Roosevelt, after his election to a third term, created
the lend-lease plan at the behest of Prime Minister Churchill.
Newly reassured in the support of the American people, FDR returned
to Washington after his vacation armed with a creative plan for
continuing aid to Britain without violating the Neutrality Acts.
He proposed that the United States lend or lease, rather than sell,
needed munitions to Britain, who could no longer afford to pay
for aid. The bill, which was the subject of fierce debate before
its approval in Congress, allowed for the United States to aid
the Allies with over $50 billion in goods and services by the end
of the war. In August, Prime Minister Churchill and Roosevelt met
formally for the first time in Newfoundland. Churchill graciously
accepted his role as supplicant, calling FDR "Mr. President" while
Roosevelt called him Winston.
Many critics suspect that Roosevelt steered the country
to war while professing all the while to avoid it. No matter what
his private sentiments were on the necessity of war, FDR chose
to wait for provocation from the aggressors to push the country
out of its isolationist mood rather than act without their support.
He attempted to manipulate an incident where torpedoes from German
U-boats hit American ships headed towards Britain into a battle-call,
but Hitler quickly apologized, and the incident faded into memory. Roosevelt
waited in vain for some overt aggression in the Atlantic, but the
Germans, wary from their experience with America in World War I,
continued without any dramatic inducement to war. In the meantime,
Roosevelt had been increasing pressure on Japan by decreasing exports
of metal and oil. When FDR finally cut off high- octane aviation
fuel to Japan entirely, the Japanese were pushed into a corner
and decided to launch an all-out offensive rather than give up their
possessions in China. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941, finally provided Roosevelt with the provocation to declare
war. The fact that the war had come from the west, not the east,
was unexpected, however. Indeed, 265 American aircraft were lost,
2,403 men were killed, and 1,178 were wounded at Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese lost only twenty-nine aircraft and fifty-five men.
On December 8, FDR asked Congress to declare war against Japan.
Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United
States.
Roosevelt chose a talented team of military advisors who
would remain at their posts for the entirety of the war. General
Marshall was the Chief Advisor for the Army and Admiral King was
the Chief Advisor for the Navy. Both Marshall and King were straightforward
with the President and had his trust, so much so that the soft-spoken
Marshall was not allowed to command the Allied advance in 1944
because Roosevelt wanted him at his side. These military leaders
had to cope with many logistical difficulties that during the war,
as not all of the Allies were at war with the same countries, nor
did they consider the same countries their friends. China was not
at war with Germany, but Britain and the Soviet Union did not have
any faith in China, and so on. The domestic front was also a major
cause of concern in mounting an Allied offensive. Although FDR had
encouraged mobilization many years before Pearl Harbor, many industrialists
were reluctant to comply with the plans of a leader who was seen
as anti-business. But Roosevelt's experience at the war desk during
World War I had taught him that a modern war was little more than
a fight between the resources of each country. With Pearl Harbor,
the resources of the United States were opened.
Roosevelt largely fumbled the administrative machinery
that was to run the domestic war effort until October 1942, when
he chose Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes to be the head of
the Office of Economic Stabilization, and later the head of the
Office of War Mobilization. Roosevelt set ambitious production
goals and Byrnes and his subordinates carried them out. The largest
question on the domestic front was who was to pay for the war.
New revenues for the country came from an increase of the top bracket
of income tax to eighty-one percent and, more significant, simply increasing
the number of people who paid tax. Congress did not increase taxes
as much as FDR asked, passing a new tax bill only in 1944 and not
taxing as much as he had proposed. He vetoed the bill but the Senate
overrode the veto–signs that his hold over Congress had completely
crumbled.
Indeed, Roosevelt's wartime humanitarian efforts were
weak at best because his brand of liberalism had never extended
to civil rights. He signed the bill to send Japanese Americans
to internment camps without any protest or consideration for their
civil liberties. He refused to take action against segregation of
African Americans in the Armed Forces. He also refused to take
real action against the harming of Jewish lives, and refused to
open American immigration doors to larger numbers of Jewish immigrants
until his advisor Morgenthau presented him with a stern report
informing of the results of his inaction. As soon as the war began,
Roosevelt also seemed to lose interest in further social reform.
Although the Depression and its unemployment were solved by the
increased production of the war, many of the New Deal programs
that had faced the most conservative opposition were disbanded
at the very beginning of the war.
Roosevelt's role as Commander-in-Chief seemed to be preferable to
him to his role as President–he preferred to be introduced as the former
at official dinners and functions. He left most tactical matters
to his able military advisors, but participated in larger questions
of strategy, often conferring with Stalin and Churchill personally.
The close relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt was crucial
to the success of the Allies. Because the Soviet Union was bearing
the brunt of Germany's forces in Europe, Stalin repeatedly asked
the Allies to open another European front rather than limiting
their fighting to Africa. Roosevelt mollified Stalin by promising
that the Allies would accept nothing less than an unconditional
surrender from Germany; that is, they would not leave the war with
the Soviet Union still fighting the Germans.
In November of 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt traveled
to Tehran to meet with Stalin for the first time. Roosevelt desperately tried
to establish a personal relationship with the Russian leader, as he
realized that the peace of the world after the war depended upon the
cooperation of the great world powers. Many critics of Roosevelt
feel that he was far too naïve about Russian intentions and set
the building blocks for the development of the Cold War by appeasing
Stalin's requests before the end of World War II. Yet, Roosevelt's
attempts to build a friendship with Stalin were characterized not
by naïveté but by a clash of goals. Roosevelt's farsightedness
in foreign policy is demonstrated in his convention of the International
Monetary Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July of
1944, a meeting that created the International Monetary Fund to
stabilize world currencies and aid in reconstruction and development
of nations after the war's end. The IMF has continued to play an
important role in distribution of aid to developing nations even
today. FDR also persuaded twenty-six countries to sign the UN Declaration,
a statement of principles that extended the Atlantic Charter that
he and Churchill had signed in Newfoundland replaced Wilson's crumbled
League of Nations.
In 1944, Roosevelt agreed without resistance to be the
Democratic candidate for president, although people close to him
say that he was more interested in retiring to Hyde Park and playing
the role of elder statesman. His ailing health and constant complaints
of fatigue may have been the reason for his lack of protest at
Harry Truman of Missouri replacing Wallace as his running mate.
FDR defeated Thomas Dewey of New York with fifty-three percent
of the vote–an easy win because the Allies, under his leadership,
were surely winning the war. On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces
finally landed on the Normandy coast of France. In August, they
liberated Paris and in another month had nearly driven the Germans
out of all of France.
Roosevelt again traveled to meet with Churchill and Stalin,
this time in Yalta. The leaders came to an agreement on the post-war occupation
of Germany, the Soviet Union's participation in the Pacific War
if necessary, and the creation of what later became the United
Nations. However, the same issues the leaders had evaded at the
earlier conference–such as the fate of Poland and other Eastern European
countries–were discussed again without agreement, and weak compromises
were instated in their stead. To historians today gifted with hindsight,
the outlines of the Cold War are clearly visible in the agreements
that came out of Yalta. Indeed, many cite Yalta as emblematic of
Roosevelt's political naïveté in trusting Stalin. Yet, at the time,
when FDR returned from Yalta, the country greeted him with great
pomp, and all, including Roosevelt himself, felt that the talks
had been a great success. He had realized early on that the Soviet
Union and the United States were to be the great powers of the
world, and had done his best to enmesh them in a net of mutual obligations
and goodwill to guarantee peace in the coming years.
While in public life Roosevelt was basking in the upcoming
victory of WWII, his personal life was lonelier than it had ever
been. His mother, with whom he had always maintained a close relationship,
had died in 1941. His four sons were all serving overseas. Missy
LeHand, his faithful secretary, had suffered a serious stroke in
1941 and died in 1944, and Eleanor was traveling the country with
her own social agenda. When Roosevelt called for cocktail hour
in the White House, there sometimes would be no one there, not
even Harry Hopkins, who had married and moved out of the White
House. For companionship, FDR turned to women– to his daughter
Anna, to two cousins, and a series of charming women who would
defer to him in the way that his wife never did. He also re- ignited
his relationship with Lucy Mercer, now Lucy Rutherford, a widower.
Whether or not their relationship in his last days was more than
a strong friendship is unclear, although Roosevelt kept the meetings
secret from Eleanor. He went for a vacation to Warm Springs in
March of 1945, just a few short months before the end of the war,
and asked Lucy to come. On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and passed away in the afternoon.
"We have learned that we cannot live
alone at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of
other nations–far away. We have learned the simple truth as Emerson
said, that "the only way to have a friend is to be one."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
