ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA
By GEORGE N. CROCKER
Earth is sick And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdom! utter when they talk Of truth and justice.
WORDSWORTH
Chapter III
HIS MAN FRIDAY
GENERAL HUGH JOHNSON, a key man in the early New Deal, once
wrote of Harry Hopkins, that "he has a mind like a razor, a
tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity ... to make a muleskinner
jealous."l This is a description of the man President Roosevelt
sent to have private chats with Winston Churchill and Joseph
Stalin. This is the man Roosevelt always brought along with him
to the big international conferences. There, as the great men sat
around the table, Hopkins would scribble and pass over to the
President initiate and gossipy little notes.
That these two men, Roosevelt and Hopkins, reveled in the
glamorous roles they were playing on the world stage and that
they were particularly susceptible to the lure of the power and
adulation which vast international manipulations offered to
them is obvious upon the least study of their characters. But it is
quite another matter to say that they were ever really "taken in"
by the blandishments of Churchill or of Stalin. [If you are calling Stalin,Uncle Joe,I am sorry, but you are taken in! DC]
At Casablanca, at a dinner attended by the Sultan of Morocco,
Hopkins, arrayed in black tie, was seated next to the French Governor,
General Nogues. His comments about this dignitary are
characteristic. General Nogues, he wrote in his notes, "is the bird that De Gaulle wants ,pitched out of here." He lives in a big
palace and is the big shot in this part of the world....I wouldn't
trust him as far as I could spit." At the same dinner, "a smart
British Marine walked in about the middle of dinner with a dispatch."
But, noted the suspicious Hopkins, "I have a feeling
Churchill cooked that up beforehand."2 This attitude is typical.
Cynical and worldly, something of an epicure in his tastes, and a
man of extraordinary political·shrewdness, Hopkins was a sophisticate
in whom one does not find the weakness-if it be that
-of credulity. If he was compliant to Soviet interests most of
the time to the point of servility, it was not because he could not
see behind the Soviet mask; it was because he saw only too well,
liked what he saw, and found that it coincided with his own
objectives. His influence on the President of the United States
exceeded that of any other person during most of the long regime.
That the President, in turn, chose this man as his intimate
helps us to understand the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt
himself.
It is, of course, impossible to study the story of the foreign conferences
of Franklin D. Roosevelt without perceiving at the outset
the enormous power which was wielded, in the open and behind
the scenes, by the ubiquitous Harry Hopkins. His finger
was in every pie. Consequently, his character becomes of great
importance to students of the Roosevelt period.
It is unfortunate that the voluminous notes and private papers
of Harry Hopkins, who died early in 1946, were turned over to
his close friend Robert E. Sherwood, the playwright, rather than
to an impartial biographer or made available to serious historians.
During the war years, Hopkins, Sherwood, and Sam Rosenman
had collaborated in the writing of Roosevelt's speeches,as
Mr. Sherwood candidly admits. When Hopkins died, Mr. Sherwood
was asked by the Hopkins family to write the book which
Hopkins was prevented by death from writing himself. So we have from the pen of this able dramatist a book which is a running
narrative. of the war years, a quasi-biography, an eclectic
publication of notes, letters, and extracts, and a potpourri of
reminiscences and hearsay which one must accept on faith, all
put together under the title Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate
History.
When Mr. Sherwood was called in by the Hopkins family to
undertake this work, he found that "there were some forty filing
cabinets packed with papers in the Hopkins·house, and a great
many more in a warehouse." For eight months an assistant employed
by Hopkins had been going over the papers.3 Obviously,
a big job of selection and editing was·done before any of the
private papers of Harry Hopkins saw the light of day in Mr.
Sherwood's book, and it is doubtful that for this job there could
have been chosen anyone more friendly to the reputations of
both Roosevelt and Hopkins than Robert E. Sherwood. Nevertheless,
the book contains a vast amount of interesting information.
In extenuation of its errors, which are more conspicuously
those of omission and misinterpretation than of misstatement,
it should be mentioned that Mr. Sherwood quite frankly avows
in his first chapter a friendship for Harry Hopkins "which," he
says, "must color everything I write about him and for which
no apologies are offered." Such loyalty to a departed friend is
commendable, but it is not conducive to objectivity in the writing
of history.
As a professional and successful writer of fiction for the stage,
Robert E. Sherwood had a keen sense of the dramatic. The playwright
must above all else possess the ability to make a sharp
emotional impact upon an audience. Using the tools of imagination,
he fashions an illusion of reality which can evoke sorrow or
laughter, anger or good humor, hatred or love. He deliberately
creates sympathy for this character, antipathy for that. The end
he is striving for may be clear enough, but his means to achieve it are professional tricks or, if one prefers, special techniques of
the art. ··These are recognizable by experts in the field of the
drama; other people are generally unconscious of the clever devices
which have been used to evoke their emotional responses to
the play. It was not because of his knowledge of economics or
world affairs that Robert E. Sherwood occupied a compartment
in Roosevelt's own car in the Presidential train which toured
the country during the election campaign of 1940, when Roosevelt
was running for a third term. Nor was it for such reasons
that he slept in the White House so much of the time during the
next four and one-half years. His plays Idiot's Delight and The
Petrified Forest had been smash hits on Broadway but certainly
his qualifications as an expert on the affairs of state were rather
inconspicuous, to say the most about them.
In that same.Presidential Pullman car in the fall of 1940 were
also Harry Hopkins and that ghostliest of ghosts, Sam Rosenman.
By this time, as even some of Roosevelt's staunchest admirers
now concede, the President was determined that the formal
entry of the United States into the war was only a matter of
time, yet he knew that if he bared his real intentions to the public,
he would be defeated in the election. There was much suspicion
in the country. Mothers wanted to be assured that if they
voted for Roosevelt, they would not be voting to send their sons
into battle. A strong anti-war statement had to be brewed for the
important speech in the Boston Arena near the end of the campaign.
Roosevelt knew this, and so did the triumvirate of Hopkins,
Sherwood, and Rosenman, who were strongly pro-war but
who also wanted above all else to have their illustrious friend and
benefactor re-elected. As the train sped through the night, there
were·some worried heads in the President's car, for disquieting
reports had come from the party politicians in the hinterland.
At this point, we learn, there came from the fertile mind of the
playwright the ·famous phrase: "... again-and again-and again....". Roosevelt, who could recognize a good punch line
as well as the crustiest journalist, grabbed the words avidly. And
from the Boston Arena there went out over the air to an anxious
people, in sonorous tones and studied cadences, the promise that
sealed his election:
And while lam talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.
I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
The playwright had earned his fare. Embedded in the President's words, of course, was a sly quibble. The average American thought he was talking about wars on foreign soil when he used the words "foreign wars," whereas Roosevelt (who knew perfectly well how the words would be taken by the public) really meant nothing more than wars not involving the United States. By the latter interpretation, no war would be a foreign war, no matter where fought, if the United States were in it. Thus the all-important question of whether or not the country would be led into a war, or an attack upon us provoked, was completely begged. The clever word-spinners of the President's private car knew that the President had pledged nothing. That this campaign coup was a monstrous piece of chicanery is now, in the light of· facts since revealed, hardly deniable. Even Sherwood admits that his conscience bothers him. "I burn inwardly," he writes, "whenever I ·think of those words 'again-and again and again.'" That his conscience may have had moments of elasticity we gather from his confession that "unfortunately for my own conscience, I happened at the time to be one of those who urged him to go the limit on this, feeling as I did that any risk of future embarrassment was negligible as compared with the risk of losing the election."5
The ghost of Machiavelli must have been stalking the President's car as it rolled on toward Boston in that campaign of 1940. It will be perceived that what was really involved in this incident, and others like it, was the deceiving of the people of the nation with regard to the most vital issue of the day. That must be why Sherwood's conscience later stirred, why he "burned inwardly" when he thought of the matter.
Sherwood declares in his Introduction that he tried, in writing of the Hopkins period, not to be influenced by subsequent events. This is not surprising, for he finds "the present" (the book was published in 1948) not only "appalling" but also "inexplicable."6 One is tempted to suggest that the reason the present is "inexplicable" to him is that he is affiicted with a bad case of historical myopia. The causative factors which lie in the past of which he writes escape his vision. It is shocking to reflect that one who pleads guilty to such a lack of historical perspective should have been for years a member of the inner White House circle and a writer of speeches for the President.
To the volatile characters for whom Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to have a strong affinity and who made up his entourage, the heady wine of war and the fast action of high-level diplomacy and politics on a world stage were an exhilarating adventure. This produced mental phenomena which, as·Sherwood describes them, appear not entirely unlike the symptoms of intoxication. Referring to his work on his book, he writes that it was a privilege to escape back into the days "when, as Herbert Agar has written, 'Good men dared to trust each other,' when 'the good and the bad, the terror and the splendor, were too big for most of us,' when 'our spirits and our brains were splitting at the seams, which may be why so many are today denying that life was ever like that.' "7 One suspects that the gifted playwright never did know what "life" was "like" in those ecstatic days, as far as the realities of world affairs were' concerned, and one is therefore not surprised that later events, which followed as the night the day, were "appalling and inexplicable" to him.
This discussion of Robert E. Sherwood's book is important to the purpose of this volume for the reason that Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History is the repository, for good or ill, of so much "Hopkinsiana" and is bound to influence academic as well as popular thinking about the man who was, says Mr. Sherwood, "the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world's greatest war."8 [1933 people 1933 was the start of what they are attempting to finish some 84 years later DC]
What manner of man was Harry Hopkins? A sinister figure, a Rasputin, a backstairs intriguer? Or a selfless man of deep human compassion? Was he a blunderer in a world he was not qualified to understand, or a paragon of judgment? As in the case of Roosevelt, the psychoanalyst must explain to us his inner springs of motivation, those drives of conscious or subconscious prejudice, fear, envy, and ambition which were so adeptly masked from view. One thing is clear: Hopkins was an aggressive, pushful man with overweening personal ambitions.[If 1933 does not work for you go back 100 years to the very interesting year of 1917-18 DC]
Misconceptions have arisen from the fact that he was a "social worker" when he first cuddled under the wing of Franklin D. Roosevelt while the latter was governor of New York. He had never been anything but a social worker-a professional one.
As he moved up the ladder, from Christadora House to the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to the Board of Child Welfare, to the Red Cross, to the Milbank Fund, to the New York Tuberculosis Association, more and more dollars came to his pockets: $40 a month, $60 a month, $3,000 a year, $8,000 a year, $15,000 a year-in pre-inflation dollars. The career of a welfare worker, says Robert E. Sherwood, is "uncomplicated by the profit motive."9 He does not give us his definition of the profit motive.
After Hopkins entered the government, his financial emoluments became incalculable. One must consider not only his salary but also the many things he no longer had to pay for. Free trips abroad, suites at Claridge's, weekends at Chequers, Hobcaw Barony, and Hyde Park, cars and chauffeurs, theater parties with Mrs. Roosevelt and her favorites, and a thousand other luxuries were his as he basked in the Presidential aura. It is not recorded that a bill for room and board was ever presented to him during the long years he resided in the White House. Whether the hospitality be considered that of the Roosevelt family or of the taxpayers of the country, Harry Hopkins was indubitably one of the most successful house guests in American history. Nor has any attempt ever been made to evaluate, in monetary terms, the ministrations of Dr. McIntire, the White House physician, or the advice of the Surgeon General of the United States Navy, or the sojourns for weeks and months at the Naval Hospital, with the medicines, facilities and experiments that were made freely available to this friend of the President. For Hopkins, who had serious ailments requiring expert treatment and much rest during most of these his years of glory, these gratuities saved tens of thousands of dollars. In short, there are at least two ways to obtain the luxuries of life that money can buy. One way is to earn the money to pay for them; the other is to manage to be the No. 1 man in the palace guard of a President like Roosevelt and not have to pay for them. The second was Hopkins' way. This is not to imply any corruption or even impropriety on his part, but merely to challenge the notion that Harry Hopkins was a sort of selfless humanist who sacrificed his all for public service.[Hopkins,a freeloading thieving card carrying Communist...see From Jordan's dairies DC]
It was not only for money that Hopkins was greedy. It was for power. This was attested to by his behavior in social-welfare work and later in government. Through his relationship with President Roosevelt, he achieved great power, even to affect the course of world history, as these pages will show. But he failed in his ambition to be President. Perhaps that was because the idea of Harry Hopkins being President was, as General Hugh Johnson called it, "ineffable nonsense," or perhaps it was because it so happened that an insatiable lust for power was not left out of the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was budged from the Presidency only by death. However that may be, Mr. Sherwood tells us that Hopkins thought for a long time that Roosevelt would retire in 1940 and that he, Hopkins, might succeed him. As far back as December, 1937, it appears, this rosy dream had already come to him. His biographer writes: "Hopkins did take himself seriously as a candidate at that time, and one of the last requests that he made before his death was that, if anything should be written about him, there should be no attempt to disguise the fact that he once had ambitions for the highest office and that he worked and schemed to further them."10
There is something rather pathetic about this "one of the last requests" of Harry Hopkins. It was not enough that he thought himself big enough to be President; he wanted the world to know-posterity to know-that he thought so! It is as though, with his devious mentality,·he·believed on his deathbed that by binding his probable biographer to make this strange posthumous revelation, he could raise himself, in the eyes of history, to a higher stature.
The cream of the jest is that apparently, Roosevelt-if we are to believe Hopkins' handwritten notes of a private conversation with the President in the spring of 1938-led Hopkins to believe he was his, Roosevelt's, own choice for the Democratic nomination in 1940.11 The ironic appointment of the soaring social worker to the Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce was supposedly part of the "build..up" which followed. Since Hopkins had never had .any experience as a part of the American business and industrial system and was known to be unsympathetic to it, it seemed logical·that the exigencies of politics should demand such a maneuver. To make a show of re-establishing a residence in his native state of Iowa (which he had abandoned immediately after he finished school), Hopkins even took a lease on a farm there in 1939. He never lived on this farm and visited it only once.12 But if Harry Hopkins was a sly fox when it came to politics, in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue there lived a slier one. While Roosevelt was nurturing this happy hope in the breast of his crony, he was giving very different ideas to others, as the memoirs of Cordell Hull, Frances Perkins, and James A. Farley disclosed after Roosevelt had passed on to his reward.[Am I the only who thinks it strange, that an un-elected person not related to the 1st Family has taken up permanent residence in the White House? DC]
Serious illness in 1939 dampened Hopkins' ambition, to be President, and the growing realization that Roosevelt intended to seek a third term squelched it entirely. He was sure of the truth long before Cordell Hull was. Hull was being told by Roosevelt right up to the month of the Democratic convention of 1940 that he, Hull, would be nominated. 13
The practical maneuvering of the nomination at the convention was handled by the trusted Hopkins, who had resigned himself to the not uncongenial fate of being the good man Friday of the President of the United States in the exciting war years ahead. From a suite in Chicago's Blackstone Hotel, with a direct wire to Roosevelt at his hand, he directed the sham proceedings which "drafted" Roosevelt for a third term. The faithful biographer Sherwood, unable to escape what he calls the tawdriness and vulgarity of this notorious display of high-powered practical politics, would have us believe that Roosevelt and Hopkins both had great distaste for this sort of thing, although evidence of such delicate sensibilities on their part seems conspicuously lacking. We are expected, apparently, to share the assumption, which Mr. Sherwood takes for granted, that "the job that Hopkins had to do ... had to be done."14
It is not surprising that Mr. Sherwood takes pains to bring Harry Hopkins·out of this episode unscathed. Throughout his book, the dramatist draws him as a man of finer mold. He had "lyrical impulses," we learn, and was even known to have written poetry. Experiencing such a "lyrical impulse," he said after a look at the English countryside: "It's only when you see that country in spring that you begin to understand why the English have written the best god damn poetry in the world."15 Whether he had ever heard of Sophocles, Virgil, Li Po, Dante, Goethe, Heine, or Verlaine is not recorded. Nor are we told whether or not Boss Kelly's infamous "voice from the sewers" at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1940 should be considered one of Harry Hopkins' "lyrical impulses."
With the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term, the star of Harry Hopkins climbed high in the heavens. He, a dilettante in the field, was catapulted into the inner circle of world statesmen. Lend-lease,* which followed after the election, resulted in his wielding almost dictatorial powers over the giving of billions of dollars in American resources to Britain, Soviet Russia*, and other recipients. In Washington, London, Tehran, Moscow, Yalta, on the high seas, and in the air, as he breezed through the war years like a boy at a country fair, he was, with his illustrious chief, one of the co-architects of the most terrifying "peace" ever to follow a great war.
*https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/10/part-1-from-major-jordans-diaries.html
History, it is safe to predict, will be less kind to the memory of Harry Hopkins than is his adulatory friend, collaborator, and biographer, Robert E. Sherwood. It will not soft-pedal the "subsequent events."
The most poignant tragedy of war is perhaps the fact that those who fall in battle know not for what they died. Subjectively, a man fights for those ends which he is told and believes will follow a victory. Objectively, however, he fights for the consequences which actually will ensue in a compassion less world of cause and effect. If his leaders have misinformed him or if they betray him at the council table, the quintessence of irony may be brought to pass: a man may forfeit his life for the exact opposite of that of which he dreamed.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower's war memoirs were published
under the imposing title Crusade in Europe. The war ostensibly
ended in complete military victory. Five years later, the good
General was still-or again-crusading, only now he was crusading against the forces he had previously crusaded with. On
September 4, 1950, in a nationally broadcast address launching
a movement· called the Crusade for Freedom, he said: "The
people behind the Iron Curtain have no conception of a free
press.. or of free discussion.... This is what the Soviet planners contemplate for all the world, including America.... How depressing it is to realize on this Labor Day, 1950, that one-third
of the human race works in virtual bondage. In·the totalitarian
countries, the individual has no right the state is bound to respect."1 In 1952, General Eisenhower was elected President. of
the United States. His most serious task was to fend off the consequences
of World War II.
What, one must ask, was the great crusade of 1941-1945 meant to accomplish? Just the defeat of Hitler? Or was it a crusade to bring the Russians to the Elhe? To partition Poland again? To lop off one-fourth of the arable land of overpopulated Germany? To make Konigsberg, German since its founding by the Teutonic order seven hundred years ago and the home of Germany's greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, a Russian city? To hand Stalin the keys to eastern Europe and eastern Asia? To uproot and cast upon the open roads ten million people whose homes were bartered away at a conference table? To put eight hundred million people under the yoke of Communism? To make the eighty million people living on the tiny islands of Japan dependent upon the United States for their economic survival? To put the whole world under fear of Soviet aggression?
Actually, all of these things, and more, were accomplished. A crusade with such multifarious results should be suspect. Whose crusade was it ? Was there one crusade, or could it be that there were several, contemporaneous but irreconcilable in purpose?
The intellectual climate of America during World War II, writes William Henry Chamberlin, was "a depressing compound of profound factual ignorance, naivete, wishful thinking and emotional hysteria."2
The disillusioning results followed inexorably. In the Introduction
to his war memoirs, Winston Churchill gloomily looks
at the world and observes: "The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the righteous
cause, we have still not found peace or security, and that we lie in
the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted."3
On four separate occasions since the war, Churchill has said that
only the possession of the atom bomb in American hands kept
the Red Army from invading western Europe after the war.
The war aims of the United States, as proclaimed by President Roosevelt, were grandiose. They went far beyond the mere military defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt took pains to identify himself in the public mind as the harbinger of spectacular reforms, which were to be the fruits of the war and which would accrue to all of the peoples of the world, victor and vanquished alike. The United States was still technically at peace with all nations when, in August, 1941, he staged his dramatic meeting with Winston Churchill on a battleship in the Atlantic. For the Prime Minister, the occasion served but to hasten the entrance of the United States into the war, but for public consumption,chiefly in the United States, there emerged a windy document that was promptly hailed as the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt had long since determined upon war.4 If men needed causes for which to fight and die, here they were. Here was the vision of a world of justice, liberty, and abundance for all men everywhere.
On December 15, 1941, eight days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt took to the radio on the occasion of the anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Over a nationwide hookup, he said in a stirring peroration:
We covenant with each other before all the world that, having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in.5
This pledge was intended for the ears of all the people of··the world, and it was rebroadcast across the seas. It obviously did not mean liberty only for Americans; it meant liberty for Poles, for Lithuanians, for Manchurian's, for sad, regimented men and women in Dresden and Budapest-all people who had become the pawns of tyrants. It was a covenant "before all the world," and it brought upon Franklin D. Roosevelt the prayers and blessings of humble people wherever tyranny existed. Naturally, its leavening effect upon the American audience was very important to Roosevelt. He wanted no misgivings about the moral rectitude of any phases of the global struggle he had championed so vigorously and into which American men and resources were to be thrown on a prodigious scale. The war would not be over in 1944 when he would run for his fourth term.
The crusade was on. Roosevelt, although never a student, knew something of history; he knew very much about the psychology of his countrymen. No doubt he was aware that Americans have a habit of idealizing the wars in which they become engaged as almost holy crusades. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The Battle Hymn of the Republic gave emotional satisfaction to the armies of Grant and Sherman, just as, half a century later, the slogan of World War I, "To make the world safe for democracy," fired the imagination of a half-reluctant people and made acceptable to them a conflict the issues of which were far from clear. Now, a generation later, we were embarking upon an even more heroic crusade, this time allied with a semi-Oriental dictatorship which rested upon ideological foundations repugnant to most Americans and which had only two years before been expelled from the League of Nations for brutal aggression upon a small, peaceful neighbor. This phantasmagoria set in motion, Roosevelt took it upon himself to pledge to the world on our behalf that we would not lay down our arms "before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in."
[So in other words,we got sucked into WW II over certain men's vanity DC]
This promise, in addition to the alluring, if ill-defined, Quixotism of the Atlantic Charter, put upon the project, or projects, the stamp of self-righteousness. Nor did Roosevelt overlook the fact that religion is a cause for which men have often fought. He took pains to sanctify the struggle long before the United States was in it. In his message to Congress in January of 1939, he asserted that the United States was menaced by "storms from abroad." These storms, the President said, challenge "three institutions indispensable to Americans. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two,democracy and international good faith."6 [ Bullshit religion had nothing to do with the birth of democracy.Democracy is the last child of the Rationalists,they are the parents of ALL the isms and the political consequences of their birth. DC]
To be sure, there were religious persecutions occurring in Germany and Austria, to which Roosevelt was referring, but religion was dealt with roughly in other countries, to which he was not referring and which he then and later condoned. The Nazi cruelty was indeed deplorable. However, since the nations of the world were not at that time lining up on a religious basis (nor did they later), this statement of his was merely an oversimplification of a tangled skein of issues.
Not all observers were willing to grant the purity of President Roosevelt's solicitude about religion in his message of January, 1939. The historian Charles A. Beard was moved to comment, with dripping sarcasm: "Evidently he was clearing a way to make the next war a real holy war."7 (Coincidentally with the end of the "holy war" some years later came the brutal obliteration of religious freedom in vast areas of eastern Europe.) [Sadly Beard nailed it,as they are trying to push this endless 'war' as a holy war, but this is simply not true as clearly certain STATES are the aggressors in this war,not some religion D.C]
At the end of November, 1939, the Red war machine invaded little Finland. Since the Roosevelt administration had for years been very cordial with the Soviet dictatorship (one-sided though the cordiality had been), this was naturally embarrassing to the President, just as the German-Soviet pact of the preceding August had been. In the United States there was a potent bloc of voters of Scandinavian descent. They were irate at Soviet.Russia. Sympathy for the Finns was widespread throughout the world, and on December 14, Russia was expelled from the League of Nations for her ruthless aggression, which had been initiated, with dramatic cruelty, by the bombing of Helsinki. But it was the impact upon public opinion in the United States which particularly disturbed President Roosevelt. Within a matter of months, a Presidential election campaign would be starting. He was never one to be insensitive to any political wind that was blowing at such a time. Although he had never previously expressed any particular abhorrence for the Soviet system of government and had not appeared shocked by its religious practices, he now deemed it expedient, in a speech to the American Youth Congress on February 10, 1940, to call Russia a dictatorship and to say that he detested "the banishment of religion" from Russia.8
However, this sudden moral upsurge was temporary, for after the election of 1940 was. safely passed and the dictator Stalin was locked in mortal combat with the dictator Hitler, none of Roosevelt's plenteous supply. of righteous wrath was reserved for Soviet Russia. If Marxian dialectic materialism had no room for God, that was never again mentioned. On the contrary, when Roosevelt started pouring lend-lease into Russia in 1941, he told skeptical reporters at an amazing press conference that they should read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution; the provisions concerning religion, said he, are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way." Since the Russian Constitution with its Article 124 had been adopted in 1936, why had he not mentioned it on February 10, 1940, when he had momentarily deplored "the banishment of religion" in Russia? Could it be that his research experts had simply overlooked the fact that Russia had a constitution, or was it because he and they knew perfectly well that the Russian Constitution was mere window dressing and that Article 124 was not to he taken seriously as giving a true picture of religion under the Soviet system?
The plain truth is that at that time it had served a temporary purpose of Roosevelt to appear perturbed by the pugnacious atheism of the Soviet regime. Now, in 1941, he had another purpose: to give Russia a clean bill of health on religion. It was purely a matter of political tactics. Nor was Roosevelt in the least deterred by the fact that Article 124 of the Russian Constitution contains several jokers and is heavily weighted in favor of anti religious forces in the Soviet Union.9 His bald statement would be published in·all newspapers, and who would bother to check its veracity by seeking out a copy of the Russian Constitution and analyzing its tortuous phrases? None but a few inquisitive souls. The soporifics administered by the efficient Roosevelt propaganda machine had already begun to dull the public's consciousness of the realities of world affairs.
So godliness was added to the virtues at stake in President Roosevelt's great crusade. The details were a bit hazy, perhaps, but most people were inclined not to quibble about them. They felt rather exalted following the plumed knight from Hyde Park, who promised to bring about a Utopia on earth.[great delusion DC]
These grandiose aims all converged in the beloved concept of freedom. That was something an American could understand and would fight for, would pour out his wealth for. Franklin D. Roosevelt well knew this. But from former President Herbert Hoover, there was a stern warning. He said on June 29, 1941, one week after Germany attacked Russia and while Roosevelt was preparing to give all-out aid to the Soviets: "Joining in a war with Stalin to impose freedom is a travesty." He called it a "gargantuan jest."10 But Roosevelt never let it be thought of as anything but a war for universal freedom, and such was the alchemy of mass propaganda that he largely succeeded in implanting that fallacy in the public mind. As we have seen, there were really three wars being waged simultaneously, one of which was kept secret from the American people and was to continue to rage long after the termination of the other two.
How Roosevelt-by means of an oil embargo which would stall the machines of Japan and reduce her people to starvation and by means of other measures-deliberately, and over Navy objections, goaded the Japanese into their rash attack on Pearl Harbor is now a revealed, thoroughly documented story.11 After that attack, the theme of self-defense was joined with that of the crusade for universal freedom. We now had to fight. [Total pond scum this man was. DC]
The crusading spirit was infectious. For one thing, the President
had much to offer to those who would jump on his bandwagon.
The flighty Wendell Willkie, after losing in his try for
the Presidency in 1940, suddenly "got religion" and became an
ebullient emissary for Roosevelt, traveling to London, Moscow,
and Chungking in an Army transport plane, emotionally overcome
by his precipitate arrival in the upper regions of international
fame. His much-publicized slogan, "One World," served
well to help cover up the real state of affairs. In a speech in
Toronto, he gushed: "This war is either a 'grand coalition' of
peoples, fighting a common war for liberation, or it is nothing!"12
This, of course, was meaningless jargon, just as "One World" was. With Stalin as a partner, did Willkie think he was going to liberate the Lithuanians? Who was going to liberate the millions of Poles Stalin had captivated in 1939 and whom he still claimed as his subjects? What did he think were Stalin's plans for Manchuria, for Romania, for Bulgaria? Was the great liberator in the Kremlin going to give back to Finland what he had just stolen from her? Did he think the Red Army of Communism was going to bring to the lands it overran things never tolerated in Soviet Russia-such as free speech and free elections?
Whether other Republican leaders, such as Hoover and Taft, and dissident Democrats, such as former Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring, looked upon these antics of Wendell Willkie as those of an opportunistic hypocrite or an impressionable dupe, we know not. They themselves had no hallucinations about "a 'grand coalition' of peoples, fighting a common war of liberation." Where did Willkie get this idea ?There was nothing in the array of forces at battle to suggest it. He got it from his new host and promoter, President Roosevelt. Where did the President get it? From his own fecund imagination. It was an ipse dixit, a supercilious pontification, a self-serving dictum, never anything more. Its promulgation was the Atlantic Charter.
This remarkable document was the fulcrum of Franklin D. Roosevelt's herculean feat of embroiling his country in war, hypnotizing its people into what the war was about, and winning for himself a third and a fourth election as President of the United States. It was never carried out. It was never intended to be carried out. In the rush of time, it has never yet been held up to more than superficial scrutiny, although it has an import far greater than historical. For a people who profess to be self-governing, there are lessons now to be learned.
The children of 1941 are adults of our day. What do they know of these techniques? More than their parents did? Perhaps. Yet in the intensity of men's craving for the peace and justice which World War II made impossible, traps will be laid again, and words-bewitching words-will again be the bait. "Behind the shallow truism that 'history repeats itself,'" Arthur Koestler gloomily remarks, "hide the unexplored forces which lure men into repeating their own tragic errors."
And while lam talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.
I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
The playwright had earned his fare. Embedded in the President's words, of course, was a sly quibble. The average American thought he was talking about wars on foreign soil when he used the words "foreign wars," whereas Roosevelt (who knew perfectly well how the words would be taken by the public) really meant nothing more than wars not involving the United States. By the latter interpretation, no war would be a foreign war, no matter where fought, if the United States were in it. Thus the all-important question of whether or not the country would be led into a war, or an attack upon us provoked, was completely begged. The clever word-spinners of the President's private car knew that the President had pledged nothing. That this campaign coup was a monstrous piece of chicanery is now, in the light of· facts since revealed, hardly deniable. Even Sherwood admits that his conscience bothers him. "I burn inwardly," he writes, "whenever I ·think of those words 'again-and again and again.'" That his conscience may have had moments of elasticity we gather from his confession that "unfortunately for my own conscience, I happened at the time to be one of those who urged him to go the limit on this, feeling as I did that any risk of future embarrassment was negligible as compared with the risk of losing the election."5
The ghost of Machiavelli must have been stalking the President's car as it rolled on toward Boston in that campaign of 1940. It will be perceived that what was really involved in this incident, and others like it, was the deceiving of the people of the nation with regard to the most vital issue of the day. That must be why Sherwood's conscience later stirred, why he "burned inwardly" when he thought of the matter.
Sherwood declares in his Introduction that he tried, in writing of the Hopkins period, not to be influenced by subsequent events. This is not surprising, for he finds "the present" (the book was published in 1948) not only "appalling" but also "inexplicable."6 One is tempted to suggest that the reason the present is "inexplicable" to him is that he is affiicted with a bad case of historical myopia. The causative factors which lie in the past of which he writes escape his vision. It is shocking to reflect that one who pleads guilty to such a lack of historical perspective should have been for years a member of the inner White House circle and a writer of speeches for the President.
To the volatile characters for whom Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to have a strong affinity and who made up his entourage, the heady wine of war and the fast action of high-level diplomacy and politics on a world stage were an exhilarating adventure. This produced mental phenomena which, as·Sherwood describes them, appear not entirely unlike the symptoms of intoxication. Referring to his work on his book, he writes that it was a privilege to escape back into the days "when, as Herbert Agar has written, 'Good men dared to trust each other,' when 'the good and the bad, the terror and the splendor, were too big for most of us,' when 'our spirits and our brains were splitting at the seams, which may be why so many are today denying that life was ever like that.' "7 One suspects that the gifted playwright never did know what "life" was "like" in those ecstatic days, as far as the realities of world affairs were' concerned, and one is therefore not surprised that later events, which followed as the night the day, were "appalling and inexplicable" to him.
This discussion of Robert E. Sherwood's book is important to the purpose of this volume for the reason that Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History is the repository, for good or ill, of so much "Hopkinsiana" and is bound to influence academic as well as popular thinking about the man who was, says Mr. Sherwood, "the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world's greatest war."8 [1933 people 1933 was the start of what they are attempting to finish some 84 years later DC]
What manner of man was Harry Hopkins? A sinister figure, a Rasputin, a backstairs intriguer? Or a selfless man of deep human compassion? Was he a blunderer in a world he was not qualified to understand, or a paragon of judgment? As in the case of Roosevelt, the psychoanalyst must explain to us his inner springs of motivation, those drives of conscious or subconscious prejudice, fear, envy, and ambition which were so adeptly masked from view. One thing is clear: Hopkins was an aggressive, pushful man with overweening personal ambitions.[If 1933 does not work for you go back 100 years to the very interesting year of 1917-18 DC]
Misconceptions have arisen from the fact that he was a "social worker" when he first cuddled under the wing of Franklin D. Roosevelt while the latter was governor of New York. He had never been anything but a social worker-a professional one.
As he moved up the ladder, from Christadora House to the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to the Board of Child Welfare, to the Red Cross, to the Milbank Fund, to the New York Tuberculosis Association, more and more dollars came to his pockets: $40 a month, $60 a month, $3,000 a year, $8,000 a year, $15,000 a year-in pre-inflation dollars. The career of a welfare worker, says Robert E. Sherwood, is "uncomplicated by the profit motive."9 He does not give us his definition of the profit motive.
After Hopkins entered the government, his financial emoluments became incalculable. One must consider not only his salary but also the many things he no longer had to pay for. Free trips abroad, suites at Claridge's, weekends at Chequers, Hobcaw Barony, and Hyde Park, cars and chauffeurs, theater parties with Mrs. Roosevelt and her favorites, and a thousand other luxuries were his as he basked in the Presidential aura. It is not recorded that a bill for room and board was ever presented to him during the long years he resided in the White House. Whether the hospitality be considered that of the Roosevelt family or of the taxpayers of the country, Harry Hopkins was indubitably one of the most successful house guests in American history. Nor has any attempt ever been made to evaluate, in monetary terms, the ministrations of Dr. McIntire, the White House physician, or the advice of the Surgeon General of the United States Navy, or the sojourns for weeks and months at the Naval Hospital, with the medicines, facilities and experiments that were made freely available to this friend of the President. For Hopkins, who had serious ailments requiring expert treatment and much rest during most of these his years of glory, these gratuities saved tens of thousands of dollars. In short, there are at least two ways to obtain the luxuries of life that money can buy. One way is to earn the money to pay for them; the other is to manage to be the No. 1 man in the palace guard of a President like Roosevelt and not have to pay for them. The second was Hopkins' way. This is not to imply any corruption or even impropriety on his part, but merely to challenge the notion that Harry Hopkins was a sort of selfless humanist who sacrificed his all for public service.[Hopkins,a freeloading thieving card carrying Communist...see From Jordan's dairies DC]
It was not only for money that Hopkins was greedy. It was for power. This was attested to by his behavior in social-welfare work and later in government. Through his relationship with President Roosevelt, he achieved great power, even to affect the course of world history, as these pages will show. But he failed in his ambition to be President. Perhaps that was because the idea of Harry Hopkins being President was, as General Hugh Johnson called it, "ineffable nonsense," or perhaps it was because it so happened that an insatiable lust for power was not left out of the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was budged from the Presidency only by death. However that may be, Mr. Sherwood tells us that Hopkins thought for a long time that Roosevelt would retire in 1940 and that he, Hopkins, might succeed him. As far back as December, 1937, it appears, this rosy dream had already come to him. His biographer writes: "Hopkins did take himself seriously as a candidate at that time, and one of the last requests that he made before his death was that, if anything should be written about him, there should be no attempt to disguise the fact that he once had ambitions for the highest office and that he worked and schemed to further them."10
There is something rather pathetic about this "one of the last requests" of Harry Hopkins. It was not enough that he thought himself big enough to be President; he wanted the world to know-posterity to know-that he thought so! It is as though, with his devious mentality,·he·believed on his deathbed that by binding his probable biographer to make this strange posthumous revelation, he could raise himself, in the eyes of history, to a higher stature.
The cream of the jest is that apparently, Roosevelt-if we are to believe Hopkins' handwritten notes of a private conversation with the President in the spring of 1938-led Hopkins to believe he was his, Roosevelt's, own choice for the Democratic nomination in 1940.11 The ironic appointment of the soaring social worker to the Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce was supposedly part of the "build..up" which followed. Since Hopkins had never had .any experience as a part of the American business and industrial system and was known to be unsympathetic to it, it seemed logical·that the exigencies of politics should demand such a maneuver. To make a show of re-establishing a residence in his native state of Iowa (which he had abandoned immediately after he finished school), Hopkins even took a lease on a farm there in 1939. He never lived on this farm and visited it only once.12 But if Harry Hopkins was a sly fox when it came to politics, in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue there lived a slier one. While Roosevelt was nurturing this happy hope in the breast of his crony, he was giving very different ideas to others, as the memoirs of Cordell Hull, Frances Perkins, and James A. Farley disclosed after Roosevelt had passed on to his reward.[Am I the only who thinks it strange, that an un-elected person not related to the 1st Family has taken up permanent residence in the White House? DC]
Serious illness in 1939 dampened Hopkins' ambition, to be President, and the growing realization that Roosevelt intended to seek a third term squelched it entirely. He was sure of the truth long before Cordell Hull was. Hull was being told by Roosevelt right up to the month of the Democratic convention of 1940 that he, Hull, would be nominated. 13
The practical maneuvering of the nomination at the convention was handled by the trusted Hopkins, who had resigned himself to the not uncongenial fate of being the good man Friday of the President of the United States in the exciting war years ahead. From a suite in Chicago's Blackstone Hotel, with a direct wire to Roosevelt at his hand, he directed the sham proceedings which "drafted" Roosevelt for a third term. The faithful biographer Sherwood, unable to escape what he calls the tawdriness and vulgarity of this notorious display of high-powered practical politics, would have us believe that Roosevelt and Hopkins both had great distaste for this sort of thing, although evidence of such delicate sensibilities on their part seems conspicuously lacking. We are expected, apparently, to share the assumption, which Mr. Sherwood takes for granted, that "the job that Hopkins had to do ... had to be done."14
It is not surprising that Mr. Sherwood takes pains to bring Harry Hopkins·out of this episode unscathed. Throughout his book, the dramatist draws him as a man of finer mold. He had "lyrical impulses," we learn, and was even known to have written poetry. Experiencing such a "lyrical impulse," he said after a look at the English countryside: "It's only when you see that country in spring that you begin to understand why the English have written the best god damn poetry in the world."15 Whether he had ever heard of Sophocles, Virgil, Li Po, Dante, Goethe, Heine, or Verlaine is not recorded. Nor are we told whether or not Boss Kelly's infamous "voice from the sewers" at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1940 should be considered one of Harry Hopkins' "lyrical impulses."
With the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term, the star of Harry Hopkins climbed high in the heavens. He, a dilettante in the field, was catapulted into the inner circle of world statesmen. Lend-lease,* which followed after the election, resulted in his wielding almost dictatorial powers over the giving of billions of dollars in American resources to Britain, Soviet Russia*, and other recipients. In Washington, London, Tehran, Moscow, Yalta, on the high seas, and in the air, as he breezed through the war years like a boy at a country fair, he was, with his illustrious chief, one of the co-architects of the most terrifying "peace" ever to follow a great war.
*https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/10/part-1-from-major-jordans-diaries.html
History, it is safe to predict, will be less kind to the memory of Harry Hopkins than is his adulatory friend, collaborator, and biographer, Robert E. Sherwood. It will not soft-pedal the "subsequent events."
Chapter IV
WHOSE CRUSADE?
IN A CORNER of Amiens Cathedral there is a wreath of Flanders
poppies dedicated to the memory of the British soldiers who perished
in France in World War I. An inscription reads:
Went the day well or ill?
I died, and never knew.
The most poignant tragedy of war is perhaps the fact that those who fall in battle know not for what they died. Subjectively, a man fights for those ends which he is told and believes will follow a victory. Objectively, however, he fights for the consequences which actually will ensue in a compassion less world of cause and effect. If his leaders have misinformed him or if they betray him at the council table, the quintessence of irony may be brought to pass: a man may forfeit his life for the exact opposite of that of which he dreamed.
What, one must ask, was the great crusade of 1941-1945 meant to accomplish? Just the defeat of Hitler? Or was it a crusade to bring the Russians to the Elhe? To partition Poland again? To lop off one-fourth of the arable land of overpopulated Germany? To make Konigsberg, German since its founding by the Teutonic order seven hundred years ago and the home of Germany's greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, a Russian city? To hand Stalin the keys to eastern Europe and eastern Asia? To uproot and cast upon the open roads ten million people whose homes were bartered away at a conference table? To put eight hundred million people under the yoke of Communism? To make the eighty million people living on the tiny islands of Japan dependent upon the United States for their economic survival? To put the whole world under fear of Soviet aggression?
Actually, all of these things, and more, were accomplished. A crusade with such multifarious results should be suspect. Whose crusade was it ? Was there one crusade, or could it be that there were several, contemporaneous but irreconcilable in purpose?
The intellectual climate of America during World War II, writes William Henry Chamberlin, was "a depressing compound of profound factual ignorance, naivete, wishful thinking and emotional hysteria."2
The war aims of the United States, as proclaimed by President Roosevelt, were grandiose. They went far beyond the mere military defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt took pains to identify himself in the public mind as the harbinger of spectacular reforms, which were to be the fruits of the war and which would accrue to all of the peoples of the world, victor and vanquished alike. The United States was still technically at peace with all nations when, in August, 1941, he staged his dramatic meeting with Winston Churchill on a battleship in the Atlantic. For the Prime Minister, the occasion served but to hasten the entrance of the United States into the war, but for public consumption,chiefly in the United States, there emerged a windy document that was promptly hailed as the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt had long since determined upon war.4 If men needed causes for which to fight and die, here they were. Here was the vision of a world of justice, liberty, and abundance for all men everywhere.
On December 15, 1941, eight days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt took to the radio on the occasion of the anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Over a nationwide hookup, he said in a stirring peroration:
We covenant with each other before all the world that, having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in.5
This pledge was intended for the ears of all the people of··the world, and it was rebroadcast across the seas. It obviously did not mean liberty only for Americans; it meant liberty for Poles, for Lithuanians, for Manchurian's, for sad, regimented men and women in Dresden and Budapest-all people who had become the pawns of tyrants. It was a covenant "before all the world," and it brought upon Franklin D. Roosevelt the prayers and blessings of humble people wherever tyranny existed. Naturally, its leavening effect upon the American audience was very important to Roosevelt. He wanted no misgivings about the moral rectitude of any phases of the global struggle he had championed so vigorously and into which American men and resources were to be thrown on a prodigious scale. The war would not be over in 1944 when he would run for his fourth term.
The crusade was on. Roosevelt, although never a student, knew something of history; he knew very much about the psychology of his countrymen. No doubt he was aware that Americans have a habit of idealizing the wars in which they become engaged as almost holy crusades. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The Battle Hymn of the Republic gave emotional satisfaction to the armies of Grant and Sherman, just as, half a century later, the slogan of World War I, "To make the world safe for democracy," fired the imagination of a half-reluctant people and made acceptable to them a conflict the issues of which were far from clear. Now, a generation later, we were embarking upon an even more heroic crusade, this time allied with a semi-Oriental dictatorship which rested upon ideological foundations repugnant to most Americans and which had only two years before been expelled from the League of Nations for brutal aggression upon a small, peaceful neighbor. This phantasmagoria set in motion, Roosevelt took it upon himself to pledge to the world on our behalf that we would not lay down our arms "before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in."
[So in other words,we got sucked into WW II over certain men's vanity DC]
This promise, in addition to the alluring, if ill-defined, Quixotism of the Atlantic Charter, put upon the project, or projects, the stamp of self-righteousness. Nor did Roosevelt overlook the fact that religion is a cause for which men have often fought. He took pains to sanctify the struggle long before the United States was in it. In his message to Congress in January of 1939, he asserted that the United States was menaced by "storms from abroad." These storms, the President said, challenge "three institutions indispensable to Americans. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two,democracy and international good faith."6 [ Bullshit religion had nothing to do with the birth of democracy.Democracy is the last child of the Rationalists,they are the parents of ALL the isms and the political consequences of their birth. DC]
To be sure, there were religious persecutions occurring in Germany and Austria, to which Roosevelt was referring, but religion was dealt with roughly in other countries, to which he was not referring and which he then and later condoned. The Nazi cruelty was indeed deplorable. However, since the nations of the world were not at that time lining up on a religious basis (nor did they later), this statement of his was merely an oversimplification of a tangled skein of issues.
Not all observers were willing to grant the purity of President Roosevelt's solicitude about religion in his message of January, 1939. The historian Charles A. Beard was moved to comment, with dripping sarcasm: "Evidently he was clearing a way to make the next war a real holy war."7 (Coincidentally with the end of the "holy war" some years later came the brutal obliteration of religious freedom in vast areas of eastern Europe.) [Sadly Beard nailed it,as they are trying to push this endless 'war' as a holy war, but this is simply not true as clearly certain STATES are the aggressors in this war,not some religion D.C]
At the end of November, 1939, the Red war machine invaded little Finland. Since the Roosevelt administration had for years been very cordial with the Soviet dictatorship (one-sided though the cordiality had been), this was naturally embarrassing to the President, just as the German-Soviet pact of the preceding August had been. In the United States there was a potent bloc of voters of Scandinavian descent. They were irate at Soviet.Russia. Sympathy for the Finns was widespread throughout the world, and on December 14, Russia was expelled from the League of Nations for her ruthless aggression, which had been initiated, with dramatic cruelty, by the bombing of Helsinki. But it was the impact upon public opinion in the United States which particularly disturbed President Roosevelt. Within a matter of months, a Presidential election campaign would be starting. He was never one to be insensitive to any political wind that was blowing at such a time. Although he had never previously expressed any particular abhorrence for the Soviet system of government and had not appeared shocked by its religious practices, he now deemed it expedient, in a speech to the American Youth Congress on February 10, 1940, to call Russia a dictatorship and to say that he detested "the banishment of religion" from Russia.8
However, this sudden moral upsurge was temporary, for after the election of 1940 was. safely passed and the dictator Stalin was locked in mortal combat with the dictator Hitler, none of Roosevelt's plenteous supply. of righteous wrath was reserved for Soviet Russia. If Marxian dialectic materialism had no room for God, that was never again mentioned. On the contrary, when Roosevelt started pouring lend-lease into Russia in 1941, he told skeptical reporters at an amazing press conference that they should read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution; the provisions concerning religion, said he, are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way." Since the Russian Constitution with its Article 124 had been adopted in 1936, why had he not mentioned it on February 10, 1940, when he had momentarily deplored "the banishment of religion" in Russia? Could it be that his research experts had simply overlooked the fact that Russia had a constitution, or was it because he and they knew perfectly well that the Russian Constitution was mere window dressing and that Article 124 was not to he taken seriously as giving a true picture of religion under the Soviet system?
The plain truth is that at that time it had served a temporary purpose of Roosevelt to appear perturbed by the pugnacious atheism of the Soviet regime. Now, in 1941, he had another purpose: to give Russia a clean bill of health on religion. It was purely a matter of political tactics. Nor was Roosevelt in the least deterred by the fact that Article 124 of the Russian Constitution contains several jokers and is heavily weighted in favor of anti religious forces in the Soviet Union.9 His bald statement would be published in·all newspapers, and who would bother to check its veracity by seeking out a copy of the Russian Constitution and analyzing its tortuous phrases? None but a few inquisitive souls. The soporifics administered by the efficient Roosevelt propaganda machine had already begun to dull the public's consciousness of the realities of world affairs.
So godliness was added to the virtues at stake in President Roosevelt's great crusade. The details were a bit hazy, perhaps, but most people were inclined not to quibble about them. They felt rather exalted following the plumed knight from Hyde Park, who promised to bring about a Utopia on earth.[great delusion DC]
These grandiose aims all converged in the beloved concept of freedom. That was something an American could understand and would fight for, would pour out his wealth for. Franklin D. Roosevelt well knew this. But from former President Herbert Hoover, there was a stern warning. He said on June 29, 1941, one week after Germany attacked Russia and while Roosevelt was preparing to give all-out aid to the Soviets: "Joining in a war with Stalin to impose freedom is a travesty." He called it a "gargantuan jest."10 But Roosevelt never let it be thought of as anything but a war for universal freedom, and such was the alchemy of mass propaganda that he largely succeeded in implanting that fallacy in the public mind. As we have seen, there were really three wars being waged simultaneously, one of which was kept secret from the American people and was to continue to rage long after the termination of the other two.
How Roosevelt-by means of an oil embargo which would stall the machines of Japan and reduce her people to starvation and by means of other measures-deliberately, and over Navy objections, goaded the Japanese into their rash attack on Pearl Harbor is now a revealed, thoroughly documented story.11 After that attack, the theme of self-defense was joined with that of the crusade for universal freedom. We now had to fight. [Total pond scum this man was. DC]
This, of course, was meaningless jargon, just as "One World" was. With Stalin as a partner, did Willkie think he was going to liberate the Lithuanians? Who was going to liberate the millions of Poles Stalin had captivated in 1939 and whom he still claimed as his subjects? What did he think were Stalin's plans for Manchuria, for Romania, for Bulgaria? Was the great liberator in the Kremlin going to give back to Finland what he had just stolen from her? Did he think the Red Army of Communism was going to bring to the lands it overran things never tolerated in Soviet Russia-such as free speech and free elections?
Whether other Republican leaders, such as Hoover and Taft, and dissident Democrats, such as former Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring, looked upon these antics of Wendell Willkie as those of an opportunistic hypocrite or an impressionable dupe, we know not. They themselves had no hallucinations about "a 'grand coalition' of peoples, fighting a common war of liberation." Where did Willkie get this idea ?There was nothing in the array of forces at battle to suggest it. He got it from his new host and promoter, President Roosevelt. Where did the President get it? From his own fecund imagination. It was an ipse dixit, a supercilious pontification, a self-serving dictum, never anything more. Its promulgation was the Atlantic Charter.
This remarkable document was the fulcrum of Franklin D. Roosevelt's herculean feat of embroiling his country in war, hypnotizing its people into what the war was about, and winning for himself a third and a fourth election as President of the United States. It was never carried out. It was never intended to be carried out. In the rush of time, it has never yet been held up to more than superficial scrutiny, although it has an import far greater than historical. For a people who profess to be self-governing, there are lessons now to be learned.
The children of 1941 are adults of our day. What do they know of these techniques? More than their parents did? Perhaps. Yet in the intensity of men's craving for the peace and justice which World War II made impossible, traps will be laid again, and words-bewitching words-will again be the bait. "Behind the shallow truism that 'history repeats itself,'" Arthur Koestler gloomily remarks, "hide the unexplored forces which lure men into repeating their own tragic errors."
Part Two
The Atlantic Charter:
Platform for a War
Chapter V
FROM SHOUTS TO WHISPERS
When THE Atlantic Charter was proclaimed to the world on the
fourteenth of August, 1941, wild cheers and hosannas arose in
certain quarters. A state of mind bordering on ecstasy seems to
have possessed the editorial room of the Atlanta Constitution,
for example. That newspaper hurried to rank the Roosevelt Churchill
declaration with Magna Carta and the United States
Constitution, an evaluation which the Roosevelt sycophants
through the country proceeded to echo with alacrity. The New
York Times saw "the beginning of a new era."
So moved was the president of Chicago's Zionists that after
reading the words Roosevelt and Churchill had put together at
their battleship rendezvous, he looked back as far as the dawn
of human history and then pronounced this conference to be
"the most momentous meeting in the history of the world."
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 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 phrase maker even before
his post-graduate course at the knee of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
has called it "the beacon." It was "heldaloft." It was to light
the way "forward to peace, to human progress and to a free
world."1 In the United States, every propaganda medium was
used to glorify it. People who swallow words with the same abject
trust with which they swallow a pill saw no abracadabra in
its phrases; they saw only shining truth and virtue.
[*Talk about Pie in the Sky,only 2 pages...https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000003-0686.pdf]DC
The Atlantic Charter* was posted on the walls of public libraries.
It was praised in pulpits in awed tones. Teachers celebrated
it in elementary classrooms for the edification of children barely
able to read a comic book. The ladies' clubs throughout the country
were descended upon by an army of lecturers, including an
unusual proportion who had irresistibly attractive English accents,
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 enough to dash·off articles and 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 the representatives of more than thirty nations, including Soviet
Russia, with great pomp and ceremony. Soviet Russia, then on
the receiving end of Mr. Roosevelt's bounty, 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 administration,
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 possibilities
of the episode. There was to be no risk that an insufficiently
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-seller novels.
The traveloguist, H. V. Morton, was naturally deeply moved
by his presence at this meeting of the two great leaders, Churchill
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 Meeting,
he predicted that "the Atlantic Conference will take its place
along 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 history
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 war-time. It may be that a dramatist, an artist or a writer of films will wish to picture Churchill upon the admiral's bridge gazing through the mists of early morning toward 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 [Or perhaps some will look at it as 2 elite pond scum plotting war and trying to cover their butts with history DC]
Such was the exuberance of the moment. Actually, the conference
meant to the English mainly one thing: President Roosevelt
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 officers of 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 11 from the Prince of
Wales that Roosevelt was set on issuing it because "he believes it will influence the whole movement of United States opinion,"
and he tipped off the cabinet that it would be "most imprudent
on our part to raise unnecessary difficulties."4 The eight
points were not taken seriously in England (as a study of contemporary
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 sons and Harry Hopkins, as well as the
faithful Sumner Welles[L] and W. Averell Harriman.[R] 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 to capture the imagination of the American people,who, whatever
else may be their virtues and faults, do indubitably love a
good show. Mr. Roosevelt's wife also loaned her not inconsiderable
talents to·the glamorization 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 Charter
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 embarrassment
to all who were in any way connected with its spectacular
origin or who once glorified its maker. Shy at appearing ludicrous,
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 beginning
of a new era. Not one in twenty has more than the vaguest
knowledge of its contents.
To Rooseveltians, the most disconcerting fact is that the death
of the Charter occurred during the lifetime of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
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 become the forgotten prodigy. The cynosure of hundreds of millions
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 1946 Under
the title As He Saw It (the He being his father), he had to
say something about the Atlantic Charter. After all, he was writing
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 access to 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 uncomplimentary
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 contribution"
to America's victory in the war, he wrote, was "the
greatest single fact in our lifetime."6 If the reputations of Franklin
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 Americans
who eventually, after the war, decided to stand tip to Communist 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 unimportant. 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 Welles 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 scruples
be flexible, plays a constant game to outwit his contemporaries. 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.
next
"IF I WERE A JAP .... "
notes
CHAPTER III 1. Sherwood, Ope cit., 80.
2. Ibid., 690.
3. Ibid., xii.
4. Ibid., 191.
5. Ibid., 201.
6. Ibid., xvii.
7. Ibid., xvii.
8. Ibid., 212.
9. Ibid., 26.
10. Ibid., 92.
11. Ibid., 94-98.
12. Ibid., 112.
13. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Macmillan, 1948).
14. Sherwood, Ope cit., 179.
I S. Ibid'J 529.
CHAPTER IV
1. Associated·Press report in the public press, September 4, 1950.
2. William Henry Chamberlin, America's Second Crusade (Regnery,
1950).
3. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Houghton Mifflin,
1948), Preface.
4. This is no longer open to question. How Roosevelt planned
American involvement in war in Europe and Asia and goaded Japan
into attacking Pearl Harbor has been thoroughly documented in
the following books: Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the
NOTES FQR PAGES 45 TO 64 289
Coming of the War, 1941- (Yale University Press, 1948); Chamberlin,
Ope cit.; George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor (Devin-Adair, 1947);
Tochikazu Kase, Journey to the Missouri (Yale University Press,
1950 ); FrederickR. Sanborn, Design for War (Devin-Adair, 1951);
Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War (Regnery, 1952); Admiral
R. A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (Devin-Adair,
1954); Grew, The Turbulent Era; Admiral H. E. Kimmel, Admiral
Kimmers Story (Regnery, 1955); Wedemeyer, Ope cit., Chapter I.
See also the Introduction to this volume.
5. Public Papers (1941), 557.
6. Ibid. (1939), 1-12.
7. Charles A. Beard, Giddy Minds -and Foreign Quarrels (Mactnillan,
1939), 54·
8. Public Papers (1940 ), 93.
9. A good discussion of Article 124 of the Russian Constitution appeared
in the magazine Christian Century on October IS, 1941. This
was one of the few publications that n1.ade more than a superficial
examination of it for the information of the American public.
10. Vita/Speeches, Vol. VII, 583.
11. See Note 4, supra.
12. Quoted in Nation (December 5, 1942).
CHAPTER V
1. Sumner Welles, Where Are. We Heading? (Harper, 1946), 3.
2. H. V. Morton, Atlantic Meeting (Methuen & Company, Ltd.
[London], 1943), vi-vii.
3. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
4. Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Houghton Mifflin,
1950 ), 441
5. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 44.
6. Ibid., xiv.
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