All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [117]
America Embattled
The people of the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J.P. Marquand’s contemporary novel So Little Time says: ‘You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.’ Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 per cent of Americans thought that US citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 per cent believed they should retain that option. Very few wanted to see their nation join either side in a bloodbath an ocean apart from their own continent. A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the US should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 per cent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 per cent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 per cent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.
For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to US London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: ‘We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the “relativity” of world geography and the rapid annihilation of distance and purely local economics.’ Given the strength of isolationism, however, between 1939 and 1941 he felt obliged to act with circumspection in aiding Britain. In many respects a cautious politician, he had to manage what one of his supporters called ‘the most volatile public opinion in the world’. White House familiar Robert Sherwood wrote: ‘Before the advent of calamity in Western Europe and of Winston Churchill, the Allied cause did not have a good smell even in the nostrils of those who hated Fascism and all its evil works.’
The writer John Steinbeck spent some weeks in the spring of 1940 sailing down the Pacific coast of South America, from whence he wrote to a friend on 26 March: ‘We haven’t heard any news of Europe since we left and don’t much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow, but something more vital and surviving than either.’ Like many liberals, Steinbeck was convinced America would eventually have to fight, but viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. ‘If it weren’t for the coming war, I could look forward to a good quiet life for a few years,’ he wrote on 9 July.
The morning after Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940, reporters crowded into FDR’s office and asked if this brought the US closer to war. The president chose his words as carefully as ever: ‘You can put it this way: that the events of the past forty-eight hours will undoubtedly cause a great many more Americans to think about the potentialities of war.’ Roosevelt avowed reluctance to run for a third presidential term in 1940, and intimated that only world crisis, and explicitly