Those Angry Days Page 16

  Eleven days after delivering his “fight on the beaches” speech, Churchill sat down to compose his latest appeal to the president of the United States for aid. Gone was the tone of inspiration and defiance that he had used over and over to raise the morale of his countrymen and rally them to fight. This message contained only the bleakest of warnings. If France collapsed, as appeared increasingly likely, and his country received no help from America, Churchill warned, a “shattered, starving” Britain might well sweep his government out of power and install one willing to make peace with Germany.

  Such a scenario would be almost as catastrophic for the United States as it would be for his own nation, he went on. America would be left to face “a United States of Europe under Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.” To keep that from happening, the United States must waste no time in sending destroyers, planes, and weapons to the British. It was, the prime minister declared, “a matter of life or death.”

  Virtually from the day he replaced Neville Chamberlain, Churchill had been engaged in a battle of wits with the president. When he begged for destroyers, as he had done repeatedly, Roosevelt responded that he could not send them without the approval of Congress. At the same time, FDR urged Churchill to consider dispatching the British fleet to Canada or the United States in case of German invasion. The prime minister replied that Britain was hardly likely to entrust its navy, the very symbol of British power, to a neutral America. According to the British cabinet, Roosevelt “seemed to be taking the view that it would be nice of him to pick up the pieces of the British Empire if this country was overrun.… [H]e should realize that there was another aspect of the question.”

  Roosevelt certainly understood the importance of the British fleet to the defense of both Britain and America, and there’s no question he wanted to do all he could to keep Britain fighting. Indeed, five days before receiving Churchill’s warning of a defeatist government replacing his own, the president had pledged to use all “the material resources of this nation” to provide the British with the help they needed. “We will not slow down or detour,” FDR declared during a June 10 commencement speech at the University of Virginia. “Signs and signals call for speed—full speed ahead.”

  John Wheeler-Bennett, the historian turned British propagandist, was present at the speech. He remembered “the shock of excitement which passed through me.… This was what we had been praying for—not only sympathy but pledges of support. If Britain could only hold on until these vast resources could be made available to her, we could yet survive and even win the war. It was the first gleam of hope.” As Time saw it, the president’s address marked the official end of American neutrality. “The U.S. has taken sides.… Ended is the utopian hope that [it] could remain an island of democracy in a totalitarian world.”

  Yet Roosevelt’s prodigal promises were unlikely to be translated into action any time soon. Arguing that America lacked almost everything it needed for its own defense, George Marshall and most of his military colleagues, along with secretary of war Harry Woodring, were unalterably opposed to sending to the British any of the minuscule number of planes, tanks, ships, and weapons the country did have. They emphasized the necessity of building a strong armed force here before becoming entangled in Europe’s struggle. “It is a drop in the bucket on the other side,” Marshall told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, “and it is a very vital necessity on this side, and that is that.”

  When the president asked the Army and Navy in June to come up with ideas for utilizing U.S. naval and air power against German forces, the services’ Joint Planning Board replied: “Our unreadiness to meet such aggression on its own scale is so great that, so long as the choice is left to us, we should avoid the contest until we can be adequately prepared.”

  Complicating the situation for Churchill and the British was the widespread belief in Washington, particularly among the military, that Britain was already doomed and that any aid it received would be captured by Germany and used against the United States. If Britain were vanquished after America sent supplies desperately needed at home, Marshall declared, “the Army and the Administration could never justify to the American people the risk they had taken.” In a tart letter to the British ambassador in Washington, Churchill observed: “Up till April, [U.S. officials] were so sure that the Allies would win that they did not think help necessary. Now they are so sure we shall lose that they do not think it possible.”

  On June 24, Marshall and his naval counterpart, Admiral Harold Stark, urged Roosevelt to shut off all aid to Britain. The president rejected the idea out of hand, making clear to his service chiefs that America would not renege on its commitment to help the last European country standing against Hitler. Nonetheless, the only equipment made available to the British over the next couple of months was a few dozen planes and hundreds of thousands of World War I–era rifles, machine guns, revolvers, mortars, and ammunition. While certainly important, such matériel could clearly do little in the long run to stave off defeat by Germany. Indeed, as Marshall remembered, the rifles were sent with only ten rounds of ammunition per weapon.

  Joining the military in opposing a transfer of arms was a majority of members of Congress, who were as parsimonious toward Britain as they had been generous in bolstering American defenses. Senator Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went so far as to urge the British government to surrender to Hitler. “It is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defense,” he said, “and that nothing the United States has to give can do more than delay the result.” In early June, Pittman’s committee blocked the sale of modern warplanes and ships to the Allies, and later that month, Congress banned the sale of any further supplies unless U.S. military chiefs declared them surplus to American national defense requirements.

  Observing the events in Washington that fateful spring, the German chargé d’affaires assured his superiors in Berlin that America, to the president’s great chagrin, was unlikely to do much to help ward off British and French defeats. “Only the experienced observer,” Hans Thomsen wrote, “can detect Roosevelt’s tremendous fury at not seeing any possibility at the present of helping the allies in their fateful struggle.”

  THE ARGUMENTS RAGING IN Washington over aid to Britain were echoing throughout the country as well. “No newspaper was too small, no hamlet too remote, no group of citizens too insensitive to be untouched,” Time wrote in late May. “The question under debate was, broadly: ‘Is this war our concern?’ ” Americans from Maine to California began making their voices heard, with many enlisting in hastily organized and passionately waged campaigns to influence their government’s actions. Advocates of aid, galvanized by the fall of France in late June, were the first to make their presence felt.

  “If you could have asked millions of Americans what single moment made the war real to them, many would have answered that it was the day the Germans marched into Paris,” the historian Richard Ketchum noted. Most people in the United States had little knowledge of the countries previously vanquished by Germany; for them, Hitler’s earlier victims were, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain’s notorious remark about Czechoslovakia, faraway countries full of people about whom we knew nothing. But France—and its capital—was different. Even those who had never been to Paris could summon up mental images of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the lovely tree-lined boulevards, the bustling sidewalk cafés. Now Paris was gone. Would London be next?

  If so, what would happen to the British fleet? If it, too, were swallowed up by Germany, the Reich would control the Atlantic sea-lanes, posing an agonizing dilemma for the United States. The main U.S. fleet was currently based in Hawaii as a deterrent to an increasingly aggressive Japan, now at war with China, while a considerably smaller, weaker naval force patrolled the Atlantic. If the fleet remained in the Pacific, Germany could send troop ships with impunity to South America or, in an equally nightmarish possibility, cu
t the United States off from its overseas sources of vital raw materials. If the ships were transferred to the Atlantic, the Pacific would be open to the Japanese fleet.

  Supporters of aid to Britain used this troubling scenario as a key argument in their newly organized campaigns. One particularly influential advocate, the columnist Walter Lippmann, declared: “We have been deluding ourselves when we have looked upon a vast expanse of salt water as if it were a super Maginot Line. The ocean is a highway for those who control it. For that reason every war which involves the dominion of the seas is a world war in which America is inescapably involved.”

  The idea that America’s security depended on Britain’s continued independence was heavily promoted by the first major citizens’ group to spring up. Headed by William Allen White, it was created in late May, just days after German troops began tearing through Western Europe. The organization’s official title was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, but virtually everyone referred to it as the White Committee.

  After helping Roosevelt win congressional approval of “cash and carry” in the fall of 1939, the Kansas editor had grown increasingly alarmed by America’s continuing apathy toward the war. A couple of days after the German juggernaut began, he sent a telegram to several hundred prominent Americans, many of them members of his former committee to lobby for neutrality law revisions, urging them to join him in championing the cause of “all aid short of war.” Like Roosevelt, who had given his blessing to the new group, White argued that the main reason for aiding the Allies was to keep America out of the conflict. The future of Western civilization, White declared, was “being decided upon the battlefields of Europe.” If Britain and France were allowed to fall, “war will inevitably come to the United States.”

  Serving in effect as an unofficial public relations agency for Roosevelt and his administration, the White Committee enlisted governors, mayors, college presidents, professors, newspaper editors, writers, businessmen, actors, and at least one prizefighter—Gene Tunney—to serve on its executive board. The board members, in turn, helped organize local groups throughout the country to generate widespread grassroots support. “Our idea,” White wrote to a friend, “is to fill the radio and the newspapers and the Congressional mail with the voices of prominent citizens urging America to become the nonbelligerent ally of France and England.”

  With the fall of France, membership in the committee mushroomed. By July 1, it had three hundred local chapters across the nation; a month later, there were nearly seven hundred chapters in forty-seven states. Members sponsored rallies, radio broadcasts, and newspaper advertisements, while at the same time writing their congressmen and shipping pro-aid petitions bearing millions of signatures to Capitol Hill and the White House.

  AMONG WHITE’S MOST PRIZED recruits was Elizabeth Morrow, then serving as acting president of Smith College. While Mrs. Morrow had long been involved in a wide range of charitable and philanthropic causes, her main value to the committee obviously lay in the fact that she was Charles Lindbergh’s mother-in-law. An ardent advocate of aid to the Allies, she was already active in a number of organizations providing private help to European citizens caught up in the conflict. In her diary, Anne Lindbergh noted her mother’s “terrible sense of shame and even guilt for Americans not helping more.”

  Mrs. Morrow had turned her New Jersey estate into a sort of informal headquarters for some of these private aid groups—a matter of considerable discomfort for Anne whenever she came to visit. On occasion, she would find old friends of hers helping her mother put together food and clothing parcels for refugees. When they asked her to pitch in, she declined. It would be a violation of her own personal neutrality to do so, she said; Charles and she weren’t taking sides in this war, which, in Lindbergh’s view, was a clash of rival imperialistic states, both undeserving of American support.

  Until Lindbergh’s May 19 broadcast, Elizabeth Morrow had held her tongue about his and Anne’s stand on the war, at least when other people were around. But she was so upset by his speech that, in the presence of a close friend of Anne’s, she suggested to her daughter that, at the very least, Lindbergh might in the future express some sympathy for Hitler’s victims and revulsion toward Nazi methods. That was impossible, Anne replied: it was important to Charles that he be seen as an impartial observer, a kind of umpire, in the war in Europe. Her mother looked at her for a moment, then snapped, “I always understood that umpires have whistles and sometimes blow [them] when there’s a foul.”

  Much of Mrs. Morrow’s indignation stemmed from the obvious emotional toll that Lindbergh’s activism was taking on Anne. She wrote to a friend: “I am in a difficult position just now between my two sons-in-law, but my chief worry is over Anne. She is torn in spirit, and it is telling on her health.”

  On the surface, Anne was her usual quiet, reserved self. Deep down, however, she was consumed by tension, pain, sadness, and regret. She felt so guilty about Charles’s public repudiation of the British and French that when she and her sister Con had lunch in New York one afternoon, she insisted they go to an Italian rather than a French restaurant. “I can’t bear to face French people,” she wrote in her diary. A few days earlier, when an old French acquaintance—a military pilot on a mission to buy aircraft from the U.S. government—asked Lindbergh to lunch, Anne was amazed. “He has been there in the battle, he knows what France faces, and he can still meet and treat C. as a friend. It is incredible. I do not believe, placed in the same position, I could do it.”

  As the debate over the war grew more vitriolic, she found herself estranged from virtually all her old friends and acquaintances. Lindbergh, she mused, had become the “Anti-Christ” to a “certain class.” She added: “I know the ‘class’ well. It is ‘my’ class. All the people I was brought up with. The East, the secure, the rich, the cultured, the sensitive, the academic, the good—those worthy intelligent people brought up in a hedged world so far from realities.”

  Her inner conflicts were further exacerbated by the escalating conflict between her mother and her husband. Despite her worries about Anne, Elizabeth Morrow, at the request of William Allen White and urged on by Aubrey Morgan, decided to go public with her opposition to Lindbergh’s views. In early June, she made a national radio address on behalf of the White Committee, calling on the government to provide all-out support for the Allies: “I urge the sending of munitions and supplies, food, money, airplanes, ships, and everything that could help them in this struggle against Germany.” Then, in what could easily be viewed as a rebuke to Lindbergh, Mrs. Morrow declared, “There are some things worse than war. There are some things supreme and noble that are worth fighting for.”

  Before the speech, she had insisted to Anne that it was not meant as an attack on Charles, but as her daughter noted, “Of course, it will be used and publicized in that light.” After the broadcast, Mrs. Morrow returned to her New Jersey estate, where Con and Aubrey Morgan opened a bottle of champagne to toast her success. Anne, meanwhile, had listened to the speech by herself, glad that Charles was not at home to hear it. “It is a beautiful speech, a fighting speech, with much of her faith and spiritual force in it,” she wrote in her diary. “But I cannot agree with its premises, and I feel only sad at not being able to, and [being] very much alone and separated from all these good people.”

  To her mother, she wrote: “How I wish, oh how I wish, I could feel wholehearted about this war, in any way. Either that I could feel it were necessary for our self-preservation, or that the war simply and purely was a struggle between evil and good. To so many people … it is clearly a case of the forces of evil vanquishing the forces of good. I cannot simplify it to that.”

  While Elizabeth Morrow’s broadcast was clearly meant to counter Lindbergh’s position on the war, it also was intended to challenge the widespread idea that women, because they were mothers, would be more inclined to oppose intervention. That view was pushed hard by the so-called “mothers’ movement,” a co
alition of right-wing women’s organizations that had sprung up in opposition to Roosevelt and his foreign policy, claiming that interventionism was both un-American and antifamily.

  After her speech, Mrs. Morrow was bombarded by hate mail, with many of the letters using the rhetoric of motherhood in their assaults on her views. “Unless you recall your speech, it will not go well with you,” one anonymous letter declared. “We, all the ‘Mothers’ of the United States, will see that you will be railroaded to England and France and put in the ‘Front-line’ where the likes of you belong. How dare you speak about war!! Have you sons to give? … Don’t forget, We are coming for you. We are going to get you.”

  THE INCREASINGLY ACRIMONIOUS CLIMATE in the country also had a profound impact on another prominent member of William Allen White’s committee. Robert Sherwood’s friends knew him as a gentle, kind man, but when he received word in January 1940 that Senator William Borah was dying, he wrote in his diary: “A bit of good news today.… Now—if only God will take [isolationist publisher William Randolph] Hearst.” In a profile of Sherwood published later that year, The New Yorker described him as a “fiercely militant liberal” who “feels a burning indignation against those he considers callous and insensitive to the struggle in Europe.”