Clare Boothe Luce, who thought the President should be tougher with Hitler, accused him of waging a “soft war.” Every leader has his symbolic gesture, she said: Churchill’s fingered V, Hitler’s stiff arm, Mussolini’s strut. When she was asked about Roosevelt, she moistened her finger and held it up to test the wind. It was clever, it was true, and it was absolutely necessary. The President had to know how Americans felt. Divided countries do not win great wars. He could be a step ahead of the people, perhaps even two steps. But if he ever lost them he would fail them and his oath of office. “To serve the public faithfully and at the same time please it entirely,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “is impossible.”
The polling business was among the booming new industries. Some of the pollsters’ findings were predictable. New York City was more interventionist in spirit than the rest of the country. Yet Texas was more belligerent toward Hitler; anglophilia was rare in Texas, but nationalism was intense. The only section of the country with genuine war fever was Dixie. (No America First rally was ever held in Georgia.) White Anglo-Saxon Protestant southerners were six times as ready to fight Nazis as their countrymen—perhaps, as Dean Acheson has suggested, because so many southern heroes are soldiers. Taking the country as a whole, 62 percent of America had approved the destroyer swap. Ethnic groups whose homelands had been overrun were passionately hostile to Germans, with the exception of Scandinavians. The upper classes tended to be interventionist; by the early summer of 1940 better than two-thirds of America’s business and intellectual leadership favored increased shipments to Britain, and almost half the men and women listed in Who’s Who in America wanted Congress to declare war at once. By then virtually everyone in the nation (93.6 percent) favored building up the armed forces.
But many of the straw votes defied understanding. In the fall of 1939, 40 percent of all Americans believed the United States would be drawn into the European war. After the fall of France, when the danger was much greater, only 7.7 percent believed it. Late in 1940 60 percent believed Britain was fighting for American interests, but only 13 percent approved American participation. And by 1941 a Fortune survey reported that 67 percent of the American people were ready to follow President Roosevelt into a war that 70 percent did not want. “The fact is,” Lincoln had said in 1862, “that the people have not yet made up their minds that we are at war.”
The New York Times concluded in late 1940 that the country was suffering from “a form of schizophrenia.” But one set of figures was consistent and indicated a trend. To the Gallup question “Do you think the United States should keep out of war or do everything possible to help England, even at the risk of getting into war ourselves?” the response was:
STAY OUT HELP ENGLAND
May 1940 64 36
November 50 50
December 40 60
The President was under immense pressure from extremists at both ends of the spectrum; it came from congressional leaders, aides, cabinet members; even from his wife. In retrospect, his policy seems clearer than it did then. He was giving Britain everything he could lay his hands on. He was mobilizing American industry and arming the country to the teeth. And by drifting ever closer to Hitler’s periscopes in the Atlantic, he was hoping for an incident which would weld the entire nation into a single aggressive instrument. He gave little thought to the Pacific, nor, so far as is known, was he shown one poll which in some respects was the most interesting of all. On the West Coast Americans weren’t much interested in Germany, but they were ready to take on the Japanese any time.
It was the first aspect of his policy which was weakest in late 1940. The United Kingdom was taking terrible punishment, British arms had been defeated on all fronts, and the pound was disappearing. Roosevelt was brooding about all this while basking in the Caribbean sun aboard the cruiser Tuscaloosa, recovering from his third presidential campaign and a subsequent sinus attack, when a seaplane arrived alongside to deliver a personal letter from Winston Churchill—“perhaps the most important letter of his [Churchill’s] life,” James MacGregor Burns has called it. England was running out of supplies and money to buy more; the exchequer was down to its last two billion dollars. The United States was the greatest industrial nation on earth. Indeed, two days after this last election Hitler himself had declared publicly, “As far as American production figures are concerned, they cannot even be formulated in astronomical figures. In this field, therefore, I do not want to be a competitor.”2 But this, Churchill felt, was the very ground upon which Hitler should be required to compete. Was there some way that the President, working within the American Constitution, could prevent the British from being “stripped to the bone”?
Hopkins was aboard the Tuscaloosa when the letter arrived. He saw no immediate sign that Roosevelt had been impressed by it. It took a while for Hopkins to realize that the President was thinking hard—“refueling,” Hopkins put it, “the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.” According to Churchill’s memoirs, Hopkins later told him that the President read and reread the letter as he sat alone in his deck chair. For two days he appeared to be undecided; he was deep in thought, reflecting silently. Knowing his moods, Hopkins asked no questions. “Then,” according to Hopkins, “one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. …there wasn’t much doubt that he’d find a way to do it.” The program, the answer to Churchill’s dilemma and the weapon Hitler could not match, was to be fortuitously numbered House Bill 1776 and known around the world as lend-lease.
Roosevelt returned to Washington December 16. Next morning he called a press conference, and after saying, “I don’t think there is any particular news, except possibly one thing,” he proceeded to give them one of the biggest stories in American history, explaining the lend-lease concept for forty-five minutes. “Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose,” he began. “If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.” If the hose were destroyed, the neighbor replaced it “in kind.”
As reasoning, the parable was both brilliant and specious. He proposed to loan the British, not hoses, but tanks, warplanes, and ships. How could they be returned “in kind” after the war? Moreover, to accept his own metaphor, the hose was the smallest part of lend-lease. With it he would also be signing over to his “neighbor” the hydrant and a great deal of expensive plumbing. Finally, the President alone would decide what to lend, when to lend it, and to whom. H.R. 1776, entitled “A Bill to Further Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” would give him powers no other President had ever requested. It provided for aid to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
As a precedent, the measure would reach far into the future, eventually penetrating the jungles of Southeast Asia, but at the time the debate over it was seen merely as an epic struggle between isolationists and interventionists. The President described the proposal to the country on December 29—the night of one of London’s worst fire-bombings—in a fireside chat. The intent of the program, he said, was confined to lending, leasing, and selling war goods. He named the enemy—the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Tripartite Axis—and he renewed his pledge to keep out of war. “We must,” he said, “be the great arsenal of democracy.” It was an exceptionally effective speech; letters and telegrams to the President supported him a hundred to one. The polls reported that 71 percent of the people agreed with him, and 54 percent wanted lend-lease to start now.
It couldn’t start now, because the isolationists on Capitol Hill realized t
hat this was their Little Bighorn. Hamilton Fish cried that 1776 would leave Congress “with no more authority than the German Reichstag.” Ironpants Johnson testified that lend-lease meant “humanitarian lollipop-ping all over the world.” Senator Nye alone spoke for twelve hours; Clark of Missouri called it a “war bill.” But their power to intimidate was gone. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed that “Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign of the change,” and this is what had happened to isolationism. The pendulum of history had swung away from it. Its loyalists were little people in the way. A group called the Mother’s Crusade Against Bill 1776 staged a sit-down strike before the office door of Senator Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass called the FBI and then told the press: “It would be pertinent to inquire whether they are mothers. For the sake of the race, I devoutly hope not.”
Roosevelt’s floor managers had signed up the Republican moderates, every one of them. When Homer Bone of Washington asked the question which had cornered interventionists in the past—“What is worse than war?”—Warren Austin of Vermont replied, “I say that a world enslaved to Hitler is worse than war, and worse than death.” The galleries cheered. Bone disappeared into a cloakroom. On February 11, 1941, Willkie testified for lend-lease, assuring its passage. He said, “It is the history of democracy that under such dire circumstances, extraordinary powers must be granted to the elected executive.” The bill became law in March, and FDR asked Congress to give him nine billion dollars for starters—which raised the money going to arms at home and abroad to twenty-six billion. American flags flew all over London. Hitler said that despite lend-lease, “England will fall.” In Italy Mussolini’s press said ominously, “Roosevelt’s gesture may cause some unpleasant surprises to England and the United States in the Pacific.” But who listened to the Duce any more?
***
Now developments began to gather momentum. Heavy industry, retooling for war production, hired three million new workers. Red, white, and blue banners over assembly lines warned, TIME IS SHORT. Government regulatory agencies were established, and Washington saw the first influx of top-notch managerial talent since the President and big business had crossed swords. Civilians began to encounter shortages; Harold Ickes had turned 150 tankers over to the British, cutting Americas tanker fleet by 40 percent and creating the East Coast’s first gasoline famine.
In February Mussolini had ordered United States consulates in Palermo and Naples closed. Roosevelt retaliated by shutting down Italian consulates in Detroit and New York; then he declared an “unlimited national emergency,” freezing German and Italian assets in the United States. Axis ships, and ships from countries which had been overrun by Axis troops, including Vichy France’s Normandie, were seized “to prevent their sabotage.” The Army Air Corps announced that it would train eight thousand fledgling RAF pilots. Roosevelt transferred ten Coast Guard cutters—old rumrunner chasers, relics of Prohibition—to the British and, in sublime defiance of de facto hostilities, he opened up the Red Sea to American freighters by declaring Egypt neutral and therefore not in a war zone. On April 9 the United States and Greenland signed a treaty under which Washington, in exchange for the right to establish U.S. weather stations and other bases there, pledged itself to defend Greenland from invasion. A terse announcement said German weathermen already on the island had been “cleaned out.” The defense of Greenland, the President declared, was essential to the security of the western hemisphere.
But how far did the western hemisphere extend? That was what Senator Taft kept asking, and responses from the White House were nebulous. The hottest issue that spring, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, was convoying. Gallup first reported that the public attitude was almost entirely negative. A private poll of the Senate disclosed that forty-five senators would approve of U.S. warships escorting freighters halfway across the Atlantic. But forty were against even that, and appalling figures from the British Admiralty left no doubt that the U-boats were winning the Battle of the Atlantic. If the President wanted his lend-lease supplies to reach England he would have to be very clever out on the deep, and far more daring than the Tafts of the Senate would approve.
In February and March, German raiders and submarines operating in what they called “wolf packs” sank or captured twenty-two ships (115,000 tons). The opening of American shipyards to damaged British ships helped, but not enough; the Atlantic was fast becoming a German sea. The President announced that the United States “safety belt”—reporters called it “the chastity belt”—now reached a thousand miles into the Atlantic. At the same time he disclosed that American warships were “cooperating” with the British fleet. He cabled Churchill on April 11: “The United States will extend its ‘security zone’ to about west longitude 26 degrees.” He requested the prime minister to see to it that the Admiralty notify American naval units in “great secrecy” of its convoy dates, plans and destinations, “so that our patrol units can seek out any ships or planes of aggressor nations operating west of the new line.” As Fehrenbach has pointed out, “It was under this policy, and these conditions—unannounced military orders—that America entered the North Atlantic war.”
In June popular support for U.S. convoys was up to 52 percent, with 75 percent approving if it appeared that British would lose the war without convoys. But Roosevelt remained elusive. Knox and Stimson were publicly arguing for convoying; the President told reporters he was against it, and against Americans being sent overseas. That was duplicity, as we now know. Walter Lippmann saw the credibility gap and wrote a bitter column accusing FDR of treating the American people “cleverly, indirectly, even condescendingly and nervously.” It was Roosevelt who had to lead a united country, however, and he knew unity would be strengthened if the flag were attacked on the high seas, which, under his policy, was inevitable.
The first incident occurred on April 10. There wasn’t much to it. The U.S.S. Niblack, a destroyer picking up survivors from a torpedoed Dutch freighter, made sound contact with a U-boat and drove it away with depth charges. Not even Roosevelt could make much out of that. Still, with the British continuing to lose 400,000 tons of shipping every month, he felt he had to make some move. As he told the press, “It would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard.” Therefore he extended the western hemisphere some more. Now, apparently, it would almost reach the North Sea. The spark plug behind the new move was the Chief of Naval Operations, who on June 17 sent Hopkins a memorandum proposing that the 1st Brigade, U.S. Marine Corps, relieve the British troops in Iceland and ready themselves for “operations.” Back came the memo, initialed: OK FDR.
On July 7 the marines landed at Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, backed by a presidential statement noting that the Icelandic government had invited the troops and that Roosevelt agreed to prevent the use of Iceland “for use as a naval or air base against the Western Hemisphere.” That was absurd. As the bomber flew, Reykjavik was 3,900 miles from New York but only 2,800 miles from Berlin. Iceland was being “protected” from other powers. Confronted with a variation of the very stratagem they used so often and so effectively, the Nazis were indignant. The German Navy wanted to turn loose its U-boats against American shipping, but Hitler, sensing that Roosevelt was looking for just that sort of trouble, refused to be baited. He ordered Admiral Erich Raeder to take every possible precautionary step to see that no American vessel was attacked. Of course, he added, he understood the possibility of an honest U-boat error. So did Roosevelt. The American presence in Iceland put U.S. troops and ships squarely into the Battle of the Atlantic. “If ever there was a point when Roosevelt knowingly crossed some threshold between aiding Britain in order to stay out of war and aiding Britain by joining in the war,” Burns wrote, “July 1941 was probably the time.”
It was also a time when the Führer had to exercise self-control. Two weeks earlier, on Sunday, June 22, he had taken the boldest gamble of all, invading the Soviet Union
on a two-thousand mile front from the Arctic to the Ukraine. If there was one thing he didn’t need right now, it was another enemy. In any event, he suspected that this new invasion would not be entirely unpopular in the United States. It wasn’t. Time probably expressed the average American’s lack of commitment when it commented, “Like two vast prehistoric monsters lifting themselves out of the swamp, half-blind and savage, the two great totalitarian powers of the world now tore at each other’s throats.” Senator Harry Truman—in a remark Stalin would never forgive—said he hoped “the Nazis will kill lots of Russians and vice versa.” Washington’s generals and admirals thought Russia a lost cause and recommended that no supplies be sent there. Roosevelt and Hopkins disagreed. On October 1 a billion-dollar lend-lease protocol was signed with Soviet diplomats, and Russian freighters began making the long, dangerous Murmansk run.
Hopkins and Averell Harriman, lend-lease coordinator, were working with their staffs in seventeen hastily cleared rooms of the Federal Reserve Building. Mobilization was changing the face of Washington. Both the Pentagon and the new State Department Building were finished that autumn. Temporary buildings were rising on the Mall—though the “temporaries” of World War I were still in use. Here and there a name suggestive of the future appeared. Aboard the U.S.S. Augusta a young Knox assistant briefly conferred with the President over a labor problem; the ship log noted the call by “Adelai” Stevenson. In the Louisiana Army maneuvers Robert Sherrod told Eric Sevareid, “Be sure you see Colonel Eisenhower—he makes more sense than the rest of them.” Eisenhower himself was amused to see his photograph accompanied by the caption Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing. (“At least the initials were right,” he said wryly.)
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 35