by Lynne Olson
“Of course, the delegates were free to vote for whom they wished,” Ernest Cuneo, a Democratic Party troubleshooter, would later observe. “They were free to jump in Lake Michigan, too, if they felt like it, and for all the effect they had on the nomination, they might just as well have.” In Richard Ketchum’s view, “the affair had the unsavory odor of an assembly rigged by and for Roosevelt.” Such suspicions were reinforced when Kelly and other party bosses made clear to the delegates that they were expected to nominate Roosevelt by acclamation. Farley, however, insisted on a roll call, with Roosevelt getting 946 votes, Farley 72, and Garner 61. Though resentful at being ordered about and angry at what they regarded as the president’s deviousness, the delegates were somewhat mollified by the thought that they would at least be free to pick the vice presidential nominee. Several leading members of Congress, including House Speaker William Bankhead and Senator James Byrnes, were openly campaigning for the position, some with the belief that they had Roosevelt’s blessing.
Once again, the president unveiled an unwelcome surprise: through Harry Hopkins, his emissary in Chicago, he made it clear that he alone would designate the man for the ticket’s second spot. His choice was Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, an Iowa native who had revolutionized American farming through his key role in the development of hybrid corn and, even more important, through the revolutionary programs his department had introduced to save farmers from economic ruin. He was popular in the Midwest, a strong point in his favor as far as the president was concerned. But even more important to Roosevelt was the unwavering support of the staunchly liberal Wallace for the president and his domestic and foreign policies. “As Franklin noted the signs of eroding loyalty everywhere around him, it grew on him that Henry Wallace could be counted on to the limit,” observed Rexford Tugwell, a leading Roosevelt adviser in the early days of his presidency.
In the eyes of a fair number of Democratic Party regulars, however, Wallace was an extremely poor choice. They saw him as a radical liberal, a poor administrator, an inarticulate campaigner, and a Democratic Johnny-come-lately, having only joined the party in 1936. He was, they believed, “a man more interested in the genetic properties of corn than in the precinct returns from Jersey City.” A vegetarian and teetotaler, Wallace was also widely regarded as an eccentric who sought spiritual truth by dabbling in such phenomena as astrology, Native American religions, utopian communes, and Eastern mysticism.
In the late 1920s, Wallace had become close to a Russian-born guru and painter named Nicholas Roerich, who was as skilled in attracting wealthy American patrons as he was in teaching his own version of divine wisdom. In the mid-1930s, with Roosevelt’s permission, Wallace sent Roerich on a government-funded expedition to Mongolia and Manchuria to find drought-resistant plants and grasses that might help fight soil erosion in the heat-seared plains of America’s heartland. The sixteen-month mission, which cost $75,000 ($1.1 million in today’s dollars), produced a total of twenty plants; instead of following his original mandate, Roerich, accompanied by his son and eight Cossack guards, spent much of his time riding around Mongolia and Manchuria and stirring up political trouble. Aghast at what it considered Roerich’s mischief-making, the State Department pressured Wallace to end the expedition. He finally did so, cutting off all contact with Roerich and urging the Internal Revenue Service to investigate his finances.
Not surprisingly, this kind of activity did not exactly endear the agriculture secretary to Democratic Party regulars. Midway through the convention, Hopkins warned Roosevelt that Wallace’s nomination would face “a hell of a lot of opposition”—a massive understatement, as it turned out. Both the delegates and those who had sought the nomination were outraged. Bankhead, for one, told Ickes he felt he’d been “manhandled.” When Hopkins informed Roosevelt that a rebellion was brewing in Chicago, FDR snapped: “Well, damn it to hell, they will go for Wallace or I won’t run, and you can jolly well tell them so.”
Thanks to the vigorous intervention of Edward Kelly and other big-city party bosses, Wallace managed to eke out a slim victory in the roll call, winning 627 of the 1,100 votes cast. Bankhead had refused to withdraw his name from consideration, and the delegates showed their fury at the president by cheering wildly during the nominating speeches for the Speaker of the House while booing and hissing any mention of Wallace’s name. The mood was so ugly and hostile that Hopkins would not allow Wallace to give an acceptance speech for fear of causing a riot. During the raucous balloting, Wallace’s face was filled with “agony … just utter, blank suffering,” recalled Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. “I have never lived through anything worse.” Close to tears, Wallace’s wife asked Eleanor Roosevelt, “Why are they booing my Henry?”
As the vote dragged on, a group of journalists, including Century Group members Herbert Agar and Joseph Alsop, passed a scathing note to Solicitor General Francis Biddle, who was sitting just above them in the gallery. “The President could have had anything on God’s earth he wanted, if he had the guts to ask for it in the open,” the message read. “The people … want to follow him [but] nobody can follow a man who will not lead, who will not stand up and be counted, who will not say openly what we all know he thinks privately, who thinks you can substitute tricks for morals, smartness for passion, cunning for a soul.… He’ll get Wallace in the end.… But he’ll get him out of the gutter, which is an insult to the President, to Mr. Wallace, to you, to us and to the American tradition of democracy.”
In the days that followed, newspapers and magazines, many of them clearly pro-Willkie, portrayed the convention as a study in manipulation—by the White House, big-city bosses, and “the voice from the sewer.” Life proclaimed: “No amount of rationalizing could disguise or demolish the solid fact that at Chicago last week, in a time of world democratic crisis, the greatest democracy treated the world to one of the shoddiest and most hypocritical spectacles in its history.” Although not quite as hyperbolic in their criticism, a number of liberal, usually pro-Roosevelt publications agreed. The New Republic, for one, called the convention “a shambles” and described the White House’s performance as “fearful, panicky and weak.” And the liberal columnist Raymond Clapper wrote: “Something has gone out of American life this week. At least I have lost something. It was faith in President Roosevelt.”
Polls taken immediately after the conventions showed Willkie and the Republicans on the verge of overtaking FDR and his party. “If the President can retrieve this campaign after all the glaring blunders that he has made or been responsible for,” Harold Ickes glumly mused in his diary, “then the god of elections is indeed on his side.”
WITH THE FUROR OF the conventions finally over, the Century Group and William Allen White’s committee could return to the task of trying to save Britain. At Roosevelt’s request, White himself approached Willkie to see if he would support the destroyers-bases deal. A friend and strong backer of the Republican nominee, the Kansan, through his outspoken pro-Willkie editorials and his influence in the party, was believed to have sparked many of the telegrams and letters sent to the convention delegates. Another intermediary between the White House and Willkie was the Century Group’s Lewis Douglas, a former head of the Bureau of the Budget who had defected from the New Deal and was now a key Willkie adviser.
Willkie made clear to both men that, for political reasons, he could not issue a public statement approving the destroyer transactions. He found himself in an intensely uncomfortable position: although he was an interventionist, most prominent Republicans, including members of the Senate and House, were not. As the GOP standard-bearer, he had to give the impression of unity within the party (false as that was), which a public avowal of support for the destroyer deal would undermine. Yet at the same time, Willkie gave his word he would not attack the deal once it was announced. He made the same pledge to Lord Lothian, who reported to Churchill that Willkie was “most insistent that this statement should not in any circumstances be allowed to leak out becau
se it would certainly be used against him in the campaign.”
With the winning of Willkie’s tacit approval, the final obstacle to the destroyer transfer had been cleared away. On September 3, Roosevelt announced the deal, putting heavy emphasis on the importance of the bases acquired in exchange for the old ships: “The value to the Western Hemisphere of these outposts of security is beyond calculation.”
Although Roosevelt seemed his usual ebullient self, he continued to be deeply worried about the deal’s potential political fallout, telling a number of friends and advisers that he expected to lose the election over the issue. To his secretary, he declared: “Congress is going to raise hell about this.”
Some legislators were indeed indignant—Gerald Nye called the president’s circumvention of Congress “a dictatorial step”—and a few newspapers condemned the deal. But the storm of disapproval expected by the president never materialized. Thanks in large part to the publicity campaigns mounted by the White Committee and others, most Americans (70 percent in one survey) considered the destroyers-bases exchange to be highly beneficial for both the United States and Britain. “You can’t attack a deal like that,” one isolationist senator told the New York Post. “If you jump on the destroyer transfer, you’re jumping on the acquisition of defense bases in the Western Hemisphere. And the voters wouldn’t stand for that. Roosevelt outsmarted all of us when he tied up the two deals.” Even the Chicago Tribune approved the exchange, noting that America would now have “naval and air bases in regions which must be brought within the American defense zone.”
Later, Roosevelt would be rightly lauded for his courage in approving the politically risky transaction just two months before the election. He clearly had no idea beforehand that the response would be so favorable, yet he had gone ahead and done it. Credit, however, must also go to Wendell Willkie, who defied the urging of GOP leaders to issue a public condemnation of the deal and as a result was heavily criticized within his party. Lord Lothian played a major role, too, in bringing the deal to fruition, as did members of the Century Group and the White Committee, who acted as front men for the president, educating the public about the value of the exchange and making it politically possible for him to act.
THREE DAYS AFTER THE agreement was signed, eight destroyers slipped out of Boston Harbor, to the accompaniment of honking horns from cars crossing Charleston Bridge and cheers and applause from spectators standing along the shore. They were on their way to Halifax, Nova Scotia—the first batch of over-age ships to be transferred to the Royal Navy, which would immediately put them to work as escorts for merchant ship convoys across the Atlantic.
As the British would soon discover, the destroyers were hardly in the best of shape. “I thought they were the worst I had ever seen,” one admiral fumed. “Poor seaboats with appalling armament and accommodation.” Churchill was somewhat more tactful when he presented the U.S. naval attaché in London with a list of their problems: weak bridge structure, corroded superstructure, defective hatch covers, bad steering, and leaks everywhere.
For all their defects, however, the American ships played a key role in fighting the Battle of the Atlantic over the next nerve-racking year. Throughout the rest of 1940 and 1941, they comprised between 20 and 25 percent of the battleship escorts available for duty in the Atlantic; several were responsible for sinking German submarines. “Any destroyer that could steam, shoot, and drop depth charges was worth its weight in gold,” noted Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Creasy, director of antisubmarine warfare at the British Admiralty. “Admittedly many of them were an appalling headache to keep running. But, taken by and large, they gave invaluable service at a time of really desperate need.”
Yet even if the destroyers-bases deal had yielded no military value at all, it still would have been a significant milestone in America’s reluctant march to war. For the first time, the United States had done something consequential to help Britain. In the process, it had served notice to Germany and the rest of the world that it would not stand idly by while the last bastion of democracy in Europe went down to defeat. As the Baltimore Sun noted, the destroyer transfer “makes our official neutrality, already highly diaphanous, a well-nigh transparent cover for nonbelligerent cooperation on the side of Great Britain.” Hanson Baldwin, the military correspondent for The New York Times, went even further, declaring that the destroyers “sealed what in effect was an unofficial alliance between the English-speaking nations and brought the United States far closer than ever before to entry into the war.” German officials agreed, calling the destroyers-bases exchange “an openly hostile act against Germany.”
The U.S. public’s enthusiastic support for a transaction that Roosevelt feared would cost him the election would later make it easier for him to propose a considerably more valuable aid program for Britain: Lend-Lease. The shift in Americans’ views on Britain and the war was slow but unmistakable. During the German blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940, nearly two-thirds of the country thought it was more important for the United States to stay out of war than to risk getting involved in the conflict by helping Britain. By August, the country was evenly divided on the issue. By the end of the year, a majority of Americans would favor coming to the aid of Britain even if it meant entry into the war.
That change in attitude was especially crucial now. As Churchill had predicted, “the fury and might of the enemy” had finally descended upon his island nation.
SINCE THE MIDDLE OF August, German bombers had been wreaking havoc on airfields, aircraft factories, and radar installations in the south of England, trying to break the back of the Royal Air Force before launching a cross-Channel invasion. Then, on September 7, the day after the first American destroyers started steaming across the Atlantic, the Luftwaffe began a relentless reign of terror against London and other major British cities. For fifty-seven nights, German bombing raids would batter the British capital, killing tens of thousands of civilians and leaving millions homeless.
In this crucial showdown between Britain and Germany, both countries did their best to convince the United States that their forces were winning. General Raymond Lee, the American military attaché in London, provided Washington with British intelligence reports claiming the downing of huge numbers of German aircraft by the RAF. Similar messages came from the British embassy in Washington.
General Friedrich von Boetticher, in turn, passed along sheaves of top-secret cables and maps claiming the opposite to Colonel Truman Smith and the German attaché’s other friends in U.S. Army intelligence. According to these detailed reports from Berlin, the Luftwaffe attacks were decimating British airpower and crippling the country’s ports and industries. Army intelligence experts valued von Boetticher’s information so highly that when he stopped by the War Department’s headquarters on his daily rounds, he was exempted from the rigorous mandatory security search endured by other visitors. Summaries of the German reports, prepared by Truman Smith, were circulated throughout the War and State Departments. With their gloomy assessments of Britain’s chances, they bolstered the arguments of those in both departments who opposed giving aid to Britain.
Most Americans, however, felt differently: their focus was not on Britain’s losses but on the courage and toughness of its people in standing up to the German onslaught. Such admiration was stimulated by a flood of newspaper and magazine articles—and, above all, radio broadcasts—from American correspondents in London, who described the dogged determination of the capital’s residents to live their lives while their world threatened to shatter around them. Virtually every issue of Life during that period featured dramatic photographs of the Blitz and its effect on ordinary British citizens. A particularly poignant photo—showing a cute, wide-eyed blond toddler in a hospital bed, her head swathed in bandages and clutching a teddy bear—appeared on Life’s cover and touched hearts everywhere. It soon became a poster for William Allen White’s committee.
The journalist who did the most, however, to influence U.S. pu
blic opinion toward Britain was the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow, whose wartime broadcasts, with their famed “This is London” opening, were required listening for millions of Americans. In homes across the country, people gathered around their radios each evening to hear Murrow’s vivid verbal portraits of the civilian heroes of the Blitz—the “little people … who have no uniforms, who get no decorations for bravery,” but who were risking their lives night after night to aid the wounded, retrieve the dead, and bring their battered city back to life. Obsessed by the danger that Germany posed to the world and convinced of the vital importance of Britain’s survival, Murrow was unapologetic in demanding that America must come to its rescue. “He was concerned, very concerned that his own country wasn’t aware of the facts of life,” said a British friend of his. “And that if Hitler & Co. were not stopped here, the next stop was Manhattan.”
Thanks in large part to Murrow’s reports and those of other American correspondents, Lord Halifax was able to inform the British war cabinet in late October of “an almost miraculous change of opinion” of Americans toward their country and the importance of saving it. As the historian Nicholas Cull later put it, “Hitler had given America something to hate; now Britain provided something for America to love.”
In his travels throughout the United States that fall, John Wheeler-Bennett witnessed firsthand that rapidly changing sentiment. After he gave a speech to a midwestern group about the valor of the British people during the Blitz, a member of the audience rushed up to him, shaking his fist. “You’re a scoundrel, sir, a damned dangerous insidious scoundrel!” the man exclaimed. “I’ve been an iron-bound isolationist all my life—and you’ve made me feel like a heel.”
