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.
