The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Overall, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later wrote, “Wallace was a great secretary of agriculture. . . . In time he widened his concern beyond commercial farming to subsistence farming and rural poverty. For the urban poor, he provided food stamps and school lunches. He instituted programs for land-use planning, soil conservation and erosion control. And always he promoted research to combat plant and animal diseases, to locate drought-resistant crops and to develop hybrid seeds in order to increase productivity.”7

  During his eight years as secretary of agriculture, Wallace not only solidified his reputation as one of the New Deal visionaries on domestic policy, he carved credentials as an outspoken antifascist. In 1939, he lent his support to the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF). The ACDIF had been organized by Franz Boas, America’s leading anthropologist, and like-minded left-leaning scientists earlier that year. In late 1938, Boas released his Manifesto on Freedom of Science. Signed by 1,284 scientists, it condemned Nazi racism and treatment of scientists and teachers and urged a vigorous defense of democracy and intellectual freedom in the United States. Scientists held Wallace in high regard, considering him the most scientifically literate member of the Roosevelt administration and the scientific community’s best ally. They invited him to participate in an October 1939 ACDIF panel discussion on “How the Scientist Can Help Combat Racism” at the New York World’s Fair. Wallace defined “racism” as “the attempts of individuals in certain groups to dominate others through the building up of false racial theories in support of their claims.” Drawing on his background in plant genetics, he focused on “the role that scientists can play in combating such false theories and preventing the use of these theories for the destruction of human liberty.” He appealed to scientists to lead the fight:

  For the combating of “racism” before it sinks its poison fangs deep in our body politic, the scientist has both a special motive and a special responsibility. His motive comes from the fact that when personal liberty disappears scientific liberty also disappears. His responsibility comes from the fact that only he can give the people the truth. Only he can clean out the falsities in our colleges, our high schools and our public prints. Only he can show how groundless are the claims that one race, one nation, or one class has any God-given right to rule.8

  Now, with European democracy on life support, Roosevelt demanded a champion of freedom and democracy as his running mate. But party bosses and party conservatives opposed Wallace for the very reasons Roosevelt wanted him. They feared his radical views. They mistrusted his devotion to principles over politics. It looked as though the Wallace nomination would go up in flames. Roosevelt, angry and frustrated, wrote a remarkable letter to the assembled delegates, a letter of which contemporary Democrats would be wise to take heed, in which he flatly turned down the presidential nomination. He explained:

  the Democratic Party [must] champion . . . progressive and liberal policies and principles. . . . The party has failed . . . when . . . it has fallen into the control of those [who] think in terms of dollars instead of . . . human values. . . . Until the Democratic Party . . . shakes off all the shackles of control fastened upon it by the forces of conservatism, reaction and appeasement, . . . it will not continue its march to victory . . . the Democratic Party . . . cannot face in both directions at the same time. [Therefore, I] declin[e] the honor of the nomination for the Presidency.9

  Eleanor Roosevelt saved the day. The first wife of a nominee ever to address a convention, she told disgruntled delegates that “we face now a grave and serious situation” and reminded them that this was “no ordinary time.”10 Under intense pressure, the party bosses, who dominated the nominating process, and the convention delegates buckled and put Wallace onto the ticket. They would, however, later seek an opportunity to exact revenge.

  In November, Roosevelt and Wallace handily defeated Wendell Willkie and Charles McNary, winning 55 percent of the vote. Before the vote, Roosevelt promised that he would keep the United States out of the war. He told an overflow crowd in Boston Garden, “I have said this before but I shall say it again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”11 But the United States was indeed inching closer to the conflict and was already supplying Great Britain with much of its military needs, including artillery, tanks, machine guns, rifles, and thousands of planes.

  In early January 1941, Roosevelt upped the ante further by proposing lend-lease aid to Great Britain in a bill patriotically numbered H.R. 1776. This would give him enormous discretion in providing assistance short of war to the increasingly desperate British without worrying about the “silly, foolish dollar sign.”12 The response to Roosevelt’s message showed the challenge he faced in convincing the country that war was in the United States’ best interest. At a press conference the next day, Eleanor Roosevelt said she was “astonished and saddened” by the cold Republican response to the president’s message.13

  Republican critics were indeed more incensed than ever. Thomas Dewey, who would later run for president, warned that the bill “would bring an end to free government in the United States and would abolish the Congress for all practical purposes.” Alf Landon called it “the first step toward dictatorship by Mr. Roosevelt.”14 Landon saw the handwriting on the wall: “Step by step, he is working us into war,” he charged. Gerald Nye contended that if lend-lease passed, “war is almost inevitable.”15

  Critics feared that loans and other ties to Great Britain would again draw the United States into war as they had in 1917. A heated debate erupted in Congress. Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana dismissed the thought that Hitler would ever declare war on the United States and charged that the lend-lease-give program was “the New Deal’s Triple A foreign policy—plow under every fourth American boy.”16 Roosevelt shot back, saying that Wheeler’s comment was “the most untruthful . . . the most dastardly, unpatriotic . . . the rottenest thing that has been said in public in my generation.”17

  Roosevelt’s defenders agreed that aiding Great Britain was the United States’ best chance to avoid being drawn into the war. Senator Joshua Lee of Oklahoma came to the president’s defense: “Hitler is a madman standing at the switch of the most powerful and destructive machine that the human brain ever devised. The charred ruins of an entire continent stand as grim proof that he does not hesitate to throw that switch. . . . America has only one chance to escape total war and that chance is England. England is the only barrier between America and a baptism of blood.”18

  Lend-lease passed Congress in early March with an amendment banning the U.S. Navy from providing protection for the convoys carrying the goods. Congress appropriated the first $7 billion out of what would eventually total $50 billion to fund the shipments. Senator Arthur Vandenberg vented, “We have torn up 150 years of traditional American foreign policy. We have tossed Washington’s Farewell Address in the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and power wars of Europe, Asia and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”19

  Prime Minister Churchill thanked the Americans profusely. He telegrammed the president, “Our blessings from the whole of the British Empire go out to you.” The British soon realized, however, that there were limits to Roosevelt’s largesse and his support for the perpetuation of Churchill’s empire. Roosevelt included provisions in the Lend-Lease Act that would allow the United States to penetrate the British Empire’s closed trading sphere and prevent its reestablishment after the war. The British were less than thrilled at the prospect or at the forced sale of British assets. Churchill complained, “we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.” But he understood that, much as Roosevelt’s critics feared, the United States was on the path to war. “I would like to get them hooked a little firmer,” he confessed, “but they are pretty on now.”20

  The American people, it turned out, were increasingly willing to hook themselves. Their sympathies lay entirely with
the Allies. A Gallup Poll released in October 1939 found that 84 percent wanted Great Britain and France to win the war. Only 2 percent were rooting for Germany. Still, at that point, 95 percent wanted the United States to stay out of the war.21

  Ironically, it was Hitler who helped end Great Britain’s isolation, as history took another dramatic turn on June 22, 1941. Breaking its 1939 treaty with the USSR, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa—a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin, who had earlier purged much of his general staff, ignored repeated warnings that an attack was imminent. His forces were caught completely off guard as 3.2 million German troops attacked along a two-thousand-mile front.22 Germany quickly pushed deep into the Soviet Union. The Luftwaffe destroyed Soviet air units and the Wehrmacht encircled Soviet forces, inflicting terrible losses. The Nazis advanced toward Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kiev. The crippling blow dealt to the Red Army by the Nazi blitzkrieg sparked fears in London and Washington that Stalin would conclude a separate peace with Hitler, as Lenin had done with Germany in 1918.

  American-made howitzers ready for transport to Great Britain in 1941 as part of the lend-lease program to aid the British war effort. Lend-lease deepened U.S. involvement in the European war, outraging isolationist Republicans in Congress.

  The Soviet Union certainly felt little allegiance toward Great Britain, France, and the United States, each of which had, in its own way, tried to undermine the Russian Revolution. Beginning in 1925 with the publication of Mein Kampf, Hitler had repeatedly expressed his enmity toward the Soviet Union. As his expansive intentions became clear in the mid-1930s, Stalin’s appeals to England and France for a military alliance against Germany proved fruitless. When the Soviets aided the republican forces in Spain, who were locked in bitter combat with the German- and Italian-backed army of General Francisco Franco, British conservatives, including Winston Churchill, sympathized with Franco’s Fascist rebels. The Soviets also deplored the Allies’ craven performance at Munich, which effectively gave the Germans free rein to destroy the Soviet Union.

  Few people believed that the Soviets could withstand the Nazi onslaught. The U.S. Army calculated that they could hold on for no more than three months and might even fold in four weeks. Roosevelt and Churchill desperately sought to keep the Soviets in the war, knowing that Great Britain’s survival might depend on it. Swallowing his long-standing hatred of communism, Churchill pledged support for the Soviet Union and urged his allies to do the same. He promised “to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.”23 Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles issued a statement on behalf of the president indicating that material assistance to the Soviet Union might be forthcoming but left the question of lend-lease up in the air for the time being. Some tried to nip that idea in the bud. Missouri Senator Harry Truman fanned the flames of mistrust toward the Soviet Union, recommending, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”24

  Ignoring Truman’s advice, Roosevelt asked the Soviet ambassador to compile a list of items the United States might provide. In July, Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow to take the Soviets’ pulse and assess their staying power. He instructed Stalin to treat Hopkins “with the same identical confidence you would feel if you were talking to me.” Stalin acknowledged the German military superiority but said that the Soviets would take advantage of the winter lull to be ready to fight by spring: “Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum [for planes and] we can fight on for three or four years.” Hopkins believed him.25 By August, Roosevelt ordered delivery of the first hundred fighter planes. More supplies were on the way.

  U.S. military leaders, intent upon building up U.S. defenses, impeded Roosevelt’s efforts. The British also objected to diversion of their supplies. Seeing the bigger picture, Roosevelt ordered Secretary of War Henry Stimson and other cabinet members to speed delivery to the Soviet Union. His announcement that W. Averill Harriman would be leading a U.S. delegation to Moscow to confer on providing more military aid drew an outraged response from Robert McCormick’s right-wing Chicago Tribune:

  A national emergency does not require that an American mission go to the bloody Kremlin to consider the needs of the greatest barbarian of modern times. We are not required by our national interests or our national dangers to join hands with a system of government which professes undying contempt for everything we regard as necessary in our way of living and plans unremitting and unrelenting warfare against such people as constitute the American nation.26

  German cavalry leave a Russian village in flames during Operation Barbarossa, the full-scale German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

  Given the depth of anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States, Roosevelt felt he had to move gingerly in providing tangible assistance to the Soviet government. A Gallup Poll found that only 35 percent of respondents favored aiding the Soviets on the same basis as that offered to Great Britain three months earlier. On November 7, 1941, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Roosevelt announced that the United States would extend lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union. The president offered a billion-dollar interest-free credit to be repaid starting five years after the end of the war.

  But when promised U.S. aid failed to arrive, Soviet elation turned bitter. The New York Times reported that U.S. shipments in October and November had fallen “far, far short” of “the specified tonnage of materials of war” the United States had committed. In fact, the United States had delivered less than half of what it had offered. Arthur Krock attributed this to special circumstances but failed to mention deliberate foot-dragging by some who disapproved the entire enterprise.27 The failure to deliver the promised equipment dealt a crushing blow to Soviet prospects, with Moscow and Leningrad under siege, Ukraine occupied, and the Red Army suffering debilitating losses, and did little to convince the Soviets of U.S. goodwill.

  Roosevelt wanted the United States in the war and, like Wilson before him, maneuvered quietly to make that happen. He believed that Hitler was intent on world domination and must be stopped. In early 1941, U.S. and British military officers met to devise a strategy for first defeating Germany and then engaging Japan that they would implement upon the U.S. entry into the war. In the meantime, Germany’s U-boat campaign was undermining U.S. efforts to supply Great Britain, sinking an inordinate number of British ships. In April, Roosevelt began allowing U.S. ships to provide vital intelligence to the British about the presence of enemy ships and planes and soon authorized transporting supplies to British soldiers in North Africa, precipitating direct confrontations with German U-boats. After one incident, a German communiqué charged Roosevelt with “endeavoring with all the means at his disposal to provoke incidents for the purpose of baiting the American people into the war.”28 In September, after one of these allegedly unprovoked attacks, Roosevelt announced a “shoot on sight” policy toward German and Italian ships in U.S. waters.29

  In August 1941, Roosevelt met secretly with Churchill in Newfoundland. The two leaders drew up the Atlantic Charter, which, much like Wilson’s Fourteen Points, articulated a democratic and progressive set of war aims. It would remain to be seen if the United States could deliver better this time around. The charter disavowed territorial aggrandizement and territorial changes without the consent of the governed. It proclaimed self-government, equal access to trade and resources for victors and vanquished alike, a peace allowing “freedom from fear and want,” freedom of the seas, disarmament, and a permanent system of general security. Fearing that Roosevelt’s proposed wording threatened Great Britain’s colonial sphere, Churchill added a clause stipulating that equal access to international wealth would be guaranteed only “with due respect for . . . existing obligations.”

  Roosevelt turned down Churchill’s request to have the United States join the war immediately. But Churchill’s account of the talks captures Roosevelt’s true intentions: Roosevelt,
he told his cabinet, “said he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. Everything was to be done to force an ‘incident’ that could lead to war.”30 Though some people might excuse Roosevelt’s deceptive behavior in the lead-up to the war as a necessary manipulation of public opinion in a righteous cause, future presidents would also take it upon themselves to play fast and loose with the truth in manipulating the nation into wars, as Woodrow Wilson had done a quarter century earlier. Such a policy in the hands of less scrupulous and less farsighted presidents, much like Roosevelt’s wartime abuse of civil liberties, would pose a grave threat to the nation and its republican system of governance.

  The president ultimately got his wish, but it was not triggered by an incident in Europe, as most were anticipating. On December 7, 1941, the day President Roosevelt said would “live in infamy,” the Japanese navy attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, leaving almost 2,500 dead and sinking or disabling much of the U.S. fleet. The Americans were caught literally sleeping on a Sunday morning. They knew an attack from Japan was coming, but they didn’t anticipate that it would be in Hawaii. It was an intelligence failure on a colossal scale. Given the abundance of warning signs and the degree of ineptitude involved, much as with the attacks on September 11, 2001, many believed then and now that Roosevelt must have abetted the attack in order to draw the United States into the war. The evidence, however, does not support that charge.31