ON THE EVE OF THE New Year of 1941 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt entertained a small group of family and friends at the White House. It was the kind of affair the President liked most—acquaintances who could talk about the old days, an orchestra serving up old favorites, the White House at its gayest and most relaxed. Toward midnight the group broke into “Auld Lang Syne.” Then the President, eggnog glass in hand, offered his annual toast: “To the United States of America.”
It was a moment for remembrance of the dying year—the dull winter months of the phony war; the lightning attack on Norway; the remorseless impalement of Belgium, Holland, and France; the third-term nomination struggle; the mounting air attack on Britain; the draft; the Willkie challenge; the gathering Nazi invasion fleet; the destroyer deal; the election victory; the lull; and the letter from Churchill.
A time for remembrance—and now a time for action. Next day the President sat in his study with his speech writers, Hopkins, Sherwood, and Rosenman, working on his annual message to Congress. He studied a sheaf of rough drafts. The speech had been well laid out; now it needed a peroration. Dorothy Brady, a stenographer, waited, pencil in hand, as the President leaned far back in his swivel chair, gazed at the ceiling, suddenly leaned forward, and, mimicking George M. Cohan in I’d Rather Be Right, trumpeted; “Dorothy, take a law.”
The President at this moment may have remembered a press conference the previous July, when a reporter had asked him to spell out his long-range peace objectives. Slowly the President had listed them: freedom of information and of religion and of self-expression and freedom from fear. Wasn’t there a fifth freedom, a reporter asked—freedom from want? Yes, he had forgotten it, Roosevelt said. In the ensuing six months he had been saving in his speech file ideas for an economic bill of rights—ideas gathered from administration officials, personal advisers, newspapers, religious leaders. Now he dictated his own formulation, pausing to find the right phrases.
Six days later the President stood before Congress. The floor and galleries were crowded with legislators, Cabinet members, diplomats. Eleanor Roosevelt, accompanied by Princess Martha of Norway, scrutinized the congressional reaction. Roosevelt waited for the applause to die down. The moment was unprecedented, he began, “because at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.” Then he ripped off some telling sentences:
“In times like these it is immature—and incidentally, untrue—for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, singlehanded, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.
“No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion—or even good business.
“Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. ‘Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
“As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.
“We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”
Then came the presidential call for a world founded upon the Four Freedoms. Roosevelt gave the concept sharper meaning by spelling out an economic bill of rights:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others
Jobs for those who can work
Security for those who need it
The ending of special privilege for the few
The preservation of civil liberties for all
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:
“The 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, translated into world terms, 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.
“That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation….”
So stirring was this message, following so quickly on the “Arsenal of Democracy” fireside chat, that the grandest moment of all—the third-term inaugural—was almost anticlimactic. Judging that the people had had enough of warnings and proposals, the President devoted his Inaugural Address to a ringing but rather abstract affirmation of faith in democracy. He had always loved to sermonize; while he had had help from his friend Archibald MacLeish, the President himself insisted on a high-toned speech. “It is not enough to clothe and feed the body of this Nation,” he intoned in his clear, beautifully modulated voice. “For there is also the spirit. And of the three the greatest is spirit.” To perpetuate democracy “we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”
The words fell hollowly on the shivering throng in the Capitol Plaza, and the President felt later that he had failed to rouse his audience. But the inaugural as a whole was a triumph. There was the presidential procession down flag-bedecked Pennsylvania Avenue, as Roosevelt waved his top hat jubilantly at the crowds; the democratic flavor of the hosts of party faithful who crowded into the White House for their moment of recognition; the martial pomp and pageantry of the Inaugural Parade, as the services showed off their finest marching men; the fragment of the New Deal represented by the uniformed youths of the Civilian Conservation Corps doggedly trying to order their ranks; the glitter of the showy Inaugural Ball. And there was humor, too, when Fala jumped into the President’s seat for the inaugural ride and had to be ousted; when the borrowed top hat of retiring Vice President John N. Garner kept falling off his patch of white hair; and when the Supreme Court clerk holding Roosevelt’s worn and heavy old family Bible dropped it after the oath-taking, picked it up—and dropped it again.
All these doings were mirrored in Roosevelt’s face—in his grave expression while attending service at St. John’s in the morning, in his wide grin as he nodded and waved to the crowds, in the set of his jaw as he affirmed his faith in democracy, in his eager interest in the guns, scout cars, and tanks that rolled by in front of his stand. They were reflected in the faces of the people, too, as they stood deep along Pennsylvania Avenue, climbed on trees and boxes to get a better view, and yelled “Atta boy, Franklin!” as the presidential limousine rolled by.
At the start of his third term Franklin Roosevelt seemed to be reaching a peak in his political prestige and reputation. In 1940 he had put down his adversaries in the Democratic party and beaten the keenest competition the Republicans could offer. He had challenged and overcome one of the oldest and most potent political bugaboos—the no-third-term tradition. He had won virtually every major piece of foreign-policy legislation he had requested since the start of the war in Europe. His standing in the polls—on the question “If you were voting today, would you vote for or against Roosevelt?”—was rising toward the mid-seventy percentile, after running in the fifties during 1938 and 1939 and the sixties during 1940 (except during the campaign period, when it dropped).
If presidential power turns as much on the appearance of power as on direct control of the mechanisms of power, Roosevelt’s capacity to mobilize influence in national politics was probably greater in early 1941 than it had been at the height of the euphoria of 1933. The “Ace Power Politician of the World,” a Republican Senator termed him—in his diary.
He seemed to have reached a peak of personal efficacy, too. His long, rubbery face was more deeply lined and jowly than eight years before, his hair a bit thinner, but he seemed on Inauguration Day as keen and zestful as his friends could ever remember. On the eve of the third term Dr. Ross McIntire, who examined him about twice a week, diagnosed his health as the best in many years. His weight was a near-perfect 187½ , he was still managing to swim several times a week in the White House pool; he had his old buoyancy and resiliency and, above all, the ability to put his burdens aside. “We are looking ahead to the next four years without any apprehension,” said Admiral McIntire.
Beyond all this, the President was now presiding over and ruling through a new coalition, which undergirded his national and world leadership with a structure of political authority. It was a coalition of three of the four parties that dominated American politics by the end of the 1930’s.
The strongest of these parties was the national Democratic party, which Roosevelt had reshaped in gaining and holding the presidency in 1932 and in 1936. This party embraced a restless collection of industrial workers, reliefers, Western farmers, city machines, elements of the old Border State Democracy, and middle-income and even upper-income groups that had turned against the Republicans. Roosevelt’s party was closely allied with a second party, comprising Deep South interests, which had controlled the machinery of the “Solid South” in Congress, to a degree far beyond what its numbers would warrant, by gaining seniority on committees in both chambers and thereby controlling congressional machinery and organization. The two Democratic parties—one centered in the Northeast and the other in the Southeast; one liberal and the other moderate to conservative; one wielding influence largely through the executive and the other through the legislature—fought with each other over domestic policy, but they tended to agree on a low-tariff, pro-British, generally interventionist foreign policy. In 1938 Roosevelt had battled month after month with Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and other Southern conservatives—even to the point of trying to purge Southern obstructionists from their congressional seats—and had mainly failed. But as the decade waned, Roosevelt Democrats reunited with their Southern brethren against the isolationist forces.
By early 1941 Roosevelt was losing no opportunity to butter up old Carter Glass, whom he had fought in the late thirties for control of Virginia patronage. He wrote to him that the Nazis had described Glass, the President, and President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, as Jewish Freemasons. “I can understand it in your case and mine on account of our noses but I do not quite see where Nicholas Miraculous Butler comes in.”
The Republicans were as divided as the Democrats. After eight years out of power, the national organization had fallen partly into the hands of such congressional nabobs as Senators Charles McNary of Oregon, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, already a rising young fogy, Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and others, mainly Mid-westerners, in the Senate; and of such as Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts and John Taber of New York in the House. Cautious toward innovations, prudent in public finance, tending toward isolationism in foreign policy, the Republican congressional leadership had allied with its ideological counterparts in the Southern Democracy to hamstring the New Deal during Roosevelt’s second term. Symbolic of this party to the President, but actually in the party’s right wing, was his own Congressman, Hamilton Fish, fellow Harvard man, fellow mid-Hudson politician, and ex-football great. Roosevelt had barred him from the White House because, he told friends, he had made a knowingly false attack on the President’s mother years before.
Flanking the congressional Republicans was the presidential Republican party, more liberal in economic and social policy, far more international-minded, rooted more in the urban areas of the Northeast, and imbued with memories of its great days in the past. This party, led in past years by a string of New Yorkers including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, had been headless and disorganized in the 1930’s. Then in 1940 it suddenly found a dramatic champion in Wendell Willkie, of Indiana and New York. For four months the Taft-Martin Republicans papered over their differences with the presidential party in a frantic effort to overcome the “third-term candidate”; then, with Willkie beaten, the election coalition began to break up again.
The plight of the Republican presidential party was due in part to Roosevelt’s skill at not challenging but infiltrating it. At just what point he decided to win over some of the presidential Republican leadership is still hard to say. Perhaps he was tempted by immediate advantages and only later saw the strategic possibilities, for he had always stepped easily back and forth between his roles as party leader and as bipartisan chief of state. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 he had sought to achieve a political coup by bringing into his Cabinet the 1936 Republican ticket of Alf Landon and Frank Knox. Landon declined, fearing that he might become a cat’s-paw for Roosevelt’s third-term ambitions. Roosevelt let the matter lie until the spring of 1940, when Felix Frankfurter and others urged him to draft Stimson. Reassured that Stimson, at seventy-two, was still keen and resilient, the President telephoned him on a day in June 1940 just after Stimson, over the radio, called for repeal of the Neutrality Act, compulsory military service, and stepped-up aid to Britain and France even if it required Navy convoys.
In drafting Stimson, Roosevelt had gained an indomitable, world-minded, richly experienced war administrator. Equally significant was the fact that Stimson brought into his administration a symbol and rallying point for a host of Republicans who since Hoover’s time, and even since Teddy Roosevelt’s, had felt cut off from the nation’s service—cut off by the stultifying Harding and Coolidge administrations, by the congressional Republicans, by Roosevelt and the national Democracy. These men came mainly from the larger cities, especially in the Northeast; attended old preparatory schools and Ivy League universities and took on a speech and a set of airs with a slightly alien, British tinge; fanned out into law firms and banks and brokerage houses; worked smoothly together in clubs, foundations, and on boards of trustees; read the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or their moderate, internationalist counterparts in Boston, Philadelphia, or a dozen other cities. Experienced in managing or advising big enterprises, cosmopolitan in their national and international travels and contacts, accustomed to dealing with governmental bureaucracy even while denouncing it, these Republicans, along with their opposite numbers in the Democratic party, were anti-Hitler, pro-British, and defense-minded.
Frank Knox represented a somewhat different sector of Republicanism. A Rough Rider who had backed Teddy Roosevelt in the great schism of 1912, while Stimson, as a member of William Howard Taft’s Cabinet, had stayed with his chief, Knox had been a newspaperman and politician in both New Hampshire and Michigan before becoming publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931. In the Chicagoland of Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Tribune, he had been a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism, especially in more recent years.
The two presidential parties supplied Roosevelt with public servants as well as political support. Stimson and Knox, along with old New Dealers Hopkins, Justice Frankfurter, and others, served as recruiting sergeants for the host of lawyers and businessmen who were taking posts in Washington—including Robert Patterson, Union College 1912, Harvard Law School, and infantry officer in World War I, and a federal judge until coming to Washington; James V. Forrestal, a Princetonian who had seen naval service during the first war and had later worked his way up to the presidency of Dillon, Read; John J. McCloy, a graduate of Amherst, Harvard Law School, and prestigious New York law firms, who became Assistant Secretary of War in the spring of 1941; Robert Lovett, Yale University, Harvard graduate school, and long a banker. These men had the defects of their virtues; they were sometimes narrow in vision and conventional in outlook, but few challenged their public spirit—or their usefulness to Roosevelt as the nation mobilized for defense.
If Stimson and others provided Roosevelt’s coalition with authentic Republican credentials, Cordell Hull and the new Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, spoke for the old and the new South. After eight years in office Hull was still the Wilsonian idealist and moralizer, still the advocate of world trade as the long-run solution to world conflict, still a link between the White House and the old Southerners on Capitol Hill. Jones was cut from different calico. A towering, white-thatched Texan, long hostile to Wall Street finance, he had built a small bureaucratic empire in alien New Deal soil just as he had once built a financial empire in Texas. Part capitalist, part populist, but always a Houston Texan, the “Emperor Jones” wielded wide influence because of his control of both Commerce and the Federal Loan Agency, and because of his ties with Southerners on the Hill.
The rest of the Cabinet seemed to reflect all the main elements of the New Deal Democratic party: Morgenthau, who could speak for Eastern financial, philanthropic interests; Frances Perkins, for the labor, humanitarian, social-welfare groups; Harold Ickes, for the old Bull Moose, clean-government, conservation elements; Attorney General Robert Jackson, for the urban, partisan, liberal Democratic party; Claude Wickard, for the new agriculture subsidized by the New Deal. The new Postmaster General, Frank Walker, who had taken Jim Farley’s place after Farley quit on the third-term issue, carried on the old urban-immigrant-Catholic traditions of the party. Vice President Henry Wallace, a baffling combination of agrarian, progressive, administrative politician, scientific agriculturalist, and philosophical mystic, had emerged from the progressive wing of Midwestern agriculture and still spoke for it, but he was a man of parts, as liberal in domestic policy as Ickes or Perkins, as internationalist as Hull or Stimson. Indeed, all the Cabinet members were far more than brokers of group interests. Most by now were veteran administrators and hardy survivors of bureaucratic infighting. In their experience, drive, political skills, breadth of outlook, and sheer diversity they made up by 1941 one of the ablest Cabinets in American history—though Roosevelt dealt with them far more as individuals than as a collective organism.
The President’s three-party coalition also embraced key enclaves of Capitol Hill. The President’s men—Speaker Sam Rayburn, of Texas, and Majority Leader John W. McCormack, of Massachusetts, in the House, and Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, of Kentucky, and James F. Byrnes, of South Carolina—were party, and partisan, leaders in the two houses. Southerners chaired most of the important committees in both chambers; the Deep South bloc, though occasionally divided, formed the most cohesive of the party voting blocs on Capitol Hill, especially on foreign policy. This bloc, allied with conservative, mainly rural Republicans, had harassed the New Deal, but as the axis of national priority shifted from domestic to foreign policy, the Southern bloc was becoming a legislative bastion for the White House. Senator Walter George of Georgia symbolized the shift. The prime target—and survivor—of Roosevelt’s unsuccessful purge of conservative Southerners, George was now supporting Roosevelt’s interventionist policies from his high post on the Foreign Relations Committee. The Southerners, in any event, did not wholly monopolize the committee chairmanships. Urban Democrats, slowly building seniority after the cities had begun to go heavily Democratic twenty years before, were now crowding toward the top. Robert F. Wagner, of New York, presided over the Senate Banking and Currency Committee; David I. Walsh, of Massachusetts—no friend of the President—over Naval Affairs; and, in the House, Sol Bloom, of uptown Manhattan, over the Foreign Affairs Committee; Mary T. Norton, of New Jersey, over Labor; and Adolph J. Sabath, of Chicago, over the Southern-dominated Rules Committee.
Formidable though it was, this three-party coalition of Franklin Roosevelt’s depended in the end on the votes and voices of the people. And as the nation turned to its great decisions of 1941, the President was taking his soundings of popular attitudes through his visitors, public-opinion polls, White House mail, fellow politicians, press opinion—and through his own extrasensory political perceptions.
Public opinion hunched strongly toward greater aid to Britain. Poll after poll in the early weeks of 1941 showed that by roughly two-to-one margins people supported not only the Lend-Lease bill but also controversial specifics, such as use by British warships of American ports to repair, refuel, and refit; and the lending of war-planes and any other war supplies belonging to the United States services if the President judged that such aid would help the defense of the United States. A strong majority would help England win even at the risk of getting into war. Such opinions had a markedly geographical cast. Polls showed isolationist feeling to be strongest in the nation’s broad hinterland, the Midwest and the Plains states. Generally, younger people were more isolationist than older; lower-income than higher; less-informed than better-informed—differences that implied some weaknesses in the foundations of Roosevelt’s three-party coalition.
Guiding and galvanizing interventionist attitudes was an energetic pressure group, the carefully named Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Organized in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Norway, the committee was headed by William Allen White, the shrewd old Kansas editor. The President, an old friend, enjoyed chiding him for being with the administration three and a half years out of every four, but White had retained his Republican credentials even while helping mobilize support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Local chapters of the committee were so numerous and articulate that the national committee seemed, to many a friend and foe, to be the spearhead of a mighty army. Actually, its numbers were relatively few, and White, who kept in close touch with the White House, was almost as cautious on intervention as the President himself. He felt that his committee should not “get out ahead of the White House and the main body of troops.” The committee had been rent by divisions between all-aid-short-of-war advocates and all-out interventionists, who were especially strong in the big Eastern cities. White resigned his chairmanship of the committee at the beginning of January 1941, not long after Fiorello La Guardia, the pugnaciously interventionist Mayor of New York, had accused him of “doing a typical Laval.” Equally formidable in appearance but divided in fact were the isolationist groups, which stretched across a broad spectrum from the “respectable” Fight for Freedom Committee to the largest and most prestigious organization, America First, to Gerald L. K. Smith’s Committee of One Million, along with a host of smaller, even more extreme groups.
There was, indeed, a curiously mottled, unstable quality to opinions on foreign policy, especially on the isolationist side. There were the ethnic isolationists—the German-Americans and Italian-Americans, who resented the ever-intensifying feeling against the old country (the German-Americans, moreover, remembered the anti-Hun hysteria of World War I); the Irish-Americans centered in the larger cities, who could not forget English excesses on the Ould Sod. There were the ideological isolationists, who felt that the United States had been sucked into the first war, bled white, and then rejected as Uncle Shylock, and who saw a diabolical motive and a cabalistic plot in every step toward intervention. There were the left-wing isolationists, who viewed the war as a struggle among imperialisms; right-wing isolationists, who feared intervention would mean more spending, heavier taxes, bigger government, less individual liberty, and an even more dictatorial Roosevelt; intellectual isolationists, who had little in common with one another except their fear of militarism, their reading of diplomatic history as the seduction of innocent Americans, and their vision of war as corrosive of civil liberties, social welfare, and the free play of the mind.
The interventionists were divided, too, and in much the same way. No group was monolithic. The division over foreign policy within business, labor, and liberal groups seemed as sharp as the divisions between them. And bit by bit alignments were changing under the impact of events abroad.
Behind this complex of slowly shifting attitudes was something far more powerful, more unreasoning, more awesome to the Washington politicians. This was not a program or group or opinion; it was a mood, expressed in the simple outcry “No Foreign Wars!” It was a mood compounded of fear of foreign involvement, cynicism toward other nations, pessimism about the possibilities of cooperation among the democracies. It was a mood fired by frustration, fear, disillusion, mingled feelings of superiority and inferiority toward other peoples. It took form in a simple, powerful, irresistible feeling against taking part in foreign wars. Defense, yes; aid to the Allies, perhaps; but foreign wars—never.
Roosevelt had not only recognized this mood; he had helped create it. In speech after speech he had made his obeisances to the God of No Foreign War. His protestations had reached a climax in the 1940 election campaign. Military action, he seemed to be saying, was no longer an alternative to be used prudently and sparingly as an instrument of foreign policy. It was flatly ruled out, except in case of outright invasion. But now this mood was confronting another mood, still of lesser sweep and intensity, but rising in the face of Nazi conquest, a mood resulting from indignation over fascist conquest and cruelty, hostility to Nazi racism, sympathy for afflicted peoples and occupied nations, concern for the Jews, admiration for the British.
Like a huge old sounding box, Congress picked up, amplified, and distorted this welter of ideologies, attitudes, and moods. With the more interventionist South and the more isolationist hinterland both overrepresented in the Senate, the extremes tended to dominate debate. It was an easy way to avoid the dilemmas of hard policy. Isolationist Congressmen could arouse emotional unity by spurning the horrors of war for American boys. Interventionist Senators, spread-eagling above the baffling choices and dilemmas, could appeal to sympathy for the heroic Allies and to fear of the Axis.
But the President could not elude the hard choices. The time for oratory alone was long past. It was a time for policies and programs, and for politicians who could work together. The crucial step for the President was to cement his alliance with the moderate, interventionist Republicans. Wendell Willkie, who had wasted little time nursing his election sores, had decided to visit embattled Britain. When in mid-January he came to Washington to pick up his passport, Hull took him to see the President. The two ex-candidates had a jocular meeting. The President handed Willkie a letter addressed to “Dear Churchill.”
“Wendell Willkie is taking this to you. He is being a true help in keeping politics out of things.
“I think this verse applies to you people as well as to us:
“Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
The President now faced a daunting political problem: how to gain congressional and popular support for a measure strong enough to give decisive aid to the democracies—but a measure that would be unfamiliar to most voters, expensive to the taxpayers, and obviously unneutral; a measure that would so entangle the nation’s military and diplomatic affairs with Britain’s—and with other nations’—as to arouse the isolationists; a measure that, above all, would challenge the popular mood of No Foreign Wars. The President’s solution to this problem was simple. The Lend-Lease bill was to be presented as a step not toward war but away from war. Roosevelt would not challenge the mood-god of America.
His foes suspected as much. “Never before,” cried Senator Burton K. Wheeler, of Montana, over the radio, “has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this Nation of its defenses.” Warming to the attack, Wheeler went on: “The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt, who was usually an expert in remaining quiet under attack, saw his opening and struck back. He regarded Wheeler’s statement, he told reporters, as the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that had ever been said. “Quote me on that. That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”
As Congress convened and politicians prepared for the great debate, the President took charge of the shape and strategy of the bill. He sought advice and suggestions from a host of advisers and experts, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; tried—and failed—to bypass the isolationist-ridden Senate Foreign Relations Committee; consulted the House and Senate leadership and some internationalist Republicans; counseled Morgenthau, with whom he was working closely, on his presentation to the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and even wrote part of Hull’s opening testimony. The bill itself—happily given the number H.R. 1776—vested sweeping powers in the President to make or procure “any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States”; to sell or transfer or exchange or lease or lend any such article to any such government; to repair or outfit any such defense article for any such government. The President would also have full authority over arranging terms, if any, with such governments.
April 17, 1941, CD. Batchelor, Times-Herald, courtesy of The News, New York’s Picture Newspaper
“This is a bill for the destruction of the American Republic,” thundered the Chicago Tribune. “It is a brief for an unlimited dictatorship with power over the possessions and lives of the American people, with power to make war and alliances forever.” Interventionist papers answered Colonel McCormick; soon the debate was raging in the press. Messages to the White House reflected strong support for the bill, especially in the Middle Atlantic states, but Roosevelt knew the dangers of relying on mail as a measure of public opinion.
“Now don’t be definite,” he had cautioned Morgenthau about his testimony. The Secretary complied. So did Hull, Stimson, and Knox, in testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. To the tune of four-column headlines in the New York Times, the Cabinet members warned of a likely invasion of Britain within three months, expressed fear of an invasion of the United States if the British Navy was beaten or taken, and asked for the widest executive discretion possible under the act. They were evasive on specifics, such as how much money Lend-Lease would require, and what nations besides Britain might be included. The committee members, flanking their chairman, the owlish Sol Bloom, pressed the notables on two key questions: Would not Lend-Lease, to be effective, require United States naval help in convoying munitions across the Atlantic? And would not convoying mean war?
These questions posed a moral problem for the Secretaries. All four were activists who, in their own ways, wanted to intervene more strongly than the President was yet willing to do. But all had to follow their chief’s step-by-step tactics—and his claim that Lend-Lease would be a way of reducing the chances of war. Stimson’s dilemma was especially painful. Given to blunt talk and direct action, he believed that the Navy must convoy merchant ships and that ultimately the United States would have to go to war. But he could not speak up. Sensing his dilemma, the congressional foes bore down on him—and none more than his old adversary Ham Fish.
Roosevelt managed to stay clear of the sharpening clashes on Capitol Hill. But when committee members repeatedly questioned his spokesmen as to whether the President under the bill could hand over part of the United States naval forces, the old Navy hand rebelled. “The President—being very fond of the American Navy—did not expect to get rid of that Navy,” he remarked icily at his press conference. The bill did not prevent the President, he went on, “from standing on his head, but the President did not expect to stand on his head.”
The first witness against the bill was also a member of the administration, but a departing one—Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Great Britain. Kennedy proved to be a disconcerting witness. So divided was he between his skepticism over Britain’s chances and his admiration for the nation he had seen under bombardment, between his loyalty to the President and his fear of presidential power, between his distaste for Nazism and his opposition to American involvement, that he ended by opposing the Lend-Lease bill while favoring all aid to Britain short of war. Norman Thomas, four-time Socialist candidate for President, spoke with his usual eloquence of the threat in the bill to American democracy and civil liberties, but the isolationist members found his articulate major premises so alien to their own that they took mixed comfort from his testimony. The isolationists needed a national hero, a popular symbol, and a clear voice, and they found all three in their star witness, Charles A. Lindbergh. As slim and youthful-appearing as when he had flown the Atlantic fourteen years before, the “Lone Eagle” drove home his points before an applauding, neck-craning audience. Air power, he said, had made it impossible for Germany to conquer the United States, and vice versa. The nation should channel all its strength into hemispheric defense. The United States had no stake in victory for either side; it should seek a negotiated peace. H.R. 1776 would simply prolong the war and increase bloodshed on both sides. It was a step away from democracy and a step closer toward war. “We are strong enough in this nation and in this hemisphere to maintain our own way of life regardless of…the attitude…on the other side. I do not believe we are strong enough to impose our way of life on Europe and on Asia.”
Roosevelt knew that he had the votes in the House committee and in the House itself, but to make doubly sure he readily agreed late in January to accept several amendments, including a limitation of the period during which he could authorize agreements; a requirement that he consult with the service chiefs before sending defense materials abroad; and a vague anticonvoy provision. On February 8 the House passed the revised bill, almost intact, 260 to 165. The four-party pattern was clear, with a large Democratic group and a small Republican contingent voting Yea, and most of the Republicans and only a few of the Democrats voting Nay.
The main test lay ahead, in the Senate. Waiting in the proud upper chamber was the high priestdom of American isolationism: Hiram Johnson, of California, the old Bull Mooser and League of Nations foe, pugnacity and independence stamped on his face; Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin, son and political heir of the progressive, isolationist “Fighting Bob”; Arthur Vandenberg, shrewd, observant, contemplative; Bennett Champ Clark, son of the great Champ Clark, of Missouri, a dogged cross-examiner; Gerald P. Nye, of North Dakota, captain and caretaker of the world-famous investigation of munitions makers as “merchants of death” in the mid-thirties. All these were members of the Foreign Relations Committee; they were supported in the chamber by a bipartisan faction headed by Burton Wheeler, a fiery speaker who was conducting a personal vendetta against the President, and by Robert Taft, elected only two years before but already gaining intellectual ascendancy on the Hill. Administration stalwarts were represented on the committee, too: Tom Connally, of Texas, Claude Pepper, of Florida, Theodore Francis Green, of Rhode Island, Barkley, and Byrnes.
February 11, 1941, H. M. Talburt, courtesy of the Washington Daily News
Argument resounded throughout the land. Educators, lawyers, businessmen, ministers took to the rostrum, the microphone, and the soapbox. The America First Committee vied with the Committee to Defend America in disgorging pamphlets, broadsides, radio transcriptions, petitions, auto stickers, buttons, posters, news letters. The two groups fought a pitched battle in Chicago; America First amassed over half a million Illinois names on petitions, while the interventionists mailed 100,000 letters and distributed 30,000 handbills at mill gates. These were the “respectable” adversaries; flanking them were a host of extremist, demagogic groups that had reduced the whole debate to a contest between “defeatists and fascists” on one side and “Commies and warmongers” on the other.
The storm swept into Washington and into the Capitol itself. The Paul Revere Sentinels and the Women’s Neutrality League marched in front of the British Embassy with their placards; one read BENEDICT ARNOLD HELPED ENGLAND TOO. They left a two-faced effigy of Roosevelt and Willkie hanging on the embassy gate. Mothers, real ones and not, were especially active. Elizabeth Dilling, author of The Red Network, led the Mothers’ Crusade Against Bill 1776 into the Senate Office Building and staged a sit-down strike outside the office of outspoken interventionist Carter Glass. House debate was disrupted by a lady wearing a black cloak and death’s-head mask and chanting “My Novena.” Police stopped a large left-wing parade at the Capitol steps. The militants stayed in town for the next phase, the Senate hearings in the dim, ornate old Senate caucus room.
Once again Hull, Stimson, and the others argued the administration’s case and played down the likelihood of war; once again Lindbergh and the other foes of the bill warned of war, dictatorship, bankruptcy, and postwar chaos and Communism. But now the White House had a new and powerful voice for the bill. Wendell Willkie was back from his triumphant visit to Britain. He appeared before the committee on February 11, just off the plane, as rumpled, genial, and fast-talking as ever. Twelve hundred people, packed deep against the marble walls, variously cheered and groaned as he broadly endorsed Lend-Lease. Again and again committee members quoted Willkie’s campaign charges of Rooseveltian deviousness, secretiveness, and incitement to war.
Willkie hunched forward; he tried to explain, then broke off. “Again I protest. I struggled as hard as I could to beat Franklin Roosevelt, and I tried to keep from pulling any of my punches. He was elected President. He is my President now.” The audience broke into applause; the chairman threatened to clear the room. A few minutes later Senator Nye picked up the line. He quoted candidate Willkie on Roosevelt: “On the basis of his past performance with pledges to the people, you may expect we will be at war by April 1941, if he is elected.”
“You ask me whether or not I said that?”
“Do you still agree that that might be the case?”
“It might be. It was a bit of campaign oratory.” Laughter swept the chamber. “I am very glad you read my speeches, because the President said he did not.” More laughter. Nye desisted.
Once again the administration had the votes. In mid-February the Committee on Foreign Relations endorsed the bill in substance, 15 to 8, with one Republican supporting the measure and two Democrats opposing it. The isolationists made a final effort to weaken the bill by stalling it in the Senate. Nye alone spoke twelve hours. By now it was certain that the bill would pass; the question was how soon and with what changes. Working through his legislative leadership, Roosevelt was able to ward off an amendment designed to curb his use of naval or military forces outside the hemisphere. But the President, who had hoped that the bill would pass Congress by mid-February, was dispirited by the semifilibuster on the Hill and by an influenza attack.
At this juncture two influential Democratic Senators, Byrnes and Harry Byrd, of Virginia, combined with Taft to give Congress final control over Lend-Lease supplies by retaining for it close authority over appropriations. From the start Roosevelt had insisted on presidential discretion, but he felt that debate must not be prolonged. After strenuous efforts by the administration to block this change, the President accepted it. Congressional opposition now crumbled. The revised bill passed both houses by resounding majorities. Roosevelt, recovered in body and spirit, moved quickly. Within a few hours of signing 1776 on March 11, he sent lists of available weapons to British and Greek officials and asked Congress for an appropriation of seven billion dollars to carry out the new law.
Seven billion dollars—no one now could doubt the President’s determination, or the nation’s. After agonizing delays the United States had made a commitment to Atlantic unity and defense, a commitment that would hold for decades.
“Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at,” the President said a few days later at the dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty million.”
Roosevelt had not thrown his full weight into the congressional struggle over Lend-Lease. He had readily compromised on several major amendments, declined to answer bitter personal attacks on him as a warmonger, and used his direct influence sparingly—though one pork-barrel-minded Western Senator did walk into the President’s office hostile to Lend-Lease and walked out converted. Mostly the President suffered in silence. Once the struggle was over, however, he no longer contained himself.
It was the day after he had signed the Lend-Lease bill. Following dinner with Hopkins, Sherwood, and Missy LeHand, the President sat in the oval study ruminating over the speech he was to give to the White House Correspondents’ Association. He had been gay at dinner; now as he went through the clippings in a speech folder on his lap he remembered all the bitter accusations. Announcing that he was going “to get really tough in this one,” he proceeded to dictate one of the most scathing and vindictive speeches Sherwood had ever heard. A “certain Senator” had said this, a “certain Republican” had said that—now Roosevelt let his pent-up indignation lash back at them. For one endless hour he went on in this fashion. Appalled, Sherwood sought out Hopkins, who had left for his room down the corridor. How could the President be so irate in his hour of victory? Hopkins was reassuring. The boss would not use any of that tirade, he said; he was just getting it off his chest. Then Hopkins spoke of Roosevelt in a fashion that Sherwood had rarely heard before:
“You and I are for Roosevelt because he’s a great spiritual figure, because he’s an idealist, like Wilson, and he’s got the guts to drive through against any opposition to realize those ideals…. Oh—there are a lot of small people in this town who are constantly trying to cut him down to their size, and sometimes they have some influence. But it’s your job and mine—as long as we’re around here—to keep reminding him that he’s unlimited, and that’s the way he’s got to talk because that’s the way he’s going to act….”
Hopkins was right about Roosevelt’s blowing off steam. “Do not let us waste time in reviewing the past, or fixing or dodging the blame for it,” Roosevelt told the White House correspondents once they had settled down from their annual skits and hijinks. “…The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger our democracy has gone into action….
“We believe firmly that when our production output is in full swing, the democracies of the world will be able to prove that dictatorships cannot win.
“But now, now, the time element is of supreme importance. Every plane, every other instrument of war, old and new, every instrument that we can spare now, we will send overseas because that is the common sense of strategy….”
By now the reporters, normally so overexposed to Roosevelt as to seem almost apathetic, were cheering.
“Here in Washington, we are thinking in terms of speed and speed now. And I hope that that watchword—‘Speed, and speed now’—will find its way into every home in the Nation….”
It was one of Roosevelt’s most stirring speeches, but his rhetoric was running far ahead of the nation’s war capacity as of late winter 1941. Many officials were doubtful that the President’s defense organization could perform the gigantic tasks of mobilizing a still-disorganized and strike-ridden economy. Production was uneven; in places there were miracles of output, but as over-all production rose by degrees, the demand—at home, in Britain, in Greece and the Near East and the Far East—was soaring above the highest earlier efforts and even predictions.
Late the previous year Roosevelt had been hotly criticized, especially by Willkie, for clinging to an old-fashioned defense organization. In the wake of the Nazi blitz in France the President had established the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. A carry-over from World War I, the council lacked legal authority, adequate delegation of power from the President, or a single head. The NDAC was impressive less as an agency than as a collection of notable “advisers”: William S. Knudsen, an immigrant’s son who had risen through the assembly line to become famous as a General Motors production genius, was in charge of “advising” on industrial production; Edward R. Stettinius, son of a Morgan partner but friendly to the New Deal, on industrial materials; Sidney Hillman, another immigrant’s son, a curious amalgam of driving union leader and labor-management diplomat, an old friend and supporter of the President, on manpower problems; Leon Henderson, a hard-driving, highly undiplomatic New Dealer, on materials and food prices. By the end of 1940 the advisers, still lacking clear leadership and authority, themselves were urging on Roosevelt a tighter and stronger organization.
Early in the new year the President set up the Office of Production Management, headed by Knudsen, Hillman, Stimson, and Knox, staffed with most of the old advisers, and granted, on paper, wider and clearer powers than the NDAC had enjoyed. The President explained the new setup to the press. The “Big Four” would make policy and Knudsen and Hillman would carry it out, “just like a law firm that has a case.” The reporters groped for an understanding of the shape of this Hydra-headed agency. Would Knudsen and Hillman be equals?
Roosevelt: “That’s not the point; they’re a firm. Is a firm equals? I don’t know….”
Reporter: “Why is it you don’t want a single, responsible head?”
“I have a single, responsible head; his name is Knudsen & Hillman.”
“Two heads.”
“No, that’s one head. In other words, aren’t you looking for trouble? Would you rather come to one law firm or two?”
“I don’t think that’s comparable.”
“Just the same thing, exactly. Wait until you run into trouble.”
“I would rather avoid trouble.”
“I think they will. They think they will—that’s an interesting thing….”
“Wait until you run into trouble”—this might have been the motto of Roosevelt’s defense mobilizers throughout 1941. By early spring they were running into serious materiel shortages. After much false optimism the OPM chiefs had to cope with a dearth of aluminum—so vital for planes—and with the near-monopoly of aluminum produced by the Aluminum Company of America. When the question rose of expanding supply more quickly through Alcoa or more slowly by a new and potentially competitive company, New Dealers opposed the aluminum “trust,” but Stimson remarked: “I’d rather have some sinful aluminum now than a lot of virtuous aluminum a year from now.” Machine tools, the cutting edge of any defense effort, were limited, and despite optimistic statements from the industry a shortage of electric power loomed. Coal reserves were vast, too, but here the problem was a threat of strike action by the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis, who was still smarting from his vain election appeal to his miners to support Willkie over Roosevelt.
The President seemed to retain his usual debonair optimism about the nation’s capacity to produce in the pinch. A crucial potential bottleneck was steel. Late in 1940 he had asked Stettinius to assess steel capacity; when Stettinius’s man Gano Dunn, working with the steel industry, predicted a surplus of ten million tons of steel in 1942, Roosevelt canonized the report by devoting a whole press conference to it and accepting its findings. Dunn had to issue a more pessimistic report within five weeks.
Watching these happenings through skeptical pince-nez was a veteran of World War I mobilization struggles. Bernard Baruch had long enjoyed a friendly relation with the President, who paid the old Wilsonian every compliment except following his advice. For months Baruch’s advice had been simple and flat: centralize all controls—allocations, priorities, price-fixing—in one agency, with one boss. Many editorial writers agreed; so did many high administration officials. Stimson, too, had urged this move, on the ground that someone clearly in charge would feel the “sting of responsibility.” Morgenthau wanted his chief to set up a Cabinet-level department of supply to run the whole mobilization program. Everyone seemed to want a czar—especially if he himself could be the czar.
Roosevelt would have none of it. It was impossible to find any one “Czar” or “Poohbah” or “Ahkoond of Swat,” he had said in explaining the OPM to reporters, and only amateurs thought otherwise. Under the Constitution only one man—the President—could be in charge. But as spring 1941 approached, it was clear that the President, with his other multifarious responsibilities, could not be the co-ordinating head of defense production. Yet he would not budge. Clearly he had deeper reasons—reasons distilled from his diverse tactics of moving step by step, avoiding commitments to any one man or program, letting his subordinates feel less the sting of responsibility than the goad of competition, thwarting one man from getting too much control, preventing himself from becoming a prisoner of his own machinery, and, above all, keeping choices wide in a world full of snares and surprises—that prompted him to drive his jostling horses with a loose bit and a nervous but easy rein.
On the day after Roosevelt’s inaugural in January 1941 the liberal newspaper PM in New York ran across its front page not an account of the Washington glitter but a picture of row upon row of men on the benches of a Bowery mission. They sat, their heads lowered, not in prayer, but on the hard narrow top of the bench ahead, their coats pulled up over their heads, babbling, coughing, snoring, scratching. They were part of an army of 7,000 homeless men in New York City—men who lived on handouts during the day and in missions, lodges, and flophouses at night. In the morning, young and old, amply nourished or not, well-clad or ill-dressed, able-bodied or lame, they would be turned out at 5:00 A.M. sharp, no matter how bitter the weather, to begin another day of aimless wandering.
It was a cruel comment on the end of two terms of “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” under Roosevelt. But it was not unfair. Four years after Roosevelt had pictured “one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed,” four years after he had demanded that “if we would make democracy succeed…we must act—NOW,” economic and social conditions in the nation had not markedly improved. Nourishment: a national nutrition conference for defense, meeting in Washington in the spring of 1941, reported that over 40 per cent of the people were not getting enough food or the right food. Housing: private construction was still lagging; in defense areas people were living in shacks, cabins, trailers, tent colonies, and “motor courts,” often a whole family to a room, and towns were flooded by defense workers while rents soared. Health: of the first million men selected for the draft, almost 40 per cent were found unfit for general military service; one-third of the rejections were due directly or indirectly to poor nutrition. These were evils in themselves; they also showed marked social weaknesses in a nation girding for defense.
March 3, 1940, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
As usual, the plight of the Negro caricatured the social malaise of the whole people. A brilliant group of social scientists, under the leadership of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was discovering that the percentage of Employment Service placements in major defense industries was actually declining for nonwhites during early 1941. Most of the big war plants had no blacks at all among their workers. Many unions discriminated against them, in part because of their fear that if Negroes came in, white workers might well go out. The future looked no more encouraging; in December 1940 less than 2 per cent of the trainees under defense pre-employment and refresher courses were black. Negroes could find opportunities for education and equal pay in the Army, but the services were still almost completely segregated, Negro trainees were concentrated mainly in the South, and as late as 1940 there were only two Negro combat officers in the Regular Army and none in the Navy. In the next year a detail of black soldiers, marching on an Arkansas highway, was pushed off the road by state troopers; when the white detail officer protested, he was called a “nigger lover.”
It was not that the federal government lacked agencies to cope with this sharpening problem. The New Deal had immensely enlarged the machinery of action—perhaps too much so, in some sectors, considering the eleven federal agencies dealing with housing. But most of the programs were badly underfinanced; research and planning units had been starved by congressional conservatives; and the government was heavily dependent on state and local agencies and funds. Employment services, so crucial in a time of manpower mobility and mobilization, were an arresting example.
Confronting these problems almost daily in his double task of getting workers into the right jobs and keeping them there was the second half of the ungainly OPM leadership of “Knudsenhillman.” Sidney Hillman was Roosevelt’s kind of union man: opportunistic in meeting problems but principled in outlook; flexible in negotiations but right-minded in the final test; a tenacious defender of union rights who could also operate in the wider political arena; and with a solid and deliverable constituency in his Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Long accustomed to pacifying Communists, socialists, ethnic groups, hardboiled garment-industry bosses, “labor’s politician” now had to thread his way between his old comrade in arms CIO chief John L. Lewis and William Green, of the AFL, between liberal labor ideologists all out for defense and pragmatic Washington politicians, between industry representatives in the defense establishment and New Dealers operating out of their old Washington enclaves.
Hillman needed all his rough-and-tumble union skills in Washington, for from the start he had to fight to maintain labor standards in the defense industry and his own influence among the loosely organized defense agencies in Washington. He got along with Knudsen—he could get along with almost anyone. They had easily agreed on their jurisdictions: Knudsen would concentrate on production and priorities, and Hillman on manpower supply, strike prevention and mediation, and safeguarding labor standards. But different constituencies, conflicting responsibilities and perceptions, and the pushing and hauling of interest groups and staff assistants around the two men brought constant strain. Racked by tension and illness, Hillman would turn to the White House for support.
He liked Roosevelt—he liked his cordiality, the very tilt of his cigarette holder; the man had style, Hillman told friends. But Roosevelt, too, had to bargain and conciliate and compromise, in a much wider orbit than Hillman did, and labor’s politician was often left to build and repair his own fences in the Battle of Washington.
And so in early 1941 Hillman and Knudsen and their colleagues and rivals and clients carried on as best they could, coping with the social ills of twelve years of depression, partial recovery, and recession; often running separately under Roosevelt’s loose rein; trying to convert men and plans to a war that was swiftly changing, to an American strategy that was obscure, to a leadership that delayed decisions for agonizing weeks and then moved overnight without warning. During the early weeks of 1941 a strike by thousands of workers at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee—holder of a forty-million-dollar contract for turbines—seemed to symbolize OPM’s problems. Hillman had to deal with left-wing union leaders, AFL and CIO factions, a company president who was antiunion and an isolationist, and a dispute over union status that was legally complex and ideologically explosive. He and his aides managed to get the workers back on the job, only to have the management in effect go on strike. As these and other disputes seized the nation’s headlines, conservative Congressmen denounced Hillman as pro-Communist and prepared measures to limit the right to strike.
The President had called for “speed now”; in the late winter of 1941 everything seemed to conspire against action by a still-floundering democracy.
One morning early in April, John Gunther, already famous for his inside reports on Europe and Asia, visited Roosevelt to give his impressions from a recent tour of Latin America. Pa Watson told him that he could have only six or seven minutes; it was a crowded day, and the President was running behind. Gunther waited tensely. At the moment, Roosevelt was talking with the Commissioners of the District of Columbia; they took so long that Gunther’s appointment had to be reset for the afternoon. When he finally was admitted to the oval office, the President was leaning back in his chair, Fala was biting a squealing doll, Missy LeHand was clearing up some papers. Roosevelt shoved himself forward. “Hello, how are you?” he called out brightly. Quickly put at ease, Gunther mentioned that he had visited all twenty Latin-American republics. The President asked one question: “What are the bad spots?” Panama, said Gunther, adding that its president was an adventurer—and also a Harvard man.
“My goodness,” Roosevelt said. “Not really. Is he a Harvard man?” The President mentioned two other Latin-American dictators. “They’re both bad men, really bad, shocking, but they’ve done good things.”
Then, while Gunther sat in embarrassment thinking of the presidential time he was taking, his host began a monologue. The chatty, discursive talk went on and on—how the President had once met President Stenio Vincent, of Haiti; how Argentina really was a problem, but that one solution might be (Gunther shuddered) “colonizing” it; how Lend-Lease was going to help all along the line because (a big wink) “money talks”; how Iquitos, Peru, should become a free port; how he once told President Getulio Vargas, of Brazil, that if he were in his place he simply wouldn’t stand for most Brazilian public utilities being owned outside Brazil; how the tourist business might be stimulated in Chile; how some foolish American politicians had opposed the Pan-American Highway because it might be a route for invasion of the United States (“as if a real enemy would use roads!”);how Gunther ought to have met a certain chap in Puerto Rico, who lived on Such-and-Such street, had once been married to So-and-So, and liked very dry Martinis; how he often made idealistic speeches but knew full well that what really counted in Latin America was power; and how (laughing) no Latin American knew how to sail a ship.
Suddenly a quick movement of the eyes, Gunther noticed, and the President began talking about Europe. Gunther’s embarrassment grew, but now more because of the President’s seeming indiscretions. We were not ready for convoys across the Atlantic “yet.” Yes, the power of the Japanese was overestimated. Yes, we already had full plans to take over the whole Atlantic sphere, including Greenland. No, it would take about two months to get effective relief to Yugoslavia. Yes, Natal was necessary, but we could have it for the asking. Gunther got a remark in here; he said that he thought before the war was over the Union Jack and the Hammer and Sickle would be on the same side, and that the Red Army “might save us all.” “Really! What makes you think that?” Roosevelt said, and laughed.
“The phone rang with a low buzz, and I made to go,” Gunther wrote later. “He picked up the receiver, waving me to stay. Then began ten or eleven long minutes during which he said, ‘Yes, Harry…No, Harry…Why, I thought that had been done, Harry!’ He looked angry and nervously, forcefully, stabbed with a pencil at a pad. ‘All right, I’ll see to it, it’s done now, thanks, Harry.’ ” Gunther thought this must be Harry Hopkins, but when Roosevelt leaned back in his chair, cupping the phone to his ear, and began a long discussion of the history of American foreign policy and of “your” Manchurian doctrine, Gunther realized it was Stimson. “Then I saw a quick rather hurt expression on FDR’s face, and he laid the phone down suddenly. Obviously, Mr. Stimson had cut him off.” Roosevelt stuck out his hand to Gunther and said, “So long! I’ve got to run along now!”
Scores of visitors had Gunther’s experience: the long anxious wait outside, while Watson bustled around trying to keep a semblance of the agenda, the sudden admission to the ample room, the radiant smile and flung-up arm of welcome, the disconcerting use of the visitor’s first name (disconcerting especially to Englishmen), and then the talk—bright, smooth, animated, discursive, but rarely on the purpose of the visitor’s call. Many visitors felt cheated; they inferred that the President did not want to confront their problem, that he was deliberately diverting them. They were right only in part, perhaps the lesser part. Roosevelt had to talk, to laugh, to tell stories, to dramatize, to dominate the room, to exhibit his amazing array of information, to find bearings and moorings in his own experiences and recollections. But there were no histrionics; there was not even an attempt at grandeur. Sitting behind his desk, with its casual display of mementos, souvenirs, and gimcracks, the President put his visitors at ease with his expansiveness, openness, geniality.
The White House seemed to mirror its master’s personality. By now journalists were picturing the President’s home as the center of Free World decision making, the pivot of American power, the economic GHQ of the anti-Nazi coalition. Roosevelt had become President of the World, said the New Republic’s TRB after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. Visitors from abroad, accustomed to showy palaces for even pip-squeak dictators, were astonished by the lack of front and ostentation in the President’s home. Even more they were charmed by the simplicity and grace of the White House architecture, grounds, and some of its decor. And if they were important or lucky enough to visit the second floor of the house, they were surprised and a bit abashed by the casual appointments and cluttered quarters.
The second floor was pure Roosevelt; indeed, it seemed to Robert Sherwood that the President’s and the First Lady’s rooms had come almost to duplicate the rooms at Hyde Park. Bisecting the second floor was the same kind of long, narrow hall, haphazardly furnished with bookcases, photographs of crowned heads—most of them throneless, Sherwood noted—and prints. In 1941 Hopkins was living in a small suite in the southeast corner; Eleanor Roosevelt had a sitting room and bedroom in the southwest corner. Between them was the President’s oval study, and off that were a bedroom and bath. The north side of the hallway was taken up mainly by guest rooms, large and small. In one of them hung Dorothy McKay’s famous Esquire cartoon showing a moppet writing ROOSEVELT on the pavement in front of his house while his sister called out to their mother in the doorway: “Wilfred wrote a bad word.”
The oval study—the decision-making center of the Free World—was actually a modest room, rather casually furnished, with naval prints and family phototgraphs pinned to the walls. Here Roosevelt liked to sit in the evening making an occasional phone call, sorting out his stamps, telling long anecdotes to his secretaries. On the third (and top) floor Missy LeHand, who was seriously ill by 1941, had a small sitting room and bedroom; the other rooms were used for overflow guests, especially for grandchildren at Christmastime. There was an air of small-town friendliness about the place extending through all the members of the staff, Sherwood remembered, and even to the Secret Service and White House police.
Washington reporters happily noted the symbolism: the President lodged in the center of the second floor, with Eleanor Roosevelt on his left and Harry Hopkins to his right. This was a comment on Hopkins’s reputed desertion of the New Deal for the war, but actually both the First Lady and the First Assistant were committed liberals and internationalists. If they diverged in their approach to politics, much of their divergence was reflected in Roosevelt himself.
After eight years in White House service Eleanor Roosevelt was still the compassionate, idealistic, wholly engaged woman who had thrown herself into social welfare and liberal politics during the 1930’s. Assisted by her faithful “Tommy,” Malvina Thompson, she was still leading the seven lives of wife, mother, chief hostess, White House columnist, nationwide lecturer (one hundred lectures in 1940, about one-third of them paid), Democratic party voice and organizer, and spokeswoman in the White House for labor, Negroes, youth, tenant farmers, the poor, and women in general. If inevitably she could not wholly devote herself to any of these roles, she had learned to be well organized and efficient. And she still possessed the vigor that had awed and amused the country in the earlier White House years; in 1941, in her late fifties, she occasionally worked the whole night through and went right on the next day.
Hers was a conscience combined with an almost demonic commitment and tenacity. By now she had come to recognize that she could not have, even if she still wanted, a romantic or even close relation with her husband. Married now for thirty-six years, they treated each other with devotion, respect, and tolerance, but Roosevelt had learned how to withdraw into protective covering against his wife’s importunings; and Eleanor had learned to accept her White House role as essentially a presidential aide, though a very special one, who was with the President far less than Grace Tully and Missy LeHand were. Often she was assailed by doubts; sometimes she was lonely in the White House crowd; but always there was the self-mastery and the passion that led her on to the next column, the next lecture, and the next cause.
Hopkins was made of quite different stuff. Years of growing power and racking illness had not changed him much; he was still the intense, brittle, tactless, irreverent operative who could prod defense bigwigs as mercilessly as he had once chastised state officials and relief administrators. Along with his chief he saw the New Deal as a source of strength to the nation at war, not a handicap to it, but now with a lower priority than defense preparation. He had become as intolerant of liberal ideologues as he had been of standpat businessmen. He had almost an extrasensory perception of Roosevelt’s moods; he knew how to give advice in the form of flattery and flattery in the form of advice; he sensed when to press his boss and when to desist, when to talk and when to listen, when to submit and when to argue. Above all, he had a marked ability to plunge directly into the heart of a muddle or mix-up, and then to act. “Lord Root of the Matter,” Churchill dubbed him.
By the spring of 1941 Hopkins had been living in the White House for a year, and was paying the price of standing and sleeping so close to throne and bedchamber. Ickes noted on a fishing trip with the President to the Everglades that Hopkins could walk into the President’s cabin without being announced or even knocking, and that the President handed him apparently confidential papers that he showed no one else. “I do not like him,” Ickes confided to his diary, “and I do not like the influence that he has with the President.” Baruch complained that Hopkins was like a jealous woman in keeping others away from Roosevelt; everyone else had to “play him in a triangle.”
Others were more charitable. Morgenthau found him deceptive and flamboyant but absolutely dedicated to the President. Stimson had his troubles with Hopkins but confided to his diary: “The more I think of it, the more I think it is a Godsend that he should be at the White House.” But Roosevelt liked him—for his acute common sense, his humorous cynicism, his ability to cut through protocol, ignore old jurisdictions, straighten out tangled lines of administration. When Willkie, on visiting the White House after the election, asked the President why he kept Hopkins so close in view of the distrust and resentment people felt toward his aide, Roosevelt could speak his mind:
“I can understand that you wonder why I need that half-man around me. But—someday you may well be sitting here where I am now as President of the United States. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.” The President was probably exaggerating for Willkie’s benefit, but there was a ring of conviction to his words. In April he put his aide in charge of Lend-Lease and thus at the heart of economic, political, and military decision making.
Roosevelt’s White House was a home inside a mansion inside an executive office. In 1941 the mansion was, to thousands of Americans, the first floor, with its Blue Room and Green Room and state dining room and all the rest, where the touring public could gawk during the day, and captains and kings were entertained at night. By 1941 the President was holding formal entertaining to a minimum; in wartime he would largely dispense with it. He spent most of his daytime working hours in the oval office in the southeast corner of the executive wing. Here he could look through the tall windows onto the hedges and garden outside.
Superficially there was a sort of pattern to Roosevelt’s working day. Ensconced behind his big desk by 10:00 A.M. or so, he usually saw visitors through the rest of the morning, during the luncheon period (when a hot tray was brought in), and well into the afternoon. He spent the rest of the afternoon dictating letters and memos—most of them pithy but friendly little messages. His week had some pattern, too. He saw the congressional Big Four—the Vice President, the Speaker, and the majority leader of each chamber—on Monday or Tuesday; met with the press on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings; and presided over a Cabinet meeting on Friday afternoons.
This schedule could be easily upset by any kind of crisis, however, and there seemed to be no pattern at all in the way that Roosevelt actually did his work. Sometimes he hurried through appointments on crucial matters and dawdled during lesser ones. He ignored most letters altogether, sent many over to the agencies to be answered, turned over some to Watson or Early or Hopkins for reply, under their name or his. Sometimes he even wrote letters for an aide or secretary to sign. He took many phone calls (though few at night), refused others, saw inconsequential and even dull people and ignored others of apparently greater political or intellectual weight—all according to some mystifying structure of priorities known to no one, perhaps not even to himself.
Yet if Roosevelt’s working habits lacked system and plan, they bespoke a habit of mind, a style of intellect, a sens de l’état that could be summed up in one word: accessibility. After eight years of pressure in the White House mold Roosevelt was still endlessly curious; he was still reaching out for ideas, open to innovation, willing to experiment. He corresponded and/or talked with an amazing variety of people: Supreme Court justices; royalty, including King George VI and King Haakon, of Norway; old family friends from Dutchess County; poets and novelists, including Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair; old political colleagues from Albany days; radicals, including Norman Thomas; journalists; old friends and diplomats, perhaps William Phillips, from Rome, Francis Sayre, from Manila, or Grew, from Tokyo; old Wilsonians, including Josephus Daniels; chiefs of government, including Canada’s Mackenzie King; wise old men, including Grenville Clark, of New York and New Hampshire, and Bernard Baruch, of Lafayette Park; as well as Cabinet members, Senators, Representatives, undersecretaries, bureau and agency chiefs, governors, mayors, leaders of business, agriculture, and labor, veterans, and a host of other interest groups, with all their subleaders, opposition leaders, and rebels.
Inevitably this breadth and variety made for some superficiality of contact and probably of comprehension. No one—not even his wife or sons—felt that he could get close enough to the President to understand him. No one could assume that he himself was indispensable; Raymond Moley, Thomas Corcoran, and even his son James had moved in and out of the bright orbit of influence. Now that Hopkins was on top, people—Eleanor Roosevelt among them—were wondering how long the friendship would last, and whether Hopkins could stand the heartbreak if the time came when he might not be needed. Roosevelt was committed to no man or woman, nation or ally, cause or principle, but to some goal so deeply buried within himself and yet so transcendent that few could discern it amid the complex and turbulent events of the time.
But Roosevelt was not given to musing on such matters. He presided gaily over his White House. He kept channels open, fought routine, sabotaged institutionalization, knocked heads together, “locked people in rooms” until they agreed. He could confront with equal aplomb Ickes’s obsessive efforts to wrest the Forest Service away from Agriculture, his son John’s phone call asking his father to make arrangements for diaper service for a forthcoming visit of his wife and baby, the latest demand from Churchill for emergency aid, Eleanor’s proddings to appoint liberals, and still cope with the voracious demands on his time and temperament. Amid emergencies he could pen joshing notes to his secretaries, challenge Ickes to catch bigger fish on the next expedition, record a memory of a long-forgotten episode of his childhood, and send Mrs. Watson (with copies to the Secret Service and the FBI) a newspaper photo of Pa with an Apple Blossom Queen. On the eve of the greatest crisis of all, with Hitler turning to the most fateful venture in modern history, with Roosevelt leading an underprepared and undermobilized people at a moment of great peril, the “power center of the Western world” was a cluttered study or office inside an executive department inside a gracious home.