• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1351 0

presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence. Roosevelt became alarmed that, as a supposed advocate of war, he was threatened with defeat. Gen. Hugh Johnson, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, wrote: ‘I know of no well-informed Washington observer who isn’t convinced that if Mr R is elected he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that if none presents itself he will make one.’ A Fortune poll on 4 November 1940 showed that 70 per cent of Americans saw at least an even chance of America getting into the war; but while 41 per cent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 per cent advocated sending Americans to fight. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congressman close to the administration on almost all domestic issues, secured big pork-barrel funding for Texas from the surge in defence spending. Johnson nonetheless spoke out against US involvement in Europe, telling his constituents in June 1940: ‘The ability of the American people to think calmly and act wisely during a crisis is going to keep us out of a war.’ He changed his mind only in the summer of 1941, when British defeats in the Mediterranean persuaded him that the threat of an Axis triumph was unacceptable to the United States.

The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: ‘And 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.’ The president’s wife Eleanor was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column ‘My Day’, she qualified it importantly: ‘No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.’ The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war, had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.

On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 per cent support for his re-election, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The US minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: ‘The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began “Roosevelt is in!” His voice betrayed relief and some exultation’. But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that ‘no war ever accomplished what it was intended to’. In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases – for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.

American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: ‘All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes in Albania and Libya, worried over Ireland’s suicidal obstinacy [in remaining neutral], fearful of entry ourselves, yet wanting to help out as much as possible.’ But Dees displayed a shrewd understanding of the range of sentiment in his own country when he wrote later in the year: ‘Some of my friends hold the opinion that Roosevelt should take stronger measures, full-out convoying with American war vessels etc. They think FDR is behind the national tempo instead of ahead of it. But I think he’s driving us as fast as we’ll allow. “We” means 130 million people, includes a mass of corn and wheat-growing, cattle-raising mid-westerners who are sentimentally anti-Nazi but can’t see how the Germans could come