FDR - Jean Edward Smith [304]
With Congress adjourned until the new year, Roosevelt carried his idea directly to the country. On Sunday, December 29, 1940, he delivered one of his most famous fireside chats, the “arsenal of democracy” speech. He called it a talk on national security, coining an expression that would permeate American debate for generations.21 Movie theaters, restaurants, and other public places emptied as nine o’clock Eastern Standard time approached. CBS, NBC, and the Mutual network carried the address live, and a record 75 percent of Americans would either listen to or read the president’s remarks.22 In the White House, Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard, joined Eleanor, Sara, and members of the cabinet to watch FDR declare that there was no hope of a negotiated peace with Hitler. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”
Roosevelt told his listeners, “If Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” The United States must prepare for the danger ahead. “But we well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.”
The answer for Roosevelt was unstinting support for Britain’s resistance:
The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For 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.23*
At one point in the fireside chat Roosevelt spoke of German fifth columnists operating in the Western Hemisphere. Then followed the sentence “There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.”
When the speech had been submitted to the State Department, the draft came back with the words “many of them in high places” crossed out in red pencil. FDR, who had little affection for the nation’s career diplomats, was appalled. “Leave it in,” he instructed Rosenman. “In fact, I’m very much tempted to say, ‘many of them in high places, especially in the State Department.’ ”24
In much the way that Churchill galvanized British resistance, Roosevelt’s speeches and press conferences in December 1940 and January 1941 deepened America’s understanding of what was at stake.25 Buoyed by his unprecedented third-term mandate, FDR assumed command of public opinion as he had done during the hundred days in 1933. Letters and telegrams to the White House after his fireside chat ran 100 to 1 in the president’s favor. A Gallup Poll in early January showed 68 percent of Americans in favor of Lend-Lease and only 26 percent opposed.26 In Britain and throughout the Commonwealth the public was thrilled by Roosevelt’s stirring affirmation of American purpose. Churchill wrote that it was his duty “on behalf of the British Government and indeed the whole British Empire