by Jon Meacham
Disappointed liberals lobbied the president to move more quickly on social and economic issues. “You’ll never be a good politician,” FDR once told Eleanor, who frequently presented such pleas to her husband. “You are too impatient.” At a White House meeting, Roosevelt parried a questioner with a lesson in practical politics. Lincoln, Roosevelt said, “was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can. Maybe you would make a much better President than I have. Maybe you will, someday. If you ever sit here, you will learn that you cannot, just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.” He sometimes turned to sports to make his point. “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat,” Roosevelt remarked. “What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”
He argued that leadership, even his own, was imperfect. A wise public, Roosevelt believed, would give a well-meaning, forward-leaning president the benefit of the doubt. “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt said in 1932. “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something….We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely.”
His headmaster from Groton, Endicott Peabody, grasped the essence of his old pupil. “At the time Franklin Roosevelt became President,” Peabody said, “things were in the worst kind of doldrums owing to the inefficiency of Mr. Hoover as President. Change of a drastic nature was called for, and Franklin answered the call. Some of his policies have been mistaken. He prophesied that they would be….Many have in my judgment contributed to the benefit of the people at large and have saved this country from the serious attacks made upon it by extreme radicals.”
The Rector, as Peabody was known, held a special place in Roosevelt’s heart and mind. “It is a great thing for our country,” Peabody wrote Roosevelt, “to have before it the leadership of a man who cares primarily for spiritual things.” (This was a common view among those who loved Roosevelt. “You and I are for Roosevelt because he’s a great spiritual figure, because he’s an idealist,” FDR confidant Harry Hopkins once remarked to the playwright and speechwriter Robert E. Sherwood. “Oh—he sometimes tries to appear tough and cynical and flippant, but that’s an act he likes to put on.”) For all the exigencies of political life, Roosevelt had been shaped by, and drew sustenance from, the message of hope that Peabody had taught him.
Sustained by this view of progress, Roosevelt urged the nation onward. “We shall strive for perfection,” Roosevelt said. “We shall not achieve it immediately—but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle….Our Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy.”
The salience of hope, the dangers of fear, and the need for open American hearts were familiar Roosevelt themes throughout his presidency. When FDR died, Harry Hopkins called Robert Sherwood. “You and I have got something great that we can take with us all the rest of our lives,” Hopkins said, continuing:
It’s a great realization. Because we know it’s true what so many people believed about him and what made them love him. The President never let them down. That’s what you and I can remember. Oh, we all know he could be exasperating, and he could seem to be temporizing and delaying, and he’d get us all worked up when we thought he was making too many concessions to expediency. But all of that was in the little things, the unimportant things—and he knew exactly how little and how unimportant they really were. But in the big things—all of the things that were of real, permanent importance—he never let the people down.
Reporting from North Carolina in 1934, the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote that she had found Roosevelt’s portrait in house after house after house. The president, she wrote, was “at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems….He is there, and will not let them down.” The novelist Sherwood Anderson affirmed the point. “More than any man who has been President within the memory of any of us now living,” Anderson wrote, “he has made us feel close to him.”
Through the vagaries of the thirties, Roosevelt tacked this way and that, sometimes under-reaching with the New Deal, sometimes over-reaching. “The New Deal is simply the effort of a lot of half-baked Socialists to save capitalism for the dumb capitalists,” a “shrewd liberal” remarked to the journalist John Gunther. Roosevelt’s initial two years in office were focused largely on rescuing the American system, including banks and basic economic confidence.
Beginning in 1935, in what was known as the Second New Deal, the president blunted much of Long’s redistributive platform with the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act (guaranteeing collective bargaining), and programs that put millions to work on infrastructure and other public projects. In a pre-1936 campaign conversation with his adviser Samuel Rosenman, Roosevelt sketched out how he would oppose himself if he were running as a Republican in the coming race for reelection: “I would say: ‘I am for social security, work relief, etc., etc. But the Democrats cannot be entrusted with the administration of these fine ideals.’ I would cite chapter and verse on WPA inefficiency—and there’s plenty of it—as there is bound to be in such a vast, emergency program. You know…the more I think about it, the more I think I could lick myself.”
But no one else could. The threat from Huey Long ended with the Kingfish’s assassination in the fall of 1935: Long had lived, and died, violently. Thunderously reelected in 1936—he lost only Maine and Vermont—Roosevelt read too much into his mandate and attempted to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court, which had blocked a number of New Deal measures. There was a backlash against the plan, which, along with a recession, brought the overconfident FDR back into balance. Arthur Krock of The New York Times evoked the era well with this observation about the president:
The Republicans say officially that the President is an impulsive, uninformed opportunist, lacking policy or stability, wasteful, reckless, unreliable in act and contract….Mr. Roosevelt seeks to supervene the constitutional processes of government, dominate Congress and the Supreme Court by illegal means and regiment the country to his shifting and current ideas—a perilous egomaniac.
The Democrats say officially that the President is the greatest practical humanitarian who ever averted social upheaval, the wisest economic mechanician who ever modernized a government…savior and protector of the American way—including the capitalist system—and rebuilder of the nation….Mr. Roosevelt has constructed, with daring and fortitude, a sound bridge from the perilous past to the secure future.
He is not wholly either, and he is certainly something of both. In the opinion of this writer he is much more of the latter than the former.
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The telephone in the president’s bedroom in the family quarters of the White House rang in the middle of the night as Thursday, August 31, 1939, became Friday, September 1, 1939. Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, executing a war plan code-named Case White, had struck Poland. World War II had begun in earnest. William Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to France, got the word and called the president, who took the call in bed. “Well, Bill,” Roosevelt said, “it’s come at last. God help us all.”
It was understandable that Roosevelt was thinking about the Almighty, for the problems the president faced seemed insuperable. The nation was strongly isolationist, and fear was a common theme—fear of entanglement, fear of sacrificing American blood and treasure for the advantage of others, fear of putting foreign demands ahead of national needs. The Depression was global in nature; if only we could put America first, the isolationists argued, then al
l might still be well.
This view was held widely and deeply. In 1936, a survey by George Gallup found that 95 percent of those polled believed America should stay out of any European war. Roosevelt was intuitively attuned to such political facts. “He is a gentleman in every sense of the word, well meaning and very ambitious,” Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador to the United States, wrote the Foreign Office in London. “He has antennae and political sense to his very finger-tips. Instinctively he knows what the feeling of the moment is and what is politically possible.”
He also performed the essential presidential function of looking ahead, beyond the moment, to what the world might bring. And the more he contemplated Germany’s evident designs to expand—Hitler referred to it as the Reich’s search for Lebensraum, or living space—the more Roosevelt sensed ultimate trouble. Constrained by neutrality legislation and by public opinion, the president nevertheless did the best he could to prepare for the possibility of war. His success can be gauged, in part, by the anti-Roosevelt views of the more fervent isolationists. Oswald Garrison Villard believed “the greatest safeguard would be having a man in the White House firmly and immovably resolved not to let the country get into war under any conditions whatsoever.”
Roosevelt waged a steady but not overwhelming campaign to make the world appear relevant to a country battered by Depression and wary of foreign entanglements. That wariness was tangible. Congressman Louis Ludlow of Indiana even proposed a constitutional amendment that would have required a popular referendum to declare war (except in cases where the United States was attacked). The amendment came to a vote in the House in early 1938. Polling showed significant public support, with 73 percent favoring Ludlow’s bill. In a letter to the Speaker of the House, Roosevelt wrote: “Our Government is conducted by the people through representatives of their own choosing. It was with singular unanimity that the founders of the Republic agreed upon such free and representative form of government as the only practical means of government by the people. Such an amendment to the Constitution as that proposed would cripple any President in his conduct of our foreign relations, and it would encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.” The House voted the measure down, 209 to 188.
Score one for Roosevelt, but he did not win them all. “We must not be misguided by this foreign propaganda that our frontiers lie in Europe,” the aviator and isolationist leader Charles Lindbergh said. “What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east, the Pacific on the west? An ocean is a formidable barrier, even for modern aircraft.” Roosevelt’s view was subtler: The fates of nations were interconnected.
In late July 1939 the president met with the congressional leadership seeking to revise neutrality laws in order to enable the United States to sell arms to Britain and France. Led by Senator William Borah of Idaho, the isolationists refused. “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts,” Vice President John Nance Garner told Roosevelt. “You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.”
Then, in a matter of weeks, Hitler invaded Poland. In a broadcast two weeks after the invasion, Charles Lindbergh argued for leaving the Old World to its own devices. “Now that war has broken out again, we in America have a decision to make on which the destiny of our nation depends,” Lindbergh said, adding: “In making our decision, this point should be clear: these wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend the White race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more of those age-old quarrels within our own family of nations.”
Roosevelt disagreed. In his own address to the nation in the first days of September 1939, FDR summed up the reality of the modern world. “Passionately though we may desire detachment,” the president said, “we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.”
From the fall of 1939 through 1940 and into 1941, Roosevelt carefully but surely signaled his opposition to Germany. As he sought a third term, running against the Republican Wendell Willkie, himself an interventionist, the president conceded this much to isolationist sentiment, announcing in Boston: “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.” Listening on the radio, Willkie said, “That hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me.”
Roosevelt’s deeds did not comport with his remarks in Boston. He had already won repeal of the embargo on arms sales overseas. He had worked out an agreement with Britain to exchange old American destroyers for basing rights. He waged an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. And at the beginning of 1941, he proposed a broad plan, called Lend-Lease, to supply the Allies.
The idea had come to him during a holiday fishing trip aboard the USS Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean with Harry Hopkins. A seaplane had brought Roosevelt an impassioned letter from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was pleading for material aid to keep Hitler at bay.
Six months earlier, writing on the evening of Saturday, June 15, 1940, Churchill, standing virtually alone against Hitler, had begged Roosevelt for help. “Although the present government and I personally would never fail to send the Fleet across the Atlantic if resistance was beaten down here, a point may be reached in the struggle where the present ministers no longer have control of affairs and when very easy terms could be obtained for the British Islands by their becoming a vassal state of the Hitler empire,” Churchill had said. “A pro-German Government would certainly be called into being to make peace and might present to a shattered or a starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the Nazi will.”
In the bleak days of May and June, Churchill was ready to die, if necessary, for the cause of Britain; as he had told his cabinet on Tuesday, May 28, “We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”
Now, in the closing weeks of 1940, Churchill sought aid from Roosevelt, who read the letter in the sunshine aboard the Tuscaloosa. “Unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island,” Churchill wrote, “to import the munitions of all kinds which we need, unless we can move our armies to the various theatres where Hitler and his confederate, Mussolini, must be met, and maintain them there, and do all this with the assurance of being able to carry it on till the spirit of the Continental Dictators is broken, we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming.”
Churchill’s appeal worked. The president proposed Lend-Lease, a program to supply the British without becoming more directly involved in the war. Returning to Washington, Roosevelt used his State of the Union address, delivered to Congress on Monday, January 6, 1941, to link his vision of life at home with his understanding of America’s interests abroad: “Today, thinking of our children and of their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any other part of the Americas.” He continued:
Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world—assailed either by arms or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace….
As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses, and those behind them who build our defenses, must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all th
ings worth fighting for.
And what were the democracies fighting for? “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he said.
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—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
He closed on a note of realistic hope. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” Roosevelt said. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
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On Thursday, September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh stepped to the microphones at an America First Committee rally in Des Moines. Founded by law students at Yale University, America First was devoted to the principle that “American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war” and that “ ‘Aid short of war’ weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.” In late 1940, so many Americans were signing up for America First that Time said the group’s “organization drive…was going like a house afire.” By one estimate sixty thousand people had joined eleven different chapters.