Fear Itself (47 page)

As the House prepared to endorse the end of the embargo, Hamilton Fish noted, “There is not a northern State, not one, that is not divided, that I know about, but in the South you will find Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia and Alabama all lined up to defeat the arms embargo. If this vote rested with the North and with the East and the West we would carry it by an overwhelming majority.”
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This bitter observation proved accurate. During the November 3 House vote of 243–181, “the solid Democratic South . . . delivered the decisive votes to repeal the arms embargo.”
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Southern voices, in fact, had been the most constant and determined in making the case. In just one of tens of interventions by southern members, Majority Leader Sam Rayburn of Texas asked the House, “When great governments, ambitious men who have a desire to control the earth, attempt to stamp out liberty and democracy, is there any immorality in supplying arms to a little weak country so that it may let the dictators and the autocracies of the earth know that it can somewhere, even though it does not have a factory within its own boundaries, get arms to protect its liberty?”
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Similar southern talk predominated in the Senate. Tom Connally of Texas recalled, “We passed this embargo act unwittingly and with not the proper foresight, not with clear enough vision, not with a view away down the road; we passed it as a handsome and beautiful gesture of peace, but we now find that the operation of this domestic law . . . has put us in a position where we are not neutral in this war, but to all intents and purposes we are aiding Stalin and Hitler.” Long-serving Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, who first had arrived in Washington two years before Vinson, in 1911, explained that he advocated “repeal of the embargo because it has the effect of aiding nazi-ism and communism, to neither of which ‘isms’ I subscribe, and both of which I abhor. . . . I am against the embargo because some time ago I read Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf,
and after reading that book I believe it is Hitler’s purpose to bring as much of the world as possible under his control during his lifetime.”
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Fortune’s
projection that public opinion would shape what Congress would do was borne out. “The neutrality act of 1939,” the historian Robert Divine observed, in fact “was a perfect expression of the contradictory mood of the American people. They strongly favored the cause of England and France, yet they did not want to risk American involvement in the European conflict.”
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Combining a softer version of cash and carry with an end to the arms embargo was something of a contradictory policy, and the other limitations that had been elements of earlier laws remained present. Still, this legislation provided a huge boost to Britain. The repeal, Neville Chamberlain told his country, “reopens for the Allies the doors of the greatest storehouse of supplies in the world.”
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Tapping those reserves required hard currency, which Britain no longer had. With the Royal Navy pressed for ships, the United States agreed in September 1940 to send fifty destroyers of World War I vintage in exchange for British colonial basing rights, primarily in the Caribbean. But this was a limited option and an inadequate response as Nazi Germany conquered much of Europe, turning neutral yellow to German green, and Britain became ever more isolated. The answer, signed into law on March 11, 1941, was Lend-Lease. Building on the end of the arms embargo, the law permitted the United States to transfer huge stocks of weapons to any country whose military actions advanced the defense of the United States. Lend-Lease did not offer credit for purchases, much to the chagrin of the government in London, which faced a severe monetary crisis, but it did provide for a continuing flow of weapons once cash terms became impossible by implementing the formal fiction that these supplies were being loaned. As Britain fought for survival, steady consignments of ships, aircraft, tanks, and self-propelled guns began to cross the Atlantic. Observers and historians differ about how quickly this delivery of arms enhanced British capabilities, but even in the spring of 1941, the symbolic significance of Lend-Lease was impossible to miss.
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As the
Washington Post
columnist Mark Sullivan observed, “the psychological factor” would have a powerful effect on German understanding. “Every agent Hitler has in America, every expert who follows the American press for him, and the actions of our Congress, must have already told him that Britain is going to be able to get practically unlimited war supplies from the United States.”
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Congressional Lend-Lease roll calls followed the same course as the 1939 votes that had first rotated away from neutrality. When the House endorsed the program by a majority of 95 on February 8, southern Democrats offered overwhelming support, producing a decisive regional majority of 102. In the Senate, the majority of twenty-five southern members produced on March 8, voting 27–2, was smaller than the overall majority of twenty-nine (on a 62–33 division), but these votes were crucial, nonetheless, because they made the prospect of a filibuster by the bill’s strong isolationist opponents impossible.
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A pleased president cautioned the dictatorships not to confuse division in the legislature with a country whose citizens were at odds. “As a united nation,” he declared on March 15, “our democracy has gone into action.”
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The Lend-Lease votes proceeded, it should be recalled, in an atmosphere of acute fear. Writing in February 1941, Walter Lippmann offered up “a horrid subject to discuss,” the entirely realistic and haunting prospect of a British defeat: “For there is at stake here—let us realize—not merely aid to Britain in the sense of supplying the British resistance. In the last analysis there is at stake also, should Britain fall, the dire possibility that the whole vast power of the British and French and Dutch empires will not only be lost to our defense but will be turned around and turned against us.”
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The vote also followed a period in which the United States had begun to build up its military capacity. On May 16, 1940, President Roosevelt had urgently called for a special appropriation of nearly one billion dollars, bringing the annual total to an unprecedented $3,787,000,000 to bolster the army, navy, and marine corps, and produce an air force with fifty thousand planes. By month’s end, labor had endorsed the buildup, and industry offered full cooperation. Extensive steps were taken to speed up production. Some were technical, including a decision that aircraft engines would be standardized. Others were organizational. These included sidestepping competitive bidding requirements for arms contracts, remaking the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as an instrument to finance the conversion of industry to defense production and the purchase of strategic materials, and suspending antitrust rules for such arms manufacturers. It also took in the appointment of a National Defense Advisory Commission, which included Sidney Hillman, the garment labor leader who was put in charge of manpower utilization and labor problems (a harbinger of the active role labor would play during the mobilization of the U.S. economy in World War I), and, to deal with strategic raw materials, Edward Stettinius Jr., chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, who had signed the first contract with the CIO, who had worked for the NRA, and who, in 1941, would be chosen to head up Lend-Lease.
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As moneys flowed (contracts for national defense were being awarded from June 1, 1940, to the end of the year at the rate of $1.5 billion each month
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), American factories were booming, and weapons production began to provide a powerful antidote to a recurring economic depression. Government oversight of industry and labor, the type of intervention that had characterized the radical moment of the NRA during the early years of the New Deal, returned in a new form. Deepened in scope and capacity, it now was limited to matters of might. Like that of the NRA, the program of mobilization that reached its peak in 1943 harnessed civil society to public purpose. As Eliot Janeway put it in his classic study, “to Roosevelt, as the crisis deepened, as the battle over isolationism grew more embittered, the important question was the participation of the nation as a whole in its own defense.”
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A remarkable national consensus developed among political leaders and the mass populace to build American strength. This policy was supported not just by those who backed energetic, direct help to the Allies but also by isolationists who had not, who were now worried about the country’s abilities to protect its own shores and its own hemisphere. “I was astounded to learn,” John Carl Hinshaw, a Republican isolationist, reported to the House, “that there were only three antiaircraft guns in the whole of southern California, and that those were accompanied by antiquated auxiliary equipment. . . . We are 3,000,000 people in Los Angeles County with practically no defense against hostile attack if our fleet is disposed elsewhere.”
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Likewise, Hamilton Fish bitterly complained about the lack of preparedness, scoring partisan points:

President Roosevelt has been in power ever since Hitler came into power in Germany. No man in America has had a better opportunity to observe the preparedness program in Germany during the last 7 years. President Roosevelt has had full advantage of the information that came through his military and naval aides at Berlin, but, nevertheless, knowing that Germany had modernized its army, the President of the United States has completely failed to take cognizance of these facts and has failed to modernize and properly equip the Army of the United States; and I say this without fear of contradiction from anyone.
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For the internationalists, by contrast, it was Hitler’s advances that should motivate the dramatic increases in spending and production. Once again, southern voices dominated. Oklahoma’s senator Joshua Lee sought to rejoin a common isolationist argument that Germany would be incapable of assaulting the United States after its victories in Europe. “There are those who say that the Nazis would be too exhausted. But has the victor exhausted? . . . On the contrary, like a beast, with every new fresh piece of meat he has gained strength. With new aggression his vision has widened, with every new conquest, until today he is on the pinnacle of success and world domination is in his mind.”
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During the same debate, Florida’s Claude Pepper, who was the most assertive voice on the Democratic side of the aisle, similarly commented on the swift pace of German expansion. “We see in every headline evidence of the expanding power of the military machine of Hitlerism,” he said, and insisted that Congress face up to “how it can most effectively and efficiently assure the country and this hemisphere that our soil will always be sacred against an invader’s foot.”
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Congress seemed uncharacteristically covered by a welter of unanimity. With this drumbeat of diverse but universally positive opinions, it opted for preparedness with uncommon solidarity: 392–1 in the House and 80–0 in the Senate in May and June of 1940 for “A Bill to Expedite the Strengthening of the National Defense”; and 401–1 in the House and 78–0 in the Senate in late May for naval expenditures.
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At the start of June, the
New York Times
took note of how “there was unanimity over the need for expanded defense,” but it also observed that “wide differences of opinion continued over where to draw the lines of defense.” Despite agreement about a massive acceleration of defense spending and the production of weapons, these views were irreconcilable. The central choice posed by the newspaper’s editorial was this: “Was it North America alone, with enough protection of the South American shore to assure defense of the Panama Canal? Or was it necessary, for American security, to prevent defeat of the Allies in Western Europe?”
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Despite the best efforts of Hinshaw, Fish, and the countrywide isolationist movement, Lend-Lease produced a decisive answer to this question, turning a remarkable, indeed unprecedented, peacetime mobilization into a means to stiffen British capacity and resolve. The United States was not yet at war, but neutrality had now been quarantined. Speaking on the Senate floor during a critical debate he was shepherding on conscription only months later, Lister Hill of Alabama reminded his colleagues that, in building America’s military and extending arms overseas, “we have done that which perhaps no man in this Chamber 2 or 3 years ago even dreamed we might do, a thing 2 or 3 years ago would no doubt have seemed absolutely fantastic to any man in this Chamber; that is, we have given millions of dollars in arms and equipment and military supplies to England, China, and other countries. . . . We have given to every country that stands and helps hold the line against Adolf Hitler in his attempted conquest of this world, that helps keep Adolf Hitler from coming to the shores of the United States.”
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If military preparedness elicited wide support, the same was not the case with respect to neutrality. Even after the end of the arms embargo, the United States faced barriers in its wish to help the British war effort, most notably the restriction on sending armed ships into combat zones. On October 7, 1941, President Roosevelt wrote to Winston Churchill to explain why he was about to ask Congress to legislate “sweeping amendments to out Neutrality Act,” because “the Act is seriously crippling our means of helping you.”
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Two days later, he asked Congress to remove existing shipping prohibitions. The 50–37 November 7 vote in the Senate, exactly one month before Pearl Harbor, and the 212–194 vote that followed on November 13 in the House were uncomfortably close, the smallest majorities on war-related roll calls since the German invasion of Poland. With Republicans united and nonsouthern Democrats divided, it yet again took positive southern support to defeat the isolationist position.