The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  As Congress convened and politicians prepared for the great debate, the President took charge of the shape and strategy of the bill. He sought advice and suggestions from a host of advisers and experts, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; tried—and failed—to bypass the isolationist-ridden Senate Foreign Relations Committee; consulted the House and Senate leadership and some internationalist Republicans; counseled Morgenthau, with whom he was working closely, on his presentation to the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and even wrote part of Hull’s opening testimony. The bill itself—happily given the number H.R. 1776—vested sweeping powers in the President to make or procure “any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States”; to sell or transfer or exchange or lease or lend any such article to any such government; to repair or outfit any such defense article for any such government. The President would also have full authority over arranging terms, if any, with such governments.

  April 17, 1941, CD. Batchelor, Times-Herald, courtesy of The News, New York’s Picture Newspaper

  “This is a bill for the destruction of the American Republic,” thundered the Chicago Tribune. “It is a brief for an unlimited dictatorship with power over the possessions and lives of the American people, with power to make war and alliances forever.” Interventionist papers answered Colonel McCormick; soon the debate was raging in the press. Messages to the White House reflected strong support for the bill, especially in the Middle Atlantic states, but Roosevelt knew the dangers of relying on mail as a measure of public opinion.

  “Now don’t be definite,” he had cautioned Morgenthau about his testimony. The Secretary complied. So did Hull, Stimson, and Knox, in testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. To the tune of four-column headlines in the New York Times, the Cabinet members warned of a likely invasion of Britain within three months, expressed fear of an invasion of the United States if the British Navy was beaten or taken, and asked for the widest executive discretion possible under the act. They were evasive on specifics, such as how much money Lend-Lease would require, and what nations besides Britain might be included. The committee members, flanking their chairman, the owlish Sol Bloom, pressed the notables on two key questions: Would not Lend-Lease, to be effective, require United States naval help in convoying munitions across the Atlantic? And would not convoying mean war?

  These questions posed a moral problem for the Secretaries. All four were activists who, in their own ways, wanted to intervene more strongly than the President was yet willing to do. But all had to follow their chief’s step-by-step tactics—and his claim that Lend-Lease would be a way of reducing the chances of war. Stimson’s dilemma was especially painful. Given to blunt talk and direct action, he believed that the Navy must convoy merchant ships and that ultimately the United States would have to go to war. But he could not speak up. Sensing his dilemma, the congressional foes bore down on him—and none more than his old adversary Ham Fish.

  Roosevelt managed to stay clear of the sharpening clashes on Capitol Hill. But when committee members repeatedly questioned his spokesmen as to whether the President under the bill could hand over part of the United States naval forces, the old Navy hand rebelled. “The President—being very fond of the American Navy—did not expect to get rid of that Navy,” he remarked icily at his press conference. The bill did not prevent the President, he went on, “from standing on his head, but the President did not expect to stand on his head.”

  The first witness against the bill was also a member of the administration, but a departing one—Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Great Britain. Kennedy proved to be a disconcerting witness. So divided was he between his skepticism over Britain’s chances and his admiration for the nation he had seen under bombardment, between his loyalty to the President and his fear of presidential power, between his distaste for Nazism and his opposition to American involvement, that he ended by opposing the Lend-Lease bill while favoring all aid to Britain short of war. Norman Thomas, four-time Socialist candidate for President, spoke with his usual eloquence of the threat in the bill to American democracy and civil liberties, but the isolationist members found his articulate major premises so alien to their own that they took mixed comfort from his testimony. The isolationists needed a national hero, a popular symbol, and a clear voice, and they found all three in their star witness, Charles A. Lindbergh. As slim and youthful-appearing as when he had flown the Atlantic fourteen years before, the “Lone Eagle” drove home his points before an applauding, neck-craning audience. Air power, he said, had made it impossible for Germany to conquer the United States, and vice versa. The nation should channel all its strength into hemispheric defense. The United States had no stake in victory for either side; it should seek a negotiated peace. H.R. 1776 would simply prolong the war and increase bloodshed on both sides. It was a step away from democracy and a step closer toward war. “We are strong enough in this nation and in this hemisphere to maintain our own way of life regardless of…the attitude…on the other side. I do not believe we are strong enough to impose our way of life on Europe and on Asia.”

  Roosevelt knew that he had the votes in the House committee and in the House itself, but to make doubly sure he readily agreed late in January to accept several amendments, including a limitation of the period during which he could authorize agreements; a requirement that he consult with the service chiefs before sending defense materials abroad; and a vague anticonvoy provision. On February 8 the House passed the revised bill, almost intact, 260 to 165. The four-party pattern was clear, with a large Democratic group and a small Republican contingent voting Yea, and most of the Republicans and only a few of the Democrats voting Nay.

  The main test lay ahead, in the Senate. Waiting in the proud upper chamber was the high priestdom of American isolationism: Hiram Johnson, of California, the old Bull Mooser and League of Nations foe, pugnacity and independence stamped on his face; Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin, son and political heir of the progressive, isolationist “Fighting Bob”; Arthur Vandenberg, shrewd, observant, contemplative; Bennett Champ Clark, son of the great Champ Clark, of Missouri, a dogged cross-examiner; Gerald P. Nye, of North Dakota, captain and caretaker of the world-famous investigation of munitions makers as “merchants of death” in the mid-thirties. All these were members of the Foreign Relations Committee; they were supported in the chamber by a bipartisan faction headed by Burton Wheeler, a fiery speaker who was conducting a personal vendetta against the President, and by Robert Taft, elected only two years before but already gaining intellectual ascendancy on the Hill. Administration stalwarts were represented on the committee, too: Tom Connally, of Texas, Claude Pepper, of Florida, Theodore Francis Green, of Rhode Island, Barkley, and Byrnes.

  February 11, 1941, H. M. Talburt, courtesy of the Washington Daily News

  Argument resounded throughout the land. Educators, lawyers, businessmen, ministers took to the rostrum, the microphone, and the soapbox. The America First Committee vied with the Committee to Defend America in disgorging pamphlets, broadsides, radio transcriptions, petitions, auto stickers, buttons, posters, news letters. The two groups fought a pitched battle in Chicago; America First amassed over half a million Illinois names on petitions, while the interventionists mailed 100,000 letters and distributed 30,000 handbills at mill gates. These were the “respectable” adversaries; flanking them were a host of extremist, demagogic groups that had reduced the whole debate to a contest between “defeatists and fascists” on one side and “Commies and warmongers” on the other.

  The storm swept into Washington and into the Capitol itself. The Paul Revere Sentinels and the Women’s Neutrality League marched in front of the British Embassy with their placards; one read BENEDICT ARNOLD HELPED ENGLAND TOO. They left a two-faced effigy of Roosevelt and Willkie hanging on the embassy gate. Mothers, real ones and not, were especially active. Elizabeth Dilling, author of
The Red Network, led the Mothers’ Crusade Against Bill 1776 into the Senate Office Building and staged a sit-down strike outside the office of outspoken interventionist Carter Glass. House debate was disrupted by a lady wearing a black cloak and death’s-head mask and chanting “My Novena.” Police stopped a large left-wing parade at the Capitol steps. The militants stayed in town for the next phase, the Senate hearings in the dim, ornate old Senate caucus room.

  Once again Hull, Stimson, and the others argued the administration’s case and played down the likelihood of war; once again Lindbergh and the other foes of the bill warned of war, dictatorship, bankruptcy, and postwar chaos and Communism. But now the White House had a new and powerful voice for the bill. Wendell Willkie was back from his triumphant visit to Britain. He appeared before the committee on February 11, just off the plane, as rumpled, genial, and fast-talking as ever. Twelve hundred people, packed deep against the marble walls, variously cheered and groaned as he broadly endorsed Lend-Lease. Again and again committee members quoted Willkie’s campaign charges of Rooseveltian deviousness, secretiveness, and incitement to war.

  Willkie hunched forward; he tried to explain, then broke off. “Again I protest. I struggled as hard as I could to beat Franklin Roosevelt, and I tried to keep from pulling any of my punches. He was elected President. He is my President now.” The audience broke into applause; the chairman threatened to clear the room. A few minutes later Senator Nye picked up the line. He quoted candidate Willkie on Roosevelt: “On the basis of his past performance with pledges to the people, you may expect we will be at war by April 1941, if he is elected.”

  “You ask me whether or not I said that?”

  “Do you still agree that that might be the case?”

  “It might be. It was a bit of campaign oratory.” Laughter swept the chamber. “I am very glad you read my speeches, because the President said he did not.” More laughter. Nye desisted.

  Once again the administration had the votes. In mid-February the Committee on Foreign Relations endorsed the bill in substance, 15 to 8, with one Republican supporting the measure and two Democrats opposing it. The isolationists made a final effort to weaken the bill by stalling it in the Senate. Nye alone spoke twelve hours. By now it was certain that the bill would pass; the question was how soon and with what changes. Working through his legislative leadership, Roosevelt was able to ward off an amendment designed to curb his use of naval or military forces outside the hemisphere. But the President, who had hoped that the bill would pass Congress by mid-February, was dispirited by the semifilibuster on the Hill and by an influenza attack.

  At this juncture two influential Democratic Senators, Byrnes and Harry Byrd, of Virginia, combined with Taft to give Congress final control over Lend-Lease supplies by retaining for it close authority over appropriations. From the start Roosevelt had insisted on presidential discretion, but he felt that debate must not be prolonged. After strenuous efforts by the administration to block this change, the President accepted it. Congressional opposition now crumbled. The revised bill passed both houses by resounding majorities. Roosevelt, recovered in body and spirit, moved quickly. Within a few hours of signing 1776 on March 11, he sent lists of available weapons to British and Greek officials and asked Congress for an appropriation of seven billion dollars to carry out the new law.

  Seven billion dollars—no one now could doubt the President’s determination, or the nation’s. After agonizing delays the United States had made a commitment to Atlantic unity and defense, a commitment that would hold for decades.

  “Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at,” the President said a few days later at the dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty million.”

  “SPEED—AND SPEED NOW”

  Roosevelt had not thrown his full weight into the congressional struggle over Lend-Lease. He had readily compromised on several major amendments, declined to answer bitter personal attacks on him as a warmonger, and used his direct influence sparingly—though one pork-barrel-minded Western Senator did walk into the President’s office hostile to Lend-Lease and walked out converted. Mostly the President suffered in silence. Once the struggle was over, however, he no longer contained himself.

  It was the day after he had signed the Lend-Lease bill. Following dinner with Hopkins, Sherwood, and Missy LeHand, the President sat in the oval study ruminating over the speech he was to give to the White House Correspondents’ Association. He had been gay at dinner; now as he went through the clippings in a speech folder on his lap he remembered all the bitter accusations. Announcing that he was going “to get really tough in this one,” he proceeded to dictate one of the most scathing and vindictive speeches Sherwood had ever heard. A “certain Senator” had said this, a “certain Republican” had said that—now Roosevelt let his pent-up indignation lash back at them. For one endless hour he went on in this fashion. Appalled, Sherwood sought out Hopkins, who had left for his room down the corridor. How could the President be so irate in his hour of victory? Hopkins was reassuring. The boss would not use any of that tirade, he said; he was just getting it off his chest. Then Hopkins spoke of Roosevelt in a fashion that Sherwood had rarely heard before:

  “You and I are for Roosevelt because he’s a great spiritual figure, because he’s an idealist, like Wilson, and he’s got the guts to drive through against any opposition to realize those ideals…. Oh—there are a lot of small people in this town who are constantly trying to cut him down to their size, and sometimes they have some influence. But it’s your job and mine—as long as we’re around here—to keep reminding him that he’s unlimited, and that’s the way he’s got to talk because that’s the way he’s going to act….”

  Hopkins was right about Roosevelt’s blowing off steam. “Do not let us waste time in reviewing the past, or fixing or dodging the blame for it,” Roosevelt told the White House correspondents once they had settled down from their annual skits and hijinks. “…The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger our democracy has gone into action….

  “We believe firmly that when our production output is in full swing, the democracies of the world will be able to prove that dictatorships cannot win.

  “But now, now, the time element is of supreme importance. Every plane, every other instrument of war, old and new, every instrument that we can spare now, we will send overseas because that is the common sense of strategy….”

  By now the reporters, normally so overexposed to Roosevelt as to seem almost apathetic, were cheering.

  “Here in Washington, we are thinking in terms of speed and speed now. And I hope that that watchword—‘Speed, and speed now’—will find its way into every home in the Nation….”

  It was one of Roosevelt’s most stirring speeches, but his rhetoric was running far ahead of the nation’s war capacity as of late winter 1941. Many officials were doubtful that the President’s defense organization could perform the gigantic tasks of mobilizing a still-disorganized and strike-ridden economy. Production was uneven; in places there were miracles of output, but as over-all production rose by degrees, the demand—at home, in Britain, in Greece and the Near East and the Far East—was soaring above the highest earlier efforts and even predictions.

  Late the previous year Roosevelt had been hotly criticized, especially by Willkie, for clinging to an old-fashioned defense organization. In the wake of the Nazi blitz in France the President had established the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. A carry-over from World War I, the council lacked legal authority, adequate delegation of power from the President, or a single head. The NDAC was impressive less as an agency than as a collection of notable “advisers”: William S. Knudsen, an immigrant’s son who had risen through the assembly line to become famous as a Ge
neral Motors production genius, was in charge of “advising” on industrial production; Edward R. Stettinius, son of a Morgan partner but friendly to the New Deal, on industrial materials; Sidney Hillman, another immigrant’s son, a curious amalgam of driving union leader and labor-management diplomat, an old friend and supporter of the President, on manpower problems; Leon Henderson, a hard-driving, highly undiplomatic New Dealer, on materials and food prices. By the end of 1940 the advisers, still lacking clear leadership and authority, themselves were urging on Roosevelt a tighter and stronger organization.

  Early in the new year the President set up the Office of Production Management, headed by Knudsen, Hillman, Stimson, and Knox, staffed with most of the old advisers, and granted, on paper, wider and clearer powers than the NDAC had enjoyed. The President explained the new setup to the press. The “Big Four” would make policy and Knudsen and Hillman would carry it out, “just like a law firm that has a case.” The reporters groped for an understanding of the shape of this Hydra-headed agency. Would Knudsen and Hillman be equals?

  Roosevelt: “That’s not the point; they’re a firm. Is a firm equals? I don’t know….”

  Reporter: “Why is it you don’t want a single, responsible head?”