Anyone watching Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he neared middle age would have no reason to suspect he would ever enjoy anything less than a favored life, one cushioned by the intelligence, good looks, and wealth bestowed on him at birth. He moved through childhood pampered and as a young man obtained an education from the best schools. He glided into politics, lifted by the right contacts, experiencing only slight turbulence, landing, almost always, gently. 264 Franklin Delano Roosevelt All of that changed during a vacation in August 1921 when in a single day he exerted himself fighting a forest fire, then cooled off by swimming in a lake, then jogged, and then dove into the frigid Bay of Fundy, after which he sat in his wet bathing suit for half an hour and caught a chill. The next day pain shot through his back and legs, accompanied by a fever. Two days later, a doctor diagnosed his illness as polio. Paralyzed, for weeks he could barely move. His wife, Eleanor, tended to his needs while he sank into a deep depression. Gradually, however, he began to exercise and strengthen his upper body. He wintered in Florida, where he swam long distances, his arms pulling his deadened legs, and crawled along deserted beaches. Six years into his illness, he still expressed hope he would one day walk. But he never did. Throughout the rest of his life, Roosevelt remained a paraplegic. He had to be lifted out of bed each day by a valet. Even with heavy braces he could move only jerkily, perilously close to toppling over. Although his aides, helped by a cooperative press, hid his handicap so effectively that many Americans never realized the extent of his condition, it was always there, a constant challenge that some observers thought affected his personality, making him not angry or mad but patient and confident. Rather than languish in self-pity, Roosevelt pushed himself harder to become governor of New York and president of the United States. According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, he "had such inner elan, such confidence, such sparkle that to be around him was like opening your first bottle of champagne.” He communicated that quality to Congress and to the public, and through the difficult years of the Great Depression and the darkest years of World War II, his fortitude remade American society and saved it from Nazi conquest. k Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, at Springwood, his family’s home located at Hyde Park, a village in upstate New York. His father, James Roosevelt, came from a long line of wealthy Roosevelts whose involvement in West Indian trade and real estate investments, along with strategic marriages, made them prosperous. His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, was James’s second wife. Rebecca Brien Howland, whom he had married in 1853, died from a heart attack in 1876 and was buried at the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park. Like James Roosevelt, Sara Delano came from wealth. Her father, Warren Delano, was descended from an old family accustomed to fine houses and exclusive schools. Warren Delano had added to his inherited fortune through his merchant trade with China. Springwood, Franklin Roosevelt’s birthplace, was a large clapboard house on 110 acres (later expanded to 1,000) that overlooked the Hudson River. Some 30 years before Franklin’s birth, essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis said, "The Hudson at Hyde Park is a broad, tranquil, noble river. . . . The shores are cultivated by the water’s edge, and lean up in graceful rather than bold elevations; the eminences around are crested with the villas of the wealthy. . . .” None of that had changed by 1882. James Roosevelt, who invested in various businesses, pictured himself a country gentleman and embellished his home’s address with a British-sounding name, "Hyde Park on the Hudson.” While growing up, Franklin Roosevelt spent much time at his family’s second home in New York City and traveled overseas with his parents. Hyde Park, however, was special. Here, as an only child, he lived in a protected world. Both of his parents loved him; his mother doted on him, constantly watching him and following him. She planned his every day: awake at seven in the morning, breakfast at eight, school lessons with a private tutor from nine until noon, play from noon until one, and so on. Not until age nine did he take a bath on his own, and she picked his playmates, invariably from the nearby homes of other wealthy people. Her apron strings loosened a bit in 1896 when Franklin, then 14 years old, entered Groton School in Massachusetts, two years later than when boys normally did. "James and I feel this parting very much,” Sara wrote in her diary. "It is hard to leave my darling boy.” Nine out of 10 of Groton’s students came from families listed on the social registers of major cities. Franklin found his days at Groton as regimented as those his mother had planned for him but without the warmth. Groton provided its boys an austere atmosphere with its strict dress codes, cold showers, and bare rooms, each six by nine feet with a bed, bureau, and chair. Franklin found his budding snobbishness reinforced at Groton—he threw his head back and looked down his nose at those he spoke to—yet he learned about social commitment and attended lectures given by prominent reformers. In one year alone he heard Jacob Riis, the progressive photographer and writer, and Booker T. Washington, the African-American leader. More than once he heard his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy and soon to be governor of New York. For Franklin, though, social consciousness would await another day, for when he entered Harvard in 1900 he stuck with the Groton crowd, dined with Boston’s elite Beacon Hill families, and showed more interest in conforming to his upper-crust peers than in excelling at academics. In 1902, soon after his father died, his mother rented an apartment near the Harvard campus. Franklin spent much time there and escorted her to the theater and other events, while she frequently entertained his friends. In his junior year he began dating a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. Although Eleanor lacked beauty, her intelligence and sympathy attracted him; they had both grown up largely in the company of adults and had both led pampered and sheltered lives. When they decided to marry, Franklin’s mother opposed their engagement and insisted they keep it secret for several months until they could be sure they wanted to spend their lives together. They agreed, and as Sara Roosevelt adjusted herself to the prospect of losing her son, he wrote her: "I am so glad, dear Mummy, that you are getting over the strangeness of it all—I knew you would, and that you couldn’t help feeling that not only I but you also are the luckiest & will always be the happiest people in gaining anyone like E. to love and be loved by.” Franklin graduated from Harvard in 1903 and the following year entered Columbia Law School in New York City. He and Eleanor married on March 17, 1905. Eleanor immediately found herself subject to Sara’s commands. She also acquiesced in Franklin’s desire for a large family—five children in all, born between 1906 and 1916. Franklin Roosevelt passed his bar exam in 1907. He then practiced law as a well-heeled attorney commuting between Hyde Park and New York and vacationing at his family’s large "cottage” on Campobello Island, off the coast of Maine. Nothing he did indicated he wanted to pursue a career in politics. He stayed away from civic clubs and had no contact with political bosses or their machines. Instead, in 1910 the Democratic Party came to him, its leaders anxious to capitalize on the Roosevelt name, made nationally prominent when Franklin’s cousin, Theodore, won the White House. They recruited him to run for the state senate in the traditionally Republican district that included Hyde Park. FDR, as he came to be known, enjoyed the challenge. He campaigned in a Maxwell car that was painted red and adorned with flags, and he quickly honed his oratory, using the phrase "my friends” to reach out to his listeners. Taking advantage of a year in which the Republicans suffered from infighting, he surprised almost everyone by winning. In the legislature, Roosevelt caused turmoil by defying the political bosses and opposing the candidate picked by Tammany Hall for the U.S. Senate. "The Democratic Party is on trial,” he said, "and having been given control Franklin Delano Roosevelt 265 266 Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the government chiefly through up-State votes, cannot afford to surrender its control to the organization in New York City.” He joined the insurgents, as they were called, and although the bosses forced them to compromise and accept another Tammany-endorsed candidate, he and his colleagues won national acclaim for their reformist crusade. In 1912 Roosevelt supported Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, for president and played an important role in getting the New York delegation to vote for him on the 46th ballot. That fall, while Wilson won the presidency, Roosevelt won reelection to the state senate. After Wilson appointed Josephus Daniels as secretary of the navy, Daniels asked Roosevelt to join his department. The New Yorker quickly agreed, and in 1913 he arrived in Washington as assistant secretary of the navy, the exact position held some 15 years earlier by his cousin, Theodore. When World War I began in 1914, Franklin Roosevelt advocated that America enter the fight against Germany, and he pushed for military preparedness. He even fed information to the Republicans about the navy department so they could attack Josephus Daniels for moving too slowly. That same year he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, upon which he returned to his post in the navy department. In fall 1916 Roosevelt said impatiently to Daniels, "We’ve got to get into this war.” That he saw pre-Hitler Germany as a threat to American power suggested how he would see Germany in the 1930s, under a Nazi dictator. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Roosevelt compiled a plan for naval action, coordinated ship deployments with Britain and France, and supervised the building of more battleships. Most notably, he advocated a mine field between Scotland and Norway in order to keep Germany’s submarines in port. The scheme was so complex that Britain initially objected to it, but improved technology, along with Roosevelt’s continued pressure, brought it to reality. In 1918 Eleanor’s life crumbled when she discovered her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer, a pretty young woman Eleanor had hired as her social secretary. Eleanor offered Franklin an amicable divorce, but neither he nor his mother wanted to see the marriage end in disgrace and ruin his political future. Instead, Franklin temporarily distanced himself from Lucy and remained with Eleanor. He still looked elsewhere for companionship, however, and in 1920 he began a close friendship with his secretary Missy LeHand, though it remains uncertain as to whether they had an affair. At the 1920 Democratic convention the delegates chose James M. Cox of Ohio to run for president and tried to make the ticket more glamorous by picking Roosevelt as his running mate. FDR campaigned vigorously for Cox and defended outgoing President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, but the Democrats stood no chance of winning. Americans wanted to retreat from overseas involvement, much as they wanted to retreat from domestic reform. The Republican ticket, led by Warren G. Harding, who promised "normalcy” and a return to traditional values, won in a landslide. Roosevelt returned to his law practice. The following year, 1921, he contracted polio. As he fought his disease and reached the point where he could sit up and move his upper body, he rejected his mother’s pressure to live at Hyde Park as an invalid and instead reentered politics. Having received therapy in 88° waters at Warm Springs, Georgia, he led Governor Alfred E. Smith’s New York campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924. Smith lost, but Roosevelt earned respect for his appearance at the state convention when he made his way to the speaker’s rostrum hobbled by pain and metal braces strapped to his legs— and then flashed his famous grin. When Alfred E. Smith won the presidential nomination a second time around, in 1928, he urged FDR to run for governor of New York to attract Democratic voters. Roosevelt at first refused, but when the New York state convention nominated him anyway, he changed his mind. Republicans questioned whether FDR’s polio would impair him, but he engaged in a vigorous campaign to dispel any doubts. He won by a slim margin, while Smith lost the state in the presidential contest. Just a few months into his term, in October 1929, the stock market crashed and New York’s once prosperous economy collapsed. To meet the crisis, FDR advanced innovative ideas and practices that he later applied to his presidency. He won reelection in 1930 by 725,000 votes, taking nearly every county with a margin of victory greater than that for any other Democratic candidate in the state. At Roosevelt’s urging, in 1931 the New York legislature passed a bill limiting the workweek for women and children to 48 hours. Another act expanded workmen’s compensation. In his boldest move, FDR began the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, funded with $30 million to help the jobless and needy. According to historian James MacGregor Burns in Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, "The governor possessed the indispensable quality of accepting the need for change, for new departures, for experiments.” As the depression continued, FDR began broadcasting his "fireside chats” on radio and so raised people’s spirits. In such a devastating economic crisis, the national government needed to act boldly, something President Herbert Hoover found difficult to understand. As FDR felt the country’s discontent with the president and studied his own ambition for higher office, he decided to seek the White House. He entered the Democratic National Convention in June 1932 about 100 votes short of the number he needed to win the presidential nomination. He collected the remainder on the fourth ballot after promising to make John Nance Garner of Texas, then Speaker of the House, his running mate. Roosevelt broke with tradition and traveled to Chicago to accept his nomination in person. At the end of his speech he proclaimed: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” The press picked up on his phrase new deal, and it became the label attached to his reform programs. In the campaign against Herbert Hoover, FDR offered few specifics—though he did stress the need for unemployment relief, the repeal of Prohibition, and lower tariffs. He largely attacked Hoover for encouraging the speculation and overproduction that had caused the depression and said he opposed letting powerful interests exploit the people. FDR again showed his remarkable physical stamina when he pursued a coast-to-coast campaign covering 27,000 miles across 41 states. His message of hope contrasted with Hoover’s defensive speeches, just as his warm voice and broad smile contrasted with Hoover’s stilted and wooden manner. Roosevelt won in a landslide, capturing all but six states. FDR almost never saw the White House. When he visited Miami, Florida, in February 1933, an unemployed bricklayer, Giuseppe Zangara, tried to kill him. After shouting, "Too many people are starving to death,” Zangara opened fire, but a bystander knocked his gun upward and the bullets meant for Roosevelt struck others, among them Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was killed. As FDR prepared to begin his presidency, he selected his cabinet, including Cordell Hull as secretary of state, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., as secretary of the treasury, and Frances Perkins, the country’s first female cabinet member, as secretary of labor. Outside the cabinet, he surrounded himself with experts, financiers, union leaders, and college professors whom newspapers started calling a "brain trust.” Roosevelt’s voice resonated with firmness and command when he delivered his inaugural address on March 4, 1933. "This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper . . .,” he said. "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That Roosevelt would act quickly, supported by an overwhelmingly Democratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt 267 268 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Congress, became clear at the very start of his term. On March 5 he declared a four-day bank holiday (though most banks were already closed) to prevent people from withdrawing money and to stop the carnage of bank failures. On March 8 he held his first press conference and displayed an openness and warmth unknown during the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Unlike his predecessors, he let reporters ask questions off the cuff rather than submit them in advance. On March 12, 1933, FDR made the first of his presidential fireside chats, in which he explained the problems facing America’s banks. He talked with such confidence and clarity that people quickly gained trust in his leadership and in the banking system itself. Congress soon provided insurance for depositors through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, along with federal assistance that made banks stronger. Given public discontent and Roosevelt’s backing in Congress, he could have nationalized all banks but refused to do so. The way he approached banking typified how he intended to battle the depressed economy—namely, with moderation rather than radicalism. Roosevelt’s main strategy was to experiment. The New Deal never developed from a grand plan; it was always a laboratory where formulas sometimes mixed well and sometimes poorly and where he was less the master strategist than the seasoned politician taking the details drawn up by his aides, smoothing them over, and getting them through Congress. The legislation passed during Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office emphasized relief and recovery. The Economy Act, passed on March 20, aimed at balancing the budget and reorganizing government agencies to reduce costs. The Beer and Wine Revenue Act legalized and taxed wine, beer, and ale. Concerned about the natural environment and about putting people to work, FDR convinced Congress to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) . Some 250,000 young men went into forests and parks to plant trees, build roads, and work to control floods. On May 12 Congress created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and provided it with $500 million to help the states establish programs for the unemployed. The controversial Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) sought to boost prices for corn, cotton, wheat, rice, hogs, and dairy products by paying farmers a subsidy for reducing their production. But the AAA hurt poor farmers when the wealthy ones used the government money they received to buy machinery and evict sharecroppers and tenants from their lands. "Tractored out,” these people, and others dislocated by exhausted soils, joined the ranks of hollow-eyed migrant workers wandering the countryside in search of low-paying jobs picking fruits and vegetables. In the boldest legislation of his first 100 days, Roosevelt worked with Senator George W. Norris to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and save the region from its chronic poverty while protecting its natural resources. Roosevelt wanted a comprehensive plan that would include power development, flood control, land reclamation, projects to stop soil erosion, and enticements to attract industry. The bill gave the TVA authority to build dams and power plants and to make and distribute fertilizers. Between 1933 and 1944, the government constructed nine main dams and several smaller ones and generated electricity at prices that attracted industry. Conservatives protested, claiming only private business should operate electric plants. As a result of TVA, the Tennessee Valley entered a modern era of scientific land use, industry, and electricity. Passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) on June 16, 1933, caused yet more controversy. This bill sought to reduce unemployment by encouraging businesses to collude in fixing prices and wages, while through Section 7A it guaranteed labor’s right to bargain collectively. Roosevelt reasoned that if businesses set prices to keep them from falling, profits would be maintained and jobs saved, but in the long run the NIRA failed. When FDR presented his inaugural address in March 1933, he said he would dedicate America "to the policy of the good neighbor— the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” He particularly directed his remarks at Latin America, where Woodrow Wilson had on several occasions intervened militarily. At a conference in Montevideo late in 1933, Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed a document declaring no state had the right to intervene in the affairs of another. Consequently, while Roosevelt pursued his domestic New Deal, he applied the Good Neighbor Policy to the Western Hemisphere. In 1934 the United States agreed to end the Platt Amendment which had given it nearly absolute authority to send troops into Cuba. That same year, Roosevelt withdrew American troops that had been stationed in Haiti. As war threatened in Europe, he wanted the Good Neighbor Policy to foster inter-American unity. He therefore presented a speech to the Buenos Aires Conference in which he warned aggressors from outside the Western Hemisphere that should they attack, they would find the Americas united in their defense. Roosevelt changed his domestic course in 1935 and shifted, as he put it, "a little left of center.” Several developments led to his Second New Deal. For one, attacks by big business angered him. When members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce denounced the New Deal, he said that their criticism failed to take "the human side, the old-age side, the unemployment side.” For another, Roosevelt felt emboldened by Democratic gains in the 1934 congressional elections. He also feared that continued high unemployment might mean his defeat in 1936 and cause Americans to embrace radical leaders, such as Louisiana Senator Huey Long, who promoted his plan to limit wealth and assure everyone a guaranteed annual income of $2,500. FDR stunned Washington when he ordered Congress into special session for the summer of 1935 to consider proposals aimed mainly at reform. One of the most important established a social security system to provide retired persons with a small pension, ranging from $10 to $85 a month, from moneys paid into a fund by employers and employees. The National Labor Relations Act, also called the Wagner Act, created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which had the power to supervise elections called by workers to determine collective bargaining units. The NLRB could also hear testimony about unfair employment practices and issue orders to stop them. Notably, it could act against companies that fired workers for engaging in union activities. Historian Walter E. Leuchtenburg has called the Wagner Act with its pro-labor content "one of the most drastic legislative innovations of the decade.” The act had languished until FDR supported it, leading one observer to recall, "We who believed in the Act were dizzy with watching a 200-to-1 shot come up from the outside.” The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act that passed in April 1935 established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a large-scale program to employ the jobless. (In 1939 the name was changed to Works Projects Administration.) Roosevelt saw the WPA as a way to get money both into the pockets of workers and flowing through the economy. Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA employed 8.5 million workers at a cost of $11 billion. Critics called it wasteful and pointed to those on the government payroll whose jobs consisted of little more than "busy work” to kill time. Undoubtedly, waste occurred, but the WPA produced some outstanding results: paintings, public buildings, playgrounds, and some of the finest state histories ever written. WPA workers built more than 650,000 miles of highways and built or improved more than 120,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 850 airport runways. Teachers taught the mentally handicapped, and musicians played to community audiences for pay that averaged $55 a month. By executive order President Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration to Franklin Delano Roosevelt 269 270 Franklin Delano Roosevelt help poor farmers ignored by the Agricultural Adjustment Act. He also founded the Rural Electrification Administration, which encouraged farmers to form nonprofit cooperatives and obtain low-cost government loans to bring electricity into rural America. In 1935 few farms had electricity; by 1941, four out of every 10 had it. No single measure more strongly stirred America’s well heeled into contempt for the New Deal than the Revenue Act of 1935, passed by Congress after FDR criticized America’s "unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.” Along with increases in estate and gift taxes, the government increased the surtax rate on individual incomes over $50,000 and imposed a 75 percent tax rate on incomes over $5 million. With the New Deal, Roosevelt attempted to build a welfare state with corporate capitalism as its foundation, meaning he wanted the federal government to help those Americans that business could not or would not help. He rejected socialism and other radical ideas and thought his programs would save capitalism. But conservatives considered him an extremist, a threat to free enterprise and the profit motive. In the 1936 presidential campaign, about 70 percent of the newspapers in America’s 15 largest cities supported FDR’s Republican opponent, Alfred M. "Alf” Landon. Nevertheless, Roosevelt won the biggest victory in the electoral college since James Monroe’s first-term triumph in the early 1800s, and he collected nearly 61 percent of the popular vote as the working class cast its ballots for him. Economic conditions helped FDR with more than 6 million new jobs created since 1933. More than any presidential election since 1896, the vote divided along class lines, with big business backing Landon and unions backing Roosevelt. Critics assailed FDR for stirring class animosities. They pointed to his statement in October 1936 calling for an end to "the glaring inequalities of opportunity and security which, in the recent past, have set group against group and region against region,” as well as his declaration: "Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.” In Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, David M. Kennedy agrees with FDR’s critics and says that for all Roosevelt’s good qualities, he could call out the worst in people and did so when he exploited class resentments. Franklin Roosevelt’s coattails proved so strong in 1936 that Democrats captured 334 seats in the House of Representatives compared to only 89 for Republicans, while in the Senate they held a 75-17 advantage. FDR cemented an emerging coalition of Southern Democrats, urbanites, labor, and African Americans. Blacks, who had traditionally voted Republican, benefited from the relief programs that uplifted all lower-income groups, such as the WPA, 20 percent of whose jobs went to African Americans. Roosevelt, though, refrained from pushing a strong civil rights program that would antagonize the southern white congressmen whose support he needed for his New Deal. Despite the Democratic election sweep, the New Deal lost its momentum when Roosevelt attacked the Supreme Court, whose conservative justices had ruled several of his programs unconstitutional, among them the NIRA and the AAA. The justices also struck down a New York law establishing a minimum wage, which they said interfered with the right of workers to negotiate contracts. In February 1937, FDR announced he would ask Congress to allow him and future presidents to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court for each one that remained on the bench after age 70, up to a total of six. Called by critics a "court-packing bill,” it was intended to let Roosevelt appoint enough justices sympathetic to the New Deal so they could outvote the conservatives. Many Americans agreed with Roosevelt’s criticism that the Court intended to gut the New Deal, but they considered his proposal too radical. FDR lost the fight, and the entire episode emboldened conservatives and others who warned about dictatorial tendencies in the White House. Yet as congressmen debated the Court-packing bill, the Supreme Court began finding New Deal programs constitutional; they approved the Wagner Act in April 1937 and the Social Security Act a short time later. FDR endangered the New Deal again in 1937 when he reacted to an economic upturn by cutting federal programs quickly and severely to achieve a balanced budget. He slashed WPA rolls by 50 percent, and as the Federal Reserve Board tightened credit, unemployment returned to its pre-1935 level. The president took a different course in 1938 when he increased spending, but the economy remained weak. In elections that year Republicans gained 13 governorships, eight Senate seats, and 81 House seats. From then on, Roosevelt was unable to convince Congress to pass most of the reform legislation he wanted. As the New Deal lost its vitality, in many ways it left America unchanged: It had failed to end the depression or to compensate for declines in private investment, and it had failed to shift the distribution of wealth or income significantly. Yet FDR strengthened the presidency by exerting stronger leadership and wielding more power than his predecessors, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, and the federal government entered people’s lives more extensively than ever. Historians still debate how innovational FDR was with his New Deal. John A. Garraty, for example, sees Roosevelt as merely reflecting efforts then underway to reform the European economies, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., believes that America was moving toward a new era of reform even before the Great Depression began. FDR’s response to the economic crisis, he says, "was controlled and tempered by the values of traditional American experimentalism.” As Adolf Hitler built his war machine in Germany, Americans wanted to avoid entry into another world war. Consequently, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, including one that placed an embargo on arms shipments to belligerents. These, however, limited FDR’s power to act against aggression in Europe and the threat from Japan in the Pacific. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, igniting war with Britain and France, Roosevelt responded: "It’s come at last. God help us all.” He convinced Congress to repeal the 1935 Neutrality Act and allow the United States to export arms to belligerent powers, provided they pay cash for the supplies and carry them in their own ships. In June 1940 France surrendered to Germany, leaving Britain as the last western defense against Hitler. By that time FDR openly favored the Allies, and while isolationists warned that he was pulling the United States into war, he signed a deal that transferred 50 old destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on British bases in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1940 election, FDR ran for an unprecedented third term against Indiana lawyer and utilities executive Wendell Willkie. Both men favored an international role for the United States while advocating the avoidance of war. Roosevelt talked about the economy and said, "This year there is being placed on the tables of America more butter, more cheese, more meat, more canned goods—more food in general than in that luxurious year of 1929.” He also promised the voters: "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” and added, "It is for peace that I have labored; and it is for peace that I shall labor for all the days of my life.” Yet after his victory, events combined with his own actions to take the United States deeper into the conflict. In December 1940 he declared that America must defend freedom overseas by becoming an "arsenal of democracy.” When Britain could no longer afford to pay for arms, Roosevelt obtained congressional approval in March 1941 for a lend-lease deal whereby the British (and other countries) promised to return weapons lent to them. In May a German submarine downed the American merchant ship Robin Moor near the coast of Brazil. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June, FDR extended lend-lease to that country. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 271 272 Franklin Delano Roosevelt In August Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, committing their countries to a list of "Four Freedoms” that FDR had expressed earlier: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The charter renounced territorial ambition and pledged support for people to choose their own form of government. In September the American ship Greer provoked a German submarine into attacking it. FDR then announced that American destroyers would shoot German and Italian ships on sight in a zone that extended to Greenland and Iceland. When in October the Germans sank the American destroyer Reuben James, killing more than 100 sailors, Congress permitted the shipment of weapons to England on armed American merchant ships. While confronting the European crisis, Roosevelt also had to deal with Japan. After the Japanese occupied French Indochina in July 1941, he prohibited shipments of scrap iron and oil to them and froze their credit in the United States. Diplomatic talks followed, but when he insisted the Japanese get out of China, they decided to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. The surprise bombing on December 7, 1941—"a date which will live in infamy,” FDR intoned—destroyed 19 ships, most of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and killed 2,400 Americans. After the United States declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. For the most part, Roosevelt left battlefield strategy to his generals and delegated the job of mobilization to the War Production Board, which faced the challenge of rapidly converting industries from civilian to military use. The change happened so quickly that one observer called it an "economic revolution.” FDR generally respected civil liberties, except in one notable instance when he approved the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans—77,000 of whom were native-born citizens of the United States—in "relocation centers.” They were imprisoned because the army thought all Japanese, whether they were American or not, were "an enemy race” that threatened national security. The United States quickly mobilized its armed forces in 1942 and entered the war in the Pacific, European, and Mediterranean theaters. As the Japanese advanced throughout the Netherlands East Indies, Major General James Doolittle led a fleet of B-25 bombers on a raid of Tokyo in April. In May there occurred the Battle of the Coral Sea and in June the Battle of Midway, which was the first major defeat of the Japanese navy. In August, American forces began their offensive at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, leading to a decisive naval victory that November. The United States launched its first independent bombing attack in Europe in August with a raid on railroad yards near Rouen, a city in northern France. That November, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and British admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham unleashed Operation Torch, an amphibious assault in North Africa. As the war continued to expand, Roosevelt adeptly handled the difficult diplomacy necessary to coordinate plans with Britain and the Soviet Union. In January 1943 he conferred with Winston Churchill at Casablanca, Morocco, and they agreed to a strategy whereby Allied troops would attack Hitler’s army from the Mediterranean and from the west through France. The two leaders also declared they would demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. In November 1943 Roosevelt met with Churchill and Soviet communist dictator Joseph Stalin at Tehran, Iran. At the meeting Stalin expressed his fear that Britain would delay launching the planned western assault through France as a way to bleed his country in a prolonged fight with Germany. After prodding from Roosevelt, Churchill mollified Stalin by agreeing to launch Operation Overlord—the invasion of France by allied troops—in May 1944. Roosevelt thought that by charming Stalin, he could loosen him up. He started cracking jokes about Churchill, telling Stalin one morning that the British prime minister was cranky because "he got up on the wrong side of the bed.” FDR later recounted: A vague smile passed over Stalin’s eyes, and I decided I was on the right track. I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, . . . about his cigars, about his habits. . . . Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, heavy guffaw . . . . I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him "Uncle Joe.” In August 1944, the tide of battle having turned in their favor, the Allies met at Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington, D.C., to structure a new international peacekeeping organization, the United Nations. That fall, Roosevelt turned back the challenge from another Republican presidential candidate, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and won reelection to an unprecedented fourth term. In February 1945 FDR again met with Stalin and Churchill, this time at Yalta in the Crimea. They gathered at a former summer retreat for the Russian czars—with 50 ornate rooms, gardens, and trees—while Allied troops from the west and Soviet troops from the east advanced toward Berlin. As Hitler’s end neared, they discussed policies for postwar Europe. Stalin wanted Germany punished; Churchill wanted to ensure that Germany would be left strong enough to resist Soviet aggression. They ultimately decided to divide Germany into occupation zones, one each for the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union (with France to be given a zone carved from the British and American ones, and all four countries to govern Berlin). The biggest sticking point involved Poland. Both FDR and Churchill wanted Polish exiles in London to form a government in Warsaw. But Stalin insisted on maintaining the Sovietbacked government already in Poland and headquartered in Lublin. The three leaders eventually reached a compromise whereby the Soviets obtained territory in eastern Poland and promised to hold free elections throughout the country after the war. The agreement, however, left this last point vague, and in the long term, the elections were never held. In the Far East, FDR wanted Stalin to join the war against Japan. Uncle Joe agreed, but for a price: The Soviet Union would be given the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Island, the port of Darien, and control over a railroad in Manchuria. Critics later charged FDR had abandoned eastern Europe to the Soviets and their communist system. In truth he could do little against Stalin’s army, which occupied Poland and most of eastern Europe, and little more without risking Stalin’s refusal to participate in the United Nations, which FDR considered crucial to any postwar peace. FDR knew full well the Soviet dictator could not be trusted. In March 1945 he said to a friend, "We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In recent years a few historians have criticized Roosevelt for failing to prevent Hitler from slaughtering European Jews during World War II. They claim he should have ordered the bombing of Auschwitz and of railroad lines leading to other death camps. But Lucy Dawidowicz and other historians reject the idea that Roosevelt cared little about the Jews and insist that by diverting air strikes away from military installations, he would have prolonged the war and its horrible Holocaust. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt looked pale and drawn; Churchill later said, "I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” In late March he went to Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest. While there he drafted his Jefferson Day speech, in which he said about World War II, "We must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible.” Roosevelt had begun seeing Lucy Mercer again. On April 12 he was speaking with her and her friend, Madame Shoumatoff, an artist painting his portrait, when he complained of a severe headache and suddenly slumped over, unconscious. His aides carried him to his bed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 273 274 Franklin Delano Roosevelt where he lay in a coma. Realizing what propriety required, Lucy left the scene. At 3:35 P.M. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Americans deeply mourned the death of a president who had led them through depression and war. That in meeting these challenges Roosevelt conquered his own physical handicap makes his accomplishments all the more momentous. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls that whenever FDR had trouble sleeping at night, he would think back to his boyhood when he would jump on his sled and fly down a hill, reach the bottom, then go back up, over and over again. "This man is the most powerful man in the world, and yet he’s imagining . . . —and getting solace from—the idea that he can run, sled, walk again. . . .” Americans also sought solace and found it in Franklin Roosevelt’s
leadership.