He dodged questions about specifics. A newsman asked whether the president thought “this takes us any more into the war than we are.”
“No, not a bit.”5
In fact, Roosevelt, convinced that Nazi Germany posed a mortal threat to the United States, was determined to deepen American involvement. He clearly believed war was inevitable, that the nation had to prepare for it, and that the United States would need viable allies in the struggle that lay ahead. His task, as historian David Kaiser has put it, entailed “enlisting the nation.”6
FDR worked closely with Harry Hopkins, who had resigned as secretary of commerce. Functioning without a formal appointment in the administration, a bachelor since the death of his second wife in 1937, and in shaky health, Hopkins had taken an offer of residence in the White House. He was rapidly becoming Roosevelt’s closest and most influential adviser. Another important influence was Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a superb professional diplomat, a close friend of FDR, and, not least, a fellow Groton man. His closeness to the president was a constant irritant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Sam Rosenman still led the speechwriting team. Two other participants burnished Roosevelt’s rhetoric to a high standard: distinguished playwright Robert E. Sherwood and acclaimed poet Archibald MacLeish, whom Roosevelt had appointed Librarian of Congress. Ben Cohen made occasional contributions. So did the old Brains Truster Adolf A. Berle, who had finally come to Washington as an assistant secretary of state.7
Roosevelt began his powerful rhetorical offensive with a fireside chat on Sunday, December 29, 1940. The White House had put out word that the speech would make an important national security pronouncement. In New York, movie theaters, normally crowded on a Sunday night, reported unusually low ticket sales. Radio City Music Hall, which carried the audio broadcast of the speech, was packed.8
The president did not mince his words. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” The German-Italian-Japanese pact of September 1940, he asserted, had been undertaken in pursuit of a goal of world domination and directly targeted the United States. Britain and China were in effect protecting the United States by engaging the aggressor nations. Should they fall, control of both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans might be beyond the power of the American navy. New long-range bombers could endanger the American continent. South America would be far more open to German aggression. “American appeasers” willing to accept peace on Axis terms would lay the United States open to a “new order” characterized by “the concentration camp and the servants of God in chains.” He was not, he assured his listeners, asking for war. It was his purpose to avoid war by providing all possible assistance to Britain and to do so with the cooperation of labor and industry united in the common cause. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”9
The State of the Union address followed on January 6, 1941. The message was the same. Continental isolation, a viable policy before 1914, was no longer possible. Democracy was under attack in every part of the world. Continued aloofness could leave the United States as the last refuge of free government in a hostile international environment. The survival of Britain and the British navy was essential to national security. Hostile subversion threatened Latin America. The United States had to respond with a strong defense program and provide the means of resistance to other nations on a lend-lease basis. The cause, he asserted, was greater than national survival. It ultimately involved “the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world” and the international struggle for “four essential human freedoms”:
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.10
With the proclamation of the Four Freedoms, Roosevelt gave his war policy a moral significance on a plane with his national security rationale. He neatly combined the outlooks of the two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who had most influenced him. He also laid himself open to the problem that had destroyed Wilson’s presidency: the difficulty of achieving millennial goals within a world order that only the relentless application of naked power could create.
Roosevelt next delivered his third inaugural address on January 20, 1941. Once again, on a cold, sunny day in the east portico of the Capitol, he took the oath of office from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. He spoke for only sixteen and a half minutes, not proclaiming a program but making a declaration of the American spirit. Referring to the crisis of 1933, he warned of a looming new emergency, this one precipitated by opponents of democracy who envisioned tyranny and slavery as “the surging wave of the future.” The American way—blessed by God and enshrined in such documents as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address—would meet the challenge, preserve what George Washington called “the sacred fire of liberty,” and vindicate the nation’s destiny. The inaugural parade that followed was heavy with the latest military hardware.11
The reaction in Washington and across the country was one of wary acceptance. The opinion pollsters revealed a public that accepted rearmament and lavish aid to Britain but wanted above all to stay out of the war. Roosevelt clearly understood this dominant current of opinion, respected the limitations it placed on his freedom of action, and played it masterfully.12
First needing to gauge Britain’s determination and staying power, in January the president dispatched Harry Hopkins to London. Britain’s prime minister and the fortitude of its ordinary people won over the initially skeptical emissary. Asked to say a few words at an official dinner in Glasgow, he quoted a passage from the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Even to the end.” He returned to the United States in early March, a firm believer in Churchill and an admirer of the British nation.13
In London, Hopkins shared British attention with another prominent American, Wendell Willkie, who had met with Roosevelt before leaving the United States. He came equipped with a message from the president to the prime minister. It was a passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Building of the Ship”:
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!14
Traveling as an unofficial visitor, Willkie not only met with Churchill and British officials but had far more opportunities than did Hopkins to visit with ordinary people and share their experiences. He toured bomb shelters during an air raid. Like Hopkins, he received a warm welcome and returned as a firm partisan of the British cause. He would testify before Congress on behalf of the Lend-Lease Bill.15
As Congress considered Lend-Lease, American, British, and Canadian military officers engaged in confidential “conversations” in Washington. They aimed to develop a grand strategy should the two countries find themselves allied in a war against Germany and/or Japan. Their primary conclusion, embedded in a March 27 report (“ABC-1”), held that the two powers would give priority to control of the Atlantic and the defeat of Germany. They had thus agreed on the basic design for total war.16
Lend-Lease dominated American political debate after its introduction in Congress on January 10 as HR-1776. Given the steady “all aid short of war” public sentiment, congressional approval was all but foreordained. That did not stop the rhetoric from becoming heated. Roosevelt’s court-packing critic, Burton K. Wheeler, led the opposition in the Senate. Drawing an analogy to the New Deal agricultural program, he declared that “the lend-lease-give program” wo
uld “plow under every fourth American boy.” At his regular press conference a few days later, Roosevelt called the remark “the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”17
The Lend-Lease debate effectively terminated FDR’s relationship with Joe Kennedy, who had resigned as ambassador to Britain after the presidential election. On January 18, 1941, Kennedy delivered a radio speech arguing for extensive aid to Great Britain but also declaring that the bill in its present form concentrated too much power in the hands of the president. On the morning of January 21, just hours before he was scheduled to testify before the House Foreign Relations Committee, he met with Roosevelt. They had what must have been a strained, if outwardly calm, discussion. In the course of five hours of rambling testimony at the House hearing that afternoon, Kennedy underscored his opposition to the legislation in its present form.18
Roosevelt must have been livid, all the more so when he learned that his son-in-law John Boettiger and his daughter Anna had sent Kennedy a supportive note. Kennedy had responded with thanks, complained about attacks by the president’s “hatchet men,” and lamented that the administration was going to make him “a social outcast.” Boettiger forwarded the communication to FDR, who responded with a blistering “memorandum”:19
It is, I think, a little pathetic that he worries about being, with his family, social outcasts.
. . . [H]e ought to realize of course that he has only himself to blame for the country’s opinion as to his testimony. . . . Most people and most papers got the feeling that he was blowing hot and blowing cold at the same time—trying to carry water on both shoulders.
. . .
The truth of the matter is that Joe is and always has been a temperamental Irish boy, terrificly [sic] spoiled at an early age by huge financial success; thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly selfish, and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with $1 million apiece when he dies (he has told me that often).
He has a positive horror of any change in the present methods of life in America. To him, the future of a small capitalistic class is safer under a Hitler than under a Churchill. This is sub-conscious on his part and he does not admit it.20
Roosevelt’s words, dripping with condescension, said as much about him as about Kennedy. They hinted at his sense of belonging to a natural elite, his personal indifference to great wealth, and above all his willingness to use others, accept their favors, and drop them when they had served their purpose.
Lend-Lease cleared Congress on March 11. The president signed the bill ten minutes after it arrived at the White House, then promptly authorized shipments to Britain and Greece. He would, he told a press conference, be requesting large appropriations.21
Four days later, riding the crest of a Gallup popularity rating of 72 percent, he delivered a nationally broadcast address to the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. The humor usually expected at such occasions was brief, the message serious. He called bluntly for national sacrifice in an all-out effort to defend democracy around the world and defeat the Axis powers. The speech recognized the codependency that had emerged between Germany and Japan and came close to a declaration of war against both.22
Acting without explicit congressional authorization, Roosevelt had effectively placed the United States in a state of cobelligerency with Britain against the Axis. Moreover, he had suggested generous and idealistic war aims. His actions synthesized the power politics he had learned from Theodore Roosevelt with Woodrow Wilson’s millennial goal of constructing a new world order. Details would follow.
The most urgent priority was ensuring that British supply convoys actually made it across a North Atlantic thick with German submarines and surface raiders. On April 10, the United States announced an agreement with the Danish minister in Washington for a US occupation of Greenland. Providing for naval installations, the accord moved the nation’s first line of defense far into the North Atlantic. The administration peremptorily dismissed objections from the Nazi-dominated government in Copenhagen and refused to accept its envoy to Washington.23
Establishment of a functioning base would take time. The sea lanes remained extremely dangerous. On May 23, Churchill sent Roosevelt an urgent request for US naval convoy support. He attached a list of thirty-four British freighters, many of them loaded with food, weaponry, and ammunition, sunk by enemy action over the previous seven weeks.24
That very day, the British navy encountered the deadliest threat yet to the US-British supply line. The new German battleship Bismarck, teamed with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had left its port in Norway in search of a Lend-Lease convoy to destroy. One of only two full-scale modern battleships in the German navy, the Bismarck represented both the menace and the limitations of German sea power. Heavily armored and equal in its armament to anything in the British navy, it had to be stopped.
On May 24, the Bismarck faced off against the World War I–vintage battle cruiser Hood, a vessel analogous, as many observers noted, to the British Empire: huge, outdated, and vulnerable. A shell from Bismarck’s fifteen-inch guns penetrated Hood’s poorly protected ammunition magazine and blew the ship out of the water. Only three of the 1,418 crew members survived. Next, the Bismarck exchanged rounds with the new fourteen-inch-gun battleship Prince of Wales. The superior German gunnery prevailed again. After serious direct hits and the deaths of several senior officers, Prince of Wales threw up a smoke screen and abandoned the fight. It had, however, managed to land a hit on Bismarck that caused a serious fuel leak, compelling the ship to head for its port in France. Prinz Eugen broke off on its own course toward home base.
King George V, a twin of Prince of Wales with just three months of service, took up the chase joined by the older sixteen-inch-gun battleship Rodney. An air attack by antiquated torpedo biplanes from the carrier Ark Royal appeared at first glance ineffective but managed a hit that jammed Bismarck’s rudder, causing the ship to steer uncontrollably in a wide circle and leaving it hopelessly vulnerable. On May 27, after a merciless shelling, Bismarck, which its own crew seems to have scuttled, sank beneath the surface. Roosevelt was with Sam Rosenman when he received confirmation from the Navy Department. “There could not have been more satisfaction in his voice,” Rosenman recalled a decade later, “if he had himself fired the torpedo that sank her.”25
That evening, Roosevelt delivered the speech he and Rosenman had been developing. It went farther, he told Churchill, than he had thought possible only two weeks earlier. He spoke from the East Room of the White House before a large audience of diplomats and guests from the other twenty American republics; an estimated 85 million people around the world listened.
Employing references to historic documents ranging from the Magna Carta to the Emancipation Proclamation and casting himself as a defender of the entire Western Hemisphere, the president proclaimed “an unlimited national emergency.” Maintaining control of the seas was critical to sustaining the British resistance to Hitler. The navy would extend its “patrol” throughout the Atlantic and do its utmost to insure the delivery of vital supplies to Britain. At home, the government would begin to organize a civilian defense apparatus. It would reject the efforts of “racketeers and fifth columnists” to disrupt the nation’s defense program. Capital and labor had to work together in a common cause, facilitated by government mediation as necessary. The nation would defend its ideals, preserve its right to freedom of the seas, place its military forces in strategic positions, and use them without hesitation to repel attack.26
A bold assertion of presidential power, the speech heartened the supporters of interventionism and confirmed the fears of its opponents. Roosevelt had in effect issued a declaration of naval war against Germany, utilizing destroyer patrols that were really convoy escorts, working when possible with the British navy but ready to take on enemy U-boats alone. The policy amounted to a quest for an incident that wo
uld justify a formal declaration of war. Newspaper editorial commentary was broadly supportive. A post-speech Gallup poll showed 55 percent in favor of convoying shipments to Britain, 38 percent against.27
Among the more mainstream Republicans, Willkie tendered unconditional support, but Alf Landon veered toward the isolationist side, and Robert A. Taft dismissed the proclamation of unlimited national emergency as lacking any legal or constitutional standing. The pushback from isolationists was vehement. Burton Wheeler accused Roosevelt of following a line laid down by international bankers, jingoistic journalists, and “elder statesmen who want war but are too old to fight.” Senator Gerald Nye labeled him a fearmonger. Republican congressman Hamilton Fish called the fireside chat “a typical Rooseveltian speech to promote further war hysteria and fear.”28
Sensing an emotional opposition that could draw support from at least a third of the country, Roosevelt reverted to a zigzag course, not unlike a ship trying to evade torpedoes in hostile waters. Responding to charges from his critics, he told a press conference that he would not ask for alterations of the Neutrality Acts and denied any intention of establishing convoys. A step forward, a half step back, the uneasy minuet went on.29
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 44