American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  October 16—Following congressional passage of the Selective Service Act in mid-September, Roosevelt took symbolic as well as actual leadership of the muster, speaking movingly to the nation about its significance and presiding magisterially at the first drawing from the goldfish bowl.

  The President had worried about pressing for the draft in the middle of a reelection campaign. After taking a moderately interventionist line early in his campaign, to the approbation of eastern internationalists like Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce, and Dorothy Thompson, Willkie suddenly switched toward isolationism when he found his early strength dwindling. His new position lost him Lippmann’s and Thompson’s backing but brought him into “a temporary alliance with people for whom he had contempt,” according to a biographer, “including such isolationist stalwarts” as Hamilton Fish, Lindbergh, and McCormick. It also helped win him an endorsement from John L. Lewis, who had turned bitterly against FDR. Willkie’s new line appeared to boost him in the presidential polls.

  While Ickes and other activists agonized, the President stuck to the appearance of nonpartisanship until late in October. Then he attacked. Few commanders have sized up the terrain more shrewdly, rallied their restless battalions more boldly, and struck at the enemy’s weak points more tellingly than did FDR during the two-week blitz that he unleashed on October 23. From his declaration that night to a roaring crowd in Philadelphia that “I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight,” to his attack not on Willkie but on the congressional Republicans symbolized by “Ma-a-a-rtin, Ba-a-a-rton, and Fish,” to his rash promise in Boston to the “mothers and fathers of America” that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he stayed on the offensive.

  With Lewis, antiwar socialists, and the communists attacking the Administration in a strange partnership, the President noted that there was something “very ominous in this combination that has been forming within the Republican Party between the extreme reactionary and the extreme radical elements of this country.” On election night the President was so worried by the apparent closeness of the contest that he untypically took the early returns alone. But his victory was decisive: 449 electoral votes to 82 for Willkie, and a popular-vote margin of five million. FDR won every city, save one, with a population over 400,000. Labor had stuck with him—including Lewis’s mine workers. Willkie picked up five million more votes than Landon had four years before.

  “I’m happy I’ve won, but sorry Wendell lost,” Roosevelt told his son James. The two men quickly buried their campaign hatchets. When Willkie visited the White House after the election, the two men were overheard swapping campaign anecdotes amid great bursts of laughter.

  The War of Two Worlds

  In front of a bristling artillery piece at the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works of Berlin, Adolf Hitler poured out his wrath on the capitalists of the world, their kept press and political parties. The stakes, he told the assembled workers, were far greater than the fate of one nation. “Two worlds are in conflict, two philosophies of life … Gold versus labor.” One of these worlds would crack up.

  Three weeks later, in a fireside chat on the eve of 1941, Roosevelt accepted the gage of battle. Citing Hitler’s remark about “two opposing worlds,” the President said, “In other words, the Axis not only admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” The “Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”

  Wearing his pince-nez and his usual bow tie, the President was sitting in front of a plain desk covered with microphones labeled NBC, CBS, MBS. Around him in the little room crowded a small and mixed company: his mother, Sara, Cordell Hull and other cabinet members, and Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard.

  The American appeasers, the President went on, “tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all this bloodshed in the world could be saved; that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can.

  “They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?” After these bellicose words the President once again renewed his pledge to keep out of war.

  “Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United Slates getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.” Admittedly, he said, there was risk in any course. But his “sole purpose” was to keep war away from the United States. His listeners could “nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.” America, he proclaimed in the grand climax of his talk, “must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

  Roosevelt’s talk, by far his most militant response to Hitler’s challenge, sent a thrill of hope across the anti-Nazi world—to Londoners who on that very night were reeling from a stupendous firebombing by the Nazis, to Frenchmen and Dutchmen crouching by their radios, to impatient interventionists at home listening to Roosevelt’s strong, resonant voice by their own firesides. His speech aroused isolationists to a new pitch. More than ever they were convinced that Roosevelt was now plotting to bring the nation into a shooting war.

  They did not know their man. It was not Roosevelt’s style or strategy to fashion a grand political and military strategy that in turn would produce a clear-cut decision. Rather, he kept his eye constantly cocked on public opinion, especially as reflected in Congress. It was never clear when he crossed the momentous threshold from viewing “all aid short of war” as a way of keeping out of war to seeing it as a way of winning an inevitable war. More likely he approached the threshold warily, evaded it, skirted around it, and then found himself past it, without having ever decisively stepped over it. Intellectually, he had no secret plan to involve the United States in the war; strategically, he was not a plotter.

  But the isolationists in a fundamental sense were more justified in their suspicions than perhaps even they wholly recognized. For the crucial question in these epochal days was not what Roosevelt was secretly thinking. It was what he was publicly doing, whether or not even he realized the full implications of all he was doing. And what he was doing was inextricably linked with its impact on public opinion and Congress and cabinet at home, on the arousal of expectations in London and fears in Berlin and Tokyo, on the forging of a closer alliance between Germany and Japan. And what Roosevelt and Churchill did, how Hitler reacted to it, how Congress and public responded, unleashed further events that ineluctably brought the United States into the war. Thus it can be said in retrospect that the several months beginning with Roosevelt’s reelection in early November—another “hundred days,” as it turned out—marked the start of the country’s intervention in World War II. It was, not in mind but in effect, the Administration’s declaration of war.

  That declaration began with the American voters’ decision, by a clear-cut majority, to endorse the more strongly interventionist of the two major-party candidates. Hitler could read election returns. Now he began to take seriously the likelihood of American entrance into the war, even while he underestimated the American military-industrial potential. As a global strategist he saw the interrelationships of national power. If the Russian threat against Germany were removed, he told his generals, “we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved; this in turn would mean increased danger to the U.S.A.”

  By tying down the United States in the Pacific, the Japanese would draw the Americans away from Europe, making Britain
more vulnerable.

  Churchill too could read election returns—and his own shipping losses. Early in December he wrote Roosevelt that those losses had been over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports.” In his letter—“one of the most important I ever wrote”—he laid out his urgent requests: American aid in keeping the supply routes open to Britain, which would help ensure continued British resistance and would not, Churchill said, provoke Hitler into fighting the United States; Roosevelt’s “good offices” to induce Eire to cooperate on such matters; and above all dollars to help Britain pay for massive supplies of planes, ships, tanks, and other arms.

  “I believe you will agree,” Churchill concluded, “that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”

  Carrying Churchill’s letter, a seaplane splashed down next to the cruiser Tuscaloosa off Antigua, where the President was vacationing in the bright Caribbean sun. He read the letter with a poker face and seemed unmoved, but Hopkins sensed during the next few days “that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.… Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program.” The whole program was Lend-Lease—the simple but drastic idea that the United States could send Britain munitions without charge and be repaid, not in dollars, but in kind, after the war was over. The President could not doubt Britain’s financial urgency; word came from Washington that London evidently had less than $2 billion available to pay for $5 billion in orders.

  Back home, in press conferences, speeches, his eve-of-1941 fireside chat, and in his inaugural address, the President used the momentum of his election victory to press for massively increased aid to Britain. He wanted to “get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign,” he told reporters, and offered an example. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.” Afterward he would ask for no money from his neighbor—only to have his garden hose back. Few challenged Roosevelt’s analogy, save for Senator Robert A. Taft, who said that lending war equipment was like lending chewing gum—you wouldn’t want it back.

  Isolationists pounced on the bill as soon as it was introduced into Congress in mid-January. The great debate got off to an acrimonious start when Wheeler called the bill “the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Telling the press they could quote him, Roosevelt labeled this remark “the most untruthful, as the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said.” Wheeler, Hamilton Fish, and others pictured the bill as an act of war. It was a bill for the “destruction of the American Republic,” thundered the Chicago Tribune; a bill designed to scuttle American democracy, cried Father Coughlin. Lindbergh urged in congressional hearings that America should concentrate on building up her air power and retire behind continental defenses; he predicted German victory in Europe but denied he favored it. Claiming he was barred from testifying, the blatantly anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith threatened to bring in a petition with two million signatures against the bill. Almost drowned out in the furor were the words of thoughtful critics of the bill such as the historian Charles A. Beard, who warned that the measure would engage the government “officially in the conflicts of Europe and Asia.”

  The passage early in March 1941of Lend-Lease by overwhelming majorities—60-31in the Senate and 317-71in the House—had just the effect that interventionists wanted and isolationists feared: deeper entanglement of the United States in the war. The stakes were higher now: Roosevelt’s in having supplies reach England, Churchill’s in receiving them, Hitler’s in halting them. All the stakes were raised after the Führer’s unstoppable armies invaded Yugoslavia and Greece in April. As the spring days lengthened, the Nazi threat to North Atlantic shipping grew sharply; as did pressure on Roosevelt from Stimson, Knox, and other interventionists to convoy ships through the submarine-infested waters. But Roosevelt feared that convoying would move him too far ahead of public opinion. He would only patrol—but his naval and air patrols, he confided to his war cabinet, would notify British convoys of the whereabouts of Nazi raiders.

  Slowly—all too slowly for his impatient advisers—the President involved his navy and his nation in the Battle of the Atlantic. He did everything save convert his “undeclared naval war” into a declared one: he took over the defense of Greenland from Denmark; authorized British ships to be repaired in American shipyards and British pilots to be trained on American airfields; transferred ten Coast Guard cutters to the Royal Navy; sent his patrol ships farther north and east; proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency.” His destroyers became ever bolder in tracking U-boats and reporting their locations. Roosevelt half feared, half hoped for some incident in the brumous mists of the North Atlantic. But it had to be a major incident that would unite the country, not a minor incident that might merely inflame the debate at home. When the American freighter Robin Moor was sunk in the South Atlantic by a U-boat in June, the President found it an inadequate excuse to start convoying.

  By late spring 1941 Roosevelt was impaled on the horns of his own strategic dilemma. He had so insisted that aid was a means of avoiding rather than preparing for war that he cloaked his aggressive Atlantic patrolling in secrecy. Hitler could ignore small provocations; Roosevelt dared not try a large one, such as armed convoying, which would divide Congress and the electorate. So he had become hostage to Hitler’s strategy; as long as the Führer refrained from responding to an action of FDR’s as casus belli, the President was imprisoned in his policy of aid short of war.

  Only another momentous event now could free the President from his dilemma. Germany’s massive invasion of Russia in June 1941 transformed the global struggle but it only served to worsen FDR’s predicament. For Hitler, now that he was fighting on two fronts, was all the more intent on keeping the United States out of the European war, and hence all the more intent on edging Japan toward a more belligerent posture in the Pacific. More than ever on the global chessboard, Roosevelt seemed to be a pawn edging ahead one or two steps, or a knight moving obliquely—and certainly not a queen radiating power across the board or a king offered as the supreme prize of battle.

  If the President felt constrained in the Atlantic, he felt positively frustrated in the Pacific. On becoming President he had inherited an enmity between his own country and Japan that he had found no opportunity to overcome. In the fall of 1931, a year and half before he entered the White House, Japanese officers of the Kwantung Army had used a manufactured incident to attack and then take over Manchuria, which Tokyo thereupon recognized as Manchukuo. Soon Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, had promulgated the “Stimson Doctrine,” which held that the United States would not acknowledge agreements impairing the sovereignty of the Republic of China. Later Japan denounced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, quit the League of Nations, promulgated the “new order” as a substitute for the “antiquated” Open Door policy, and stepped up its aggressive activities in North China. Stimson, now FDR’s Secretary of War, pressed the President to take a firmer stand in the Pacific. Whenever the Administration appeared to be making concessions to Japan at the expense of China, moreover, protests and lamentations arrived from the beleaguered President Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking.

  It was no simple matter, the President was discovering, to be aggressive in the Atlantic and pacific in the Pacific. Around the globe the fronts were linked in numberless ways: Tokyo would benefit from the success of Hitler�
�s drive east into Russia; Hitler hoped for Japanese action against Russia; Britain’s interests in Asia were imperiled; Vichy’s authority over Indochina was vulnerable; the Dutch had a presence in the East Indies; and these all were further linked with the interests of secondary powers. The President had to calculate how these fears and ambitions were cantilevered by the complex and ever-shifting strains and thrusts of military power and strategy. One blow could upset the swaying, quivering mobile of global balances, but what kind of blow and with what effect?

  And always the President had to act amid the murk of secret plans and obscure rivalries. “The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves,” he wrote Ickes early in July 1941, “and have been for the past week—trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. No one knows what the decision will be.” The Japanese leaders had no less difficulty divining the Administration’s intentions. Through myopic eyes the inscrutable Orient and the incomprehensible Occident viewed each other.

  Events were no less cloudy in the Atlantic. The five months of diplomatic activity, military planning, and incidents from the early summer of 1941 to the end of November were among the most critical and complex in the history of American foreign relations. Not only were the events themselves significant, but how they were perceived or misperceived by the other side closely affected the course of events.

  In mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly at Argentia Bay off Newfoundland. It was less a time of close military planning than an opportunity for the two leaders to size each other up face to face, discuss postwar problems and opportunities, and issue an eloquent Wilsonian Atlantic-Charter of war aims. To Hitler it was a meeting of warmongers plotting the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a phrase in the sixth article of the Charter.