VII. Demagoguery Wtih a Groton Accent

ChapterVII DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON ACCENT To MAKE THE WAR HOLy-or even to give it some consistent moral character-was not easy, particularly with Communist Russia in it as an ally. It would take what Kipling called the nerve of a brass monkey to talk about democracy versus total itari~nism or about fighting the anti-Christ. We were to be link~d in this great endeavor with a semi-Asiatic despQtism which had already shown an incorrigible bent toward interna tional piracy, an utter contempt for human freedom, and an ideology of which atheism was a natural end product. This did not abash Franklin D. Roosevelt.The nerve of a brass monkey was exactly what he did have. He knew that we live in a propaganda age. In our time, public opinion is largely a re sponse to propaganda stimuli exerted on a vast scale by the new techniques and instruments of the twentieth century. Nature had· bestowed upon him some rare gifts, including a magnetic personal·charm and a mellifluous voice, and he had assiduous!y cultivated the subtlest, if not necessarily the noblest, arts of pol itics. If any man could make red seem white, he was surely the one to do it.·Thanks to the fortune of birth, he could give dema goguerya Groton accent.

8S 86 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER In the second week of July, 1941, Wendell Willkie lunched with President Roosevelt at the White House. Willkie was a renegade Democrat who had, in 1940, ingratiated himself into the Republican nomination for President and, after being de feated, had leaped onto the Roosevelt bandwagon with the agil ity of a sophomore doing a broad jump. He had not yet invented his fatuous slogan, "One World," which was to help seduce the Western peoples oft on a calamitous false premise, but he had cozied up to the President and put himself in position for some spectacular globe-trotting and world-wide publicity. He came out of the White House all smiles. Two days before, the President had revealed to Congress that American naval forces had occupied Iceland. The ebullient Will kie now told reporters that he even favored American bases in Ireland and Scotland. A newspaperman reminded him that pollsters had found the people of the United States overwhelm ingly opposed to war. Willkie smiled and said that "leadership"

would win out in the end.! He had just lunched tete-a.-tetewith the man who was going to do the leading. He did not reveal what was said over the lamb chops. But one story about this long conference reached the press as Willkie was leaving. According to Willkie, Roosevelt told him that friends had advised him to retain the foremost psychiatrists in the United States "to work out ways of correct ing and influencing public opinion." Willkie grinned. "Mr. President," said he, "have you heard of the first meeting of your fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert Lasker, the adver tising man?" The President had not. Willkie told how Lasker traveled to Oyster Bay, how Teddy, all smiles, teeth, and out stretched arms, burst in to greet him, crying out, "Mr. Lasker, I've been told that you have the master advertising mind in the country." Said Lasker hastily, "It would be presumptuous for anyone to claim that in your presence." "And so," said Willkie DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON ACCENT 87 to his.luncheon host, "I think it would be presumptuous for any psychiatrist to tell you how to influence public opinion." Willkie could call it "leadership." (Rather maladroitly, he smiled ashe said it.) It had different names in different parts of the world.

Whatever it was, it was to be laid on thick, with a heavy trowel. The objectives of the international Communist movement, under the aegis of Soviet Russia, were as obvious as the sun at noon. As early as 1936, the American Ambassador in Moscow had cabled to Washington: "We should not cherish for a mo ment the illusion that it is possible to establish really friendly relations with the Soviet Government, or with any Communist party or Communist individual."2 This cable was not made pub lic by the State Department until May, 1952, sixteen years later.. However, the caveat should have been redundant to anyone who had ever troubled to read Karl Marx's manifesto. The virus was endemic in Communism; its fetid breath was its own ill omen to the world. There was no room for illusion. So it is that the American apologists and court historians of the 1950'S,bent on whitewashing the Roosevelt record, were in so many caseseither the fools or the faithless of the 1930'Sand 1940's.

As General Douglas MacArthur has reminded us, "Long be fore even the secondW orld War, the Soviet was known to plan suppression of the concept of freedom and the advance of Com munism throughout the world, as rapidly as conditions would permit."3 In the summer of 1941, the United States, egged on by Franklin D. Roosevelt,was about to mold those conditions to the Soviet plan. An historic apostasy in the camp of Western Christendom, even more startling than Hitler's pact with Stalin in 1939,was about to take place. Bolshevism, now stricken, was to be put under an American oxygen tent and saved; then it was to be launched on conquest and its enemies disarmed. The next generation was to wrestle with the consequences. Lord Lloyd, in his The British Case/ which was published in 88 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER 1940 under an American imprint with a Foreword and official blessing by none other than Lord Halifax, had said the German Soviet pact was "Hitler's final apostasy. It was the betrayal of Europe." He also had said that "Russian agents and Russian money were busy all over Europe." Sir Victor Sassoon, the Brit ish banker and a man of wide knowledge of the world, had con fided to newspapermen upon arriving in New York that "Rus sia would be found to be the real enemy of Great Britain before long" and that the elimination of Hitler would leave that prob lem unsolved.5 Now in the summer of 1941,Hitler had bowed out and Frank lin D. Roosevelt was bowing in as the collaborator with Stalin.

However, the people were not to· see the historical import of what was taking place. President Roosevelt would divert their attention by talking only about Hitler and Mussolini and their sins, and Tojo would be cast as the only bad man of Asia. "Prac tical politics," Henry Adams had said, "consists in ignoring facts." Even before there was the added embarrassment of a Com munistic ally, the war faction in the United States found that it had a difficult product to sell. The people were not sure what the war was all about. Hitler and his Nazis were generally de spised for their chauvinistic antics, their arrogance and cruelty, but cool heads could admit the possibility that the international mayhem committed at Versailles had left Germany with some just grievances. The British themselves were not amateurs at the power game. Did an empire which sprawled over six continents have a right, and particularly a moral right, to denounce aggres sian? The British and the French, for all their obeisances to international morality, were perhaps just as cutthroat as the Ger mans. The only difference was one of timing; wars and pillage had satisfied their ambitions earlier. Both of them had grabbed more territories in the first World War and were exploiting DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON AGeE-NT 8g themwitha finessedevelopedin threecenturiesof imperialism.

What had America to gain by getting into the power struggle? Americans were in a mood to take wars with a grain of salt. In April, 1937, exactly twenty years after the United States had plunged into a war "to make the world safe for democracy," 71 per cent of those polled by the Gallup Institute believed that America's entry into World War I had been a mistake. Were they going to dash forth again in the trappings of angels and run the risk of having their children laugh at them as dupes some twenty years later? The mirages of one generation are dis persed by the revisionism of the next. Perhaps this war would spawn more problems than it would solve. Perhaps, ironically, it would beget still another war to undo the consequences of this one. Such sentiments were not pro-Hitler. They were heard from the most divergent sources, from the National Association of Manufacturers to Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist can didate, and such respected publicists and scholars as Harry Elmer Barnes, Stuart Chase, Quincy Howe, Oswald Garrison Villard, Sidney Hertzberg, and C. Hartley Grattan, who were as anti Fascist as they were anti-Communist. Former brain truster and columnist Hugh Johnson said bluntly what many were think ing: "I despiseHitler and I like England but in any international war situation I wouldn't trust our fate to either of them as far as I could throw a bull by the tail."6 Men such as these naturally shunned any sympathy with the self-styled Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, which avowed its·de votion to Hitler. The Bund members were poison to their own cause. Their inept, loutish organization was repulsive to almost all Americans of German descent, who disowned it. It did der Fuhrer more harm than good. More effective for the German cause was that high priest of American anti-Semitism, the Rev erend Charles E. Coughlin. His racist overtones were obnoxious THE ATLANTIC CHARTER to the great majority of people,·but his barbs at the Allies often touched a sensitive point. At times history seemed to be irrefut ably on his· side, in spite of the obfuscation and imagery with which he embroidered his tirades on the radio and in his weekly magazine, SocialJustice.Father Coughlin preached that the "ad vance of Red Communism into Christian Europe is even a worse threat to civilization than was the rise of Hitler." He was an early prophet-if an unwelcome one-when he wrote in Social Justiceon October 23, 1939: "No one condones the persecutions of Hitler, nor his pact with Stalin, but when Hitlerism has been destroyed, Communism will possessGermany-Communism at the very doors of Paris and London." The passing of Hitler, he said, would not bring tranquility to Europe, and he warned his listeners·against being deluded by the politicians into believing that it would. Naturally, the Rooseveltians hated him, and the feeling was mutual.

The United States was a maelstrom of conflicting propagan das.7 Protagonists of the German cause were, however, doomed to a chilly response in the long run. The Roosevelt administra tion put every possible legal obstacle in their path and threw the full weight of its own propaganda facilities against them. More over, Adolf Hitler was too unpalatable a morsel to appeal to the American taste. As for Mussolini, only too easily could he be caricatured as a.comic-opera buffoon, and the basic dilemma of overpopulated Italy slurred over. If the public was confused about the real causes of Europe's malaise, which erupted in such violent symptoms, it was also somewhat apathetic about deter rniningthem. As for the British and the French, they sent a virtual expedi tionary force to the United States, the promised land. This mo bile corps invaded the drawing rooms, the lecture halls, the women's clubs, the colleges, the industrial plants, the fashion shows, even the bars. (Lucius Beebe complained in the New DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON ACCENT 91 YorkHeraldTribunethathe could no longer "jerk a quick one"

without hearing some "British Sir Somebody Something" de claiming on "what you Americans should understand.") One battalion of the invaders was erudite, another was glamorous. In Hollywood, the Anglo-French forces scored some of their most effective advances, with such shock troops as Ronald Colman, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Lawrence Olivier,Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, and Basil Rathbone in the front line. Filmland hummed with pro-Allied activity. Charles Boyer was thought to be away in the French army when, early in the war, he suddenly arrived back in New York on his greater mission. Eve Curie was also sent over. She made charming talks about springtime in Paris, delicately interspersed with world politics. Leon Blumts brother, Rene, was on hand with a dossier on Americana and a Gallic ingenuity in probing for soft spots in the armor of Ameri can neutrality. With Alfred Duff Cooper came his wife, Lady Diana Manners, who had played the Virgin in The Miracle and who informed reporters that her trip to America was "my war work.

H8 This phalanx had only a limited success.Too many Americans were still unimpressed with the holiness of the Allied cause. One could not just slough off all the facts. After all, the population of Danzig was 99 per cent German;9 the checkered area of central and southern Europe was "an economic nightmare," as Hitler called it; the French, English, Dutch and Belgians did have rich colonies, while Germany had none; the rise of Hitler and Mus solini was} in a sense,a reaction to chaos and despair and Marxist violence in Germany and Italy. These and a score of other in controvertibles kept popping up in spite of the barrage of invec tive. They made the issuesseem much less simple than they were described in the winsome pleadings of a Lady Diana Manners or in the ingratiating rhetoric of the British Ambassador. The majority of the American people had, it is true, a preference 92 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER for an Allied victory, but the majority also wanted the United States to stay out of the war. Every poll confirmed that.

When the German Wehrmacht wheeled into Russia late in June of 1941 and it became clear that the defeat of Hitler would be but one face of a two-sided coin, the victory of Stalin being on the other side, the holiness of the war was even less apparent. However, the radical labor movement, whipped up by the Com munists in their ranks,. made a sudden flip-flopand abandoned their anti-war stand overnight. With the mother of Bolshevism at bay, the war became, for them, a crusade. From top to bottom, the Roosevelt administration became feverish with the desire to help Russia. In other circles, there was more skepticism than ever. Herbert Hoover, sensing what President Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins were up to and foreseeing what the consequenceswould be, warned against "a gargantuan jest" at the expense of Amer ica. "Joining in a war alongside Stalin to impose freedom is a travesty," he said.10 Hiram Johnson thundered in the Senate: "I will not subscribe to the doctrine that you must be a Stalinite to be an American .... Good God! Did we ever sink so low be fore as to chooseone cutthroat out of two? This man was Hitler's ally.... Now we furnish him with weapons which may be turned upon US."l1 Charles A. Lindbergh's voice, resonating from the deep wells of courage and sincerity of this grave, studi ous man, foretold what lay at the end of the Roosevelt path: a Europe half enslaved and barbarized, an Asia corroded by hatred, an America bled and drained of its resources for at least a decade, perhaps two.

Well, what did lie ahead, at the end of President Roosevelt's path? What would Europe and the world look like? What po tion was he really brewing in his bubbling cauldron? Mr. Roose velthad not said. By the end of July, 1941, it was high time that he did say.He knew that. The country had one foot in the morass DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON ACCENT 93 of war already, chiefly as a result of his policies.Skepticism was rife. Even England, which had declared war on Germanyin September, 1939, ostensibly because the territory of Poland had been violated, had not stated its war aims with any clarity. Now that the Soviet Union, which had recently had a field day ravag-ing half of Poland as an accomplice of Hitler, was being wel comed into the Allied camp, no one knew what would happen to Poland after an Allied victory, much less to the rest of eastern Europe or Germany. A powerful blast at the Rooseveltpolicy of getting this country involved in such a war had just been prepared for public release over the signatures of the following: Felix M. Morley, a former League of Nations functionary and a recent editor of the Wash ington Post) then president of Haverford College; Frank o.

Lowden, patriarchal former governor of Illinois; Herbert Hoover; Robert M. Hutchins, precocious president of the Uni versity of Chicago; Joshua R. Clark, former Ambassador to Mex ico and a powerful Mormon; Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University and former Secretary of the Interior; AI£ M. Landon; Hanford MacNider, former Minister to Canada; Henry P. Fletcher, former Ambassador to Italy; former Vice-President and World War I General Charles G. Dawes; the Pennsylvania Quaker figure, Joseph H. Scattergood; old-time opera star Geraldine Farrar; and writers Irvin S. Cobb and Clarence Buddington Kelland. The statement said: "The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop.to step-hy-stepprojection of the United States into unde claredwar.... Exceeding its expressed purpose, the Lend-Lease bill has been followed by naval action, by military occupation of basesoutside the Western Hemisphere, by promise of unauthor ized aid to Russia and by other belligerent moves.... We have gone as far as is consistent either with law, with sentiment or with security.... It [the war] is not purely a world conflict be94 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER tween tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion.... Insofar as this is a war of power politics, the American people want no part in it. . .. Few people honestly believe that the Axis is now, or will in the future, be in a position to threaten the independence of any part of this Hem isphere if our defenses are properly prepared. Freedom in Amer ica does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations.,,12 It was not enough to sneer at such a protestation or to brush it off as politically inspired. Was not President Roosevelt himself at least as politically minded as any of these distinguished indi viduals could be charged with being ? Was their patriotism any more impeachable than his? More was needed by way of an swer. Mr. Roosevelt was astute enough to perceive that.

In reality, the gloomy prognostications of Hoover, Lindbergh, and the other critics of Roosevelt's war obsession were, both at the time they were uttered and later as reviewed retrospectively, unanswerable logically. They merely expressed what any objec tive analyst of the international facts of life would have had to concede. But could propaganda so becloud the obvious that the masses of the people would actually believe that Soviet Russia would be fighting shoulder to shoulder with America· for free dom everywhere (or even anywhere) ? Franklin D. Roosevelt quite evidently thought this possible. It required a tour de force in the manipulation of mass psychol ogy, which daunted him not at all. People "are governed more by feeling and sentiment than by reasoned consideration," Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf.It is difficult not to perceive that Franklin D. Roosevelt also believed this and acted upon it.

The habitual political techniques of both of these men were based on the premise that man is basically irrational. Each of them was a sensational political phenomenon in his own coun try, Hitler with his revival of the Fuhrerlegend and Roosevelt DEMAGOGUERY WITH A GROTON ACCENT 95 with his four terms. Each drew upon war, preparation for war, and the propaganda of war for motive power to propel himself onward and upward in his spectacular political career. Rarely does a nation go to war without illusions. The people of the UnitedStateshad not yetbeen giventheirset of illusions. Thispreliminarycould be postponedno longer.Some beautiful war aims, innocent as the magician's fluffy white rabbit, had to be pulled out of the Presidential hat.