• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 931 0

nation’s policy in accordance with a belief that he could not move faster than public opinion would allow. Such opinion was moving Britain’s way. To the boundless relief of the prime minister, on February 8 the Lend-Lease bill passed the House by 260 votes to 165, and on March 8 was endorsed by the Senate, 60 votes to 13. For months thereafter, the last of Britain’s foreign exchange continued to be drained to pay for supplies—only 1 percent of war matériel used by Britain in 1941 represented fruits of Lend-Lease. But the new measure ensured that, even when Britain’s cash was exhausted, shipments kept coming. Importantly, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie supported it—and Britain.

The president extracted for the British through Lend-Lease the most generous terms a U.S. legislature would swallow, much preferable to the straight loans of World War I, which Britain alienated U.S. opinion by failing to repay. A substantial minority of Americans, including many at the summits of industry and commerce, not merely opposed Roosevelt’s policies, but hated the man. He perceived his own power as circumscribed, in a fashion which the prime minister underestimated. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt never led a coalition government, though he included some prominent Republicans such as Henry Stimson in his Cabinet. He always faced substantial opposition in Congress—sometimes only on lesser matters, but sometimes also on great ones. There was no doubt of his sincerity in desiring British victory. Having overcome his initial reservations about Churchill, partly thanks to Hopkins, by March 1941 he could declare to the American people: “In this historic crisis, Britain is blessed with a brilliant and great leader.” But Roosevelt considered himself lacking any mandate to dispatch American soldiers to fight in Europe. Until December 1941, while he provided increasing aid to Britain—“we must become the great arsenal of democracy,” a phrase borrowed from French economist Jean Monnet by way of Felix Frankfurter—he remained unwilling to lead a charge towards war. In this, he was assuredly wise. If the United States had plunged into belligerence with Germany before Pearl Harbor, and even in the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have pushed a declaration of war through Congress, he would thereafter have led a divided country.

The historian Michael Howard, in 1941 a student at Oxford awaiting a summons to the army, has written: “It is never very easy for the British356 to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt … In the 1940s the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.” Melville Troy was an American cigar importer living in London. Though he admired the fortitude of the British amid the blitz, he was deeply anxious to see his own country spared from its horrors: “Personally I am very sorry to see America turning357 her pruning hooks and ploughshares into implements of war, and wish we had a Woodrow Wilson to keep us out of it.” Many of Troy’s fellow countrymen thought likewise.

There was much, much more British wooing to be done. The extravagant courtesies shown by the government to Harry Hopkins were outdone when Winant arrived as ambassador. He was met at Bristol by Brendan Bracken and the Duke of Kent. A special train took him to Windsor, where King George VI was waiting at the station. The monarch then drove Winant in his own car to the castle. Never in history had a foreign envoy been received with such ceremony. Meanwhile, implementation of the Lend-Lease programme enlisted another key American player in Britain’s cause. Averell Harriman, fifty-year-old son of a railroad millionaire, was a supremely gilded product of Groton and Yale, a polo player and skier, international banker and collector of Impressionist paintings, a cosmopolitan of considerable gifts. Roosevelt explained Harriman