Flanking the congressional Republicans was the presidential Republican party, more liberal in economic and social policy, far more international-minded, rooted more in the urban areas of the Northeast, and imbued with memories of its great days in the past. This party, led in past years by a string of New Yorkers including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, had been headless and disorganized in the 1930’s. Then in 1940 it suddenly found a dramatic champion in Wendell Willkie, of Indiana and New York. For four months the Taft-Martin Republicans papered over their differences with the presidential party in a frantic effort to overcome the “third-term candidate”; then, with Willkie beaten, the election coalition began to break up again.
The plight of the Republican presidential party was due in part to Roosevelt’s skill at not challenging but infiltrating it. At just what point he decided to win over some of the presidential Republican leadership is still hard to say. Perhaps he was tempted by immediate advantages and only later saw the strategic possibilities, for he had always stepped easily back and forth between his roles as party leader and as bipartisan chief of state. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 he had sought to achieve a political coup by bringing into his Cabinet the 1936 Republican ticket of Alf Landon and Frank Knox. Landon declined, fearing that he might become a cat’s-paw for Roosevelt’s third-term ambitions. Roosevelt let the matter lie until the spring of 1940, when Felix Frankfurter and others urged him to draft Stimson. Reassured that Stimson, at seventy-two, was still keen and resilient, the President telephoned him on a day in June 1940 just after Stimson, over the radio, called for repeal of the Neutrality Act, compulsory military service, and stepped-up aid to Britain and France even if it required Navy convoys.
In drafting Stimson, Roosevelt had gained an indomitable, world-minded, richly experienced war administrator. Equally significant was the fact that Stimson brought into his administration a symbol and rallying point for a host of Republicans who since Hoover’s time, and even since Teddy Roosevelt’s, had felt cut off from the nation’s service—cut off by the stultifying Harding and Coolidge administrations, by the congressional Republicans, by Roosevelt and the national Democracy. These men came mainly from the larger cities, especially in the Northeast; attended old preparatory schools and Ivy League universities and took on a speech and a set of airs with a slightly alien, British tinge; fanned out into law firms and banks and brokerage houses; worked smoothly together in clubs, foundations, and on boards of trustees; read the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or their moderate, internationalist counterparts in Boston, Philadelphia, or a dozen other cities. Experienced in managing or advising big enterprises, cosmopolitan in their national and international travels and contacts, accustomed to dealing with governmental bureaucracy even while denouncing it, these Republicans, along with their opposite numbers in the Democratic party, were anti-Hitler, pro-British, and defense-minded.
Frank Knox represented a somewhat different sector of Republicanism. A Rough Rider who had backed Teddy Roosevelt in the great schism of 1912, while Stimson, as a member of William Howard Taft’s Cabinet, had stayed with his chief, Knox had been a newspaperman and politician in both New Hampshire and Michigan before becoming publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931. In the Chicagoland of Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Tribune, he had been a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism, especially in more recent years.
The two presidential parties supplied Roosevelt with public servants as well as political support. Stimson and Knox, along with old New Dealers Hopkins, Justice Frankfurter, and others, served as recruiting sergeants for the host of lawyers and businessmen who were taking posts in Washington—including Robert Patterson, Union College 1912, Harvard Law School, and infantry officer in World War I, and a federal judge until coming to Washington; James V. Forrestal, a Princetonian who had seen naval service during the first war and had later worked his way up to the presidency of Dillon, Read; John J. McCloy, a graduate of Amherst, Harvard Law School, and prestigious New York law firms, who became Assistant Secretary of War in the spring of 1941; Robert Lovett, Yale University, Harvard graduate school, and long a banker. These men had the defects of their virtues; they were sometimes narrow in vision and conventional in outlook, but few challenged their public spirit—or their usefulness to Roosevelt as the nation mobilized for defense.
If Stimson and others provided Roosevelt’s coalition with authentic Republican credentials, Cordell Hull and the new Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, spoke for the old and the new South. After eight years in office Hull was still the Wilsonian idealist and moralizer, still the advocate of world trade as the long-run solution to world conflict, still a link between the White House and the old Southerners on Capitol Hill. Jones was cut from different calico. A towering, white-thatched Texan, long hostile to Wall Street finance, he had built a small bureaucratic empire in alien New Deal soil just as he had once built a financial empire in Texas. Part capitalist, part populist, but always a Houston Texan, the “Emperor Jones” wielded wide influence because of his control of both Commerce and the Federal Loan Agency, and because of his ties with Southerners on the Hill.
The rest of the Cabinet seemed to reflect all the main elements of the New Deal Democratic party: Morgenthau, who could speak for Eastern financial, philanthropic interests; Frances Perkins, for the labor, humanitarian, social-welfare groups; Harold Ickes, for the old Bull Moose, clean-government, conservation elements; Attorney General Robert Jackson, for the urban, partisan, liberal Democratic party; Claude Wickard, for the new agriculture subsidized by the New Deal. The new Postmaster General, Frank Walker, who had taken Jim Farley’s place after Farley quit on the third-term issue, carried on the old urban-immigrant-Catholic traditions of the party. Vice President Henry Wallace, a baffling combination of agrarian, progressive, administrative politician, scientific agriculturalist, and philosophical mystic, had emerged from the progressive wing of Midwestern agriculture and still spoke for it, but he was a man of parts, as liberal in domestic policy as Ickes or Perkins, as internationalist as Hull or Stimson. Indeed, all the Cabinet members were far more than brokers of group interests. Most by now were veteran administrators and hardy survivors of bureaucratic infighting. In their experience, drive, political skills, breadth of outlook, and sheer diversity they made up by 1941 one of the ablest Cabinets in American history—though Roosevelt dealt with them far more as individuals than as a collective organism.
The President’s three-party coalition also embraced key enclaves of Capitol Hill. The President’s men—Speaker Sam Rayburn, of Texas, and Majority Leader John W. McCormack, of Massachusetts, in the House, and Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, of Kentucky, and James F. Byrnes, of South Carolina—were party, and partisan, leaders in the two houses. Southerners chaired most of the important committees in both chambers; the Deep South bloc, though occasionally divided, formed the most cohesive of the party voting blocs on Capitol Hill, especially on foreign policy. This bloc, allied with conservative, mainly rural Republicans, had harassed the New Deal, but as the axis of national priority shifted from domestic to foreign policy, the Southern bloc was becoming a legislative bastion for the White House. Senator Walter George of Georgia symbolized the shift. The prime target—and survivor—of Roosevelt’s unsuccessful purge of conservative Southerners, George was now supporting Roosevelt’s interventionist policies from his high post on the Foreign Relations Committee. The Southerners, in any event, did not wholly monopolize the committee chairmanships. Urban Democrats, slowly building seniority after the cities had begun to go heavily Democratic twenty years before, were now crowding toward the top. Robert F. Wagner, of New York, presided over the Senate Banking and Currency Committee; David I. Walsh, of Massachusetts—no friend of the President—over Naval Affairs; and, in the House, Sol Bloom, of uptown Manhattan, over the Foreign Affairs Committee; Mary T. Norton, of New Jersey, over Labor; and Adolph J. Sabath, of Chicago, over the Southern-dominated Rules Commit
tee.
Formidable though it was, this three-party coalition of Franklin Roosevelt’s depended in the end on the votes and voices of the people. And as the nation turned to its great decisions of 1941, the President was taking his soundings of popular attitudes through his visitors, public-opinion polls, White House mail, fellow politicians, press opinion—and through his own extrasensory political perceptions.
Public opinion hunched strongly toward greater aid to Britain. Poll after poll in the early weeks of 1941 showed that by roughly two-to-one margins people supported not only the Lend-Lease bill but also controversial specifics, such as use by British warships of American ports to repair, refuel, and refit; and the lending of war-planes and any other war supplies belonging to the United States services if the President judged that such aid would help the defense of the United States. A strong majority would help England win even at the risk of getting into war. Such opinions had a markedly geographical cast. Polls showed isolationist feeling to be strongest in the nation’s broad hinterland, the Midwest and the Plains states. Generally, younger people were more isolationist than older; lower-income than higher; less-informed than better-informed—differences that implied some weaknesses in the foundations of Roosevelt’s three-party coalition.
Guiding and galvanizing interventionist attitudes was an energetic pressure group, the carefully named Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Organized in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Norway, the committee was headed by William Allen White, the shrewd old Kansas editor. The President, an old friend, enjoyed chiding him for being with the administration three and a half years out of every four, but White had retained his Republican credentials even while helping mobilize support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Local chapters of the committee were so numerous and articulate that the national committee seemed, to many a friend and foe, to be the spearhead of a mighty army. Actually, its numbers were relatively few, and White, who kept in close touch with the White House, was almost as cautious on intervention as the President himself. He felt that his committee should not “get out ahead of the White House and the main body of troops.” The committee had been rent by divisions between all-aid-short-of-war advocates and all-out interventionists, who were especially strong in the big Eastern cities. White resigned his chairmanship of the committee at the beginning of January 1941, not long after Fiorello La Guardia, the pugnaciously interventionist Mayor of New York, had accused him of “doing a typical Laval.” Equally formidable in appearance but divided in fact were the isolationist groups, which stretched across a broad spectrum from the “respectable” Fight for Freedom Committee to the largest and most prestigious organization, America First, to Gerald L. K. Smith’s Committee of One Million, along with a host of smaller, even more extreme groups.
There was, indeed, a curiously mottled, unstable quality to opinions on foreign policy, especially on the isolationist side. There were the ethnic isolationists—the German-Americans and Italian-Americans, who resented the ever-intensifying feeling against the old country (the German-Americans, moreover, remembered the anti-Hun hysteria of World War I); the Irish-Americans centered in the larger cities, who could not forget English excesses on the Ould Sod. There were the ideological isolationists, who felt that the United States had been sucked into the first war, bled white, and then rejected as Uncle Shylock, and who saw a diabolical motive and a cabalistic plot in every step toward intervention. There were the left-wing isolationists, who viewed the war as a struggle among imperialisms; right-wing isolationists, who feared intervention would mean more spending, heavier taxes, bigger government, less individual liberty, and an even more dictatorial Roosevelt; intellectual isolationists, who had little in common with one another except their fear of militarism, their reading of diplomatic history as the seduction of innocent Americans, and their vision of war as corrosive of civil liberties, social welfare, and the free play of the mind.
The interventionists were divided, too, and in much the same way. No group was monolithic. The division over foreign policy within business, labor, and liberal groups seemed as sharp as the divisions between them. And bit by bit alignments were changing under the impact of events abroad.
Behind this complex of slowly shifting attitudes was something far more powerful, more unreasoning, more awesome to the Washington politicians. This was not a program or group or opinion; it was a mood, expressed in the simple outcry “No Foreign Wars!” It was a mood compounded of fear of foreign involvement, cynicism toward other nations, pessimism about the possibilities of cooperation among the democracies. It was a mood fired by frustration, fear, disillusion, mingled feelings of superiority and inferiority toward other peoples. It took form in a simple, powerful, irresistible feeling against taking part in foreign wars. Defense, yes; aid to the Allies, perhaps; but foreign wars—never.
Roosevelt had not only recognized this mood; he had helped create it. In speech after speech he had made his obeisances to the God of No Foreign War. His protestations had reached a climax in the 1940 election campaign. Military action, he seemed to be saying, was no longer an alternative to be used prudently and sparingly as an instrument of foreign policy. It was flatly ruled out, except in case of outright invasion. But now this mood was confronting another mood, still of lesser sweep and intensity, but rising in the face of Nazi conquest, a mood resulting from indignation over fascist conquest and cruelty, hostility to Nazi racism, sympathy for afflicted peoples and occupied nations, concern for the Jews, admiration for the British.
Like a huge old sounding box, Congress picked up, amplified, and distorted this welter of ideologies, attitudes, and moods. With the more interventionist South and the more isolationist hinterland both overrepresented in the Senate, the extremes tended to dominate debate. It was an easy way to avoid the dilemmas of hard policy. Isolationist Congressmen could arouse emotional unity by spurning the horrors of war for American boys. Interventionist Senators, spread-eagling above the baffling choices and dilemmas, could appeal to sympathy for the heroic Allies and to fear of the Axis.
But the President could not elude the hard choices. The time for oratory alone was long past. It was a time for policies and programs, and for politicians who could work together. The crucial step for the President was to cement his alliance with the moderate, interventionist Republicans. Wendell Willkie, who had wasted little time nursing his election sores, had decided to visit embattled Britain. When in mid-January he came to Washington to pick up his passport, Hull took him to see the President. The two ex-candidates had a jocular meeting. The President handed Willkie a letter addressed to “Dear Churchill.”
“Wendell Willkie is taking this to you. He is being a true help in keeping politics out of things.
“I think this verse applies to you people as well as to us:
“Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
LEND-LEASE: THE GREAT DEBATE
The President now faced a daunting political problem: how to gain congressional and popular support for a measure strong enough to give decisive aid to the democracies—but a measure that would be unfamiliar to most voters, expensive to the taxpayers, and obviously unneutral; a measure that would so entangle the nation’s military and diplomatic affairs with Britain’s—and with other nations’—as to arouse the isolationists; a measure that, above all, would challenge the popular mood of No Foreign Wars. The President’s solution to this problem was simple. The Lend-Lease bill was to be presented as a step not toward war but away from war. Roosevelt would not challenge the mood-god of America.
His foes suspected as much. “Never before,” cried Senator Burton K. Wheeler, of Montana, over the radio, “has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this Nation of its def
enses.” Warming to the attack, Wheeler went on: “The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt, who was usually an expert in remaining quiet under attack, saw his opening and struck back. He regarded Wheeler’s statement, he told reporters, as the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that had ever been said. “Quote me on that. That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”
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.
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