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

by Lynne Olson

  A loose national coalition of right-wing women’s groups, with names like the Congress of American Mothers and the American Mothers’ Neutrality League, added to the furor. Thousands of supporters of this so-called “mothers’ movement” traveled to Washington whenever Congress took up legislation they considered interventionist. Dressed in black, many with veils covering their faces, the women made life miserable for members of Congress who were not avowedly isolationist. They stalked their targets, screamed and spat at them, and held vigils outside their offices, keening and wailing.

  One such group hanged an effigy of Senator Claude Pepper, a diehard interventionist, from an oak tree in front of the Capitol. The dummy, with its coconut head, denim overalls, and straw-stuffed body, wore a sash inscribed with the words CLAUDE “BENEDICT ARNOLD” PEPPER. The women were disappointed when, instead of rising to the bait, the Florida Democrat professed himself delighted, declaring in the Senate that it was “a splendid demonstration of what we are all trying to preserve—freedom of speech and freedom of action.”*

  An isolationist women’s group, which called itself a “mothers’ committee,” hangs an effigy depicting interventionist Senator Claude Pepper on a tree outside the Capitol.

  But the antidraft demonstrations and mail did succeed in cowing other legislators—so many, in fact, that the Burke-Wadsworth bill appeared likely to fail in committee. That was unacceptable to Stimson, who, along with Frank Knox, pressed Roosevelt hard at an August 2 cabinet meeting to support conscription. To the surprise of the two new secretaries and the rest of the cabinet, the president agreed. He told Stimson he would “call some of the [congressional] leaders in and tell them they must get busy on that bill,” which he regarded as “one of the great fundamental pillars of national defense.” The following day, FDR informed reporters he supported the draft legislation and considered it “essential to adequate national defense.”

  With that, the congressional battle was joined. It was a nasty, vitriolic fight, exacerbated by the hot, humid weather that had smothered Washington for weeks. “Whenever the Congress remains in session after August 1, you can look for trouble,” said Senator James Byrnes. “The fellows begin to look like [the brawling prizefighter] Tony Galento and act like [the heavyweight champion] Joe Louis. They hit from any position, and the referee is in as much danger as the opposing fighters.” Another senator remarked: “I shudder for the future of a country whose destiny must be decided in the dog days.”

  Byrnes’s colleagues proved him prescient. In the Senate, Rush Holt, a thirty-year-old isolationist Democrat from West Virginia, accused Grenville Clark and his associates, whom he called “dollar patriots,” of forming a cabal to lead America into war to protect their foreign investments. To accomplish their objective, he added, they were “willing to sacrifice American boys on European battlefields.” The Senate visitors’ gallery, packed with opponents of the draft, erupted in applause and cheers.

  Jumping to his feet, Senator Sherman Minton, who supported the draft, declared that Clark and his friends were far more patriotic than Holt’s own “slacker family.” Holt’s father, Minton contended, had sent one of his sons to South America to dodge the draft during World War I and had opposed the dispatch of food to American troops fighting in Europe. “A malicious lie!” Holt shouted, then claimed that whenever the White House wanted filth thrown, it called on Minton. The Indiana Democrat shot back: “When Hitler wants it thrown, you throw it.” At that point, Senator Alben Barkley, the majority leader, stepped in and put an end to the unseemly verbal duel.

  In the House, the fight turned physical; once again, it involved two Democrats. After Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused “to sit by a traitor.” Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering. It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in fifty years.

  Even without the punches, the debates in both House and Senate were noted for their flamboyant combativeness. Burton Wheeler was particularly melodramatic when he described his vision of America under the thrall of peacetime conscription: “[N]o longer will this be a free land—no longer will a citizen be able to say that he disagrees with a government edict. Hushed whispers will replace free speech—secret meetings in dark places will supplant free assemblage.… If this bill passes, it will slit the throat of the last great democracy still living—it will accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory.”

  While public opinion remained overwhelmingly in favor of conscription, the bill’s opponents stymied any attempt to bring it to a vote. They filibustered in the Senate and offered a series of amendments in both houses. Day after sweltering day, these delaying tactics continued, until Claude Pepper had had enough. In a speech to his Senate colleagues, he declared that their behavior reminded him of France’s inept, incompetent Chamber of Deputies in the months before its country’s defeat earlier that summer: “They debated; they haggled; they equivocated; they hesitated; they thought of the next election, and they lost France.… If we are not willing to make up our minds that we are facing a new kind of a war and a new kind of a world, then I venture to predict, sadly, that we are going to lose that kind of a war and our kind of a world.”

  After his declaration of support for the draft in early August, the president had done nothing to help push the bill along. He spent the next ten days out of Washington, giving his opponents the chance to dominate the discourse and the headlines. Stimson, Clark, and other conscription proponents feared that unless Roosevelt made his influence felt soon, Congress would approve a compromise Senate amendment to continue the Army’s current volunteer system until after the election. Stimson urged FDR to speak up again for the legislation, but the president ignored the suggestion.

  Then, on August 17, Wendell Willkie weighed in. The occasion was his speech formally accepting the Republican nomination. Coming two months after the Philadelphia convention, the address would finally spell out the GOP candidate’s official stand on foreign and domestic issues.

  For weeks, Willkie had been under enormous pressure to oppose conscription. He had received thousands of antidraft letters and telegrams, as well as phone calls and visits from Republican members of Congress. Rep. Joseph Martin, the House minority leader and Willkie’s choice to head the Republican National Committee, told him: “These legislative issues are Roosevelt’s responsibility, not yours.… You don’t have to comment on every bill. The draft is a very unpopular issue. Naturally, people don’t want their sons in uniform. Go slow on this thing.”

  Willkie knew that if he opposed the bill, Republicans would join isolationist Democrats in killing it. But if he backed it, the draft, like the destroyer deal, would no longer be a campaign issue, allowing nervous members of Congress to take much less of a political risk in voting for it.

  The Republican nominee ended the suspense on a blazingly hot August day in his hometown of Elwood, Indiana. Speaking to a massive crowd of more than two hundred thousand people, he voiced support for “some form of selective service,” saying it was “the only democratic way to secure the trained and competent manpower we need for national defense.” At a press conference two days later, Willkie elaborated on his statement, declaring that conscription should be enacted immediately and that he would continue to support such a step, even if it meant his defeat in November. Soon afterward, Joseph Martin announced that the GOP would take no official stand on the draft measure. The Republican members of Congress were free to vote their conscience.

  Roosevelt and Stimson had spent the day of Willkie’s speech observing maneuvers by the First Army in upstate New York. Both were visibly relieved when they received news reports that night of the Republican’s support. “The Willkie speech was a godsend,” Stimson told an acquaintance the
next day. In his diary, the war secretary wrote that Willkie “has gone far to hamstring the efforts of the little group of isolationists to play politics.”

  Willkie’s acceptance of conscription, coupled with the lamentable performance of the troops during the New York maneuvers, finally convinced Roosevelt that he must make an unequivocal statement urging immediate passage of the bill. He suggested to Julius Adler that he get a New York Times reporter to pose a question about the draft at FDR’s next press conference. On August 23, Charles Hurd of the Times did just that, asking Roosevelt if he would comment on the Senate amendment to postpone conscription. The president replied that he was “absolutely opposed” to any delay in enactment of the original bill. He described to reporters the poor training and physical condition of the soldiers he had seen the previous week, declaring that they “would have been licked by thoroughly trained forces of a similar size within a day or two.” The army not only must be expanded as quickly as possible, he said, but must be given far better training and arms as well.

  With the president’s explicit endorsement, Democratic congressional leaders united behind the bill, and the momentum shifted dramatically. “While not a particularly courageous performance by the President, it was successful,” noted J. Garry Clifford, who, with Samuel R. Spencer Jr., wrote an authoritative history of the draft legislation. “That it was so successful owed a great deal to Willkie.” The measure’s supporters were also aided by media stories and photos of Germany’s aerial assaults on Britain and its capital. As one Army officer close to Marshall put it: “Every time Hitler bombed London, we got another couple of votes.”

  Nonetheless, the fight in both chambers was bitter to the end. After defeating a number of crippling amendments, the Senate and House on September 14 approved the Selective Service Act, instituting compulsory military service for one year and mandating the registration of all American men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five. Several GOP senators voted for the measure, as did a number of House Republicans, including minority leader Joseph Martin. Senator Hiram Johnson angrily complained that Willkie’s speech “really broke the back of the opposition to the conscription law. He slapped every one of us … who were thinking American and acting American.”

  After he signed the bill, Roosevelt attempted to reassure his countrymen that its enactment did not mean the dispatch of young Americans to Europe. “We have started to train more men not because we expect to use them,” he said, “but for the same reason [you put] your umbrellas … up—to keep from getting wet.” Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, called such talk foolish. “Openly and officially, we have identified ourselves with the nations fighting against Hitler,” Kirchwey wrote. “The bill is a war measure, enacted on the assumption that active participation in the struggle cannot ultimately be avoided.”

  Roosevelt’s caution also prompted him to seek a delay in the draft’s actual implementation until after the election. Several aides, however, advised him not to do so. “To postpone [the draft lottery] until after the election would leave you open to the charge that it was postponed for political reasons,” James Rowe, Roosevelt’s administrative assistant, wrote him. Rowe also noted that a deferral would seriously disrupt the timetable for conscription that had just been set up.

  FDR followed Rowe’s advice. On October 29, less than a week before Americans went to the polls, he stood next to Henry Stimson on the stage of the War Department auditorium. Flashbulbs from news cameras popped as the blindfolded secretary reached into a huge glass fishbowl filled with thousands of bright blue capsules and retrieved one. He handed it to Roosevelt, who opened it and announced: “The first number is one-five-eight.” A woman in the audience screamed. Her son and the more than six thousand other young Americans whose draft number was 158 would be the first ones called up to serve. For the next several hours, War Department officials drew the remainder of the numbers to determine the order in which more than a million men—of the more than sixteen million who had registered for the draft—would be inducted.

  Stimson, who was generally sparing in his praise for the president, applauded FDR’s courage and “good statesmanship” in launching conscription before the election. In his own analysis of the chief executive’s behavior during the fight, the columnist Mark Sullivan described him as having a split personality—“Mr. Roosevelt the President and Mr. Roosevelt the candidate for a third term.… On this occasion, Mr. Roosevelt the President seems to have won.”

  Not surprisingly, the man most lauded for his role in the draft’s enactment was Grenville Clark. “Without his tireless energy, unusual ability, influence in many areas, and perhaps most of all, dogged perseverance, the law would not have been enacted,” declared General Lewis Hershey, who later became director of the Selective Service System. Stimson agreed. The day after Roosevelt signed the act, the war secretary wrote to Clark: “If it had not been for you, no such bill would have been enacted at this time. Of this, I am certain.” In his own letter of thanks, Rep. James Wadsworth expressed his “admiration and gratitude” to Clark and his committee for their resolution in performing “a vital public service.” Wadsworth added: “You paid me a high compliment in asking me to introduce the bill and what is more important, you gave me a chance to serve in a great cause.”

  In the view of J. Garry Clifford, the inception of conscription “was undoubtedly the most important of America’s defense measures prior to Pearl Harbor.” For the first time in U.S. history, the Army was given the authority to begin the training of massive numbers of troops, introduce modern weapons and tactics, and carry out large-scale maneuvers before war began. When America finally did enter the conflict in December 1941, the War Department had on its roster thirty-six divisions, numbering some 1.65 million men.

  Without the million-plus troops made available by the draft, the U.S. military would not have been able to invade North Africa, the first in its series of offensives against Germany, less than a year after Pearl Harbor. According to Marshall’s biographer, Forrest Pogue, “it was the Selective Service Act of 1940 … that made possible the huge United States Army and Air Force that fought World War II.”

  In addition, the national debate over the draft, drawn-out and contentious as it was, helped awaken the American people to the need to prepare themselves for a war that was drawing steadily closer. As Grenville Clark saw it, the passage of the measure, despite the initial foot-dragging by the White House, the Army, and Congress, proved the truth of Abraham Lincoln’s maxim that “the people will save their government if the government itself will do its part only indifferently well.”

  * Pepper kept the effigy as a memento. It is now on display at Florida State University’s Claude Pepper Library in Jacksonville.

  CHAPTER 15

  “THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING”

  In 1977, Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale University, was named U.S. ambassador to Britain. His appointment to the Court of St. James’s was almost universally praised, with few people noting the irony of his selection. Thirty-seven years before, as a Yale undergraduate, Brewster had been one of the founders of the America First Committee, which, within months of its creation in the summer of 1940, emerged as the most powerful, vocal, and effective isolationist organization in the country. One of the group’s chief goals was to stop America from going to war, even if that meant Britain’s defeat by the Germans.

  Although America First has usually been viewed as the embodiment of conservative midwestern isolationism, it was actually born on the Yale campus—the outgrowth of a nationwide student revolt against the very idea of another war. Brewster and most of his fellow student rebels had been born during or just after World War I, and the widespread disillusionment and bitterness over that bloodbath and its aftermath had helped shape their early years.

  “The conduct of the war itself, with the years of stalemate, the slaughter of millions—all this chilled our marrow,” recalled the CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, who as a student at the Unive
rsity of Minnesota participated in a number of pacifist demonstrations in the mid-1930s. “We were young, and to those just beginning to taste the wonderful flavors of life, the idea of death was a stark tragedy of unutterable horror.… We began to detest the very word ‘patriotism,’ which we considered to be debased, a cheap medallion with which to decorate and justify a corpse.”

  On campus after campus, students demonstrated to keep America out of any future war, to “preserve at least one oasis of sanity in an insane world,” as Sevareid put it. At the University of Chicago, marchers carried white crosses symbolic of “Flanders fields”; at the University of Missouri, students held up signs reading “The Yanks Are NOT Coming.” Thousands of young Americans, including Sevareid, followed the lead of students at Britain’s Oxford University in pledging not to “bear arms for flag or country.”

  Few people, however, expected such outbursts at Yale. Most of its students, after all, came from the upper-crust elite of the East Coast. Many of their fathers were Anglophiles and interventionists, a good number of whom had fought in the war themselves.

  Several members of Kingman Brewster’s own family were outspokenly pro-British. His first cousin, Janet Brewster, for one, was not only an ardent supporter of aid to Britain but was married to Edward R. Murrow, who championed the British cause in his CBS broadcasts from London. Products of an old New England family, Kingman and Janet were direct descendants of Elder William Brewster, who had come to America on the Mayflower and had been the chief religious leader of the Plymouth Colony.