But isolationism remained a critical force in the 1940 presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence. Roosevelt became alarmed that, as a supposed advocate of war, he was threatened with defeat. Gen. Hugh Johnson, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, wrote: ‘I know of no well-informed Washington observer who isn’t convinced that if Mr. R is elected he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that if none presents itself he will make one.’ A Fortune poll on 4 November 1940 showed that 70 per cent of Americans saw at least an even chance of America getting into the war; but while 41 per cent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 per cent advocated sending Americans to fight. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congressman close to the administration on almost all domestic issues, secured big pork-barrel funding for Texas from the surge in defence spending. Johnson nonetheless spoke out against US involvement in Europe, telling his constituents in June 1940: ‘The ability of the American people to think calmly and act wisely during a crisis is going to keep us out of a war.’ He changed his mind only in the summer of 1941, when British defeats in the Mediterranean persuaded him that the threat of an Axis triumph was unacceptable to the United States.
The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: ‘And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ The president’s wife Eleanor was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column ‘My Day’, she qualified it importantly: ‘No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.’ The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war, had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.
On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 per cent support for his re-election, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The US minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: ‘The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began “Roosevelt is in!” His voice betrayed relief and some exultation’. But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that ‘no war ever accomplished what it was intended to’. In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases – for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.
American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: ‘All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes in Albania and Libya, worried over Ireland’s suicidal obstinacy [in remaining neutral], fearful of entry ourselves, yet wanting to help out as much as possible.’ But Dees displayed a shrewd understanding of the range of sentiment in his own country when he wrote later in the year: ‘Some of my friends hold the opinion that Roosevelt should take stronger measures, full-out convoying with American war vessels etc. They think FDR is behind the national tempo instead of ahead of it. But I think he’s driving us as fast as we’ll allow. “We” means 130 million people, includes a mass of corn and wheat-growing, cattle-raising mid-westerners who are sentimentally anti-Nazi but can’t see how the Germans could come all the way across the ocean and do anything when they get here. I couldn’t call the American public unaware. It is aware all right. But it hasn’t that driving conviction that made men die in Spain and other men join the Free French.’
The arguments advanced by Roosevelt for supporting Britain mirrored those later deployed by the Western Allies to justify assistance to the Soviet Union: material aid saved American blood, just as Russian blood spared many British and American lives. The March 1941 Lend-Lease Act authorised credit deliveries: only 1 per cent of munitions used by Churchill’s forces that year was Lend-Lease material, but thereafter the programme provided most of the island’s food and fuel, together with a large part of its armed forces’ tanks, transport aircraft and amphibious operations equipment. The British focused their own industrial production on combat aircraft, warships, army weapons and vehicles. From 1941 onwards, they were almost wholly dependent upon American credit to pay for their war effort.
Though Winston Churchill strained every sinew to induce the US president to lead his nation into belligerence before Pearl Harbor, it was fortunate that his efforts failed. In the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have forced a declaration of war on Germany through the US Congress, thereafter he would have led a divided nation. Until December 1941, public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to fighting Hitler. A much higher proportion of people favoured stern action against the Japanese, a policy most conspicuously manifested in the July 1941 freeze on Japanese assets and embargo on all exports, which was decisive in committing Tokyo to fight, since 80 per cent of its oil supplies came from the US and the Dutch East Indies. The embargo was far more popular at home than Roosevelt’s escalation of the US Navy’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic – escorting convoys to Britain progressively farther east, and sporadically exchanging fire with U-boats.
Whatever the president’s personal wishes, Congress remained a critical check upon American policy until Tokyo and Berlin put an end to argument. Historian David Kennedy has suggested that, since Germany was always the principal enemy of the democracies, Roosevelt would have better served his nation’s interests by averting war with Japan in order to concentrate upon the destruction of Nazism: ‘a little appeasement – another name for diplomacy – might have yielded rich rewards’. Once Hitler was beaten, Kennedy argues, the ambitions of Japan’s militarists could have been frustrated with vastly less expenditure of life and treasure, by the threat or application of irresistible Allied power. But this argument raises a large question: whether Roosevelt could ever have persuaded his people to fight the Germans, in the absence of overwhelming aggression such as Hitler refused to initiate.
Even after war was declared in December 1941, and indeed until the end of hostilities, few Americans felt anything like the animosity towards Germans that they displayed against the Japanese. This was not merely a matter of racial sentiment. There was also passionate sympathy for the horrors China had experienced, and continued to experience, at Japanese hands. Most Americans deplored what the Nazis were doing to the world, but would have remained unenthusiastic or indeed implacably hostile about sending armies to Europe, had not Hitler forced the issue.
On 27 May 1941, following the fall of Greece and Crete, eighty-five million Americans listened to Roosevelt’s national radio broadcast, in which he warned of the perils of Nazi victory. The nation was, in one historian’s words, ‘afraid, unhappy and bewildered’. The president concluded by declaring a ‘state of unlimited national emergency’. No one was sure what this meant, save that it brought war closer and increased the powers of the executive. Many towns, especially in the South, began to experience economic booms on the back of military and naval construction programmes. Yet labour disputes dogged the nation: some industrial workers felt as alienated from America’s national purposes, and from their employers, as their counterparts in Britain. Unregulated mining killed nearly 1,300 US underground workers in 1940 and maimed many more. Passions ran so high that strikes were often violent: for instance, four men died and twelve more were badly injured during a 1941 dispute in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Popular sentiment strongly resisted admitting foreign refugees, victims of Nazi persecution: in June 1941 it was decreed that no one with relatives in Germany could enter the US. The isolationists never quit. There was a powerful Irish lobby, most