Kaye explains: “Roosevelt understood that he needed to firmly engage American collective memory and imagination. Rallying support for the New Deal, he had regularly evoked historical images and personages such as Jefferson and Lincoln. But on this occasion, the nation’s 32nd president would reach even more deeply into America’s Revolutionary heritage, to the very crucible of war out of which the United States had emerged.”
Just ten weeks after America’s entry into World War II, on February 23, 1942, with a bow to the 210th anniversary of George Washington’s birth, FDR gave one of his “fireside chats” on national radio and identified “a most appropriate occasion for us to talk with each other about things as they are today and things as we know they shall be in the future.” Speaking on a day when a Japanese submarine shelled coastal targets near Santa Barbara, California, the president was remarkably frank in spelling out the details of the new crisis. “We have most certainly suffered losses—from Hitler’s U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific—and we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide,” he conceded. “But, speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies, will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”
This was an example of the lofty rhetoric that the president who popularized the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” in the midst of the Great Depression was capable of employing in dire circumstances. But for the conclusion of one of the most important addresses of his presidency, FDR turned to the words of another wordsmith in another time of war.
“The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost,” he said, acknowledging the challenge that lay ahead. “Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ ”
Roosevelt noted, with only slight embellishment, that:
Tom Paine wrote those words on a drumhead, by the light of a campfire. That was when Washington’s little army of ragged, rugged men was retreating across New Jersey, having tasted naught but defeat. And General Washington ordered that these great words written by Tom Paine be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army, and this was the assurance given to the first American armed forces.
The United States was not just waging a necessary fight against fascism, Roosevelt made clear; it was fighting to begin the world anew. “We of the United Nations are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek,” he told tens of millions of listeners. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”
Even before the United States had entered into the war, FDR devoted time and energy to crafting a vision of what would come after. This was vital work, as his was a war-weary and war-wary land. The experience of World War I, a fight of kings and kaisers into which the U.S. had been drawn at immense human and material cost, had soured Americans on seemingly distant conflicts. The “war to end all wars” had enriched munitions merchants but it had left a generation of young men shell-shocked and receptive to the isolationist appeals of Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee.
Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation magazine, recognized the challenge. “Before its total, uncompromising demands are laid upon them,” she explained as the daunting prospect of American involvement in a second world war emerged, “the people of America must learn that this war is their war.” Labor unions and civil rights groups, leaders like A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and H.L. Mitchell of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and dramatist Lillian Hellman, all championed the view that America must fight not merely to defeat fascism but to win a new world in which the root causes of bigotry, demagoguery, inequality and injustice would be addressed.
The poet Langston Hughes put it more bluntly, writing in a 1943 reflection on the racial violence that had flared in cities such as Beaumont, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan: “You jim crowed me/ Before hitler rose to power/ And you’re STILL jim crowing me/ Right now, this very hour…/ Yet you say we’re fighting/ For democracy/ Then why don’t democracy/ Include me?” The Pittsburgh Courier, a widely circulated African-American newspaper during the war years, launched what it referred to as the “Double V” campaign, which demanded victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
Woody Guthrie, whose guitar featured the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists,” joined the Merchant Marine and the National Maritime Union, a militant CIO union with multiracial leadership from its founding in the 1930s, and became a member of the unionized fighting force that braved U-boats to deliver supplies and save soldiers and sailors. In “Talking Merchant Marine,” he sang of preparing to drop a depth charge on the Nazis:
Walked to the tail, stood on the stern,
Lookin’ at the big brass screw blade turn;
Listened to the sound of the engine pound,
Gained sixteen feet every time it went around.
Gettin’ closer and closer, look out, you fascists.
I’m just one of the merchant crew,
I belong to the union called the N.M.U.
I’m a union man from head to toe,
I’m U.S.A. and C.I.O.
Fightin’ out here on the waters to win some freedom on the land.
Roosevelt saw this bigger picture. He knew that the politics of the moment demanded a bold assertion not merely of military necessity but of postwar possibility—a vision rooted in the premise that the fascist threat had to be met with weapons and with ideas. It was a call to arms as urgent and meaningful as that of the battlefield trumpet.
FDR was not alone in this understanding. Indeed, it was the essential premise of liberal and progressive thinking in the early 1940s, and the basis for the essential divide in debates about the contribution that the Democratic Party would make to postwar politics. Americans, Henry Wallace counseled in 1943, expected a serious response to the question “What will we will get out of the war?” The answer could not be a transitory period of “peace” characterized by the recessions, depression, authoritarian power grabs and simmering conflict that marked the interlude between World War I and World War II. “We shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944 whether to plant the seeds for World War No. 3,” Wallace contended. To avert that prospect, FDR’s vice president argued his party and his country must champion “the new democracy, the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.” Author Max Lerner wanted a crusade on behalf of “militant democracy” as an antidote to authoritarianism, while Kirchwey proposed “A New Deal for the World.” Historian Norman Markowitz argues that “social liberals came to enthusiastically define the war as a revolutionary struggle and to look to America to redeem her own revolutionary heritage by uniting with the forces that sought the destruction of colonialism and by working to construct international organizations