By September of 1938, Hitler was demanding to annex the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. At Munich, at the end of that month, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, agreed not to oppose him—in exchange for a promise of what Chamberlain called “peace in our time.”
Then, on the evening of November 9, Hitler’s paramilitary thugs looted Jewish homes all over Germany, smashed Jewish shops, and burned synagogues. Scores of Jews died, and thousands were imprisoned. The rest were required to pay what the Nazis called an “atonement fine” of 20 percent of their assets to the state. It was remembered as Kristallnacht—the “Night of Broken Glass.”
FDR told a press conference he could “scarcely believe … such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.” He ordered the visas of fifteen thousand German and Austrian resident aliens extended so that they would not be forced to return to Nazi rule—and he recalled his ambassador from Berlin, something neither Britain nor France dared do.
But a Gallup poll taken in early 1939 would show that 85 percent of American Protestants and 84 percent of Catholics opposed offering sanctuary to European refugees. So did more than one-quarter of American Jews. “What has happened to us in this country?” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. “If we study our own history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunate from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand-fold by what they have brought us.”
In March of 1939, Hitler sent his armies into what remained of Czechoslovakia. Poland looked to be next, and Britain pledged to go to war if Germany invaded her.
Roosevelt begged Congress to allow arms sales to Britain and France. The House watered down his proposal, and it never even reached the Senate floor.
That spring, FDR sent a list of thirty-one sovereign nations to Hitler, asking the dictator to pledge that he had no plans to attack any of them. Hitler did not bother to reply. Instead he launched a two-hour tirade of contempt directed at Roosevelt personally. It was clear that the Führer of Germany believed he had nothing to fear from the president of the United States.
Members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, in Washington to present a petition to FDR calling for universal disarmament, cluster around a statue of Admiral David Farragut in the heart of the Capitol, May 30, 1933.
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In Chicago on October 5, 1937, Roosevelt calls for an international “quarantine of the aggressor nations.” When he realized there was little American sympathy for any kind of collective action overseas, he dropped the subject.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Adolf Hitler in 1925, eight years before assuming power in Germany, and the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini parading in Rome in the spring of 1938. Together, Mussolini said, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy would form the “axis” around which Europe was destined to revolve.
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In 1938, peace advocates like this protester still greeted even the most tentative White House moves toward strengthening America’s defenses with hostility and derision.
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In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Austrian Jews crowd a passport office in Vienna seeking visas to escape Nazi rule.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A Berlin synagogue gutted on Kristallnacht, and the official White House statement deploring the Nazi assault on the Jews, amended by the president’s strong personal reaction in his own hand
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One of many telegrams and letters from American anti-Semites received by the White House after Roosevelt’s denunciation of Nazi thuggery. It accuses the president of being a “catspaw” for “International Jew war mongers.”
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All the Luck in the World!
When FDR learned that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England were to visit Canada in the spring of 1939, he invited them to extend their trip to include Washington, New York, and his own home at Hyde Park, where, he said, “the simplicity and naturalness of such a visit would produce a most excellent effect” on American public opinion. Both he and the British government wanted to do all they could to bring their two peoples together in the face of Hitler’s growing threat. The royals agreed to come, even though a previous British ambassador’s wife objected that Springwood was unsuitable for the king and queen—“a dismal, small house, extremely badly run and most uncomfortable.”
Roosevelt was sure that the royal presence would “be an excellent thing for Anglo-American relations,” and he was right; some 750,000 people turned out to see them in Washington, almost twice the city’s population; three and a half million more cheered them in New York, many shouting, “Hiya King!”
The royal couple spent two days at Springwood. They attended the Roosevelt family church, swam in the pool at Val-Kill, and attended a picnic at the president’s new hilltop cottage, where much was made in the newspapers of the fact that the king had enjoyed a hot dog and even asked for a second.
On the evening of June 11, as the royals’ train started to pull out of Hyde Park, beginning their journey home to what seemed more and more like war, FDR called out, “Good luck to you. All the luck in the world.” At the same time, Eleanor remembered, “the people who were gathered everywhere on the banks of the Hudson … began to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ There was something incredibly moving about this scene—the river in the evening light, the voices of many people singing this old song … the train slowly pulling out with the young couple waving good-bye. One thought of the clouds that hung over them and the worries they were going to face and turned away from the scene with a heavy heart.”
“Well, at last I greet you!” FDR focuses his charm on Queen Elizabeth of England as she and King George VI arrive at Union Station in Washington, D.C., June 8, 1939. The president grips the arm of his military aide, Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson.
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With FDR at the wheel, the royal couple and James Roosevelt’s wife, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, drive to Top Cottage for a picnic. “Motorcycle police cleared the road ahead of us,” the queen remembered sixty years later, “but the president pointed out sights, waved his cigarette holder about, … was conversing more than watching the road.… There were several times when I thought we would go right off the road and tumble down the hills.… It was a relief to get to the picnic.”
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The Roosevelts and the royal couple wave goodbye as the train carrying the king and queen leaves Hyde Park.
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CHAPTER 6
The Common Cause
1939–1944
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, FDR, and Allied brass at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943
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The Sphinx
In the summer of 1939, Franklin Roosevelt was more than halfway through his second four years as president. None of his predecessors had dared defy the precedent set by George Washington and run for a third term. At first, FDR did not expect to do so either, though he continued to maintain his silence on the subject. Work was beginning on a presidential library at Hyde Park, where he planned to store his papers and write his memoirs, and he had built himself a hilltop cottage nearby where he could get away from visitors and where both his close personal secretary Missy LeHand and his devoted distant cousin Daisy Suckley separately hoped to live with him. He told another relative, “I am a tired and weary man.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was weary, too. “There is no end to the appointments, teas, social obligations,” she wrote. That year alone, she would entertain 323 overnight guests, oversee dinner for 4,729 more visitors, preside over tea for over 9,000—and shake hands with another 14,000—all while dictating a daily column, delivering 45 lectures, conducting a weekly radio prog
ram, and trying to focus on the host of social issues that took her all over the country.
She did not want four more years of it, she told an old friend, and couldn’t wait for the day when she could at long last “take on a job and see it through to a conclusion” on her own. If FDR didn’t leave the White House in 1941, she had warned her daughter, Anna, she would.
Then everything began to change.
FDR gazes fondly into Daisy Suckley’s camera on the porch at Top Cottage. “I had a lovely time alone with the P[resident],” she wrote after one of their visits to the hilltop. “You can say anything & ask any questions of him when alone, but when others are there I am always afraid of saying something I shouldn’t or asking what he doesn’t want to answer.”
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The president spars with the press at a Val-Kill picnic, July 4, 1939. “It is a game with me,” Roosevelt once told a friend. “They ask me a lot of questions and I really enjoy trying to avoid them.” The man in the dark suit behind FDR is William D. Hassett, assistant secretary to the president. The woman in the polka-dot dress is Grace Tully, the assistant—and eventual successor—to Missy LeHand, who sits facing her.
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This eight-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture was the centerpiece of a satirical review at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in 1939. It portrays Roosevelt as the Sphinx because he remained so maddeningly silent about whether or not he planned to run for a third term. FDR attended the dinner and was so amused by the statue that he asked that it be sent to the “Oddities Room” in his new library and museum at Hyde Park. When it got there, an unwise aide asked the president’s mother if she didn’t think it was a pretty good caricature of her son. It was not, she said; her jaw was identical to his. Did she think this grotesque object looked anything like her?
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“But It Would Make Such a Nice Scoop if You’d Only Tell Me, Franklin.” Of all the caricatures of her that appeared over the years, its subject said, it was this one, by Jacob Burck of the Chicago Daily Times, “that amused me most.” The president did, in fact, keep her in the dark about his plans, along with the rest of the country.
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I Can Feel Little Pity
In the early-morning hours of September 1, 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt was asleep at Val-Kill when the telephone rang: “It was my husband in Washington,” she reported the next day, “to tell me the sad news that Germany had invaded Poland and that her planes were bombing Polish cities.… I feel no bitterness against the German people. I am deeply sorry for them, as I am for the people of all other European nations facing this horrible crisis. But for [Hitler], the man who has taken this responsibility on his shoulders, I can feel little pity. It is hard to see how he can sleep at night and think of the many people in many nations whom he may send to their deaths.”
When the Great War broke out in 1914, Woodrow Wilson had called upon all Americans to remain neutral “in thought as well as deed.” As the Second World War began, FDR was careful not to make the same request. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” he said, “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 close his conscience.”
Roosevelt and most of his fellow citizens sympathized with Hitler’s victims—and with France and England when they went to war to stop him. But an even bigger majority was still opposed to any American involvement overseas, for fear that the Allies would pull the United States into another war.
German troops parade through Warsaw, September 28, 1939. Half the city’s buildings had been destroyed or heavily damaged; forty thousand civilian city dwellers had died. “Take a look around Warsaw,” Hitler told reporters. “That is how I can deal with any European city.”
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A Polish girl grieves for her sister, killed by German strafing during the first hours of the German attack. “Well, it’s come at last,” Roosevelt said when he was first told of the invasion. “God help us all.”
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FDR’s notes on the early-morning telephone call to the White House during which he learned that the Second World War had begun, dated, initialed, and carefully preserved by him: “The President received word at 2:50 a.m. by telephone from Ambass. [Anthony Drexel] Biddle through Ambass. [William] Bullitt that Germany has invaded Poland and that four cities are being bombed. The Pres. directed that all Navy ships and army commands be notified by radio at once. In bed 3:05 a.m. Sept. 1, 39. FDR.” Biddle was the ambassador to Poland, Bullitt to France.
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The Scene Has Darkened
The United States was poorly prepared for conflict. The army was smaller than that of Romania: fewer than 174,000 men were in uniform, fitted out with tin hats and leggings issued during the Great War and carrying rifles designed in 1903. The army still owned tens of thousands of cavalry horses. Even Roosevelt’s beloved navy was only marginally bigger than it had been when he took office.
The question became how far Roosevelt dared go to help the Allies. According to one poll, roughly one-third of all Americans wanted nothing to do with the warring nations; another third was willing to sell arms to the belligerents as long as the United States would “take no sides and stay out of the war entirely.” “I am almost literally walking on eggs,” Roosevelt told a visitor.
Three weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, FDR called upon Congress to revise the Neutrality Act and end the embargo on the sale of arms to belligerents—but only by arguing that the stronger the Allies got the less likely it was that the United States would ever have to go to war. After six bitter weeks of debate, Congress did lift the ban, but insisted that arms could be shipped only on American vessels and sold only on a “cash and carry basis.”
Most of the progressive midwestern Republicans, who had once supported New Deal legislation, were isolationists opposed to any aid to the Allies. Roosevelt found himself more dependent than ever before on the conservative southern Democrats he’d once tried to purge from his party.
After the Nazis devastated Poland, a shadowy seven-month lull settled over Europe. Senator William Borah, an isolationist from Idaho and the former lover of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, dubbed it the “Phony War.”
Then, in the spring of 1940, the Phony War became real again. In April, the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway. On May 10, German bombers filled the skies over Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam; German troops invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.
The following day, Winston Churchill, who had warned for years of the Nazi threat to Britain, became prime minister. By early June, the Germans would force 338,000 British, French, and Belgian troops to flee across the English Channel, leaving behind at Dunkirk hundreds of thousands of tons of armaments and heavy equipment.
“The scene has darkened swiftly,” Churchill told Roosevelt in the first of a series of nearly two thousand secret wartime messages between the prime minister and the president. “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood,” he said. “We expect to be attacked here ourselves.… If necessary we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.” But unless the United States would sell Britain several hundred aircraft and lend her forty to fifty destroyers, he could not promise to hold out for long.
Roosevelt had been corresponding quietly with Churchill for almost a year. Churchill had been first lord of the admiralty then, but Roosevelt had understood that he might well be prime minister one day.
FDR did all that he felt he could to help. “These are ominous days,” he told Congress, and asked for half a million more men for the army and called for the building of fifty thousand warplanes within the next twelve months—enough planes to outstrip the German air force in a single year—and to provide sufficient additional aircraft for sale to Britain. Fifty thousand planes was ten times the country’s current capacity. Critics thought he was delusional. �
�This seemed at first like an impossible goal,” a close adviser wrote, “but it caught the imagination of the Americans, who have always believed they could accomplish the impossible.”
General George C. Marshall, who took the oath as army chief of staff on the day the war in Europe began. He was able, taciturn, and so blunt that after he had vigorously disagreed with the president at a meeting in the White House, his fellow generals told him his career was over. Instead, when the time came, FDR reached down past the names of thirty-four of them to put him in charge.
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German troops move through a burning Norwegian village in May 1940. A week after the invasion began, isolationist Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota told a Pennsylvania crowd that stopping Hitler was “not worth the sacrifice of one America mule, much less one American son.”
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“Very Well, Alone.” British cartoonist David Low speaks for his embattled countrymen in the spring of 1940.
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Winston Churchill in the study at his country home, Chartwell. Many of his messages to FDR were written in the quiet of this room.
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Disaster at Dunkirk: Allied troops huddle together on the beach, vulnerable to attack from the air and hoping to be rescued by one or another of the nine hundred military and civilian vessels that made up a motley armada plying back and forth across the English Channel. Reporting the evacuation to Parliament on June 4, Churchill vowed that if, as now seemed likely, Germany sought next to invade Britain, “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”
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