by Lynne Olson
Abstract ideas were of little interest to most of these literary celebrities, nor did they talk much about politics, economics, or social problems. For much of the 1920s, they were blithely disconnected from the real world, absorbed in incessant, feverish socializing. Sherwood was no exception, usually following lunch at the Algonquin with a night out at a theater, a nightclub, or a late-night Round Table poker game. His weekends were often spent at boozy parties at the Manhattan apartments or country houses of other Round Table members, where croquet was played as if it were a blood sport.
Much as he enjoyed the company of his Round Table colleagues, however, Sherwood felt more and more out of step with their superficial, self-absorbed way of life. Still trying to come to grips with his experiences in World War I, he wanted to do something meaningful, but he was not quite sure what that might be.
Then, in the summer of 1925, during a raucous country house weekend on Long Island, Edna Ferber pulled the twenty-nine-year-old Sherwood aside for a heart-to-heart talk. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of such novels as So Big, Show Boat, and Giant, Ferber was one of the few Round Table regulars who took her writing seriously. Ignoring “crap games to the right of us, chemin de fer to the left of us, and Irving Berlin in front of us,” as Sherwood remembered, she told him: “The best thing that could happen to you would be to have you snatched out of the Algonquin and exiled to Kansas City for two years. At the end of that time, you’d come back with some fine work.”
The conversation with Ferber proved to be a defining moment in Sherwood’s life. Although he did not go to Kansas City, he did take the rest of her advice. Distancing himself from the Round Table, he began writing plays, churning out more than a dozen over the next decade, most of them dealing in some fashion with what he considered the mindless, nonsensical folly of war. Like many of his early efforts, Sherwood’s first major hit, Road to Rome, cloaked its angry antiwar message in a smoke screen of witty, urbane dialogue designed to appeal to New York audiences; the critic Charles Brackett described the play in The New Yorker as “a hymn of hate against militarism—disguised, ever so gaily, as a love song.”
A number of his plays, including Waterloo Bridge, Reunion in Vienna, and The Petrified Forest, were made into movies. So was Idiot’s Delight, which opened as a Broadway play in 1936 and earned him his first Pulitzer Prize. Both anti-Fascist and antiwar, Idiot’s Delight was Sherwood’s last play to feature characters who raged against evildoers but who failed to do anything meaningful on behalf of what they believed.
As Europe drew closer to the brink in the late 1930s, he struggled to find a balance between his hatred of war and his growing conviction that Hitler and Mussolini must be stopped. “Oh God,” he wrote in his diary in 1937, “how I hope to live to see the day when those unspeakable barbaric bastards get their punishment.”
Increasingly obsessed by the worsening European situation, Sherwood gave up his writing to focus on reading “practically every word of foreign news in the papers—columns, editorials—and listening to news broadcasts as much as I can.” After the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich, he finally abandoned his pacifism: “I feel that I must start to battle for one thing—the end of our isolation. There is no hope for humanity unless we participate vigorously in the concerns of the world and assume our proper place of leadership with all the grave responsibilities that go with it.”
Not long after Munich, his change of heart energized him into writing another play. This one would feature neither his trademark witty cynicism nor his customary gently nihilistic approach. Reaching back to the past, it would focus instead on one of America’s most cherished heroes, who, like Sherwood and millions of other Americans, had been a man of peace forced to grapple with the dilemma of appeasement or war.
Abe Lincoln in Illinois follows Abraham Lincoln in his pre-presidency days, as he agonizes over what position to take on slavery. Should he remain quiet and let that evil institution metastasize throughout America, or should he stand firm against it, thus accepting the possibility of civil war, the idea of which he hates as much as slavery itself?
In tracing Lincoln’s tortuous journey from neutrality to his acknowledgment of the need to take action, Sherwood features a brief reenactment of the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. When Senator Stephen Douglas insists that each state should be allowed to mind its own business and “leave its neighbors alone,” Lincoln retorts that such an attitude is “the complacent policy of indifference to evil, and that policy I cannot but hate.” He explains: “I hate it because it deprives our republic of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions everywhere to taunt us as hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.”
The implied comparison of America’s dilemma in the 1850s to that in the late 1930s was clearly understood by the play’s audiences. Heywood Broun of the New York World called Abe Lincoln in Illinois “the finest piece of propaganda ever to come into our theater.… To the satisfied and the smug, it will seem subversive to its very core. And they will be right.… It is the very battle cry of freedom.”
But having sounded that battle cry, Sherwood, caught up “in a frenzy of uncertainty,” was still ambivalent about what steps the country should take to combat Hitler. Even when Germany invaded Poland, he did not add his voice to the public discourse. It wasn’t until he listened to Lindbergh’s speeches that he decided he must step from behind his playwright’s persona and speak out as Robert Sherwood.
A great admirer of Lindbergh since his 1927 flight, Sherwood believed that the young aviator’s decency and dignity had provided a beacon of light for the country amid the corruption and materialism of the 1920s, which Sherwood later described as “the most sordid of periods.” When others criticized Lindbergh and his wife for their trips to Germany, he had defended them. In early 1939, he wrote in his diary: “It makes me sick to think of the way the Lindberghs have become excoriated as pro-Nazis—shows how unbalanced people have become on that awful subject.”
But when he heard Lindbergh declare that the United States should do nothing to help the Western allies and that they, not Germany, were responsible for the war, he felt shocked, horrified, and “rather sick.” While he did not doubt the sincerity of Lindbergh’s beliefs, he was appalled that the man he had once regarded as a hero was so oblivious to the evil of Nazism and the threat it posed to the world. As he listened to Lindbergh’s broadcasts, he was convinced, as he wrote later, that “Hitlerism was already powerfully and persuasively represented in our own midst.” Shortly after Lindbergh’s first speech, Sherwood wrote in his diary: “Will Lindbergh one day be our Fuehrer?”
A few days later, when the famed Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White sent Sherwood a cable asking him to join a nationwide campaign to lobby Congress for revision of the neutrality law, Sherwood immediately said yes. He told White he would “give all the help I can, physical, moral and financial.… If the Allies should be defeated, then the next war will follow quickly, and it will be fought in this hemisphere.”
Several weeks after that, in a long, soul-searching letter seeking White’s advice on what further role he should take in the burgeoning debate over the European conflict, Sherwood observed that he still hated war with all his might. But, he added, “the terrible truth is that when war comes home to you, you have to fight it; and this war has come home to me.”
* A month later, the letter finally made it to the White House, prompting Roosevelt to begin the process that led to America’s development of the atomic bomb.
† In 1936, the now struggling Life was bought by the magazine publisher Henry Luce, who closed it and used its name for the new photo magazine he was about to launch.
CHAPTER 6
“I AM ALMOST LITERALLY WALKING ON EGGS”
Robert Sherwood was hardly the only person to turn to William Allen White for counsel. From William McKinley on, most U.S. presidents had done the same. Indeed, seeking White’s opinions had beco
me an American habit. He was, as one historian put it, “as close to being a national institution as an elderly newspaper editor could be.”
Rotund and bespectacled, the seventy-one-year-old White had spent most of his life in the little Kansas town of Emporia. His newspaper, the Emporia Gazette, had never boasted a circulation above seven thousand, yet the name of its Pulitzer Prize–winning editor was instantly recognized by millions of people throughout the country.
White was also a biographer, political kingmaker, novelist, writer of articles and short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and other major national magazines, and an outspoken enemy of the Ku Klux Klan. But what appealed most to his countrymen was his homespun political and social commentary and the values it espoused—the need for tolerance and community, for example, and the importance of local institutions such as churches and schools in building democracy. His writings were akin to the paintings of Norman Rockwell, depicting innately decent people who eschew conflict and come together for the common good, all of which helped give readers and viewers a sense of pride and comfort about themselves and their country.
William Allen White.
An old-style Republican progressive who’d been a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, White had a somewhat complex relationship with the current occupant of the White House. He’d long advocated many of the social and economic reforms that Franklin Roosevelt had implemented; at the same time, he was a staunchly loyal Republican who had never voted for a Democratic candidate for president, even when he preferred the Democrat’s stand on issues. On a stop in Emporia during the 1936 presidential campaign, Roosevelt, who considered White a friend, laughingly declared to the crowd he could count on the editor’s support “three and a half years out of every four.”
That support extended to Roosevelt’s foreign policy as well. Like Robert Sherwood, White hated the very idea of war, and it would have been logical to assume that he was an isolationist, coming from the Midwest as he did. But he was also a man of the world, an incessant traveler who had visited six of the seven continents and who had long advocated closer U.S. cooperation with the rest of the globe.
He had earlier supported strict enforcement of the Neutrality Act, hoping it would keep America out of the approaching war in Europe. But when Germany invaded Poland, he changed his mind, backing Roosevelt’s proposal to revise the law to allow Britain and France to buy arms. Well aware of White’s popularity in Middle America, the president asked for his help in selling the plan to the public.
White was initially reluctant because of his age. But he finally yielded to FDR’s famed persuasiveness, becoming head of a group with the tongue-tying name of the Nonpartisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Law. Recruiting Sherwood and more than a hundred other prominent Americans as members, the committee worked to mobilize public opinion through editorials, newspaper advertisements, and radio broadcasts. After urging supporters to flood Congress with letters and telegrams of support, White went to Capitol Hill himself to buttonhole Republican senators and congressmen.
When he arrived, it was apparent that the isolationists, at least initially, had gained the advantage in the fight. Lindbergh’s first radio speech had had a dramatic impact, as had broadcasts by Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and other noted antiwar figures. “If America really means to stay out of foreign wars, she needs to remember how easy it is to get in,” Nye declared in one of his radio addresses. “We need the neutrality law. We need restraints upon a President.”
Such appeals to antiwar sentiment had resulted in a torrent of several million telegrams, letters, and postcards to lawmakers, almost all demanding that the arms embargo remain untouched. Of 1,800 pieces of mail received by one Republican senator, only 76 were in favor of repealing the embargo. Although he had been inclined to support the president’s proposal, the senator said, he now would probably vote against it. Other members of Congress made similar statements.
Yet despite these gloomy portents, the situation remained extremely fluid, as Roosevelt realized when he looked at the latest public opinion polls. Most Americans were still adamant about staying out of the war, but at the same time, most (85 percent in one survey) wanted the British and French to win. In another poll, 24 percent of those questioned were in favor of supplying aid to the Allies, while 30 percent opposed giving help to any warring country. Thirty-seven percent, meanwhile, said they favored neither the Allies nor Germany but would approve the selling of arms to belligerents on “cash and carry” terms.
This lukewarm middle group, combined with those unequivocally in favor of aid, would give the president the public backing he needed. As he saw it, the only way to ensure that support was to downplay the importance of saving the European democracies and to argue instead that replacing the embargo with “cash and carry” was the best way to keep America out of the war.
In his campaign to garner congressional support, Roosevelt, who was acutely aware of how vulnerable he still was after the political disasters of the previous two years, moved as carefully and cautiously as possible. “I am almost literally walking on eggs,” he told an acquaintance. Before calling Congress back into session, he took pains to lay the political groundwork, asking Senate and House leaders for their opinions and briefing individual members to try to win their backing. At the same time, governors, mayors, and prominent businessmen sympathetic to the Allies’ cause were recruited to help in marshaling votes, while William Allen White’s committee was handed the job of rallying public opinion. Influential interventionists such as former secretary of state Henry Stimson were called on to make radio addresses to counter those of the isolationists.
Most important was the creation of an entirely new coalition of pro-administration legislators. Just as the president’s chief opponents were now the progressives who previously had backed his domestic programs, many of his new supporters in this topsy-turvy period were conservatives who in the past had savagely attacked the New Deal.
Roosevelt was particularly assiduous in courting southern Democrats, whose region was traditionally pro-military and pro-British. Among them was Senator Walter George of Georgia, one of the chief targets on the president’s 1938 purge list. To manage the revision bill in the Senate, the White House chose Senator James Byrnes, a wily South Carolinian who, according to an acquaintance, “could charm snakes without a flute and with his eyes closed.” The administration also handed out a substantial number of patronage plums to southerners.
Once his spadework was done and Congress had reassembled in emergency session, Roosevelt traveled to Capitol Hill to deliver his appeal in person. In the wake of the outbreak of war in Europe, Washington was bristling with extra security against potential saboteurs and spies, and the Capitol and its grounds had taken on the appearance of an armed camp. Several dozen policemen and an expanded Secret Service detail swarmed around the president as he entered the building and, clutching the arm of an aide, walked slowly and awkwardly to the dais of the House chamber.
Showing no sign of his usual cheerful, buoyant manner, Roosevelt stood unsmiling at the podium, barely acknowledging the ripple of applause that greeted him. One reporter described him as looking “tired and worn.” But when he began to speak, there was no hint of weariness in his voice. Until that moment, Lindbergh, Borah, and his other opponents had dominated the discussion. Now it was the president’s turn in the spotlight, and he was determined to make the most of it.
To the assembled lawmakers and the millions of Americans listening to the speech on radio, FDR bluntly declared: “I regret that the Congress passed the [Neutrality] Act. I regret equally that I signed that Act.” He argued that revising the law was the best way to guarantee peace and safety for the United States in the tumultuous period ahead: “Our acts must be guided by one single hardheaded thought—keeping America out of this war!”
FDR urged the isolationists not to regard themselves as the only members of “the peace bloc,” adding, “We all belong to it.” Again,
he emphasized: “This government must lose no time or effort to keep the nation from being drawn into the war”—a comment that drew the loudest applause of the day.
As the president’s limousine left the Capitol grounds following the speech, a crowd of protesters, waving small flags, demonstrated against both his appearance before Congress and his proposal. “We’re mothers!” one woman shouted. “We don’t want our boys to go to war!” Overall, however, public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. Within a couple of days, the White House received tens of thousands of telegrams and letters applauding the speech, while members of Congress reported a shift in their mail that favored repeal of the embargo. According to polls taken immediately after the president’s address, slightly more than 60 percent of the American people now backed repeal.
When the congressional debate began a few days later, “nerves were strung fiddle-tight,” Time noted. Hundreds of people, most of them opponents of the bill, crammed the galleries of both houses. Herbert Agar, a well-known southern newspaper editor who watched several days of the Senate debate from the press gallery, said of the onlookers’ reaction: “One might have thought the President had asked permission to sell the United States to England.” Agar, an ardent interventionist, observed foes of the measure “storming the corridors of the Senate [office] building, screaming about ‘merchants of death,’ ‘the House of Morgan,’ ‘British propaganda,’ and similar phrases from long ago—not a pretty picture of democracy at work in the making of foreign policy.”
Immediately after the president’s speech, a group of more than twenty isolationist senators had vowed to fight the proposed repeal “from hell to breakfast.” Throughout the intense six-week debate that followed, they made good on their pledge. The most eloquent foe was William Borah, who, although physically frail, showed once again why he was regarded as the best orator in the Senate. His voice shaking with fury, the aging Borah told his fellow senators that passage of the legislation would be the first step on the slippery slope to active intervention in the war. Aiming his next comment at the American public, he warned: “If you believe what is now being preached throughout this country, you will soon be sending munitions without pay, and you will send your boys back to the slaughter pens of Europe.”
