Isolationists turn their fire on convoying,
Roosevelt attacks the Copperheads, Lindbergh
resigns from the army, Willkie backs the president,
the Royal Navy sinks the Bismarck.
HALIFAX HAD a tin ear for public opinion and little grasp of American politics, which is why he believed isolationism was finished. “With the passage of the [Lend-Lease] Bill, it can be said that except for a small number of irreconcilable isolationists the whole country is united in its support of the Allies against the totalitarian powers,” he wrote home.1 He declared that the chronic insularity in America that had caused the Senate to refuse to ratify the Versailles Treaty had been roundly defeated.
Hopkins had a clearer view. He told Churchill that the 10–15 percent of Americans who said they supported neutrality were Nazi or Communist sympathizers who, like Lindbergh, prayed for Hitler to succeed; that a further 15–20 percent, led by Kennedy, wanted to help Britain but not if it meant going to war; that 10–15 percent believed, like Knox, Stimson, and most of the military officers, that war was now inevitable and that war should be declared against the Axis; and that Roosevelt, like 50–60 percent of Americans, wanted to give Britain as much help as it needed, even if this meant that America would be dragged into war. As the president was backed by the Knox–Stimson group and also represented a fair proportion of Kennedy’s supporters, Hopkins estimated support for Britain at about three-quarters of the country.2 Gallup confirmed that 72 percent favored the president’s support for Britain.
Still reeling from their Lend-Lease defeat, the isolationists regrouped and returned to the attack. On April 1, seventy-one isolationist members of Congress met to discuss how best to continue their opposition to the president. The suggestion that the US Navy should escort British merchant vessels provided a perfect opportunity. Their intransigence gave credence to a view circulating in the British Foreign Office that, even with Lend-Lease now the law of the land, America might still find a way to duck out of playing its part in defeating Fascism.
It was an opinion propounded by the Foreign Office official and later Harvard Business School professor T. North Whitehead, who, after more than a decade in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had returned to London to advise on American attitudes. The Americans, he said, were “a mercurial people.” “Until they are finally committed to actual warfare, it would be unwise to assume that, in certain circumstances, the Americans would be incapable of checking their present helpful trend,” he wrote. “The Americans are coming on well, but they are not yet in the bag.”
It was a view shared by Sir Robert Vansittart,3 the veteran Foreign Office official whose suspicion of Hitler from the early 1930s had sat oddly with having to lead the British foreign service during appeasement. “Many here have an uneasy feeling that, if we study America, she may in her turn yet rat on us,” he wrote. “My country is, for the second time, doing America’s fighting for her.”4 His view coincided with that of Fish, who had asked in the Lend-Lease debate, “Is it not rather cowardly of us, if England [sic] is fighting our battle, not to go into the war?”5
The isolationists had pressed for a ban on convoying in the Lend-Lease Act. The key line was, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or to permit the authorization of convoying by naval vessels of the United States.” During the Senate hearings, Nye had extracted a statement from Knox that convoying was an act of war. For opponents of the war, convoying became the key test of the president’s sincerity when he said he had no intention of America entering the fray. His remark, made at a press conference on January 21, that convoys would bring America “awfully close to war”6 was simplified by isolationists into “Convoys mean shooting, and shooting means war” and repeatedly thrown back at him.
After Lend-Lease became law, throughout March the president batted increasingly aggressive questions about convoying. In his speech to the White House correspondents on March 15, he spoke of “the survival of the vital bridge across the ocean—the bridge of ships which carry the arms and food for those who are fighting the good fight,”7 which suggested convoying. The next day, Senator Carter Glass8 said he favored convoys, if that is what was needed. The next day, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies announced its support for convoys. On March 19, a motion was introduced into the House to reinforce the ban on convoying, and on March 31, the Senate debated a proposed ban led by isolationist Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire. Polls showed, as Whitehead and Vansittart had predicted, that a majority of Americans were not in favor of the US Navy protecting British ships, despite their notional support for Britain against Hitler.
By mid-April, rumors in Washington that “battlecraft of the Navy and Coast Guard are now giving armed escort to munition-laden British merchantmen leaving Atlantic ports for the European battlefront”9 were swiftly denied by Stark. Early told the press that the president was obliged to protect American shipping and might issue “a sensational announcement that if New York City were attacked by an enemy it will be defended.”10
The next day, Early confirmed that American vessels were “on neutrality patrol” in the Atlantic and if they encountered “alien ships” they would report the sighting by unscrambled radio message, meaning that anyone, including the Royal Navy, could listen. Roosevelt had gradually extended the reach of naval patrols. In September 1939, the limit was just three miles from the American shore. By November 1940, that had been extended to 1,000 miles. In the spring of 1941, it reached 1,200 miles.
Tobey increased the heat on the White House when he published a letter from an anonymous mother of an American sailor alleging that “the United States has been convoying ships for about 1 month.” The accusation was true, in that American naval vessels were accompanying British ships. The administration then made it clear that they were indeed prepared to convoy British ships, however convoying might be defined. On April 24, Knox declared, “We cannot allow our goods to be sunk in the Atlantic—we shall be beaten if they do. We must see the job through. . . . This is our fight.”11 The same day, Hull confirmed that “aid [to Britain] must reach its destination in the shortest time and in maximum quality. So ways must be found to do this.”12
Into this confusion came Lindbergh, who had finally agreed to join the committee of America First, but had declined the chairmanship. He continued to campaign as if Lend-Lease had not become law and could be repealed. Before “an enthusiastic crowd” of “11,000 inside and about 4,000 outside”13 at the Chicago Arena on April 17, he claimed that America First represented “the hundred-odd million people in our country who oppose sending our soldiers to Europe again.” His aim was “to make America impregnable at home, and to keep out of these wars across the sea.” He believed that “sending of arms to Europe was a mistake” and insisted, “Whether or not America enters the war is within our control.”
He thought it would be “a tragedy to the world—a tragedy even to Germany—if the British empire collapses. But I must tell you frankly that I believe this war was lost by England [sic] and France even before it was declared, and that it is not within our power in America today to win the war for England. . . . We will not be able to transport an army across the ocean large enough to invade the continent of Europe successfully.”14
Six nights later, in the Manhattan Center, New York, he told a capacity crowd of 10,000 much the same, but elicited some of the most savage criticism he had yet received. Columnist Walter Winchell reported that “every hate spreader they could find showed up.” The newspaper PM described the audience as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, crackpots and just people. The just people seemed out of place.” Rex Stout, chairman of the prowar Friends of Democracy, said that Lindbergh “would be acceptable to Hitler as an American gauleiter.”15
The following day, Roosevelt insisted to the press that American ships were “patrolling” the Atlantic rather than “convoying” British ships. The words meant very different things, he said. “I think some of you know what a horse looks like. I think you also know what a cow looks like,” he said. “You can’t turn a cow into a horse by calling it something else. Calling it a horse, it is still a cow.” He used the analogy of Western wagon trains that employed scouts to discover whether there were dangers ahead. “It didn’t move across the plains unless it got reports from a long ways—200 to 300 miles off,” he said. “It was not felt safe to wait until the Indians got two miles away before you saw them.”
Then he turned his fire on Lindbergh. Asked why the army, which needed experienced fliers, had not called up Lindbergh from the reserve, he replied, “There are people in this country . . . who are adopting a rather curious attitude.” There was “this mythical person in our midst who takes the attitude that dictatorships are going to win,” he said, which was “dumb.” If anyone doubted that the “mythical person” the president had in mind was Lindbergh, Roosevelt reminded the reporters of the Civil War Democratic leader Clement Vallandigham,16 leader of the “Copperheads,” opponents of the war who constantly demanded that Lincoln sue for peace with the Confederacy.
“Vallandigham, as you know, was an appeaser,” said the president. “He wanted to make peace from 1863 on because the North ‘couldn’t win.’ Once upon a time there was a place called Valley Forge and there were an awful lot of appeasers that pleaded with Washington to quit, because he ‘couldn’t win.’ ”17 He commended to the reporters what Thomas Paine had to say about “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.”18
To be attacked directly by the president was too much for Lindbergh. “Roosevelt had implied treason in connection with my name,” he wrote in his diary. “The President’s attack was more than just a political attack, for he did so in connection with my commission in the Army. . . . A point of honor is at stake.” He thought he would have to resign from the reserve. For once, he considered his paradoxical position. “Here I am stumping the country with pacifists and considering resigning as a colonel in the Army Air Corps, when there is no philosophy I disagree with more than that of the pacifist, and nothing I would rather be doing than flying in the Air Corps.”
Two days later, he decided to resign, lest “I would lose something in my own character that means even more to me than my commission in the Air Corps.”19 Everywhere he saw conspirators working to do him and America ill. “Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio and most of our motion pictures,” he wrote. “There are also the ‘intellectuals,’ and the ‘Anglophiles,’ and the British agents who are allowed free rein, the international financial interests, and many others.”20 Two days after Lindbergh’s resignation from the armed forces, isolationists suffered another blow when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed an attempt to pass a reinforced ban on convoying.
By the start of May, Lindbergh had recovered his composure and, at an America First rally in St. Louis on May 3, explained why he had resigned his commission. It was because “our country should not enter the war in Europe, while the President . . . believe[s] we should take part in that war.” He reassured his audience that America was not in real danger, saying, “Bombing planes can be built to fly across the ocean, but their cost is too high and their effectiveness too low to make them a serious menace to this country.”21
The same day, Willkie made a dramatic reentry into the national debate by writing to the president saying that the Atlantic patrols were inadequate and that he would support convoying. “If I were President,” Willkie told reporters, he would ask the armed services the best way to ensure that the supplies reached Britain. “I do not believe the present use of the Navy for patrolling is enough to prevent our production from going to the bottom,” he said. He thought Roosevelt’s comparison of Lindbergh to a Copperhead ill-advised. “The best way to dissipate Colonel Lindbergh’s influence is to show the fallacy of his arguments, not to attack him personally,” he said.
Three days after Lindbergh spoke, Stimson, at Roosevelt’s urging, told a national radio audience, “So long as [the Atlantic and the Pacific] are under our own or of friendly control their broad waters constitute an insuperable barrier to any armies.” He reminded his listeners that “for over one hundred years” the British fleet had protected America, which had allowed America to do without “large standing armies. We have built populous cities upon our seacoast which are easily vulnerable to attack” and “adopted a mode of national life” dependent on the British, whom Americans did not fear.
But Britain was now besieged by Hitler and America still needed two years to rearm. If the US Navy “should make secure the seas for the delivery of our munitions to Great Britain,” it would help preserve America’s freedom. “Unless we on our side are ready to sacrifice and, if need be, to die for the conviction that the freedom of America must be saved, it will not be saved.”22 It was the closest anyone in the administration had come to saying that war was at hand. America First issued a statement accusing Stimson of being “old womanish and defeatist”23 and saying that he should have openly asked for congressional consent to convoy and a declaration of war against Germany.
The same evening, at Madison Square Garden, Willkie told a capacity crowd at a “Freedom Rally” that isolationism was an inadequate defense. “One might as well seek to guard his own home with an iron fence while all his neighbors are sickening and dying of a contagious disease,” he said. “I care not whether you call safe delivery [of arms supplies to Britain] convoying, patrolling, airplane accompaniment, or what not. . . . We want them protected at once.” Arming Britain was the “last probable chance to ultimately avoid war.” He denounced “self-styled practical men” like Lindbergh, who said that Britain was heading to defeat, as “looking into the small end of a telescope.”24
On May 12, the Nazis bolstered the interventionists’ view that democracy itself was in danger when the House of Commons was bombed and American newspapers were filled with pictures of Churchill standing in the rubble of “the cradle of democracy,” proclaiming it would be rebuilt exactly as before.
The same day, Lindbergh visited Ford at his home in Dearborn and asked for money to mount a national campaign. Ford was “very much interested,” assured Lindbergh “there was almost no limit to what he would do in opposing American intervention in the war,”25 and ordered the Ford Motor Company’s advertising chief, Lou Maxon, to design a $250,000 campaign ($4 million in 2014 terms), with a promise that this sum was just a start.
Maxon put Ford’s “four best ad writers”26 to work. Then, on May 20, Lindbergh was thrown into despair when Ford abruptly canceled the campaign without explanation. The car mogul’s personal assistant “implied that Ford did not trust some of the people on the America First Committee,” Lindbergh wrote. “What is it really due to? Eccentricity and advancing years? Actual suspicion of the America First Committee? The desire to completely control everything in which he invests heavily? Or is it government pressure in the form of ‘defense’ contracts?”27 In fact, all three played their part, though Ford’s increasing eccentricity and pressure from his son to stop allowing politics to interfere with business was the likely main reason for his about-turn. Ford may have been sympathetic to America First, but he was a businessman above all. The lucrative government contracts to make Pratt and Whitney engines and B-24 warplanes would have been enough to persuade Ford to back off from an activity that would have endangered making profits.
Further setbacks beset the isolationists. There was a flurry of talk about a negotiated peace to the European war when on May 10, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess,28 flew alone, unannounced, and apparently unbidden to Scotland to negotiate peace with Britain. Churchill, who had no intention of negotiating, kept Hess’s arrival secret until the top Nazi had been diagnosed and found mentally unstable. Hitler was apoplectic at Hess’s unauthorized mission and Stalin grew suspicious that Germany and Britain were about to unite against the Soviet Union. The German press soon dismissed the peace initiative as the act of “a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinations traceable to World War [One] injuries.”29 As soon as it became clear that Hess was operating without Hitler’s authority, speculation about peace talks, which had buoyed the isolationists for a few days, subsided.
For a while, Churchill was happy to allow speculation to build in America that Britain was so near defeat she might accept a negotiated peace. On May 4, feeling severely threatened by invasion, the prime minister wrote to the president, imploring him to show solidarity with the democracies by declaring war against Germany. Morgenthau and Ickes agreed: now was the time to formally enter the war. Stimson, who unlike others in the cabinet had experience of war, urged the president to prepare himself, the country, and the world for American involvement in the war. But Roosevelt claimed that public opinion was not yet overwhelmingly in favor, and that isolationist sentiment was still running too high. Shortly afterward, the president, rarely in the best of health, fell ill with intestinal flu and acute anemia.
On May 16, Tobey withdrew a motion in the Senate to reconfirm the ban on convoying after the America First committee asked him to call off the measure. As Lindbergh explained, “It would almost certainly have been defeated, and the Administration would then have claimed that its defeat was an implied authorization for convoys.”30
Alf Landon, the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, was approached to head up America First and declined. His experience and national reputation would have proved useful to a wilting campaign. With congressional attempts to halt convoying running into the sand, America First began to consider campaigning for a national referendum on entering the war and talked about impeaching Roosevelt, which Lindbergh thought “possible though not probable.”31
It was not long before an incident appeared to prove that America was already in a shooting war and that the convoying debate had been overtaken by events. On May 21, an American steamship, the Robin Moor, en route from New York to South Africa, was sunk by a German submarine, even though it was flying the Stars and Stripes. The captain, crew of twenty-nine, and eight passengers were given meager rations of ersatz bread and butter and time to board the lifeboats, but it was a particularly cruel sinking. The ship was 750 miles from the nearest port, Freetown, Sierra Leone, and it was two weeks before the survivors were rescued. In a message to Congress a month later, Roosevelt would call it a “ruthless sinking” designed to intimidate America “into a course of non-resistance to German plans for universal conquest” and evidence that Hitler wanted “to seize control of the high seas.”32
Roosevelt ordered all German and Italian consulates closed and the freezing of German and Italian assets in the United States, leaving Wheeler to bluster, “At least we ought to await an explanation before we jump at conclusions.”33 Later, Wheeler justified the German sinking of the Robin Moor because 70 percent of the cargo consisted of war materiel. Roosevelt was happy for him to take such an unpopular line, knowing that the cruelty of the incident spoke for itself and served to reinforce his policy of escorting merchant vessels across the Atlantic.
News of the sinking of the Robin Moor had not reached Lindbergh by the time on May 23 when he addressed a noisy crowd of 22,000 in Madison Square Garden, with 14,000 more listening in the street on loudspeakers, and millions listening on the radio. It was an ill-tempered, highly charged audience. An attempt by the band to play “God Bless America,” composed by Irving Berlin,34 was shouted down as it was deemed “an interventionist song.”35 Coughlin, the perennial socialist candidate Norman Thomas, and Joseph McWilliams, “self styled fuehrer of the Christian Mobilizers,” Teddy Roosevelt’s son Archie,36 and his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth were present, and Wheeler was a fellow speaker. Telegrams of support came from the novelist Sinclair Lewis,37 the film star Lillian Gish,38 and Wood.
The event was more telling in exposing America First’s deep divisions and its extremist support than in any new argument. Before the rally, Lindbergh issued a statement, in response to Friends of Democracy, that America First was not backed by “Bundists, Communists, or any other un-American support.”39 McWilliams’s presence confounded that attempt to distance the organization from the radicals in its midst. On seeing McWilliams in the hall, organizers tried to have him ejected but police refused, saying it was none of their business, and the Fascist leader remained.
The New Republic’s house isolationist John T. Flynn suspected an interventionist conspiracy. “What he is doing here, how he got in, or whose stooge he is I do not know,” said Flynn, “but I do know that the photographers for the war-making newspapers always know where to find him.” Flynn said that America First wanted the support of “the 100 million Americans who are against the war,” not “a handful of Bundists, Communists and Christian Fronters who are without number, without influence, without power and without respect in this or any other community.”
Lindbergh and Anne were welcomed into the hall amid cries of “Our next president!” and his address was preceded by a parade weaving its way through the hall bearing the banner “Copperheads of Westchester.” Lindbergh declared that America First meant that “American boys will not be sent across the ocean to die so that England or Germany or France or Spain may dominate other nations” and that “our soldiers will not have to fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours. . . . Many of us do not think we can impose our way of life, at the point of a machine gun, on the peoples of Germany, Russia, Italy, France and Japan.”
He said it was only a matter of the right leadership to make America “the most powerful country in the world.” He argued that Roosevelt had made America a dictatorship and the presidential election had been a sham. “We had no more chance to vote on the issue of peace and war last November than if we had been in a totalitarian state ourselves,” he said. It was “as if Hitler had run against Goering.” If America entered the war, “losses are likely to run into the millions and . . . victory itself is doubtful.” Lindbergh was aware that he was repeating himself. “I have already used up all the arguments against getting into the war,” he complained to his diary.40
Speaking next, Wheeler condemned Halifax and “the royal refugees” for urging war “to save the British empire” which he described as “tottering,” and he dismissed the suggestion Hitler would invade America as he would need a force two million strong.41
Stark had not waited to be asked by the president before he began making plans to convoy British ships. As early as mid-February, weeks before Lend-Lease became law, he ordered the commander of the newly created Atlantic Fleet to create a force to take over convoying from the Royal Navy. On March 20, Stark informed Roosevelt that it was ready to begin convoying duties. By March 24, Stimson and Knox let the president know they believed that convoying was “the only solution” to German raids on British shipping.42 The following day, Hitler extended U-boat operations to the coast of Greenland.
In early April, Roosevelt called an all-day meeting at the White House attended by Stimson, Knox, Hopkins, and others, and asked for an atlas of the Atlantic. He ran his finger around Greenland and Iceland as if with a pencil and sketched a line down toward the coast of Brazil. “By drawing a line midway between the western-most bulge of Africa and the easternmost bulge of Brazil, we found that the median line between the two continents was at about longitude line 25,” Stimson wrote in his diary.
His plan is then that we shall patrol the high seas west of this median line, all the way down as far as we can furnish the force to do it, and that the British will swing their convoys over westward to the west side of this line, so that they will be within our area. Then by the use of patrol planes and patrol vessels we can patrol and follow the convoys and notify them of any German raiders or German submarines that we may see and give them a chance to escape.43
The same day, April 10, Roosevelt announced that he had signed an agreement with the Danish government in exile in Washington to include “Greenland in our sphere of cooperative hemispheric defense,” and that naval patrols would now guarantee the safety of the surrounding waters. Just as he had avoided the neutrality legislation by inventing Lend-Lease, so Roosevelt moved to avoid the prohibition of convoying in the Lend-Lease Act by redefining the western hemisphere to include Greenland. His solution to the ban on convoying was literally to redraw the map.
Little could more graphically underline Britain’s vulnerability by sea as the arrival into the North Sea on May 19 of the new German battleship Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. On the morning of May 24, it encountered the British battle cruiser the Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales in the Denmark Strait. In the ensuing battle, the Hood was hit in the magazine, exploded, broke in two, and sank in three minutes. Of the 1,418 crew, only three survived. The Prince of Wales landed three shells on the Bismarck before it broke off the action. The Bismarck headed to the French port of Saint-Nazaire for minor repairs. Unharmed, the Prinz Eugen continued into the Atlantic in search of British vessels to sink.
Two days later, the Bismarck was sighted by an American naval ensign aboard a long-range RAF American-built Catalina flying boat, and was pursued and hit by torpedoes launched from Swordfish flying boats assigned to the carrier Ark Royal. One jammed the Bismarck’s steering gear, leaving the battleship only capable of sailing in circles. Then on the morning of May 27, the King George V and the Rodney appeared. In less than an hour, after sustaining a number of direct hits, the Bismarck was on fire. She was finished off with torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire, capsized, and sank. Of her crew of 2,300, all but 118 perished.
The sinking of the Bismarck was a salutary lesson. It deterred Hitler from sending more surface vessels into the Atlantic, but the element of chance that caused damage to the Bismarck and made it vulnerable to attack demonstrated to Churchill and Roosevelt how slender was the naval advantage Britain enjoyed. The same day, May 27, the president informed Churchill that he would be sending 75,000 tons of supplies in American ships to shore up the British army in Egypt, including 200 tanks and 700 trucks.
In a fireside chat on the evening of the 27th, the president explained his current thinking about helping Britain and revealed some startling news. “The present rate of Nazi sinkings of merchant ships is more than three times as high as the capacity of British shipyards to replace them,” he said. “It is more than twice the combined British and American output of merchant ships today. We have, accordingly, extended our patrol in North and South Atlantic waters. We are steadily adding more and more ships and planes to that patrol.” In fact American forces had been protecting British convoys for some time.
He then addressed his isolationist opponents:
There is, of course, a small group of sincere, patriotic men and women whose real passion for peace has shut their eyes to the ugly realities of international banditry and to the need to resist it at all costs. I am sure they are embarrassed by the sinister support they are receiving from the enemies of democracy in our midst, the Bundists, the Fascists, and Communists, and every group devoted to bigotry and racial and religious intolerance.
It is no mere coincidence that all the arguments put forward by these enemies of democracy—all their attempts to confuse and divide our people and to destroy public confidence in our Government—all their defeatist forebodings that Britain and democracy are already beaten—all their selfish promises that we can “do business” with Hitler—all of these are but echoes of the words that have been poured out from the Axis bureaus of propaganda.44
The president proclaimed “an unlimited national emergency,” though he did not explain what this would entail. In fact, it meant little except to encourage Americans to take the prospect of war even more seriously than before. It was, as ever, a case of a dramatic Roosevelt announcement followed by extreme caution. King George VI was impressed, writing to the president, “I have been so struck by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.”45
Roosevelt’s broadcast brought an immediate riposte from the isolationists, with Taft fuming, “He has no right to declare war whether a national emergency or not. It follows inevitably that he has no right to engage deliberately in military or naval action equivalent to war except when the country is attacked.”46
The administration was by now paying little attention to isolationist complaints. In the months of May and June, Knox ordered the transfer of three battleships, an aircraft carrier, four cruisers, and smaller naval vessels from the Pacific to the Atlantic to bolster defense of the British convoys. On June 6, Churchill went to an airfield in southern England to witness the first Lend-Lease Flying Fortress bombers landing in Britain.
Although support for staying out of the war remained strong, and was certainly enough to ensure Roosevelt edged toward a full state of war with the utmost care, the isolationists were increasingly seen as out of touch, treacherous, unrealistic, and un-American. The following month, the war in Europe took a surprise turn, a radical shift that would completely alter the calculations of interventionists and isolationists alike.