Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  76. Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper 1, 58–60 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940).

  TWENTY | Stab in the Back

  The epigraph is from FDR’s commencement speech at the University of Virginia, June 10, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 259–264, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).

  1. 14 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 130–132 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

  2. The record of Roosevelt’s remarks to the cabinet was made by acting Navy secretary Charles Edison, who then forwarded it to FDR. “My only reason for sending it is that somebody ought to make a record of how you felt after getting the phone call [from Bullitt] and this may serve as notes for—that somebody—.” Edison to FDR, September 2, 1939. 2 FDR: His Personal Letters, 1928–1945 915–916, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). Edison’s emphasis.

  3. Quoted in Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 579 (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, was ill in hospital.

  4. Walter Crookshank, diary, quoted in Watt, ibid.

  5. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 460–464. Roosevelt’s statement, made over Hull’s objections, provided a deliberate contrast to Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 admonition that Americans must be “neutral in fact as well as in name; impartial in thought as well as action.” Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 547–551 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928). For Hull’s objections, see 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 676 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

  6. Presidential Proclamation 2365, September 13, 1939, 8 Public Papers and Addresses 510. After an informal head count, Ed Halsey, secretary of the Senate, advised the White House that at least sixty senators would support repeal and twenty-five oppose, a remarkably accurate assessment. Steve Early to FDR, September 7, 1939, 2 FDR: Personal Letters 918–919.

  7. FDR to Moore, September 11, 1939, ibid. 919.

  8. The New York Times, September 15, 1939.

  9. 5 Vital Speeches 751–752.

  10. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 496 (New York: Random House, 1993).

  11. Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper 73 ff. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940).

  12. Harding set a presidential record, addressing joint sessions of Congress six times in two years. His final message, on February 7, 1923, pertained to Britain’s war debt to the United States. Neither Coolidge nor Hoover addressed Congress, and their annual messages were read by the reading clerks. Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, “Joint Meetings, Sessions, Inaugurations, 60th to 79th Congress.”

  13. Message to Congress, September 21, 1939. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 512–522.

  14. Memo of General Watson to FDR, September 21, 1939, reporting Borah’s approval but also the senator’s determination “to make some kind of fight.” William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, 1 The Challenge to Isolation 224n (Cambridge, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970) (reprint).

  15. 4 Public Opinion Quarterly 102 (1940); Davis, Into the Storm 499.

  16. For the committee vote, see The New York Times, September 29, 1939. Democrat Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri voted against; Republican Wallace White of Maine in favor. Otherwise it was a straight party-line vote.

  17. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 500.

  18. The New York Times, October 27, 1939.

  19. FDR to Lord Tweedsmuir, October 5, 1939, 2 FDR: Personal Letters 934.

  20. 2 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 712–713 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954).

  21. Daniel Levy and Susan Brink, A Change of Heart 13 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

  22. 6 Vital Speeches 57–59.

  23. Radio address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum, October 26, 1939. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 554–557.

  24. Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 265 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).

  25. Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 154 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).

  26. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 740–741n (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 107–108 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  27. FDR’s conversation with Tobin was reported by Frances Perkins, who had accompanied the Teamster president to the Oval Study. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 126 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).

  28. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 308–309 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Also see Paul H. Appleby, “Roosevelt’s Third Term Decision,” 46 American Political Science Review 754–765 (1952).

  29. Morgenthau diary, January 24, 1940, FDRL.

  30. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 519–520 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

  31. For the President: Personal and Secret: The Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt 398, Orville H. Bullitt, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

  32. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 95.

  33. “James, it is my sincere feeling that a Roman Catholic could not be elected President of the United States at this time or for many years to come,” said Mundelein. “I hope, therefore, that you will do nothing to involve the Catholics of this country in another debacle such as we experienced in 1928.” James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 174–177 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).

  34. Hull, 1 Memoirs 856.

  35. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 414 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).

  36. Hull, 1 Memoirs 856.

  37. Quoted in Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won 63 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  38. Senator Borah’s “phony war” remark was made in a Washington press conference on December 18, 1939, and reported in The New York Times the following day. Professor Henry Graff, interview with ER, Graff papers, FDRL.

  39. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

  40. When Allied forces landed in France in 1944, there were nearly 500,000 German troops in Norway. When the war ended, there were more than 300,000. Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won 66.

  41. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm 667 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

  42. The remark was recorded by Harold Ickes in his manuscript diary entry of May 12, 1940. When the diaries were published after the war, Ickes deleted “even if he was drunk half of his time.” 3 Secret Diaries 176.

  43. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 42 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).

  44. Churchill to FDR, May 15, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence 94–95, Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jones, eds. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).

  45. “Appropriations for National Defense,” May 16, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 198–205.

  46. “Additional Appropriations for National Defense,” May 31, 1940, ibid. 250–253.

  47. Ibid. 207; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 718 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).

  48. FDR to Churchill, May 16, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill 95–96.

  49. Churchill to FDR, May 18, 1940, ibid. 96–97.

  50. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 328–329 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

  51. One of the best accounts of the German breakthrough and the evacuation at Dunkirk is provided by Churchill in Their Finest Hour 74–118. Also see B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 79–80 (London: Cassell, 1970); Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won 80–81.

  52. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 141–143.

  53. FDR to Morgenthau, June 6, 1940. Quoted in John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938–1941 155 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

  54. Quoted in Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 85.
>
  55. Address at the University of Virginia, June 10, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 259–264. Drafts of the speech at the Roosevelt Library show FDR’s handwritten inserts stiffening the message. The “stab in the back” reference was ad-libbed by Roosevelt and does not appear in the copy from which he spoke.

  56. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 302–303 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

  57. Churchill to FDR, June 11, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill 98–99.

  58. On June 17, and again on June 18, Woodring challenged presidential authority when he refused to approve the sale of B-17 bombers to Great Britain. On the morning of the nineteenth Roosevelt requested his resignation. FDR offered Woodring a consolation prize of governor of Puerto Rico—a considerable step-down—which Woodring refused. FDR to Harry Woodring, June 19, June 25, 1940, 2 FDR: His Personal Letters 1041–1044.

  59. FDR to Knox, December 29, 1939, ibid. 975–977. Also see Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 242–243 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949). After his dismissal Woodring told the Topeka Capital he had been the victim of “a small clique of international financiers who want the United States to declare war and get into the European mess with everything we have.… They don’t like me because I am against stripping our own defenses for the sake of trying to stop Hitler 3,000 miles away.” Reprinted in The New York Times, June 21, 1940.

  60. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 163 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948).

  61. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 323–325 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). FDR had promised the post of undersecretary of the Navy to Thomas Corcoran, but Knox rejected him as too political. Robert C. Albion and Robert H. Connery, Forrestal and the Navy 1–9 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

  62. For the text of the Stimson and Knox speeches, see The New York Times, June 19, 1940. The fact that both Knox and Stimson should advocate conscription in their commencement addresses was scarcely coincidental. On May 22, 1940, the two, joined by William Donovan; former budget director Lewis Douglas; Judge Robert Patterson; Julius Ochs Adler of The New York Times; Grenville Clark, who had clerked with FDR at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn; Langdon Marvin, Roosevelt’s old law partner; and some ninety other distinguished alumni met at the Harvard Club in New York and agreed to beat the drum for reinstitution of the draft, universal service, and immediate expansion of the regular Army and the National Guard. J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft 14–26 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986).

  63. The New York Times, June 25, 1940.

  64. The statement was made by Ruth McCormick Simms, one of Dewey’s principal aides at the convention. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 19 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).

  65. Ibid. 20.

  66. Taft’s remarks were in a speech he delivered in St. Louis, May 20, 1940. Taft also said that America’s participation in war was “more likely to destroy American democracy than to destroy German dictatorship.” James Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft 217 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

  67. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be 60 (New York: Knopf, 1975); Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 310–311.

  68. New York Sun, January 16, 1940, reported in Peters, Five Days 25. In 1920, Willkie, as a young lawyer in Akron, Ohio, introduced James Cox (FDR’s running mate) at a Democratic rally. He supported Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic convention, served as an assistant floor manager for Newton D. Baker at the 1932 convention, and voted for Herbert Lehman against Thomas Dewey in the 1938 New York gubernatorial race. Ibid. 30–32.

  69. “Fair Trial,” The New Republic 370 (March 18, 1940). Also see “Political Power: The Tennessee Valley Authority,” The Atlantic Monthly, August 1937; “Brace Up, America!” The Atlantic Monthly, 163 (June 1939): 549–561; “Idle Money—Idle Men,” The Saturday Evening Post, 211 (June 17, 1939); “The Faith That Is America,” Reader’s Digest, 36 (December 1939): 1–4; “With Malice Toward None,” The Saturday Evening Post, 212 (December 30, 1939); “We, the People,” Fortune, 21 (April 1940): 64–65; “New Deal Power,” The New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1937, p. 6; “Five Minutes to Midnight,” The Saturday Evening Post, 212 (June 22, 1940).

  70. Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

  71. Quoted in Peters, Five Days 41.

  72. Neal, Dark Horse 99. Ickes’s characterization was made in a speech to a Democratic rally in Saint Louis on October 18, 1940. T. H. Watkins, The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874–1952 694 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).

  73. Joseph W. Martin and Robert J. Donovan, My First Fifty Years in Politics 101–108 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). After the convention Willkie named Martin chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  74. Time, July 1, 1940. The Republican plank stated, “We favor the extension of aid to all people fighting for liberty or whose liberty is threatened as long as such aid is not in violation of international law or inconsistent with the requirements of our national defense.” Peters, Five Days 91.

  75. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 223. FDR said that he liked McNary and he “deserved the nomination.”

  TWENTY-ONE | Four More Years

  The epigraph is from FDR’s campaign speech at Boston, October 30, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 514–524, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).

  1. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 421–422 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). Walsh’s rider to the appropriations bill left FDR no choice but to sign.

  2. Mark S. Watson, The United States Army in World War II: Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Operations 312 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).

  3. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny 341 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).

  4. Chicago Daily News, July 16, 1940.

  5. Roosevelt phoned Farley Monday morning, July 15, and elliptically suggested that Farley withdraw. Jim Farley’s Story 271–272 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).

  6. Ibid. 274–275.

  7. Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 619 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Ed Flynn, who had superseded Farley as FDR’s principal political adviser, wrote that the Democratic leaders considered Hopkins an amateur. “While they had nothing against him personally, they felt that he, representing the President, directly lowered their prestige.” Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 156 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).

  8. Roosevelt wrote the statement in pencil and transmitted it to James Byrnes, who convinced Walsh and Wheeler to go along. 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1048, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).

  9. Harold L. Ickes, 3 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 245 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955).

  10. The text of Ickes’s telegram is ibid. 249–250.

  11. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 131–132 (New York: Viking, 1946) (FDR’s emphasis supplied by Miss Perkins).

  12. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  13. Ibid. 215.

  14. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 620.

  15. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 283.

  16. July 16, 1940, 9 Personal Papers and Addresses 292. Roosevelt’s disavowal was strikingly similar to the statement of “Uncle Ted” to the Republican convention in 1900 announcing he was not a candidate for the vice presidency (which of course he was):

  In view of the revival of the talk of myself as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I have this to say. It is impossible too deeply to express how touched I am by the attitude of those delegates, who have wished me to take the nomination.… I understand the high honor and dignity of the office, an office so high and so honorable that it is well worthy of the ambition of any man in the United States. But while appreciating all this to the full, I nevertheless feel
most deeply that the field of my best usefulness to the public and to the party is in New York State; and that, if the party should see fit to renominate me for Governor, I can in that position help the National ticket as in no other way. I very earnestly hope and ask that every friend of mine in this Convention respect my wish and my judgment in this matter.

  Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 764 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).

  17. Chicago Daily News, July 17, 1940.

  18. “It was a job right up my alley,” Garry told Time. “I figured out a lot of my own angles.… I’m just an ordinary lug who loves the game of politics.” Garry’s day job involved keeping 3,800 miles of sewers in working order. “First thing when you get up in the morning you come in and see me. You don’t know it but that’s me you’re visiting.” Time, July 29, 1940. Also see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 597 (New York: Random House, 1993).

  19. For Hull’s description of FDR’s overtures, see 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 860–861 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

  20. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 145 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).

  21. “He’s not a mystic, he’s a philosopher,” FDR told a skeptical Farley. “He’ll help people think.” Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 294. Also see Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 213 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).