by FDR
Roosevelt fared less well in his effort to repeal the Neutrality Act. The administration bill, introduced by Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, passed the House 200–188, but with a crippling isolationist amendment that would continue the embargo on “arms and ammunition” while permitting the sale of airplanes and other war materiel.71 In the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee, despite frantic administration efforts, voted 12–11 to delay consideration of the House bill until the next session of Congress, which would not convene until January 1940. Purge survivors Walter F. George of Georgia and Guy Gillette of Iowa, who normally would have supported repeal, George especially, voted against the president.
The highlight of the Washington summer was the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In September 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, FDR invited the King to Washington as a goodwill gesture to cement Anglo-American relations. “You would, of course, stay with us at the White House. You and I are fully aware of the demands of the Protocol people, but, having had much experience with them, I am inclined to think you and Her Majesty should do very much as you personally want to do—and I will see to it that your decision becomes the right decision.”72
The King and Queen arrived in the United States June 7, 1939. After a ceremonial reception in Washington,* the Roosevelts and Windsors adjourned for a summer weekend at Hyde Park. FDR, who personally planned every detail of the trip, treated the King as a fellow head of state: no bowing, no curtsies to the Queen, hot dogs on the lawn at Top Cottage, informal dinner at Springwood. Sara had urged Franklin to dispense with the usual cocktail hour. “My mother says we should have tea,” Roosevelt told the King. “My mother would have said the same thing,” His Majesty replied—at which point FDR reached for the martini shaker. After dinner the King and the president talked privately well into the night. About one-thirty FDR placed a fatherly hand on the King’s knee. “Young man, it’s time for you to go to bed.” Not only had Roosevelt covered the gamut of world affairs, but his combination of charm, respect, and paternal guidance won George’s admiration. “Why don’t my Ministers talk to me as the President did tonight?” he asked Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King before retiring. “I feel exactly as though a father were giving me his most careful and wise advice.”73
The King’s visit provided a momentary distraction from the deteriorating situation in Europe. After incorporating the Baltic port of Memel into East Prussia, Hitler turned his attention to Danzig and the Polish Corridor. The Treaty of Versailles, in the process of creating an independent Poland, had not only stripped a large slice of Silesia from Germany but granted landlocked Poland access to the sea by establishing a corridor along the Vistula River terminating in the port city of Danzig. Danzig, one of the four principal cities of the Hanseatic League and demonstrably German since the Middle Ages, was made a Free City tied economically to Poland. Even more onerous, the Vistula corridor split East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Hitler demanded the immediate return of Danzig and an extraterritorial road and rail link across the Corridor. Paradoxically, these demands were among the least unreasonable Hitler had made. When Poland refused, war became inevitable.
On August 23, 1939, Hitler achieved his final diplomatic triumph—a surprise Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union. A secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.74 At first light on the morning of September 1, forty-two German divisions, including ten armored divisions, stormed across the Polish frontier.75 Roosevelt was awakened at 2:50 A.M. Washington time by a phone call from Ambassador Bullitt in Paris relaying a message from Anthony Drexel Biddle in Warsaw that war had begun. “Well, Bill, it has come at last,” said the president. “God help us all.”76
* A Fortune magazine poll taken at the time Lippmann wrote indicated that fewer than 25 percent of the respondents would be willing to go to war to defend the Philippines if they were attacked. “The Fortune Survey,” Fortune 46–47 (January 1936).
* U.S. forces were in China under the provisions of the Sino-American Treaty of 1858. In 1937 the Yangtze Patrol consisted of thirteen vessels (nine of which were gunboats), 129 officers, and 1,671 enlisted men. In addition, 814 soldiers from the 15th Infantry were stationed in Tientsien; 528 marines in Peking; and another 2,555 marines in Shanghai. Secretary Hull to Vice President Garner, January 8, 1938, 83 Congressional Record 261, 75th Congress, 3rd session (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938).
* The operative portion of what came to be known as the Ludlow Amendment provided:
Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its Territorial possessions and attack upon the citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a Nationwide referendum.
The amendment also provided that Congress, by joint resolution, could refer the question of war or peace to the electorate “when it deems a national crisis to exist.” 75th Congress, 1st Session, House Joint Resolution 199. See Jean Edward Smith, The Constitution and American Foreign Policy 245 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1989).
* The 188 votes Ludlow received were for his resolution to bring the amendment to the floor, not for the amendment itself. Even if those 188 members were to vote for the amendment (which was not guaranteed), it would have fallen 102 votes shy of the 290 (two thirds of 435) required for passage.
† In a plebiscite on April 10 Austrians voted 99.75 percent for union with Germany. Historians of the Third Reich have often noted that Hitler took advantage of the euphoria surrounding the Anschluss to consolidate his hold on the German Army. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was relieved as war minister (Hitler himself assumed the office), General Freiherr von Fritsch was replaced as commander in chief, sixteen older generals (including Gerd von Rundstedt) were retired, and forty-four were transferred to less sensitive posts. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 489 ff. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945 365–368 (London: Macmillan, 1961); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler 542–550 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
* Hopkins’s second wife, Barbara, Diana’s mother, died of cancer in the summer of 1937, when Diana was five years old. Until Hopkins remarried in July 1942, he and Diana lived off and on in the White House, where ER supervised Diana’s activities. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 106–107 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* Though Marshall ranked thirty-fourth, the rule that no one be appointed chief of staff who could not complete the four-year term before reaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five ruled out all but four general officers senior to Marshall. Of those, the odds-on favorite of military prognosticators was Major General Hugh A. Drum, commander of the First Army at Governors Island and the senior officer on active duty.
* As a child of seven I was privileged to watch from the window of my mother’s eighth-floor office in the Farm Credit Administration the parade escorting President Roosevelt and the King from Union Station to the White House. The crowd lining the parade route, estimated at 750,000, was the largest ever assembled in Washington. Will Swift, The Roosevelts and the Royals: Franklin and Eleanor, The King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History 113–114 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
TWENTY
STAB IN THE BACK
On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JUNE 10, 1940
WITH GERMAN ARMOR slicing through Poland’s defenses, Roosevelt met the press in the Oval Office shortly before noon on September 1. “Can we stay out of this?” he was asked. “I not only sincerely hope so,” FDR replied, “but I believe we can and every effort will be made by this Administration so to do.”1 Later
Roosevelt told the cabinet that his World War I experience was eerily familiar. The president said he felt he was picking up an interrupted routine. “Unless some miracle beyond our present grasp changes the hearts of men the days ahead will be crowded days—crowded with the same problems, the same anxieties that filled to the brim those September days of 1914. For history does in fact repeat.”2
In London, Chamberlain spoke feebly to Parliament, a waffling, self-pitying address that gave no indication Britain intended to stand by its commitment to the Poles. When Arthur Greenwood, the acting leader of the Labour opposition, rose to reply, Leo Amery, one of many prominent Conservatives appalled at Chamberlain’s limp response, shouted, “Speak for England, Arthur.” The House erupted with a mighty cheer, and Greenwood gave a brief, stirring speech that reflected the mood of the country: “I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate … when Britain, and all Britain stands for, and human civilization are in peril.”3 A thunderous, prolonged ovation greeted Greenwood’s remarks. As one member noted, “A puff would have brought the Government down.”4 With Parliament in revolt the cabinet recovered its lost courage. At 8 A.M. Sunday, September 3, the British government informed Berlin that unless it received assurances within three hours that Germany would begin an immediate withdrawal of its forces from Poland, Great Britain would declare war. At 11:15, with no response, a dispirited Chamberlain informed a radio audience and later Parliament, “This country is now at war.” Five hours later France followed suit.*
Roosevelt addressed the nation Sunday night in a fireside chat. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” said the president, “but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”5
FDR’s first order of business was repeal of the Neutrality Act. So long as the act remained on the books, the United States was precluded from providing aid to any of the belligerents, even if they paid cash on the barrelhead. Congress had adjourned for its annual recess, and the members were spread across the country. On Wednesday, September 13, after touching base with the leadership of the House and Senate, Roosevelt summoned the legislators into special session the following Thursday.6 “My own personal opinion,” he wrote Judge Walton Moore, counselor of the State Department, “is that we can get the votes in the House and Senate but that the principal difficulty will be to prevent a filibuster in the latter.”7
Isolationist opposition mobilized quickly. The following evening Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate’s longest-serving member, delivered a blistering attack over a national radio hookup. European wars, said the aged Borah, were “wars brought on through the unconscionable schemes of remorseless rulers.” If the United States sold European countries arms, “we would be taking sides, and that would be the first step to active intervention.”8 Borah’s speech resonated strongly among those determined to keep the United States out of war.
Roosevelt recruited the Republican leadership to respond. Alf Landon, Frank Knox, and Henry L. Stimson waded into the fray to support immediate repeal. The academic establishment joined the fight. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, James B. Conant of Harvard, and Karl Compton of MIT, together with the presidents of Princeton and Yale, mobilized the nation’s educators to support repeal. The Kansas editor William Allen White organized a wide array of notables through the Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Act.*
The battle escalated on September 15, when Charles A. Lindbergh, one of the country’s sentimental heroes, addressed a national audience at least as large as that which had listened to FDR’s fireside chat twelve days before. “This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one of those age-old struggles within our own family of nations—a quarrel arising from the errors of the last war—from the failure of the victors to follow a consistent policy either of fairness or force.”9 Lindbergh, who had received Germany’s second highest decoration from Hermann Göring shortly after Munich,† tapped into a vast reservoir of antiwar sentiment. Midwestern progressives, old-line socialists and Communists, Christian pacifists, cryptofascists such as Father Coughlin, and the German-American Bund launched an avalanche of letters, postcards, and telegrams to representatives and senators demanding retention of the arms embargo. Legislators previously disposed in favor of repeal began to waiver. One Republican congressman reported receiving 1,800 messages after Lindbergh’s speech, only 76 of which supported repeal.10
When FDR met with the congressional leadership on September 20, the day before Congress would convene, it was clear that outright repeal of the Neutrality Act was beyond reach. “The trouble is,” said Senate Republican leader Charles McNary of Oregon, “if we repealed the whole Neutrality Act people would think we were repealing our neutrality.”11 Roosevelt reached a bipartisan compromise: repeal the arms embargo, but put the sale of weapons on a “cash-and-carry” basis. No sales on credit; no U.S. funding; no bank loans; no American transport.
To emphasize the urgency of repeal, FDR chose to address Congress directly. Roosevelt always delivered his annual message in person, but not since Warren Harding in 1923 had a president spoken to Congress during the session.12 Recognizing the bad blood that had accumulated during the past two years, the president was at his conciliatory best. “These perilous days demand cooperation among us without a trace of partisanship. Our acts must be guided by one single hard-headed thought—keeping America out of war.” To avoid offending Anglophobic midwesterners and Irish Catholics, Roosevelt downplayed aid to Britain and France while emphasizing that repeal of the embargo would aid the cause of peace. The “cash-and-carry” requirement would avoid economic entanglement and keep American vessels out of the war zone.
“In a period when it is sometimes said that free discussion is no longer compatible with national safety, may you by your deeds show the world that we of the United States are one people, of one mind, one spirit, one clear resolution, walking before God in the light of the living.”13
Public approval was overwhelming. The White House mail room was inundated with messages of support. Even Senator Borah thought it was a good speech and said privately that he favored “cash and carry.”14 A Gallup poll immediately following the president’s speech indicated that 60 percent of Americans now supported repeal and 84 percent favored an Allied victory.15 On September 28 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16–7 to send the bill to the floor. This time Senators George and Gillette voted with the president.16
On the same day the Foreign Relations Committee reported the “cash-and-carry” bill, the beleaguered Polish garrison in Warsaw capitulated. Organized resistance ended. The Soviet Union, pursuant to the deal Stalin had struck with Hitler, intervened on September 17, and from that point on Poland’s fate was sealed. Germany and the USSR proclaimed a Boundary and Friendship Treaty defining Poland’s division. The Soviets acquired nearly half of Poland’s territory and one third its population. Germany gained the remainder. Like Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. The Poles had fought bravely; their losses in battle totaled 70,000 killed, 133,000 wounded, and 700,000 captured. The Nazi war machine did not go unscathed, however; the final figures from Berlin listed 10,572 killed, 30,322 wounded, and 3,400 missing. The first great battle of World War II had ended in total defeat for the Allied powers.
With Poland’s collapse the momentum to repeal the arms embargo accelerated. Isolationist stalwarts Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Robert Taft of Ohio endorsed “cash and carry.” On October 5, Henry L. Stimson put the fox among the chickens when he departed from White House strategy and bluntly warned the country that “Britain and France are now fighting a battle which, in the event of their losing, will become our battle.” Hull had tried to get Stimson to delete the reference to Britain and Fran
ce, but Stimson, characteristically, refused. To the administration’s surprise, Stimson’s speech was well received—so well that tens of thousands of copies were printed for national distribution.17 Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago delivered a powerful radio address supporting repeal, as did Al Smith, both designed to overcome Irish Catholic opposition. Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, back in the fold, told his colleagues, “Civilization demands that we give all the aid we can to a nation attacked, and not run like cowards until our turn comes.”18
Roosevelt kept a low profile. These were tense times for the president. “I am almost literally walking on eggs” he wrote Canada’s Lord Tweedsmuir.19 For relaxation the president turned to poker, usually on Saturday evenings. Ickes, Robert Jackson, Pa Watson, Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR’s doctor, and Steve Early usually filled the places at the table. “We played until half past twelve,” Ickes reported after one such session. “We broke up because the President was tired, having had his sleep interrupted for two or three nights by flash news from Europe.” Roosevelt enjoyed wild-card games, especially “Woolworth’s,” a seven-card hand with fives and tens wild. “We were playing dollar limit,” said Ickes. “I won $53.50. The President was the heaviest loser. The game cost him about $35. One thing about playing with the President, we do not have to curry favor by letting him win.”20
