by FDR
When she finished, Chicago Stadium was absolutely still. “The hot and weary delegates caught her mood and gravity and fell silent,” reported the United Press. “She has done more to soothe the convention bruises than all the efforts of astute Senators,” said the New York Daily News.26 When Barkley asked the clerk to call the roll of the states, tempers had subsided. Without ER’s intervention, it is not clear that Wallace would have won.
What is clear is that if he had not won, Roosevelt would not have run for a third term. In the White House, FDR listened to the proceedings in the upstairs study, playing solitaire. “His face was grim,” Sam Rosenman remembered. As the vote tally seesawed, Roosevelt asked Missy for pad and pencil and began writing. He gave the draft to Rosenman. “Sam, take this inside and go to work on it. Smooth it out and get it ready for delivery. I may have to deliver it very quickly, so please hurry it up.” Should Wallace lose, FDR would decline the nomination.* “If I ever saw him with his mind made up it was that night,” said Rosenman.27
On the floor of Chicago Stadium, South Carolina’s James Byrnes moved rapidly from delegation to delegation. “For God’s sake, do you want a president or vice president.”28 The vote continued nip and tuck. Eight states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, passed. When Wyoming was called at the end of the roll, Bankhead held a two-vote lead. The states that passed clamored for attention. Barkley recognized Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh, who cast 68 of Pennsylvania’s 72 votes for Wallace. Ohio (52), New Jersey (32), and Michigan (38) followed. Wallace was over the top. Other delegations shifted. The final tally gave Wallace 627 of the convention’s 1,100 delegates, a tribute to the muscle of the White House rather than Wallace’s support. After Speaker Bankhead’s brother, Senator John Bankhead of Alabama, offered the traditional motion to make Wallace’s nomination unanimous, the “no”s outshouted the “aye”s by a considerable margin.29 As Wallace moved toward the podium to deliver his acceptance speech, Byrnes intercepted him.
“Don’t do it, Henry. Don’t go out there. You’ll ruin the party if you do.”30
Crestfallen, Wallace walked away. The convention adjourned. For Roosevelt, it was an expensive victory. Farley resigned as national chairman, southerners felt slighted at the treatment Bankhead received, the organization bosses despised Wallace, and the rank-and-file delegates felt bullied by the president. “Everyone got out of Chicago as fast as he could,” wrote Ickes. “What could have been a convention of enthusiasm ended almost like a wake.”31 Roosevelt’s determination to force Wallace on the convention resembled the obstinacy he had displayed during the 1937 Court-packing fight and the congressional purge in 1938. Commander in chief or not, he had not lost his capacity to shoot himself in the foot.
In Europe the situation was grim. With the defeat of France, the Battle of Britain began. Willkie’s nomination had removed the questions of preparedness and aid to Britain from the campaign agenda, and the election would not be waged on those issues. Nevertheless, sizable segments in both parties continued to fight a rearguard action to ensure American neutrality. The two principal issues involved Churchill’s May 15 request for fifty older American destroyers and the need for peacetime conscription. Public opinion hung in the balance. Gallup Polls in June and July 1940 indicated that 61 percent of Americans believed the most important task for the United States was to stay out of the war. At the same time, 73 percent favored all possible aid to Britain short of war. On the question of whether the United States should send airplanes to England “even though it might delay our own national defense program,” respondents divided 49 percent in favor, 44 percent against.32
Bipartisan legislation for a peacetime draft, the first in American history, was introduced in the Senate on June 20 by Nebraska Democrat Edward R. Burke and in the House the next day by New York Republican James W. Wadsworth. This was not an administration measure. Burke was an anti–New Deal Democrat who vigorously opposed FDR’s Court-packing plan and had earned the president’s ill will. Wadsworth, who had served two terms in the U.S. Senate (1915–1927), was an upstate Republican from Livingston County and an old friend of Roosevelt but scarcely in the liberal wing of the party.33
The bill was framed by a private citizens group headed by Grenville Clark, Stimson’s former law partner, and was accorded little chance of passage.* James Byrnes, the Democratic whip, said there was “not a Chinaman’s chance.”34 Labor’s William Green called voluntary enlistments, not the draft, “the American way.”35 John L. Lewis, with his gift for invective, denounced the proposal as “a fantastic suggestion from a mind in full intellectual retreat.”36 Religious leaders such as the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, an internationalist on many issues, vigorously opposed the plan.37 The Progressive George Norris, who continued to support the president, was convinced that conscription would end in military dictatorship. Isolationists had a field day. “The idea of letting the boys sit around for a year playing stud poker and blackjack is poppycock,” said Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa.38 “The only emergency in this country is the one conjured up by those who want to send our boys to Europe or Asia,” proclaimed North Dakota’s Gerald Nye. “Militarism repugnant to every American instinct and institution,” announced Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. “If this bill passes,” said Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, “it will slit the throat of the last great democracy still living. It will accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory. On the headstone of American Democracy he will inscribe: ‘Here lies the foremost victim of the war of nerves.’ ”39
Roosevelt initially kept the bill at arm’s length. It was an election year, and he did not wish to move too far ahead of public opinion. “Governments such as ours cannot swing so far so quickly,” he wrote his old friend Helen Rogers Reid, the wife of the publisher of the Herald Tribune, an old childhood neighbor and playmate. “They can only move in keeping with the thought and will of the great majority of our people. Were it otherwise the very fabric of our democracy—which after all is government by public opinion—would be in danger of disintegration.”40
Privately he encouraged Grenville Clark and his allies to press forward but suggested they downplay the compulsory aspect. With FDR’s blessing, Stimson and Marshall testified repeatedly on Capitol Hill in favor of the Burke-Wadsworth bill. “Selective service was the only fair, efficient, and democratic way to raise an army,” Stimson told the House Military Affairs Committee.41 Marshall said there was “no conceivable way” to secure the men necessary for the nation’s defense “except by the draft.”42 Public opinion lurched forward. At the time of France’s surrender, slightly more than half of Americans polled favored selective service. On July 20, less than a month later, the figure stood at 69 percent, and by late August it was 86 percent.43
The combination of Clark’s public relations effort, the testimony of Stimson and Marshall, plus the intrepid stand Britain was making against the Luftwaffe’s assault paid dividends. On July 24, 1940, the Senate Military Affairs Committee reported the Burke-Wadsworth bill favorably. Five days later Roosevelt asked Congress for authority to call the National Guard and the Reserve Officers Corps to active duty.44 On August 2 FDR fired his first public shot in favor of the draft. Meeting the press for the 666th time since assuming office, Roosevelt said he was distinctly in favor of a selective training bill and considered it essential for national defense.45 Willkie added his endorsement on August 17. Echoing Stimson’s remarks, Willkie said that selective service “is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense.” When a reporter told Willkie that if he wanted to win the election he would come out against the draft, Willkie shot back, “I would rather not win the election than do that.”46
Willkie’s support for the draft “broke the back” of the opposition, said California’s isolationist senator Hiram Johnson.47 The democratic aspect of selective service carried the day. On August 28 the Senate passed the Burke-Wadsworth bill 69–16, a majority of Republicans voting in fav
or. In the House, New York’s Hamilton Fish, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a crippling amendment to delay selective service registration until after the election and limit the size of the draft to 400,000 men. Fish’s amendment carried narrowly; Stimson, FDR, and Willkie protested vigorously; and the provision was stripped from the final conference report that reconciled the House and Senate versions. On September 14 the bill, essentially as the Clark group had prepared it originally, passed the Senate 47–25 and the House 232–124. Roosevelt signed it into law two days later, and on October 16, 1940, more than 16 million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five registered for the country’s first peacetime draft.
Thirteen days later a blindfolded Secretary Stimson dipped a ladle carved from a beam taken from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall into a huge fishbowl filled to the brim with bright blue celluloid capsules, each of which contained a number that would determine the order in which men would be called up. Stimson gave the first capsule to FDR, who opened it and announced, “One hundred fifty-eight.”48 At the end of October, the first 16,000 inductees reported for duty. Over the next year, at the rate of 50,000 a month, 600,000 men would be called to active duty. The draftees, together with 500,000 regular Army troops and 270,000 from the National Guard, would form eleven full-strength divisions, an air force of 5,000 planes, and all the support personnel a force of that size required. The Army, which numbered 189,839 men at the end of 1939, would top 1.4 million by mid-1941.49
Britain’s need for destroyers grew ever more pressing. Three times in June, Churchill repeated his request.50 Britain was down to its last sixty-eight vessels, with which it had to defend not only its trade routes against German U-boats but patrol the Channel against possible invasion. “We must ask therefore as a matter of life and death to be reinforced with these destroyers. We will carry out the struggle whatever the odds but it may be beyond our resources unless we receive reinforcement.”51 On June 26 King George VI, who unlike his brother David (Edward VIII) stood resolute against Nazi aggression, departed from protocol to add his personal plea for the destroyers. “I well understand your difficulties,” he wrote Roosevelt, “and I am certain that you will do your best to procure them for us before it is too late.”52
FDR’s first impulse was to ask Congress for authorization. The United States had 200 four-funnel destroyers from World War I, and in late 1939 172 of the vessels had been refitted and returned to service. Fifty of them could probably be spared.53 But with the selective service bill pending on Capitol Hill there was a danger of legislative overload, and it was possible both measures might fail. Also, the destroyer deal would fall squarely in the bailiwick of Naval Affairs Committee chairman David I. Walsh, possibly the most intransigent opponent of the transaction in the Senate. To pry the bill loose would not be easy.
Without congressional authorization the road seemed barred. To lease the vessels to a belligerent ran afoul of international law; the Walsh amendment to the 1940 Defense Appropriations Act required the chief of naval operations to sign off on the vessels, and Admiral Stark had recently testified to their usefulness when he had obtained the funds to have them refitted; and above all, the Espionage Act of 1917 made it a criminal offense to deliver naval vessels to a country at war.54
On July 19 Benjamin Cohen, who had moved from the White House to become general counsel of Ickes’s public works domain, provided Ickes with a skillfully argued memorandum suggesting that the president could release the destroyers to Britain on his own authority as commander in chief. Ickes forwarded the memorandum to the White House but was not convinced.55 Neither was Roosevelt. “This memorandum from Ben Cohen is worth reading,” he told Navy secretary Frank Knox, “but I frankly doubt it will stand up. Also I fear Congress is in no mood at the present time to allow any form of sale.” FDR told Knox it might be possible at a later date to get Congress to permit the sale of the destroyers to Canada for hemisphere defense, but at present there was nothing that could be done.56
Just when it appeared that the administration’s efforts had run aground, Roosevelt received an unexpected assist. On July 11, 1940, at a dinner at New York’s prestigious Century Club hosted by Lewis Douglas, thirty distinguished and influential Americans from across the political spectrum formed themselves into a loose alliance to arouse the country to the danger the defeat of Britain would pose and the need to do everything possible to prevent it. Among the guests were Time’s Henry Luce; Admiral William Standley, the former chief of naval operations; Ivy League presidents James Conant of Harvard and Ernest Hopkins of Dartmouth; Henry Sloan Coffin and Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary; lawyers Dean Acheson, Charles Burlingham, Allen Dulles, and Thomas Thacher; journalists Herbert Agar, Joseph Alsop, Elmer Davis, and Walter Millis; and Francis Pickens Miller of the Council on Foreign Relations, who became executive director of what became known as the “Century Group.”
The group discussed a number of proposals that evening, but the one that hit home was the suggestion that the United States provide Britain with the fifty destroyers it needed in exchange for naval bases in the Western Hemisphere.57 That is the first proposal to trade destroyers for bases on record, which is a surprise since the isolationist press had long favored the acquisition of naval installations in the Americas in exchange for cancellation of Britain’s war debts. At the direction of the Century Group, Alsop took the proposal to Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, who listened with interest but gave no commitment. (Lothian, as Philip Henry Kerr, had been a member of the Century Club since 1938 and was well acquainted with Alsop.) Luce, for his part, put the proposal to FDR on July 25 and met with a similar cautious response. “Harry, I can’t come out in favor of such a deal without the support of the entire Time-Life organization,” said Roosevelt.58
Encouraged by reports from Lothian of possible American support, Churchill renewed his plea for the vessels on July 31. “It is some time since I ventured to cable personally to you,” he told FDR. “In the past ten days we have had eleven destroyers sunk or damaged,” said Churchill.
Destroyers are frightfully vulnerable to air-bombing, and yet they must be held in the air-bombing area to prevent sea-borne invasion. We could not keep up the present rate of casualties for long, and if we cannot get a substantial reinforcement the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor.
This is a frank account of our present situation, and I am confident that you will leave nothing undone to ensure that fifty or sixty of your oldest destroyers are sent to me at once.…
Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.59
Lothian followed up Churchill’s cable with a lengthy late-night meeting with Secretary Knox on August 1. Both agreed the destroyers were vital. Knox asked point-blank if the British had considered trading base sites in the Western Hemisphere for the vessels. Lothian conceded they had not. Knox agreed to raise the issue at cabinet the next day, and Lothian volunteered to query his government.60
The cabinet convened on August 2 in crisis mode. Stimson, who could remember tense sessions under Taft and Hoover, called it “one of the most serious and important debates that I have ever had in a cabinet meeting.”61 Knox recounted his conversation with Lothian and suggested the destroyers be traded for bases in the West Indies. Hull questioned whether the acquisition of British territory might not violate Inter-American agreements. FDR said it might, but the bases could be leased instead of transferred, which would not pose a problem.
There were two sticking points. It was unanimously agreed that congressional authorization would be required, and FDR worried about the political fallout. Without Willkie’s support, Republicans on Capitol Hill would not go along. Wallace, Attorney General Robert Jackson, and Ickes thought it would be risky to consult him. He might refuse and leave the administration holding the bag. Knox, Stimson, and Hull disagreed. Everyone in the room
turned to Farley, whose political judgment weighed heavily with his colleagues. “Consult him,” said Farley. “It is good for the country, and what is good for the country is good politics.”62 FDR agreed. That evening he called Kansas editor William Allen White, a mutual friend of the two candidates, who was vacationing near Willkie in Colorado. White thought Willkie would agree and said he would give it a try.63
On August 3 Churchill replied to Lothian. His Majesty’s Government would agree to swap bases for destroyers but would prefer to lease the facilities to the United States rather than transfer title. That dovetailed with FDR’s desire. “It is vital to settle quickly,” Churchill told Lothian. “Now is the time when we want the destroyers. Go ahead on these lines full steam.”64
The Century Group, meanwhile, stepped up its public pressure. On August 4, at the group’s behest, General of the Armies John J. Pershing, the nation’s most revered military hero, spoke to the country over a national radio hookup from his home in Washington’s Carlton Hotel. “The British Navy needs destroyers to convoy merchant ships and to repel invasion. The most critical time is the next few weeks and months. Today may be the last time when, by measures short of war, we can still prevent war.”65
Pershing’s address kicked off a national campaign to make it politically possible for Roosevelt to act. On August 5, 1940, Time bannered Britain’s need for destroyers. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune followed suit. The Century Group scored another coup on August 11, when the Times published a long and closely reasoned letter from Dean Acheson and three other prominent lawyers arguing that the president could transfer the destroyers to Britain on his own authority without additional legislation.66 “At the time my friend and classmate Charles Merz had charge of the editorial page of The New York Times,” wrote Acheson. “I showed him the opinion and suggested putting it forth as a letter to the Times, to be prominently displayed on the editorial page in the Sunday edition. He approved of this and published it.”67 Acheson’s letter was a reworking and expansion of Ben Cohen’s original memo, and it found a responsive audience. Stimson thought the prospect of getting Congress to act was poor, but Acheson’s “carefully worked out paper … adds a speck of light on the situation.”68
