were angered by Roosevelt’s deft appointment, on the eve of the convention, of Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox as Secretaries of War and Navy. The galleries kept chanting “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!” until on the sixth ballot the convention gave them Wendell L. Willkie.
Willkie was a better man than his campaign. He was plagued by small disasters. His larynx wasn’t strong enough for leather-lunged oratory. After two days of speeches in September, his voice literally disappeared. In Rock Island County, Illinois, he croaked gamely, “The spirit is—squawk—but the voice is—squawk.” The rest of it was weird, like a silent movie; the lips moved, but no sound issued from them. Specialists told him to shut up, that was the only cure, but it is one thing no presidential candidate can do. Despite ointments and gargling, his voice cracked and scratched and never did return to normal until after the election.
Some party regulars rejected him on the ground that until recently he had been a registered Democrat. Willkie asked Senator James E. Watson for support, and the old man snorted, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew, but by the Eternal, I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.” Blue-collar toughs booed him, and an egg hit his wife. More seriously, he was weakened by some of the gut-fighters in his own party who had learned nothing in 1936. A Philadelphia lawyer was quoted as saying that Roosevelt’s support was confined to “paupers, those who earn less than $1,200 a year and aren’t worth that, and the Roosevelt family.” The Republican National Committee’s antiwar radio spots were so rough they created sympathy for the President: “When your boy is dying on some battlefield in Europe… and he’s crying out, ‘Mother! Mother!’—don’t blame Franklin D. Roosevelt because he sent your boy to war—blame YOURSELF because YOU sent Franklin D. Roosevelt back to the White House!”
Willkie was blameless in this. The war was the one issue which might have been turned against the President, but Willkie was too good a man, and too gallant an American, to stoop to use it. He encouraged Roosevelt to send arms to England, supported a peacetime draft and the destroyer deal, and though he faulted the President for bypassing Congress in the swap, the criticism was fair. He didn’t deserve the charge of the Old Guard that he was a “me-too” candidate. He could hardly have taken any other stand when the national security was threatened. Above all, he should never have been subjected to the accusation from Henry Wallace, FDR’s new vice-presidential candidate, that Willkie was the Nazis’ choice.
During all this, the President went smilingly about his business, giving no indication that he had ever heard of a man named Wendell Willkie. His renomination was masterminded by Harry Hopkins, sitting in a tan-walled bedroom in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel with a direct line to the White House in the bathroom. The names of Farley, Garner, and Tydings were placed in nomination—a sign that since their last quadrennial meeting the Democrats had become a divided party. But the convention was plainly rigged. Chicago’s Mayor Edward J. Kelly had hooked a microphone in the basement of the Chicago Stadium to the public address system. At the key moment a Chicago official triggered the demonstration by shouting “We want Roosevelt!” into the mike. Republicans thought it significant that the official was Chicago’s Superintendent of Sewers.
The only really controversial moment in Roosevelt’s campaign came in Boston five days before the election. Local politicians kept urging him to repeat his promise that American boys would not have to fight abroad. He was weary of this, he told them; he had done it so many times. But he finally consented to say: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Sam Rosenman protested; that wasn’t the language of the platform. The President should add the proviso “except in case of attack.” Roosevelt shook his head. It was too obvious, he replied: “Of course we’ll fight if we’re attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War?” John Gunther afterward suggested that this was “disingenuous.” Robert Sherwood, who had argued for the passage, said afterward that he burned inwardly whenever he thought of those words “again—and again—and again,” and other Roosevelt admirers still cringe whenever those lines are repeated. Until this year Roosevelt had always leveled with the American people. That was one
of the reasons he was about to be returned to the White House.
The morning after the election John L. Lewis found a huge sign draped across the facade of his United Mine Workers Building: RESIGNATION ACCEPTED. The popular vote was the closest of FDR’s career—27 million to 22 million—but the indisputable fact was that he still was, as Willkie had called him: “the Champ.” Two days after the election the Champ returned to Union Station and rode triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, beaming and doffing his old fedora as the 200,000 people lining the curbs cheered. The Roosevelt lovers were still legion. Their opposites were around, too. It is entertaining to find that the election results were buried on page six of that day’s Wall Street Journal.
***
In the interval between the conventions and the campaign, Roosevelt visited the 94,000 officers and men of the First Army. He sent word that he wanted no gun salutes, no brass band, no reviewing of troops, and no saluting—the Army, being the Army, gave him all of them—but he did want to see what their equipment was like. There still wasn’t much to see. The commanding general told him, “We are using broomsticks for machine guns and rain pipes for mortars.” The President laughed and said everyone seemed to be in the same boat.
Not quite everybody; not the British. Roosevelt had not only sent them everything he could lay his hands on after Dunkerque; he was now assigning current production of P-40 fighter planes to Britain. It was a sensible decision; the stronger the British became, the longer America would have to get ready. Explaining its wisdom to the American public would probably have been impossible, however, and as he entered his third term, with events escalating at home and abroad, the secrecy surrounding his moves increased. Except when he needed money from Congress, he tended to act independently, sending personal emissaries like Harry Hopkins to London instead of following regular diplomatic channels. Not until the congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor in 1946 did Congress know that the British military staffs flew to Washington for secret conversations with the Combined Chiefs from January 29 to March 27, 1941. Although the two countries were not yet allies, they were, in T. R. Fehrenbach’s phrase, “associated powers” with a common goal.
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