Free Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns Page A

frustration, fear, disillusion, mingled feelings of superiority and inferiority toward other peoples. It took form in a simple, powerful, irresistible feeling against taking part in foreign wars. Defense, yes; aid to the Allies, perhaps; but foreign wars—never.
    Roosevelt had not only recognized this mood; he had helped create it. In speech after speech he had made his obeisances to the God of No Foreign War. His protestations had reached a climax in the 1940 election campaign. Military action, he seemed to be saying, was no longer an alternative to be used prudently and sparingly as an instrument of foreign policy. It was flatly ruled out, except in case of outright invasion. But now this mood was confronting another mood, still of lesser sweep and intensity, but risingin the face of Nazi conquest, a mood resulting from indignation over fascist conquest and cruelty, hostility to Nazi racism, sympathy for afflicted peoples and occupied nations, concern for the Jews, admiration for the British.
    Like a huge old sounding box, Congress picked up, amplified, and distorted this welter of ideologies, attitudes, and moods. With the more interventionist South and the more isolationist hinterland both overrepresented in the Senate, the extremes tended to dominate debate. It was an easy way to avoid the dilemmas of hard policy. Isolationist Congressmen could arouse emotional unity by spurning the horrors of war for American boys. Interventionist Senators, spread-eagling above the baffling choices and dilemmas, could appeal to sympathy for the heroic Allies and to fear of the Axis.
    But the President could not elude the hard choices. The time for oratory alone was long past. It was a time for policies and programs, and for politicians who could work together. The crucial step for the President was to cement his alliance with the moderate, interventionist Republicans. Wendell Willkie, who had wasted little time nursing his election sores, had decided to visit embattled Britain. When in mid-January he came to Washington to pick up his passport, Hull took him to see the President. The two ex-candidates had a jocular meeting. The President handed Willkie a letter addressed to “Dear Churchill.”
    “Wendell Willkie is taking this to you. He is being a true help in keeping politics out of things.
    “I think this verse applies to you people as well as to us:
    “Sail on, O Ship of State!
    Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
    Humanity with all its fears,
    With all the hopes of future years
    Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
LEND-LEASE: THE GREAT DEBATE
    The President now faced a daunting political problem: how to gain congressional and popular support for a measure strong enough to give decisive aid to the democracies—but a measure that would be unfamiliar to most voters, expensive to the taxpayers, and obviously unneutral; a measure that would so entangle the nation’s military and diplomatic affairs with Britain’s—and with other nations’—as to arouse the isolationists; a measure that, above all, would challenge the popular mood of No Foreign Wars. The President’s solution to this problem was simple. The Lend-Lease billwas to be presented as a step not toward war but away from war. Roosevelt would not challenge the mood-god of America.
    His foes suspected as much. “Never before,” cried Senator Burton K. Wheeler, of Montana, over the radio, “has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this Nation of its defenses.” Warming to the attack, Wheeler went on: “The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt, who was usually an expert in remaining quiet under attack, saw his opening and struck back. He regarded Wheeler’s statement, he told reporters, as the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that had ever been