Britain runs out of cash, Morgenthau
eyes British companies and gold reserves,
Roosevelt ponders how to supply Churchill without
involving Congress, “The Arsenal of Democracy.”
FRESH FROM HIS election victory, Roosevelt was exhausted and needed a break. At the end of November, Lothian found him “in a fatigued and depressed state of mind, unresponsive to any new ideas for action.”1 Churchill, too, was disappointed at his lack of urgency and told colleagues he was “rather chilled”2 by Roosevelt’s drifting attitude. The president found a pretext to spend a few nights at sea in the need to inspect the new US facilities in the British West Indies won in the destroyers-for-bases deal. In the final cabinet meeting before he set sail on his ten-day Caribbean cruise, he set his colleagues a question.
He was already speeding supplies to Britain. As soon as the election was won, he announced that half the planes and war supplies made in America would now go straight to Britain. There was, however, a question of how Britain could continue to pay for the war goods. It was no secret that Britain was running short of dollars. Anxious that Britain might default, American exporters of food and other supplies had begun asking for cash up front. By the end of 1939, British gold and dollar reserves stood at $545 million and were diminishing at the rate of $200 million a year. Since war was declared, Britain had spent $4.5 billion in cash with American arms manufacturers and had only $2 billion left in total dollar and sterling cash reserves, which would last until the middle of 1941.
Roosevelt told his cabinet that Britain “still has sufficient credits and property in this country to finance additional war supplies. . . . [and that the $2.5 billion in assets remaining] ought to be spent first, although the British do not want to liquidate their American securities.” But, he added, according to Harold Ickes’s diary account, “the time would surely come when Great Britain would need loans or credits. He suggested that one way to meet that situation would be for us to supply whatever we could under leasing arrangements . . . ships or any other property that was loanable, returnable, and insurable.”3
Lothian gave the New York press a more exaggerated account of Britain’s financial embarrassment when he arrived on a flight from London on November 23. “Britain is bust,” he said, before explaining that matters were “becoming urgent” and that “available gold and securities had been virtually used up.”4 Lothian’s remarks annoyed Roosevelt because they suggested a mercenary side to the president and encouraged the congressional isolationists. Nye declared that he and the rest were “ready to battle to the bitter end against any attempt to extend financial aid to the British” and that loans would “mean actual entry into war.”5 It was a reminder that the Johnson Act of 1934, which outlawed loans to any country “delinquent in its war obligations,” remained in force.
Britain’s cash shortage also revealed the anti-imperialist undercurrent to what was fast becoming an Anglo-American military alliance. Roosevelt and Churchill came from aristocratic backgrounds with many superficial similarities. Churchill, as the tenth-generation descendant of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, victor of the Battle of Blenheim (1704), enjoyed a clear edge in the social grandeur stakes over the relatively nouveaux riches of the mercantile Roosevelts. Roosevelt, however, benefited from inherited wealth which gave him complete independence of action, while Churchill was obliged to work as an author and journalist in order to feed his family and his extravagant lifestyle.
What the pair shared in their inherited privilege, however, did not translate into identical views. Churchill saw the British Empire as a dignified, patrician, and benevolent institution; Roosevelt thought it exploitative, unfair, and unkind. Some left-leaning Democrats even expressed the view that there was “a moral equivalency between Germany’s war of conquest and England’s [sic] efforts to protect the empire.”6
Roosevelt had learned from Wilson that America, as the world’s mightiest economy since the early years of the century, should take up the responsibilities that accompany such good fortune and treasure. With Britain rapidly spending its vast accumulation of imperial wealth on fighting Nazism, Roosevelt grasped the chance to seal the fate of the wobbling empire, which held by force of arms much of the Middle East, Africa, and India. The legitimacy of the empire was already being tested by freedom movements. So long as the isolationists insisted that Britain should not be helped, Roosevelt was able to press Churchill for the speedy liquidation of British assets. By the turn of the year, however, he was beginning to question whether insisting on full payments from an ally spending its fortune on a shared noble cause would jeopardize the goodwill necessary for their joint venture.
On December 1, Morgenthau showed the president Britain’s balance sheet. Roosevelt glanced briefly at the figures before throwing them on the desk, saying, “Well, they aren’t bust. There’s lots of money there.”7 The same day, Roosevelt told Kennedy the same. “I’ve gone over their financial position and they’re all right for quite a while,” he said. “They’ve got plenty in the [sic] South [Africa] and holdings all over the world.” Three days later, Sir Frederick Phillips,8 a British Treasury official, returned to Washington9 to resume meetings that had been going on with Morgenthau for some months to establish “a factual basis of British financial resources and war supply expenditures.”10 Phillips was working to a brief written by the British economics genius John Maynard Keynes.11 It soon became clear in London that it would have been better if the silver-tongued Keynes, rather than the lackluster Phillips, had argued the British case.
Keynes provided Phillips with a robust response should Roosevelt and Morgenthau demand that Britain divest itself of all foreign investments before America provided direct military aid: Britain’s investments were essential to the country’s ability to pay its way after the war. A fire sale of assets would not provide Britain with their true value. Keynes had learned from his loan negotiations with American bankers to finance the Allies in World War One, and insisted that this time financial aid from America should be gifts, not loans. Britain would not “accept the dishonor and the reproaches of default whilst allowing to the U.S. all the consequent conveniences to their trade.” If Britain were deliberately beggared, he foresaw “revolutionary changes in the commercial relations” between the two countries that would involve the closure of British and empire markets to American exporters as soon as the war was won. “America must not be allowed to pick out the eyes of the British Empire,” he wrote.12
“Suave, balding Sir Frederick Phillips,” as Time magazine described him, was an old-school civil servant who had been given a near-impossible task. Roosevelt and Morgenthau were daunting when working in concert, and they needed to be able to reassure Americans in general, who were still distrustful of Britain’s failure to pay its World War One debts, and the isolationists in particular, who did not want to give any aid to Britain, that they had squeezed the British until the pips squeaked. Morgenthau put pressure on Phillips to liquidate national assets, such as British ownership of South American railroads and tin mines, and rubber plantations in Malaya. At one point, the president asked Phillips straight out, “How about selling some of those securities you have in Argentina?”13 Morgenthau wanted to get American hands on British-owned companies in America, such as Shell Oil, Lever Brothers, and Brown & Williams Tobacco. At the insistence of Morgenthau, Courtaulds, the giant plastics and chemicals company, was sold in 1941 to American buyers at a fraction of what it was worth. Britain had had its pockets picked.
Roosevelt and Morgenthau also wanted Britain’s gold. British reserves in Canada were already depleted to pay for war production in other parts of the empire. Britain had requisitioned French gold reserves and shipped them to Canada when the Reynaud government collapsed, but the gold could not be spent for fear of sparking a hostile reaction from the French Québécois. Nonetheless, Roosevelt and Morgenthau pressed their advantage, insisting that a warship be sent to Cape Town to pick up $50 billion ($800 billion in 2014 terms) in British gold holdings there. Picking over their financial bones was humiliating to the British, one minister complaining “that the Americans’ love of doing good business may lead them to denude us of all our realizable resources before they show any inclination to be the Good Samaritan.”14 Churchill drafted a letter to Roosevelt saying that the American gold grab “would wear the aspect of a sheriff collecting the last assets of a helpless debtor.”15 For fear of offending the president, the note was never sent.
Eventually, as 1941 progressed, Roosevelt ran out of British assets to take. And from that moment he came face to face with the burdens of empire. In a memorandum to Hull, the president explored whether America should demand territory in return for armaments. He speculated about confiscating Bermuda, the British West Indies, British Honduras, and British Guiana. He could not decide whether acquiring poor colonies would be “something worthwhile or as a distinct liability. If we can get our naval bases, why, for example, should we buy with them two million headaches, consisting of that number of human beings who would be a definite economic drag on this country?” Similarly with a number of small British dependencies in the Pacific: “the islands south of Hawaii (Canton, Enderbury, Christmas, the Phoenix group, etc. down to Samoa) and the islands southwest of Hawaii and south of the Japanese mainland.” “If we owned them,” Roosevelt told Hull, “they would be difficult to defend against Japan.”16 For the first time, it seems, the president began to understand the burdens as well as the benefits of leading an empire that stretched around the globe.
By Thanksgiving 1940, Roosevelt faced a political and moral dilemma. He asked his cabinet to ponder in his absence how America could continue to supply the last bastion of democracy against the dictators without having to run the gauntlet of Congress, which would find endless reasons to delay the provisions. Taking with him his close aide Hopkins and a couple of other chums to make up a hand of cards, Roosevelt, in Frankfurter’s words “in a deep Lincolnesque mood,”17 departed Washington for the naval dock in Miami to sail the high seas aboard the USS Tuscaloosa.
Roosevelt fished by day, played poker by night, and otherwise let it be known that he wanted time alone to think. There were minor distractions, such as a stop at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to pick up Havana cigars, and lunch on board with the Duke of Windsor, George VI’s feckless brother. The duke, a vacuous playboy ordered by the British government to live in exile since he abandoned the throne in 1936, had, much to British dismay, paid Hitler a visit the following year. The moment war was declared, he was appointed governor of the Bahamas to keep him away from further trouble. There were rumors that if Hitler succeeded in conquering Britain, he would reinstall the duke on the throne as a Nazi stooge. Roosevelt found the fallen monarch an intriguing curio, though “more pessimistic about the progress of the war than seemed suitable.”18 Noblesse did not always oblige.
A naval flying boat delivered mail to the Tuscaloosa, and on December 11 a long dispatch arrived from Churchill. The president retreated from the rest of the party for the duration of the cruise. For two days he lolled in a deck chair, reading and rereading the letter that Churchill believed was “one of the most important I ever wrote.”19 It suggested that Roosevelt’s reelection confirmed that “the vast majority of American citizens” now believed that “the future of our two democracies and the kind of civilization for which they stand are bound up with the survival and independence of the British Commonwealth” and that “control of the Pacific by the United States Navy and of the Atlantic by the British Navy is . . . the surest means to preventing the war from reaching the shores of the United States.”
Until America and Britain were fully rearmed, which Churchill thought would take at least two more years, it had fallen to Britain “to hold the front and grapple with Nazi power until the preparations of the United States are complete.” Churchill asked for four specific favors: for America to maintain the freedom of the seas; to provide “escorting battleships” to keep Atlantic convoys safe from marauding Nazi submarines; that if convoying by American vessels proved impossible, to provide “the gift, loan, or supply” of warships so the Royal Navy might protect the Atlantic supply route; and, to that end, to encourage the Irish Free State government to grant Britain naval bases on Ireland’s western and southern coasts. In addition, Churchill asked for many more merchant ships, 2,000 combat aircraft a month, and machine tools that would allow the British to make their own ammunition and small arms.
Then came the nub. “The more rapid and abundant the flow of munitions and ships which you are able to send us, the sooner will our dollar credits be exhausted,” Churchill wrote. The current orders for arms “many times exceed the total exchange resources remaining at the disposal of Great Britain. The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.” While Britain was happy to foot the bill, he hoped the president would agree that “it would be wrong in principle . . . if, at the height of the struggle, Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets so that after victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”
The prime minister ended his plea: “If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to the achievement of our common purpose.”20 Roosevelt agreed with Churchill. But what to do? When helping draft Churchill’s missive, Lothian purposely played on the president’s acute sense of personal responsibility and sense of history. He was aware that “the knowledge that some day [the letter] might be published would act as a continual spur in meeting our requirements for fear lest it should be said in years to come, ‘He knew, he was warned and he didn’t take the necessary steps.’ ”21 Roosevelt and Churchill were engaged in a game of chicken. Both believed that America, Britain, and Western democracy were at stake in the war, yet the president was incapable of persuading the isolationists in Congress to fund Britain’s armaments, and the prime minister was short of dollars but reluctant to let Britain go bankrupt. Unless he found a means to help Britain, the president would stand accused of dismantling the British Empire at the point of a German gun and bankrupting America’s closest ally at the moment of its direst need. The shortage of British dollars also affected the pace of American rearmament. By the end of 1940, Britain had invested $2 billion in American arms companies, including $880 million constructing state-of-the-art warplane plants. Roosevelt worried that Britain would no longer be able to invest in new war equipment factories and the consequent American jobs if they were to go broke.
Lothian made his final contribution to the debate on December 11, the day before he died. He had been doubly cursed by Nancy Astor. She had, first, invited him to her weekend house parties at Cliveden, which had caused him to be dubbed, not entirely unfairly, an appeaser and, less fairly, a defeatist. He recovered from that taint by waging a strenuous campaign in Washington to encourage America to arm Britain. But in her second curse, Astor had converted him to Christian Science, which proved fatal. He contracted a liver complaint in early December and refused the medical attention and blood transfusions that would have saved his life. His last speech was read out while he was lying on his deathbed. It was addressed to Roosevelt: “If you back us, you won’t be backing a quitter.”22
It was a mark of how central Churchill now believed Anglo-American relations to be that at first he suggested as Lothian’s replacement David Lloyd George, the larger-than-life World War One prime minister who had been a principal figure in shaping the Treaty of Versailles. However, Lloyd George’s advanced age, seventy-seven, and the receipt of a number of skeptical letters from Commonwealth leaders caused Churchill to change his mind and he decided instead to send the foreign secretary, Halifax, whom he had beaten to the premiership. Churchill was glad to be rid of Halifax, who, as a rare remaining holdout from the Chamberlain cabinet, was still liable to argue from time to time for a negotiated peace.
Roosevelt returned to the White House on December 14, refreshed and ready for action. Awaiting him was a belatedly delivered letter of congratulation on his election victory from a much relieved Churchill, carefully tailored to flatter Roosevelt’s growing sense of his place in history. “We are entering upon a somber phase of what must evidently be a protracted and broadening war,” the prime minister wrote. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.”23 The letter’s subtext stressed their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage while at the same time alluding to the alternative: a world in which the world’s common tongue was German.
It was time for Roosevelt to unveil what biographer Conrad Black judged “one of the most brilliant ideas of his career.”24 With this ingenious notion, the president managed to square the circle. It would help Britain, continue American rearmament at full throttle, avoid proposing a measure that Congress would not pass, was unlikely to be subverted by the isolationists, yet would continue to placate them by keeping America at arm’s length from the war. Like the New Deal, it was Roosevelt at his most imaginative and practical. In an act of political genius, he slipped it out as if it were hardly worth mentioning in a routine press conference called after his Caribbean absence.
“I don’t think there is any particular news, except possibly one thing that I think is worth my talking about,” he told the assembled reporters.
There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Great Britain in defending itself and that, therefore, quite aside from our historic and current interest in the survival of democracy in the world as a whole, it is equally important from a selfish point of view of American defense that we should do everything to help the British Empire to defend itself.
He reminisced about the time, at the outbreak of World War One, when he met some friends in the smoking car of the Bar Harbor Express, all “eminent bankers and brokers,” returning from their holiday homes in Maine. They all insisted there was not enough money in the world for the war to continue beyond three months, or maybe six months at most, and Roosevelt disagreed. He even put bets of five dollars here and there that the war would last far longer. “I must have made a hundred dollars,” he said. “I wish I had bet a lot more.” The anecdote was to show that “no major war has ever been won or lost through lack of money.”
Talking “selfishly, from the American point of view, nothing else,” he said that orders for military equipment from Britain helped America’s defense “because they automatically create additional facilities.” At first, he thought the only way to allow Britain to continue investing and ordering supplies from American factories was to repeal the neutrality laws and lend the Brits cash, either through banks or from government coffers. An alternative would be for America to make a gift of “all these munitions, ships, plants, guns, et cetera.” He ruled that out. “I am not at all sure that Great Britain would care to have a gift from the taxpayers of the United States,” he said.
But there was another way, he said, that did not involve money or mortgages or gifts. “What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign,” he said. “Get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.”
Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15. You have to pay me $15 for it.” . . . I don’t want $15. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire. We don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, “I was glad to lend you that hose. I see I can’t use it any more. It’s all smashed up.” . . . He says, “All right, I will replace it.” Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.25
Thus, Lend-Lease was born. As Roosevelt knew, there was little chance that Britain would ever pay for the war supplies they were about to be lent. His hosepipe banter was the most elegant and fanciful piece of American fiction since Mark Twain penned Huckleberry Finn.
When it came to drafting what Roosevelt liked to call the “Aid-for-the-Democracies bill,” he was eager to be aboveboard. “We don’t want to fool the public, we want to do this thing right out and out,” he told Morgenthau,26 who was set the task of wording the legislation. The two bills were drafted by Frankfurter, by now a Supreme Court judge, the screenwriter Ben Cohen,27 and two of Morgenthau’s most trusted aides, Edward H. Foley and Oscar S. Cox, to the president’s specific brief to provide legislation “in the blank check form.”28
The draft presented to the Senate and the House asked that the president, “notwithstanding the provisions of any other law,” be given powers to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” any “defense article” to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States” and to accept in eventual payment for the supplies “any other direct or indirect benefit which the President deems satisfactory.” The “any other law” line was included to circumvent the neutrality laws that Roosevelt had found it so hard to repeal. No president had asked for such wide-ranging powers outside of wartime.
British reaction to the wording was one of joy and amazement. Unnamed “British political leaders” were quoted as saying it was “the absolute ultimate” they could have hoped for. The whole tone of the bill “demonstrated to the world the tremendous lengths to which the United States was prepared to go to supercharge Britain’s war machine.” The New York Times reported that the bill “was assured a reception by the man in the [London] street no less enthusiastic than if an important British military victory had been announced.”29
THE SCENE WAS NOW set for a pitched battle over Lend-Lease that extended far beyond the set-piece skirmishes staged in the House and Senate. America was as deeply divided over Lend-Lease as it had been over any issue since emancipation. On one side stood the interventionists centered around the president and his entourage, seconded by well-connected Century Club members, backed by the massed ranks of William Allen White’s Committee for Peace through Revision of the Neutrality Act, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and similar pro-British, pro-Greek, and pro-democracy groups, along with the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Herald Tribune.
Lined up against them was America First led by Wood—only founded in September, but picking up considerable public support—as well as a coalition of pacifist, socialist, Communist, and nationalist groups, given supportive column inches by McCormick’s papers led by the Chicago Tribune, and the Hearst press including the San Francisco Examiner. By the end of February 1941, America First had 650 local groups distributing 1.5 million leaflets, 750,000 campaign buttons, and 500,000 bumper stickers. Money came from large donors and small. Kennedy’s son John, in his senior year at Harvard, sent a $100 check with a note, “What you are all doing is vital.”30 He was joined by future president Gerald R. Ford and the future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver.31
Roosevelt told senators Barkley, Harrison, and Byrnes on January 3 that he would present them with “a comprehensive plan for all-out aid to Great Britain ‘short of war’.”32 Both sides began scouring the nation to find suitably persuasive witnesses to put their cases before the congressional hearings that would start in a couple of weeks.
Most of the big guns were on the side of the interventionists, starting with the president himself. There could be no more eloquent advocate for helping Britain than Roosevelt, and he was prepared to use without restraint the persuasive might of his office in what Theodore Roosevelt had called “the bully pulpit.”33 The anti-interventionists, like Henry Luce, who were internationalists but still wished to keep out of the war, and the all-out isolationists found it more difficult to recruit first-rate campaigners.
By 1940, Lindbergh had been devoting most of his time to trying to help isolationists organize. He was in at the birth of America First, which was based in Chicago with its large German American population, and the No Foreign War campaign, which worked out of the Lexington Hotel in New York. Lindbergh’s diaries through that summer and into the winter are littered with rendezvous in hotel rooms or at the Engineers’ Club, New York. Pressed to take a personal lead, he persuaded his fellow campaigners that he could more effectively promote their cause if he maintained his independence from individual groups.
But that was not the only reason. He was aware that his co-conspirators were mostly third-rate characters, naive and callow students, businessmen with plenty of money but without experience of public speaking or organizing, and self-seeking egomaniacs hitching a ride to national fame on a nascent political movement. Lindbergh was happy to plan endless rallies, mail shots, and newspaper publicity campaigns, but he was always sure to keep himself at a safe distance from them.
“The people who stand against our involvement in the war are badly organized at this time, and I believe we are rapidly approaching a crisis,” he wrote on December 12, 1940.34 The following day he reported, “Up to the present time there has been too large a percentage of cranks and people with strange ideas.”35 Even prominent supporters of isolationism were downhearted, Wesley Stout of the Saturday Evening Post telling Lindbergh that he expected his paper would continue opposing intervention “but that it looks ‘like a losing fight.’ ”36
As 1941 approached, and Americans waited on Roosevelt’s fireside chat that would explain why he was asking for Lend-Lease, Lindbergh, too, felt victory slipping away. “The country—or is it the newspapers?—blows hot and cold on the war,” he wrote. “People do not understand either the issues or the conditions which now exist.”37
Every now and then, he attended meetings to discuss the prospect of America entering the war only to discover that he was surrounded by prowar zealots. After one such encounter at Princeton, he wrote, “During many of the conversations it was taken for granted that the most desirable course of action for this country was that which would be of greatest aid to England, whether or not it involved us in war! . . . In other words, the prime concern of the conference seemed to be the future welfare of England rather than of the United States! . . . I kept wanting to remind them that we were in America and not England.”38
Lindbergh had intentionally kept away from Kennedy, for fear the ambassador might be embarrassed by being associated with such a prominent opponent of Roosevelt, but on November 29 he and Anne were invited at short notice to meet with the ambassador in his suite at the Waldorf Towers. “He feels, as we do, that the British position is hopeless and that the best possible thing for them would be a negotiated peace,” wrote Lindbergh. “He said the damage done by bombs was far greater than had been admitted and that the British could not continue for long to stand the present rate of shipping loss. He said that war would stop if it were not for Churchill and the hope in England that America will come in.”
Kennedy believed that the German submarine war against merchant shipping in the Atlantic was proving so effective the British had just two months’ food before being starved into submission. “Kennedy says he intends to fight to the limit American entry into the war, that he thinks our entry would be unsuccessful and do nothing but damage,” wrote Lindbergh.39
A few days later, in a further attempt to find a charismatic leader to be the isolationists’ champion, two leading lights of America First, Douglas Stuart and Hanford MacNider,40 flew to meet Kennedy in West Palm Beach. They explained that Wood wanted to take a less conspicuous part in the movement and asked the ambassador whether he would become chairman and principal spokesman. Kennedy was encouraging but noncommittal.
On December 19, the day after the president announced Lend-Lease, the pair wrote formally offering Kennedy the position. He replied on the 23rd, saying that he would like to help but as he was still technically an ambassador he was inhibited from joining any political group.41 He said he supported their cause but would probably wait until “sometime in January,” when it became clear what the president was proposing, before he joined the debate. He signed off “with warmest personal regards.”
Wood thought Kennedy’s rejection an act of cowardice and wrote a stinging note. “You are the one man who can speak with authority,” he said. “I believe that if you made some speeches or wrote some articles explaining why it would be disastrous for this country to get into the war, it would turn the tide. I believe it is your duty to do so.”42
The battle of Lend-Lease opened with Roosevelt in a strong position and the isolationists scrabbling to find a true leader. Then came a bombshell. William Allen White, the populist owner and editor of the Emporia Gazette, in Kansas, and national chairman of the interventionist Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, abruptly resigned to join the non-interventionists, claiming in his resignation letter that the committee contained members “ghost-dancing for war.” He sent the letter to Howard, who published it with great glee in full in the New York World–Telegram.
“White says, among other things, we should stay out of this war, that we should not carry contraband into the war zones, that we should not repeal the Johnson Act, or use the Navy to convoy,” reported a delighted Lindbergh. “He says that if he were making a motto for the use of his committee . . . it would be ‘The Yanks Are Not Coming.’ ” Lindbergh was encouraged. “The antiwar sentiment seems to be gaining, at least momentarily, in this country.”43 He fired off a public statement of congratulation to White, the first press notice he had issued since his baby son was kidnapped eight years before.
Eager to grasp the initiative delivered him by White’s defection, Wood, despite his wish to desert the front line, fired a salvo, sending a telegram to the president on December 28, the day before Roosevelt was to deliver his Lend-Lease fireside chat. Wood told the president he was “confident that you will impress upon the nation your pre-election statements that under no conditions will you involve our nation in war abroad.”44
Roosevelt was aware that his broadcast was the key to winning American support for Lend-Lease. Having scored a hit with his hosepipe analogy, Roosevelt cast his net wide among his intimates asking for other ingenious, striking phrases to inspire the nation. The key words emerged from an unlikely source. Over lunch with Frankfurter, the Free French official Jean Monnet, now a member of the British Supply Council arranging the purchase of war supplies for Britain, summed up America’s role in a single, simple phrase. As soon as Frankfurter heard it, he ordered Monnet not to repeat it to anyone until the president had considered using it. When Roosevelt heard the soubriquet he immediately made it his own. It proved one of the most memorable and evocative catchphrases of the war: America was to become “The Arsenal of Democracy.”45
When he began his broadcast from his desk in the White House, Roosevelt met Wood’s point head on. “The whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence,” he said. The Axis nations had threatened “that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations—a program aimed at world control—they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.” He quoted Hitler’s menacing words and paid tribute to the British and the Greeks who were fighting to keep Nazism away from America’s shores.
Then he directed his fire at the isolationists. “Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us,” he said. “But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere.” America only remained free because the British navy stood in the way of Hitler. “If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere,” he said. “It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.”
“Some of us like to believe that even if Britain falls, we are still safe, because of the broad expanse of the Atlantic and of the Pacific,” he continued. “But the width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.” The distance between Africa and Brazil was less than a five-hour flight by a modern bomber plane. One of the telegrams he had received “begged me not to tell again of the ease with which our American cities could be bombed by any hostile power which had gained bases in this Western Hemisphere. The gist of that telegram was: ‘Please, Mr. President, don’t frighten us by telling us the facts.’ ” He reminded appeasers that even nations that had signed nonaggression pacts with Hitler found themselves overrun by Nazi troops.
He warned of “American appeasers” and “secret emissaries” who spread defeatism and dissension to make it easier for Hitler to conquer America.
There are also American citizens, many of then in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.
These people not only believe that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations. Some of them go much further than that. They say that we can and should become the friends and even the partners of the Axis powers. Some of them even suggest that we should imitate the methods of the dictatorships. But Americans never can and never will do that.
He warned against clamor for a negotiated peace. “Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?” he asked.
The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war.
“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he said. “For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself.”46
It was a powerful and passionate address heard by three-quarters of all Americans, the highest number ever to listen to a broadcast by Roosevelt. Of that number, polls recorded 80 percent agreeing with the president and only 12 percent disagreeing. Previous polls had shown that until then, 61 percent favored helping Britain even if it led to war.47
The “arsenal of democracy” broadcast immensely pleased Churchill, listening on the night that Hitler’s bombers were laying waste to the City of London, the capital’s financial district. He wrote to Roosevelt, “I thank you for testifying before all the world that the future safety and greatness of the American union are intimately concerned with the upholding and the effective arming of [Britain’s] indomitable spirit.”48 He confided to an aide that Lend-Lease “is tantamount to a declaration of war.”49
Roosevelt’s broadcast was going to be a hard act for the isolationists to follow. Wood described Roosevelt’s words as “virtually a personal declaration of undeclared war on Germany,” which was a feeble and inadequate response in light of the atmosphere of crisis Roosevelt had managed to convey. In this, the first skirmish that led to two months of hard pounding, the isolationists had been outgunned. On January 3, Roosevelt told senators Barkley, Harrison, and Byrnes that he would submit to Congress “a comprehensive plan for all-out aid to Great Britain short of war.”50