Those Angry Days

by Lynne Olson

  The following morning, Lothian’s ashes were taken to Arlington National Cemetery, where they were interred, with full military honors, at the base of the mast of the USS Maine, the battleship whose sinking in Cuba in 1898 helped precipitate the Spanish-American War. “Very softly and reverently, the urn was placed on a folded British flag and carried into the vault to rest with the men of the Maine,” Eleanor Shepardson, an American friend of Lothian’s, wrote to the marquess’s two sisters in Scotland. “He now rests in a country which loved him and believed in him.”*

  In Britain, meanwhile, Lothian’s death was regarded as an incalculable loss. “When the news was brought to me, I felt stunned, as if a bomb had exploded at my feet,” former prime minister David Lloyd George remarked. The New York Times noted: “It is no exaggeration to say that Lord Lothian’s death struck government circles [in London] first as a major disaster and secondly as a personal deprivation.” One radio commentator equated the impact of his death to the sinking of a battleship; a government official said it was worse than losing two army corps. The only “graver blow to Britain’s cause” would have been the death of Churchill, another official declared.

  In the draft of a cable to Roosevelt about Lothian’s death, Churchill initially referred to the peer as “one of our greatest Ambassadors to the United States.” Then he struck out “one” and changed the sentence to read “our greatest Ambassador to the United States.”

  Like Churchill, Lothian had achieved his greatest triumph in the climactic years of 1940 and 1941. In his eloquent, wistful House of Commons eulogy to the ambassador, the British leader alluded to that when he said: “I cannot help feeling that to die at the height of a man’s career, universally honoured and admired, to die while great issues are still commanding the whole of his interest, to be taken from us at the moment when he could already see ultimate success in view—is not the most unenviable of fates.” A number of those present thought Churchill was talking about himself, as well as the man to whom he was paying tribute.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER LORD Lothian’s death, FDR wheeled himself into the Diplomatic Dining Room of the White House and took his place behind a large desk covered with microphones. He was about to deliver another of his famed fireside chats to the American people, one of the most significant of his presidency.

  In the simple, informal language of which he was a master, he sketched for his radio listeners an outline of the revolutionary new aid program he had conceived, and then he told them why it was vital for the safety of America as well as Britain. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” he said. If the British were defeated, the Axis powers would “control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas.” They would be “in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun—a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.”

  To avert such a horrific future, the United States “must become the great arsenal of democracy,” supplying Britain and other nations fighting the enemy with everything they needed. “We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

  A genius at explaining difficult and complex issues to his countrymen in terms they could relate to, Roosevelt had paved the way for his announcement of Lend-Lease when, at a White House press conference a few days earlier, he presented the analogy of the neighbor and the garden hose. The new aid program, he said, was akin to lending a hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. Once the fire was put out, the hose would be returned. Similarly, military supplies would be of considerably more benefit to the United States if employed by the British to defeat Germany and Italy than remaining unused here. When the war was over, Roosevelt implied, they would be sent back to America. (The improbability of this actually happening was left unmentioned.)

  But there was a problem with Roosevelt’s garden hose analogy, as the historian Richard Snow has pointed out: “If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you not only lend him your garden hose, you help him use it.” In his fireside chat, the president took pains to emphasize, as he had done repeatedly since the beginning of the war, that the main purpose of this initiative, like the others before it, was to keep America out of the conflict. “There is far less chance of the United States getting into the war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis,” he said. “You can nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as a deliberate untruth.”

  In his effort to rally the American people behind Lend-Lease, Roosevelt failed to address the disquieting question in the minds of many in both isolationist and interventionist camps. Even with supplies from the United States, how could Britain’s forces vanquish an enemy whose army was ten times bigger? And if they couldn’t, what action, if any, would America take? FDR himself had said that the preservation of American democracy demanded the destruction of Hitler and Nazism. How could that be accomplished unless the United States entered the war as a full belligerent?

  Accusing Roosevelt of duplicity, isolationist leaders contended that Lend-Lease was just another of his furtive, indirect means to get the country into the war. “If it is our war,” Senator Burton Wheeler declared, “how can we justify lending [the British] stuff and asking them to pay us back? If it is our war, we ought to have the courage to go over and fight it. But it is not our war.”

  Herbert Agar was as ardent an interventionist as Wheeler was an isolationist, yet he agreed with the senator that the idea of Lend-Lease as a guarantee of peace for America was “bunk.” When Wheeler asked Agar during the Lend-Lease debate if he was not, in fact, working for an undeclared war against Germany, Agar retorted: “Certainly not. I am working for a declared war against Germany. Today, Lend-Lease is the best we can get.” Later, the Courier-Journal editor would write: “The opponents of the bill and the warmongers were the only ones free to say what they thought. When Roosevelt said the bill would make us the arsenal of democracy, we said this was wishful thinking: we could never be the arsenal of anything until we went to war.”

  Four key figures in the administration’s fight for Lend-Lease—Henry Stimson, Frank Knox, General George Marshall, and Admiral Harold Stark—agreed. At a meeting shortly before Roosevelt’s fireside chat, they came to the conclusion, as Stimson noted in his diary, “that this emergency could hardly be passed over without this country being drawn into war.” Several months earlier, Knox had written to his wife: “The sooner we declare war, the sooner we will get ready.”

  Roosevelt, however, made clear to the civilian and military chiefs that they were not to voice that opinion in public. Unlike the conscription legislation, Lend-Lease was a White House initiative, and its advocates in the administration were told they must follow the president’s lead and use his arguments when they testified on Capitol Hill. For Stimson and Knox, especially, the strictures posed a painful dilemma. Convinced that war was drawing ever closer, they had to insist to skeptical members of Congress that with the passage of Lend-Lease, peace would continue to reign in America.

  THE CONGRESSIONAL FIGHT OVER Lend-Lease was in several respects reminiscent of the battle over the administration’s proposal to expand the Supreme Court four years earlier. The leader of the opposition in both cases was Burton Wheeler, and a key issue—the unprecedented amount of power the legislation would grant to Roosevelt—was also the same.

  In addition to putting a clear end to U.S. neutrality, Lend-Lease would give the president sole authority to decide which countries should get U.S. military aid, how much they would receive, and whether—and how—that help would be repaid. Once again, Roosevelt’s opponents raised the charge of incipient dictatorship. Describing the Lend-Lease measure as “monstrous,” Senator Hiram Johnson declared: “I decline to ch
ange the whole form of my government on the specious plea of assisting one belligerent.… It is up to Congress now to determine whether our government shall be as ordained or become a member of the totalitarian states.” Echoing Johnson’s allegations, Philip LaFollette, an isolationist former governor of Wisconsin, contended that the administration’s “only answer to the menace of Hitlerism in Europe is to create Hitlerism step by step in the United States.”

  As inflammatory as these assertions were, none approached the stridency of Burton Wheeler’s invective. The Montana Democrat despised Roosevelt—a sentiment that FDR cordially reciprocated—and was determined to curb what he saw as the president’s insatiable appetite for power. In a dispatch to his superiors in Berlin about the Lend-Lease struggle, Hans Dieckhoff, the Reich’s former ambassador to the United States, reported: “Wheeler fights more out of personal hatred of Roosevelt than out of objective conviction.”

  In a radio broadcast blasting Lend-Lease in January 1941, Wheeler snapped: “Never before has the U.S. given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses.” Then, in a reference to the administration’s controversial farm program to plow under crops and kill livestock to raise prices, he declared: “The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.”

  That incendiary comment ignited a political firestorm, as Wheeler realized it would. “I must confess,” he said years later, “that it did sound somewhat harsh.” An enraged Roosevelt told reporters that the remark was “the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said.” He added icily: “Quote me on that.”†

  Wheeler’s statement set the tone for a two-month nationwide battle over Lend-Lease and America’s growing involvement in the war—a debate that the 1940 presidential candidates had declined to have and one whose vehemence and venom would surpass the passions unleashed by the clash over conscription. The isolationists knew that this was their last major chance to stop the United States from becoming a fully committed partner, at least economically, in Britain’s fight against Hitler. In their view, H.R. 1776—the deliberately patriotic number assigned the Lend-Lease bill by its House authors—meant a renewed subservience to Great Britain, rather than the declaration of independence signified by its title.

  An extraordinarily high number of Americans—91 percent, in one poll—were aware of Lend-Lease, and, unfortunately for the isolationists, most thought it was a good idea. According to a Gallup poll taken shortly after Roosevelt’s fireside chat, 61 percent approved of the plan while only 24 percent opposed it. A survey taken more than a month later showed that 68 percent of Americans favored aid to Britain even at the risk of war for the United States.

  But, as both sides knew from their fight over conscription, favorable public opinion did not necessarily translate into congressional support. Aware that they must defeat Lend-Lease to have any realistic chance of keeping the country out of war, the isolationists marshaled their forces for an all-out attack. The America First Committee was in the vanguard.

  For the first four months of its existence, America First had done relatively little. Lend-Lease was the catalyst it needed to spark a huge increase in its membership and establish it as the country’s leading anti-intervention organization. Within weeks, hundreds of new chapters sprang up, and tens of thousands of America First volunteers circulated anti-Lend-Lease petitions, put up posters, staged rallies, and showered Capitol Hill and the White House with letters and telegrams. In Washington, America First staff members became unofficial staffers for isolationist senators and congressmen, providing them with research and writing speeches opposing the legislation.

  As with conscription, congressional mail on Lend-Lease was solidly opposed, bearing no resemblance to American public opinion as measured by the polls; indeed, some congressmen reported receiving up to twenty times more letters against the bill than for it. “The opposition has us on the run here,” Adlai Stevenson, head of the pro-Lend-Lease effort in Chicago, admitted to Frank Knox.

  Alarmed by the intensity of the isolationists’ lobbying campaign, Roosevelt reached out to the White Committee and the Century Group for help. During the campaign, the president had shied away from contact with both. He was irritated by their pressure on him and feared that their increasingly outspoken interventionism would hurt him politically. But now, using Robert Sherwood as his intermediary, he appealed to them to “use all our efforts,” as Herbert Agar recalled, on behalf of Lend-Lease.

  The two organizations immediately responded. While the Century Group worked behind the scenes, soliciting favorable newspaper editorials and radio commentaries, the White Committee vied with America First in turning out huge numbers of leaflets, bumper stickers, buttons, posters, and petitions. Throughout the country, both sides went door to door collecting signatures and passing out material. They also staged community debates and forums. As Roosevelt noted, the “great debate” over Lend-Lease “was argued in every newspaper, on every wave length, over every cracker barrel in all the land.”

  The historian Wayne Cole has referred to the nationwide discussion as “democracy in action.” That it certainly was, albeit with a high degree of acrimony. Contending that the purpose of the legislation was “the destruction of the American Republic,” the Chicago Tribune refused to use the term “Lend-Lease” and instead referred to “the war dictatorship bill” in all its editorials, columns, and news stories. The Tribune’s crosstown rival, Frank Knox’s Chicago Daily News, accused Robert McCormick and other isolationists of “playing Hitler’s game.” The interventionist Louisville Courier-Journal, meanwhile, compared congressional opponents of Lend-Lease to German submarine commanders, declaring that both were intent on preventing aid from reaching Britain.

  As the debate raged throughout the nation, thousands of activists poured into Washington to buttonhole members of Congress and argue their positions. Lend-Lease foes paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, waving American flags and banners reading “Kill Bill 1776, Not Our Boys.” An organization called American Peace Mobilization picketed day and night outside the White House, its members carrying signs denouncing Roosevelt as a warmonger. One of the ubiquitous right-wing mothers’ groups also appeared outside the White House bearing a parchment scroll quoting Roosevelt’s numerous pledges to keep the country out of war. As news photographers aimed their cameras, the women burned the scroll and placed the blackened pieces in an undertaker’s urn labeled “Ashes of FDR’s Promises.”

  On Capitol Hill, women in black dresses, with veils covering their faces, sat day after day outside the Senate chamber, weeping and moaning. Others kept a so-called “death watch” in the Senate and House galleries; during one House discussion, a woman wearing a black robe and skull mask jumped up and shouted “Death is the final victor!”

  Members of yet another mothers’ group, chanting “Down with the Union Jack,” staged a sit-down strike in the corridor outside the office of Senator Carter Glass, a staunch interventionist. The group’s leader called the Virginia Democrat “a traitor to the republic,” while he blasted her and her followers for creating “a noisy disorder of which any self-respecting fishwife would be ashamed.” Later, Glass asked the FBI to investigate whether the “mothers” had links to Germany or any other foreign country. “I likewise believe it would be pertinent to inquire whether they really are mothers,” he added tartly. “For the sake of America, I devoutly hope not.”‡

  WHEN CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS ON Lend-Lease began in mid-January 1941, huge crowds packed each session. The atmosphere in the House and Senate committee rooms resembled a sporting event, with highly partisan spectators cheering the champions of their point of view and booing opponents.

  There were two unmistakable stars on the committees’ long lists of witnesses: Charles Lindbergh, the country’s most prominent isolationist, and his interventionist counterpart, Wendell Willkie. Hours before Lindbergh appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on
January 15, long lines of people hoping for admittance snaked down the sidewalk outside the Longworth Office Building. When he entered the cavernous committee room, he was greeted by raucous cheers and applause from the hundreds of onlookers jammed into the room.

  The applause continued throughout his testimony, along with boos and hisses for one congressman who asked him which side he preferred to win the war. “I want neither side to win,” Lindbergh responded, touching off another round of frenzied clapping. He added that he favored a negotiated peace to a British or German triumph, contending that “complete victory on either side would result in prostration in Europe such as we have never seen.”

  As notable as Lindbergh’s appearance was, however, it did not come close to the drama and controversy of Wendell Willkie’s February 11 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Well before dawn that day, throngs of people were already milling outside the Senate Office Building, even though Willkie was not scheduled to testify until that afternoon. When he finally arrived, the high-ceilinged, marble-walled Senate Caucus Room was jammed to overflowing with some twelve hundred spectators, more than double the room’s supposed capacity and the largest crowd ever to gather there.

  The testimony of the man who took his seat at the witness table bore little resemblance to the speeches of Willkie the presidential candidate. By all accounts, he deeply regretted his surrender to expediency and divisiveness during the campaign, and he vowed it would never happen again. After the election, in addition to offering his own personal support for Roosevelt as president, Willkie called on his backers to become “a vigorous, public-spirited loyal opposition which would not oppose for the sake of opposition.” Underscoring the importance of putting aside political differences and antagonisms at this time of great crisis, he pledged “to work for the unity of our people in the completion of the defense effort [and] in sending aid to Britain.”