From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (85 page)

Roosevelt cleverly played on a mood he likely shared to secure the changes in the neutrality laws he had sought for months. Ingeniously—perhaps disingenuously—packaging his proposals as a "Peace Bill" to keep the United States out of war and insisting that he was reverting to traditional standards of neutrality, he warned that existing legislation permitted American ships to go into combat zones, where, as in 1917, they would be prey for enemy warships. Avoiding any hint that he was seeking to assist the Allies, he proposed to ban U.S. ships from war zones while also asking for repeal of the arms embargo. For the first time on a foreign policy issue, he put the full prestige of his office on the line and summoned all his considerable political skills. He called a special joint session of Congress and presented the legislation in person. His aides lobbied furiously to keep wobbly legislators in line and win over fence-sitters and Republican internationalists. The White House encouraged private citizens to organize nominally private groups to mount an intensive public campaign to win popular support and put pressure on Congress. Headed by legendary Kansas journalist William Allen White, the organization orchestrated speeches, radio addresses, rallies, and letter-writing campaigns. The measure naturally provoked powerful opposition from isolationists who saw through FDR's rhetoric and warned, correctly as it turned out, that aid to the Allies would lead to war. After nearly six weeks and more than a million words of often heated debate, Roosevelt in early November signed legislation repealing the arms embargo but extending cash-and-carry to all trade, still a major limitation on the president's ability to assist Britain and France. Nevertheless, it was another important turning point. The United States was again poised to be the arsenal of democracy. A
measure promoted to keep the nation out of war provided the means to make it virtually a cobelligerent.
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The new relationship developed more slowly than Roosevelt had hoped in the fall and winter of 1939–40. After Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland, and the Soviet Union swallowed up Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia and invaded Finland, an extended lull followed. In this period of inaction and uncertainty known as the Phony War, the United States and Britain did not openly clash over neutrality issues as in 1914–17, but there were problems. Although cheered by repeal of the arms embargo, British officials objected to U.S. caution, insisting that, as in World War I, the Americans would fight to the last Briton and then step in to dictate the settlement. "God protect us from a German victory and an American peace" was a frequently heard complaint.
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Roosevelt hoped that Allied purchases of war materials would stimulate U.S. rearmament and promote prosperity. Fearing a long war, the British husbanded their resources, especially cash. They placed small war-related orders. To the great irritation of Hull and the southern bloc in Congress, they cut back purchases of other items such as tobacco.

The next turning point came in the spring of 1940. In April, after six months of inactivity, Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg warfare in all its fury, employing air power, armor, ground forces, and fifth column subversion against Scandinavia, the neutral Low Countries of Western Europe, and France. The results stunned the world. Denmark capitulated without opposition; Norway fell within weeks. The Netherlands surrendered in four days, Belgium in less than a month. The greatest shock came in France. German forces skirted the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. Exploiting the Allies' poor leadership and failure to coordinate forces, they sped down the Somme Valley and by late May reached the English Channel. The only flaw in the Nazi campaign was a delay that permitted the British miraculously to evacuate 220,000 of their own forces and an additional 120,000 French troops at Dunkirk. Enormous quantities of vital war materials were abandoned in France. In a ceremony rich with symbolism, a jubilant Hitler on June 22 accepted the French surrender in the same railway car in the Compiègne Forest where Germany had signed the armistice on November 11, 1918. In less than three months, Hitler had accomplished what Kaiser Wilhelm could not do in four years. Britain stood alone.

The fall of France had an enormous impact in the United States. It caught even well-informed Americans completely by surprise, and the
complacency that had marked the Phony War gave way to fear, even panic. For the first time since the early national period, Americans felt threatened by events abroad. Hitler's ruthless attacks on neutral nations, the collapse of France, and the speed, precision, and seemingly unchallengeable power of the Nazi war machine worked a great transformation in American attitudes toward the war and indeed toward foreign policy and national defense. A nation that had long taken its security for granted suddenly felt vulnerable.
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Roosevelt used the urgency created by these shocking events to push with a rare dispatch and certitude his policies of rearmament and aid to Britain. To build bipartisan backing, he brought into his cabinet Republican internationalists Henry L. Stimson and Chicago publisher Frank Knox to head the War and Navy departments, solidifying cabinet support for his policies and creating the closest thing the United States has had to a coalition government.
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Resolving months of indecision and justifying his actions in terms of duty rather than ambition, he permitted his political stalwarts to arrange a "spontaneous" demonstration at the Democratic convention in favor of his tradition-shattering nomination for a third term. In a dramatic speech in Charlottesville, Virginia, in June 1940, he denounced Italy's intervention in the war, warned that the United States could not remain free in a world dominated by the "contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents," and vowed to "extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation." He secured $10.5 billion from Congress for rearmament. He overrode War Department opposition to gain the release of substantial quantities of arms and ammunition to be sold to private companies and then through cash-and-carry to Britain.
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Roosevelt also took unprecedented steps to mobilize public support. The White House used the Federal Bureau of Investigation not only to monitor subversive groups but also, through such means as illegal wiretaps, to secure information about the activities of anti-interventionists, giving it a marked political advantage in a major foreign policy debate. The administration closely followed public opinion polls, sometimes shaping the responses by formulating the questions. To undermine Catholic opposition, Undersecretary of State Welles encouraged the U.S. hierarchy to deliver speeches supporting aid to Britain and then distributed the
speeches to the nationwide Catholic press.
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Pressure groups organized around causes or specific issues had existed since the turn of the century, but for the first time in 1940–41 they played a central role in a debate on a vital issue. And for the first time they had intimate ties with government. In the spring of 1940, Roosevelt encouraged White to form the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDA) to educate the nation about the fascist threat and mobilize backing for aid to Britain. The Committee eventually had six hundred chapters and thousands of members. It held local and regional meetings, wrote newspaper and magazine articles, sponsored radio messages, and petitioned Congress. The extent of this ostensibly private group's ties with government was not known at the time. In fact, the administration often suggested what it should do and furnished inside information, making it appear that the government was responding to popular demand, a practice that raises serious questions about the democratic process.
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Those internationalists who believed the fascist threat demanded an immediate declaration of war formed in June 1940 a splinter organization, the Century Group, named after the posh New York men's club where they met. Later reincarnated as the Fight for Freedom Committee, it supplanted the CDA as the major pressure group as the nation moved closer to war.
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Pressure groups also spearheaded the opposition. In July, Yale University students and midwestern businessmen formed the America First Committee. As the name suggests, America Firsters ardently opposed intervention—and aid to Britain, which, they argued, would inevitably lead to intervention. They saw the war not as a great ideological conflict but as another round in the endless struggle among Europeans for power and empire. The United States, they insisted, had no stake in that conflict. Some like aviator hero Charles Lindbergh preached accommodation with Hitler. Others minimized the German threat and advocated defense of the Western Hemisphere. America First was an unwieldy coalition of strange bedfellows, businessmen, old progressives and leftists,
and some strongly anti-Jewish groups. Many blamed Roosevelt's interventionist policies on a personal lust for power. These various groups created local and regional offices, organized rallies, sent out mailings, and propagandized Congress.
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The most important development in the fall of 1940 was the famous destroyers-bases deal in which the United States "gave" Britain fifty old destroyers in exchange for leases for U.S. naval bases on British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. Initiating a new period of cautious cooperation with the United States and what would become a special personal relationship with FDR, Britain's new prime minister, Winston Churchill, first raised the issue in May, warning of his nation's declining cash reserves and its desperate need for military equipment, especially for ships to meet an increasingly urgent German threat in the Atlantic. When Roosevelt deflected these requests, Churchill warned in July that "the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor."
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Although troubled by Churchill's reputation as a heavy drinker, FDR was encouraged by his firm leadership and was urged on by hawks in his cabinet and the Century Group. Increasingly optimistic that Britain could hold out, he nevertheless faced major obstacles. Alarmed by the president's earlier efforts to make arms available to Britain, Congress had forbidden such transfers unless the items in question had been declared by U.S. military leaders obsolete and of no value to the national defense.

Roosevelt ingeniously—some have argued illegally—got around the various obstacles. He encouraged White's group to stimulate debate, making it appear that the idea came from the public. He headed off possible domestic challenge by having top military leaders declare the ships obsolete. To sweeten the deal for Congress, the public, and the U.S. military, he persuaded a wary and reluctant but ultimately compliant Churchill to agree to ninety-nine-year leases for U.S. bases on eight British territories from Central America to Newfoundland and to pledge publicly that Britain would not surrender its fleet. Through Century Group intermediaries, he secured from his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie a private pledge not to make the arrangement a campaign issue. In his boldest—and most legally
questionable—move, he avoided Congress by using an executive order, citing a 1936 Supreme Court ruling that in foreign affairs the executive was "the sole organ of the federal government" and did not require congressional authority to act. The deal did not provide immediate tangible assistance either to Britain or the United States. It was months before the ships would be available for use or construction could begin on the bases. But it gave a powerful morale boost to embattled Britain at one of the most crucial periods in its history—"more precious than rubies," Churchill called the rusty destroyers. It stretched the president's constitutional authority beyond generally acknowledged bounds, establishing a precedent that would be used repeatedly in the next half century. It was, in Churchill's words, a "decidedly unneutral act," pushing the United States into a new phase of non-belligerency—not yet at war but closely tied to Britain—and a giant step closer to war.
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The election campaign of 1940 in a curious way may have set back policies both candidates preferred. Willkie generally agreed with Roosevelt's foreign policy; at first he faithfully adhered to his pledge not to challenge aid to Britain. As his campaign lagged, however, he let fly with charges that Roosevelt's handling of policies would lead the nation into war. The president responded with a typically Rooseveltian obfuscation that he likely later regretted. "I have said this before," he proclaimed in Boston, "but I shall say it again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars," calculatingly omitting the phrase in the written speech "except in case of foreign attack." "That hypocritical son of a bitch!" Willkie exclaimed. "That's going to beat me."
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The war itself rather than FDR's shenanigans likely dictated Roosevelt's victory and unprecedented third term. Americans watched—and listened—in late 1940 as Britons heroically held out against furious German air attacks in the Battle of Britain. Radio played a vital role. "You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it," poet Archibald MacLeish told legendary radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, who reported the Battle of Britain firsthand.
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Britain's stubborn resistance created with Americans a shared identity and a growing belief that with U.S. aid it could survive. Polls indicated a sharp increase in Americans' support for aid to Britain even though they recognized it entailed greater risks of war. With war looming, Roosevelt's experience gave him a distinct edge over his contender.

On December 8, 1940, while indulging in a postcampaign cruise aboard the USS
Tuscaloosa,
FDR received by seaplane an urgent letter from Churchill. Ambassador Lord Lothian had already bluntly informed American reporters: "Britain's broke. It's your money we want." Churchill spelled out the same message in more delicate language and greater detail. He stressed the "solid identity of interests" between the two nations fighting tyranny and highlighted the dangers of mounting shipping losses in the Atlantic. Above all, he warned, "the moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies."
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