This Day in Presidential History (FDR Urges ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ for Britain)

December 29, 1940—Two months after campaigning on a promise not to involve America in another overseas war, Franklin D. Roosevelt took an enormous step toward doing just that by urging his countrymen to become an “arsenal of democracy” by shipping arms to Great Britain in its struggle against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.

The military might displayed by these dictatorships was immense, but so, at the time of this foreign-policy “fireside chat,” was the American isolationist movement—a force that crossed partisan, religious and ethnic lines, taking its initial cue from George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address admonition to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” reinforced by the nation's disillusionment with WWI.

That movement was also deeply suspicious of FDR's intentions. While normally choosing his words with enough care to allow him wiggle room in case of a policy reversal, Roosevelt felt the necessity, in an October 1940 campaign address in his close race against Republican Wendell Willkie, to make the kind of categorical assertion that his enemies would remember for decades: “I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.”

(That statement makes the short list of Presidential utterances regarded by supporters as unfortunate bows to necessity and by naysayers as blatant lies, along with George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes” and Barack Obama’s “If you like your doctor, you'll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan.")

FDR had just demonstrated, in his precedent-breaking third-term victory, that he still held enormous sway with the electorate. But it would take all his mastery of men to shift America’s diplomatic posture away from isolationism. In solving the immediate problem of confronting Fascism, though, he would shove the nation decisively toward what historians Thomas K. Duncan and Christopher J. Coyne of George Mason University have called “The Permanent War Economy.”

Roosevelt was one of the great Presidential phrasemakers (e.g., “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” “rendezvous with destiny,” “date that will live in infamy”). But in this instance, it was Harry Hopkins, his former Secretary of Commerce (and continuing devoted informal adviser), who suggested the most enduring phrase in the radio address, and Hopkins who would help implement the legislation it championed as the President’s unofficial representative to the U.K.

Unlike his predecessor at Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill had found in FDR a congenial transatlantic partner in his policy concerning Hitler. The British Prime Minister, then, had no hesitation in spelling out, in a long letter read by FDR on a Caribbean cruise early in December 1940, the dire straits in which his country found itself.  A little less than one year after declaring war on Germany—and only a bit more than half a year since Churchill himself had assumed the reins of power—the U.K. was running out of money to pay for war goods.

FDR had arranged a “Destroyers for Bases” swap in early September, but American law still limited the transfer of weapons. His Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had expressed frustration over Congressional foot-dragging in coming to the aid of Britain. (Congress was “doing an immense amount more harm than good and [members] restrict the power of the Commander in Chief in ways in which Congress cannot possibly wisely interfere. They don’t know enough.”)

Churchill’s massive missive catalyzed FDR to push for the Lend Lease Act to get munitions into the hands of Britain and Canada. In one sense, the President was doing what he had been since the start of the New Deal: not consciously implementing a long-range program, but dealing, on an ad-hoc basis, with an immediate problem as realistically as he could. But, even as he attempted to defuse the fears of isolationists at the start of his speech by saying it would not be “a fireside chat on war,” he was pointing toward its ultimate import by labeling it “a talk on national security.”

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he urged. “For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

By his own lights, his proposal—to pull out all stops, through Lend Lease, to ensure Britain had enough resources to survive against Nazi Germany—was the only feasible way to ensure that America would not become directly involved, as he put it, in “a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.” But in the process, he was uniting the military, big business and labor in a defense-mobilization effort that would survive the end of WWII, through the Cold War and the War on Terror, as the military-industrial complex.

FDR can be best understood now as a crypto-interventionist. He had to proceed carefully because of neutrality legislation passed by Congress in the last decade. But events overseas gave an assist to his persuasive rhetoric: His fireside chat had “particular power and urgency,” noted David McCullough in his biography of Harry Truman, “because German bombers were pounding London” in the Blitz.

The march of Nazism across Europe began to tilt the balance, in the following year, as the President took one unneutral step after another to supply Great Britain and the USSR in their fights against Hitler. It culminated in the fall of 1941, when the U.S. had become involved in an undeclared shooting war in the North Atlantic against Germany. 

Had Hitler not declared war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, thereby fulfilling his diplomatic promise to his Axis partner, Japan, the United States would have faced the thorny question of whether to take the last fateful step—a declaration of war—in which FDR’s policies had increasingly inclined the U.S.

This Day in Presidential History (FDR Calms Banking Fears With ‘Fireside Chat’)

March 12, 1933—Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to establish himself as the dominant player in American politics for more than a decade with a landmark radio address that explained the reasoning behind his plan to stabilize the nation’s banking system.

Like the politician who influenced him the most, his fifth cousin, the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, F.D.R. was a masterful communicator who knew how to sway the modern media. T.R. started the Presidential practices of "floating trial balloons" and meeting regularly with reporters (the hyperkinetic chief executive did so, at several times, while he was shaving); FDR used an outgrowth of these interactions, the press conference, to introduce the concepts of “background” and “off the record.” But F.D.R. seized on another booming technology of the Twenties to become what the Radio Hall of Fame has called “the first great American radio voice.”

A CBS station manager, Harry Butcher, noticing that FDR would be speaking from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room furnished with a fireplace, came up with the phrase “fireside chat,” and the President’s press office immediately seized on the homespun term. Through 1944, FDR would deliver more than 30 of these, becoming, in effect, a kind of audio uncle to the average American family.

In a period that, as much as any other in our history, might be described as one of unrelenting crisis—pulling the nation through the Great Depression and the struggle against Fascism—FDR’s voice went against the grain. In these conversational addresses, he spoke more than 50 words per minute slower than the average person. Particularly in that first fireside chat, when events had seemed to be hurtling out of control because of a run on banks in the Depression, he set the nation at rest. His words assured Americans that, following a “bank holiday,” in which the nation’s financial institutions were closed to allow the Federal Reserve to create de facto 100 percent deposit insurance in the reopened banks, “No sound bank is a dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last Monday.” But it was his tone which confirmed that calm was being restored and there would be no more runs on banks.

Second, he was countering all the forces arrayed against him. Many newspaper owners were Republicans who were unalterably opposed to the massive experiment with government and the economy that the New Deal represented. FDR could, at his untelevised news conferences, enlist reporters—labor stiffs, if you will—against their bosses. But fireside chats allowed him to go directly over the news barons’ heads and to make news himself, without the intercession of even his own press office.

Third, FDR used simple language that anyone could understand and a device that virtually every one possessed. He might have been an Ivy League-educated patrician, but his words never conveyed distance from his audience. He included himself and his audience with the words “we” and “us,” and he used analogies and metaphors common to all. (Several years later, when he sought to circumvent isolationist sentiment to aid Great Britain against the riding Nazi tide, he likened Lend Lease to providing a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire.) By speaking on the radio—a device that 90% of Americans owned at this time—he created an alternative to the newspaper.

Unlike predecessor Herbert Hoover, FDR was thoroughly comfortable with radio. He had been using it for the last four years, as governor of New York, to rally support for his programs. He was demonstrating that radio could be used not merely as a persuasive, but also an informative voice in American democracy. (During WWII, he would urge listeners to go to their globes or atlases so they could follow along as he explained where their sons would be going into harm's way.) Americans confirmed his belief in the efficacy of radio by sending letters pouring into the White House afterward, thanking him for his talks

Three years ago, Ken Mueller, a former curator at the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for the Media), called FDR “the first Social Media rock star.” The President might not have been around for Facebook, Twitter and the like, but he sensed how new forms of communication could help him.

This Day in Presidential History (Ronald Reagan Born)

Feb. 6, 1911—Ronald Wilson Reagan, America’s 40th President, was brought into the world as a 10-pound baby, with the services of a midwife rather than a doctor that his family couldn’t afford, in a three-bedroom, walk-up apartment in Tampico, Ill.

It was the kind of Middle American community to which the future actor and politician long paid tribute and that biographers Lou Cannon and Anne Edwards claim profoundly influenced him. Nevertheless, Reagan's parents left Tampico within a few years after his birth, and he resisted revisiting it for much of his life. The one indelible memory from his very early years in this village that he didn’t mind relating: the image of a white house with high ceilings, a place he felt comfortable.

On the centennial of his birth, even Reagan’s admirers and loved ones have grappled with the duality of a man who, for all his geniality, remained utterly remote. His daughter Patti, locked in a love-hate relationship with him for much of her life, observed that his “presence felt like absence.”

That same absent quality comes through in today’s New York Times op-ed contribution by biographer Edmund Morris, a vivid piece about an episode late in the President’s life: his sudden desire, three years out of the Presidency, to revisit his birthplace.

Morris poignantly evokes “an old man in retreat — withdrawn, halting and perplexed,” already emitting the first signs of the Alzheimer’s that would finally claim him. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer never really offers a glimpse into the politician who long shied away from looking back at his origins.

If you want to understand Reagan’s reluctance to go home—as well as the values of the place that bred him—I think you can’t simply read the facts of his life. You have to supplement it by listening to what is, for me, the high point of the careers of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel following their breakup: their brief reunion in 1975, in the form of one of their greatest songs, “My Little Town.”

The dual nature of this tune is not unlike the dual nature of Reagan himself. Its dominant initial impression is Garfunkel’s majestic voice, soaring as it sings of seemingly halcyon childhood days of believing in a god who “keeps his eye on us all” and pledging allegiance.

Before long, though, that voice, still golden, is creating images that increasingly call into question what the narrator learned in “my little town”: clothes hanging “in the dirty breeze,” a rainbow with only black colors because “it’s just imagination they lack.”

Before long, it’s painfully clear that this factory town is a place to be escaped from: one where the narrator is “just my father’s son,” where he is desperate to leave: “saving my money,/Dreaming of glory.” The listener can’t believe what he has just heard Simon and Garfunkel sing: “Nothing but the dead and dying/Back in my little town.”

And so, I think, it must have been for Ronald Reagan. The one time he returned to Tampico before his late-life visit, during his 1976 Presidential campaign, paralleled his race that year: a triumph that went oddly sour. The Hennepin Canal, being built at the time of his birth, no longer generated employment or was even open to boat traffic, and the The Hooppole, Yorktown and Tampico (HY&T) Railroad had stopped running a generation before.

According to Morris, Tampico was now no more than “a depressed village on the Illinois corn flats” that turned worse when its “least desirable citizen” somehow managed to make it to the front of the line and plant a big wet kiss on Nancy Reagan’s face. Moreover, according to a Fred Barnes article in The Weekly Standard, Reagan didn't even get to see the bedroom where he was born on that visit: The apartment was then rented and locked. (It's now open to the public.)

If anything, Ronald Reagan wanted to be more than “just my father’s son” that the narrator of the Simon and Garfunkel song lamented being. And now, we come to a curious disagreement about what else was in the building where Reagan was born. Morris and Barnes note that the Reagan apartment was over a bank; another article I came across, by Steve Martens of the Herald-Review (Decatur, Ill.), claims it was over a bakery. But yet another, by architect and city planner Richard Thornton, offers more details. A bank occupied the ground floor of the "Graham Building" from 1919 to 1931 and a bakery from 1915 to 1931, but a saloon was on the first floor from 1896 to 1915--including the birth date of Reagan.

The saloon downstairs would not have been present by the time of his 1976 disastrous return, but even the wisp of its memory would have been enough to revive an image he had spent much of his life overlooking or expunging from his mind: Jack Reagan, tolerant, kind-hearted shoe salesman, sprawled out a few years later on the porch of their Dixon home, drunk, as he was all too often because of the disease of alcoholism.

Again, like the Simon and Garfunkel character, Ronald Reagan dreamed of glory in Tampico and the other Illinois communities where his father’s varying fortunes took the family—Galesburg, Monmouth and Dixon. The man who showed him the way out was the hero of his young manhood: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

At first glance, it would seem well-nigh impossible that the product of a Midwestern down-on-their-luck family who went on to question the foundation of the modern American welfare state and to undermine the American conservation movement could have any affinity for the Northeastern patrician who was the architect of the American safety net and the second-most-influential President concerning the environment (taking a back seat only to distant cousin Theodore). But in a professional and personal sense, the two Presidents had elements in common.

Reagan’s first major job out of college was as a radio announcer. FDR’s live “fireside chats” impressed him with more than simply its sense of timing and dramatic enunciation, as Reagan explained during his own Presidency a half-century later: “His strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem. I will never forget him for that.”

Forty years after first absorbing those seminal lessons in communication, in the interval between governing California and winning the Presidency, Reagan returned to radio with weekly commentaries that kept him present in the public eye. Some of the same FDR hallmarks—humor and well-turned metaphors and similes—allowed him to communicate, simply and directly, with his target audience.

Reagan’s life resembled that of the hero of his youth in another, less flattering way: While impressing their children with warmth, the two aspiring politicians were never around long enough to serve as stabilizing influences. They were so busy saving the world that they often didn’t see that their own progeny were drowning.

As they entered adolescence, the children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became painfully aware of the divisions between their parents resulting from FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer and the stress involved with his adjustment to life after polio. The five children who survived to adulthood struggled for professional footholds or, simply, marital stability (19 marriages and 15 divorces).

The record with the Reagan children wasn’t this catastrophic, but it featured episodes of sharp, often public pain. Maureen and Michael, the two older children from Ronald’s marriage to actress Jane Wyman, felt shunted aside when their father remarried and started a new family. The title of Michael’s autobiography speaks volumes: On the Outside Looking In. On Michael's wedding day, Ron and Nancy chose to go to another wedding on the same day: that of Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia, at the White House.

Growing up, Maureen was annoyed to find that her father had not yet told her half-sister Patti about her existence yet (they hadn’t gotten that far yet, Ronald said—as if that explained everything). During Maureen's campaign in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in 1982, her father—by then President—perpetually had a pained expression on his face when asked about it, as if he wished it could all go away.

Until the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s, Patti seemed to act out in public at every turn, with one embarrassing tell-all screed and episode (e.g., posing nude in Playboy) after another.

Even Ron Jr.—the youngest in the family and the one with the least ambivalent relationship with his parents—seems to have produced his new memoir, My Father at 100, in an attempt to pierce the veil his father kept over his own life. Much of it is simply goes back to the places where his father grew up: “to arrive where we started,” in the words of T.S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets, “And know the place for the first time.”

Back to FDR. Like Reagan, the President who guided America through the Depression and World War II possessed charisma to spare while leaving most visitors unsure if they had really penetrated that genial surface. But FDR's remoteness, we know now, was a mask, a device that allowed him to discern visitors' intentions and vulnerability without revealing his own (especially the frailty left by polio). Reagan's sense of inner withdrawal can only be ascribed to Alzheimer's rather late in his adult life. More telling might have been his admission that, after coming to Dixon at age nine, he'd been slow to make friends. "In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely," he wrote in a rare introspective moment. "I've been inclined to hold back a little bit of myself, reserving it for myself." He might have imbibed certain values in his Midwestern small towns while growing up--belief in the American dream, the bright line between good and evil--but also a sense of isolation, even embarrassment, about his origins.