Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (117 page)

Not all the reporters did get it. Roosevelt had cautioned them about inquiring too closely of a project that was still in the conceptual stage, but one couldn’t resist. “Would the title still be in our name?” he asked.

“You have gone and asked a question I told you not to ask,” the president replied. “It would take lawyers much better than you or I to answer it.”

“Let us leave the legal phase out of it entirely,” another reporter asked. “The question I have is whether you think this takes us any more into the war than we are.”

“No, not a bit,” the president replied.

T
HIS LAST ASSERTION
was what provoked all the controversy when the president presented Lend-Lease to Congress in January 1941. He proposed that the legislature underwrite the expansion of American war production facilities and that it appropriate funds to pay for the weapons and supporting equipment the facilities produced. These weapons should be sent to the countries battling aggression, with compensation to be deferred until after the battle was won. Roosevelt again rejected the isolationist assertion that his plan would push the United States closer to war, but more than ever he embraced the cause of those fighting fascism. And for the first time he spoke explicitly of war aims.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon 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—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.

The Lend-Lease bill—introduced in the House with the curious designation, for a bill affirming Anglo-American solidarity, H.R. 1776—evoked the expected response from the isolationists. Several derided the notion that Hitler would threaten the United States even if he conquered Britain. Gerald Nye called the bill a war measure in all but name. “Make no mistake about it,” the North Dakota Republican declared of the struggle against the president’s proposal. “This is a last-ditch fight. This is our last fight before the question of war itself is raised. If we lose it, war is almost inevitable.” Hiram Johnson of California was more succinct: “This bill is war.” Republican Robert Taft of Ohio drew laughs from even supporters of the bill when he remarked, “Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum—you certainly don’t want it back.” Wendell Willkie’s endorsement of the general idea of Lend-Lease, albeit without reference to a specific bill, prompted the Republican isolationists to remind anyone who would listen that Willkie didn’t speak for the Republican party. Democrat Burton Wheeler distanced himself from Willkie differently. “Do not be dismayed because Mr. Willkie, lately of the Commonwealth & Southern, is on the side of Mr. Roosevelt,” Wheeler told his isolationist friends. “This puts all the economic royalists on the side of war.”

Wheeler went on to lash Lend-Lease as an insult to the American people, an injury to the American Constitution, and an affront to American values. “Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give so bounteously and so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation,” Wheeler said. “Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any president to violate international law. Never before has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses in time of war or peace.” Speaking as a skeptic in regard to Roosevelt’s domestic policies too, the Montana senator called Lend-Lease another “New Deal AAA foreign policy—plow under every fourth American boy.”

Roosevelt took the criticism personally—or at least affected to. He called Wheeler’s statement “the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing” he had ever heard. “Quote me on that,” he told reporters. “That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”

Roosevelt had to deal with questioning from within his own administration as well. John Nance Garner wasn’t quite out the door; his replacement by Henry Wallace wouldn’t be official until January 20. At his final cabinet meeting the vice president made his distrust of Lend-Lease felt. “Garner was there, flushed of face and loud of voice and at least half full of whisky,” Harold Ickes recorded.

We spent a lot of time talking about the lend-lease bill and the question of England’s financial ability to pay for more material in this country. Over and over again, in a loud voice and with his customary bad English, Garner kept insisting that he was under the impression from what had been said at Cabinet on previous occasions that the British had plenty of wealth in this country that could be turned into dollars and used to buy munitions. The burden of his song was: “Why, Mr. President, you told us that the British had three or four billion of dollars in this country that could be spent here. The British, per capita, are the richest in the world, and if they care anything about their freedom, they ought to be willing to spend all that they have.”

Roosevelt might have ignored Garner but for the fact that the crusty Texan articulated, in his distinctive way, an undercurrent of Anglophobia that still flowed broadly in America. Roosevelt wanted not simply a victory on Lend-Lease but a mandate. The measure would be a vote of confidence in his ability to guide America through the troubles ahead. To silence the skeptics he persuaded Churchill to open Britain’s account books to American perusal. “So far as I know,” Henry Morgenthau told the House foreign affairs committee, “this is the first time in history that one government has put at the disposal of another figures of this nature.” The numbers revealed that the British were indeed strapped, for ready cash if not for illiquid assets. In any event, the whole purpose of Lend-Lease was to put off haggling over just such questions until the military emergency was past.

Churchill provided crucial assistance of another sort. In a radio speech broadcast to America, the prime minister explained that Britain did not want and would not require American troops. “In the last war the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic, but this is not a war of vast armies, hurling immense masses of shells at one another,” Churchill said. “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor the next year, nor any year that I can foresee.” Roosevelt had sent Churchill part of a poem by Longfellow. “I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us,” Roosevelt had written. Churchill now read the verse to the American people:

Sail on, Oh Ship of State!

Sail on, Oh Union strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

The prime minister asked rhetorically what answer he could give to Roosevelt, “this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of 130 million?” The answer was simply this:

Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire…. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

Equally essential to the success of the Lend-Lease bill was the cooperation of certain members of Congress who hadn’t backed the president on other issues. The war in Europe was splintering the opposition to the administration. Since Roosevelt’s first term, the anti–New Deal coalition had consisted of Republicans, conservative southern Democrats, and some maverick western Democrats. The war aroused different emotions than the New Deal, and even as many Republicans crossed party lines to join the president, southern Democrats, reflecting the strong patriotic streak of their region, found their way to the president’s side. The support of the Southerners was amplified—just as their opposition had been—by their control of the most important committees. After Henry Morgenthau satisfied the pertinent committees regarding the effects of Lend-Lease on American finance, and Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox did the same regarding American diplomacy, the American army, and the American navy, respectively, the committees reported the bill favorably to their full houses.

More important than anything, though, was Roosevelt’s personal popularity. The 1940 election had demonstrated his appeal to the American people as of November; his actions and words since then had enhanced the widespread feeling that this was the man who should be leading the country through these dangerous times. A poll conducted amid the deliberations over Lend-Lease put the president’s approval rating at 71 percent, the highest in the seven-year history of the Gallup organization.

With the stars aligned, Lend-Lease moved steadily, if deliberately, through Congress. An isolationist filibuster was averted. Amendments were added, dropped, revised, and re-added, without materially altering the president’s design. The Senate and House passed the measure in early March, the former by a vote of 60 to 31, the latter by 317 to 71.

“Let not the dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity now,” Roosevelt declared. “Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at. But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt.”

41.

H
ARRY
H
OPKINS ARRIVED IN
L
ONDON MIDWAY THROUGH THE CONGRESSIONAL
debate over Lend-Lease. Edward R. Murrow, the American journalist who had made his reputation broadcasting news of the German blitz against the British capital, met Hopkins and inquired what brought him to England. “I suppose you could say that I’ve come here to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas,” Hopkins replied.

One of the prima donnas Hopkins knew as well as anyone did. By early 1941 Hopkins had become Roosevelt’s indispensable man. He combined the functions of a civilian chief of staff and a cabinet secretary without portfolio. He had instant access to the president and to whatever passed across the president’s desk. He knew what Roosevelt knew; he often felt what Roosevelt felt, sometimes before Roosevelt did. And he juggled all this without holding any formal title. “The extraordinary fact,” Robert Sherwood wrote, “was that the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world’s greatest war had no legitimate official position nor even any desk of his own except a card table in his bedroom. However, the bedroom was in the White House.”

Hopkins moved into the White House in the spring of 1940. His bedroom—a suite, actually—was located in the southeast corner of the second floor, looking out across the lawn to the Washington Monument and the Virginia hills beyond the Potomac. The suite had been a single room during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln used it as his study. Hopkins’s four-poster bed displaced the desk on which the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. More recently the suite had served as quarters for distinguished guests; Britain’s George VI slept there during a state visit in 1939. After Hopkins moved in, guests stayed across the hall, in the suite in the northeast corner. On several visits to Washington during the war, Winston Churchill would become quite familiar with Hopkins, as they bumped into each other in the hall every day.

The acquaintance began in January 1941. For some time Roosevelt had been dissatisfied at having to communicate with Churchill through letters and the occasional telephone call. The destroyers-for-bases deal could have been concluded much sooner, he believed, if he had been able to speak with Churchill in person. A comparable thought occurred to him as he laid the groundwork for Lend-Lease and had to estimate Britain’s liquid assets and its collateral. “You know,” he told Hopkins, “a lot of this could be settled if Churchill and I could just sit down together for a while.”