FDR - Jean Edward Smith [291]
In Europe the situation was grim. With the defeat of France, the Battle of Britain began. Willkie’s nomination had removed the questions of preparedness and aid to Britain from the campaign agenda, and the election would not be waged on those issues. Nevertheless, sizable segments in both parties continued to fight a rearguard action to ensure American neutrality. The two principal issues involved Churchill’s May 15 request for fifty older American destroyers and the need for peacetime conscription. Public opinion hung in the balance. Gallup Polls in June and July 1940 indicated that 61 percent of Americans believed the most important task for the United States was to stay out of the war. At the same time, 73 percent favored all possible aid to Britain short of war. On the question of whether the United States should send airplanes to England “even though it might delay our own national defense program,” respondents divided 49 percent in favor, 44 percent against.32
Bipartisan legislation for a peacetime draft, the first in American history, was introduced in the Senate on June 20 by Nebraska Democrat Edward R. Burke and in the House the next day by New York Republican James W. Wadsworth. This was not an administration measure. Burke was an anti–New Deal Democrat who vigorously opposed FDR’s Court-packing plan and had earned the president’s ill will. Wadsworth, who had served two terms in the U.S. Senate (1915–1927), was an upstate Republican from Livingston County and an old friend of Roosevelt but scarcely in the liberal wing of the party.33
The bill was framed by a private citizens group headed by Grenville Clark, Stimson’s former law partner, and was accorded little chance of passage.* James Byrnes, the Democratic whip, said there was “not a Chinaman’s chance.”34 Labor’s William Green called voluntary enlistments, not the draft, “the American way.”35 John L. Lewis, with his gift for invective, denounced the proposal as “a fantastic suggestion from a mind in full intellectual retreat.”36 Religious leaders such as the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, an internationalist on many issues, vigorously opposed the plan.37 The Progressive George Norris, who continued to support the president, was convinced that conscription would end in military dictatorship. Isolationists had a field day. “The idea of letting the boys sit around for a year playing stud poker and blackjack is poppycock,” said Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa.38 “The only emergency in this country is the one conjured up by those who want to send our boys to Europe or Asia,” proclaimed North Dakota’s Gerald Nye. “Militarism repugnant to every American instinct and institution,” announced Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. “If this bill passes,” said Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, “it will slit the throat of the last great democracy still living. It will accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory. On the headstone of American Democracy he will inscribe: ‘Here lies the foremost victim of the war of nerves.’ ”39
Roosevelt initially kept the bill at arm’s length. It was an election year, and he did not wish to move too far ahead of public opinion. “Governments such as ours cannot swing so far so quickly,” he wrote his old friend Helen Rogers Reid, the wife of the publisher of the Herald Tribune, an old childhood neighbor and playmate. “They can only move in keeping with the thought and will of the great majority