by FDR
An America where those who have reached the evening of life shall live out their years in peace and security. Where pensions and insurance for these aged shall be given as a matter of right to those who through a long life of labor have served their families and their nation as well.
I see an America devoted to our freedom—unified by tolerance and by religious faith—a people consecrated to peace, a people confident in strength because their body and their spirit are secure and unafraid.110
On November 5, 1940, 50 million Americans went to the polls, the largest number ever. The final Gallup polls showed Roosevelt leading by a slim 52 to 48 percent. More worrisome was the state-by-state breakout. In addition to rock-ribbed Republican strongholds, Willkie held slim leads in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania—industrial states with large electoral vote totals the Democrats could ill afford to lose.111 FDR anticipated a cliffhanger. His entry in the traditional preelection poll taken by the White House press pool showed him with 315 electoral votes to Willkie’s 216.
On Tuesday evening FDR settled in with friends and staff at Hyde Park to take the returns. The early reports from New York and New Jersey were glum. As Ed Flynn had warned, Italian precincts were going heavily for Willkie and the Irish less so. Upstate, Democrats were running behind. In the city, only the Jewish vote was holding firm. Roosevelt asked to be left alone. With Mike Reilly of the Secret Service manning the dining room door, FDR tabulated the returns for the next hour by himself. The voter turnout (62.5 percent) was the greatest in more than three decades, and gradually the tide turned.112 By nine it was clear that the great industrial states in the East and Middle West would fall in behind the president.
The dining room doors were flung open, and the celebration began. By midnight the magnitude of the victory was clear. Roosevelt received 27,263,448 votes to Willkie’s 22,336,260. In the electoral college, FDR took 449 votes and Willkie won 82. Except for Maine, Vermont, and six farm states in the great plains, Willkie carried only Michigan and his native Indiana. Roosevelt won every large city in the country except Cincinnati. Labor and blacks remained in the Democratic column. A strong showing among Polish Americans helped offset the losses in the Italian community. German Americans for the most part voted Republican.113 The Democrats picked up six seats in the House, giving them a 268–162 majority, and lost three in the Senate, which they still controlled by well over 2 to 1.
The hostility between Roosevelt and Willkie faded quickly. Willkie conceded gracefully and called upon the nation to cast bitterness aside and give the president the support and respect he deserved. FDR invited Willkie to the White House and took an immediate liking to him. “You know, he’s a very good fellow,” Roosevelt told Frances Perkins. “He has lots of talent. I want to use him somehow. I want him to do something where the effort is nonpolitical but important. But I’d like to use him, and I think it would be a good thing for the country, it would help us to a feeling of unity.”114
* Hopkins found himself ensconced in the Blackstone’s suite 308/309, the same suite with “the smoke-filled room” in which Warren G. Harding had been selected to be the Republican nominee in 1920. Hopkins was connected to the White House with a direct line—the phone mounted in the bathroom to ensure privacy. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 136 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
† Hopkins was not a delegate to the convention and got onto the floor only by courtesy of a badge from Mayor Kelly designating him a deputy sergeant at arms. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 179 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* “Don’t any of you realize that there is only one life between this madman and the presidency?” thundered party chairman Mark Hanna—an observation that would not have been out of place in 1940. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 763 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
* Roosevelt wrote in his draft that the Democratic Party could not continue to be divided between liberals and conservatives. “It would be best not to straddle ideals. It would be best for America to have the fight out. Therefore, I give the Democratic party the opportunity to make that historic decision by declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency.” For the full text, see Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 216–218 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
* Clark, a senior partner in the firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine, was a 1906 Harvard Law School classmate of Felix Frankfurter, and had clerked with FDR at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn from 1907 to 1910. It was he who suggested to Frankfurter, who conveyed the suggestion to FDR, that Stimson be appointed secretary of war. In May 1940, at a series of small meetings of elite lawyers and businessmen in New York City’s Harvard Club, he organized the 2nd Corps of the Military Training Camp Association, a nostalgic reminder of the Plattsburg Movement organized at the Harvard Club after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Among those present were Langdon Marvin, Roosevelt’s old law partner; Julius Ochs Adler of The New York Times; Henry L. Stimson; Frank Knox; William J. Donovan; Lewis Douglas, who had been FDR’s first budget director; and Judge Robert P. Patterson of the U.S. Court of Appeals. The group issued a series of manifestos advocating military conscription and established a national network (the MTCA) to press the cause. General Marshall cooperated covertly with the group and in early June dispatched three officers, including Major Lewis B. Hershey, to New York to assist Clark’s organization in drafting a selective service bill. This was the measure Burke and Wadsworth introduced. Hershey subsequently became the first head of selective service. J. Gary Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft 14–26 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope 57–58 (New York: Viking Press, 1966).
* For Jackson’s view of the swap, see his That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 86–103, John Q. Barrett, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jackson’s Opinion was harshly criticized by Professors Herbert W. Briggs and Edwin Borchard in “Neglected Aspects of the Destroyer Deal,” 34 American Journal of International Law 569–587, 690–697 (1940). For support, see Quincy Wright, “The Transfer of Destroyers to Great Britain,” 34 AJIL 680–689 (1940).
* Speaker Bankhead, campaigning for the national ticket in Maryland, suffered a fatal hemorrhage and died at Washington’s Naval Hospital on September 15, 1940. Cognizant of his error at the time of Senator Joseph Robinson’s death, FDR not only attended the funeral in Jasper, Alabama, but instructed his entire cabinet to attend. The Southern Railroad laid on two special trains, one for the congressional delegation, another for the president’s party. Hull was detained in Washington, and Welles substituted for him at the funeral. Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles 219–220 (New York: Enigma Books, 1995).
* Willkie deplored the hypocrisy of politics and insisted that his private life was his own. Several times during the campaign he scheduled press conferences at Van Doren’s apartment. “Everybody knows about us—all the newspapermen in New York,” Willkie told his friends. “If somebody should come along to threaten me or embarrass me about Irita, I would say, ‘Go right ahead. There is not a reporter in New York who does not know about her.’ ” Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 43–44 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984).
* The reference, following FDR’s castigation of Republican Senators McNary, Vandenberg, Nye, and Johnson, was to Representatives Joseph W. Martin, Bruce Barton, and Hamilton Fish. Martin was House minority leader and had been named by Willkie to be Republican National Chairman; Barton, chairman of the board of the New York advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, represented New York’s Seventeenth District on the fashionable Upper East Side; and Fish, Roosevelt’s Dutchess County neighbor and longtime nemesis, was the ranking member on Foreign Affairs.
TWENTY-TWO
ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY
The decision as to how much shall be sent abroad and how much shall remai
n at home must be made on the basis of our over-all military necessities.… We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, DECEMBER 29, 1940
THE THURSDAY AFTER the election, Roosevelt boarded the presidential train in Hyde Park for the long, slow journey back to Washington. At Union Station Vice President–elect Henry Wallace welcomed him along with a swarm of jubilant Democrats. Two hundred thousand cheering spectators lined Pennsylvania Avenue. FDR repeatedly doffed his battered campaign fedora as the open limousine made its way to the White House. Thousands of well-wishers followed the car through the open gates of the Executive Mansion chanting “We Want Roosevelt” until the president and Eleanor appeared on the north portico.1
Waiting for Roosevelt was a congratulatory message from Churchill. “I did not think it right for me as a Foreigner to express my opinion upon American politics while the Election was on,” said the prime minister, “but now I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success.”2 Bismarck had said that the most important geopolitical fact of the modern era was that the Americans spoke English, and Churchill exploited that fact shamelessly.3 “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe,” he told Roosevelt. “In expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”4
As Churchill wrote out that message, the Battle of Britain approached a climax. The Luftwaffe had failed to gain air superiority over the Channel; Operation Sea Lion—the German invasion plan for the British Isles—had been shelved, yet air attacks against civilian targets accelerated. For fifty-seven consecutive nights the Nazis bombed London: ten thousand were dead, more than fifty thousand injured.5 On November 14 three hundred German bombers hit Coventry, kindling a firestorm that claimed 568 civilian casualties and destroyed the city’s center.* Five nights later, 1,353 people were killed in a massive raid on Birmingham.6 At sea, the battle hung in the balance. More than five hundred British merchant ships had been sunk by German U-boats and surface raiders—a total of more than 2 million tons of lost shipping that was difficult to replace. Most serious of all, Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy. The “cash-and-carry” provision of the Neutrality Act had drained the British Treasury of its dollar reserves.
Roosevelt appeared in little hurry to offer assistance. No one was better at laying a smoke screen to cloak his intentions than FDR, and he masked his plans for aid to Britain in postelection euphoria. In late November, Lord Lothian, who had just returned from London, called on the president to explain Britain’s plight. At his press conference on November 26 Roosevelt was asked:
Q: Mr. President, did the British Ambassador present any specific requests for additional help?
FDR: Nothing was mentioned in that regard at all, not one single thing—ships or sealing wax or anything else.7
Roosevelt’s cavalier denial concealed the intense planning that was under way in Washington. On Tuesday, December 3, Hull, Stimson, Knox, Commerce secretary Jesse Jones, and General Marshall met with Morgenthau at the Treasury to review Britain’s financial situation. As Treasury officials scrawled figures across a blackboard, the inescapable conclusion was that the British would exhaust their gold and dollar reserves within the month just to pay for the orders already placed with American industry. The money to pay for future orders was nowhere in sight. “What are we going to do?” asked Morgenthau. “Are we going to let them place more orders?”
“Got to,” said Knox. “No choice about it.”8
Roosevelt took the problem with him when he departed Washington the next day for a Caribbean cruise on the USS Tuscaloosa accompanied only by Hopkins and his immediate staff—Pa Watson, Dr. McIntire, and Navy captain Daniel Callaghan. The White House proclaimed the purpose of the cruise was to inspect base sites in the West Indies, but FDR wanted time at sea to refresh and regroup.* Aside from meeting local dignitaries, including the Duke of Windsor, Roosevelt spent his days fishing, basking in the sun, and spoofing with cronies. Evenings were devoted to poker and movies. When Ernest Hemingway sent word that many big fish had been caught on a stretch of the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, FDR trawled there for several hours using a feathered hook baited with a piece of pork rind as Hemingway suggested but failed to get a strike.9
Roosevelt seemed carefree and relaxed, almost indifferent to the calamity facing Britain. “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” said Hopkins. “But then—I began to get the idea he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.” There were no substantive discussions on board, Roosevelt did not consult or ask advice, he did not study briefing documents or background papers, but it soon became clear he was pondering Britain’s problem and plotting his response.10
On December 9 Roosevelt’s thoughts were stimulated when a Navy seaplane set down alongside Tuscaloosa, lying at anchor off Antigua. In the mail pouch was a historic letter from Churchill, a four-thousand-word cable that the prime minister considered “one of the most important of my life” and that historians describe as “the most carefully drafted and re-drafted message in the entire Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence.”11
The letter was Churchill at his best: articulate, comprehensive, well argued, dignified yet deferential. The prime minister began with a masterly restatement of the military situation. He traced the war in minute detail from the North Sea to Gibraltar to Suez to Singapore. “The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow has for the time being very greatly receded. In its place there is a long, gradually maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly.” Churchill reviewed the problems of war production and sea tonnage, both imperiled by persistent attacks by German bombers and U-boats. But the most serious problem Britain faced was financial:
The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost, and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the Exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.12
Hopkins recalled that Roosevelt read and reread Churchill’s letter as he sat alone in his deck chair, and for two days he did not seem to reach any conclusion. “He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently.”13 Then one evening it all came out: the program the world would know as Lend-Lease. “He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”14 Essentially, the president’s plan was that the United States would lend Britain whatever it needed, at no cost, and the British would repay the United States by giving back what it had borrowed, or in some other tangible manner, when it could.15 Like a creative artist, FDR had devoted his time on the cruise to evolving his conceptual idea. Once he saw it clearly, he moved decisively.16
Back in Washington a week later, tanned and rested from his cruise, Roosevelt unveiled his masterpiece—“one of the greatest efforts of all his years in office,” said Morgenthau.17 Meeting the press the afternoon of December 17, he broke the news. There had been no staff studies, no diplomatic discussions, no touching of political bases. It was pure Roosevelt. The president took the initiative himself.18 The working press, especially the White House press corps, was always FDR’s greatest ally, and he initiated the debate with a homey analogy:
Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help
him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.” No! I don’t want fifteen dollars. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
“What I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign,” he continued. “Get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign.” Weapons and war materiel would be of greater service if they were used in Great Britain rather than kept in storage. After the war the United States would be repaid in kind, thereby “leaving out the dollar mark and substituting for it a gentleman’s obligation in kind. I think you all get it.”19 Churchill, who had no prior knowledge of the president’s plan, was stunned. When he digested the proposal he told Parliament that Lend-Lease was “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.”20
With Congress adjourned until the new year, Roosevelt carried his idea directly to the country. On Sunday, December 29, 1940, he delivered one of his most famous fireside chats, the “arsenal of democracy” speech. He called it a talk on national security, coining an expression that would permeate American debate for generations.21 Movie theaters, restaurants, and other public places emptied as nine o’clock Eastern Standard time approached. CBS, NBC, and the Mutual network carried the address live, and a record 75 percent of Americans would either listen to or read the president’s remarks.22 In the White House, Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard, joined Eleanor, Sara, and members of the cabinet to watch FDR declare that there was no hope of a negotiated peace with Hitler. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”
Roosevelt told his listeners, “If Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” The United States must prepare for the danger ahead. “But we well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.”
