Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (111 page)

Churchill’s appeal was seconded in the most poignant way from France, where the French army was battling for its life. “For six days and six nights our divisions have been fighting without rest against an army which has a crushing superiority in numbers and material,” French premier Paul Reynaud wrote Roosevelt. “Today the enemy is almost at the gates of Paris.” The French would never yield, Reynaud vowed. “We shall fight in front of Paris; we shall fight behind Paris; we shall close ourselves in one of our provinces to fight, and if we should be driven out of it we shall establish ourselves in North Africa to continue the fight, and if necessary in our American possessions.” Reynaud urged Roosevelt to tell the Americans that France was fighting on their behalf. “Explain all this yourself to your people, to all the citizens of the United States, saying to them that we are determined to sacrifice ourselves in the struggle that we are carrying on for all free men.” As the president did so, he should elaborate on what he meant in promising support to the opponents of aggression. “I beseech you to declare publicly that the United States will give the Allies aid and material support by all means short of an expeditionary force. I beseech you to do this before it is too late.”

R
OOSEVELT WAS TOUCHED
by the pleas from across the Atlantic; who wouldn’t have been? But the brave words of Reynaud and Churchill were belied by the dismal performance of the French and British armies in the field. Reynaud might be a tiger and Churchill a bulldog, but their soldiers were pussycats, at least to judge by the results of their actions. To promise aid to a losing cause would make Roosevelt appear foolish at a moment when cunning was called for. And it might jeopardize American security by squandering resources that would be more effective if kept in American hands.

His Charlottesville speech had had multiple audiences. Roosevelt hoped to encourage the British and French to fight on; their armies continued to be America’s first line of defense abroad. He also hoped to counter the isolationists, who remained a potent political force at home. Roosevelt judged that the arguments of Lindbergh and the others were wrong, but he understood that they weren’t implausible. The Atlantic was still a formidable barrier to any attack on the United States; reinforced by ships patrolling American waters and planes flying out from American bases, it would allow Americans to repel any invasion Hitler might mount. Of course Roosevelt had to think beyond mere physical security; American prosperity and American values would be at risk in a world dominated by a hostile regime and a vicious ideology. But on this question Roosevelt reaped what he had sown during the first years of his administration. By adopting a nationalist approach to economic recovery, Roosevelt had told the American people, in essence, that the world didn’t matter. He had been wrong, as he may have known at the time and certainly figured out later. Yet to admit as much didn’t seem prudent.

Hitler’s campaign in France proceeded with appalling success. “Our army is now cut into several parts,” Reynaud cabled Roosevelt on June 14. “Our divisions are decimated. Generals are commanding battalions.” The Germans had entered Paris. The unthinkable was at hand. Only four days after vowing to Roosevelt to fight forever, Reynaud sounded a different note. “At the most tragic hour of its history, France must choose. Will she continue to sacrifice her youth in a hopeless struggle?…Or will France ask Hitler for conditions of an armistice?”

The French government hadn’t decided, Reynaud told the president. And he appealed to Roosevelt, in terms more desperate than ever, to help it hold on. “The only chance of saving the French nation, vanguard of democracies, and through her to save England, by whose side France could then remain with her powerful navy, is to throw into the balance, this very day, the weight of American power.” Reynaud appreciated that the American president couldn’t declare war by himself. But he could urge Congress to declare war. And he must do so, at once. “If you cannot give France, in the hours to come, the certainty that the United States will come into the war within a very short time, the fate of the world will change. Then you will see France go under like a drowning man and disappear after having cast a last look toward the land of liberty from which she awaited salvation.”

39.

I
T WAS TOO LATE
. A
ND IT WAS TOO EARLY
. R
OOSEVELT LEARNED FROM
Churchill that Reynaud had already asked that France be released from its alliance with Britain in order to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. Churchill implored Reynaud to continue the struggle, saying that only Hitler would benefit from an armistice. “He needs this peace in order to destroy us and take a long step forward to world mastery,” the prime minister explained to Roosevelt. Churchill seconded Reynaud’s final appeal to the American president. “This moment is supremely critical for France,” Churchill said. “A declaration that the United States will, if necessary, enter the war might save France. Failing that, in a few days French resistance may have crumbled and we will be left alone.”

There would be no such declaration. Roosevelt wasn’t ready to take that step. “I am doing everything possible,” he said privately, referring to various measures to increase the supply of war material to France and Britain. He probably believed it. But he defined the possible narrowly, and in the context of American politics. “I am not talking very much about it,” he continued, “because a certain element of the press, like the Scripps-Howard papers, would undoubtedly pervert it, attack it, and confuse the public mind.”

Yet talking about it was precisely what France needed. A straightforward commitment from Roosevelt would mean as much, at the moment, as American arms. Roosevelt refused to oblige, and France went down. On June 21 Hitler received France’s representatives in the same railroad car and in the same part of the Compiègne forest where Germany’s envoys had signaled their capitulation in November 1918. The next day the French accepted Hitler’s terms, which provided for the disarmament of most of the French military and the surrender of the northern three-fifths of the country to German occupation and control. The French were allowed to govern the southern rump of the country and to retain possession of their navy, which in any event had sailed beyond Hitler’s reach.

Roosevelt declined to comment on what could be interpreted only as a disaster for democracy and a stunning blow to American security. He left the ill tidings to Cordell Hull to deliver. “These are black days for the human race,” the secretary of state intoned. “These are ominous days for us in this country.” The forces of evil were rampant in the world. “Never before have these forces flung so powerful a challenge to freedom and civilized progress as they are flinging today. Never before has there been a more desperate need for men and nations who love freedom and cherish the tenets of modern civilization to gather into an unconquerable defensive force every element of their spiritual and moral resources, every ounce of their moral and physical strength.”

R
OOSEVELT WOULD
have said more than he did say if the fall of France hadn’t coincided with the quadrennial summer season for national political conventions. The Republicans went first, being the challengers, and their convention produced what the editors of the
New York Times
dubbed a “political miracle.” Wendell Willkie, a forty-eight-year-old son of Elwood, Indiana, was the darkest of dark horses, a lawyer and businessman who had never sought public office and who hadn’t been considered for the presidency until just weeks before the convention. He had entered no primaries, wooed no delegates, hired no professional campaign advisers. He had been a Democrat most of his life, converting to Republicanism only after Roosevelt took the New Deal in what Willkie—with others—perceived as a deliberately anti-business direction. Many Republicans still distrusted his Democratic antecedents. James Watson of Indiana thought forgiveness had gone too far. “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church,” Watson said, “I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But by the Eternal, I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night!”

The one thing that made Willkie acceptable to a nominating majority of the convention—on the sixth ballot—was his internationalist pedigree. To many Republicans the isolationists, including such Senate stalwarts as Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Robert Taft of Ohio, had become an embarrassment. Some agreed with Roosevelt that American security required a forward stance on the troubles in Europe, even if they were as vague as he in articulating that conviction. Some simply didn’t want to concede to the Democrats the large and growing portion of the electorate that was tilting internationalist. Willkie had been as forthright as Roosevelt in criticizing the arms embargo; he was even more outspoken than the president in advocating aid to Britain.

Willkie’s internationalism was part of what made him such an improbable candidate. He couldn’t well criticize Roosevelt’s foreign policy, at one of the very few times in American history when foreign policy appeared likely to determine the outcome of a presidential election. He harped on the New Deal, although less on particular programs than on the excessive influence it accorded the federal government. “What I am against is power,” Willkie said. “Power ruins anybody that has it. It’s the worst corrupting thing in the world.”

What went almost without saying was that in criticizing power Willkie was criticizing Roosevelt’s run for a third term. The Republican candidate couldn’t be explicit because Roosevelt hadn’t been renominated yet. In fact he hadn’t even announced his candidacy. But he was quietly engineering another nomination. The first step was negative—simply not renouncing a third term as the Democratic convention approached. Roosevelt’s silence paralyzed potential rivals within the party, who couldn’t declare their own candidacies without breaking with a president of their own party who was doing his best, as most Democrats were willing to acknowledge, to guide the country through dangerous times and who, should he be renominated and reelected, would be able to visit vengeance on the apostates. Southern conservatives who had defied Roosevelt on the New Deal and survived his purge didn’t have to worry, but in the Jim Crow era southern conservatives couldn’t be elected president and didn’t bother to run. All the others had to weigh the risks of taking on a popular president and party leader. “What’s the Boss going to do?” John Nance Garner asked Jim Farley in the spring of 1940.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Farley answered. The postmaster general and party chairman coveted the nomination for himself, and he had told friends he would let his name be put to the convention. “I’ve given up guessing,” he said.

Garner eyed Farley closely. “I guess he’s going to run,” the vice president said.

“It begins to look that way,” Farley acknowledged.

“Hell,” said Garner, “he’s fixed it so nobody else can run.”

Roosevelt’s second step was to arrange for the convention to be held in Chicago. The Windy City remembered his 1932 nomination and how he had electrified the delegates and the country by flying in to accept the nomination in person. Expectations of presidents and presidential candidates hadn’t been the same since, and if Roosevelt was to challenge history in a try for a third term, Chicago was the place for the challenge to be made.

His third step was to orchestrate a draft. He didn’t have to do this himself, for as in every administration there were plenty of people hoping for another four years in office. The New Deal had been good to Illinois Democrats and especially to the boss of Chicago’s Democratic machine, Edward Kelly, whose men were expected to stampede the convention for Roosevelt. Kelly’s affection for Roosevelt was as self-interested as most things the boss did—and as self-interested as the support for Roosevelt displayed by other bosses. “They did not support Roosevelt out of any motive of affection or because of any political issues involved,” Edward Flynn, who would succeed Jim Farley as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recalled. “Rather they knew that opposing him would be harmful to their local organizations. The Roosevelt name would help more than it could hurt, and for that reason these city leaders went along on the third-term candidacy.”