These Truths
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Roosevelt pounded this same message at home. Six days later, in a commencement address at the University of Virginia, at his son Franklin Jr.’s graduation, Roosevelt described the dream that the United States is “a lone island” as a nightmare, the “nightmare of a people without freedom,” he said, “the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”22
Roosevelt had decided to run for an unprecedented third term, against the Republican challenger, Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie, who hoped to win over Democrats disenchanted with Roosevelt’s reign. Whitaker and Baxter produced materials for Willkie’s campaign, including a speaker’s manual that offered advice about how to handle Democrats in the audience: “rather than refer to the opponent as the ‘Democratic Party’ or ‘New Deal Administration’ refer to the Candidate by name only.” But Willkie was unwilling to run a divisive campaign. The president’s short-of-war strategy had led him to propose the first ever peacetime draft; Willkie refused to oppose it. “If you want to win the election you will come out against the proposed draft,” a reporter told Willkie. Willkie answered, “I would rather not win the election than do that.”23
Americans had so far been spared the misery of war. But, notwithstanding Hearst and Lindbergh and Coughlin, Willkie’s refusal to undermine Roosevelt had spared Americans the burden of division. “Here we are, and our basic institutions are still intact, our people relatively prosperous, and most important of all, our society relatively affectionate,” Dorothy Thompson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune the month before the election. “No country in the world is so well off.”24
In September of 1940, Churchill refused to surrender to Germany, even after the German blitz took the lives of forty thousand Londoners. Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers, signed a pact, acknowledging one another’s geographical spheres in the work of “their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things,” as if the world were theirs to divide.25 In November, moved by Churchill’s fortitude and fearful of the Axis menace, voters returned FDR to the White House. This unprecedented third term, along with the powers he’d assumed during the New Deal, the memory of the court-packing crisis, and the draft itself, added to the ongoing debate over whether the American system of government could endure the brutality of modernity. “Can our government meet the challenge of totalitarianism and remain democratic?” political scientist Pendleton Herring asked. “Is the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches compatible with the need for authority? In seeking firm leadership do we open ourselves to the danger of dictatorship?”26 But for the most part, these questions were set aside until after the war.
On December 29, 1940, FDR again took to the radio, this time to talk about the distance of both time and space. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” he said. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had been made obsolete, he said, by the speed of travel, even across the vast seas. “The width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships. At one point between Africa and Brazil the distance is less than from Washington to Denver, Colorado, five hours for the latest type of bomber. And at the North end of the Pacific Ocean America and Asia almost touch each other.” And what of the Axis’s “new order”? “They may talk of a ‘new order’ in the world, but what they have in mind is only a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny.” Americans would not do Europe’s fighting for them but were duty-bound to provide arms to save the world from that tyranny. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he said. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” Descending from the lofty to the practical, he said, “I appeal to the owners of plants—to the managers—to the workers—to our own Government employees—to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint,” he said. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”27
Britain, overwhelmingly outgunned by Germany and with its own armaments fast dwindling, had run out of cash to buy tanks and ships and planes from the United States. FDR had a plan for that, the Lend-Lease Act: the United States would lend these things to Britain, to be returned after the war, in exchange of long-term leases of territory for American military bases. To reach Americans still wavering, Roosevelt aligned fighting the Axis with the United States’ founding purpose, its self-evident truths. On January 6, 1941, in his annual address to Congress, he argued that the United States must exert its might in securing for the world “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. (Answered one African American, “White folks talking about the Four Freedoms and we ain’t got none.”)28
As he readied for his third inauguration, Roosevelt took time to write a note to Churchill, which he trusted to his defeated opponent, Wendell Willkie, to deliver in person. “He is truly helping to keep politics out over here,” Roosevelt said of Willkie. On a green sheet of White House stationary, Roosevelt wrote out, from memory, lines from the last stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” the poem Longfellow had drafted in 1849 and revised after his friend Charles Sumner had convinced him to end with hope. “I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill:
Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.
Churchill read Roosevelt’s letter on the radio. “What is the answer that I shall give in your name to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty million?” he asked his listeners. “Put your confidence in us, give us your faith and our blessing,” he answered. “Give us the tools and we shall finish the job.”29
Willkie, after meeting with Churchill, flew back to Washington in time to appear before the House Committee on Foreign Relations to offer his support for the Lend-Lease Act. When isolationists on the committee presented him with remarks he had made during the campaign, about Roosevelt rushing the United States into war, Willkie waved those remarks aside as campaign bluster. “He was elected President,” Willkie said. “He is my President now.”30
While Congress deliberated, Henry Luce took to the pages of Life to make the case for Lend-Lease. In 1919, Luce said, the United States had passed up “a golden opportunity . . . to assume leadership of the world.” He urged Americans not to make that same mistake again. America must not only enter the war—he argued against “the moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism”—but adopt a new role in the world. “The twentieth century is the American century,” he insisted.31
Against the internationalism of Roosevelt, Willkie, and Luce stood the increasingly besieged and embittered ranks of “America Firsters.” In testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Charles Lindbergh refused to make a distinction between the Axis and the Allies. “I want neither side to win,” he answered.32 Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and their followers adopted Hearst’s America First motto in founding the America First Committee, which launched a publicity campaign against the Lend-Lease program by buying fifteen-minute ads on a forty-station radio network. So helpful were their efforts to the Germans that Nazi shortwave radio broadcast its approval from the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin: “The America First Committee is true Americanism and true patriotism.”33
Congress nevertheless passed the Lend-Lease Act, which Roosevelt, relieved beyond measure, signed on March 11. A grateful Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” The New York Times marked its passage as the long-delayed reversal of America’s retreat from the world at the end of the last war.34 Yet that spring and summer, Lindbergh drew crowds ten thousand strong, even as much of the world lay in the hands of the Axis. Hitler, having aban
doned his pact with Stalin, had invaded the Soviet Union. Germany had seized virtually all of Europe; only Britain remained. Japan, feared for its pitilessness as a result of its invasion of Manchuria and Nanking, controlled nearly half of China. Lindberg fiercely opposed communism. “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exists in the Soviet Union,” he insisted. His fevered anticommunism left him blind to other kinds of ruthlessness. He offered excuses for Nazi propaganda: “In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question of whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances.” (Much of the American Left suffered from a different blindness—to the ruthlessness of Stalinism.) But he was also animated by other passions, confiding to his diary his belief that the press, in the United States, was controlled by Jews—“Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio, and most of our motion pictures.” Lindbergh, while defending Nazi propaganda, spoke out against what he considered to be American propaganda. At an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in September, he named three forces as responsible for spreading it: “The British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” Wendell Willkie, who had heroically cast down the campaign cudgel to lend his support to FDR and the war effort, called Lindbergh’s speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.”35
More moderate isolationists set their objections within the long tradition of opposition to American expansion and American imperialism, elaborating on arguments that had been made during the War with Mexico and the Spanish-American War. In May of 1941, Robert Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio, warned prophetically that American entry into the war would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft said, “Frankly, the American people don’t want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom. It is not our manifest destiny or our national destiny.”36
Roosevelt knew how to counter an argument about national destiny. That summer, in an elaborate ruse designed to fool the press, he appeared to leave Washington for a fishing trip in Maine. Even Eleanor didn’t know the truth.37 Instead, he headed out across the ocean to meet Winston Churchill. Each man came on a gray battleship of steel and glass; the American president arrived on board the Augusta, the British prime minister on the Prince of Wales. The portly Churchill, wearing the dark blue uniform of a navy man, crossed over to the Augusta to meet with Roosevelt, who was determined to stand to receive him, leaning heavily on his son Elliott. “The Boss insisted upon returning to the painful prison of his braces,” an aide said, an arrangement all the more worrying on board a lurching ship. “Even the slight pitch of the Augusta meant pain and the possibility of a humiliating fall.” But the president stayed on his feet.
“At last—we’ve gotten together,” Roosevelt said, as the two men shook hands.
“We have,” said Churchill.
They opened negotiations. Churchill hoped to convince Roosevelt to ask Congress to declare war. They resumed talks on board the Prince of Wales, Roosevelt again insisting on not using his wheelchair, holding onto Elliott with one hand and a rail with the other. Churchill didn’t get what he wanted, but the two men forged a historic agreement. By telegram, they released a joint statement on August 14, containing, in eight points, their commitment, “after the final destruction of Nazi tyranny,” to a postwar world of free trade, self-determination, international security, arms control, social welfare, economic justice, and human rights. Their agreement, dubbed the Atlantic Charter, established a set of principles that would later be restated at Bretton Woods and in the charter of the United Nations. They agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” And they pledged themselves to what had been the tenets of Roosevelt’s New Deal, “improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security.” And, bringing together Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms with Churchill’s knack for poetry, they pledged themselves to a peace in which “all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”38
It was meant as a new deal for the world. But first, they would have to win the war.
II.
EARLY IN THE SUN-STREAKED morning of December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched more than 350 planes from aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean. They flew to Hawaii and began a surprise attack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbor, a torrent of bombs raining down from the sky like bolts of thunder thrown by an angry god. Japanese bombers sank four battleships, destroyed nearly 200 American planes, killed more than 2,400 Americans, and wounded another 1,100. Sixty-four Japanese military men were killed and one Japanese sailor was captured. Without issuing a declaration of war, and while the United States and Japan were still engaged in diplomacy, the Japanese had essentially wiped out the United States Pacific Fleet. Churchill called Roosevelt to ask if the news he’d heard could possibly be right.
“It’s quite true,” the president said. “We are all in the same boat now.”
“This certainly simplifies things,” Churchill said. “God be with you.”39
Immediately, Roosevelt set about dictating the address he would deliver to Congress, marking the attack on a chronicle of time. “Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history dash the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan period paragraph.”40 He thought better of it and rewrote his words with care, and with an ear for force. The next day, Americans turned to their radios to listen as the president, his voice unshaken, spoke to Congress, calling December 7, 1941, not “a date which will live in world history” but “a date which will live in infamy.”
His hands bracing a podium crowded with microphones, he called upon the “righteous might” of the American people. Less than a half hour after the president finished his seven-minute speech, Congress declared war on Japan. As the nation set about the grim task of wartime mobilization, Roosevelt began the work of laying the groundwork for an argument that the United States ought to declare war on Germany, too. “We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map,” he told radio listeners on December 9, in a fireside chat in which he strategically tied Japan to Germany. “We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.”41
A 1943 Office of War Information poster celebrated the combined strength of the Allied forces. Roosevelt would not need to press that argument. On December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States. This was Hitler’s worst miscalculation, since it’s by no means clear that Roosevelt would have been able to convince Congress to declare war on Germany if Hitler hadn’t acted rashly. He’d underestimated Churchill, and he’d underestimated Roosevelt. Above all, he’d underestimated the United States.
However sudden, the decisive entry of the United States into the war in both Asia and Europe rested on years of preparation. American planning for the war had begun in the 1930s, with dedicated munitions manufacturing and the building of planes, tanks, and battleships, much of this taking place in the South. Under the terms of the draft for men between eighteen and forty-five, put in place in 1940, 31 million men registered, 17 million were examined, and 10 million served. Adding volunteers and women to that number, the total reached more than 15 million: 10.4 million in the army, 3.9 million in the navy, some 600,000 in the marines, and another 250,000 in the coast guard. Three million women en
tered the labor force. Three-quarters of those women were married. The female labor force doubled. Beginning in 1942, women joined the Women’s Army Corps and the navy’s WAVES. By the time the war ended, in 1945, 12 million Americans were active-duty members of the military, compared with 300,000 in 1939.42
Wartime mobilization called on women to join the military, as in this U.S. Navy recruiting poster from 1942. American manufacturing and farming were conscripted, too. Between 1940 and 1945, Americans produced 300,000 military planes, 86,000 tanks, 3 million machine guns, and 71,000 naval ships. Farm production increased by 25 percent. Farmers produced 477 million more bushels of corn in 1944 than they had in 1939. These supplies weren’t just for American forces; the United States supplied Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies. Fifteen percent of American output was shipped abroad.43
The federal budget grew at an astounding rate, from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945. Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941. In 1939, less than 2 percent of American national output went to war; by 1944, 40 percent did. The GDP doubled. And the GNP rose from $91 billion to $166 billion, crushing doubts that the economy had reached its limit. Mobilization for war acted as a public works program, the largest ever. In Europe, even food was rationed during the war; in the United States, civilians enjoyed a wealth of consumer goods and increased buying power. The leanness of the Depression was over. “The pawnbroking business has fallen upon dark days,” the Wall Street Journal observed in 1942.44