The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  Two Times Is Enough for Any Man

  Two days after France surrendered to the Nazis, the Republicans met in Philadelphia to choose their presidential nominee. The front-runners were mostly isolationists. But recent events in Europe had shaken the delegates, and in the end they chose an unlikely but remarkable dark horse: a big, rumpled, corporate attorney from the Midwest who had once been a Democrat and who, like FDR, believed that the United States had a crucial role to play abroad: Wendell Willkie.

  FDR believed him “the most formidable candidate” the Republicans could possibly have chosen.

  A few days later, Eleanor expressed her concerns to her daughter:

  Anna Darling:

  The Republican convention seems so “usual” and the times so “unusual” that I find it hard to reconcile the two.… France is crushed.… What will be Hitler’s next move? South America or the U.S.A.? And will Japan be acting with them in a concerted plan? It looks that way just now. What a sad world.

  Roosevelt continued to remain silent about whether or not he would break with tradition and run for a third term. He did nothing to discourage others from announcing their candidacies, including his own former campaign manager, James Farley. And he refused to attend the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago, claiming that the international situation was far too grave. Instead, he dispatched his close adviser Harry Hopkins to try to organize a supposedly spontaneous “draft.” Many delegates—southern conservatives, Farley advocates, and those opposed to a third term for any man—felt used and angry.

  Labor Secretary Frances Perkins called FDR from Chicago, pleading with him to appear personally at the convention and calm things down. If he didn’t, she said, he wouldn’t have the party behind him in the fall. He refused to come, but suggested she ask his wife if she would appear on his behalf.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was at Val-Kill, listening to the convention on the radio. There had been changes in her inner circle. Her friendship with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, with whom she’d built her cottage, had cooled. She saw less of Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller, too. But with her this evening was a new friend and confidant, a former youth leader named Joseph P. Lash who had become a sort of surrogate son. The Democrats were in trouble, she told him. They hadn’t ended unemployment. They now seemed about to break the no-third-term ban, which she believed was “a very great tradition.” And she felt that her husband had already served his purpose in history.

  The phone rang. It was Frances Perkins. Would she go to Chicago? Only if the president asked her himself, Eleanor answered. She wanted to be coaxed—and she wanted Franklin to do the coaxing.

  She spoke to FDR.

  “Well, would you like to go?” he asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t like to go. I’m very busy.… Do you really want me to go?”

  Yes, he finally answered. “Perhaps it would be a good idea.”

  She boarded a plane and headed for Chicago.

  Meanwhile, as the nominations began, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the convention chairman, told the delegates that he had a message for them from FDR: “The President has never had, and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the Convention for that office. He wishes, he wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all of the delegates to this Convention are free to vote for any candidate.”

  As Barkley finished, a single disembodied voice began a chant. Delegates joined in. It was later discovered that the chanting was led by the Chicago superintendent of sewers, broadcasting from somewhere in the basement.

  Roosevelt was renominated on the first ballot. But then word came that FDR wanted Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as his vice president. A rebellion began to brew. Wallace was too liberal for many conservatives; he had never run for office—and he had once been a Republican.

  FDR wouldn’t budge: “Damn it to hell,” he said. “They will go for Wallace or I won’t run.” To emphasize that he meant it, he wrote out a statement: if the Democrats could not unite behind a liberal ticket, he would decline the honor of their nomination.

  Eleanor arrived just before the vice presidential nominations began and took a seat beside Mrs. Wallace. When Wallace’s name was introduced, delegates booed and jeered. Then, just before the vote, Eleanor rose to speak.

  The convention fell silent. No first lady had ever spoken to a national convention before. She thanked Jim Farley for his lifetime of service to the Democratic Party and then called upon the delegates to rally to a cause greater than themselves. “This is no ordinary time, no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole.… This is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it to the fullest of their ability, with the highest ideals, with a determination … and through doing what this country can, to bring the world to a safer and happier condition.”

  After Eleanor’s speech, a united convention nominated Henry Wallace for vice president on the first ballot. The audience had been “just like lambs,” she said. When Harry Hopkins escorted her back to the airport for the flight home she told him, “You young things don’t know politics.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING THREE IMAGES The Republican case against the Roosevelts; and the Democratic response

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  A Willkie poster, 1940. Although the Republican nominee had made his name and fortune on Wall Street, Republican publicists made much of his Indiana boyhood and supposed closeness to everyday people. When the newspaperman Joseph Alsop, a Roosevelt cousin, said that the Willkie-for-president fervor came “from the grassroots,” Alice Roosevelt Longworth answered, “Yes, from the grassroots of 10,000 country clubs.”

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  Eleanor Roosevelt and her new friend, Joseph Lash. As with so many in her closest circle, her relationship with him was initially built on how she could be useful. “She had a compelling emotional need to have people who were close, who in a sense were hers,” Lash remembered, “and upon whom she could lavish help, attention, tenderness.”

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  Eleanor speaks at the Chicago convention. When she arrived, she reported that evening, “the atmosphere … was very much like the atmosphere one always finds on these occasions. Everybody was very busy, very troubled or very elated about one thing or another.” But when she began to speak the great hall fell silent. The man in the dark suit behind the first lady is the convention chairman, Alben Barkley.

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  Henry Wallace surrounded by reporters in Chicago: “I have always felt in him a certain shyness … that has kept him aloof from some Democrats,” Eleanor wrote after she helped get him nominated for vice president, “but … I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love.”

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  America’s Answer to Hitlerism

  As Willkie prepared to campaign across the country, Roosevelt sought to seem above politics. As a sign of bipartisanship, he had named two eminent Republicans to his cabinet—Henry L. Stimson, as secretary of war, and as secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, who had fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider.

  Two issues demanded immediate attention—and either one could have lost him the election. First, he needed a military draft—it would be the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Initially, he didn’t dare publicly support a conscription bill that was working its way through Congress, for fear of Republican attack. Opponents besieged Capitol Hill—mothers’ groups, college students, clergymen. “If you pass this bill,” said Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, “you slit the throat of the last democracy still living.”

  Then, Wendell Willkie defied his advisers and many in his own party and came out in favor of the draft as the best way to shore up the nation’s defenses. A relieved Roosevelt now enthusiastically endors
ed it, too; it was, he said, “America’s answer to Hitlerism.” More than sixteen million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five would be registered on the draft rolls.

  The second compelling issue facing Roosevelt that autumn was finding a way to respond to Winston Churchill’s desperate calls for help. German bombs were now falling on London. An all-out German assault across the Channel seemed imminent. Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt’s ambassador in London, believed Britain’s surrender “inevitable.” So did the president’s top military commanders. They argued that America’s military needs should take precedence over those of any foreign power.

  FDR overruled them all. On September 2, 1940, without consulting Congress, he signed an executive order transferring fifty overage destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on British bases in the Western Hemisphere. Arming Britain was “nothing more than a guess,” FDR admitted to a member of his cabinet. If he guessed wrong and Britain fell he would have accomplished nothing—except to further enrage Hitler.

  Wendell Willkie denounced the deal as “the most arbitrary and dictatorial action ever taken by a President of the United States.” Isolationists were even angrier. There was talk again of impeachment. Students at Yale University formed the noninterventionist America First Committee, dedicated to an “impregnable national defense”—but no help whatsoever for embattled Britain. Hundreds of thousands signed up, including the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the actress Lillian Gish; the poet Robert Frost; the composer Charles Ives and two soon-to-be-celebrated Ivy Leaguers, Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy.

  The Oyster Bay Roosevelts, like the rest of the country, were divided over the issue. Kermit Roosevelt, who had always remained friendly with Franklin and Eleanor, was already serving in the British army. But Theodore Roosevelt Jr. campaigned against U.S. involvement: he was “bitterly fearful of Franklin,” who, he told his sister Alice, was “itching” to get into the war “partly as a means of bolstering himself and partly … because of megalomania.” When Alice told a reporter that, rather than vote for a third term for Franklin, she’d cast her ballot for Hitler, the president told Eleanor he didn’t want “to have anything to do with that damned woman again.”

  Less than a month after the president’s destroyer deal was announced, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Treaty, agreeing that if any one of them was attacked, the others would come to its aid.

  Wendell Willkie kicks off his presidential campaign in his hometown of Elwood, Indiana. In front of an overwhelmingly isolationist crowd, he declared his support for the draft: “I cannot ask the American people to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way to secure the trained and competent manpower we need for national defense.” Without Willkie’s backing, FDR later admitted, the conscription bill would not have passed.

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  As Roosevelt looks on, Secretary of War Henry Stimson is blindfolded before drawing the first draft number from the fishbowl in front of him, September 16, 1940. “It was a brave decision on the part of the President,” Stimson said, “not to delay the lottery until after election day.”

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  Army doctors examine new draftees at Fort Slocum, New York, 1940. Nearly half the men who reported to their local draft boards were rejected as unfit, most suffering from bad teeth, poor eyesight, heart problems, or venereal disease—or because they didn’t measure up to fourth-grade educational standards.

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  Londoners take shelter in an underground tunnel from the German bombs falling above.

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  A small English boy and his stuffed animal, all that is left of his family after a direct hit.

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  Thousands of America Firsters and their supporters crowd into New York’s Madison Square Garden to hear Charles Lindbergh attack both Roosevelt and Willkie as heedless interventionists, intent on getting America into a war against Germany he was sure it could not win.

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  Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a charter member of the America First board of directors, sits on the Garden platform alongside the wives of isolationist senators Robert A. Taft and Burton K. Wheeler. “Franklin’s trite pieties mean nothing,” Alice wrote to her brother Ted. “He wants war … the only way he can retrieve his power which has been slipping so rapidly.… Only war can divert attention from his sweeping failures.”

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  Safe on Third

  Republicans tried to keep the third-term issue alive: reelecting Roosevelt would destroy America’s “democratic way of life,” Willkie said. But both sides realized the real issue was the war, and falling behind late in the race, the Republican candidate began to charge FDR with secretly planning to send America’s sons into a European war.

  Roosevelt had always been careful to say that the United States would never go to war—“except in case of attack.” In Boston, where many Irish voters opposed any aid to Britain, he deliberately dropped even that qualifier. “And while I’m talking to you fathers and mothers,” he told the crowd in Boston Garden. “I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again, and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.”

  “That hypocritical son of bitch!” Willkie said when he heard Roosevelt’s Boston pledge. “This is going to beat me.”

  On election night at Springwood, the returns were at first so close that even FDR’s optimism faltered momentarily, and he asked to be left alone. But by the end of the evening, the tide had once again turned toward Roosevelt. In the end, he won 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82.

  Around midnight, a torchlight parade of townspeople wound its way onto the Roosevelt estate, following a tradition that had greeted Democratic victories since the days of the president’s father. Roosevelt and his family went out to greet them. FDR was jubilant, roaring when he saw a small boy carrying a sign that read “SAFE ON THIRD.” Eleanor was somber. “This is the first time a President has been [elected] for a third term,” she wrote. “I looked at my children, at the President’s mother, and then at the President himself, and wondered what each one was feeling down in [their] heart of hearts. I feel that any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give to his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.”

  As the Roosevelts waved to their neighbors that evening, Nazi warplanes dropped fifteen hundred bombs on London.

  Roosevelt winds up his campaign in Poughkeepsie. At the beginning of the race, he’d claimed the overseas crisis was too grave for traditional politicking. But he also considered it a “public duty” to correct what he called “falsifications of fact.” “I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty,” he’d told a cheering crowd. “I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight.”

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  The advantages of incumbency: Willkie gamely campaigns in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, where Mayor Frank Hague has made sure no photograph of the Republican candidate fails also to advertise his Democratic opponent.

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  A triumphant FDR waves to his Hyde Park neighbors on election night, November 5, 1940. “We are facing difficult days in this country,” he told them, “but I think you will find me the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years. My heart has always been here. It always will be.” To the president’s left are Franklin Roosevelt Jr. and his wife, Ethel du Pont Roosevelt; John Roosevelt and his wife, Anne Clark Roosevelt; Sara Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor.

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  The Arsenal of Democracy

  Roosevelt redoubled his efforts at aiding Hitler’s enemies. In a December fireside chat, he declared that the Nazis could never be appeased: “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” The only way to keep the United States out of the struggle against the Axis was to provide further aid to the Allies already engaged in fighting it. The United States must become
the “arsenal of democracy,” and, since Britain could no longer pay for arms, the president proposed continuing to provide ships, planes, tanks, and guns—so long as the British promised to return or replace them when the war was over. Roosevelt compared it to lending a neighbor a garden hose.

  A few weeks later, in his 1941 State of the Union message, Roosevelt formally presented his “Lend-Lease” program to Congress and then tried to describe the kind of world he hoped would emerge from the war. It should be based, he said, “on four universal freedoms.”

  First is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

  The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

  The third is freedom from want—which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

  The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.