Part Two - The Atlantic Charter: Platform for a War

This hyperbole prodded the magazine Christian Century, which still preserved its balance, to quip: "One thinks immediately of a certain meeting that is supposed to have taken place on Mount Sinai, or of a. number of others that might be mentioned." Of course, not everybody was enthusiastic. Some people were distinctly less so when such newspapers as the war-minded Louisville Courier-Journal gleefully crowed that "America stands committed." And not a few eyebrows were raised when the Left Wing New Republic, which had been in paroxysms of 55 56 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER anxiety ever since Soviet Russia was attacked the previous June, now came out flatly on its front cover for a declaration of war. Many people who carefully studied the words of the Charter made a wry face. It was, they said, just a piece of rhetoric and a rather fuzzy one at that. The Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express called it "a prelude" to taking the country into war and was skeptical of any other import.

Not only was the Atlantic Charter hatched in a setting of carefully contrived theatrics, however, but it was broadcast to the entire world as no other document ever had been before. Sumner Welles, who was no mean phrasemaker even before his post-graduate course at the knee of Franklin Delano Roose velt, has called it "the beacon." It was "held aloft." It was to light the way "forward to peace, to human progress and to a free world."! In the United States, every propaganda medium was used to glorify it. People who swallow words with the same ab ject trust with which they swallow a pill saw no abracadabra in its phrases; they saw only shining truth and virtue. The Atlantic Charter was posted on the walls of public librar ies. It was praised in pulpits in awed tones. Teachers celebrated it in elementary classroomsfor the edification of children barely able to read a comic book. The ladies' clubs throughout the coun try were descended upon by an army of lecturers, including an unusual proportion who had irresistibly attractive English ac cents, who told them that the great Charter was the harbinger of the millennium on earth. (First the United States had to get into the war; then would come Utopia.) Plausible pundits could not take up their pens fast enoughto dash·off articlesand books in which they assumed that the Charter must mean something, and presumed to know what it meant. They took it for granted that whatever it meant would be honored in fact and deed, at least by President Roosevelt.

This remarkable document was eventually subscribed to by FROM SHOUTS TO WHISPERS 57 the representatives of more than thirty nations,includingSoviet Russia, with great pomp and ceremony. Soviet Russia,then on the receiving end of Mr. Roosevelt'sbounty, vowed allegiance to it in St. James's Palace on September 29, 1941, and again later in Washington, D.C. In this country all the disciples of the ad ministration, the fantasists and the word-worshipers, applauded as one, apparently taking it all quite seriously. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill set out from the shores of Britain to attend the Atlantic Conference, he, as an old trouper on the world stage, was well aware of the dramatic pos sibilities of the episode. There was to be·no risk that an. insuffi cient!y glowing account of it would be.written. He took with him on the battleship Prince of Wales two "literary men," as he called them. One was a writer of travel books; the other wrote best-sellernovels.

The traveloguist, H. V. Morton, was naturally deeply moved by his presence at this meeting of the two great leaders, Church ill and Roosevelt, "far from the haunts of man," as he put it (although the meeting took place in a landlocked bay within rowboat distance of both Argentia, a large American seaplane base, and the town of Placentia, which had a population of three thousand and was on a railroad). In his book Atlantic Meeti1lg, he predicted that "the Atlantic Conference will take its place anlong the great meetings of history." Strangely, his treatment of the eight points of the Charter consisted only of printing them in the appendix of the book. About the meeting, however, he wrote: Seen against.the tremendous events of 1939-41,it will live in the his tory books of the future and will arouse the interest and the curiosity of generations yet unborn. Men will ask what it was like to cross the Atlantic with Winston Churchill in wartime. It may be that a dram ..

atist, an artist or a writer of films will wish to picture Churchill upo~ the admiral's bridge gazing through the mists of early morning to58 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER wards the shores of the New World. Time may prove that such a picture was one of the great symbolic moments of the war. And should this be so, the writer and the artist will have many a question to ask. What did he wear? What did he look like? Was he well and in good spirits? Was he ill? What did he talk about? How did he spend his time as the warship carried him across the ocean?2 Such was the exuberance of the moment. Actually, the confer ence meant to the English mainly one thing: President Roose velt had virtually committed his country to war. American and British warships had churned the waters of Placentia Bay as one armada. As for the Charter, Robert E. Sherwood, writing with Harry Hopkins' notes before him, tells us that the officersof the British government "never regarded it as a formal State Paper; it was, to them, not much more than a publicity handout."3 Churchill wired his cabinet on August I I from the Prince of Wales that Roosevelt was set on issuing it because "he believes [it] will influence the whole movement of United States opin ion," and he tipped off the cabinet that it would be "most impru dent on our part to raise unnecessary difficulties."4The eight points were not taken seriously in England (as a study of con temporary British opinion clearly shows). They were food for American consumption, which is probably why they ended up rather ignominiously in the Appendix of Mr. Morton's book.

As for President Roosevelt,he appeared at Placentia Bay cozily surrounded by two of his sonsand Harry Hopkins, as well as the faithful Sumner Welles and W. Averell Harriman. These could be relied upon to hear nothing they should not hear, to report nothing which it would be indiscreet to reveal. He allowed no representatives of the press to accompany him. But when he came home, his administration, which harbored more publicity (or "public liaison") experts than any prior President had ever dared dream of, got busy. It set in motion, in the press, on the screen, and on the air waves, a glamour drive which was meant FROM SHOUTS TO WHISPERS 59 to capture the imagination of the American people,who, what ever else may be their virtues and faults, do indubitably love a good show. Mr. Roosevelt's wife also loaned her not inconsider able talents to· the glamourization of the Atlantic Conference and its eight-point offspring, the Charter. Less than four months later the United States was in the war officially. The Atlantic Charter was supposed to be its platform.

During the next five years, two things happened. First, before Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in April, 1945,the Atlantic Char ter was torn to shreds and thrown into the trash pile of discarded nostrums. Second, its memory was almost expunged by new divertissements.Those who had sung its praises most lustily had cause to forget the melody. They gave it the treatment of silence. A decade and a half has now passed. The Atlantic Charter is seldom spoken of anymore. Its very mention is an embarrass ment to all who were in any way connected with its spectacular origin or who once glorified its maker. Shy at appearing ludi crous, friendly biographers, and even many historians, are found to skirt around its phrases and avoid serious consideration of it. Schoolteachers and professors have little, if anything, to say about it to their students. A sampling of college students today will disclose that the majority cannot even identify this strange international compact, which at its birth was heralded as one of the most memorable in the history of the world and the begin ning of a new era. Not one in twenty has more than the vaguest know ledge of its contents.

To Rooseveltians, the most disconcerting fact is that the death of the Charter occurred during the lifetime of Franklin D. Roose velt, and his own finger marks were on the throat of the corpse. It was a plain case of infanticide. An examination of the writings and speeches of the voluble Eleanor Roosevelt from 1943 to the present discloses a marked reticence on the subject, as compared with her earlier effusiveness. The Atlantic Charter has indeed 60 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER become the forgotten prodigy. The cynosure of hundreds of mil lions of human beings at its birth, violence and oblivion were its destiny. It was never given a decent burial. When Elliott Roosevelt wrote his book, published in 1946Ull der the title As He Saw It (the He being his father), he had to say something about the Atlantic Charter. After all, he was writ ing about the various international conferences at which he had accompanied his father, and his memory was purported to be so precise that he could quote, verbatim, choice little confidences that came to him from the lips of his father over several years.

Yet about the Atlantic Charter, Elliott seems to have decided that the less said, the better. He wrote that it had "a peculiar and bitter historical interest" and then proceeded to dispose of the celebrated eight points with a few flippant evasions, all in less than a page. For example, of the important fourth point, which deals with accessto the raw materials of the world, his treatment was: "Pass over the fourth point; its mysteries are too deep."5 Of course they always had been too deep; his father and Churchill had purposely made them that way, although this uncompli mentary thought finds no expression by Elliott. Whom did Elliott blame for the sad fate of the more explicit points of the Charter? Never Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nor the Russians. In 1946, Elliott was apparently still under the spell of the Russophilism which had infected his father's administration, even to the point of his rhapsodizing over Russia so much in this book that one would gain the impression that Russia saved the skin of America in the war, not vice versa. Russia's "mighty con tribution" to America's victory in the war, he wrote, was "the greatest single fact in our lifetime.,'6 If the reputations of Frank lin D. Roosevelt and of the Soviet Union were sacrosanct, that left the British to blame. So Elliott placed the blame, at least by insinuation, jointly on "British imperialism" and on those Amer icans who eventually, after the war, decided to stand tip to ComFROM SHOUTS TO WHISPERS 61 munist expansionism. The waywardness of this logic, or lack of it, is hardly worthy of remark. What one reads between the lines is that at least as early as 1946, Elliott Roosevelt knew that the Atlantic Charter was "a dead duck" (to borrow a metaphor he seems fond of). He played it down, just as his mother had been doing for a long time. In a sense, it had served its purpose, for its real purpose was propagandistic and therefore ephemeral.

The Atlantic Charter may indeed be unimportant now, as is any cadaver, but the story of it is not unilnportant. The corpus delicti is all but forgotten, but the lesson of the crime should never be. Franklin D. Roosevelt is not the last mortal who will present himself as a savior to the world. The Atlantic Charter is not the last "beacon," as Sumner WeUes called it, that will be "held aloft" just before men are asked to die. The tale does not unfold easily. One must start far enough back and carry it well forward; otherwise the real gist of it is never found or is lost in sheer fantasy. The politician, if his scru ples be flexible,.plays a constant game to outwit his contem... poraries. If he is extraordinarily clever, he will do more: he will outwit the historians. "We cannot escape history," said Lincoln, but a Franklin D. Roosevelt would intuitively know this to be a half-truth. Much that men such as he do and think escapes at least the conscious record of history, and historians only too often lose the scent in their quest for the truth. The story they tell of an event is too pat. They make a frontal attack where only an enveloping movement will yield the prey.

We shall begin by looking in at the White House a few days before President Roosevelt sailed away for his secret rendezvous with the Prime Minister of Great Britain in the summer of 1941. It was just four months and one week before, on the other side of the world, the upstart "land of the Rising Sun" made its most desperate gamble: an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.