The upshot was that by mid-August the President was committed to a draft bill now stalled in Congress, and, amid frightening reports from Britain, was thinking of sending a destroyer bill to the Hill that would pass too late if at all. In a last-minute essay at the personal influence that had once served so well, Roosevelt wrote Walsh a long, pleading letter. He tried to rebut Walsh’s claims that sending the destroyers would be an act of war, that Americans thought it was too late to commit themselves as the saviors of “surrendered France and Great Britain,” that Hitler would retaliate. It was not time for politics in the ordinary sense, Roosevelt said. But he could not move the Senator from Massachusetts.
What to do? Once again private citizens stepped in at the critical moment. On August 11 there had appeared in the New York Times a long, carefully argued letter showing how the sale of destroyers could be made under existing legislation. It was signed by Charles C. Burlingham, Dean Acheson, and two other distinguished lawyers. The idea of bypassing Congress on the matter was not new to Roosevelt, but this kind of authoritative support could help immeasurably to prepare public opinion for a presidential act. Walsh’s stubborn opposition put the final capstone on Roosevelt’s determination to go ahead on his own.
But now a new set of difficulties loomed. Churchill had always wanted to announce the leasing of bases to America as a spontaneous act separate from the destroyer arrangement. Tying the two matters together in one package, he argued, would make it a kind of business deal, and people would start trying to compute the money value. The embattled Prime Minister doubtless reasoned, too, that the British would consider that they had got the worst of the deal. Roosevelt took just the opposite view. Legally, he could hand over the destroyers only as part of an arrangement that would improve American defenses. Politically, he could win popular support for the measure, he felt, only if he could offer it as a good Yankee deal, so that people would say (in Roosevelt’s later words), “My God, the old Dutchman and Scotchman in the White House has made a good trade.”
For a moment a fatal deadlock threatened. Then Green Hackworth, State Department adviser, came up with an idea. Why not divide the bases into two lots, those in Bermuda and Newfoundland to be leased to America as an outright gift from Britain, the rest to be swapped for the destroyers? Roosevelt eagerly seized on the compromise, and Churchill reluctantly went along. On September 3, with all legal and diplomatic snags overcome, the President announced the deal.
It was barely in time. At the end of August the Battle of Britain was moving toward an agonizing climax. Day after day fagged, red-eyed pilots raced for their planes, rose to engage the invaders, and, if they lived, rose again the next day. Nazi losses were heavy, but the tide of battle was running against Britain’s fighter command. In the fortnight following August 24 nearly a quarter of its thousand pilots were killed or seriously wounded. Airfields were pitted, aircraft factories gutted. Hundreds of German barges were moving down the coasts of Europe to the ports of northern France. On September 3 the German command issued operational schedules for invasion.
But the final order for Sea Lion was never to come. Infuriated by the bombing of Berlin, Hitler turned the weight of his air attack on London and gave respite to the battered fighter command. After that the Luftwaffe could never quite gain mastery of the air. German naval chiefs warned the Fuehrer on September 12 that the British fleet was still in command of the Channel. The invasion date was postponed again and again. On October 12 Hitler shelved Sea Lion until spring.
Just what part the fifty overage destroyers had in the decision to postpone the invasion cannot be known; surely it was a minor factor in the Nazis’ over-all estimate of the situation. Yet it was a factor at a time when the decision on Sea Lion lay in the balance. Even more important, the deal marked decisively the end of American neutrality. The United States was now in a status of “limited war.” The deal came as a jolting shock to Hitler and Mussolini and forced them to consider America more seriously in their global strategy. Late in September the two dictators replied to the destroyer deal by welcoming Japan into a Tripartite Pact; this action, they hoped, would enable Japan to draw America away from Europe and would strengthen American isolationists.
The destroyer deal, too, was a decisive commitment to aiding Britain. It meant that much more military help would follow—as it did. Britain and the United States, Churchill said in Commons, would henceforth be “somewhat mixed up together” in some of their affairs for mutual advantage. “I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on—full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”
For Roosevelt, the destroyer deal was a colossal political risk. He told friends that he might lose the election on the issue. Even more, if England should fall and the Nazis gain control of the British fleet, the President would be fair game for the Republicans, for in that event the fifty destroyers would be turned against their former owner. To be sure, Roosevelt had gained assurances from Churchill that the fleet would not fall in German hands—but who could guarantee the actions of a defeated nation’s government seeking peace? Not only had Roosevelt dared to act—he had acted without Congress.
“Congress is going to raise hell about this,” the President said to Grace Tully as he worked on the draft of the agreement, but, he added, delay might be fatal. He was right. A howl of indignation rose from Capitol Hill. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an advertisement in leading newspapers: “Mr. Roosevelt today committed an act of war. He also became America’s first dictator.… Of all sucker real estate deals in history, this is the worst.…” Willkie approved the trade but denounced the bypassing of Congress, which he was soon calling “the most dictatorial and arbitrary act of any President in the history of the United States.”
All this—and the election in two months. Whatever he gained from negotiating the deal—which most voters favored—he might lose from the reaction to his method of bringing it off. Roosevelt knew in advance that bypassing Congress would intensify the popular fear of presidential dictatorship that had bedeviled him for years. Yet he had gone ahead, assumed the responsibility, taken the risk. The President had performed many acts of compromise—perhaps of cowardice—in the White House, especially during his second term. But on September 3, 1940, he did much toward balancing the score. After years of foxlike retreats and evasions, he took the lion’s role.
Churchill had not appealed in vain to the President’s sense of the verdict of history. But Roosevelt wanted vindication on Election Day too.
THE TWO-WEEK BLITZ
By the end of September the campaign was taking on an ugly, ominous tone. As he rode through industrial areas Willkie heard workers booing and heckling, saw them spit on the sidewalk and turn their backs. He was showered with confetti in the business and financial sections, but he was pelted with fruit, stones, eggs, light bulbs in the grimy factory areas. Stories circulated about his German ancestry, about signs in his home town reading: “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you.” Roosevelt, of course, was not spared either. Besides all the shopworn slanders there were new and ingenious slurs. Leaflets asserted that the combined Roosevelt family had made millions of dollars out of the presidency. When Elliott Roosevelt received an army commission, huge buttons sprouted with the slogan, “Poppa, I wanta be a captain.” SAVE YOUR CHURCH! billboards screamed in Philadelphia, DICTATORS HATE RELIGION! VOTE STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN TICKET!
The President still did not campaign. In mid-September, to be sure, he made an admittedly political speech to the Teamsters Union convention, but he dwelt sonorously on preserving peace and extending New Deal welfare—his hearers would hardly have known that an election campaign was on. Too, he dedicated schools and issued statements on Leif Ericson and Columbus days, but all in his role of chief of state and commander in chief.
Willkie by now was in trouble. The big man, his ha
ir more rumpled, his voice more gravelly than ever, was still drawing big crowds. His difficulty was that he could not find a winning political stance from which to strike out at his elusive foe. At the outset Willkie punched at the New Deal record on two counts: employment and defense. He had a case here: unemployment was still high; Roosevelt had lagged behind rather than led public opinion in national defense measures; sticking to his usual administrative habits, he had not set up an integrated organization for rearmament. But the times were not propitious for an indictment on these counts. The war boom was on: as Willkie spoke in the Northwest, people were flocking back to work in aircraft factories and lumber yards; as he spoke in Pittsburgh the steel mills were humming with new orders. And Roosevelt symbolized the aroused commander in chief. Newspapers and magazines were adorned almost daily with pictures of the President next to big guns, ships, tanks.
Nor did the third-term issue seem to be paying off. Willkie made much of the undemocratic idea of the indispensable man, but here again he could not come to grips with the enemy. Democrats, taking their cue from the President, handled the question by ignoring it. Events abroad, moreover, helped maintain during September the crisis atmosphere in which the voters might find a third term acceptable. The Battle of Britain roared on; Japanese troops moved into Indochina; Italy prepared an attack on Greece.
The Republican challenger also faced divisions within his own camp. Glorifying his amateur support, leaning heavily on the thousands of Willkie Clubs that had sprung up, treating the Republican party as an allied but somewhat alien power, he had antagonized some of the professional organization men at the start. Willkie made things worse by accepting the substance of the New Deal and, on some issues, taking a more internationalist position than Roosevelt. Just a “me-too” candidate, the professionals grumbled. And they pointed to the public opinion polls as proof that such soft campaign methods were not working.
Roosevelt himself helped Willkie decide to reassess his tactics. The President had been stung by Willkie’s assertions earlier in the campaign that the “third-term candidate” at the time of Munich had telephoned Hitler and Mussolini to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. To a press conference early in October the President brought a New York Times dispatch from Rome reporting that the Axis hoped for Roosevelt’s defeat. He would not comment. “I am just quoting the press at you,” he said archly.
Late in September Willkie shifted tactics. Roosevelt now was not an appeaser but a warmonger. “If his promise to keep our boys out of foreign wars is no better than his promise to balance the budget,” he proclaimed in a voice that had acquired the low flat tone of a bass horn, “they’re already almost on the transports.” Sensing that at last he had a winning issue, Willkie went from extreme to extreme.
“WARMONGER!”, drawn after Roosevelt sent a message to Hitler on April 18, 1939, David Low, Europe Since Versailles, Penguin Books, 1940, reprinted by permission of the artist, copyright © Low All Countries
BOMBPROOF SHELTER, Oct. 9, 1940, Carey Orr and D.L.B., Chicago Tribune
A REPORT FROM THE OLD DOMINION, Aug., 1941, Fred O. Seibel, Richmond Times-Dispatch
The President seemed all the more vulnerable to such attack because of the passage of the Selective Service Act in mid-September. Backed by both presidential nominees, the act was a special embarrassment to the President because registration day was set for October 16, and the first drawing of lots for October 29, just a week before the election. Despite hints that a delay until after the election might be the better part of discretion, Roosevelt faced his task without flinching. He took symbolic as well as actual leadership of the “muster,” as he preferred to call it, speaking movingly to the nation on registration day and presiding magisterially at the first drawing from the goldfish bowl.
By mid-October, Willkie’s cries of warmonger were sending tremors of fear through Democratic ranks. This was the one great, violent, unpredictable issue. The fear of war had a hysterical tone that seemed to spread to the whole campaign; it was solidly buttressed, moreover, by resentment at the administration among German- and Italo-Americans. Republican orators did not allow the latter to forget Roosevelt’s stab-in-the-back remark. Flynn sent in alarming reports on Italian sections of the Bronx, and Germans could turn the balance in the Midwest. Worrisome stories also reached the White House about the “Irish” isolationist vote; in Massachusetts, Senator Walsh was campaigning for re-election on an isolationist and almost anti-Roosevelt platform.
Newspaper opposition to the President was even stronger than in 1936. Roosevelt’s old friends Roy Howard, Henry Luce of Time-Life-Fortune, and Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News came out against the third term. These publishers Roosevelt long before had written off, but he was surprised when the New York Times announced for Willkie. Roosevelt dismissed the Times editors as merely “self-anointed scholars” in a letter to Josephus Daniels, but he was hurt by the switch of this newspaper that had appeal for independent voters in the East.
Most upsetting of all were the public opinion polls. During September they had shown Roosevelt comfortably leading Willkie. The President, however, was disturbed as well as pleased by these figures. He feared that the final polls might show Willkie gaining and give the impression of a horse race with his adversary likely to pass him just before the tape. Roosevelt even speculated to Ickes that if George Gallup, the head of the American Institute of Public Opinion, ever wanted to sell out, this would be his best chance; Gallup could deliberately manipulate the figures to hurt the Democrats and arrange to sell his business for a good round sum. Roosevelt was wrong about Gallup but he was right about the next poll returns. Influenced by Willkie’s cries of warmonger and by a lull in the Battle of Britain, among other things, the October returns showed Willkie rapidly cutting down the President’s lead.
This shift was all that was needed to put the Roosevelt camp into a state of near panic. For weeks letters and telegrams had streamed into the White House urging the President to come out of his corner and fight; now the stream rose to a flood. With a single voice the party turned to its leader with a cry for help. Ickes haunted the White House pleading that the fight was lost unless the President acted. Deeply angered by Willkie’s campaign Roosevelt on October 18 announced that he would answer the Republican “deliberate falsification of fact” in five election speeches. He passed out word that his lieutenants could go after Willkie with their bare hands.
“I am fighting mad,” Roosevelt said to Ickes.
“I love you when you are fighting mad, Mr. President,” the old gamecock replied.
No commander has ever sized up the terrain more shrewdly, rallied his demoralized battalions more tellingly, probed the enemy’s weak points more unerringly, and struck more powerfully than did Roosevelt against the Republican party during the climactic two weeks before the election. Nor has any commander taken more satisfaction in the job. For it was Roosevelt’s supreme good fortune that the circumstances of the election had brought together, in a sorry alliance, the reactionaries, the isolationists, the obstructionists, and the cynical laborites and left-wingers who had bruised and cut him for four years—all now under the leadership of a candidate who, the President believed, had sold out to the worst elements in his party.
Roosevelt hungered to get on the stump—yet he had to proceed cautiously. At all costs he wanted to preserve his symbolic role of commander in chief. He had said that he would not travel more than twelve hours from Washington, in case he was needed there in an emergency; and despite frantic pleas for personal appearances elsewhere, he stuck to this plan. A Secret Service ban on the presidential use of airplanes meant that the President could campaign only in parts of the Northeast. Roosevelt managed to make some automobile tours that were both defense inspections and campaign trips, but he knew that his greatest weapon was the radio, through which he could reach the whole country. Exploitation of the radio seemed all the more urgent because of Republican supremacy in the press, and it seemed all the more agr
eeable because Willkie was at his most graceless and ineffective at the microphone.
Roosevelt opened his campaign in Philadelphia on the night of October 23. He declared that he welcomed the chance to answer falsifications with facts. “I am an old campaigner,” he proclaimed, “and I love a good fight.” The huge crowd roared.
Never had the old campaigner been in better form, reporters agreed. He was in turn intimate, ironic, bitter, sly, sarcastic, indignant, solemn. He lifted his eyes in mock horror, rolled his head sidewise, shook with laughter. “He’s all the Barrymores rolled in one,” a reporter exclaimed.
Slowly and deliberately Roosevelt answered Willkie’s charge of secret understandings.
“I give to you and to the people of this country this most solemn assurance: There is no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other Government, or any other nation in any part of the world, to involve this nation in any war or for any other purpose.”
The President struck out at a Republican charge, as he described it, that his administration had not made one man a job.
“I say that those statements are false. I say that the figures of employment, of production, of earnings, of general business activity—all prove that they are false.
“The tears, the crocodile tears, for the laboring man and laboring woman now being shed in this campaign come from those same Republican leaders who had their chance to prove their love for labor in 1932—and missed it.
“Back in 1932, those leaders were willing to let the workers starve if they could not get a job.
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