Reporters watched the president raptly, while his aides, somewhat anxiously, eyed the reporters. In their minds the issue was far from settled, and no one knew whether the proposal would be greeted with smiles, derision, disbelief, or angry explosions.
“Orders from Great Britain are therefore a tremendous asset to American national defense; because they automatically create additional facilities. I am talking selfishly, from the American point of view—nothing else. Therefore, from the selfish point of view, that production must be encouraged by us,” he said.
Having thoroughly thought the matter through, Roosevelt systematically neutralized all possible objections by agreeing to them—then, in his grandfatherly, patrician tone, he explained that he, like all reasonable Americans, would not support more loans or gifts to foreign governments.
“I am not at all sure,” he gravely intoned, “that Great Britain would care to have a gift from the taxpayers of the United States. I doubt it very much.”
Leading up to his conclusion, Roosevelt then turned the entire debate into something beneficial to the United States, and to a nation still struggling with the Great Depression this was a point working-class Americans could embrace: “It is possible—I will put it that way—for the United States to take over British orders, and, because they are essentially the same kind of munitions that we use ourselves, turn them into American orders.”
Reporters smiled, and his aides breathed easier. Listening to the man, how could one not conclude that such a proposal would boost American industry, strengthen the economy, and provide support against tyranny without risking American lives?
It was genius—and only Franklin Roosevelt could have pulled it off. Yet the dollar sign issue had not yet been explained and financial details were a bit fuzzy to the average citizen, but surely the president had a plan for that.
In fact, he did.
Saving the best, and most risky aspect of his plan, for last, Roosevelt ended his homily with a parable to which everyone could relate: “Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.”
Smiles widened as the more prescient reporters saw where this was heading.
“Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’ He says, ‘How many feet of it were there?’ I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.”
However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The president fielded a few very pointed questions following the press conference.
“Mr. President, before you loan your hose to your neighbor you have to have the hose. I was wondering, have you any plans to build up supplies? There has been a good deal of discussion about lack of authority to tell a manufacturer he should run two or three shifts a day. There is no one now that has that authority.”
To which Roosevelt answered dryly, “Isn’t there?”
No one doubted that the president’s power increased dramatically through initiatives such as this, but his defenders believed it necessary to prepare the nation for what was coming. His detractors, mainly in Congress, saw it as an unnecessary expansion of the federal government and an unwarranted usurpation of their own powers. Not all were swayed by emotion and rhetoric, and several influential Republicans were against the proposal, claiming that it ceded congressional privileges to the president and would lead the United States into war. Among them was Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish (R-NY), who, like Roosevelt, was a scion of a prominent East Coast political family. A product of Swiss and American boarding schools and Harvard, the six-foot-four Fish was no dilettante politician. Serving as an officer with the 369th Infantry Regiment, Fish spent 191 days in combat on the Western Front, ending the war as major with the Silver Star.* Despite this, or very likely because of it, Fish was a hard-liner against interventionism and a formidable opponent of President Roosevelt. Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) bluntly stated, “Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don’t want it back.”
Early in January 1941, Roosevelt addressed Congress: “We cannot, and we will not, tell [Britain] that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.”
In a determined effort to kill Lend-Lease, Senator Fish called his star witness, a national hero and inspirational icon to the world and most Americans: Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh, and asked him testify before Congress. “THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT AND FAR-REACHING ADMINISTRATION BILL EVER PRESENTED TO CONGRESS,” Fish cabled Lindbergh, pulling out all the stops to get his biggest gun to Capitol Hill. Nearly fourteen years earlier, on May 20, 1927, “Lindy,” as he was known, wobbled into the air above Roosevelt Field, Long Island, bound for Paris in a single-seat, single-engine, Ryan monoplane dubbed The Spirit of St. Louis. If he made it, Lindbergh would be the first to cross the Atlantic nonstop, from either direction, in a powered, fixed-wing aircraft. Immortality, fame, and wealth were the prizes, just as oblivion and a lonely death in cold, windswept seawater were the consequences if he did not make it.
He did make it.
On May 21, 1927, at 10:22 p.m. Paris time, 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds after vanishing into the Long Island mist, Lindy rolled to a stop on Le Bourget Field in the middle of one hundred thousand hysterical, screaming Parisians. He, one man, had changed the course of the world by proving the worth of the airplane and its value in bringing the world together. Unquestionably brave and patriotic, Lindy was truly a walking mass of contradictions, not the least of which was his opposition to Lend-Lease in the face of Axis tyranny. He favored America rebuilding its own military, but keeping the equipment that would otherwise be sent overseas for defense of the United States. When asked during his congressional testimony about intervention in the European war, Lindy replied that America’s entry “would be the greatest disaster this country has ever passed through.” Ten months later, on December 8, 1941, Lindbergh wrote, “Have we sent so many of our planes and so much of our navy to the Atlantic that Japs feel they are able to get away with an attack on Pearl Harbor?” Yet, like nearly all who opposed the war, once America was attacked, he felt it his duty to enter combat on behalf of his country. “I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight,” his diary records. “If I had been in Congress, I certainly would have voted for a declaration of war.”
Despite the opposition, House Rule 1776, officially the Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, passed overwhelmingly in the House in February and then, after clearing the Senate, the president signed it into law on March 11, 1941.
“Powerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced,” Roosevelt stated to Congress. “It is not enough to turn out just a few more planes, a few more tanks, a few more guns, a few more ships than can be turned out by our enemies,” he said. “We must out-produce them overwhelmingly, so that there can be no question of our ability to provide a crushing superiority of equipment in any theatre of the world war.” Brave words, to be sure, but on the same day Roosevelt introduced Lend-Lease to Congress, the Soviet Union signed yet another treaty with Nazi Germany. The Soviet-German Border Agreement of January 1941 settled outstanding territorial issues, mainly Lithuania, which ended up in Russian hands, and this came on the heels of two previous treaties the Soviets signed with Nazi Germany.
Seventeen months earlier, while planning the invasion of Poland, Hitler anticipated a British blockade that would deprive him of war-critical resources like rubber, oil, grain, and industrial metals. The German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, signed in August 1939, gave Stalin ships, machine tools, and factory equipment in return for these resources, and a seven-year, low-interest loan of 200 million reichsmarks. Unsurprisingly, four days later, Moscow approved the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which permitted the Nazi invasion of Poland with no interference from Moscow. The Soviet Union, as always, was prepared to deal with any power in the name of its own best interests.
The early months of 1941 also saw Erwin Rommel take command of the Afrika Korps and begin his offensive lunge across North Africa toward Cairo. Bulgaria joined the Axis, and the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, then took Crete entirely with airborne troops. Faced with these threats and Japanese belligerence in the Far East, opposition to Roosevelt’s plans was lessening, with defense spending ballooning to just over $17 billion in late 1940. Plans for a 1.4-million-man army by the end of 1941, plus a two-ocean navy and fifty-four combat air groups were generally a paper tiger until Pearl Harbor. Incentivized by low-cost loans, subsidies, and tax write-offs, companies all over the United States were converting to military manufacturing. Lionel Trains made compasses, Mattatuck Manufacturing switched from upholstery nails to clips for Springfield rifles, Frigidaire and Saginaw Steering Gear made machine guns, Underwood Typewriters manufactured M1 carbines, and many other companies manufactured many more items for war. Nearly eight hundred new factories were being built, and contracts were authorized for 948 naval vessels, including twelve Essex-class aircraft carriers. Automobile manufacturers, the largest repository of skilled labor and engineering expertise, switched to tanks and aircraft production.* Now, in the grim aftermath of 1940 and 1941, the American industrial base was flexing new muscles like the awakened giant it was. In 1941, just 3,964 tanks were produced in all combined U.S. factories, but a year later 24,744 rolled off the assembly lines; small-arms production exploded from a prewar high of 617,000 to 2.3 million in 1942, while aircraft production increased eightfold to 47,836.†
Nevertheless, such an effort would only make a difference if the materiel could get to where it was needed, and in 1941 this was still a very real problem. Throughout the Atlantic, the Nazi Kreigsmarine operated twenty-six submarine Wolfpacks, composed of three to twenty-one U-boats each, in an effort to strangle Great Britain. German captains dubbed this die glückliche Zeit (“the Happy Time”), as the United States was still officially neutral and the Royal Navy was stretched too thin to protect the growing number of convoys inbound to Britain. Along the western approaches from North America 282 ships totaling 1,489,795 tons of Allied shipping were sunk, and the total climbed to 594 merchantmen destroyed by May 1941. The sinkings were outpacing the combined capacity, for the moment, of British and U.S. shipyards, and if the U-boats weren’t stopped, then Lend-Lease was figuratively and literally dead in the water.
Another danger were German raiders. The fast battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sortied from Kiel on January 22, 1941, broke out into the Atlantic, and in two months sent twenty-two ships totaling 115,000 tons to the bottom. Also departing Kiel, the battleship Bismarck passed through the Kattegat and out into the Atlantic in late May to wreak havoc on Allied shipping. Nearly eight hundred feet long with eight fifteen-inch guns, she was more than a match for British surface warships and could annihilate any convoy that happened across her way. Fortunately, Bismarck’s career was short-lived. British warships intercepted her and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Denmark straights, and though she sank HMS Hood and killed Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, Bismarck’s fuel tanks were damaged. This forced her to abort the raid and attempt to make the port of Brest in occupied France. Out for blood, the Royal Navy converged forty-two warships on the battleship, including two aircraft carriers. Hit by Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers from HMS Victorious and Ark Royal, Bismarck herself went to the bottom on May 27, 1941.
Germany’s June invasion of the Soviet triggered an immediate response from Churchill, a vehement anticommunist: “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism for the last twenty-five years,” he said in measured tones. “I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.”
Roosevelt knew as well that whatever the future ideological risk posed by communism might be, it paled against the very real threat of Hitler and Mussolini. In fairness, both he and Churchill truly believed the larger evil was from the Axis, and both may be forgiven for not viewing the USSR as the long-term, committed danger that it truly was. Two days after the invasion, Roosevelt authorized emergency assistance for the Soviet Union and, with clairvoyance, stated that the German invasion meant the “liberation of Europe from Nazi domination.”
Ardently believing the role of a government was to assist its people, Roosevelt was no communist, though his New Deal initiatives and programs like Social Security had been oft labeled “undisguised state socialism.” Many people did not, and do not, understand that socialism permits private property ownership but that the “state” controls industry, which is the true source of national wealth and power. Socialism, in some forms, also insists on “democratically” elected leadership, though the definition of that process varies greatly. Communism is best described as revolutionary socialism, and its basic premise is that violent revolution is inevitable to effect change.
A true communist state is rigidly centralized and controls all property, industry, and resources. A communist society theoretically takes from individuals based on their abilities and allocates resources back to the people based on their needs, while socialism gives back to individuals according to one’s contribution. Despite its doctrinal abhorrence of any sort of class system, communism is inherently hypocritical since there always has been, and always will be, a small circle at the top that professes to work for the “state” but exists solely to solidify its own power and influence by controlling the nation in the name of the “state.” This reality was personified in the person of Joseph Stalin.
With hindsight, Russia’s road to communism seemed unavoidable based on its recent three hundred years of history. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a vast, underdeveloped, and largely impoverished land. Weakly ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, last of the Romanov dynasty, real power lay in the hands of noble families that controlled the land, the resources, and the peasants. Practicing serfdom, where those born to a piece of land belonged to the landlord, Russian society was still decidedly medieval. Nicholas’s father, Alexander, emancipated the serfs yet provided no real opportunities for the massive influx of agrarian peasants now flocking to large cities in search of work. The Industrial Revolution that transformed Europe and the United States had come quite late to Russia and was largely resisted by nobles who would not relinquish control over their agrarian world and by xenophobic peasants whose distrust of foreigners was as ingrained as the dirt beneath their fingernails.
When industrialization did finally creep into Russia, it caused massive overcrowding in major cities and a corresponding shortage of food and jobs. Reforms were desperately needed, but, manipulated by the aristocracy and his own very Russian absolutism, Nicholas resisted changes that might have improved conditions and mollified the masses. He then shocked the world by losing the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War, marking the first occasion a modern European power was defeated by an Asian nation. Presided over by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Treaty of Portsmouth ceded Russia’s Manchurian interests, and Port Arthur, to Imperial Japan. Though victorious, the Japanese people blamed the United States for “cheating” them out of war reparations and control of Sakhalin Island, and anti-American riots erupted in Tokyo. The seeds of Japanese resentment that indirectly led to conflict three decades later were now truly sown.
Russia, always striving mightily to be considered a world power, was embarrassed and humiliated by the loss of its perceived international prestige, and the Russian Revolution of 1905 was sparked largely by disaffected soldiers returning to low-paying jobs and large groups of minorities resentful of national discrimination. Though suppressed, the revolt forced Nicholas to attempt half-hearted reforms that ultimately failed. Russification, which forced a government-imposed cultural standard on the multiethnic, multireligious kaleidoscope that defined Russia, was deeply unpopular. In time-honored Russian fashion, Nicholas sought to focus internal dissent on external threats while regaining some national dignity. Entering the Great War against Germany and Austro-Hungary in August 1914, Russia suffered a string of abysmal military defeats. Fatefully, Nicholas assumed personal control of the Imperial Army a year later and left his German-born empress, Tsarina Alexandra, in power during his absence.
Whatever government competence remained quickly vanished as Alexandra fell under the influence of an uneducated Siberian peasant and self-proclaimed holy man named Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. Alexandra, though the granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria, was distrusted by the Russians because of her German birth and because Kaiser Wilhelm was her first cousin. Her absolute belief in the divine right of monarchs, coupled with Rasputin’s meddling, only added fuel to the smoldering fires of rebellion.*
These fires rapidly burst into flame in March 1917, when the Petrograd garrison joined striking workers calling out the tsar’s government for corruption and lack of reform.† “Be Peter the Great, or Ivan the Terrible,” Alexandra advised her wavering husband, “crush them all.” In the face of Russia’s perennial food shortages, harsh reprisals, and high battlefield casualties, this was the worst advice possible. Nicholas formally abdicated, and the imperial family was eventually sent to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the tsar, his wife, and all the children were later shot and bayonetted at the order of the newly formed Central Executive Committee—and an obscure revolutionary named Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin and his Bolsheviks advocated the Marxist-based violent overthrow of capitalism as the only true method of ridding a society of social classes.* However, like all of his ilk, Lenin then set about creating a new social class structure, with himself at the pinnacle. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the provisional government was rapidly dissolved and a new government instituted. This was based, theoretically, on the power of councils, or soviets, comprised of workers and soldiers. In fact, the true power lay with Lenin, as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—as much an absolute ruler as any tsar ever was.
Indifferent to the fate of the Allies bleeding in the Great War, Lenin made a separate peace with Germany in March 1918 and pulled his new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic out of the war. This permitted a million German soldiers fighting in the east to be redeployed to the Western Front for an offensive that promised to overwhelm the exhausted British and French and end the war with a victory for the kaiser. Through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia agreed to default on all its commitments to the Allies while ceding the Baltic States, Ukraine, and most of Belarus to the Germans. The Russian Caucasian province of Kars went to Germany’s Ottoman ally Turkey, and Lenin also agreed to pay six million marks in reparations. The treaty was nullified by the Allied victory in November 1918, but it was a disaster for Lenin and glaringly revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about the West, and this Russian capacity for duplicity would echo again and again throughout the next century.
From 1919 through 1922, there was a brief hope that widespread resistance to bolshevism would restore normalcy in Russia and provide for a fresh start. Many military officers, if not the rank and file, opposed all for which Lenin stood, as did the bourgeoisie, the remaining nobles, and large property owners. Civil war erupted throughout Russia, as these “White” Russians, backed by western governments betrayed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, fought back against Lenin’s “Red” Russians. Troops from the United States, Britain, and Imperial Japan landed in Vladivostok during November 1918 to bolster White Russian forces. Though the western soldiers were soon withdrawn, the Japanese seriously considered adding the entire Russian Maritime Territory to their empire before they, too, eventually pulled out.
Reorganizing what was left of the tsar’s Imperial Russian Army, the Bolsheviks utilized the embryonic Red Army to eventually defeat the White Russians. The Red Army also forcibly established soviets in the newly acquired states of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine. Drunk with power and consumed with a burning desire to foment a European revolution that would deliver him the continent, Lenin invaded Poland, which had established a parliamentary democracy in the wake of the Great War. Overconfident and dismissive of the Poles, the Red Army came within eight miles of Warsaw but was badly outflanked and lost three field armies in addition to a calvary corps. The Peace of Riga ended the conflict in March 1921 and set the borders that would remain until the Second World War.
Lenin, revolutionary that he was, recognized the threat posed by his fellow revolutionaries and pursued a ruthless campaign of socialist militarism after taking power. Dubbed the “Red Terror,” the goal of this democide was the elimination of the entire bourgeois class, as well as counter-revolutionaries, liberals, and organized religion. Marxist-Leninism had no tolerance for competition from the church: the state was God, and Lenin was the state. Violence and bloodshed were to become hallmarks of communist Russia, and it began with the hundred thousand Russians and twenty thousand priests executed during the Terror and culminated in thirteen million killed during the civil war.
Lenin’s steadily deteriorating health did not prevent him from binding the soviets of Belarus, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine to a union with Russia through a formal treaty signed on December 30, 1922.* The new entity, a highly centralized, single-party state with Moscow as its capital, was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the USSR. This union was, for Lenin, a living Marxist template for the future he, as the man of destiny he believed himself to be, envisioned: a global revolution that would wipe away the past and unify mankind under the banner of Russian communism. A system of control that Lenin maintained was more democratic than the western-style pretensions that were, according to him, “democracies for the rich.” However, Lenin’s single-minded, revolutionary light burned out on January 21, 1924, following his third stroke. As ideologically deluded and reprehensibly amoral as Lenin was, what came next for Russia and the world was infinitely worse: Joseph Stalin.
