The European events roused even Neville Chamberlain from his state of denial. He and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier, gave notice that they would go to war if Germany attacked Poland. Roosevelt sent letters directly to Hitler and Mussolini, asking each to pledge not to undertake aggression against thirty listed countries. Hitler treated the communication as a source of comedy. Speaking to the Reichstag, he read off the name of each nation, following each with an emphatic and sarcastic “Nein!” The performance generated peals of laughter from his devoted audience.34
By that point, Roosevelt seems to have decided that he had done all he could with the refugee problem. He had personally persuaded Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista to take in growing numbers of Jewish evacuees, but in June 1939, Cuba denied entry to several hundred Jews aboard the German liner St. Louis, rejecting visas they had purchased from a corrupt counsel. Clearly motivated by political considerations, the president refused to allow any of them into the United States. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France eventually agreed to provide asylum. Many of the St. Louis refugees would die in the war that by then seemed just over the horizon.35
The summer of 1939 generated a moment of hope. The United States and Great Britain had finally concluded a trade agreement in late 1938. It was popular in the United States, and both sides recognized it as more than a simple economic arrangement. At last the two English-speaking democracies seemed to be coming together.36
Nothing symbolized the trend more vividly than the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States in June 1939. The royal duo excelled at blending the regal grandeur of monarchy with a common touch. The king, a problematic public speaker, was at ease in informal contacts, whether with young men at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, at the New York World Fair, or at formal receptions meeting with the likes of Senator Ellison D. Smith (“‘Cotton Ed’ Smith?” he asked). Vice President John Nance Garner pronounced him “a fine feller.” The queen, if anything, outdid him in popular appeal. The royal family spent their last weekend in the United States as guests of the Roosevelts at Hyde Park, attending Episcopal services at St. James Church and being driven around the estate by Roosevelt in his specially modified Ford. They, their hosts, and two hundred invited guests consumed hot dogs at a gala picnic lunch. The president delighted in dealing with a monarch on equal terms. That last evening, he and George talked late into the night. At 1:30 a.m., Roosevelt put his hand on the king’s knee and said, “Young man, it’s time for you to go to bed!”37
The royals boarded their train the next day for Canada and the voyage home. The crowd at Hyde Park station saw them off with a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” As Eleanor remembered it, “We all knew the King and Queen were returning home to face a war.” The visit was the beginning of an alliance.38
With war probable, Roosevelt pressed Capitol Hill for legislation that would amend the Neutrality Acts to allow the sale of armaments to belligerent nations so long as the buyers paid cash up front and carried the goods away on their own ships. The congressional support was irresolute. The opposition—fueled by Republican partisanship, independent progressive isolationism, and Democrats disaffected by the purge of 1938—was determined.
At the end of June, the administration got a weak bill through the House—it continued the embargo on “arms and ammunition” but allowed cash and carry on other “implements of war”—only to see it stall in the Senate. The showdown came at a White House meeting with Senate leaders on July 18. Supporters and opponents alike told Roosevelt there was no possibility of passage. Senator William Borah of Idaho dismissed a warning by Secretary of State Hull that Europe was at the brink of war. No war was imminent, he airily declared. His sources of information were better than those of the Department of State. Vice President Garner, increasingly distant from a chief unwilling to designate him as a successor, delivered the coup de grâce: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.” Soon thereafter Congress adjourned.39
Everyone knew Hitler’s next targets: at a minimum, the Germanic free city of Danzig and the Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea; at maximum, the entire country of Poland. His major obstacles were the British-French guarantee of Poland’s boundaries and the hostility of the Soviet Union to German expansion eastward. Through the spring and summer of 1939, the British and French engaged in inconclusive discussions with the Soviets, hoping to develop this convergence of interests into an alliance that would contain German aggression. On August 22, Germany announced that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would fly to Moscow to conclude a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union. German officials openly boasted that the pact would lead to “the fourth and final partition of Poland.” Paris and London began to prepare for the war that now seemed inevitable.40
The Germans struck in the early-morning hours of September 1, first with a contrived border incident, then a well-prepared, devastating blitzkrieg into Poland. In Washington, Roosevelt got word of the invasion via a middle-of-the-night phone call from Ambassador Bullitt in Paris. “Well, Bill,” he said, “it’s come at last. God help us all.”41
Chapter 20
Private Plans and Public Danger
September 1939–November 1940
On Sunday evening, September 3, 1939, Franklin Roosevelt delivered another momentous fireside chat to a national radio audience. His voice strong, serious, and steady, he sent the overriding message that the horror of war compelled American neutrality. “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.” He would issue a proclamation of neutrality, but he would not ask Americans to remain neutral in thought. Even a neutral was entitled to the judgment of his conscience. That understood, “I have said not once, but many times, that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.”1
Roosevelt understood the need to address Americans’ widespread fear of being drawn once again to the killing fields of northern France. His sentiment was probably sincere, but his strategic calculations were incompatible with his stance. He likely hoped that sending American troops to the European continent would be unnecessary, but like many observers, he worried about Nazi ambitions for influence in the Western Hemisphere. Above all, as he had telegraphed in his Kingston, Ontario, speech of 1938, he saw the British fleet as a potential friendly collaborator in the defense of the hemisphere. Over the next year, events would move more decisively than he could have foreseen on that late-summer evening in 1939, propelling him into a de facto alliance with the beleaguered British and making him a candidate for an unprecedented third presidential term.
Although British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, deeply skeptical of Roosevelt’s reliability, had shown no interest in a closer relationship, on September 11, 1939, the American president invited him to communicate on matters of mutual interest and assured him that Congress would soon repeal the arms embargo mandated by the Neutrality Acts. He also sent a note to the newly appointed first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. He wrote, he said, because the two of them had “occupied similar positions in the World War,” and he was glad that Churchill was back at the Admiralty. He was surely more motivated by Churchill’s well-established position as the foremost critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and speculation that he might at some point succeed him. “What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.”2
Roosevelt still remembered with some annoyance that Churchill had snubbed him in 1918—Churchill had long forgotten the occasion—but from the beginning the two charismatic personalities felt a reciprocal magnetism that radiated across the Atlantic. Churchill quickly reported the president’s letter to the War Cabinet and got its approval to communicate with FDR. Nonetheless, the two men would have found it unimaginable that the president’s m
essage was the first of nearly 2,000 that would pass between them over the next five and a half years.3
Roosevelt also responded to the outbreak of the war in Europe by pressing two of the strategic goals he had pursued from the beginning of his presidency: defense buildup and hemispheric solidarity. On October 3, he stated in a press conference that, acting under his own authority, he would move ahead with the enlargement of the army and navy by 100,000 men and recommission one hundred World War I–vintage destroyers for patrol duty. He hastily called a hemispheric conference in Panama that proclaimed a wide neutral zone stretching three hundred miles into the Atlantic and Pacific. The proclamation discomfited both Britain and Germany and failed to prevent some significant engagements between them. But it also established a basis for American naval operations well into the Atlantic, showcased US leadership in the Western Hemisphere, and underscored the mission of defending the Panama Canal, a task that enjoyed wide public support.4
The Nazi-Soviet pact, the subsequent Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, and the Soviet war on Finland, a nation much admired in the United States as the only one to pay off its World War I debt, rendered the third goal, outreach to the Soviet Union, impossible. In addition, the USSR ordered friendly groups in the United States to denounce any hint that the Americans might aid victims of either Nazi or Soviet aggression. Speaking at Eleanor’s behest to a pro-Communist youth group in February 1940, Roosevelt sharply characterized the USSR as “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” Newsreel cameras recorded the event for moviegoers all over the country. Though undoubtedly genuine, as future events demonstrated, the sentiment would not prevent Roosevelt from accepting the Soviet Union as an ally.5
Britain was already a de facto ally if only because of the joint Anglo-American imperative to maintain control of the Atlantic. Roosevelt’s biggest international priority over the next two years was to keep England in the fight. On September 21, the president appeared before a joint special session of Congress and appealed for the sale of weaponry to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis. He promised to keep American shipping out of war zones and warned US citizens that they traveled on belligerent shipping at their own risk. American interests, he asserted, were best served by reverting to “cash and carry,” a traditional practice of open sales to warring nations, “all purchases to be made in cash, and all cargoes to be carried in the purchasers’ own ships, at the purchasers’ own risk.” His sole purpose, he declared, was to keep the country out of the war, but he could not avoid a solemn note: “Darker periods may lie ahead. . . . Destiny first made us, with our sister nations on this Hemisphere, joint heirs of European culture. Fate seems now to compel us to assume the task of helping to maintain in the Western world a citadel wherein that civilization may be kept alive.”6
His tactical sense was sound. Public opinion surveys revealed widespread fears that a victorious Germany would attack the United States. Just weeks after the start of the war, Gallup found 44 percent of Americans willing to commit American troops against Hitler if the Allies seemed to be losing; a separate survey showed 63 percent convinced that a victorious Reich would make the United States its next target. Cash and carry was a seductive way of addressing the nation’s incompatible fears of both involvement and German aggression.7
The bill moved through the House of Representatives quickly, then touched off extended debate in the Senate before passing on a 63–30 vote. Roosevelt signed it into law on November 4. The dialogue on Capitol Hill and across the country was impassioned. To a considerable extent, it altered the political divisions created by the New Deal. Some of the anti-Roosevelt voices were familiar: for example, that of Father Charles Coughlin or of Herbert Hoover, who weighed in with a nebulous proposal for the sale of “defensive weapons” only. Others were new on the scene, foremost among them famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who, much impressed by German air power, seems to have possessed some sympathy with Nazi racial theories. He would become Roosevelt’s most charismatic critic. Just a few Republicans voted with the administration. Among the independent or Republican progressives in the Senate, Roosevelt got only the vote of George Norris.8
For the time being, he had thrown a lifeline to Britain and France. Still, cash and carry rested on the hope that somehow the British-French alliance could stand up against the Nazi juggernaut that had crushed Poland and find a way to defeat Germany before running out of the dollars needed to buy war matériel from the United States.
As winter descended on the conflict, it was possible to believe that the war might become a stalemate. The large and well-equipped French army massed behind the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line at the French-German border. A British Expeditionary Force took up positions farther to the west along the Belgian border. Action was so spotty that observers coined the hopeful phrase “phony war.” The phoniness came to an abrupt end on April 9, 1940, when the Germans occupied Denmark without resistance and invaded Norway. Over a three-week period, they beat back British attempts to intervene and compelled Norwegian surrender. The debacle, which revealed the inadequacies of the British military, precipitated the resignation of Chamberlain and his replacement by Churchill on May 10.
That same day, the Nazis launched their offensive against France. The world watched with amazement as German mechanized forces operating with strong air support struck through Belgium, outflanked the Maginot defenses, separated the British army from its French allies, routed the French army at Sedan, and drove toward Paris. On June 15, the invaders paraded through the city. A week later, French officials signed surrender documents at Compiegne in the same railway car in which Germany had accepted defeat in 1918. The capitulation ceded most of the country to German occupation and established a nominally independent French state in the South and West with its capital at Vichy.
The British, also badly routed, managed to evacuate most of their forces and some French units with a remarkable holding action at Dunkirk. Through it all, Churchill prevailed over defeatists within his own government. To his public, he presented the Dunkirk saga, facilitated by civilian volunteers who owned small boats, as a national triumph that displayed England’s mettle, but he also freely admitted that evacuations did not win wars. In his first address to the House of Commons as prime minister, he declared, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
In his first communication to Roosevelt on May 15, he conveyed a wish list of urgent needs: forty or fifty destroyers to patrol British waters against enemy submarines, several hundred fighter planes, antiaircraft guns and ammunition, and steel for Britain’s defense plants. He added, “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”9
Roosevelt’s reply was vague but not discouraging. He understood the strategic situation. He could not, however, get past the political limitations on his freedom of action. Public opinion polling showed a more intense feeling than ever that a British defeat would place the United States in serious danger. Most Americans supported the sale of armaments. They also strongly backed building up the armed forces and defending the Western Hemisphere, even if that meant higher taxes and military conscription. But the surveys also displayed a continuing revulsion against US entry into the war and hope against hope that England could somehow continue to serve as a bulwark against the Nazi threat. For the next year and a half, the president had to maneuver cautiously within this tangle of contradictory attitudes.10
His first, and easiest, priority was a huge enlargement of the military. On May 16, he sent a message to Congress. Stressing, and to some extent exaggerating, the US vulnerability to foreign attack, it called for a supplemental appropriation of $896 million for the army and navy. Stunningly, the message stated a production goal of 50,000 airplanes per year.11
On May 26, he delivered a fireside chat. Citing the millions fleeing the Nazi adva
nce in Belgium and France, he characterized America’s defenses as strong but warned that much more would be needed. He would call on leaders of private industry to organize an increasing program of military production, but he would neither sacrifice the social gains of the past nor countenance the creation of a new class of war millionaires. He would, he declared, defend the hemisphere and build the nation’s defenses “to whatever heights the future may require.”
On May 31, with the Nazis sweeping through France, he asked Congress for another $1 billion and authorization to call up the National Guard and army reservists. He warned that critical days lay ahead. It was no longer possible to wait for a war to begin before training and equipping an army.12
On June 10 at the University of Virginia, the president delivered a bold commencement address broadcast nationally and carried overseas by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Italy had that very day attacked a France on the verge of collapse. Roosevelt could not resist a contemptuous reference to Mussolini: “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” He promised all possible aid to the embattled forces of freedom and pledged—“full speed ahead”—a program for America’s own defense. “I call for effort, courage, sacrifice, devotion. Granting the love of freedom, all of these are possible.”13
On June 18, the administration sent to Capitol Hill a plan for a “two ocean navy” capable of controlling both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Congress took only three weeks to authorize the program. In effect, the United States would be building a second navy in itself capable of besting any other navy in the world. From June through September 1940, the administration let contracts for 9 sixteen-inch-gun battleships, 11 aircraft carriers, 14 heavy cruisers, 32 light cruisers, 190 destroyers, and 65 submarines. The battleships would take at least four years from keel laying to commissioning; the rest would come into the line faster.14
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 41