WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN WAS TAPPED BY Woodrow Wilson to be secretary of state in 1913. He quit two years later because he believed that Wilson was not doing enough to keep America out of the world war that had engulfed Europe in the summer of 1914. This war, and its sequel, would extend the territory of American liberty.
The reformist impulse, so allied to the religious impulse, embraced the hope that war itself might be done away with. The first woman in Congress, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, elected to the House even before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, was among the handful of representatives to vote no when the United States, after many provocations, declared war on Germany in April 1917.
Wilson led America into war, as Bryan had feared, but he hoped that it would be a war to end wars—a hope that was shared by virtually all Americans once peace returned.
Wilson wanted to secure peace by enlisting America in his brainchild, the League of Nations, a permanent assembly of the world’s countries. Competing alliances had plunged the world into war; a grand ongoing counsel of all nations would forestall it. The Senate rejected Wilson’s vision on the grounds that a strict adherence to the league’s covenant might compel America to make war on future aggressors at the league’s behest.
Other Americans blamed armaments, and those who made them, for causing wars. If there were fewer guns, they would be less likely to go off. In the early thirties a Senate committee headed by Gerald Nye grilled scions of the houses of Morgan and DuPont on their allegedly bloodstained profits.
Diplomacy offered a less sensational approach to disarmament. In 1921, America proposed that the leading naval powers of the world cut back their fleets and set a ratio of battleship tonnage of five tons for America, five for Britain, and three for Japan (America and Britain had Atlantic and Pacific fleets, while Japan had only the latter, hence the disparity). The Senate accepted this scheme. “The very angels sang in joy,” said Sen. Samuel Shortridge when it passed.1
Not all men were angels. Great power politics reappeared, driven not by anything so old-fashioned as dynastic ambition but by totalitarian ideologies. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were too busy terrorizing their own country to lead the worldwide communist revolution they professed to seek, but Mussolini (who seized power in Italy in 1922), Hitler (who followed in Germany in 1933), and the Japanese military (which dominated Japan by 1936) readied their nations for war. By the midthirties, Italy had invaded Abyssinia, Germany had rebuilt its army, and Japan had repudiated the battleship tonnage ratio and established a puppet state in Manchuria.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 to deal with the Depression, not these matters. He was a Hudson River Valley aristocrat whose family had been in the New World since the days of Peter Stuyvesant and whose fifth cousin, Theodore, had followed William McKinley in the White House. Like Theodore, Franklin was a man of liberal inclinations; unlike him, he belonged to what was then the more liberal of the two major parties, the Democrats.
Domestic affairs consumed his first years in office. When he spoke of foreign policy, especially in election years, he echoed the American desire for peace. “We are not isolationist,” he said in 1936, “except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”2
He had, however, a better-than-average background in world affairs for an American politician. One of his lifelong passions was stamp collecting—a child’s introduction to geography and history embodied in bright bits of paper. Another, more serious obsession concerned anything to do with ships, particularly the ships of the US Navy. Partly this was in emulation of his famous cousin, who had served McKinley as assistant secretary of the navy from 1897 to 1898; Franklin served Wilson in the same role from 1913 to 1920. The younger Roosevelt dreamed of a fleet with forty-eight battleships, one for every state. He was not shy about using the ships he actually had, either. Unlike Bryan, he thought Wilson was too pacific, feeding Americans “a lot of soft mush about everlasting peace.”3
America had to hope for everlasting peace, given the shrinkage of its postwar military. Although the navy remained one of the largest on earth, the army, according to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, could fit into Yankee Stadium.
In the summer of 1937, Japan attacked China directly, which got Roosevelt’s attention. If “terror and international lawlessness” prevailed “in other parts of the world,” he said in a speech in October, “let no one imagine that America will escape.” The threat, as he saw it, went beyond conflict per se to defiance of the recognized laws of diplomacy and war. “Without a declaration of war, and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.”4 But when a reporter asked him the next day if he contemplated any new policy to respond to these outrages, Roosevelt answered, “No; just the speech itself.”5
Roosevelt was a master of mixed signals, crossed signals, and double talk. Nobody, one journalist testified, “showed greater capacity for avoiding a direct answer while giving the questioner a feeling he had been answered.”6 Some questioners felt they had not been answered. Roosevelt “does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought,” one of his own cabinet secretaries confided to his diary. Talking to him “is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room.”7
His coyness and misdirection, often amounting to duplicity, stemmed from a need to keep his options open until the last possible moment: choosing forecloses the possibility of different choices. The need to keep his options open arose, in turn, from a need for control: once you choose, others will make their own choices in response. Roosevelt had lost the use of his legs to an attack of polio when he was thirty-nine years old, which no doubt stoked his need to exercise control over himself and his surroundings, but the impulse must have been present in his character years before.
His crabwise approach to rearmament was dictated most decisively by logistics and politics. Fitting the American military to face the threats of a darkening world would take an enormous shift in priorities and production, which could only happen after an equally great shift in popular sentiment. Congress and the voters would not pay for a buildup for which they saw no urgent need. Roosevelt had to plan, build, and convince.
Gradually Roosevelt assembled a competent team. In 1939 he appointed two relatively junior officers, Admiral Harold Stark and General George Marshall, chief of naval operations and chief of staff of the army, respectively. Both men had had early run-ins with him: Marshall disagreeing with one of his more vagrant suggestions during a White House planning session; Stark refusing as long ago as 1914 to let the assistant secretary of the navy take the helm of a destroyer Stark was commanding. In Roosevelt’s mind, these encounters had proved their mettle. When Marshall was appointed chief of staff, he warned the president he would say what he thought, “and it would often be unpleasing.”8 Roosevelt was pleased.
In 1940 he put two Republicans in his cabinet. Henry Stimson, his new secretary of war, had served in Republican administrations for decades, most recently in that of Herbert Hoover, the man Roosevelt had replaced in the White House. Frank Knox, the new secretary of the navy, had been the running mate of Roosevelt’s opponent in 1936. More important to Roosevelt than their party affiliation was their fighting spirit—both had seen active duty in the world war—and their agreement with his grim diagnosis of the current world situation.
Early in the postwar years, the army and the navy had developed hypothetical war plans in which every conceivable enemy (including Britain) was assigned a different color. The new team adopted rainbow plans, anticipating multicolored threats by multiple enemies. Rainbow 1, the most conservative plan, looked only to defend the Western Hemisphere, which was daunting enough: Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland formed a hop, skip, and a jump across the northern Atlantic, while the bulge of western Africa was only eighteen hundred miles from the easternmost tip of South America. Ideas could move even more easily than fleets and troops: Germany and Italy might encourage friendly coups in unstable South American republics. Roosevelt invoked the worries of James Monroe: “for the first time since the Holy Alliance,” he told one cabinet meeting, America might be menaced in its own hemisphere, north and south.9
Roosevelt also appointed boards to oversee war production. These included executives (the chairman of U.S. Steel, the president of General Motors) and a labor leader (the vice president of the CIO, an alliance of unions) as well as government officials. They had a lot of work to do: new battleships and a new aircraft carrier were on the drawing boards, but the keels had yet to be laid; the aircraft industry had designed a new bomber with a range of two thousand miles, but the US Air Corps (then part of the army) had only seventeen of them.
Meanwhile events were in the saddle, and the dictators rode. Japan conquered northern China and drove inland up the country’s rivers. Germany, after annexing several neighbors, invaded Poland in September 1939, igniting a second European world war. In May 1940 Germany struck west; France sued for peace the following month. Germany began bombing Britain in late summer and in September signed a Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan in which each pledged to aid the others in the event of war with the United States.
In the midst of these storms, Roosevelt sought an unprecedented third term. At that time there was no legal requirement that a president serve only two, but George Washington had done so, a choice made into a custom by four of his near successors (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson). The only president to seek a third term had been Ulysses Grant, but his party had dashed his hopes by denying him a third nomination. Roosevelt’s campaign was a violation of republican norms, justifiable only (if it was) by the world crisis.
He won handily—a victory he was bound to justify by meeting the world crisis.
In October 1940, before the voters went to the polls, Admiral Stark prepared a twenty-six-page double-spaced memo that blandly described itself as outlining “steps we might take… should the United States enter war either alone or with allies.”10 Like all shrewd memo writers, Stark presented four carefully arranged options: barebones (Plan A—hemisphere defense only), two extremes (Plans B and C—all-out war in the Pacific, or in the Pacific and Europe simultaneously), and the option he favored (Plan D—holding the line in the Pacific while helping Britain with a “full national offensive”: logistical, monetary, and, ultimately, military).
America had been pursuing a Pacific-forward policy for a century: taking California from Mexico, buying Alaska from Russia, annexing Hawaii, stripping the Philippines and Guam from Spain, sending missionaries to China. Stark instead looked east, identifying Europe as our primary concern and Germany as our most serious enemy. If Britain beat Germany, he had told Knox before he began to write, “we could win everywhere; but if she loses… while we might not lose everywhere, we might, possibly, not win anywhere.”11
In the military’s phonetic alphabet, used for radio and phone messages, the word for D was dog. Stark showed the Plan Dog memo to Marshall, then gave it to Knox and the president in November.
Roosevelt’s response was to take a Caribbean vacation.
He loved being on ships as much as he loved studying them. In early December he boarded the USS Tuscaloosa, a navy cruiser, with a handful of male cronies, making a swing around the islands, fishing, drinking, playing cards, and watching the latest Hollywood movies. It was relaxing—and stimulating. “Use your imaginations,” Roosevelt had told his subordinates, who were struggling with war plans and production problems, before leaving them to chase the sun.12 Away from Washington, he was able to use his own imagination.
A bleak missive came to him when the Tuscaloosa lay off Antigua, delivered by seaplane: a letter from Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. The two men shared certain qualities: each belonged to his country’s upper crust (Churchill’s was uppermost: his mother had been a king’s mistress). Each was a naval man, Churchill having been first lord of the admiralty in the run-up to, and first year of, the last world war, and then again in 1939–1940. Churchill had the stronger mind but held the weaker hand. The Royal Air Force was winning the air war over Britain, but German submarines were bleeding his island nation to death. If shipping losses continued at current rates, she could hold out for only six more months. On top of everything else, Britain, which had been paying for American munitions, was nearly broke. Churchill begged for ships, planes, and weapons. “We look to the industrial energy of the Republic.”13
When Roosevelt returned to Washington in mid-December, he claimed not to have read a single report forwarded to him while at sea. He had much to report himself. In a press conference, he floated the idea of supplying Britain by loan. “What I am trying to do,” he explained, “is to eliminate the dollar sign.” He compared his scheme to lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. You wouldn’t charge him fifteen dollars for the use of your hose; you’d simply let him borrow it. Blaze over, he would return it or, if it was damaged, replace it. So long as “I get a nice garden hose back,” Roosevelt concluded, “I am in pretty good shape.”14 Churchill later called this plan, so plainly described, “the most unsordid act in the whole of human history.”15
Roosevelt’s press conference outlined a policy. He justified it in a long statement to the nation by radio. William Jennings Bryan had spent decades crisscrossing America orating. Radio brought the podium into the living room. The speaker was now at the listener’s elbow. Roosevelt, reflecting the new intimacy, called his presidential broadcasts fireside chats.
He had a musical tenor voice. His accent registered as posh—rolling and dropping terminal r’s. Partly it was pseudo-British, an affectation of the rich and of actors. Partly it was an authentic legacy of r-dropping New England (his mother belonged to an old Massachusetts clan, and he had been educated at Groton and Harvard). He prepared his chats carefully, talking over martinis with his speechwriters—Sam Rosenman, a New York pol and judge, and Robert Sherwood, a Broadway playwright. He insisted that the written texts he spoke from use dashes rather than commas, as a bolder visual aid, and had them typed on limp paper so that the pages would not rattle when turned.16 He spoke slowly, the better to be heard through static.
He read this fireside chat, the sixteenth of his presidency, in the White House diplomatic reception room on December 29, 1940, to an audience that included his cabinet, Hollywood stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, his mother, and, via the microphones on the desk before him, five hundred radio stations.
“My friends,” he began: an old salutation. Washington’s Farewell Address, in which he told America he would not serve a third term, had begun “Friends and fellow citizens.”17
“This is not a fireside chat on war [waugh]. It is a talk on national security.” Roosevelt began with an evasion—one he had maintained for years, and which he would maintain throughout this chat and for months afterward: we are not at war, nor are we going to war. The evasion was politic: Americans were not yet ready to hear, or think, the whole truth. It was practical: Marshall had told him that, even rearming full speed ahead, America would not be ready to fight for another eighteen months. But Roosevelt’s definition of national security would involve backing one belligerent to the utmost, and what neutral could do that and remain so indefinitely?
He invoked history. He began at the beginning. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock”—the twin settlements of Virginia and Massachusetts—“has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” He moved up to the preceding century. “One hundred and seventeen years ago, the Monroe Doctrine was conceived by our Government as a measure of defense in the face of a threat against this hemisphere by an alliance in Continental Europe.” The Holy Alliance, as he had told his cabinet. But thanks to the Monroe Doctrine, “during the whole of this time the Western Hemisphere has remained free from aggression.”
That interval of security was over. “The width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.” He gave a geography lesson: Senegal (the western African colony of newly defeated France) was closer to Brazil than Washington, DC, was to Denver. Former targets, once conquered, could become new staging areas. “Any South American country in Nazi hands would always constitute a jumping-off place for German attacks on any one of the other republics of this hemisphere.”
He made pitches to two problematic American ethnic groups (both solidly Democratic). Irish Americans had no love for Britain. But if Britain went down, “could Ireland hold out? Would Irish freedom be permitted as an amazing pet exception in an unfree world?” Mussolini was one of Hitler’s allies—a fact Roosevelt framed, with an eye to Italian Americans, as a personal aberration. “Even the people of Italy have been forced to become accomplices of the Nazis, but… they do not know how soon they will be embraced to death by their allies.”
He turned to consider “evil forces.” Some were “already within our gates.” This skirted demagogy, branding anyone who disagreed with him as a tool, unwitting or witting, of dictators. He had in mind a witting tool, Charles Lindbergh, heroic pilot and eloquent opponent of war, who had toured Nazi Germany and been mesmerized by its seeming efficiency. Perhaps, Lindbergh believed, it and not America, with its partisanship and inane squabbles, was the wave of the future.
There was no demagogy, only description, in his metaphors for Germany, Italy, and Japan. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.… There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”
Just past the halfway point, he came close to telling the full truth about America’s situation and his intentions. “If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take.” So national security might indeed entail war. He then backed away from what he had almost said. “The course that I advocate”—arming Britain—“involves the least risk.” The British “do not ask us to do their fighting.” Instead, with our help, they would do our fighting for us—“for their liberty and for our security.” He threw in a flourish as colloquial as the garden hose. “You can, therefore, nail”—he repeated it—“nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.”
He donned the protective garments of expertise. Aiding Britain “is not a matter of sentiment.… It is a matter of realistic, practical military policy, based on the advice of our military experts.” They know what they are talking about; you should agree with them.
Yet his conclusion, and the sentence that gave the talk its name, circled back to honesty—and to sentiment. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” As with many famous phrases, there was a fight over paternity. Rosenman later said that it had been coined by Jean Monnet, a French businessman, who had spoken it to Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter asked him not to repeat it so that Roosevelt could use it, as if new, himself. Sherwood claimed that another Roosevelt advisor, Harry Hopkins, had seen it in a newspaper article.18
Whoever coined it, the phrase was honest—for an arsenal is not a bank making loans, or a convoy carrying food, but a repository of weapons of war. If we were the arsenal of democracy, we were entering the war, whether we sent armies to Europe or not.
The phrase was laden with sentiment of the deepest kind, because it defined the war as being about more than aggression or the threat of it. It was about defending a system of life. The enemy stood for tyranny. “The shootings and the chains and the concentration camps are not simply transient tools but the very altars of modern dictatorships.” Their means were their ends. In their world “there is no liberty, no religion, no hope.” Roosevelt was a customary Christian—he was a vestryman of his local Episcopalian church, and he and Churchill would worship together when they first met on the deck of a battleship off Newfoundland—but he always included religion whenever he listed essential liberties. He was now asking America to defend liberty against a menace from Europe.
In a discussion of war production, he invoked the spirit of Bryan. He wanted there to be no strikes derailing assembly lines, but at the same time he wanted to assure labor that it would not be exploited. “The worker possesses the same human dignity and is entitled to the same security of position as the engineer or the manager or the owner. For the worker provides the human power that turns out the destroyers, and the planes, and the tanks.” Unlike Bryan, Roosevelt had been helping labor unions (and been helped by them, at the polls) for years. Here he presented the equality of economic man in its purest form.
He ended with an upbeat throwaway. In his last meeting with his speechwriters, hours before he went on the air, they had asked him to add something optimistic. He added this: “I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war. I base that belief on the latest and best of information.” Sheer bluff; Stark and Marshall, Knox and Stimson, had told him nothing of the kind. In it went anyway.
Roosevelt had not asked Americans to defend liberty everywhere. He said nothing about liberty in Latin American countries, nominally democratic, which actually weren’t (Argentina and Brazil had been racked by coups; Mexico was a one-party state); nothing about liberty in colonial empires, which he disliked (rather, he included the British Empire in his praise of Britain); nothing about liberty in the Soviet Union, at that moment an ally of Germany’s, though soon to become a victim. He called on Americans to defend the liberty of America, of its neighbors and nearby oceans—and of the European countries that were fighting to roll the dictatorships back.
President Monroe had said that we cherished “sentiments the most friendly” to liberty on both sides of the Atlantic, though we would defend it only on ours, where we could. President Roosevelt now said that, the Atlantic having shrunk, we would defend it in western Europe too.
A Gallup poll taken shortly after the chat showed over two-thirds of Americans agreeing that “our country’s future safety depends on England winning this war.”19 One quarter disagreed. This result was driven, in part, by intense and sympathetic coverage of the pounding Britain was taking in the air war; Germany could not control the skies, but it had rained destruction on the ground, which Americans saw in newsreels and wire photos.
Gallant resistance can inspire. But terror can also intimidate. The president’s rhetoric helped shape the reactions of his listeners sitting by their radiators (if not their firesides).
America kept up the policy of no war/war for a year. Hitler labored to avoid provoking America, forbidding his naval forces in the Atlantic to fire at American ships, even in self-defense. In the end, it was Japan that tripped the wire, bombing the Pacific fleet on December 7, 1941, as it lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt and his team had expected a Japanese attack but thought it would fall on Singapore and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies (the Japanese struck there too, of course). Jeannette Rankin, reelected to the House in 1940, voted once more against going to war, this time alone; afterward she had to be escorted to her office by a protective police guard. Germany and Italy fulfilled their treaty obligations by declaring war on us. America would fight a two-hemisphere war after all, but it still proceeded along the lines of Plan Dog, with Germany as the primary target.
When Churchill learned of Pearl Harbor, he was startled, determined—and jubilant. He knew instantly, he wrote in his war memoirs, that the United States would now be “in the war, up to the neck, and in to the death. So we had won after all!… Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.” He recalled something a fellow politician had told him years before. “The United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate’… I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”20
On the enemy side, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, shared Churchill’s view of American industrial might. In the 1920s he had spent several years in the United States as a student and a military attaché, and he would tell his colleagues that “anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”21 He placed his hopes, therefore, on a quick knockout blow.
Churchill and Yamamoto—and Roosevelt’s planners and producers—were right. Free men cannot fight with bare hands. America’s industrial heft virtually guaranteed victory (though without the administration’s years of preparation, the struggle would have been far longer).
But materiel alone never wins wars. Men have to work and fight with a will, for a reason. Roosevelt had given one in his sixteenth fireside chat.