On September 3, Washington and London announced the deal. In exchange for fifty destroyers, Britain gave the United States ninety-nine-year leases on military bases in eight Western Hemisphere locations, from Newfoundland to Trinidad and British Guiana. Roosevelt, calling the agreement “the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense that has been taken since the Louisiana Purchase,” transmitted formal notification of the deal to Congress and cited a Department of Justice opinion that the transaction could be concluded as an executive agreement that would not require congressional ratification.35
The destroyers, built in American shipyards to American specifications, required considerable crew training before the British could make use of them. Given their age, they were second-line craft at best. Still, substantially modernized, they added depth to the British navy. The new American bases, military analysts agreed, would greatly strengthen the nation’s grip on the Caribbean and the western North Atlantic. The president was widely believed to have made a good bargain in the interest of hemispheric defense.36
The swap represented a problem for Willkie. His most fervent backers supported it, but his partisan imperative was to oppose. He attempted to work both sides of the street, attacking the president for undertaking the transaction without congressional approval or public discussion, while declining to say whether he personally countenanced it. Under pressure to get tougher, he subsequently called the exchange “the most arbitrary and dictatorial action ever taken by any President in the history of the United States,” adding, “It does us no good to solve the problems of democracy if we solve them with the methods of dictators.”37
In addition to sustaining the British effort against Germany, Roosevelt also had to face Japanese moves to take advantage of the European war. After the fall of France, Japan quickly moved south from China into northern French Indochina (North Vietnam) and established military bases there. Vichy France had no alternative but to agree to the de facto occupation. The new Japanese advance threatened to encircle the Chinese Nationalist government and menaced all of Southeast Asia.
On September 26, as Japanese diplomats gathered in Berlin to sign a formal treaty of alliance with Germany and Italy, Roosevelt issued an executive order banning the sale of scrap iron and steel to any country outside the Americas other than Britain. The move was clearly aimed at Japan, which had used large quantities of American scrap for its war industry. For the time being, Roosevelt withheld the one step that would likely lead to military hostilities: an embargo on oil and petroleum products.38
By then, Congress had enacted the administration program for a military draft. Just a year earlier, peacetime conscription, unprecedented in American history, would have seemed inconceivable. By the late summer of 1940, it had solid majority support. A bill sponsored by Representative James Wadsworth, a New York Republican, and Senator Edward Burke, a Nebraska Democrat who had bolted the party to support Willkie, moved quickly through Congress with the Republican candidate’s support. Roosevelt signed it on September 23 and ordered quick implementation of selective service machinery in every state. It was surely no accident, however, that the first call-up notices would not come until after the election.39
Willkie was a formidable campaigner. He accepted the Republican nomination in his hometown of Elmwood, Indiana, recounting the odyssey of a young man who had attended its public schools, worked in its factories, and begun his law practice in its courts. Marketing himself as an independent who happened to be a Republican, he identified himself with his party’s progressive tradition. He would not, he declared, be a “pussy-footer.” Slamming the New Deal as top-down, class-conscious bureaucratic incompetence, he promised a full economic recovery that would be fair to all.
He generally supported Roosevelt’s foreign policies and defense buildup, yet adeptly found differences of detail, which (as with the Destroyer Deal) he elevated to differences in principle. Burly and a bit roughhewn but flashing a ready smile, he aggressively attacked Roosevelt’s alleged appetite for personal power. His outgoing, dynamic personality excited Republicans in a way that no candidate since TR had achieved. His voice, characterized by a raspy midwestern twang and a tendency to hoarseness after a day of impassioned speech making, gave him an air of authenticity. The New York Times’s early endorsement of his candidacy stunned the administration.40
The voting public was clearly intrigued by this new breed of Republican and perhaps let down by the staged draft at the Democratic convention. In August, the Gallup poll showed Willkie in a dead heat with the president for the popular vote and actually leading in the electoral college. By the beginning of September, the White House was receiving alarms from Democratic leaders around the country.41
Through the summer, the president had been largely content to confine his public appearances to “inspection trips” of defense plants or installations and otherwise to communicate with the public through his press conferences. He would spend much of the fall away from Washington, mixing partisan campaigning with less political events, such as the dedication of a TVA dam. He continued to profit from the sense that he was better equipped to handle the foreign crisis and probably got a bounce from the Destroyer Deal. By the end of September, he seemed to be pulling away from his opponent, but in October the polls tightened up once again.
Willkie, perhaps sensing that he could not outdo Roosevelt’s support for Britain and caught between the interventionists and isolationists in his party, made a last, desperate lunge for victory by emphasizing on the one hand his unconditional commitment to aid England and on the other his unqualified opposition to war with Germany. He would, he asserted, send Britain all the war equipment it needed. But he never would send American troops to Europe. The president, he charged, was both dragging his feet on shipments to Britain and plotting full-scale war.42
Willkie’s straddling of isolationism and interventionism shrewdly reflected an elemental contradiction in public opinion: a sense of national peril and probable war counterbalanced by a powerful instinct of denial. He made a point of referring to Roosevelt as “the third-term candidate.” The issue provided a way to convert Roosevelt’s strengths, his personal charisma, oratorical prowess, and maximization of presidential power, into character flaws. The Republican appeal represented the effort to stay in office beyond eight years as an assault on an unwritten constitutional understanding by a president who had effectively declared himself indispensable and was leading the nation toward war. The Los Angeles Times, firmly Republican and more conservative, said it all with an editorial cartoon depicting Roosevelt as a maniacal, menacing “Ca3sar.”43
Through it all, the leader of Roosevelt’s core constituency, unionized labor as organized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), remained silent. John L. Lewis met with the president at the White House on October 17 and emerged without making an endorsement. A week later he made a nationally broadcast speech backing Willkie. Perhaps he sensed a need to mollify the large Communist constituency in the organization. So long as the Hitler-Stalin pact held, American Communists were monolithically opposed to aiding Britain. Lewis also nursed an intense dislike of Roosevelt. Describing the demonstrably well-fed Willkie as a man who “has worked with his hands, and has known the pangs of hunger,” Lewis accused the president of warmongering and an “overweening abnormal and selfish craving for increased power.” He made the speech as personal as it could get, declaring that if CIO members voted for Roosevelt, he would resign as the organization’s president. Most labor leaders, other than those of the Communist-dominated unions, backed the president. Roosevelt himself must have found being lectured on lust for power by Lewis amusing, but he also knew that having the autocratic CIO leader’s backing would have been far better than losing it.44
Roosevelt, fully as much as Willkie, attempted to straddle the isolationist-interventionist divide, albeit with a different emphasis. He effectively began his reelection campaign on
September 11 with an address to the Teamsters union convention, underscoring his support for labor and his determination to achieve social equity for all working Americans. He repeated an already expressed intention to seize plants and equipment from companies that refused to cooperate with the defense buildup. He assured his audience, “I hate war, now more than ever. . . . We will not participate in foreign wars, and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack.”45
On October 23, he began a series of train trips that took him to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, back to New York for a talk in Brooklyn, and then on to Cleveland, with rear-platform appearances, brief remarks at several other stops, and also a couple of radio talks. On November 4, the day before the election, he delivered a final radio address from Hyde Park. He recalled the economic wasteland of the 1930s, the caring New Deal years, and the economic revival, then moved to the need to defend an imperiled America against rapacious dictators—who, he claimed, had pioneered the techniques of propaganda employed by his opponent—and repeated his determination to avoid an all-out war.46
His made his most spectacular appearance on October 28 in New York, spending wearying hours in the open car of a motorcade that traveled fifty-eight miles through the city before an estimated 2 million cheering people. That evening, at the end of a fourteen-hour day, he spoke to a packed house of 22,000 roaring partisans at Madison Square Garden, asserting that he had armed the nation to protect itself over the consistent opposition of a Republican congressional leadership that had displayed only timidity, weakness, and shortsightedness.47
Roosevelt surely understood that his most challenging appearance would take place in Boston. Massachusetts had been among the most consistently Republican of states before the Al Smith candidacy of 1928 mobilized its rapidly growing Irish Catholic constituency. Roosevelt had inherited the Smith electoral revolution, but the Irish had scant sympathy for England or for the increasingly close relationship with Britain that the president was fostering. The campaign needed help.
The president summoned Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy back from London and asked him to deliver a radio speech of endorsement. The gambit was nervy and dangerous. Kennedy, a hero to the state’s Irish Americans, was not anti-British, but he was a defeatist who admired Neville Chamberlain and worried about the impact of war on his children. He returned to the United States on October 27, embittered by Roosevelt’s consistently bypassing him in dealings with the Churchill government, fully understanding that he lacked the president’s confidence, and determined to resign. He would, he told Roosevelt, make the speech but would write it himself without any White House review and pay for the broadcast with family funds. He left the White House with the president uncertain whether he would receive an endorsement and doubtless fuming inwardly.48
Two days later, Kennedy delivered his talk on the 114-station CBS radio network. He made clear that he did not favor American participation in the European war and even excused Chamberlain’s acquiescence in the Munich Agreement as a way of buying time. But he also endorsed all possible aid to Britain, strongly defended the president against the charge that he wanted war, and supported his preparedness program. He conceded that he and the president had their disagreements but said that on the fundamental issues, there was little space between them. The issue of a third term was insignificant in comparison to the large questions raised by the world crisis. He and his wife were concerned above all with their nine children—“hostages to fortune”—and the world they would inherit. “In the light of these considerations,” he concluded, “I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President of the United States.”49
Roosevelt sent a telegram minutes after the speech’s conclusion: “We have all just listened to a grand speech many thanks.”50
The next evening, the president delivered his own nationally broadcast address to a capacity crowd at the Boston Garden. Roosevelt tore into alleged Republican foot-dragging on the nation’s defense program and underscored its primary objective: “to keep any potential attacker as far from our continental shores as we possibly can.” One key passage dominated the speech:
And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.
I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.51
He surely knew that he was making a promise he could not keep. In other speeches, he had followed such declarations with the phrase “except in case of attack.” This time, it seemed necessary to be categorical. Anyway, he told Sam Rosenman, “if we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.” He probably told himself that Willkie had forced him to make the pledge. That same night in Baltimore, the Republican candidate charged that a third term would mean war by April.52
Roosevelt cast his ballot on Election Day in Hyde Park, then awaited the returns at Springwood, with Sara, Eleanor, and his sons. (Anna was in Seattle with her husband.) After dining with friends, he kept his own tally sheets in the mansion’s smoking room, which was equipped with three news service teletype machines, several radios, and a number of telephones. Harry Hopkins, Sam Rosenman, Henry Morgenthau, Missy LeHand, and his old Poughkeepsie backer, Judge John Mack, all kept the vigil with him. The earliest returns were mixed, but as the evening rolled on, the numbers pointed in the direction of a solid victory. Local Democrats staged an old-fashioned torchlight parade and assembled by the hundreds in front of the Roosevelt home.53
By midnight, Roosevelt felt confident enough to address the crowd. A local party leader, Elmer van Wagner, introduced him: “Here’s the greatest of them all! Don’t ask me—ask Wendell Willkie and John L. Lewis.”54
The victory was unexpectedly decisive. Roosevelt took 55 percent of the popular vote, won the electoral college 449 to 82, and carried thirty-eight of the forty-eight states. Foreign policy issues must have been salient for many of the voters, but something more lay behind them. The president had consolidated the electoral revolution of 1936 in which the Democrats captured the votes of both an immigrant-based working class and increasingly emancipated northern Negroes, voting blocs characterized by high birth rates and a visceral loyalty to their benefactor. By backing unions and providing generous work relief for the unemployed, the New Deal had done what the Socialist Party and other leftists had never achieved. In the words of political analyst Samuel Lubell, it had “drawn a class line across the face of American politics.” The primary beneficiaries of the New Deal, voting in the afterglow of an emerging prosperity, registered their enduring loyalty.
The war also played a big part. Many of those same immigrant workers had family roots in nations overrun or threatened by Nazi Germany. Roosevelt seems to have lost the normally Republican-leaning German American vote (as had Woodrow Wilson in 1916) and suffered perceptible losses among Italian Americans. On the other hand, Polish-American precincts voted for him with near unanimity. So did Jewish voters.55
More broadly, the electorate as a whole seems to have bought into the president’s assertion that the United States could protect itself without becoming an actual combatant. Was that really possible? By the end of 1940, a German invasion of England was unlikely, but only a fantasist could imagine a successful unilateral British assault against the Continent. Roosevelt must have understood that the defeat of Hitler could come only with full American participation in the conflict. Many who voted for him probably understood in their hearts that war was coming.
Chapter 21
Undeclared War
December 7, 1940–December 7, 1941
In the weeks after the presidential election, Roosevelt managed a few days on the new presidential yacht Potomac, a hurried Thanksgiving interlude at Hyde Park, a week and a half in the Caribbean on the Navy cruiser Tuscaloosa, and a day at Warm Springs. Even in those comfortable settings, he coul
d not escape a world moving too dangerously to be ignored. Italy, having invaded Greece shortly before the election, met stiff resistance and suffered serious damage to its battle fleet from a British air raid at Taranto. Germany continued its night bombing campaign against England with repeated attacks on London and a devastating pounding of the industrial city of Coventry. The Reich concluded treaties with Hungary and Romania, prior to an expected move against Greece. In North Africa, the British faced a numerically superior Italian army. The German submarine toll against British supply convoys in the Atlantic was enormous, leading to widespread speculation that Britain would request more US destroyers.
When the president left Warm Springs, he told his beloved polios that he hoped to return in a year, “if the world survives.”1
On December 8, Roosevelt got a long message from Winston Churchill, confirming the urgency both nations faced. Britain, the prime minister declared with more bravado than his nation’s depleted resources warranted, was doing its part. But the navy was overstretched, and the U-boat campaign imperiled the Atlantic lifeline to the United States. Most ominously, “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”2
Roosevelt had a quick response, already developed in consultation with Treasury and State Department officials. A month earlier he had told Harold Ickes that first Britain had to exhaust its dollar reserves, but after that, it should be possible to “lease ships or any other property that was loanable, returnable, and insurable.”3
The president held a press conference on December 17, the day after his return to Washington. A reporter described him sitting at his desk, “his slightly tanned face solemn, his cigarette in its holder tilted upward.” There was wide agreement, he declared, “from a selfish point of view of American defense that we should do everything to help the British Empire to defend itself.” Some people wanted to repeal the Neutrality Acts, then make a government-to-government loan. Others wanted to make a gift of war matériel. Such solutions were “banal.” Why not simply let the US government lend and lease the war equipment, all in pursuit of the best defense of the United States? “What I am trying to do is eliminate . . . the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” If your neighbor’s house caught on fire, he continued, wouldn’t you lend him your garden hose to put it out? If the hose was seriously damaged, the neighbor would gladly replace it or pay for it.4
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 43