Only the United States could build at such a rate. Roosevelt had signaled to Germany and Japan that America was going to rule the waves. The effect might be to deter potential enemies or to impel them to strike early and hard.
Plans were also under way for an equally large expansion of the US Army from about 250,000 men to at least 1.25 million and probably many more. Behind all this was a push for a quantum increase in the implements of warfare and the industrial plants to produce them. The entire budget of the United States for fiscal year 1939 (July 1, 1938 to June 30, 1939) had slightly exceeded $8.8 billion. In the six and a half months from January 1, 1940, to July 15, 1940, Congress authorized $20 billion in defense spending alone.15
At the end of May, Roosevelt had established an eight-person National Defense Advisory Council. Three of its members—General Motors president William Knudsen, US Steel chairman Edward R. Stettinius Jr., and railway president Ralph Budd—were leading industrialists. Only one labor leader was named, Sidney Hillman. The others were an ideological mix. The pairing of Knudsen and Hillman as cochairs sent a message that the labor-management wars of the 1930s needed to end.16
The symbolism was potent, but reality was hard and unyielding. It was bracing to talk of producing 50,000 planes a year and establishing a two-ocean navy, and it was true that US defense-production potential was almost limitless. But in the short term, one bottleneck after another held it back. Defense industries had to compete with increasing consumer demand in an economy at last beginning to recover steadily. Old production facilities needed retooling and new ones needed building. At every step along the way, both labor and management frequently returned the message of reconciliation unopened.
The issues and forces unleashed by the New Deal transferred themselves to the new climate. New Dealers were convinced that a transition to defense production tightly managed by a government they ran would be more effective than a looser, more voluntaristic process overseen by industrial capitalists. Labor unions demanded recognition and a fair share. Strikes disrupted progress; a few were transparently fomented by Communist-influenced unions, whose activists adhered faithfully to the Moscow-imposed line of solidarity with Nazi Germany—until it changed in June 1941. A massive reorientation of a free economy would take time. But time was the enemy.
Britain had established a national coalition government with equal representation from the Labour and Conservative parties. Roosevelt sought something similar. He quietly opened negotiations with his opponents of 1936, Alf Landon and Frank Knox, to bring them into the cabinet as secretary of war and secretary of the navy. Landon saw the offer as a ploy to ease the way to a third term and declined to bite. Knox, who had served with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, signaled that he would accept the Navy Department if another leading Republican also received a cabinet post. Roosevelt thereupon turned to Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. Stimson, a much respected elder statesman, accepted the president’s offer. The administration announced the appointments on June 20, the day before the start of the Republican National Convention.17
Knox and Stimson were both critics of the New Deal but ardent supporters of Roosevelt’s foreign policy and advocates of a large military manned by conscription. They brought with them a number of Republican lawyers and financiers who would become pillars of a post-1945 foreign policy establishment, among them Robert Patterson, John J. McCloy, Robert Lovett, and James Forrestal. It probably never occurred to Roosevelt that by bringing the corporate and financial community into the war effort, he was at last acting as John Maynard Keynes had advised him to do in February 1938. The defense buildup itself was rapidly becoming an economic stimulus program of Keynesian proportions.18
Stimson and Knox were appointed on their substantial merits, but the president’s bringing them to Washington on the eve of a reelection campaign was hardly coincidental.
George Washington had established the hallowed precedent that no president should serve more than two terms, but Roosevelt long had refused to renounce the possibility of a third. In a climate of peace, voters evaluating him would have grappled primarily with the equivocal record of the New Deal, asking whether its failure to bring economic recovery was more than balanced by its relief efforts and whether the relief programs were primarily political patronage boondoggles or meritorious investments in public goods. By mid-1940, however, the war and a sense of national peril overshadowed all else. The economy was ticking upward as defense industries gathered momentum. A growing sense of national emergency had eclipsed class politics. The president was suddenly the indispensible man as commander in chief.
The Republicans assembled in Cleveland on June 21, stunned by the Stimson-Knox defection and without a clear front-runner. Their leading candidate was Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Just thirty-eight years old, Dewey had made his mark as an aggressive prosecutor who had successfully gone after some of America’s most notorious gangsters. He had come within an eyelash of election as governor of New York in 1938. Next in line was Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. The son of former president William Howard Taft, elected to the Senate in 1938, he was the intellectual leader of Republicans in the upper house. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had ten years of seniority on Taft and enjoyed considerable respect but was a fairly distant third. All had flaws. Dewey was vague on major issues, still simply a district attorney, and notably lacking in warmth. Taft had the demeanor of a cranky accountant. Vandenberg was a standard-issue midwestern senator who had stated an equivocal foreign policy position. None were exciting candidates.19
A dark horse swiftly emerged in the person of Wendell Willkie. As head of the New York–based Commonwealth and Southern electric utility corporation, Willkie attracted wide attention as a critic of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and more generally of New Deal overreach. A Democrat at the beginning of the Depression, he had changed his party registration to Republican in 1938. In the spring of 1940, he took to the pages of Fortune magazine with a short manifesto titled “We the People.” It eloquently denounced the New Deal for a multitude of sins: pessimism about the nation’s future, class warfare, hostility to individual enterprise, overweening government, excessive taxation, reckless social experimentation, and a muddled foreign policy.20
A native of Indiana who in many respects looked and sounded like a rustic Hoosier, Willkie possessed a charm that contrasted appealingly with that of the other contenders for the Republican nomination. A successful radio appearance on a popular quiz show had brought him into millions of American homes. Only he among the leading Republican contenders embraced a policy of extending to Britain all-out aid, short of joining the war, although polls showed that as the majority position. He seemed capable of taking on the biggest political personality of them all. Henry Luce’s important magazines—Time, Life, and Fortune—promoted his candidacy. So did the flagship newspaper of northeastern Republicanism, the New York Herald-Tribune.
His backers packed the convention galleries and subjected the delegates to incessant chants of “We want Willkie.” Many delegates were put off by a draft platform that tried to finesse the war issue and dissatisfied by the drab choices the establishment had put in front of them. Renowned old Kansas journalist William White wrote that the rank-and-file attendees were acting “like unwashed Democrats” and running wild.21
Willkie gained strength steadily, moving ahead on the fourth ballot and winning the necessary majority on the sixth. After his nomination, he spoke briefly to the convention, warned that the nation was “facing the most crucial test that it ha[d] ever faced in all its long history,” and promised a crusading campaign for the preservation of freedom.22 Here was no Hoover or Landon. Roosevelt probably listened to the acceptance talk and understood that if he ran for a third term, he would confront an opponent whose charisma challenged his own.
The president remained mute but di
d nothing to anoint a successor. He may have once hoped to designate Harry Hopkins, whom he made secretary of commerce in December 1938, but Hopkins had never run for public office and was in precarious health. Two other favored loyalists, Harold Ickes (too old at sixty-six and a former Republican) and Henry Wallace (a former Republican with a reputation as a mystic), were never serious candidates.
Roosevelt’s refusal to develop a succession plan discouraged possible candidates and likely provided the most obvious clue to his intentions. A few prominent Democrats—including Vice President John Nance Garner, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Postmaster General Jim Farley—were clearly receptive to a convention draft and not hesitant about letting their availability be known. None could wage an active campaign for the nomination, and none could have beaten Willkie. As the president maintained his silence, he allowed Ickes and other lieutenants to work for state convention delegations pledged to him.23
As the Democrats assembled in Chicago on July 15, Roosevelt still had not spoken, but most perceptive observers assumed he would be the nominee. The chief string puller was Harry Hopkins, who had come to Chicago early, seemed constantly on the telephone in his hotel suite, and was presumed to be in direct communication with the White House. Other conspirators were the convention’s permanent chairman, Kentucky senator Alben Barkley; Roosevelt’s most agile loyalist from the Deep South, South Carolina senator James F. Byrnes; and the Democratic boss of Chicago, Mayor Edward J. Kelly. The extent to which any of them was acting on explicit instructions from the White House remains uncertain.24
Crunch time came on the second evening of the convention. After the usual partisan speeches, adoption of a platform, and Barkley’s stem-winding keynote oration, it was time to call for presidential nominations. At that point, Barkley informed the delegates that he had an additional statement to make at the request of the president:
The President has never had and has not today any desire or purpose to continue in the office of the President, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the convention for that office.
He wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate.
After a moment of quiet, bedlam broke out. State delegations formed and marched around the hall with Roosevelt banners, all of them exhorted by a leather-lunged voice that had commandeered the public address system: “We want Roosevelt! The world needs Roosevelt!” The exhorter was Thomas Garry, Chicago’s superintendent of sewers, described tongue-in-cheek by a journalist as a “deathless voice echoing down the corridors of time.”25
The next day, the convention nominated the president on the first ballot, giving him 946 votes to 72 for Farley, 61 for Garner, 9 for Senator Millard Tydings, and 5 for Hull. Roosevelt’s longtime New York loyalist Edward Flynn, soon to succeed Farley as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sensed that most of the delegates “did not support Roosevelt out of any motive of affection or because of any political issues involved, but rather [because] they knew that opposing him would be harmful to their local organizations.” Farley, consummate political pro that he was, came to the rostrum and called for the nomination to be made unanimous. Neither Garner nor Tydings followed his lead. Hull, who had indicated no interest in the nomination, remained mute in Washington.26
Only the vice presidential selection was left. To many observers’ surprise, Hopkins passed the word that Roosevelt wanted Henry Wallace, who as secretary of agriculture had alienated the southern establishment with his tender-minded concern for impoverished (and mostly black) sharecroppers. A registered Republican until 1936, he held no appeal for northern and western organization Democrats. As the president’s close aide Samuel Rosenman later recalled it, Roosevelt prized Wallace’s militant New Dealism. The president probably also saw him as a candidate who would strengthen the ticket in the increasingly doubtful midwestern farm states. (Willkie’s running mate, Senator Charles McNary, was a longtime advocate of agricultural subsidies.) Wallace himself told an interviewer twenty-four years later that he believed the president thought they shared an assumption that war was inevitable.27
Many delegates were probably annoyed with Roosevelt’s concocted draft but accepted it as either inevitable or necessary for the good of the party. They found neither exigency in Wallace. For a few hours the convention was on the verge of revolt. One anti-Wallace speaker bellowed, “Just because the Republicans have nominated an apostate Democrat, let us not for God’s sake nominate an apostate Republican.” In Washington, Roosevelt listened to such oratory with mounting irritation. He actually drafted a statement declining the nomination and authorized press aide Steve Early to leak the possibility to the press. Equipped with that threat, Senator Byrnes scurried around the floor, asking anti-Wallace delegates if they wanted to nominate a president or a vice president.28
The president called Eleanor, vacationing at Val-Kill, and asked her to fly to Chicago. She arrived late that afternoon, was met by Farley, held an impromptu press conference, stopped briefly at her hotel, and proceeded to the convention. Her speech, brief and graceful, contained praise for Jim Farley and his years of service to the party, a reminder of the president’s grave responsibilities in a world of crisis, a warning that he would be unable to conduct a campaign in the usual sense of the word, and an exhortation to give him full support. “You will have to rise above considerations which are narrow and partisan. . . . This is no ordinary time. No time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country.”29
The talk calmed the atmosphere, but only a bit. One by one, various vice presidential aspirants withdrew, leaving only Speaker of the House William Bankhead as a serious contender. After a torrent of acrimonious oratory, the delegates swallowed hard and put Wallace over on the first ballot, with 627.7 votes to 327.2. The mood was so surly that the newly minted vice presidential candidate had to pocket his acceptance speech and stay well clear of the convention platform.30
Roosevelt accepted his nomination with a nationally broadcast address from the Oval Office. In the convention hall, the rambunctious delegates listened quietly. It was perhaps the most personal speech he had ever delivered, in tone more like a fireside address than convention oratory. In his best strong, commanding voice, he explained that he had eagerly anticipated the relaxation of an honorable retirement but felt compelled as a matter of conscience to accept the call of continued duty. The need to serve the nation at a time of world crisis went beyond party and personal ambition. “All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.”
He told the delegates that he had drafted into the service of the nation numerous men and women to manage the defense program. It would be necessary to draft many ordinary individuals to serve in the army and navy. If the people wanted to draft him, he had no right to refuse. The country faced forces of dictatorial tyranny that posed a mortal threat to a tradition of liberty that ran from England’s Magna Carta to the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution. “We face one of the great choices of history . . . the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear.” The American people would sustain representative democracy, “asking the Divine Blessing as they face[d] the future with courage and with faith.”31
The convention with its contrived draft had been, in the words of Robert E. Sherwood, a “dreadful display of democracy at its tawdriest.” Eleanor’s talk had provided a redemptive note. The president’s acceptance transformed what might have seemed an exercise in unbridled personal aggrandizement into a response to a mortal national crisis. The implicit egomania behind its inspirational text could not be wholly concealed, but its call to arms was both necessary and powerful.32
Radio, which had done so much to make Roosevelt’s political career, greatly facilitated the growing informal alliance between Britain and the United Stat
es. By the late 1930s, instantaneous shortwave communication between Europe and the United States had become practical, giving rise to a new breed of newsman who reported events as they happened. Throughout the summer, as Britain came under German attack from the air, radio correspondents described British resistance and resolve in the face of massive bombing. “If the people who rule Britain are made of the same stuff as the little people,” Edward R. Murrow told his American audience on August 18, “then the defense of Britain will be something of which men will speak with awe and admiration so long as the English language survives.” Churchill’s speeches, widely broadcast in the United States, seemed to give assurance that the ruling class would fight to the end and made possible a developing American cobelligerency.33
Through the summer, the English showed that they could take it and that the Chamberlain government, for all its failings, had managed to build an air force that could fight off Hitler’s vaunted Luftwaffe, then stage its own bombing raids on Berlin. With Germany unable to establish air supremacy, the expected Nazi sweep across the channel never materialized. Enemy bombers, increasingly coming only under cover of darkness, would continue to pound London and many other English cities but fail to destroy the morale of their people.
Britain’s greatest need remained the destroyers Churchill had asked for in mid-May. After Roosevelt’s third-term nomination, the two leaders groped toward a deal in which the US Navy would send fifty refurbished World War I–vintage destroyers to England in exchange for British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. The administration leaked the request to the public and orchestrated support for it through the summer, quietly working with the nonpartisan Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, headed by William Allen White. On August 4, General John J. Pershing, revered commander of American forces in Europe during the earlier world war, delivered a dramatic radio address supporting a destroyer transfer.34
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 42