LEND-LEASE
Winston
Churchill called it "the most unsordid act in the history of any
nation." Franklin Roosevelt introduced it at a press conference
on December 17, 1940 in typically homey, easily comprehensible
language:
"Suppose
my neighbor's home catches on fire, and I have a length of garden
hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden
hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out
the fire. Now what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation,
'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to
pay me fifteen dollars for it.' No! What is the transaction that
goes on? I don't want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose after
the fire is over."
The
neighbor on fire was England, burning under the Nazi blitz; the
only major European power still resisting the German juggernaut.
Its formal cry for help had been received on December 9, when
a navy seaplane had touched down next to the U.S. cruiser Tuscaloosa,
delivering a desperate letter from Churchill to Roosevelt, who
was recuperating from the rigors of his re-election campaign.
"The
moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash
for shipping and other supplies," the Prime Minister wrote, pointing
out that the Exchequer was down to its last $2 billion—with $5
billion in orders from American munition factories outstanding.
What
was needed was some way around the Neutrality Act, a misguided
bit of isolationist reaction to World War I, which stipulated
that any belligerents had to pay cash on the barrelhead for weapons—and
that loans could not be provided for those nations that had yet
to repay their debts from the Great War.
Harry
Hopkins, Roosevelt's man for all seasons, noted that his boss
calmly went through two days of "refueling, the way he so often
does when he seems to be resting and carefree."
“Then,
one evening," Hopkins later recalled, "he suddenly came out with
it—the whole program...there wasn't much doubt that he'd find
a way to do it." The "whole program" was House Bill 1776, better
known as "lend-lease." It would grant Roosevelt's request for
the authority to "lend" tanks, planes, ships, and other aid to
not only England but "any country whose defense the President
deems vital to the defense of the United States."
Revisionist
historians have noted that this was a nearly unprecedented concession
of power to the executive branch; one probably unmatched until
passage of the line-item veto in 1997, and still under dispute
today. Under less able or scrupulous leaders, it was the first
step on a long path to the Gulf of Tonkin, or the Iran-Contra
scandal. It was also somewhat disingenuous: Just how was England
or anyone else to return a "garden hose" that German U-boats put
on the bottom of the Atlantic?
Yet
to blame Roosevelt and the interventionists for, say, Vietnam
in the hour of the world's greatest crisis is no more fair than
to criticize Lincoln for suspending habeas corpus during the Civil
War. Something had to be done to stop Hitler, and done quickly,
and leaders across the political spectrum rallied to the standard
of H.R. 1776.
One
of them was Wendell Willkie, FDR's Republican opponent in 1940.
Quizzed by a Senate committee over the contradictions between
his support for the bill and his own, quasi-isolationist campaign,
Willkie simply grinned and answered, "I struggled as hard as I
could to beat Franklin Roosevelt, and I tried to keep from pulling
any of my punches. He was elected President. He is my President
now." When Washington state's Democratic Senator Homer Bone asked,
"What is worse than war?" Republican Warren Austin of Vermont
told him, "I say that a world enslaved to Hitler is worse than
war, and worse than death."
The
isolationists trotted out an ostentatiously prayerful Mother's
Crusade Against Bill 1776, and Col. Charles Lindbergh, who assured
the Senate that Britain was doomed. The Congress had more faith,
passing H.R. 1776 by large margins on March 11, 1941, and providing
Roosevelt with $7 billion in appropriations to America's allies—to-be-the
first of some $50 billion to be anted up by the end of hostilities
in 1945.
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
