The
Year of Hesitation
With
European armies on the march, America seemed a world
apart.
June
15, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street
Journal
It was the Year
Before. The year before Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio would light up the
baseball world with the numbers .406 and 56. The year before the Jeep was
invented and the Manhattan Project was started, the year before Mount Rushmore
was completed, the year before Joan Baez was born, the year before 2,402 victims
of the attack on Pearl Harbor would die.
1940:
FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh,
Hitler—the Election Amid the Storm
By Susan Dunn
Yale, 418 pages, $30
David
McMacken
But 1940
was more than the Year Before. It was a time and era all its own: the Luftwaffe
bombing assault on London, the assassination of Trotsky, the discovery of Stone
Age carvings in a cave in France, the appearance of nylons on the market. The
Bears beat the Redskins, 73-0, in the NFL championship game. Byron Nelson won
the PGA Championship.
And it
was the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in the
White House. It is this presidential drama that is the centerpiece of Susan
Dunn's volume with the pithy, strangely evocative title of "1940.'' The book is
a meticulous reconstruction of several battles: the one between FDR and Wendell
Willkie, naturally, but also the struggle between those who believed in
isolationism and those who believed in engagement. And the clash between those
who believed the best answer to Hitler and Mussolini was appeasement and those
who believed instead in forceful response and rearmament.
Few
years—1941, of course, and surely 1776 and 1861, and maybe 1968 and 2001—offer
so rich an American canvas, and Ms. Dunn, a prolific historian at Williams
College, uses it to paint a brilliant portrait of an America in transition, not
only between war and peace but also between a country content to stick to its
knitting and one that would soon sew together alliances and assume obligations
across the globe.
Ms.
Dunn's story begins with Japan at war in China, Germany on the move through
Europe, and Americans registering for the draft and taking jobs in the growing
defense industry. From the start it is clear that this was a time of
transformation—and crisis.
The year
was dominated by two questions whose answers would change the country. Would
Roosevelt run for the third term that none of his predecessors dared undertake?
And would the United States, possessed of the world's 18th biggest army, only
slightly bigger than Bulgaria's, be drawn into the war that was darkening the
globe?
On the
war, FDR took what you might call a lean-in position, observing in his State of
the Union address that there was a "vast difference'' between "keeping out of
war and pretending that this war is none of our business.'' On the question of
the third term, Hitler all but resolved Roosevelt's conundrum, and the
nation's.
One of
the long shadows of the year (and, it turns out, of the year ahead, too) was
cast by Charles Lindbergh: hero of Le Bourget, seatmate of Hitler at the 1936
Olympics, "intensely pleased''—his words—by the Nazi experience. FDR thought him
a Nazi, but perhaps he was simply shallow and narrow. Lindbergh, whose
relationship with FDR also is a principal theme of another book this season,
Lynne Olson's "Those Angry Days," stands out for his ignorance but not for his
isolationism, a creed embraced by, among many others, the old Herbert Hoover and
the young Gerald Ford, the reigning president of the University of Chicago
(Robert Maynard Hutchins), and the future president of Yale (Kingman Brewster),
all suffering from what the playwright Robert Sherwood described as an
"isolationist fetish.'' Their brand of isolationism was a mixture of pacifism
and defeatism in the face of fascism and totalitarianism, with a few of them
throwing in a sprinkle of anti-Semitism as seasoning.
Then
there was Willkie himself, the chairman of the Commonwealth and Southern
Utilities Corp. He won the Republican nomination by beating out Thomas Dewey
(fabled gangster-buster), Robert Taft (first in his class at both Yale and
Harvard Law and a noted isolationist), Arthur Vandenberg ("abstruse,'' she tells
us, "with his overly subtle distinction between isolationism and
insulationism''), and Herbert Hoover ("out of touch'').
A
onetime Democrat and longtime internationalist, Willkie battled the Ku Klux
Klan, made a fortune on Wall Street, and made some women, and a handful of
powerful publishers, swoon. "I am utterly devoid, I believe, of political
ambition,'' he said, which of course positioned him perfectly to attain his
ambition, the Republican presidential nomination.
Willkie's appeal was on the economic side, offering a
humane alternative to the New Deal he reviled, one concentrating on competition
and free markets. "The true liberal,'' he said, "is as much opposed to excessive
concentration of power in the hands of government as . . . in the hands of
business.'' This was a challenge both to the New Dealers and to the Republican
Old Guard. At the Republican National Convention he was, as Ms. Dunn puts it, "a
colorful maverick in a sea of gray.''
Willkie
never quite fit in the party that nominated him, referring in his acceptance
speech to "you Republicans'' and prompting Lindbergh to describe him as a
"problem child.'' If politics were a matter of logic, Willkie's nomination would
have removed the rationale for FDR's third term, but the long history of
American politics is a treatise against logic, which is why books like Ms.
Dunn's—primarily a colorful account of that most colorful American art form, the
presidential campaign, with its banners, bands, bunting and bunkum—are so
captivating.
For his
part, Roosevelt—no revisionism here, just the customary heroic but enigmatic
FDR—encouraged multiple worthies to become presidential candidates. As a result,
no single alternative emerged, and the party that had stoutly resisted a third
term for Grover Cleveland gladly offered one to Franklin Roosevelt. "It's been
grand fun, hasn't it!'' the president said to Sherwood and adviser Sam Rosenman
the Sunday night before the election, and it was.
But
there would be little in the way of grand fun for Roosevelt or anyone else in
the years to come—even in the year to come. FDR had won every large city except
Cincinnati, but the office he continued to occupy soon took on the burden of
preserving American democracy, American freedoms and American independence. The
man whom Carl Sandburg on the night before the election had described as "a not
perfect man and yet more precious than fine gold'' faced rearmament, Lend-Lease,
continued struggles against isolationists and appeasers, and, after Pearl
Harbor, a two-front war against formidable foes whose leaders possessed more
personal power, and for a time more firepower, than he.
After
the election Willkie became a sturdy supporter of engagement, an effective
emissary for FDR and a powerful pugilist against Lindbergh, whose attacks only
escalated. The victor, and the country he had sought to lead through the woes of
war, thus benefited from the broad-mindedness and personal generosity of the
vanquished. "For the good of the country and the survival of democracy around
the world,'' Ms. Dunn writes, "the former rivals sought to work together and
probably came to respect each other.'' Few years turn out to be as perilous as
1940, or as portentous.
—Mr.
Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh
Press.
A version of
this article appeared June 15, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall
Street Journal, with the headline: The Year of Hesitation.