Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  A forceful advocate of collective security all his adult life, Stimson had worked hard, if unsuccessfully, as secretary of state to encourage the creation of an international coalition to challenge Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Once out of office, he played the role of Cassandra, warning his countrymen about the perils of isolationism. In a series of hard-hitting speeches, broadcasts, and articles throughout the 1930s, he declared that the United States, “the world’s most powerful nation today,” must assume its responsibility to help maintain peace and justice in the world.

  When America did nothing to help halt the aggression of Japan, Germany, and Italy, Stimson deplored its “passive and shameful acquiescence in the wrong that is now being done.” The country, he charged, was putting “peace above righteousness. We have thereby gone far toward killing the influence of [the United States] in the progress of the world.… Such a policy of amoral drift by such a safe and powerful nation as our own … will not save us from entanglement. It will make entanglement more certain.”

  When World War II began and Roosevelt launched his campaign to help Britain and France, Stimson was one of his strongest supporters. But he was far bolder than the president. In a September 1939 radio broadcast advocating repeal of the embargo on arms sales to belligerent countries, Stimson refused to follow the administration line that selling munitions to the Allies was the best way to keep out of the war. Instead, he argued that the main reason for helping Britain and France was to make sure they were not defeated. He went even further, declaring that “a time might well come” when America would have to go to war itself.

  Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who was given an advance copy of the radio speech, was so appalled by Stimson’s forthrightness that he asked his predecessor to delete the offending language. Stimson refused, telling Hull that if he were not allowed to deliver it as written, he wouldn’t speak at all. Hull gave in, and the speech turned out to be a huge success, so much so that William Allen White’s pro-repeal committee printed and distributed tens of thousands of copies throughout the country.

  ONCE CLARK AND FRANKFURTER decided on Stimson as Woodring’s replacement, Clark called the former cabinet secretary to ask whether he would take the job if it were offered. At first Stimson said no, brusquely declaring it to be “a ridiculous idea.” But Clark, in his typical bulldog fashion, continued to press him until, after an hour or so of argument, Stimson said he would accept the post—but with certain conditions. He must be allowed to choose his own subordinates and be free to lobby for policies he favored, which included all-out aid to Britain and France and compulsory military service.

  With Stimson’s agreement in hand, Frankfurter met with Roosevelt on June 3 to press his and Clark’s case. Although Stimson had opposed much of the New Deal and had been an outspoken foe of FDR’s Supreme Court legislation, the president had great admiration and respect for him; indeed, the two had exchanged friendly notes and letters for years. But while Roosevelt seemed to like the idea of Stimson at the War Department, he said nothing definite to Frankfurter. Knowing FDR’s tendency to put off decisions, the Supreme Court justice wrote two long letters to him over the next few days, outlining again the need for Stimson’s appointment.

  Two weeks passed, and Frankfurter began to despair. Then, on June 18, Harry Woodring provided the president with the perfect excuse for his ouster when he refused to sign off on an FDR order to sell seventeen new U.S. bombers to Britain. The next morning, FDR requested and received Woodring’s resignation. A few hours later, he called Stimson to offer him the job.

  Before he accepted, Stimson said, he wanted to make sure the president was fully aware of his strong interventionist views. Just the night before, he had made another national broadcast, this one calling for conscription, repeal of the entire neutrality law, and the dispatch of massive numbers of planes and munitions to Britain—if necessary, in American ships and under American naval protection. “Short of a direct declaration of war, it would have been hard to frame a more complete program of resistance to the Nazis,” noted McGeorge Bundy, the future aide to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who helped Stimson write his autobiography after the war. When FDR replied that he had read the speech and “was in full accord with it,” Stimson took the job. He immediately phoned Grenville Clark to announce that “your ridiculous plot has succeeded.”

  Stimson, however, was not the only vigorous interventionist to join Roosevelt’s cabinet that day. The president coupled the announcement of Stimson’s appointment with that of another prominent Republican—Frank Knox, the publisher and owner of the Chicago Daily News—as secretary of the Navy. Knox was to replace the isolationist Charles Edison, whom administration officials had persuaded to run for governor of New Jersey.

  A self-made multimillionaire, the short, stocky Knox was, if anything, even more of a hawk than Stimson. He had fought as a Rough Rider in Cuba with his mentor and idol, Teddy Roosevelt, who had inspired him to go into politics. Like Stimson, Knox had been in his forties when World War I erupted, and like Stimson, he had enlisted in the Army, beginning the war as a private and ending it as a major, in charge of an artillery unit in France. A fierce critic of the New Deal, Knox had been Alf Landon’s vice presidential running mate in 1936. Since September 1939, however, he had unstintingly backed all Roosevelt’s efforts to help the Allies.

  For months, the president, urged on by his advisers, had been thinking about bringing more Republicans into his inner circle and thus creating a bipartisan coalition cabinet not unlike Winston Churchill’s. When he announced the appointments of Stimson and Knox, Roosevelt declared that the selections had been made for no other reason than to encourage “national solidarity in a time of world crisis and on behalf of our national defense.”

  But that was hardly the entire truth, as Roosevelt—and everyone else in Washington—knew. The choice of Stimson and Knox, just days before the Republican convention, had been a masterful political move on the part of a masterful politician. It not only positioned FDR as a unifying, nonpartisan figure interested only in the public good, but also worked to weaken Republican election prospects by underscoring the split between the GOP’s interventionist and isolationist wings.

  Predictably, Republican leaders exploded. How dare two leading members of their party abandon it at a critical time to join the inner circle of its archenemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt? Both Stimson and Knox were read out of the GOP, but neither of them much cared. Stimson was hardly close to Republican isolationists, labeling their views as “hopelessly twisted.” Knox, for his part, told friends: “I am an American first, and a Republican afterward.”

  This Washington Star editorial cartoon depicts Republicans’ fury over FDR’s naming of two prominent Republicans, Frank Knox and Henry Stimson, to his cabinet in June 1940. Among those booing in the background are Thomas Dewey and Senators Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye.

  One of the boldest steps taken by Roosevelt in the prewar years, the addition of Stimson and Knox to the cabinet was to have far greater consequences than simply providing two more voices in favor of conscription. Calling the appointments “a much-needed blood transfusion,” Robert Sherwood would later write: “It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which Stimson and Knox strengthened Roosevelt’s hand in dealing with the immediate problems of 1940 and the longer-range problems of aid to Britain and the building up of our armed forces, as well as in the eventual fighting of the war.”

  Over the next eighteen months, the two men were relentless in urging the president to adopt more aggressive policies, joining Harold Ickes and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the cabinet’s other two ardent interventionists, in doing so. Both were outspoken advocates of the destroyers-bases deal; indeed, it was Knox, along with Lord Lothian, who was the earliest and strongest proponent of exchanging destroyers for bases.

  Stimson and Knox also helped bring order and vigor to their departments, making it clear to the military and naval officers serving under
them that they were in charge and expected to be obeyed. At the same time, Stimson forged a close relationship with Marshall, and, although the war secretary was well ahead of the Army chief of staff in his desire to help Britain, the two were in agreement on most other issues.

  To serve as their top assistants, the two new cabinet secretaries brought to Washington an extraordinary crew of younger men, most of them from Wall Street law firms and banks. They included Robert Lovett, James Forrestal, John McCloy, and Robert Patterson, all of whom would have a major impact on American foreign policy during and after the war.

  But that was in the future. Grenville Clark was worried about the present—and the fate of his conscription legislation. On the same day that Roosevelt announced the appointments of Stimson and Knox, the euphemistically named Selective Training and Service Act was introduced in Congress.

  CLARK AND HIS ASSOCIATES knew they still faced extremely long odds in their quest for the draft. The appointment of Stimson was a vital first step, but they also needed the backing of Marshall, Roosevelt, and a majority of members of Congress, all of whom continued to treat them as if they had the plague. Following in the footsteps of William Allen White, they decided to launch a massive movement to enlist public support.

  Grenville Clark, the main architect of the 1940 conscription bill, testifies before a Senate committee.

  On June 3, the same day that Frankfurter and Roosevelt had their meeting, Clark and other leading proponents of conscription convened in the office of Julius Adler, The New York Times’s vice president and general manager, to plan their campaign. They formed what they called the National Emergency Committee, with Clark as chairman and Adler as one of four vice chairmen. That afternoon, two hundred men, most of them former Plattsburgers, joined the committee, and by the end of the week, the group had acquired more than a thousand members across the country, most of them influential figures in their communities. Some also belonged to the Century Group and the White Committee.

  To direct a nationwide public relations campaign, the committee, having raised substantial funds from its members, hired Perley Boone, a former New York Times journalist who had been publicity director for the recently closed New York World’s Fair. Boone in turn hired a staff of writers and photographers, who began churning out press releases and other material for newspapers, magazines, and radio stations throughout the United States.

  Among the papers that ran stories and favorable editorials was The New York Times, which, unlike its crosstown rival, the Herald Tribune, had up to then been relatively neutral in the fight over America’s involvement in the war. As the most influential paper in the nation, the Times had long emphasized its political objectivity, vowing in 1896 that it would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”

  Julius Adler, of course, was hardly impartial. A highly decorated veteran of World War I (in France, he had charged a German machine gun nest), the Times executive was a staunch interventionist. But he was scrupulous in not imposing his views on the paper’s editorial staff.

  It was the Times’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who played the central role in the paper’s decision to support conscription. Sulzberger, who had been a pacifist until Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe, told his editorial board in early June: “Gentlemen, we have got to do more than we are doing. I cannot live with myself much longer unless we do.” A few days later, the Times ran an editorial advocating the immediate imposition of a draft, becoming the first major U.S. newspaper to do so. “In the interest of self-protection,” the editorial said, “the American people should at once adopt a national system of universal compulsory military training. We say this as a newspaper which has never before believed in the wisdom of such a policy in time of peace. We say it because the logic of events drives us remorselessly to this conclusion.”

  On June 7, the day the editorial was published, Roosevelt mentioned it favorably at a news conference. But when a cascade of isolationist opposition followed (which included threatening letters and phone calls to Sulzberger and Adler), the president retreated, saying at his next press conference: “I did not … intend to imply that there should be compulsory military training for every boy in this country.” With Roosevelt lying low, Democratic leaders in Congress would have nothing to do with the National Emergency Committee’s bill. As Senator James Byrnes explained to Clark, the legislation would not have “a Chinaman’s chance” without the president’s backing.

  Nonetheless, the bill was introduced in Congress, albeit by two highly improbable sponsors—a Republican congressman and an anti-Roosevelt Democratic senator. The House sponsor was Rep. James W. Wadsworth, a wealthy, highly respected gentleman farmer from upstate New York. A former senator, Wadsworth had once chaired the Senate Military Affairs Committee and was a strong supporter of military preparedness. About his decision to sponsor a bill considered political poison, Wadsworth would later note that Democratic leaders in the House were “perfectly willing to see an outsider stick his neck out … and I was perfectly willing to do it.” In the Senate, the legislation’s sponsor was Edward Burke of Nebraska, who, although a Democrat, was a bitter foe of the New Deal, had been a leader in the Supreme Court fight, and had been targeted by the president in the 1938 congressional purge.

  Less than forty-eight hours after Grenville Clark approached the two members for their support, the Burke-Wadsworth bill was dropped into the House and Senate hoppers and distributed to Washington reporters. Perley Boone had already sent advance copies to several major newspapers, and once the legislation was introduced, its text was transmitted by the wire services to thousands of other papers around the country. Overnight, conscription had become a major national issue.

  Boone was also on hand when congressional hearings began on July 3. As reporters filed into the House committee room, he handed out copies of a letter from General John Pershing endorsing the legislation. Grenville Clark had solicited the elderly general’s support, and Pershing gave it in full measure. “If we had adopted compulsory military training in 1914,” he declared, “it would not have been necessary for us to send partly trained boys into battle against the veteran troops of our adversary.”

  Belatedly, George Marshall had come to the same conclusion. A month after he had all but ejected Clark and Adler from his office, the Army chief of staff decided they were right about the need for conscription. The fall of France had helped change his mind, as had the determined arguments of the Army’s new civilian chief, Henry Stimson. On July 9, just before the Senate confirmed his appointment, Stimson summoned Clark, Marshall, and other top Army leaders to his sprawling estate in Washington. While Roosevelt still wavered, Stimson emphasized that from then on, the War Department must give “strong and unequivocal support” to the draft legislation. Those who offered differing views were made to realize, in Marshall’s words, that “they were in Dutch with the Secretary of War right from the start.” Another Army officer at the meeting recalled: “We were given our marching orders.”

  Both Marshall and Stimson made repeated trips to Capitol Hill to testify on behalf of the conscription measure. On July 30, Marshall told the Senate Military Affairs Committee that there was “no conceivable way” to secure “trained, seasoned men in adequate numbers” to defend the country except through the draft. At an earlier House committee hearing, a congressman had asked the Army chief if he was not asking for more than was necessary to meet the current crisis. Dumbfounded by what he considered the stupidity of the question, Marshall snapped: “My relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something beside patriotism and spirit.”

  The testimony of Marshall and Stimson, coupled with the Clark committee’s widespread publicity campaign and the stunning collapse of France, prompted a significant change in public opinion about the draft. By the middle of June, 64 percent of Americans were in favor of compulsory military service; a month later, the number had reached 71 percent.
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  General George Marshall, Army chief of staff, and War Secretary Henry Stimson.

  At the same time, however, congressional offices and the White House were being inundated with hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, postcards, and phone calls, most of them violently opposing the legislation. Senator Burton Wheeler, who, along with other congressional isolationists, helped orchestrate the antidraft campaign, declared that “Democrats who vote for [the draft] before the coming election … will be driving nails in their coffins.”

  Many of his congressional colleagues apparently agreed. In a cable to London, Aubrey Morgan’s British press operation in New York noted: “Congressmen are frightened by their mail, which is overwhelmingly against the bill, and they don’t trust the polls which indicate the country approves. They feel that even if not faked, they don’t take into consideration the fact that a man sufficiently interested in a public question to write about it is a man prepared to turn out and vote, while a man who has to be hunted up and asked his opinion by a canvasser is likely to stay at home.”

  According to Lord Lothian, Roosevelt felt much the same way. Although American public opinion, by which Roosevelt set such great store, was overwhelmingly supportive of the draft, he remained mum on the subject, even though he, too, was increasingly convinced that conscription was necessary. In his own message to London, Lothian reported that FDR was “frightened of a die-hard bloc in Congress, has permitted no real trial of strength, and continues to encourage a seeping process … by letting facts, the Press, and his friends speak out” in favor of the bill.

  By late July, tens of thousands of people, most of them opponents of conscription, had descended on Congress. Labor leaders lobbied against the legislation, as did representatives of a wide array of pacifist and other antiwar organizations. The crowds were dense on Capitol Hill, and feelings ran high. “I myself feared violence,” said the head of one peace group. “The ugly, sinister atmosphere of war is already here.” When several antidraft protesters held a prayer vigil on the Capitol steps after being denied permission to do so, the Capitol Hill police, brandishing nightsticks, broke up the demonstration.