On this day in 1941, the Senate approved a $6 billion supplemental Lend-lease bill, thus bringing the United States closer to joining the war that was consuming the rest of the world.
The original Lend-Lease Act, passed in March 1941, gave President Franklin Roosevelt the power to lend, lease, or otherwise dispose of food, ammunition, and arms to any country he deemed essential to the defense of the United States. By the fall of 1941, those nations included the Soviet Union and China as well as Great Britain. By the end of the war, the US would give more than $49 billion to more than 40 nations under Lend-Lease.
Many members of Congress had predicted dire consequences if Lend-Lease became law; indeed, the debate shows elements of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style. Despite Roosevelt’s insistence that the law would help the country avoid war, the anti-interventionists knew that Lend-Lease signaled a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, and they put up a tremendous fight against it. They repeatedly invoked the “lessons of history” taught by World War I revisionists. Senator Burton Wheeler, the leader of congressional forces against Lend-Lease, used arguments similar to those George Norris had made in 1917. The “interests” were once again foisting “one war measure after another on you, a peace-loving and unsuspecting people,” he told Congress. The people should respond by refusing to play the game of the Morgans and the Rockefellers. “Remember,” Wheeler told his supporters, “the interventionists control the money bags, but you control the votes.”
The anti-interventionists also stressed the dangers of a leviathan government in wartime, particularly the dangers of an imperial presidency. The peril to the republic, national hero Charles Lindbergh testified to a congressional committee, “lies not in an invasion from abroad. I believe it lies here at home in our own midst.” Senator Gerald Nye decried Congress’s willingness to surrender its constitutional purview to a “power-hungry executive” and reduce itself “to the impotence of another Reichstag.” If Congress was another Reichstag, then Roosevelt, by extension, must be another Hitler. Leaders of the anti-interventionist organization America First maintained that the New Deal’s centralizing bureaucrats wanted, as Senator Wheeler said, to “establish fascism in the United States.” In his opponents’ eyes, the very act of opposing Hitler transformed Roosevelt into an American Hitler. (For more on views of Roosevelt as a dictator, see Ben Alpers’ marvelous book.)
When they insisted that neither side in the war had a righteous cause, the anti-interventionists downplayed Hitler’s brutal and increasingly genocidal policies against the Jews. Indeed, anti-Semitism was the elephant in the room that the more “responsible” anti-interventionists tried to ignore. Some, like journalist John T. Flynn, tried to keep the most vehement anti-Semites out of America First. They also tried to persuade prominent Jews to join the organization. But Lindbergh laid bare the anti-Semitic core of anti-interventionism when he gave a speech in Des Moines in September 1941 that identified the three forces leading the country to war: the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews. Lindbergh singled out the Jews for special criticism: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.”
Most newspapers and public officials condemned Lindbergh’s speech—Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”—and Flynn and some America First leaders were distressed by it. But many anti-interventionists believed that Lindbergh had simply told the “truth,” that, as the lawyer Amos Pinchot explained, “as a group, the Jews of America are for intervention.” These anti-interventionists shared Lindbergh’s conviction that Americans would never willingly join a war against Germany; instead, they were being forced into it by selfish Brits, a lying executive, and Jewish warmongers. Though they insisted that these beliefs were not anti-Semitic, they ignored the long history of American anti-Semitism that lay behind Lindbergh’s accusation.
The anti-interventionists refused to see the differences between the First World War and the Second, between the British and the Nazis. They did, however, understand that the U.S. government was changing in immense—and, they believed, frightening—ways. Senator Robert Taft, the dean of anti-interventionist conservatives, argued that support for Britain would be the first step down a slippery slope to a national security state. “If we admit at all that we should take an active interest,” he said back in 1939, “we will be involved in perpetual war.” The United States would become more like European countries, with a powerful, centralized government launching wars around the globe. The increase in the coercive power of the government—to draft men, to commandeer resources, to suppress dissent—would imperil Americans’ historic independence and autonomy. It would, as Wheeler said, “slit the throat of the last Democracy still living.”
20 comments
October 23, 2008 at 3:39 pm
urbino
One wonders why Dems don’t remind the public of this from time to time, when the GOP is bashing them for their anti-American socialism and defeatism. “You know, we heard this same crap from Republican knuckleheads back during WWII — FDR was Hitler, no he was Stalin, we can’t fight the Nazis, blah blah blah. If you’re the GOP, the sky is always falling.”
October 23, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Vance
the anti-interventionists downplayed Hitler’s brutal and increasingly genocidal policies against the Jews
Did the interventionists play them up? Or did everybody just tiptoe around them and focus on Hitler’s external aggressions?
October 23, 2008 at 4:26 pm
karen marie
i have one thing to thank sarah palin for — my introduction to this blog.
now she can return to alaska, thank you very much.
October 23, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Kathy
You’re right, Vance, that the interventionists did not emphasize Nazi crimes against the Jews. But some anti-interventionists went so far as to suggest a moral equivalence between the British (they’re imperialists, you know) and the Nazis, and to argue that the US had no reason to support one side over the other.
October 23, 2008 at 5:02 pm
TCG
Well. I’ll one up you.
On this day in history the Earth was Created….. 6012 Years ago that is.
October 23, 2008 at 5:03 pm
grackle
…the long history of American anti-Semitism that lay behind Lindbergh’s accusation.
As depressing as I suspect it might be, I’d be very interested in a post on this theme. Thanks for the good post.
October 23, 2008 at 8:16 pm
John Emerson
Despite Roosevelt’s insistence that the law would help the country avoid war, the anti-interventionists knew that Lend-Lease signaled a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, and they put up a tremendous fight against it.
And the paranoids were absolutely right.
October 23, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Vance
Also, did Sarah Palin really mention us?
October 24, 2008 at 4:59 am
leapsecond
War on Terror, anyone?
October 24, 2008 at 5:37 am
kid bitzer
“as a group, the Jews of America are for intervention.”
intervention against the nazis in 1941?
um, yeah. guilty as charged.
and i’d feel really bad about that, were i not so busy feeling bad because the neocons are constantly saying i’m a neville chamberlain.
October 24, 2008 at 8:02 am
Vance
War on Terror, anyone?
Let’s have a cold war first.
October 24, 2008 at 11:28 am
Vance
It’s interesting to read the Times’s endorsement of Willkie in 1940 (via Farley). “Both [candidates] are opposed to actual intervention in the war, but short of war both favor every possible aid that can be given to the one democracy in Europe that still stands in Hitler’s path.”
Their main beef with FDR seems to be fiscal — that Roosevelt had abandoned the pretense of Hooverite austerity.
October 24, 2008 at 7:17 pm
John Emerson
The case against the isolationists would be stronger IF a.) the purpose of WWII had been to prevent genocide OR IF b.) the effect of WWII had been to prevent genocide AND IF ALSO c.) the U.S. hadn’t ended up in a state of permanent mobilization, and under the control of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that led us into the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, both on false pretenses.
I recently realized that if I (or Kucinich, or Feingold) were to become President by some counterfactual freak of history, even with strong popular support, it would be impossible for us to find a Secretary of Defense or a Secretary of State who supported our foreign policy and also knew enough about the relevant bureaucracies to be able to manage them.
America’s actual foreign policy options include realistic interventionism, idealistic interventionism, mad-dog imperial intervenionism, and nothing else. Empire: love it or leave it.
October 24, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Josh
OR IF b.) the effect of WWII had been to prevent genocide
What do you think the Nazis would have done in Eastern Europe if the U.S. hadn’t intervened in the war? Even as bad as the actual history was, it could have been much, much worse.
October 24, 2008 at 8:38 pm
John Emerson
That comes down to saying that Hitler would have been worse than Stalin, and probably he would have been. But there weren’t a lot of Jews saved by WWI.
I annoys me to have the isolationalists blamed for the Holocaust, when they lost on the policy issue (WWII) and the Holocaust still took place.
October 24, 2008 at 8:40 pm
John Emerson
“There weren’t a lot of Jews saved by WWII”, obvs.
Germany may have been the Jewish side in WWI. Leo Strauss was a German vet of WWI, and the Jewish grandfather of a friend of mine won an Iron Cross in that war.
October 24, 2008 at 9:03 pm
urbino
Leo Strauss was a German vet of WWI
Gosh darn it. I liked him so much before you revealed he hated America.
October 25, 2008 at 1:52 pm
student
Yes, it’s true that anti-interventionists had some good points but that they were willing to make some sort of accomodation (sp?) with the Nazis suggests that, if they had prevailed, we might be living in a much worse world, something like the situations portrayed in “Plot Against America” or perhaps “The Man in the High Castle.” At least the U.S. and the British empires promised national self-determination, civil liberties, and democratic procedure, promises that would inspire resistance movements in Italy, France, and elsewhere. And we would later live in a world where people could protest Cold war and post-Cold War atrocities without having to worry (most of the time) about being shot down in the street or dragged off to jail. Ideology makes a big difference. Ideology makes a big difference.
October 31, 2008 at 7:44 am
Around the history blogosphere: October 31 : Milestone Documents Blog
[…] The Edge of the American West on the Lend-Lease Act […]
November 24, 2008 at 12:01 pm
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