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

by Lynne Olson

  As difficult as he found many officers in his own department, Stimson agreed that Knox’s situation was far worse. “Some of the Naval Officers are a good deal more stubborn and verging on insubordination than anything that I have,” Stimson wrote in his diary.

  TRY AS HE MIGHT, however, the president was unable to ignore mounting pressure from the public and from interventionist officials within his administration to take bolder action on behalf of Britain. A government survey of the press informed the White House in early May that a sizable percentage of the country’s newspapers were now openly critical of the president’s failure to shape public opinion. According to the newspapers’ editorial writers, there was considerable “apathy, confusion, and timidity” among the American people, thanks to Roosevelt’s apparent lack of confidence in their ability to understand and respond to what needed to be done to save Britain and defeat Hitler.

  According to the survey, a majority of the public had come to believe that U.S. naval protection of British merchant shipping was essential for Britain’s survival. The report urged the president to clarify the issue for his fellow citizens—a recommendation vigorously seconded by several of his advisers.

  In response, Roosevelt decided to give another speech, his first major policy address since his Lend-Lease fireside chat five months earlier. The speech, to be broadcast nationwide, was scheduled for May 14 and then delayed until May 27, adding to the already high level of tension and suspense. Rumors about its contents circulated around Washington. The president was going to announce the beginning of convoying, some said. No, others responded, he was planning to ask Congress to repeal the neutrality law. Still others said he would call for a congressional declaration of war.

  FDR was deluged by advice from all over the country on what he should say; more than twelve thousand letters were delivered to the White House in a period of three days. Among those weighing in was Henry Stimson, who, in an exceedingly blunt note, did his best to stiffen the president’s resolve. The American people, Stimson wrote, are “looking to you to lead and guide them … and it would be disastrous for you to disappoint them.” The war secretary added that “expedients and halfway measures” were no longer enough, that Americans should not be asked to go to war because of “an accident or mistake” in the Atlantic. “They must be brought to that momentous resolution by your leadership.”

  For several weeks, the militant interventionists in Roosevelt’s circle had been urging him to proclaim an unlimited state of emergency, an executive decision that would allow him to exercise a number of broad war powers. While working on the speech with his two main speechwriters, Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman, FDR did not mention the emergency declaration; after several drafts, the speechwriters, on their own initiative, put it in. When Roosevelt spied it in the text, he asked with a faint smile: “Hasn’t somebody been taking some liberties?” Rosenman and Sherwood admitted that they had but that they thought it was what he really wanted to say. The president was silent for a moment. Then he mused: “You know, there is only a small number of rounds of ammunition left to use unless the Congress is willing to give me more. This declaration of an unlimited emergency is one of those few rounds, and a very important one. Is this the right time to use it, or should we wait until things get worse—as they surely will?” The speechwriters made no reply, and the declaration stayed in the speech.

  On the evening of May 27, Roosevelt spoke to the nation from the East Room of the White House. An estimated eighty-five million Americans, more than 65 percent of the nation’s population and the largest radio audience in history up until then, had tuned in to listen.

  In highly graphic terms, Roosevelt outlined the great peril that would face the United States if Britain were defeated. The Nazis would “strangle” the country economically; American workers “would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world.… The American farmer would get for his products exactly what Hitler wanted to give.… We would be permanently pouring out our resources into armaments.”

  But, he declared, he and his administration would never allow that to happen. The president proclaimed a state of unlimited national emergency and vowed full-scale support for Britain. “The delivery of necessary supplies to Britain is imperative,” he said, and “all additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken.” With great emphasis, he added: “This can be done. It must be done. It will be done.”

  These were passionate and galvanizing words, and to many in Roosevelt’s audience, they sounded “almost like a call to arms.” Telegrams began pouring into the White House even before the president finished speaking, and, to his delight and relief, they were, as he told Sherwood, “ninety-five percent favorable!” (Whenever he gave a major policy address or announced a new initiative, such as Lend-Lease or the destroyers-bases deal, Roosevelt seemed surprised when the public responded positively. As those around him saw it, he always believed he was taking a far bigger political risk than he actually was.)

  Sherwood would later write that the American press and public interpreted the president’s May 27 speech as “a solemn commitment. The entry of the United States in the war against Germany was now considered inevitable and even imminent.” In an editorial, The New York Times praised FDR for striking “a mighty blow for freedom,” adding that the course to which the president “had pledged the country … will have the endorsement of the vast majority of our people.” But in all the favorable comment, there was little mention of FDR’s failure to commit to any future action.

  The day after the broadcast, more than two hundred reporters crowded into Roosevelt’s office, eager to learn the specifics of what he was going to do now. They were doomed to disappointment. As had happened so often before, the president, having talked tough, backed away from all notions of belligerency. There would be no convoying, at least for the present; no repeal of the neutrality law; and no fighting. In addition, Roosevelt said, he had no plans “at the present time” to issue the executive orders necessary for putting into effect the unlimited emergency he had just proclaimed.

  Throughout the country, there was a sense of deflation. The president’s speech, Life wrote, had clearly seemed to promise action: “On your marks, he had said to the nation, for a race with destiny.… Get set for the greatest effort of our history. Then, while the people waited poised and tense, he tucked the starter’s gun back in his pocket and went off to a Hyde Park weekend.”

  The British, meanwhile, were fast running out of patience. A London newspaper, the News Chronicle, pulled no punches in the first paragraph of an editorial directed at the United States: “We want you in this war on our side. Fighting. Now.” About Americans’ indecision, London’s Daily Mirror noted with exasperation: “They seem to have taken up permanent residence on the brink of a precipice.… Don’t miss the next tense installment of this gripping drama next week … next month … sometime … never.”

  In late May, a quasiofficial British publication, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, carried a statement by its editor that the United States had decided to support the war “to the last Englishman.” Embarrassed officials of the Ministry of Aircraft Production disavowed any connection with the book, and its publishers said the insult would be deleted.

  For U.S. officials in London, Washington—in its unwillingness to come to grips with the possible defeat of Britain—seemed like another planet. “It is impossible for me to understand the ostrich-like attitude of America,” Averell Harriman fumed to a friend. “Either we have an interest in the outcome of this war or we have not.… If we have, why do we not realize that every day we delay direct participation … we are taking an extreme risk that the war will be lost?”

  “The whole thing is going to be a race against time,” General Raymond Lee, the U.S. military attaché in London, wrote in his journal. “It is a question whether our support will arrive soon enough to bolster up what is a gradually failing cause.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “A
TRAITOROUS POINT OF VIEW”

  The president’s lethargy clearly did not extend to his feelings about his political enemies—a fact that Robert Sherwood discovered when he helped Roosevelt write a speech just days after congressional approval of Lend-Lease. In Sherwood’s view, the address should have been used as an occasion to celebrate the administration’s triumph. That, however, was not how the president saw it.

  Announcing that he was going “to get really tough in this one,” Roosevelt, looking gray and tired, unleashed what Sherwood later described as a “scathing and vindictive” attack against those who opposed his efforts to help the British, referring angrily to “a certain columnist” and “a certain Senator” as well as “certain Republican orators.” Sherwood was stunned. He had never seen the president in such a vile mood, had never observed him “lose his temper … or be the least bit jittery, or be anything but scrupulously cautious to subordinates.”

  After about an hour of dictating this “dossier of grudges” to a stenographer, FDR abruptly stopped and, without a word, left the room. An appalled Sherwood immediately tracked down Harry Hopkins to let him know what had happened. Hopkins airily told the speechwriter not to worry: he was sure that the president was simply getting all “the irritable stuff” off his chest and that he had no intention of using it in the speech.

  Hopkins was right, but only in regard to that one address. Roosevelt was furious at his isolationist foes, and from early 1941 on, he threw his energy into a no-holds-barred effort to destroy their credibility and influence. “If 1940 was like the start of a rough chariot race, 1941 was its brutal climax,” Ernest Cuneo, a Democratic Party operative, recalled. “Once having cleared the election barrier, FDR threw off his wraps, strapped on his helmet, and went in.”

  Initially, the president had hoped that the passage of Lend-Lease would mark the end of isolationism’s influence, that Americans would now come together to support their country’s new role as a nonbelligerent ally of Britain. Many did. But while the interventionist movement had unquestionably gained ground by the spring of 1941, isolationism, although considerably diminished, remained an unmistakable force, and its diehard proponents vowed to fight Roosevelt to the end.

  Again and again, Roosevelt and his allies stressed the need for national unity—on their terms. In one post-Lend-Lease speech, the president insisted that the time for questioning and dissent was over: “Your government has the right to expect of all citizens that they take part in the common work of our common defense—take loyal part from this moment forward.” Those who continued to dissent were criticized as narrow, self-serving, partisan, and unpatriotic. According to Roosevelt, they were aiding, “unwittingly in most cases,” the work of Axis agents in this country, who sought “to divide our people into hostile groups and destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.” FDR went on: “I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.”

  About Roosevelt’s tactics, historian Richard Steele would later observe: “What the president battled … was not disloyalty but the doubt of a minority of Americans concerning the origins and purposes of the war. Instead of tackling those misgivings head on, admittedly a difficult task of education, FDR chose to discredit and dismiss them.” Roosevelt’s strategem—to question his critics’ patriotism and accuse them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy—would be used by a number of later presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, when faced with opposition to their own foreign policy.

  The historian Wayne Cole, a scholar of the isolationist movement, wrote about this period: “Theoretically, freedom of speech prevailed on foreign policy issues, but in practice, by 1941, any individual who spoke out on the noninterventionist side was suspect and had to be prepared to have his reputation besmirched and his wisdom and even his loyalty questioned.”

  Not surprisingly, the main targets in the anti-isolationist campaign were America First and its most famous member, Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh’s decision to join the organization in April 1941 was an enormous boon to America First, which had seen its membership and fund-raising plummet following its defeat over Lend-Lease. Both shot up as soon as General Robert Wood announced the aviator’s appointment to America First’s national board. Speaking of Lindbergh, Wood declared: “He has emerged as the real leader of our point of view, with a tremendous following amongst the people of this country.” The journalist H. R. Knickerbocker noted that Lindbergh’s reputation might have been tarnished over the previous year, but “because he had something that appealed so profoundly to America that he has not lost it all yet … he towers in influence above our other isolationists.… Lindbergh is, I am convinced, mainly responsible for the long hesitation of this country to go to war to defend its life.”

  Roosevelt clearly believed that, too. According to the historian Kenneth S. Davis, the president was convinced that Lindbergh controlled the balance of power in the isolationist movement: “By holding together a hard core, which would otherwise disintegrate from obvious stresses, and by confusing and dividing a significant minority of people … he was able to prevent truly effective action by the administration. Ergo, Lindbergh should be muzzled.”

  Within a few weeks of Lindbergh’s joining America First, the reenergized group had signed up hundreds of thousands of new members. Wherever he spoke at America First rallies, enormous overflow crowds showed up to cheer him on. He was so popular with the organization’s rank and file that he was used as a sort of door prize: America First announced that the chapter showing the largest increase in membership would win the privilege of hosting Lindbergh’s next speech.

  All this was greatly worrying to the president and his men. They were particularly concerned about Lindbergh’s continuing appeal to young people, such as the Yale students who founded America First. Dorothy Thompson, who remained a stalwart supporter of the president after the 1940 election, went so far as to equate U.S. college students’ interest in Lindbergh and his views with the Hitler youth movement’s adoration of the Führer.

  Yet while America First reached the peak of its strength after Lindbergh joined its ranks, it also was subjected to considerably more criticism because of him. Ironically, one of Lindbergh’s most outspoken antagonists during this time was Robert Sherwood, who had been so aghast at Roosevelt’s bitter criticism of his opponents. Shortly before beginning work at the White House, Sherwood, in a radio speech to Canadian listeners, referred to the man he had once considered a hero as “a bootlicker of Adolph Hitler” who had “a traitorous point of view” and “devoted himself to pleading Hitler’s cause.” Having all but called Lindbergh a Nazi, Sherwood did, in fact, do so in a later speech to a White Committee gathering, in which he labeled Lindbergh as “simply a Nazi with a Nazi’s Olympian contempt for all democratic processes.”

  The White House recruited a long list of members of Congress and administration officials to join Sherwood in its vilification of Lindbergh. The main presidential surrogate was Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who clearly relished the job, repeatedly reminding his audiences that he had been the first man of prominence to attack the flier, for his acceptance of a German medal in 1938. A man with “a genius for … hitting the jugular,” as Francis Biddle noted, Ickes was so obsessed with Lindbergh that he maintained an indexed, annotated file of all his speeches and articles.

  Interior Secretary Harold Ickes shakes hands in Washington with Anthony Eden, former—and future—British foreign secretary.

  In a 1940 speech, Ickes blasted Lindbergh as a “native fascist” and “peripatetic appeaser who would abjectly surrender his sword even before it is demanded.” In February 1941, the interior secretary said Lindbergh and his allies were “the quislings who, in pretended patriotism, would cravenly spike our guns and ground our planes in order that Hitlerism might more easily overcome us.” Two months later, in his most slashing attack
yet, Ickes accused Lindbergh of being the “No. 1 Nazi fellow traveler” in the United States and “the first American to raise aloft the standard of pro-Nazism.” In that same April speech, he referred to Anne Lindbergh’s notorious The Wave of the Future as “the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist and appeaser.”

  A few days after Ickes’s address, FDR himself decided to take on Lindbergh. Until then, he had made only oblique derogatory references to the aviator and his wife. Encouraged by Sherwood, he had, for example, disparagingly taken note of Anne Lindbergh’s book in his third inaugural address, declaring: “There are men who believe that … tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide. We Americans know that this is not true.”

  But by the early spring of 1941, Roosevelt was convinced that what Ickes repeatedly told him was true—that Lindbergh was “a ruthless and conscious fascist,” motivated by his hatred for the president and determined to “obtain ultimate power for himself.” Toward the end of April, the president summoned to his office a man named John Franklin Carter, the head of a small, secret White House research and intelligence unit that FDR had created. A Yale graduate and syndicated newspaper columnist, Carter, together with his staff of researchers, collected information on a wide variety of subjects for Roosevelt, from public opinion to the president’s political opponents. On this occasion, the president asked Carter to provide him with material on Civil War Copperheads, northerners with pro-southern sympathies who had been critical of President Lincoln and the war.