The Sphinx

Anne Lindbergh steps into the isolationist debate, Willkie’s
campaign closes in on Roosevelt, Kennedy is
recalled from London, the US election results come in.

WITH THE ELECTION fast approaching, Anne Lindbergh entered the isolationist debate with publication of The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith. Her aim was benign. “The arguments of the isolationists are so often narrow, materialistic, short-sighted, and wholly selfish—I am repelled by them,” she told her mother, which is why she hoped her essay would give “a moral argument for isolationism.”¹

In the book, she described the victors of 1918 as “democracies” in inverted commas, just as Kennedy and Borah did, as if to cast doubt on whether democracy was worthwhile or genuine, and she argued that had they given “reasonable economic and territorial concessions” to Hitler, the war in Europe would never have started. She suggested that the age of democracy was over and, while she abhorred many of the methods of the dictators, “the wave of the future” had begun. The world was locked in a battle between the “Forces of the Past” and the “Forces of the Future.” “There is no fighting the wave of the future any more than as a child you could fight against a gigantic roller that loomed ahead of you someday,” she wrote. There was no point in Americans mounting “a hopeless ‘crusade’ to ‘save’ civilization.” The only way to maintain “our way of life” was to stay out of the war.²

Her argument was belated, anguished, and woefully jejune. When she showed the manuscript to a friend, George Stevens, she was taken aback by his animosity. “It was presumptuous—that I had no right to write it without more knowledge of history, economics, foreign affairs, etc. That it would be torn limb from limb. That it would be called—with some justification—‘Fifth Column’. That it would do C. no good and me, harm.”³ When Elizabeth Morrow read her daughter’s book, she burst into tears.

The instant notoriety of the slim volume made it the best-selling nonfiction book in America, with 50,000 copies sold in two months. It “overnight became the book people loved to hate. Surpassed in modern literary history perhaps only by Mein Kampf,” reported Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg. Even half a century later, “The Wave of the Future remained a book nobody remembered with affection—not even the author, who later recanted much of its contents, which she ascribed to her naïveté.”⁴ While W. H. Auden,⁵ the British poet who, as a conscientious objector, had exiled himself to Brooklyn for the duration of the war, described The Wave as “simply beautiful,”⁶ Clare Boothe Luce observed that “the world has progressed only because it has not allowed the waves to sweep over it.”⁷ Ickes condemned it as “the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist and Appeaser.” Even Anne Lindbergh’s favorite cousin concluded that the book showed that “both you and Charles seem to me to have accepted the totalitarian definition of a democracy as a static or decayed material concept.”⁸ One bookseller returned his copies to Harcourt with a note saying that he thought Lindbergh and his wife should be put “behind barbed wires.”⁹

“I find I am hurt, not by the reviews exactly, but by the growing rift I see between myself and those people I thought I belonged to,” Anne Lindbergh confided to her diary. “The artists, the writers, the intellectuals, the sensitive, the idealistic—I feel exiled from them.”¹⁰ Lindbergh told Anne they had lost friends “like a field after a bombardment.” She wrote, “I am now the bubonic plague among writers and C. is the anti-Christ!”¹¹

The election continued to move in Willkie’s direction. He traveled 34,000 miles by train, giving over five hundred speeches in thirty-four states until his voice became gravelly, then gave out. At every turn, he repeated the danger of electing Roosevelt for a third term. And at every opportunity he demanded that the president meet him to debate in person. In Chicago on September 13 he pledged to “not send one American boy into the shambles of a European war.” He departed from his prepared text to add, “If [the president’s] promise to keep our boys out of foreign wars is no better than his promise to balance the budget, they’re almost on the transports!”¹² By comparison with Willkie’s energy, Luce’s Life magazine described Roosevelt’s campaign as having “about as much pep as an old stock company vehicle with one star performer who disliked his role.”¹³

Despite polls showing that from June 1940 on Americans believed that Germany would lose the war and that the United States would become involved,¹⁴ Willkie’s message that Roosevelt would take America into war gradually began to take hold. Reading letters, telegrams, and reports from Democratic officials pouring into the White House, Roosevelt’s speechwriter Robert E. Sherwood was “horrified at the evidence of hysteria.” Even Democratic-leaning newspapermen reported “mounting waves of fear throughout the country, which might easily merge into tidal proportions by election day and sweep Willkie into office.” A bank implored its depositors to vote Republican and advertised in the Chicago Tribune, “In a last stand for democracy, every director and officer of this bank will vote for Wendell Willkie.” “Even more alarming” to Sherwood were the pleas from party activists flooding into Democratic national headquarters in New York. “All the messages said much the same thing,” recalled Sherwood. “Please, for God’s sake, Mr. President, give a solemn promise to the mothers of America that you will not send their sons into any foreign wars. If you fail to do this, we lose the election!”¹⁵

The Chicago America First Committee’s attempt to grow into a national organization was also gathering pace. In mid-September, Lindbergh, encouraged by Stuart and the ultra-conservative Brigadier-General R. E. Wood,¹⁶ a senior executive with Sears, Roebuck, met with Ford at the Ford Motors plant and persuaded him to give money and serve on America First’s governing committee. Lindbergh found Wood “an able man [who] carried on the discussion intelligently and with great discretion” and Stuart “alert, enthusiastic, and a hard worker.”¹⁷

Lindbergh, Wood, Stuart, and Ford were joined by Chester Bowles of the advertising agency Benton & Bowles. A broader meeting of interested parties was held at the University Club on Fifth Avenue, New York, in which the Fascist sympathizer Merwin K. Hart, the dean of Harvard Journalism School Carl W. Ackerman, and Lindbergh were appointed as the new organization’s steering committee. Hart wanted to set up an eastern committee to complement the thriving Chicago outfit; Lindbergh thought it best to roll out the Chicago effort across the nation.

America First soon discovered that their attempts to buy radio time were met with resistance. “Some of the radio stations have taken the stand that the committee has to do with a ‘controversial issue’ and therefore comes under the code they have formed against selling time for controversial issues,” wrote Lindbergh in his diary. “It is a fine state of affairs if the question of war and peace cannot be debated before the American people because it is a ‘controversial issue.’ ”¹⁸ They were left with buying a full page in the New York Times to set out their arguments.

To maintain momentum, Lindbergh gave another broadcast, “A Plea for American Independence,” on the Mutual Broadcasting System, a network amenable to “controversial” views. Anxious not to be accused of partisanship during an election, Mutual asked Lindbergh to remove the penultimate line from his talk: “When a man is drafted to serve in the armed forces of our country, he has the right to know that his government has the independent destiny of America as its objective, and that he will not be sent to fight in the wars of a foreign land.” Lindbergh refused.

As he prepared to broadcast on October 13, Lindbergh felt beleaguered. His mailbox was attracting letters threatening his life and those of Anne and their children. “I don’t know how much longer I will be able to do this,” wrote Lindbergh, “for there are many people who would like to see me stopped.”¹⁹ He suspected that the administration was tapping his telephone. “The freedom of action and speech that we used to know in this country seems to be rapidly disappearing,” he told his diary.²⁰

When he made his broadcast, he began by reminding the audience of the American republic’s history of keeping out of the affairs of the Old World. “Why, then . . . are we being told that we must give up our independent position, that our frontiers lie in Europe and that our destiny will be decided by European armies fighting upon European soil?” Lindbergh asked. He played to his strength: his reputation as an aviator. “We do not need untold thousands of military aircraft unless we intend to wage a war abroad,” he said.²¹ Then he spoke the forbidden line about an enlisted man having the right to know his government had the independence of America in mind and that he will not be sent abroad to fight a foreign war. It was a simple message that rang true among headline writers across America. The Spokesman–Review in Spokane, Washington, headed its verbatim report, “Let Europe Stew in Own Juice; Make U.S. Stronger.”²²

Commentary on the broadcast, however, was mixed. The Tampa Tribune ran an editorial titled “Shame!” saying, “We are being forced to the reluctant conclusion that Charles Augustus Lindbergh ought to be interned—or gagged—for the duration of the war.” A columnist in the Evening Independent in St. Petersburg, Florida, rushed to Lindbergh’s defense, writing that there was nothing seditious in the speech “unless it has become seditious to criticize the administration, in which case at least 20,000,000 Americans are going to vote seditiously on Nov. 5.”²³

Roosevelt’s attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, fired a shot across Lindbergh’s bow. “No speech, in its timing and its substance, could more perfectly have served the purpose of those who would weaken the morale of democracy and undermine the spirit of our defense effort,” he told an audience of lawyers. “We are witnessing the most ominous gathering of forces against freedom and democracy that has been seen in my time.”²⁴ Lindbergh was put on notice: if America were to join the war, his isolationist remarks would count against him.

Roosevelt was acutely aware from the tightening polls that Willkie’s campaign was effective. With Democratic support flagging, particularly among Roman Catholics, in mid-October Roosevelt decided to gamble. “I know what an increasingly severe strain you have been under during the past weeks,” he wrote to Kennedy, before suggesting he fly home on October 21, just three weeks before polling day. There was, however, a proviso. “No matter how proper and appropriate your statements might be, every effort will be made to misinterpret and to distort what you say,” the president warned. “I am, consequently, asking you specifically not to make any statement to the press on your way over nor when you arrive in New York until you and I have had a chance to agree upon what should be said.” Roosevelt asked that instead of Kennedy returning to his home in Bronxville, New York, he travel directly to the White House, “since I will want to talk with you as soon as you get here.”²⁵

Kennedy was in two minds about how to respond. He would return home, certainly, but he could not decide whether to back Roosevelt. Luce left him an open invitation to treachery, asking him to lunch the day he returned with the intention of persuading him to back Willkie. Kennedy had one last grisly task to perform in London. On October 19, he said farewell to Chamberlain on his deathbed. The prime minister whose poor judgment had led to the ignominy of Munich clasped Kennedy’s hand between his and said, “This is goodbye. We will never see each other again.”²⁶ Three days later, Kennedy set off by flying boat to Lisbon, then via Horta in the Azores, and Bermuda, to New York.

Roosevelt’s weekly poll numbers kept dropping. In response, the president decided to give five speeches to counter what was called “a systematic program of falsification of fact” by Willkie. The first, delivered in Philadelphia on October 23, was a piece of political knockabout. Pointing out that since July “hardly a day or a night has passed” without his having to attend to a sudden political crisis stemming from the war, the president felt the time had come to confront “the more fantastic misstatements” made by his opponents. In particular, he wanted to deny the suggestion “that the President of the United States telephoned to Mussolini and Hitler to sell Czechoslovakia down the river” and that “the election of the present Government means the end of American democracy within four years.”

To whoops of delight from the packed convention hall, Roosevelt declared, “I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with facts. I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight.” He addressed the isolationists’ suggestion he had “secretly entered into agreements with foreign nations” and had pledged “the participation of the United States in some foreign war.” He gave a “most solemn assurance”: “There is no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other Government, or any other nation in any part of the world, to involve this nation in any war.”

He addressed “one outrageously false charge,” that he was leading the country into war, which he described as “contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.” He reminded Americans of the words of the Democratic platform: “We will not participate in foreign wars and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas except in case of attack.” “It is for peace that I have labored,” Roosevelt said, “and it is for peace that I shall labor all the days of my life.”²⁷

Willkie immediately responded, highlighting the failures of the New Deal and charging that, by seeking a third term, Roosevelt was becoming a dictator. He reminded his audience that George Washington had declined a third term, “even though it was urged upon him by his countrymen at a time when discord prevailed at home and war prevailed abroad.”²⁸

Kennedy landed in Lisbon on October 25, the day of the president’s Philadelphia address, and was met by an American diplomat with a letter from the president reminding him that he should travel straight to the White House on his arrival and say nothing to the press. In Bermuda, Kennedy received a cable from the president: “I hope Rose and you will come to Washington immediately after your arrival in New York to spend Saturday night at the White House.” Kennedy telephoned Roosevelt from Bermuda who “was very pleasant”²⁹ but again urged the ambassador to stay mum until he had had time for a long conversation. Kennedy was still angry with the president and scribbled on an envelope, “You can’t say you don’t want to go to war if you listen with great intolerance to somebody like Col. Lindbergh.”³⁰

There was a further message from the president waiting for Kennedy on his arrival at the flying boat port on Long Island Sound.³¹ “Thank the Lord you are safely home,” it read. “I do hope you & Rose can come down Sunday p.m.—we expect you both at the White House.” Kennedy called to say he was on his way. The president took the ambassador’s call in the Oval Office, where he was conferring with Speaker Rayburn and Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson³² from Texas. “Joe, it is so good to hear your voice,” said the president. “Come to the White House tonight for a little family dinner. I’m dying to talk to you.” To the delight of Rayburn and Johnson, the president was all the while passing his hand across his throat to signal he was about to cut Kennedy off at the neck.

The president was not the only one trying to reach Kennedy. There was also a letter waiting from Wood of America First, pleading for the ambassador to join the movement. “The whole future of the country is at stake,” wrote Wood, “and the present is one of those times in history when the truth must be told.” If Kennedy knew of any secret deals between the president and Churchill, now was the time to declare them. “I believe you owe to your country and to your fellow citizens the duty of telling those facts, regardless of partisanship or any personal friendships,” he wrote.

Kennedy ran the gauntlet of the press at the airport and, his date with Luce apparently forgotten, was ushered with Rose to a military plane waiting to fly them to the capital. During the flight, Rose reminded her husband that he should be sure to be grateful for the opportunities Roosevelt had granted him. “The President sent you, a Roman Catholic, as Ambassador to London, which probably no other President would have done,” she said. “He sent you as his representative to the Pope’s coronation. . . . You would write yourself down as an ingrate in the view of many people if you resign now.”³³

Arriving at the White House, Kennedy was escorted to the president’s study, where the smiling Roosevelt was “shaking a cocktail shaker and reaching over for a few lumps of ice.” Missy LeHand was the only other person present. Kennedy was just starting on the diatribe he had been rehearsing for days when Rose entered, with Senator Byrnes and his wife. After drinks, the party went to the dining room for a supper of scrambled eggs on toast and sausages, where Byrnes, in a carefully prepared intervention, suggested that Kennedy might like to make a broadcast to boost the president’s campaign. “I didn’t say Yes, Aye, or No,” Kennedy reported to his diary. The president directed the full force of his charm on Rose and recounted loving stories about her father, the Boston Democratic boss “Honey Fitz.”

After dinner, they all returned to the study. Kennedy surmised that the evening had been choreographed to prevent him spending time alone with the president to air his grievances. He abandoned etiquette and took the floor. “Since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the President alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody,” he said, and began to enumerate the slights, omissions, slaps, overrulings, rudeness, and personal treachery that had made his life in London such a misery.³⁴ In an attempt to defuse the awkwardness, Rose suggested that it must be difficult to maintain good relations between friends when they were 3,000 miles apart. The president, looking red-faced and blinking throughout Kennedy’s tirade, took a deep breath before speaking. He said he agreed with every word, it was all a terrible mistake, and that the following day he would reprimand those in the State Department who had so upset the ambassador. After the election there would be “a real housecleaning” to purge the administration of such wretched people. Kennedy later reflected, “Someone is lying very seriously and I suspect the President.”³⁵

Byrnes returned to the idea of a broadcast and put Kennedy on the spot: would he be prepared to talk to the nation? “I said that I would write the speech without saying anything to anybody and say just what I felt,” Kennedy recorded in his diary. Missy LeHand telephoned the Democratic National Committee to tell them Kennedy would use the hour they had reserved on CBS the following Tuesday. As the president was returning to New York by train late Sunday, it was suggested that perhaps the ambassador would like to accompany him. Kennedy declined, saying it would undermine the surprise of the broadcast. To the reporters who had already been briefed that the ambassador would accompany the president to New York, it was clear that the meeting between president and ambassador had not gone smoothly. There was intense speculation that Kennedy was about to launch an unpleasant surprise into the campaign, a rumor that gathered strength when, the following morning, Kennedy abruptly canceled a press conference.

After traveling to New York, Kennedy spent the next two days holed up in the Waldorf-Astoria writing his broadcast. He conferred with friends and received a strong plea from Clare Boothe Luce. “When you make that radio address tomorrow night, throwing as you will all your prestige and reputation for wisdom, your experience abroad into the scales for F.D.R., you’ll probably help to turn the trick for him,” she wrote. “I believe with all my heart and soul you will be doing America a terrible disservice. . . . I’m so terribly frightened for this country.”³⁶

On October 28, after a campaign tour of New York’s five boroughs, Roosevelt gave the second of his five speeches, in Madison Square Garden. Kennedy appeared alongside him on the platform. As if on cue, the same day Mussolini ordered the invasion of Greece. Roosevelt confronted head-on the charge that he had jeopardized America’s freedom by being slow in rearming the nation. He pointed the audience toward the pages of the Congressional Record. There they would discover that Republican leaders “not only voted against these efforts, but they stated time and again through the years that they were unnecessary and extravagant, that our armed strength was sufficient for any emergency.”

He singled out some of those who had railed against rearmament: former president Hoover, the vice presidential candidate Senator McNary, senators Taft, Vandenberg, Nye, and Johnson, and congressmen Martin, Barton, and Fish, Roosevelt’s upstate New York sparring partner. He then listed opponents of the “cash and carry” measure that allowed America to arm the democracies, “Senators McNary, Vandenberg, Nye and Johnson. Now wait, a perfectly beautiful rhythm—Congressmen Martin, Barton and Fish.” The audience began to catch on. “Great Britain and a lot of other nations would never have received one ounce of help from us,” Roosevelt said, “if the decision had been left to”—and the crowd joined him in reciting the trio of names—“Martin, Barton and”—long pause for maximum effect—“Fish!” The president asked for support to continue making arms to defend America and Britain. Then, without mentioning Willkie by name, he said, “The alternative is to risk the future of the country in the . . . inexperienced hands of those who in these perilous days are willing recklessly to imply that our boys are ‘already on their way to the transports’.”³⁷

The following day, Roosevelt took a leading role in the drawing of the first draft lottery, overruling the advice of his campaign team who thought it too close to election day to draw attention to the prospect of America joining the European war. As commander in chief, Roosevelt insisted on being there. An ominous sense of history surrounded the occasion. The glass drum containing the names was the same Wilson had used to pick conscripts for World War One. War Secretary Stimson’s blindfold was made from the cushions on which the founding fathers had sat to sign the Declaration of Independence. Using words sent by the first American senators to the first president, Roosevelt declared, “You have the confidence and the gratitude and the love of your country. We are all with you.”³⁸ While polls showed that a majority of Americans were in favor of the measure, Roosevelt was careful not to use the word “draft,” instead calling it a “muster,” invoking the volunteers from the farms in Lexington and Concord who fought for independence.

Roosevelt won a ringing endorsement for “selective service” from America’s top Roman Catholic, Archbishop Francis J. Spellman,³⁹ who wrote, “It is better to have protection and not need it than to need protection and not have it. . . . We really can no longer afford to be moles, who cannot see, or ostriches who will not see. . . . We Americans want peace and we shall prepare for a peace, but not for a peace whose definition is slavery or death.”⁴⁰ It was an argument as much against isolationism as it was in favor of the draft.

The following night, Roosevelt sat in his White House study with the radio tuned to CBS. It did not take long before Kennedy came to the heart of the matter. “Even the most staid isolationist is now alive to the danger facing any nation in the modern world,” he said. “The realization that oceans alone are not adequate barriers against revolutionary forces which now threaten a whole civilization.” He continued cautiously: “While we shall not be involved in this war, we are bound to be seriously affected by it.”⁴¹ Then he turned to “the charge that the President of the United States is trying to involve this country in the World War. Such a charge is false.”⁴² He continued to deny Willkie’s assertion that Roosevelt was lying. “To even suggest that our boys will soon be on the transports in this kind of war,” said Kennedy, “is completely absurd.”⁴³

The ambassador ended on a personal note. “My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world,” he said. “In the light of these considerations, I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be reelected President of the United States.” Relieved, within minutes of the end of the broadcast, Roosevelt sent Kennedy a cable: “We have all just listened to a grand speech. Many thanks.”⁴⁴ Kennedy’s twenty-year-old daughter Kathleen sent him a congratulatory note, signing off, “Goodnight from your 4th hostage.”⁴⁵

What had changed Kennedy’s mind? Although there were a number of witnesses to the encounter between Kennedy and Roosevelt in the White House, each remembered a different version of events. Some suggested that Roosevelt had showed Kennedy transcripts of his disloyal conversations in London, a tactic that does not tally with Roosevelt’s usual sinuous methods. Kennedy may have blinked because he hoped for another important government post in the new administration: there were rumors that he was to mastermind the National Defense Advisory Commission, set up in May 1940 to coordinate the rearmament drive. He may even have genuinely believed that Roosevelt was the only person who could lead America through the war.

John F. Kennedy believed that Roosevelt had offered his father backing for a 1944 presidential bid, which rings true as the president was always encouraging rivals with empty promises of support. Rose’s advice, however, appeared to play a key part in Kennedy’s decision to stay within the Roosevelt fold. She, like him, was highly ambitious for their children and hoped they would use their great fortune to lead lives of prominent public service. Clare Boothe Luce reported years later that Kennedy had told her, “We agreed that if I endorsed him for president in 1940, then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942,”⁴⁶ though as Joe Kennedy Jr. would have been only twenty-seven in 1942, the suggestion seems fanciful. James Roosevelt believed his father threatened Kennedy and his children with the mark of Judas if the ambassador were to abandon him at this crucial stage. To become estranged from the Democratic hierarchy at such a time would seriously damage the Kennedys’ prospects of establishing a ruling dynasty.⁴⁷

Lindbergh had one last chance to help defeat Roosevelt before election day. The venue was Woolsey Hall, Yale University, at the invitation of Kingman Brewster Jr.,⁴⁸ of the school’s America First Committee. Lindbergh recalled that “every seat was taken, and people were standing along the walls”⁴⁹ as he explained in his soft, carefully enunciated speech that Americans faced a stark choice. “We must either keep out of European wars entirely or participate in European politics permanently,” he said. “I believe that the wisest policy would be for us to build our security upon the bed rock of our own continent and its adjacent islands, and to proceed toward the independent American destiny that Washington outlined in his ‘Farewell Address.’ ”⁵⁰

Just a week before election day, the polls were still moving in Willkie’s favor. Five Midwestern states were shifting from Democrat to Republican. The Democratic National Committee chairman, Ed Flynn, reported that since the president’s remarks about Mussolini stabbing France in the back, party workers needed a police escort when campaigning in the Italian American parts of Brooklyn.

As Roosevelt’s train steamed up the eastern seaboard en route to his next speech in the isolationist redoubt of Boston, he was inundated with urgent requests from anxious Democratic leaders to repeat his promise that he would not send Americans to fight in foreign wars. “How often do they expect me to say that?” Roosevelt asked Sherwood. “It’s in the Democratic platform and I’ve repeated it a hundred times.” “Evidently you’ve got to say it again and again and again,” Sherwood replied. So were written the words that became almost as famous as “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”⁵¹ The Boston line was: “I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Rosenman reminded the president that the Democratic platform included the final words “except in case of attack,” to which the president responded, “Of course we’ll fight if we’re attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War?”⁵²

On the Boston Garden stage, the president turned to his left, to where Kennedy was sitting, and paid a fulsome tribute to “that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joe Kennedy.” For the first time, perhaps, Roosevelt’s praise of Kennedy was heartfelt. The rest of the speech, to a packed audience of 14,000, was a romp. At one point a voice in the gallery cried out, “What about Barton and Fish?” Roosevelt beamed at the crowd and said, “I have to let you in on a secret. It will come as a great surprise to you. And it’s this. I’m enjoying this campaign. I’m really having a fine time,” and the audience roared.⁵³

When he came to “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” Willkie, listening on the radio, exclaimed, “That hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me!”⁵⁴