American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [Response to Chicago address and FDR’s response]: Burns, Lion, pp. 318-19; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 246-48; Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 (Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 382-98, 538-39; Divine, Reluctant Belligerent, p. 45.

  [“A terrible thing”]: quoted in Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), p. 167.

  [Hitler’s domestic power]: see Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler’s Power (Princeton University Press, 1969); Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  [Rhineland]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 290-96, Hitler quoted at p. 293; James T. Emmerson, The Rhineland Crisis, 7 March 1936: A Study in Multilateral Diplomacy (Maurice Temple Smith, 1977); William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 [Simon and Schuster, 1969), ch. 16.

  158 [Sudeten crisis]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 12, Churchill quoted at p. 423; Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (Doubleday, 1979); Burns, Lion, pp. 384-88; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 19-21 ; Larry W. Fuchser, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: A Study in the Politics of History (Norton, 1982), chs. 6-7; Offner, pp. 245-71; Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper: The Story of American Diplomacy and the Second World War (Simon and Schuster, 1940), ch. 2; MacDonald, chs. 6-7.

  158 [Czech dismemberment]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 428-30, 437-54.

  [“Never in my life”]: letter to Gertrude Ely, March 25, 1939, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), vol. 2, p. 872.

  [Efforts toward arms embargo repeal]: see David L. Porter, The Seventy-sixth Congress and World War II, 1939-1940 (University of Missouri Press, 1979), ch. 3; Betty Glad, Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider (Columbia University Press, 1986), ch. 22.

  [Pittman]: Fred L. Israel, Nevada’s Key Pittman (University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 166-67; see also Glad, pp. 217-19 and chs. 20-24; Wayne S. Cole, “Senator Pittman and American Neutrality Policies, 1933-1940,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (March 1960), pp. 644-62.

  [FDR meeting with Senate leaders]: quoted in Burns, Lion, pp. 392-93.

  159 [FDR on prospective Axis aggression]: memorandum by Carlton Savage, May 19, 1939, quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940 (Harper, 1952), pp. 138-39.

  [Stalin to Churchill on Soviet turn to Germany]: Lord Beaverbrook Papers, Cabinet Papers, House of Lords.

  [Nazi-Soviet Pact]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 15, Stalin quoted at p. 540; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 22, 24; Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 23-35; David J. Dallin, Soviet Russia’s Foreign Policy, 1939-1942, Leon Dennen, trans. (Yale University Press, 1942), chs. 2-3; Raymond J. Strong and James S. Beddie, eds., Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office (U.S. Department of State, 1948), chs. 1-3.

  [Start of World War II]: Nicholas Bethell, The War Hitler Won: The Fall of Poland, September 1939 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); Shirer, Rise and Fall. chs. 16-17; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 25-26.

  160 [“I sit in one of the dives”]: “September 1, 1939,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Edward Mendelson, ed. (Random House, 1977), pp. 245-47, quoted at p. 245.

  [“The end of the world”]: quoted in Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980), p. 190.

  [Arms embargo repeal and “cash and carry”]: Porter, ch. 4; Divine, Illusion, chs. 8-9; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 320-30; Burns, Lion, pp. 395-97; Langer and Gleason, pp. 218-35.

  [Noninterventionist mail campaign]: Dallek, p. 200.

  [“One single hard-headed thought”]: message to Congress, September 2 1, 1939, in Public Papers, vol. 8, pp. 512-22, quoted at p. 521.

  [“Dreadful rape”]: FDR to Lincoln MacVeagh, letter of December 1, 1939, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, p. 961.

  161 [Anglo-American relations]: see MacDonald, passim; Warren K. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939-1941(Johns Hopkins Press, 1969); Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door: The Temptation of British Opulence, 1937-1942,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2 (June 1971), pp. 232-59; Fuchser, pp. 97-99.

  [“Much public criticism”]: letter of February 1, 1940, in Francis L. Loewenheim et al., eds., Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (Saturday Review Press/ E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 93.

  [“The country as a whole”]: quoted in Dallek, p. 211.

  [German invasion of Denmark and Norway]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 20; J. L. Moulton, The Norwegian Campaign of 1940: A Study of Warfare in Three Dimensions (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960); Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years (Morrow, 1974), chs. 1-7.

  [“Can have no illusions”]: April 15, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, p. 161.

  162 [German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, France]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 21; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 28-29; John Williams, The Ides of May: The Defeat of France, May-June 1940 (Knopf, 1968).

  [“Decide the destiny”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 419.

  162 [“Scene has darkened swiftly”]: in Loewenheim, pp. 94-95, quoted at p. 94. [“Nazified Europe”]: ibid., p. 94.

  [Reynaud’s appeal to FDR]: quoted in Dallek, p. 230; see also Eleanor M. Gates, End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939-40 (University of California Press, 1981), Appendix D. [Walsh threat]: Burns, Lion, pp. 421-22.

  [Opinion polls on aid]: poll of May 23, 1940, in Cantril and Strunk, p. 973 (item 67).

  163 [Isolationist defections]: Justus D. Doenecke, “Non-interventionism of the Left: The Keep America Out of the War Congress, 1938-41,”Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 12, no. 2 (1977), pp. 221-36, esp. pp. 231-32.

  [FDR as Sphinx]: see Burns, Lion, p. 410.

  [FDR’s maneuverings to preserve options]: ibid., pp. 408-15; James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story (McGraw-Hill, 1948), chs. 20-24; Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas (Harper, 1948), chs. 15-16; Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht, Never Again: A President Runs for a Third Term (Macmillan, 1968), chs. 1, 2.

  163-4 [Republican convention]: Robert E. Burke, “The Election of 1940,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 2928-31; Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie (Doubleday, 1984), ch. 10; Parmet and Hecht, ch. 6; James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: Robert A. Taft (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), chs. 14-15.

  164 [“Could not in these times refuse”]: quoted in Farley, p. 251.

  [Democratic convention]: Burns, Lion, pp. 426-30; Burke, pp. 2933-36; Farley, chs. 25-29; Parmet and Hecht, ch. 8.

  [“Destroyer deal”]: Philip Goodhart, Fifty Ships That Saved the World (Doubleday, 1965); Mark L. Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 1968), ch. 4; Dallek, pp. 243-48; Kimball, Unsordid Act, pp. 67-71; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 384-86; Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 376-407; Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt: The Undeclared Naval War (Free Press, 1979), ch. 7.

  [“Whole fate of the war”]: letter of July 31, 1940, in Loewenheim, pp. 107-108, quoted at p. 107.

  [Hitler’s thwarted invasion of Britain]: see Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 22.

  165 [Selective Service]: J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, Jr., The First Peacetime Draft (University Press of Kansas, 1986); Porter, chs. 6-7; Dallek, pp. 248-50; Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 473-75.

  [Willkie campaign]: Neal, ch. 12; Burke, pp. 2937-43; Parmet and Hecht, chs. 9-12; Muriel Rukeyser, One Life (Simon and Schuster, 1957), ch. 4; Donald Bruce Johnson, The Republican Party and Wendell Willkie (University of Illinois Press, 1960), ch. 4; Cole, Roosevelt, p. 396.

  [“A temporary alliance”]: Neal, pp. 158-59, quoted at p. 159.

  [FDR’s campaign]: Burns,
Lion, pp. 442-51; Burke, pp. 2943-45; Parmet and Hechl, chs. 9-12.

  [“An old campaigner”]: in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 485-95, quoted at p. 488,.

  [“Ma-a-a-rtin”]: see ibid., pp. 506, 523; Rosenman, Working, pp. 240-41.

  [“Mothers and fathers of America”]: October 30, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 514-24, quoted at p. 517.

  [“Very ominous”]: campaign address at Brooklyn, N.Y., November 1, 1940, in ibid., vol. 9, pp. 530-39, quoted at p. 531; see also Burns, Lion, p. 449.

  [Election results]: Schlesinger, vol. 4, p. 3006; Burns, Lion, pp. 454-55.

  [“Happy I’ve won but”]: quoted in James Roosevelt and Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View (Playboy Press, 1976), p. 164.

  [FDR-Willkie meeting]: see James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R.: A Son’s Story of a Lonely Man (Harcourt, 1959), p. 325; Grace Tully, F.D.R., My Boss (Scribner, 1949), p. 58.

  The War of Two Worlds

  166 [Hitler’s address at Rheinmetall-Borsig]: New York Times, December 11, 1940, pp. 1, 4-5, quoted at p. 4.

  166 [FDR’s reply]: fireside chat of December 29, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 633-44, quoted at pp. 634, 639, 640, 643; Burns, Soldier, pp. 27-28.

  [Hitler on global strategy]: quoted in Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 821; see also Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Richard and Clara Winston, trans. (Vintage, 1975), p. 643.

  [Churchill’s letter to FDR]: December 8, 1940, in Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 558-67, quoted at pp. 561, 564, 566.

  [“One of the most important”]: ibid., p. 558.

  [FDR’s conception of Lend-Lease]: quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Harper, 1950), p. 224.

  [Lend-Lease]: Kimball, Unsordid Act; John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), ch. 6; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941 (Harper, 1953), chs. 8-9; Dallek, pp. 255-60; Cole, Roosevelt, ch. 28; Burns, Soldier, pp. 43-49; Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door”; William A. Klingaman, 1941 (Harper, 1988), ch. 3.

  [Britain’s financial straits]: Dallek, p. 255.

  [FDR’s garden-hose analogy]: press conference 702, December 17, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 604-15, quoted at p. 607; see also Kimball, Unsordid Act, p. 77.

  169 [Taft on Lend-Lease]: Patterson, Mr. Republican, pp. 242-44.

  [Wheeler on Lend-Lease and FDR’s reply]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 44; and press conference 710, January 14, 1941, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 710-12, quoted at pp. 711-12.

  [Tribune on Lend-Lease]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 45.

  [Coughlin on Lend-Lease]: see Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse University Press, 1965), p. 228.

  [Lindbergh’s testimony]: Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 416-17; Kimball, Unsordid Act, p. 190.

  [Smith’s threat]: Kimball, Unsordid Act, pp. 162-63; see also Gerald L. K. Smith, Besieged Patriot (Christian Nationalist Crusade, 1978).

  [Beard on Lend-Lease]: Kimball, Roosevelt and the World Crisis, p. 10.

  [Pressure on FDR to convoy ships]: Dallek, pp. 260-62; Burns, Soldier, pp. 80-92.

  [FDR’s “undeclared naval war”]: Bailey and Ryan; Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 878-83; H. L. Trefousse, Germany and American Neutrality, 1939-1941 (Bookman Associates, 1951).

  170 [German invasion of the Soviet Union]: G. Deborin, The Second World War (Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d.), chs. 7-8.

  [U.S.-Japanese relations in 1930s]: John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Random House, 1970), chs. 1-2; Armin Rappaport, Henry L. Stimson and Japan, 1931-1933 (University of Chicago Press, 1963); Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1973); Howard Jaslon, “Cordell Hull, His ‘Associates,’ and Relations with Japan, 1933-1936,” Mid-America, vol. 56, no. 3 (July 1974), pp. 160-74; Frederick C. Adams, “The Road to Pearl Harbor: A Reexamination of American Far Eastern Policy, July 1937-December 1938,” Journal of American History, vol. 63, no. 1 (June 1971), pp. 73-92.

  171 [Atlantic-Pacific links]: see Burns, Soldier, p. 106.

  [“Knock-outfight”]: letter of July 1, 1941, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, pp. 1173-74, quoted at p. 1174.

  [FDR-Churchill summit]: Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969); Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, ch. 21.

  [“Final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”]: quoted in Wilson, p. 206.

  171-2 [Greer and Kearny incidents]: Bailey and Ryan, chs. 12-14; Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, pp. 742-60.

  172 [“Very simply and very bluntly”]: Navy and Total Defense Day Address, October 27, 1941, in Public Papers, vol. 10, pp. 438-44, quoted at p. 441.

  [“United States has attacked”]: quoted in Bailey and Ryan, p. 202.

  [Approach of war in the Pacific]: Dallek, ch. 11 passim; Toland, Rising Sun, chs. 4-5; Burns, Soldier, ch.4; Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 25; Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1950); Kimball, Roosevelt and the World Crisis, pp. 90-103; Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), ch. 11; Christopher Thorne, The Issue of War: States, Societies, and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1985), part 1; Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978), ch. 2; Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 (University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War (Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 1; Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (Harcourt, 1967), ch. 8; Kimilada Miwa, “Japanese Images of War with the United States,” in Akira Iriye, ed., Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Harvard University Press, 1975), ch.6.

  [ U.S. gasoline and scrap iron embargo]: see Burns, Soldier, pp. 21, 107, 109-10.

  [“Within the hour”]: note from Churchill to Eden, December 2, 1941, in Churchill, Grand Alliance, pp. 600-1, quoted at p. 601.

  [“Strongest fortress”]: quoted in Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 122.

  [“This means war”]: ibid., p. 475.

  [Pearl Harbor]: ibid., chs. 61-67; Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Free Press, 1985), pp. 1-7; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 211-20; Klingaman, ch. 27.

  [Mitsuo on concentration of U.S. ships]: Spector, p. 4.

  175 [Controversy as to foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor attack]: see Spector, pp. 95-100; Prange, At Dawn, esp. ch. 81 and Appendix (“Revisionists Revisited”), pp. 839-50; Prange et al., Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (McGraw-Hill, 1986); John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (Doubleday, 1982); Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (Yale University Press, 1948); Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The. Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (Devin-Adair, 1954); Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, 1962); Telford Taylor, “Day of Infamy, Decades of Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1984, pp. 107, 113, 120.

  [Washington reaction to attack]: Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 216, 223-24, Knox quoted at p. 223.

  [Tokyo reaction to attack]: ibid., pp. 227-28, song quoted at p. 228.

  [Churchill’s reaction to attack]: Churchill, Grand Alliance, pp. 604-8.

  175-6 [Hitler’s reaction to attack]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 875-76, 883-902; Fest, pp. 655-56.

  176 [FDR on Germany and Italy at war with U.S.]: Public Papers, vol. 10, pp. 522-30, quoted at p. 530.

  [Hitler’s declaration of war upon U.S.]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 897-900; Burns, Soldier, pp. 67-68, 173-74; Bailey and Ryan, ch. 17; John Toland, Adolf Hi
tler (Doubleday, 1976), pp. 692-97; Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New American Library, 1978), pp. 489-99; James V. Compton, The Swastika and the Eagle: Hitler, the United States, and the Origins of World War II (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), chs. 1-2, 15; Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Hitler’s Image of the United States,” American Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 4 (July 1964), pp. 1006-21.

  [Japanese attack at Philippines]: William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (Little, Brown, 1978), ch. 5; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 232-35; Spector, pp. 106-8; Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (U.S. Department of the Army, 1953); Daniel F. Harrington, “A Careless Hope: American Air Power and Japan, 1941,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 48 (1979), pp. 217-38.

  177 [FDR-Churchill conference]: Robert Beitzell, The Uneasy Alliance: America, Britain, and Russia, 1941-1943 (Knopf, 1972), ch. 1; Richard W. Steele, The First Offensive: Roosevelt, Marshall and the Making of American Strategy (Indiana University Press, 1973), ch. 3; W. G. F. Jackson, “Overlord”: Normandy 1944 (Davis-Poynter, 1978), pp. 41-53; Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal of Hope, 1939-1942 (Viking, 1966), ch. 12; Churchill, Grand Alliance, chs. 14-15; see also Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Macmillan, 1973), ch. 7.

  [Religious freedom in Declaration]: Sherwood, pp. 448-49.

  [“To defend life, liberty”]: quoted in Churchill, Grand Alliance, p. 684.

  179 [Battle of the Coral Sea]: Spector, pp. 158-63; Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), pp. 90-96.

  179 [Guadalcanal]: Spector, chs. 9-10 passim; Toland, Rising Sun, part 4; Samuel B. Griffith II, The Battle for Guadalcanal (Lippincott, 1963); John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (Knopf, 1944); S. E. Morison, The Struggle for Guadalcanal (Little, Brown, 1949).

  [“Green hell”]: Toland, Rising Sun, ch. 15.

  [“Loathsome crawling things”]: Weigley, p. 276.

  [Doolittle’s feat]: Spector, pp. 153-55; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 304-10; Quentin Reynolds, The Amazing Mr. Doolittle (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), chs. 8-9. [Midway]: Spector, pp. 166-78; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 325-42; Gordon Prange, Miracle at Midway (McGraw-Hill, 1982); Lewin, pp. 96-111; Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan: The Japanese Navy’s Story (U.S. Naval Institute, 1955).