The Online Library of Liberty

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• Introduction
• 1: The First Crusade
• 2: Communism and Fascism: Offspring of the War
• 3: The Collapse of Versailles
• 4: Debacle In the West
• 5: “again and Again and Again”
• 6: Road to War: the Atlantic
• 7: Road to War: the Pacific
• 8: The Coalition of the Big Three
• 9: The Munich Called Yalta: War’s End
• 10: Wartime Illusions and Delusions
• 11: Poland: the Great Betrayal
• 12: Germany Must Be Destroyed
• 13: No War, But No Peace
• 14: Crusade In Retrospect

5

“Again and Again and Again”

No people has ever been led into war with so many soothing promises of peace as the Americans received from their Chief Executive in 1939 and 1940. The national mood after World War I had become one of profound disgust and disillusionment. It had become increasingly obvious that America’s First Crusade had not made the world safe for democracy. On the contrary, a war fought to the bitter end and a peace based on revenge, not reconciliation or compromise, had visibly promoted the growth and spread of the twin modern creeds of violence and dictatorship: communism and fascism.

There was an increasing sense in America of having been tricked into the First World War on false pretenses, or for reasons which, in retrospect, seemed inadequate to justify the expenditure of blood and treasure. Seventy-one per cent of the people who replied to a public opinion poll in 1937 expressed the opinion that our participation in the First World War had been a mistake.1

A note of acrimony had crept into much American comment on Europe and into much European comment on America. On the other side of the Atlantic the United States was reproached for not joining the League of Nations and for trying to collect the money which had been lent to its European associates in the war. Europeans felt that these debts should be written off as subsidies in a common cause.

But as American enthusiasm about the results of the war waned, the attitude on the debts tended to harden. Whatever the ethics of these two issues may have been, the German reparations and the American war debts were uncollectable for strictly economic reasons. Since these reasons involved complicated issues of currency exchange and transfer which the average American could scarcely be expected to understand, American public opinion was inclined to interpret nonpayment of the debts as deliberate “welshing” on legal obligations. Bitterness was reflected in sour witticisms which were plentifully sprinkled in the pages of the American press. As a student of public opinion recorded:

Revelations of the profits of munitions makers, popularly labeled “merchants of death,” intensified the impulse to stay out of overseas wars. The immediate cause of America’s involvement in the First World War had been Wilson’s assertion of America’s rights on the high seas against the German submarine blockade. So it was decided to forego those rights in advance, as not worth the cost of war. Neutrality legislation, passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and adopted in finally revised form on May 1, 1937, completely repudiated Wilson’s position.

The Act in its final form provided that “whenever the President shall find that there exists a state of war between or among two or more foreign states,” certain measures should automatically come into effect. There was to be an embargo on the sale of arms, munitions, and implements of war to all belligerents. American citizens were forbidden to travel on belligerent ships and to buy or sell securities of warring powers. Such products as cotton, scrap iron, and oil could be sold to belligerents, but could not be transported in American ships. This was the so-called cash-and-carry arrangement.

President Roosevelt during the first years of his long Administration made no attempt to combat the prevalent mood in favor of isolating the United States from foreign wars. Addressing the New York State Grange before his nomination, on February 2, 1932, he rejected the idea of American membership in the League of Nations for the following reasons:

Roosevelt adhered to this attitude after his election. He showed a tendency to favor economic as well as political isolationism when, in a message to the London Economic Conference in 1933, he bluntly refused to co-operate in plans for international currency stabilization, stating:

He was lukewarm in his support of such a mild experiment in internationalism as American participation in the World Court. Neutrality and noninvolvement in foreign wars were emphasized as desirable objectives in Roosevelt’s Chautauqua speech of August 14, 1936:

The President in this speech sounded a warning against the Americans who, in a hunt for profits, would seek to “break down or evade our neutrality” in the event of an overseas war.

Roosevelt’s first notable departure from his stand for neutrality and noninvolvement, except in response to an attack on the Western Hemisphere, occurred when he delivered his “quarantine speech” in Chicago on October 5, 1937. This speech had been prepared in the State Department. But the striking passage about quarantining aggressors was inserted by Roosevelt upon his own initiative.4 It was phrased as follows:

To reconcile the implications of this suggestion with the plain meaning and intent of the Neutrality Act would be extremely difficult. And Roosevelt offered no enlightenment as to what he had in mind in subsequent talks with the press. The speech is interesting, however, as an indication of the President’s changing outlook in world affairs.

The majority of the American people in 1937 were far from approving any abandonment of the official declared policy of neutrality and nonintervention. Significant straws in the wind were the absence of any demand for war after the sinking of the American gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River and the strong support for the Ludlow resolution. This resolution, introduced by Representative Louis Ludlow, of Indiana, provided that there should be no declaration of war, except in case of actual attack, without the sanction of a national referendum. This resolution was defeated, but only by a narrow margin.

As war in Europe became more imminent, the Administration became increasingly committed to a policy of trying to block the designs of the Axis powers. Since lip service was paid to the Neutrality Act, which was the law of the land and commanded wide popular support, there was a good deal of double talk and duplicity.

At the time of the Munich crisis, Roosevelt made two appeals for peace, the first to all the governments concerned, the second to Hitler alone. At first there was a disposition in Administration circles to claim credit for the Munich settlement. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State, in a radio address referred to “steps taken by the President to halt Europe’s headlong plunge into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Welles made the exaggerated claim that “Europe escaped war by a few hours, the scales being tipped toward peace by the President’s appeal.”

Soon afterwards, however, the course was set in the direction of opposing anything that savored of “appeasement.” Hugh Wilson, American Ambassador in Germany, was instructed to seize upon every informal opportunity to instill in the minds of German Foreign Office officials the belief that further German aggression would cause the gravest repercussions in the United States. Other United States ambassadors in key posts, William C. Bullitt in Paris and Joseph P. Kennedy in London, were given the same instructions, which Bullitt probably fulfilled with enthusiasm and Kennedy with reluctant misgivings.5

Wilson was recalled after the nation-wide Nazi-organized anti-Jewish riots which followed the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish refugee in November 1938. The United States remained unrepresented by an ambassador in Berlin after this. Roosevelt gave out the following statement on this occasion:

Roosevelt attacked the Neutrality Act by implication in his address to a joint session of Congress on January 3, 1939:

Shortly after the Munich Conference there were some highly secret meetings in the American Embassy in Paris. A conference of Ambassador Bullitt with French Premier Daladier and with the French Minister of Aviation, Guy La Chambre, was strongly reminiscent of the time when Anglophile Ambassador Walter Hines Page had advised the British Foreign Minister how to reply to an American note of protest, for the principal subject of discussion was the procurement of airplanes from America for France. Bullitt, who was in frequent telephonic conversation with Roosevelt, suggested a means by which the Neutrality Act, forbidding shipments of arms to belligerents, could be circumvented in the event of war. His suggestion was to set up assembly plants in Canada, apparently on the assumption that Canada would not be a formal belligerent.7

Ambassador Bullitt arranged for a French mission to come to the United States and purchase airplanes in the winter of 1938-39. The visit was kept under cover, and Bullitt persuaded Roosevelt to by-pass the Secretary of War, Harry Woodring, and to make Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, the liaison agent between the mission and the government. The secret leaked out when a French aviator crashed on the West Coast. Woodring accused Morgenthau of giving the French American military secrets, although the bombers for which negotiations were going on were already outmoded.

Roosevelt then invited some members of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to a conference, warned them that war was imminent, and suggested that America’s frontier was on the Rhine. But this talk alarmed and irritated most of the senators instead of winning them over. It hindered rather than helped the accomplishment of Roosevelt’s design: the elimination of the arms embargo from the Neutrality Act. The persistent efforts of Roosevelt and Hull to obtain the removal of the embargo before the outbreak of war failed both in the House and in the Senate. The final blow was an adverse 12-11 vote in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in July 1939.

There is not sufficient evidence to establish with certainty how far Washington may be held directly responsible for the fateful British decision to challenge Hitler on the issue of Poland. Cordell Hull’s testimony on America’s prewar policy is ambiguous if not contradictory:

“Though we had repeatedly sought to encourage the democracies of Europe, the arrival of war found us with no entangling agreements that would drag us in.”8

Obviously there were no formal treaties or commitments; these would have been impossible under the American Constitution and in the prevalent state of American public opinion. But it would have been difficult to give encouragement without holding out hope of American aid and perhaps ultimate involvement. The vehement partisanship of high Administration officials was calculated to arouse these hopes. Welles called the seizure of Prague “the first unshaded instance of open thievery,” and Hull “was moved to use all his transcendent talent for picturesque profanity.”9

If Col. Charles A. Lindbergh or one of the senators known for anti-interventionist sentiments had been President, the case for letting Hitler move eastward would have seemed much stronger in London and Paris. A well-known American statesman, not connected with the Roosevelt regime, visited Neville Chamberlain in March 1938 and suggested to the British Prime Minister that it would be much better if Germany moved east, rather than west. It would be a disaster to civilization, the American remarked, if the western democracies were dragged down by a war, the end of which would be to save the cruel Russian despotism.

Chamberlain expressed agreement with these views and said they dominated his own policies. He was only concerned about the French alliance with Russia. This might induce Hitler to destroy the weaker link first. Had the views of the American visitor prevailed in the White House, Chamberlain might never have changed his policy by giving the guarantee to Poland which worked out so disastrously both for Poland and for Great Britain.10

The beginning of the war in Europe made it possible for the Administration to get rid of the undesired arms embargo. The President’s first steps were to issue neutrality proclamations, one under general international law, the other under the Neutrality Act, prescribing an embargo on arms shipments. After starting his private correspondence with Winston Churchill, full details of which have not been revealed, Roosevelt called Congress in special session and asked for the elimination of the embargo. This request was based on the argument that repeal of the embargo was a means to keep the United States at peace. The President’s exact words were:

Not everyone agreed with Roosevelt’s viewpoint. Senator William E. Borah, the veteran lion of the isolationists, recalled that Secretary Hull had once said that the purpose of the Neutrality Act was to keep us out of war. Borah commented: “If the purpose of the Embargo Act then was to keep us out of war, what is the purpose of repealing it: to get us into war?”

Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr., argued that “repeal can only be interpreted at home and abroad as an official act taken by our Government for the purpose of partial participation in the European war.”

After the debate had gone on for several weeks, Roosevelt, in a radio broadcast of October 26, gave another of his innumerable professions of intention to keep America at peace. He characterized appeals against sending Americans to the battlefields of Europe as “a shameless and dishonest fake.” “The fact of the international situation . . . is that the United States of America is neutral and does not intend to get involved in war.”

The period when all was quiet on the Maginot Line passed with no appreciable change in the American position. The President made the following statement of the American attitude toward Finland at the time of the Soviet invasion:

The German military sweep in the spring and summer of 1940 took place so swiftly that American military intervention, even if it had been sanctioned by public opinion, could not have been effective. Calling for additional defense appropriations on May 16, after the German breakthrough in France, the President tried to make the nation’s flesh creep by pointing out alleged possibilities of attack on American soil by air from various points in the Eastern Hemisphere. Like all arguments based upon the danger of physical invasion of the American continent, this overlooked the limitations imposed by the current range and speed of aircraft. The Ural industrial region of Russia was much closer to German advanced bases than America was to any point occupied by Hitler in 1940. But this area was never subjected to serious bombing attacks.

Roosevelt hit a high emotional note in the speech at Charlottesville, Virginia, on June 10, referred to on page 78, when the French collapse had already reached an advanced stage. He denounced Mussolini, who had just entered the war against France, in the strongest language he had yet used publicly:

“On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

He warned against the idea that

There was also a hint of the future conception of lend-lease.

When Roosevelt returned to Washington, he talked in the White House office with Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, and with his most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins. Berle suggested that there might be a clear-cut world division, with Roosevelt as the leader of the free people facing Hitler. The President seems to have taken this suggestion seriously. “That would be a terrible responsibility,” he said. It is possible that his decision to run for a third term was finally taken that night.11

The responsibility which Roosevelt faced was indeed terrible. The subsequent Soviet-Nazi breach could not have been foreseen with certainty at this time. On any reasonable calculation of geography, manpower, and industrial resources, it was obvious that Great Britain, no matter how much aid it might receive from America, could never singlehandedly break the German military power. Roosevelt, therefore, had to choose between a policy of western hemispheric defense and a policy of increasing commitment to a war which might be expected to take millions of American lives.

Perhaps the President disguised, even to himself, the necessity and the implications of this choice. He continued, vociferously until his election for a third term, in more muted tones after that election, to profess his intention to remain out of the conflict. But at the same time, he instituted policies and made appointments which clearly indicated that America would finally be drawn into the war.

One of the most significant of these appointments was that of Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. Stimson had held the same office in the Cabinet of Theodore Roosevelt and had served as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. Stimson had been eager for stronger action against Japan in Manchuria, but was held back by Hoover’s aversion to war and by the nonbelligerent temper of American public opinion. Out of public office he had been a militant advocate of an American interventionist policy, both in Europe and in Asia.

Stimson on June 18 delivered a radio address calling for the repeal of the Neutrality Act, the opening of American ports to British and French vessels, acceleration of munitions supply to Britain and France, “sending them if necessary in our own ships and under convoy,” and the adoption of universal military training. Immediately after this speech, which could fairly be described as a call to undeclared war, Stimson was invited to become Secretary of War. He asked Roosevelt over the telephone whether the latter had seen the text of his radio address and whether this would be embarrassing. The President replied that he had read the speech and was in full accord with it.12 There could hardly be a more complete acknowledgment, in advance, of the insincerity of his subsequent campaign peace assurances.

At the same time, another interventionist Republican, Frank Knox, became Secretary of the Navy. Knox soon became the most articulate and garrulous warhawk in the Cabinet. Stimson’s predecessor, Harry Woodring, had favored a volunteer system of enlistment as sufficient for America’s defense needs. But Roosevelt was not thinking in terms of defense and Woodring was fired.

The American Government late in June received a suggestion from the Italian Ambassador in Germany, Dino Alfieri, that peace terms acceptable to Great Britain would be offered by the Axis if Britain would request them. Hull, through Welles, communicated this offer to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, emphasizing the point that no recommendation of any kind was being offered. On September 5, President Aguirre Cerdo of Chile proposed to Roosevelt an initiative toward peace by all the American republics. The United States reply was delayed until October 26 and was a rejection.13

Committed to an all-out victory which Britain could not conceivably win by its own efforts, Winston Churchill spared no effort to draw America into the war. As he tells us in the second volume of his memoirs: “My relations with the President gradually became so close that the chief business between our two countries was virtually conducted by these personal interchanges between him and me. In this way our perfect understanding was gained.”14

A typical budget of Churchill’s requests is to be found in his first message to Roosevelt after assuming office as Prime Minister, on May 15. Churchill asks for the loan of forty or fifty of the older American destroyers, for several hundred of the latest types of aircraft, for anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, steel and other materials. Lend-lease is foreshadowed in this sentence: “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can; but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same.”15

Churchill also proposed that an American squadron should pay a prolonged visit to Irish ports and concludes: “I am looking to you to keep the Japs quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient.”

If America was to be drawn into the war, the Pacific, as later events were to prove, offered even more opportunities than the Atlantic.

Roosevelt sometimes felt obliged to decline or postpone the granting of Churchill’s requests. As was noted in the preceding chapter, he disappointed the Prime Minister by refusing to permit the publication of the message to Reynaud—a message which Churchill had eagerly interpreted as an American commitment to enter the war. But usually Churchill’s requests were granted, after a lapse of weeks or months, if not immediately.

The British Prime Minister faced a delicate psychological problem in his dealings with Washington. He wanted to scare the American Government sufficiently to speed up aid and, if possible, to procure direct intervention. Yet the painting of too gloomy a picture might create fear in American military circles that aid to Britain out of America’s then very scanty military resources might be wasted. This led to occasional inconsistencies.

So Churchill suggested, in a message of June 14-15, that a point might be reached in the struggle where the present British Ministers would no longer be in control of the situation. A pro-German government might be formed; then where would America be, the Prime Minister continued, if the British Navy were surrendered to Hitler?

On the other hand, when arrangements were made to turn over fifty American destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases in the Caribbean area, Churchill was unwilling to publish an exchange of letters between Lothian and Hull, in which the former gave assurance that the British Navy would not be scuttled or surrendered. Churchill declared:

“I think it is much more likely that the German Government will be the one to surrender or scuttle its fleet or what is left of it.”

This exchange was a new milestone on America’s road to war. There were several legal obstacles to the transaction. In the first place, it was a violation of the Hague Convention of 1907, which forbade neutrals to sell warships to belligerents. Moreover, Section 23, Title 18 of the U.S. Code, forbade “the fitting out, arming or procurement of any vessel with the intent that it shall be employed in the service of a foreign state to cruise or commit hostilities against any state with which the United States is at peace.” And Section 3, Title 5 of the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, provides that during a war in which the United States is neutral it shall be unlawful to send out of United States jurisdiction any war vessel “with any intent or under any agreement or contract, written or oral, that such vessel shall be delivered to a belligerent nation.”

There might also have seemed to be a moral obligation to submit to the judgment of Congress a decision of such consequence for American neutrality and national defense. But such legal formalities were brushed aside. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, displaying the flexibility which was later to stand him in good stead as prosecutor in the Nürnberg trials, furnished an opinion which released Roosevelt from the necessity of abiding by the inconvenient laws.

There had been a difference of opinion between London and Washington about how the exchange should take place. Churchill, perhaps scenting a valuable precedent for future lend-lease, wanted the destroyers as a free gift and was willing to lease bases in the same way. Hull felt that Roosevelt would be on stronger ground if he could show that he had received a tangible equivalent for the destroyers.

Green H. Hackworth, legal adviser to the State Department, proposed the formula that finally proved satisfactory to both sides. Britain leased bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda as a gift and transferred others in exchange for the destroyers.

Churchill’s request for the destroyers had been made in May. It was granted in September. Looking back in retrospect to the year 1940, he could write appreciatively in his memoirs: “Across the Atlantic the great republic drew ever nearer to her duty and our aid.”

Meanwhile a mighty debate was shaping up in the United States on the issue of participation in the European war. Sentiment for a declaration of war and the dispatch of troops overseas was extremely slight. Up to the very eve of Pearl Harbor no such proposal would have stood a chance of endorsement by Congress. Public-opinion polls from the fall of France to the Japanese attack showed a pretty steady proportion of 80 per cent as opposed to war.

There was also extremely little sympathy with the Axis. Some impatient advocates of immediate war tried to pin the label of “fascist” on all opponents of American intervention. But this was demonstrably unfair and inaccurate. No influential leader of the fight against involvement in the conflict wanted to emulate Hitler or set up a fascist regime in this country. The leading organization which stood for this position, the America First Committee, barred Nazis, Fascists, and Communists from membership. A familiar argument of America First speakers was that war would bring the United States the regimentation, militarization, and unlimited governmental powers which were so objectionable in European dictatorships.

“Hitler’s Fifth Column” was a popular subject for sensational magazine articles. One might have imagined that the United States was flooded with Axis agents, carrying on active propaganda through press, radio, and other agencies for influencing American public opinion.

But on sober analysis this “fifth column” evaporates into the mist of overheated fantasy. No doubt there were German, Japanese, and Italian agents in this country. But they were not getting a hearing on lecture platforms or publishing articles in influential magazines.

I followed America’s great debate very closely, and I can recall only one alien who took an active part on the isolationist side. This was Freda Utley (now a naturalized American), an English woman publicist. She believed that Britain was being pressed by the Roosevelt Administration to fight an unnecessary war beyond its strength, and that the probable consequences of a prolonged conflict would be chaos in Europe and the triumph of communism. Miss Utley was in no sense a sympathizer with fascism.

On the other side it would be easy to recall the names of scores of alien refugees in this country who formed a kind of interventionist Foreign Legion and devoted themselves with varying degrees of tact and finesse to the task of inducing America to take up arms.

The choosing of sides in this controversy about intervention proceeded along lines that recalled America’s First Crusade in some features, but not in all. There was the same element of geographical cleavage. The East and the South were the most militant sections. Isolationist feeling was strongest in the Middle West and the Rocky Mountain area. The senators who most actively opposed the successive steps of the Administration toward war—Taft, Wheeler, La Follette, Clark, Nye—were all from states between the Alleghenies and the Rockies. Colonel Lindbergh was the son of a congressman from Minnesota who had voted against participation in World War I. The majority of Midwestern congressmen voted against the Lend-Lease Act, a major step in the direction of involvement.

There were also occupational and group cleavages, though these were blurred and shifting by comparison with the situation which prevailed at the time of World War I. Prominent on the interventionist side, in the Second Crusade as in the First, were university and college professors, especially on Eastern campuses, writers, and other intellectuals. The interventionist cause and the activities connected with it (“Bundles for Britain,” for instance) were popular in well-to-do middle-class circles. Roosevelt gained support among prowar Eastern Republicans by his attitude toward international affairs.

An amusing illustration of this point may be found in John P. Marquand’s novel So Little Time. One of the characters, a woman who regards herself as belonging to the social elite, remarks on the eve of the 1940 election:

“Fred and I always think the same way at election time. . . . We voted for Hoover in 1932. We voted for Landon in 1936. This year for the first time we’re voting for Mr. Roosevelt. . . . We’re voting for Mr. Roosevelt because England wants us to have Mr. Roosevelt. That’s the least we can do for England.”

Americans who for ethnic or religious reasons felt special sympathy for the peoples and groups in Europe which had suffered from Nazi oppression were often inclined in favor of intervention. There was more isolationist sentiment in communities with large numbers of people of Irish, German, or Italian origin.

There were no clear-cut lines of political, economic, and religious division on the issue. Conservatives and radicals, Catholics and Protestants, representatives of business, labor, and farm groups could be found on both sides.

There were spiritual descendants of the pastors of World War I who thumped their pulpits and shouted: “God damn the Kaiser.” There were more sober advocates of intervention. But there was enough pacifist and pacific sentiment in the Protestant churches to prevent the formation of anything like a united crusading front. The Christian Century, a nondenominational Protestant weekly, was one of the strongest and most serious champions of the anti-interventionist viewpoint.

Some Catholic prelates, such as Cardinal William O’Connell, of the Boston archdiocese, were vigorously and outspokenly opposed to involvement. Others upheld the Administration or side-stepped the issue. Here again there was no unity of viewpoint. Catholic doubts about the advisability of starting a second crusade were intensified after Russia entered the war. Dr. John A. O’Brien, of Notre Dame University, spoke for a considerable section of Catholic opinion when he said on June 24, 1941:

“The American people cannot be driven by propaganda, trickery or deceit into fighting to maintain the Christ-hating Stalin in his tyranny over 180 million enslaved people.”

It was the well-to-do classes which were most enthusiastic in support of America’s participation in the First World War. Opposition came mostly from the left, from Socialists, IWW’s, agrarian radicals. This time there was no such clear-cut pattern. It was government planners in Washington, rather than businessmen, who saw in a booming war economy the way out of the long depression which all the contradictory remedies of the New Deal had failed to cure.

The Saturday Evening Post, widely read organ of the American middle class, was editorially vigorously opposed to involvement until the spring of 1941, when there was a change of editorship. Some Eastern financiers maintained the pro-British attitude which was characteristic of this group in the First World War. But a number of industrialists, especially in the Middle West, were vigorous supporters of the America First Committee. There was also division on the left. The Socialist party, which had already lost much of its strength through the secession of many of its members to the Communists, was further divided into two small groups which differed in opinion on the war issue.16 The group which retained the party name, headed by Norman Thomas, was anti-war. The Social Democratic Federation was in favor of intervention.

The Communists, of course, could not be split. They always functioned as a disciplined unit, with Soviet interests as their dominant consideration. So they were unitedly on opposite sides of the debate, at various times. As long as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in force, the Communists denounced the idea of intervention, stirred up strikes in defense plants, coined antiwar slogans, and spawned a number of antiwar front organizations. As soon as Russia was attacked, on June 21, 1941, they turned a complete somersault and became as clamorous to get America into the war as they had been to keep it out before Hitler broke with Stalin.

The principal organization around which interventionist sentiment crystallized was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. This was launched, with William Allen White as chairman, at a luncheon in New York on April 29, 1940. It was the successor to a group which had been formed in the previous autumn to urge revision of the Neutrality Act by permitting the sale of munitions on a cash-and-carry basis to Great Britain and France. White had been the leader of this group and stressed the limited character of the aid which he favored in a statement to the following effect:

Frederick R. Coudert gave a luncheon for White on October 20, 1939. Among those present were Clark Eichelberger, director of the League of Nations Association, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, Thomas Watson, of the International Business Machines Corporation, Henry L. Stimson, the future Secretary of War, and Wendell Willkie, the future Republican candidate for the presidency. Willkie said on this occasion:

“Well, if money is all Mr. White needs, let’s get it for him.”17

William Allen White was a well-known, loved, and respected Midwestern small-town editor with a national audience. It seemed good strategy to the bellicose Easterners to induce him to head an interventionist organization.

It has already been shown that White was as disillusioned as the majority of his countrymen with the fruits of America’s First Crusade.18 In the face of World War II he reacted with the divided sentiment which was characteristic of the mood of many Americans. White sincerely abhorred the thought of American participation in the war. But he felt that Hitler must be defeated. He found a solution for this contradiction in the wishful thought that America could turn the tide by giving economic aid to Britain.

White was sincere in this conception of limited liability intervention. But several members of the Committee advocated a declaration of war as early as June 1940. And most of its active leaders were disposed to drift toward war at the Administration’s pace, or a little faster. There was a close connection between the Administration and the Committee. As White said:

“I never did anything the President didn’t ask for, and I always conferred with him on our program.”19

The playwright Robert E. Sherwood inserted large advertisements in the newspapers of various cities under the heading: “Stop Hitler Now.” The newspaper publishers George and Dorothy Backer, Henry Luce, and others subscribed twenty-five thousand dollars to pay for these. The advertisement contained the sentiments: “Will the Nazis considerately wait until we are ready to fight them? Anyone who argues that they will wait is either an imbecile or a traitor.” Roosevelt took time out from assurances of his intention to keep America out of the war to describe this advertisement as “a great piece of work.”20

By July 1, 1940, petitions with approximately two million signatures had been sent to the White House, along with thousands of telegrams, postcards, and letters to congressmen. There were nation-wide radio broadcasts and local rallies. By November the Committee had organized 750 local chapters (200 of the first 300 were in New England) and had received $230,000 in contributions from over 10,000 donors.

The Committee promoted broadcasts by prominent military and naval figures, including General John J. Pershing. Sometimes these men of war went beyond the declared program of the organization. Admiral Harry E. Yarnell (retired) advocated a declaration of war on July 7 and was joined by Admiral Standley (subsequently Ambassador to the Soviet Union) on October 12.

The Women’s Division of the Committee in New York enrolled five hundred women volunteers from each of the five boroughs as “Minute Americans,” to serve at a minute’s notice. Each of these received a page from a telephone directory with instructions to call the names in order to explain why aid to Great Britain was essential to national defense and to try to enlist the subscriber as a new “Minute American.” By the first week of October 1940, the Minute Americans had talked with half a million New York housewives.

The trend toward advocating war measures was becoming so strong toward the end of 1940 that White felt obliged to apply a douche of cold water. In a letter published in the Scripps-Howard newspapers of December 23 he expressed sentiments which were both surprising and unpalatable to many of his associates:

This stirred up a storm of protest and on January 2, 1941, White resigned the chairmanship of the Committee. His successor was ex-Senator Ernest Gibson, of Vermont, who was later replaced by Clark Eichelberger. As White had been left behind by his Committee, the Committee was outpaced by a group more impatient to plunge into the slaughter. This was Fight for Freedom, organized on April 19, 1941, with the Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson as chairman and Francis P. Miller, Ulric Bell, Wayne Johnson, and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge among the leading members. It set forth the position that America was already at war in the following statement:

“Fight for Freedom” specialized in putting out posters calculated to make the American flesh creep. One which appeared in the New York Times of October 19, 1941, showed a uniformed Nazi bludgeoning an American and shouting, “Shut up, Yank; learn to speak Nazi.” A poster prepared for labor groups showed a uniformed Nazi whipping workers and bore the caption: “There sits in Berchtesgaden an anemic pipsqueak who’s going to change all that labor stands for. Or is he?” Another scary, if somewhat fanciful, advertisement, designed to impress church groups, represented Hitler as saying: “Repeat after me, Yank: Adolf Hitler, hallowed be thy name.” This bit of psychological warfare bore the sprightly inscription: “Holy cats, look who’s holy!”

The Committee to Defend America came out openly for war in late June 1941, thereby catching up with Fight for Freedom. Clark Eichelberger, chairman of the Committee, stated on October 18, 1941, that “the United States has been in the war for some time, but that fact has not yet been made clear to the world.” Here was the end of a road that had begun with ardent professions of desire and intention to keep America out of war.

The largest and most representative of the antiwar organizations was the America First Committee. This organization stemmed from the initiative of a group of Yale Law School students. It was formally established in September 1940 under the chairmanship of General Robert E. Wood, Quartermaster General of the United States Army in World War I and later an executive of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Its statement of principles, published regularly in its weekly America First Bulletin, was as follows:

• 1. Our first duty is to keep America out of foreign wars. Our entry would only destroy democracy, not save it.
• 2. We must build a defense, for our own shores, so strong that no foreign power or combination of powers can invade our country by sea, air or land.
• 3. Not by acts of war, but by preserving and extending democracy at home can we aid democracy and freedom in other lands.
• 4. In 1917 we sent our ships into the war zone; and this led us to war. In 1941 we must keep our naval convoys and merchant vessels on this side of the Atlantic.
• 5. Humanitarian aid is the duty of a strong free country at peace. With proper safeguards for the distribution of supplies we should feed and clothe the suffering and needy people of the occupied countries.
• 6. We advocate official advisory vote by the people of the United States on the question of war and peace, so that when Congress decides this question, as the Constitution provides, it may know the opinion of the people on this gravest of all issues.

Despite the increasingly powerful government and social pressures for a prowar attitude, the America First Committee won wide popular support. Its stand in favor of adequate defense attracted a much larger membership than a pacifist body could have hoped to gain. Its exclusion of Nazis, Fascists, and Communists freed it from the taint of unpopular alien creeds. It served as a tangible rallying point for those who felt a deep-seated aversion to “foreign wars” and cherished the suspicion that a second crusade would be more costly in lives and resources and no more productive of positive results than the first had been.

Moreover, America First possessed an extremely magnetic spokesman in Charles A. Lindbergh. Invested with the glamor and prestige of his pioneer lone flight to Europe across the Atlantic, known for other achievements in aviation and science, tall, vigorous, and youthful, he became the outstanding personality of the antiwar party.

Lindbergh in 1940 foresaw with remarkable prescience the need for solidarity among the nations of the West which had become, perhaps too late, an objective of American diplomacy in 1950. He wrote:

About the same time Lindbergh’s wife, a poet and author gifted with a sensitive imagination and a beautiful style in prose and verse, published a forecast of the shape of things to come which stands the test of being read ten years later extremely well. In an article, “Prayer for Peace,” published in the Reader’s Digest for January 1940, Mrs. Lindbergh wrote:

Lindbergh was approached indirectly on behalf of the White House and offered the post of Secretary of Air (to be created in the Cabinet) if he would cease opposing America’s entrance into the war. He rejected the offer and threw himself into the struggle against involvement.

Lindbergh in his speeches emphasized the ideas that America should stay out of European wars, that the United States was strong enough to defend the Western Hemisphere but not strong enough to impose its will upon the entire world, and that it was no service to Europe to prolong the war. In his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opposing the Lend-Lease Act, he argued for American neutrality on the following grounds:

Asked on which side he was, the aviator replied:

“On no side, except our own.”

Lindbergh accurately analyzed the stepping up of foreign requests for aid, echoed by interventionists in America, at an America First meeting in Philadelphia on May 29, 1941:

Lindbergh presented the following analysis of the forces which were promoting American intervention in a much-criticized speech at Des Moines on September 11, 1941. The gist of this address was in the following paragraphs:

Senator Robert A. Taft was a vigorous opponent of intervention on conservative grounds. He declared in June 1941: “Americans don’t want to go to war to beat a totalitarian system in Europe if they are to get socialism here when it is all over.” And after the German attack on Russia, Taft asserted in a nation-wide broadcast that the victory of communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the United States than the victory of fascism.

Former President Hoover was a consistent opponent of involvement, although he did not associate himself with the America First Committee or any other organization. After the German attack on Russia he remarked that “collaboration between Britain and Russia will bring them military values, but it makes the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a Gargantuan jest.” A good many people behind the postwar Soviet iron curtain would probably heartily endorse this sentiment.

Hoover, together with former Vice-President Charles G. Dawes, the former Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon, and others issued a protest against “undeclared war” on August 5, 1941:

The positions of the two sides in this great debate, carried on through forums, radio addresses, magazine articles, and other means of influencing public opinion, may be briefly summarized as follows: The interventionists saw a grave threat to the United States in the possible victory of Hitler. Some of them emphasized the military, others the economic, others the moral, nature of this threat. They argued that it was an imperative American national interest to “stop Hitler.” They became increasingly reticent about the usual original qualification, “by methods short of war.”

The isolationists took their stand on the disappointing aftermath of America’s First Crusade. They maintained that there was no serious danger of an attack on the American continent, whereas an American invasion of Europe gave every prospect of being an appallingly costly operation. They foresaw dubious political results from American intervention, especially with Soviet Russia as a cobelligerent.

These opposing viewpoints were argued with varying degrees of factual knowledge and temperance. A few home-grown crackpots with extremist racial and religious views attached themselves to the isolationist cause, despite the efforts of the America First Committee to disown such undesirable and undesired camp followers.

Not all interventionists were as starry-eyed as the author of the following passage, which appeared in an article published in the Atlantic:

And despite the grotesque scare posters sponsored by Bishop Hobson, most members of Fight for Freedom would not have endorsed the peculiar conception of liberty implied in a message which was sent to an antiwar meeting in Cincinnati:

The momentous issue of deliberate involvement in the European war might well have been submitted to a referendum of the American people in the presidential election of 1940. The majority of the Republicans in both houses of Congress before and after this election systematically voted against measures calculated to bring about this involvement.

Had Roosevelt frankly presented to the voters the program which he actually carried out in 1941 (lend-lease, convoys, undeclared shooting war in the Atlantic, commercial blockade of Japan) and had Roosevelt’s opponent been a sincerely noninterventionist Republican, a very interesting discussion would certainly have ensued. The verdict of the people would then have given a clear mandate either to go into the war frankly and vigorously or to stay out of it, except in the event of direct attack.

But neither of the leading candidates in the 1940 election made a candid statement of his position on the most important issue confronting the American people. A comparison of Roosevelt’s words before the election and of his deeds after the election fully substantiates the tart comment of Clare Boothe Luce: “He lied the American people into war because he could not lead them into it.”

And by an unfortunate accident of American politics, the Republican nomination did not go to a man who shared the viewpoint of the majority of Republican members of Congress. The candidate was Wendell Willkie, a newcomer in politics, a man who in the preceding autumn had volunteered to raise money for interventionist purposes.

The result was that the very large number of American voters who wanted to stay out of the war were, for all practical purposes, disfranchised. The campaign was an amazing exhibition of double talk. Roosevelt and Willkie vied with each other in making the most sweeping promises to keep the country at peace. The frequency and forcefulness of these pledges mounted to a crescendo as the election day approached. This was a significant straw in the wind, indicating how the majority of voters in both parties felt on the issue. There were evidently few votes to be won and many to be lost by a frank call to arms.

Both platforms contained antiwar commitments. The Democratic read: “We will not participate in foreign wars and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside the Americas, except in case of attack.”

The equivalent Republican statement was more concise: “The Republican Party is firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign wars.”

Willkie said in Chicago on September 13: “If you elect me President, I will never send an American boy to fight in a European war.”

He told his audience in Cleveland on October 2: “I am for keeping out of war. I am for peace for America.”

He declared in Philadelphia on October 4: “We must stop this drift toward war,” and in a radio broadcast on October 8 he asserted: “We must keep out of war at all hazards.” He told the voters of Boston on October 11: “Our boys shall stay out of European wars.” On October 22 he offered the following explanation of the difference between his foreign policy and that of the Administration:

“One difference is my determination to stay out of war. I have a real fear that this Administration is heading for war, and I am against our going to war and will do all that I can to avoid it.”

So Willkie, whose whole attitude after the election promoted the “drift toward war” which he condemned before the votes were counted, tried to win as the champion of peace against war. But he could not outbid Roosevelt in promises on this issue. Between October 28 and November 3 the President gave repeated assurances that he would not lead the country into any foreign wars. As his admirer, Robert E. Sherwood, says:

Two days later, in Boston, Roosevelt went even further. “Fear-of-war hysteria,” in Sherwood’s phrase, seemed to be growing. Telegrams poured in from Democratic leaders, urging the President to make stronger and more specific antiwar pledges. The election, according to these telegrams, hung in the balance. Henri IV thought Paris was worth a Mass. Roosevelt apparently believed that another term of power was worth promises which would soon be disregarded, which could be broken without incurring legal liability. At the urging of Sherwood24 he decided to strengthen his pledge with the words “again and again and again.” And the rich, soothing voice poured out to the audience at Boston the following reassurance:

While I am talking to you, mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again.

Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

On November 2 Roosevelt promised: “Your President says this nation is not going to war.”

On November 3 he added: “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.”25

No isolationist could have offered more sweeping and categorical pledges. How these pledges were observed will be the subject of the next two chapters. Professor Thomas A. Bailey, a sympathizer with Roosevelt’s foreign policy, admits that the President’s tactics were disingenuous, but offers an apology in the following passage:

Professor Bailey offers the following somewhat Machiavellian conception as to how democracy should work.

That Roosevelt resorted to habitual deception of the American people both before and after the election of 1940 is not open to serious question. That such deception, on an issue which was literally a matter of life and death for many American citizens, savors of personal dictatorship rather than of democracy, responsive to the popular will, also seems obvious.

Whether Roosevelt’s deception was justified is open to debate. This is a question which everyone must answer on the basis of what America’s Second Crusade cost, what it accomplished, what kind of world emerged from it, and how real was the danger against which it was undertaken.

[1. ] Johnson, Battle against Isolation, 19.

[2. ] Bailey, Man in the Street, 48.

[3. ] Roosevelt, Public Papers, 551ff.

[4. ] Hull, Memoirs, 2:544-45.

[5. ] Alsop and Kintner, American White Paper, 23-24.

[6. ] The reference to “twentieth century civilization” was historically not very happy. The twentieth century witnessed not only in Germany but in the Soviet Union acts of mass cruelty which not only never occurred, but would not even have been conceivable, in the nineteenth.

[7. ] This information was given to me by a participant in these conferences. Another interesting sidelight on conditions in the winter of 1938-39 is that the Germans were willing to sell airplane engines to France; the proposed deal was canceled because of objections from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is another bit of circumstantial evidence indicating that Germany’s military aspirations were directed toward the East, not toward the West.

[8. ] Hull, Memoirs, 1:667.

[9. ] Alsop and Kintner, American White Paper, 34.

[10. ] This incident was described to me by the American concerned.

[11. ] Davis and Lindley, How War Came, 65.

[12. ] Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service, 324.

[13. ] Hull, Memoirs, 2:844-45.

[14. ] Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 23.

[15. ] Ibid., 24-25.

[16. ] These groups had separated on other grounds before the question of American involvement in war had arisen.

[17. ] Johnson, Battle against Isolation, 51.

[18. ] See page 20, above.

[19. ] Johnson, Battle against Isolation, 91.

[20. ] Ibid., 95-97.

[21. ]The Atlantic (March 1940).

[22. ] David L. Cohn, “I Hear Australians Singing,” The Atlantic, 167 (April 1941), 406-7. It would be interesting to hear the unexpurgated comments of soldiers in foxholes on this lush noncombatant eulogy of the idea of fighting for “our souls’ repose.”

[23. ] Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 189.

[24. ] Ibid., 191.

[25. ] For a complete survey of the antiwar professions of Roosevelt and Willkie, see Beard, American Foreign Policy, 265-323.

[26. ] Bailey, Man in the Street, 11-13.