Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  Other Americans, however, held quite a different view. Isolationists in Congress and the military believed that all this talk about German infiltration and subversion was simply a smoke screen by the administration to disguise what its critics felt were its plans to lead America into the war against Germany. “President Roosevelt tried to curdle our blood by talking about Nazi plans to invade South America … when in fact there never was any such menace,” the retired general Albert Wedemeyer, who had been one of the staunchest isolationists in the Army, contended after the war. Senator Hiram Johnson declared at the time that Roosevelt, “with diabolical cleverness,” was trying to “create a terrible public clamor and hysteria” so as to “follow the line followed by us in 1917, which took us into the European conflict.”

  Strongly opposed to what they saw as Roosevelt’s increasing bellicosity, a number of high-ranking military officers began conducting their own private guerrilla campaigns to do what they could to shut the president down.

  IN LATE MAY, A short, rotund man paid a call on Burton Wheeler in his Senate office. He was Rear Admiral Stanford Cooper, a former director of naval communications who, having created the Navy’s tactical signaling codes, was known as “the father of naval radio.” After telling Wheeler that what he had to say was confidential, Cooper declared: “The man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is going to get us into war.” The president was “blowing smoke” about the dangers of a German attack in South America, the admiral said, and was “using the specter of a Nazi invasion of the U.S. as a pretext for our joining the Allies.”

  Cooper urged Wheeler to go all out in opposing Roosevelt: “You can’t stop him by making one speech. You’ve got to make a lot of speeches. You licked him on the Court issue and you can lick him again.” When Wheeler asked him how other Navy officers felt about the war, Cooper replied: “Most of the older heads feel as I do—that we should keep out—but a lot of the younger men who look forward to promotions think the President knows more about the Navy than we do.” Before he left, Cooper agreed to provide the Montana Democrat with facts and figures backing up his arguments.

  A couple of weeks later, after Wheeler delivered a scathing radio speech against what he called the administration’s scare campaign, he received a visit from another military man—this time, a clean-cut Air Corps captain, whose name Wheeler never revealed and who told him that he was only a messenger. According to the senator’s son, Edward, Wheeler had no doubt that the envoy had been sent by Hap Arnold.

  For more than eighteen months, Arnold had mounted a rearguard action to stop Roosevelt from transferring to the Allies the modern aircraft that his own air force so desperately needed. Convinced that the United States should not become entangled in the war in Europe, the air chief had been involved in a number of confrontations with the exasperated president, who at one point threatened Arnold with exile to Guam if he kept defying FDR’s wishes.

  Arnold was sure, his wife later told his biographer, Murray Green, that the administration was bugging his home telephone. White House staffers “apparently were going to wage war against Hap,” she said. “In other words, try and force him out.” If it hadn’t been for the steadfast support of George Marshall, who had been a friend of Arnold’s for more than thirty years, “it is doubtful,” Green wrote, “that Arnold would have survived in his job.”

  A seasoned veteran in the art of leaking information to members of Congress, Arnold had known Burton Wheeler for several years; indeed, he had helped Wheeler acquire an Air Corps base for Montana several years before. Now, as Wheeler saw it, Arnold had designated this young captain as his mouthpiece in his continuing battle against Roosevelt.

  “Are you going to keep up this fight?” the captain asked Wheeler. When the senator said yes, the officer told him that the Air Corps was in no shape to go to war and that Wheeler must do everything he could to prevent it. “We haven’t got a single, solitary plane that’s fit for overseas service,” the captain added. He promised to pass on detailed information about the air force’s weaknesses in the near future.

  LIKE THE ADMIRAL AND the captain, Charles Lindbergh believed that the administration intended to do far more than shore up the military strength of America, that it was in fact preparing the country for war. And, he feared, Americans seemed to be going along with the plan. “The press is hysterical,” he wrote in his journal on May 16. “The newspapers give one the impression that the United States will be invaded next week!”

  In mid-May, over lunch at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, Lindbergh told former undersecretary of state William Castle that Roosevelt’s call for fifty thousand planes was “childish,” that “we could never manage such a force” and that the cost “would be prohibitive even for a very rich country.” As Castle recalled, Lindbergh was “furious at the President’s speech because he said it showed a lamentable lack of knowledge of the entire air situation.”

  Determined to halt what he saw as a march toward intervention, Lindbergh made another nationwide radio broadcast on May 19, three days after the president’s speech to Congress. While he agreed that America’s military forces should be reinforced, he argued to his listeners that the United States “must stop this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion that has been running rife the last few days.” There was no danger of attack, Lindbergh said, unless the country (i.e., the administration) incited it by meddling further in the European conflict: “If we desire peace, we have only to stop asking for war.” Insisting that the Western Hemisphere was secure against foreign assault, he urged: “Let us turn again to America’s traditional role—that of building and guarding our own destiny.”

  After listening to her husband’s speech, Anne Lindbergh wrote apprehensively in her diary, “This will raise the roof! It will be taken as anti–New Deal and anti-intervention.” Her fears were well founded. The first to weigh in was The New York Times, which sharply rapped Lindbergh in an editorial: “The ‘hysterical chatter’ [of which Lindbergh spoke] is the talk now heard on every side in the democracies, with France and Britain in danger of defeat by Germany. Colonel Lindbergh is a peculiar young man if he can contemplate this possibility in any other light than as a calamity for the American people.”

  The Times’s reaction was mild, however, compared to that of the administration. Although Roosevelt had been angered by Lindbergh’s speeches the previous fall, he had been content to let interventionists like Dorothy Thompson take the lead in criticizing him. Now his reticence was at an end. Enraged by Lindbergh’s continued criticism of his actions at a time of great national crisis, the president set in motion a well-orchestrated administration campaign against him. “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this,” FDR wrote to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. “I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” To former secretary of state Henry Stimson, Roosevelt observed: “When I read Lindbergh’s speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.”

  Roosevelt, however, voiced none of these criticisms in public. Instead, he employed a series of prominent presidential surrogates to make his points against Lindbergh. The first to speak out was Senator James Byrnes, the shrewd South Carolina Democrat who had become a key Roosevelt lieutenant on Capitol Hill. In a national radio broadcast on May 23, Byrnes mounted a savage attack against Lindbergh, equating him with appeasers in Britain and France and likening his speech to “fifth-column activities” that allegedly had taken place in the European countries overrun by Hitler.

  Throughout the West, there was a widespread belief that Germany’s stunning victories in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France could not be explained solely by the political and military weaknesses of those nations. The triumphs must also be due to the effectiveness of Nazi agents and their sympathizers in undermining the countries
before the Wehrmacht invaded—a belief that was later found to have very little basis in fact. Nonetheless, Roosevelt and many of those around him fully accepted the premise and applied it to the United States.

  In his assault on Lindbergh, Byrnes reported: “Fifth columns are already active in America. And those who consciously or unconsciously retard the efforts of this government to provide for the defense of the American people are the fifth column’s most effective fellow travelers.” The senator reminded his listeners that Lindbergh had accepted a medal from the German government less than two years before and accused him of having urged Britain and France to appease Hitler “by offering no resistance to Germany’s aggression.”

  Three nights later, during a fireside chat on national defense, FDR weighed in with his own denunciation of what he saw as fifth-column activities in the United States. After assuring the American people that he would do everything in his power to keep the country safe, he warned about this powerful strategy for “weakening a nation at its very roots.” He went on: “These dividing forces are undiluted poison. They must not be allowed to spread in the New World as they have in the Old.”

  Roosevelt had long been preoccupied with the idea of internal subversion. As assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, he had been instrumental in hiring hundreds of special Navy investigators to guard against sabotage of naval installations. In September 1939, his press secretary, Steve Early, suggested to reporters that the massive number of letters and telegrams sent to Congress opposing repeal of the arms embargo had been prompted by cabled instructions from Berlin to “its friends in the United States.”

  A few months later, in his 1940 State of the Union address, Roosevelt warned Americans about the “apologists to foreign aggressors,” whom he described as “those selfish and partisan groups at home who wrap themselves in a false mantle of Americanism.” In his May 16 speech requesting huge increases in defense spending, the president spoke of the new “treacherous use of the Fifth Column,” mentioning the possible recruitment of refugees coming to the United States as enemy agents.

  When Roosevelt used the term “fifth columnist,” he clearly meant it to include Lindbergh and other critics of his foreign policy. The president “did not view isolationists with the detachment of a scholar,” historian Richard Steele noted. “He believed the worst of them.” In FDR’s view, his isolationist opponents “were not only wrong, they were contributing mightily to apathy and disunity, thus jeopardizing national survival.”

  In his May 26 fireside chat, Roosevelt contended that attacks on the government’s rearmament plan and its other foreign and military policies were not part of “a wholesome political debate of honest and free men,” as Lindbergh and other isolationists maintained. Instead, those assaults were connected to the “clever schemes of foreign agents,” meant to “create confusion, public indecision, political paralysis, and eventually a state of panic.” In essence, the president was claiming that any criticism of his policies was detrimental to national security. To preserve the country’s unity and safety, he said, Americans must combat this new fifth column with all their might.

  THAT KIND OF TALK greatly worried Attorney General Robert Jackson, who thought the president was being overly alarmist. Jackson informed the cabinet in late May that even before FDR’s broadcast, “a hysteria was sweeping the country against aliens and fifth columnists.” He had received several reports of Americans “breaking into other people’s houses and confronting them with a flag, demanding that they salute it.” Many citizens, Jackson said, had the view that “anyone you don’t like is a member of the Fifth Column.”

  An ardent champion of civil liberties, Jackson had vivid memories of the vigilante mania that had taken hold of much of the country during World War I. As city attorney of Jamestown, New York, he had stood fast against what he saw as busybody snooping and spying, reckless accusations of disloyalty made against blameless town residents, and “suspicion of everyone who was not a native son and 100 per cent American.” He had been labeled pro-German and un-American because he refused to prosecute those who he believed had been unjustly targeted.

  Now, Jackson feared, that same nativist, anti-alien hysteria was on the rise again. Throughout the country, Time reported, Americans were developing “morbid fears of invisible enemies and were chasing ghosts and phantoms.… From Baton Rouge, La., to Lake George, N.Y., tales of spies and saboteurs floated wraithlike but menacing in the troubled air.” A book entitled The Fifth Column Is Here, claiming that the United States contained more than a million fifth columnists, became an instant bestseller.

  In Georgia, Jackson told the cabinet, the governor “was hunting down every alien,” ordering them to be fingerprinted and registered for a possible roundup. A German American clubhouse near St. Louis had been burned down by arsonists, while a similar club in Chicago was destroyed by a bomb. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a foundry worker, convinced that his neighbor was a fifth columnist, shot and killed him. FBI offices across the country were deluged with reports of suspected espionage and sabotage—more than 2,900 reports alone on the day after Roosevelt’s fireside chat, almost twice the number received in all of 1939.

  After listening to Jackson’s concerns at the cabinet meeting, Harold Ickes wrote in his diary: “America isn’t going to be any too comfortable a place to live in during the immediate future; and some of us are going to be ashamed of the excesses that will be committed against innocent people.” He later noted: “Some of our super-patriots are simply going crazy.”

  Declaring that American liberties were endangered more by “our own excitement” than by enemy conspiracy, Jackson was determined to impose federal control over all investigations of alleged subversion. With that goal in mind, he offered little objection to legislation passed by Congress in late May ordering the mandatory registration and fingerprinting of all resident aliens. Although the American Civil Liberties Union strongly protested the Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act after its main sponsor, Rep. Howard Smith, a conservative Democrat from Virginia), Jackson’s fear of local witch hunts of aliens and others outweighed his concern about possible abuses.

  The Justice Department was assigned to oversee the registration program, and Jackson vowed that his agency would do everything possible to protect all foreigners living in the country, some of whom were Jewish refugees from Germany and German-occupied nations. Under the direction of Solicitor General Francis Biddle, more than 3.5 million aliens were registered over the next few months. Overall, Americans accepted federal jurisdiction over alien-related activity, and the vigilante movements died out.

  But the Smith Act contained another provision that, in the long run, would threaten civil liberties far more than did the alien registration clause. This section made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of the government or to belong to any organization that did so. In effect it was an antisedition law, the first such peacetime legislation enacted in the United States since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

  Zechariah Chafee, a Harvard Law School professor and the most eminent First Amendment scholar in the country, strongly protested passage of the act. When it was still being considered by Congress, Chafee observed that the best way to preserve free speech was to prevent repressive legislation from being enacted because, once such laws were approved, “patriotic judges and panic-stricken juries” would make sure they were enforced as strictly as possible.

  Chafee had in mind what happened during World War I, when two laws—the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918—were used to suppress not only those promoting rebellion against the government but also people who simply criticized the government and its conduct of the war. Enforcement of the statutes touched off what one scholar called “an orgy of repression” in the United States that took particular aim at radical speech and ideas.

  The Supreme Court upheld the two laws, but later dissenting opinions by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis en
ded up having a powerful influence on postwar American jurisprudence. Heavily influenced by Chafee’s writings, Holmes argued that “a clear and present danger” to law and security must exist before speech can legally be curbed by the state. In other words, unless speech can be proven likely to spark immediate violence or any other lawless action that would harm the nation, it should not be punished.

  In later years, the “clear and present danger” doctrine espoused by Holmes became widely accepted in U.S. courts, and a much broader view of free speech took hold in the country as a whole. But by 1940, as the specter of war once again faced the United States, a reevaluation of rights and liberties, especially those relating to the First Amendment, had begun. The fear engendered by Hitler’s assault on Western Europe and the resulting reports of fifth columnists caused many people, including liberal intellectuals who had decried the First Amendment injustices of World War I, to urge curbs on politically provocative speech in what the historian Geoffrey Perret called “the Holy War against fascism.” Among the few dissenters to that view was the American Civil Liberties Union, which had been organized after World War I to protect individual rights. Roger Baldwin, one of the ACLU’s founders, bemoaned the fact that support for freedom of speech was “more and more confined to the small circles of defenders of civil liberty on principle,” as well as, of course, to those under attack.

  For a time, Robert Jackson and Solicitor General Francis Biddle were also among those who resisted the drive toward suppression of dissent. Decrying the attacks being made on Lindbergh and other isolationists, Biddle wrote: “Why shouldn’t Lindbergh say ‘England is defeated; we must keep out,’ if he wants to? Isn’t that part of our theory of freedom of speech? Isn’t that the thing that we must fight back with other ideas?”