American Experiment (315 page)

All this—and a presidential election campaign ahead. Somehow during these feverish days the President had time and energy to follow the fights over state delegations to the Democratic convention, to enjoy victories scored by Roosevelt slates in Texas, California, and elsewhere, to watch the spirited preconvention Republican race among Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, young Tom Dewey, and a political newcomer, utility tycoon Wendell Willkie. The anti-third-term bugaboo was still the unmeasurable factor in FDR’s own candidacy. He was so closemouthed about his plans that correspondents and cartoonists pictured him as the Sphinx.

But at the very least FDR would take no step that committed him to run—or not run—for President. His success on this score was marked. Even more, he took certain measures that would help him if he did decide to run. One was to assume a bipartisan stance. Another, a piece of pure Machiavellianism, was to enlarge the field of candidates and thereby diffuse the potential opposition within the Democracy. Unlike a dictator, who clings to his leadership position by excluding and perhaps killing rivals, the President welcomed them and even put a large bee in their bonnet, when none might have existed, by playing up their presidential qualifications. Hull, Hopkins, and others far less known received the “treatment.” Experienced enough to know they were receiving it, these men nevertheless could not leave the White House without hopes a tiny bit enhanced.

During the “hundred days” from mid-June to mid-October—one of the epochal turning points of world history—Americans were engulfed in a turbulent flow of events:

June 10
—Italy declared war on France. “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” declared the President in a Charlottesville speech.

June 17
—The French government, now headed by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, asked Germany for armistice terms.

June 20
—FDR consternated the GOP by appointing two Republicans to his cabinet—the former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson as the new Secretary of War and Chicago publisher Frank Knox as Navy Secretary.

June 28
—The Republicans convened in Philadelphia to choose a candidate for President. In a four-way race, Vandenberg was far behind at the starting gate, Dewey began strongly and then faded, Willkie started weakly and gained steadily in the next five ballots, and he and Taft made it a
two-man race before Willkie, amid wild enthusiasm and chanting galleries, swept to a majority.

July 3
—The British destroyed or immobilized major units of the French fleet anchored at Oran, Algeria.

July 7
—Pressed as to his plans by Farley on the eve of the Democratic convention, Roosevelt said that he did not want to run but, “Jim, if nominated and elected, I could not in these times refuse to take the inaugural oath, even if I knew I would be dead within thirty days.” Next day, Farley left for the convention determined that FDR would not receive an unopposed draft.

July 16
—Barkley read to the Democrats assembled in Chicago a message from FDR asserting that he had absolutely no desire to run again for President and that delegates were free to vote for whomever they wished. During the stunned silence that followed, a single thunderous voice burst out of the loudspeakers, braying
“WE. WANT ROOSEVELT!”
As a potbellied little man in the basement pressed his lips to the microphone and repeated his call, delegates and spectators took up the cry.
“ROOSEVELT, ROOSEVELT, ROOSEVELT.”
The results of the first and only ballot the next day: Farley 72, Garner 61, Tydings 9, Hull 5, FDR 946. Roosevelt’s choice of the progressive Henry Wallace for Vice President so upset the party leadership that Eleanor Roosevelt and others were recruited to placate the delegates.

August 8
—German bombers opened a massive offensive against the British industrial heartland. During the sixteen-week Battle of Britain the defenders destroyed 1,700 German aircraft, while the Royal Air Force lost 915 fighters.

September
5—As the Battle of Britain roared toward a climax and after weeks of negotiation, Roosevelt and Churchill concluded the “destroyer deal.” Informed by Churchill in midsummer that “the whole fate of the war” might be decided by the dispatch of fifty or sixty old destroyers and that “in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now,” Roosevelt had held off for fear of congressional reaction. It was only after the pro-British, Manhattan-based Century Group and others urged an exchange of destroyers for British concession of key possessions in the Western Hemisphere, and on the understanding that Willkie would not oppose the deal, that the President agreed to the swap by executive order. His “horse trade,” under which the United States received ninety-nine-year leases on naval and air bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, was well received by Congress and public.

October 12
—Chastened by British resistance in his hopes for a cross-Channel invasion of England, Hitler finally called off the project. His thoughts turned east.

October 16
—Following congressional passage of the Selective Service Act in mid-September, Roosevelt took symbolic as well as actual leadership of the muster, speaking movingly to the nation about its significance and presiding magisterially at the first drawing from the goldfish bowl.

The President had worried about pressing for the draft in the middle of a reelection campaign. After taking a moderately interventionist line early in his campaign, to the approbation of eastern internationalists like Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce, and Dorothy Thompson, Willkie suddenly switched toward isolationism when he found his early strength dwindling. His new position lost him Lippmann’s and Thompson’s backing but brought him into “a temporary alliance with people for whom he had contempt,” according to a biographer, “including such isolationist stalwarts” as Hamilton Fish, Lindbergh, and McCormick. It also helped win him an endorsement from John L. Lewis, who had turned bitterly against FDR. Willkie’s new line appeared to boost him in the presidential polls.

While Ickes and other activists agonized, the President stuck to the appearance of nonpartisanship until late in October. Then he attacked. Few commanders have sized up the terrain more shrewdly, rallied their restless battalions more boldly, and struck at the enemy’s weak points more tellingly than did FDR during the two-week blitz that he unleashed on October 23. From his declaration that night to a roaring crowd in Philadelphia that “I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight,” to his attack not on Willkie but on the congressional Republicans symbolized by “Ma-a-a-rtin, Ba-a-a-rton, and Fish,” to his rash promise in Boston to the “mothers and fathers of America” that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he stayed on the offensive.

With Lewis, antiwar socialists, and the communists attacking the Administration in a strange partnership, the President noted that there was something “very ominous in this combination that has been forming within the Republican Party between the extreme reactionary and the extreme radical elements of this country.” On election night the President was so worried by the apparent closeness of the contest that he untypically took the early returns alone. But his victory was decisive: 449 electoral votes to 82 for Willkie, and a popular-vote margin of five million. FDR won every city, save one, with a population over 400,000. Labor had stuck with him—including Lewis’s mine workers. Willkie picked up five million more votes than Landon had four years before.

“I’m happy I’ve won, but sorry Wendell lost,” Roosevelt told his son James. The two men quickly buried their campaign hatchets. When Willkie visited the White House after the election, the two men were overheard swapping campaign anecdotes amid great bursts of laughter.

In front of a bristling artillery piece at the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works of Berlin, Adolf Hitler poured out his wrath on the capitalists of the world, their kept press and political parties. The stakes, he told the assembled workers, were far greater than the fate of one nation. “Two worlds are in conflict, two philosophies of life … Gold versus labor.” One of these worlds would crack up.

Three weeks later, in a fireside chat on the eve of 1941, Roosevelt accepted the gage of battle. Citing Hitler’s remark about “two opposing worlds,” the President said, “In other words, the Axis not only admits but
proclaims
that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” The “Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”

Wearing his pince-nez and his usual bow tie, the President was sitting in front of a plain desk covered with microphones labeled NBC, CBS, MBS. Around him in the little room crowded a small and mixed company: his mother, Sara, Cordell Hull and other cabinet members, and Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard.

The American appeasers, the President went on, “tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all this bloodshed in the world could be saved; that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can.

“They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?” After these bellicose words the President once again renewed his pledge to keep out of war.

“Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United Slates getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.” Admittedly, he said, there was risk in any course. But his “sole purpose” was to keep war away from the United States. His listeners could “nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.” America, he proclaimed in the grand climax of his talk, “must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

Roosevelt’s talk, by far his most militant response to Hitler’s challenge,
sent a thrill of hope across the anti-Nazi world—to Londoners who on that very night were reeling from a stupendous firebombing by the Nazis, to Frenchmen and Dutchmen crouching by their radios, to impatient interventionists at home listening to Roosevelt’s strong, resonant voice by their own firesides. His speech aroused isolationists to a new pitch. More than ever they were convinced that Roosevelt was now plotting to bring the nation into a shooting war.

They did not know their man. It was not Roosevelt’s style or strategy to fashion a grand political and military strategy that in turn would produce a clear-cut decision. Rather, he kept his eye constantly cocked on public opinion, especially as reflected in Congress. It was never clear when he crossed the momentous threshold from viewing “all aid short of war” as a way of keeping out of war to seeing it as a way of winning an inevitable war. More likely he approached the threshold warily, evaded it, skirted around it, and then found himself past it, without having ever decisively stepped over it. Intellectually, he had no secret plan to involve the United States in the war; strategically, he was not a plotter.

But the isolationists in a fundamental sense were more justified in their suspicions than perhaps even they wholly recognized. For the crucial question in these epochal days was not what Roosevelt was secretly thinking. It was what he was publicly doing, whether or not even he realized the full implications of all he was doing. And what he was doing was inextricably linked with its impact on public opinion and Congress and cabinet at home, on the arousal of expectations in London and fears in Berlin and Tokyo, on the forging of a closer alliance between Germany and Japan. And what Roosevelt and Churchill did, how Hitler reacted to it, how Congress and public responded, unleashed further events that ineluctably brought the United States into the war. Thus it can be said in retrospect that the several months beginning with Roosevelt’s reelection in early November—another “hundred days,” as it turned out—marked the start of the country’s intervention in World War II. It was, not in mind but in effect, the Administration’s declaration of war.

That declaration began with the American voters’ decision, by a clear-cut majority, to endorse the more strongly interventionist of the two major-party candidates. Hitler could read election returns. Now he began to take seriously the likelihood of American entrance into the war, even while he underestimated the American military-industrial potential. As a global strategist he saw the interrelationships of national power. If the Russian threat against Germany were removed, he told his generals, “we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved; this in turn would mean increased danger to the U.S.A.”

By tying down the United States in the Pacific, the Japanese would draw the Americans away from Europe, making Britain more vulnerable.

Churchill too could read election returns—and his own shipping losses. Early in December he wrote Roosevelt that those losses had been over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports.” In his letter—“one of the most important I ever wrote”—he laid out his urgent requests: American aid in keeping the supply routes open to Britain, which would help ensure continued British resistance and would not, Churchill said, provoke Hitler into fighting the United States; Roosevelt’s “good offices” to induce Eire to cooperate on such matters; and above all dollars to help Britain pay for massive supplies of planes, ships, tanks, and other arms.