In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-Interventionist Movement of 1940–1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee

endeavor.

PREFACE

From September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and thereby triggered World War II, to December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans vigorously debated their nation's role in the conflict. At stake was the possible entrance of the United States into the greatest war in world history, a move bound to affect the nation for decades to come.

Yet both interventionists and anti-interventionists had one thing in common: they were composed of extremely diverse coalitions. Neither group shared economic doctrines, social bases, or political affiliation. Within the interventionist camp were Wall Street financiers, New York City labor leaders, southern Democrats noted for their domestic conservatism, and presidents of Ivy League universities. Among the anti-interventionists were midwestern Republican congressmen, followers of the radio demagogue Father Charles E. Coughlin, the labor coterie surrounding John L. Lewis, and leaders of the Chicago business community. Former participants in the old progressive movement were on both sides. Members of the German-American Bund were strong isolationists, as were Trotskyists and, until June 22, 1941, Stalinists.

Opponents of intervention found their voice in the America First Committee (AFC), established in September 1940 to oppose the interventionism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration.

Since 1942, the AFC papers have been deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. The 338 manuscript boxes contain national, state, and local records. In carton upon carton—sometimes unexpectedly—one finds material illuminating many aspects of U.S. policy, for the collection constitutes an invaluable record of one of the most vigorous action groups ever to appear in the United States. For those concerned with opinion making and economic elites, the AFC papers contain lists of major contributors, national committee members, prominent endorsers (including leaders in the black community), and those who offered confidential financial support. For those curious about student activism, the collection explores the world of the university, where two future presidents of the United States were among AFC ranks. For those who study mass opinion making, there are critiques of radio commentators, press opinion, and Hollywood films. For those interested in pressure groups, the collection is replete with AFC internal memorandums, an organizational prospectus, and candid appraisals of its own strengths and weaknesses. Historians of U.S. politics will appreciate the analysis of legislation offered by America First's Washington office. Lend-Lease, convoys, draft renewal, arming merchant ships, a possible war referendum—fresh material is offered on all these topics, and on tensions with Japan as well.

Although we have several excellent histories of America First and of anti-interventionism in general, we have not yet let Roosevelt's foes speak for themselves.¹ Until now, no documentary collection or anthology devoted to their perspective has appeared. Although the historical monograph can offer balance and perspective, only the sources themselves can convey the logic, complexity, and passion of the anti-interventionist position.

This volume is drawn entirely from the Hoover Institution's America First Collection. It reveals why many Americans, including some of great power and influence, sought to keep their country out of the war, doing so despite the likelihood that Hitler would overrun Europe if the United States did not enter on England's side. Given the enormity of what was already known about Hitler's internal regime and its imperialistic ambitions, it must seem a mystery to those living many years later why so many Americans opposed fighting the German führer. This book of documents helps solve that mystery.

NOTES

1. Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966); Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle against Intervention, 1940–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); Michele Flynn Stenehjem, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1976).

INTRODUCTION

The Origins and Activities of the America First Committee

The world of the late twentieth century is rooted in the 1940s; the outcome of World War II altered the face of the globe and left the United States dominant. Yet in 1940 and 1941, when the outcome was much in doubt, the Roosevelt administration committed the nation to a policy of all aid short of war.

Most historians praise U.S. policy of the 1940s, and World War II has gone down in history as the good war. In that scenario, Franklin D. Roosevelt was wise and courageous in supporting the Allied powers. If at times he lacked candor, he did educate his fellow citizens to the dangers posed by Axis domination of the Eurasian continent and to the need to support the victims of German and Japanese aggression. Indeed, the war was in truth what Roosevelt had originally called it—the war for survival.

Although few Americans lack some awareness of the nature and impact of World War II, many have forgotten—or never really learned—the steps by which their country was drawn ever closer to conflict. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and within two days Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. Roosevelt quickly announced that the United States would remain a neutral nation. Within three weeks, however, he urged Congress to remove an arms embargo that had been one of the linchpins of U.S. neutrality legislation. In acceding to Roosevelt's request and thereby authorizing cash and carry exports of munitions to belligerents, Congress acted in full awareness that such a move would aid the Allies, who still controlled the Atlantic sea lanes. The legislation also gave the president authority to delineate combat zones, areas that U.S. ships and citizens were forbidden to enter. On November 4, 1939, Roosevelt defined the zone as comprising the entire Baltic Sea and the whole Atlantic area from southern Norway to the British Isles, the Low Countries, and southern France.

In the late spring of 1940, the German blitzkrieg swung through the Low Countries, and Roosevelt called for all-out assistance to Britain and France. By June 22, however, France had surrendered, and Britain began fighting for her life in an unprecedented air battle. During the summer, with Roosevelt's firm backing, Congress passed the first peacetime selective service act in U.S. history. The law affected sixteen and a half million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six. Those conscripted would be trained for one year, then enter the reserves. On September 3, by executive agreement, Roosevelt transferred some fifty overage destroyers to Great Britain in return for eight bases in the Western Hemisphere.

Then, after defeating Wendell L. Willkie in the November presidential race, he called on the nation to become the great arsenal of democracy. Congress responded in March 1941 by passing the Lend-Lease Act, a comprehensive measure that gave the president broad discretionary powers to aid the Allies, including the authority to sell, transfer, exchange, and lease arms and other war materials overseas whenever he deemed such activity vital to U.S. defense.

Between April and July 1941, Roosevelt made other interventionist moves, including the creation of military bases on Greenland, the proclamation of an unlimited national emergency, and the landing of U.S. troops on Iceland. On June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Roosevelt promptly ensured that the Russians would receive U.S. lend-lease assistance. On July 26, he responded to Japan's occupation of Indochina by freezing all Japan's assets in the United States. This move severed Japan's major source of oil, and tensions mounted toward the breaking point.

At the end of the summer, joining with Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, the president signed the Atlantic Charter, a declaration of war aims that included the final destruction of Nazi tyranny and the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security. Congress extended army service for draftees by eighteen months, though this draft renewal bill squeezed through the House of Representatives by only one vote. On September 4, when a German submarine stationed off the coast of Iceland fired on the U.S. destroyer Greer, Roosevelt responded by instructing U.S. naval warships to shoot German and Italian war vessels on sight.

By autumn, the United States was fighting an undeclared war in the Atlantic. After attacks on other U.S. ships—in particular the Kearny and the Reuben James—resulted in loss of life, Congress repealed the major remaining restrictions in the 1939 Neutrality Act, allowing U.S. merchant vessels to be armed and to pass through the war zone to British ports.

Perhaps Roosevelt did not foresee committing ground forces overseas but planned merely to supply weapons and participate in air and sea engagements. It is just as plausible that he believed that he could not achieve maximum industrial and manpower mobilization without total war, that Britain and the Soviet Union alone could not defeat the Axis, and that an equal voice at the peace table could be earned only by participating fully in the conflict. One thing, however, is not in dispute: by 1941 the president was willing to risk war to ensure Allied survival.

Roosevelt gave his reasons repeatedly. In his fireside chat of December 29, 1940, he claimed that the Nazi masters of Germany had made it clear that they sought to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world. If Britain were defeated, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources [to bear] against this hemisphere. The Americas, he went on, would be living at the point of a gun. He continued this theme in his third inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1941: We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.¹

In the president's eyes, the Axis threat was not purely military. Speaking to the Pan-American Union on May 27, 1941, Roosevelt claimed that Germany posed a major economic challenge. By exploiting slave labor in the rest of the world, Hitler would be able to undersell U.S. goods everywhere. In order to survive, Roosevelt said, the United States would have to radically restructure its economy. Wages and hours would be regulated, collective bargaining abolished, and prohibitive tariffs enacted. The whole fabric of working life as we know it—business, manufacturing, mining, agriculture—all would be mangled and crippled under such a system.²

Roosevelt did not neglect matters of ideology. In December 1940 he noted that Hitler himself had denied any possibility of ultimate peace between Germany's political philosophy and that of the West. In September 1941 Roosevelt called Germany an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion. In October he referred to a secret German plan to abolish all existing religions and replace them with an international Nazi church.³

If the danger was as great as Roosevelt portrayed it, anti-interventionism could only jeopardize the United States. How indeed could anyone suggest that the United States refrain from rescuing the embattled British? In December 1940 Roosevelt challenged those who sought a negotiated peace: Such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would be only another armistice, leading to the most gigantic armament race and the most devastating trade wars of all history. Roosevelt might concede, as he did on May 27, 1941, that those who shut their eyes to the ugly realities of international banditry were sincere and patriotic. But then he said that such people were playing into Axis hands; at worst, they were downright subversive. Whatever their motive, Americans must immunize themselves against the tender whispering of appeasers that Hitler is not interested in the Western Hemisphere or the soporific lullabies that a wide ocean can protect us from him.⁴

Roosevelt and those who shared his perspective thought of their foes as isolationists. Strictly speaking, an isolationist opposes binding commitments or obligations. Guarding American freedom of action, isolationists sought—as one scholar notes—to leave America free to determine when, where, how, and whether the United States should involve itself abroad.⁵ In the eyes of the Roosevelt administration, however, isolationism connoted an ostrich-like apathy, mixed with the hope that Hitler's appetite for conquest would be sated once he controlled Europe. Little wonder most so-called isolationists spurned the term, with its connotation of naïveté, preferring less pejorative labels such as anti-interventionist, non-interventionist, and nationalist.

Roosevelt's barbed retorts did not prevent a large body of Americans from opposing each step toward intervention. Many factors came into play. Particularly haunting was the memory of the Great War. An entire generation had been raised on the revisionist histories of Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Walter Millis. Moreover, the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the plays of Lawrence Stallings portrayed a conflict that was neither purposeful nor glorious. It was, as one character noted in John Dos Passos's 1919 (1932), a goddam madhouse.⁶ And if the horrors of trench warfare and gassed troops were not enough, there was the unjust Versailles Treaty, that orgy in ink as Sen. Henrik Shipstead (Farmer-Labor–Minn.) called it, perceived as an unjust diktat that gave birth to communism, fascism, and Nazism.⁷

The anti-interventionists believed that the inevitable aftermath of any new conflict would be worldwide depression, with accompanying social disintegration. Conservatives saw the capitalist system in peril, believing that full-scale mobilization must lead to inflation, price and wage controls, and compulsory unionization; thus socialism would be the war's one lasting result. Prominent aviator Charles A. Lindbergh was even more apprehensive: God knows what will happen before we finish it [World War II]—race riots, revolution, destruction.⁸

Liberals were equally apprehensive. To them, the sensationalist exposés of the Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry were most alarming. It was popularly called the Nye Committee after Sen. Gerald P. Nye (R-N.D.) and was in session from 1934 to 1936. The committee excoriated the merchants of death, the profiteers who supposedly manipulated the Wilson administration into World War I. Similarly, a new war would engulf the nation in armament economics, a sure harbinger of fascism. Workers would receive low wages, farmers low prices. Then strikes would be outlawed. On M-Day, or Mobilization Day, a centralized defense force would assume dictatorial powers and in the process conscript at least a million men. After the immediate and artificial war boom ended, the grim aftermath of 1929 would again be at hand. Civil liberties would be abrogated, national censorship imposed, and the clampdown would be so severe that the antics of the Creel Committee (the official U.S. propaganda agency during World War I) and the repressive espionage and sedition laws of 1917 and 1918 would seem mild by comparison.⁹

The dissenters had other arguments. They denied that Axis domination of the European continent endangered U.S. security. In fact, they argued, the United States could remain the one major power unscathed by global war. If the nation could stay aloof from the struggle, perhaps supplying the British and Chinese but without risking combat, it could preserve the strength needed to play the pivotal role in postwar reconstruction.

Moreover, the anti-interventionists argued, the United States could survive quite well. Whatever dreams Hitler had at that stage, including possible global conquest, were irrelevant. Even if he sought military occupation of the entire world, the United States could remain secure. It could create an impregnable defense, while reorganizing the economy of the Western Hemisphere to keep its citizens employed, its raw materials flowing. As for the ideological problem of living in a world half slave, half free, the United States had survived amid tyrannies before and would undoubtedly do so again.

When war broke out in 1939, anti-interventionist sentiment was diffuse and unorganized. Only in the summer of 1940, after France had fallen and after the interventionists had established well-organized and well-financed pressure groups, did opponents of Roosevelt's foreign policy undertake a major organizational effort, one that centered on the America First Committee. The committee, formally organized that September, coordinated all efforts to oppose Roosevelt's proposals for providing lend-lease assistance, arming merchant ships, and escorting war supplies to Allied ports. The AFC also criticized other administration moves such as the occupation of Iceland, the drafting of the Atlantic Charter, and the placing of economic pressures on Japan.

By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the AFC had 450 units and at least a quarter of a million members. It had held massive rallies, distributed tons of literature, sponsored national radio speakers, and supplied research data to members of Congress. In the process, it forced Roosevelt to be far more circumspect in his legislative proposals and to make some interventionist moves surreptitiously, such as authorizing naval escorts in the Atlantic.

It is hardly surprising that interventionists attacked America First: its leaders and members were portrayed by their foes and in much of the press as unpatriotic, appeasement-minded, indeed downright subversive. It is probably not sheer coincidence that when one looks at later Who's Who entries of those who occupied crucial AFC posts—chairman, national director, director of organization, publicity director—their America First activities go unmentioned.

Origins

The events of the spring of 1940 were crucial to the origin of the America First Committee. One shock followed another. First Denmark fell, then Norway, then Belgium and the Netherlands, finally France—and Americans suddenly realized that Nazi Germany dominated most of Western Europe. In addition, the fate of England, the bulwark of Allied resistance, was much in doubt. Rumors circulated that Britain would soon be invaded and that the United States would be at war by Christmas.

In response to those traumatic events, public sentiment shifted rapidly. In September 1939 polls indicated that Americans above all sought to avoid war. But by November 1940 a majority of Americans told pollsters they preferred all-out war to Britain's defeat.¹⁰

If the interventionists welcomed the destroyer bases deal and the military draft, they still saw Britain in peril. Hence, they wanted major weapons sent to the besieged isles, including pursuit planes, tanks, high-speed torpedo craft (mosquito boats), and four-engine bombers (Flying Fortresses). They also sought loans so Britain could pay for these items.

This pressure, spearheaded by Kansas editor William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), greatly alarmed anti-interventionists. To send such valuable weapons overseas, they believed, was totally irresponsible because a still weak United States sorely needed such weapons for its own defense. Still more appalling, acting as a surrogate belligerent would eventually lead the nation into a futile and ruinous war. Moreover, if the United States transported such goods and extended loans, it would be violating its own neutrality legislation. As yet, though, aside from a few pacifist groups, no major national organization was devoted solely to fighting intervention.

The events of 1940 were distressing to R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., a student at the Yale University Law School. Son of the first vice president of Quaker Oats, Stuart had graduated from Princeton University in 1937. His studies in government and international relations had convinced him, he said later, that the U. S. had gained nothing and lost a great deal through participation in World War I. Soon after graduation, Stuart spent several months in Europe, where his belief was reinforced. By the spring of 1940 he was meeting informally with students who feared direct U.S. involvement and with such kindred spirits among the Yale law faculty as Edwin M. Borchard and Fred Rodell.¹¹

Late in the spring of 1940, Stuart and four other law students—among them future president Gerald R. Ford and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart—launched a petition aimed at organizing college students into a nationwide anti-interventionist organization. Their efforts centered on enforcing the key provisions of the Neutrality Act of 1939: banning loans to belligerents and blocking the shipment of war goods abroad. Insisting on cash-and-carry, the students said, We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat. In a history of the America First Committee completed in October 1942, Ruth Sarles tells how the Yale group began its activities. Sarles, who directed the AFC research bureau in Washington, D. C, begins her narrative with their petition. [Document 1]

The law students soon enlarged their focus, seeking supporters not only among college graduates but in all areas of national leadership. Stuart's New Haven home served as the national headquarters, and his wife, Barbara, was his first full-time assistant. Kingman Brewster, Jr., the articulate anti-interventionist chairman of the Yale Daily News, was particularly apprehensive about the country's direction; he took on the challenge of recruiting such prominent intellectuals as historian Charles A. Beard. [Document 2]

In part because Stuart grew up in Chicago, serious organizing started there. Early in July he met with Gen. Thomas S. Hammond, president of the Whiting Corporation, and with investor Sterling Morton. Morton's outspoken opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy is evident in his address to the National Small Business Men's Association. His speech touched on many themes dear to anti-interventionists, including the need for a small, mobile army; the difficulties Germany would have in invading the United States; and the desirability of U.S. trade with Japan. [Document 3]

Hammond and Morton proposed that Gen. Robert E. Wood lead the group. Wood, the sixty-one-year-old board chairman of Sears, Roebuck, was widely respected as one of America's leading and most progressive businessmen. He had helped to revolutionize the techniques of merchandising, fostered welfare capitalism, and backed much of the early New Deal. True, he had broken with the Roosevelt administration over pump-priming, the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, and what he saw as the president's apparent willingness to risk war. But, less isolationist than many White House critics, he supported cash-and-carry, conscription, and the president's call of May 1940 for 50,000 planes within the next calendar year.¹² Although it took a great deal of convincing to secure Wood's leadership, on July 15, 1940, he agreed to serve as acting chairman.¹³

Stuart and his friends spent the summer recruiting supporters.¹⁴ Thanks to his father's generosity, Stuart secured a rent-free office in the Board of Trade building. Initially three desks, a filing cabinet, and a telephone composed his total facilities. The group originally called itself the Emergency Committee to Defend America First, but late in August it renamed itself the America First Committee.

Even before the national organization was formally established, the first defection took place: Gerald R. Ford, former All-American center in football at the University of Michigan, resigned from the original student executive committee. Ford had been an enthusiastic recruiter for America First. Yet, because he was an assistant football coach at Yale, he feared that the athletic association might frown on his activities and that his job could be in jeopardy.¹⁵

In other ways, though, the founders were in luck. By late July, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile manufacturer and president of the Western Shade Cloth Company, promised substantial contributions if the organization was launched. Wood invited twenty-nine prominent Americans to serve as sponsors, and many responded.¹⁶

Publicizing the AFC

In order to promote the AFC, on September 4 the new organization made its first public announcement. Officially naming Stuart as national director, it proclaimed four principles:

1.  The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.

2.  No foreign powers, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America.

3.  American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war.

4.  Aid short of war weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.

The committee also outlined its proposed activities:

1.  To bring together all Americans, regardless of possible differences on other matters, who see eye-to-eye on these principles. (This does not include Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interest of any other nation above those of our own country.)

2.  To urge Americans to keep their heads amid rising hysteria in times of crisis.

3.  To provide sane national leadership for the majority of the American people who want to keep out of the European war.

4.  To register this opinion with the President and the majority of Congress.¹⁷

The AFC's aims and policies were articulated in more detail by Clay Judson, executive committee member and prominent Chicago attorney. In a letter to Wood written within three weeks after the AFC was formed, Judson stressed the primacy of national defense and the ruinous consequences of full-scale belligerency. If the United States kept supplying Britain with weapons used to kill Germans, he said, Germany would be justified in attacking U.S. commerce. Recalling with disillusionment the entry of the United States into World War I, Judson wrote, The parallel between the present time and 1916–1917 is complete. [Document 4]

On September 5 General Hugh Johnson officially launched the committee with a nationwide radio broadcast. Johnson, a flamboyant personality, was a Scripps-Howard columnist and had directed the National Recovery Administration. He stressed themes that America First would repeat continually: First, the U.S. military was far too undermanned and underequipped to send ships, tanks, or Flying Fortresses to Britain. The army had fewer than three hundred first-line combat planes and only fifty-nine heavy bombers. It also lacked enough modern equipment to outfit 100,000 men. Second, Britain—far from ever being the first line of U.S. defense—had, in the admittedly distant past, acted most aggressively in the Western Hemisphere, once in Mexico and once in Venezuela. It also took territory in Honduras and the Falkland Islands in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. In addition, at Munich, the British showed their unreliability by tossing Czechoslovakia to the wolves. Third, although the interventionists claimed that Hitler would menace the Atlantic if Britain fell, the United States could shift its fleet from the Pacific, where it had no serious material interests at stake. In fact, as far as U.S. activities in the Pacific went, one could only deduce, We are out there to help preserve the British Empire in Asia.¹⁸

In Johnson, the AFC was using a former New Dealer and Democrat to assault interventionism, and it remained strictly neutral throughout the 1940 presidential campaign. It shunned Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee, partly because his views could scarcely be distinguished from Roosevelt's. Both candidates favored a vigorous defense program and aid to Britain short of war but voiced strong opposition to entering the conflict. More important, the heavily Republican AFC leadership undoubtedly realized that many Democrats opposed intervention and that some who voted for Roosevelt could be enrolled in the AFC ranks.¹⁹ When columnist John T. Flynn proposed a pre-election broadcast, sponsored by the AFC and attacking the president, the directors objected. As Clay Judson noted, the AFC was not organized to promote or oppose candidates; rather it was established to foster non-interventionist principles.²⁰

On September 21, 1940, America First held its first directors’ meeting, one devoted primarily to promotional activities. General Wood served as chairman. Other directors attending included Regnery, Stuart, and Clay Judson. Bruce Barton—advertising executive and Republican congressman from New York City's silk-stocking district—was authorized to organize a series of radio programs that would include speeches by such luminaries as Wood, Johnson, Sen. Robert M. La Follette (Progressive-Wis.), Sen. David I. Walsh (D-Mass.), Sen. Arthur Capper (R.-Kan.), and the radio commentator Boake Carter.²¹

The AFC's immediate concern was to counter the militant wing of the CDAAA, which sought the release of secret bomb sights and of twenty-five Flying Fortresses to Britain.²² Noting a Gallup poll indicating that 52 percent of the people favored underwriting a British victory by all aid short of war, Stuart wrote Johnson on September 24, 1940, Until today this trend has not been effectively stopped. The dangers in ‘aid short of war’ have not been analysed. Hence, on October 3, 1940, the AFC started placing advertisements in the press warning against sending weapons overseas: We need guns. We need men. We need ships enough for a two-ocean navy independent of any other power. Let nobody take them away from us. Let nobody give them away. Self-made emergencies might mean war with Japan and instantly thereafter with Germany. The message was clear: "Peace at home or war abroad? Think America! you can decide if you act now!"²³

But how to act? The advertisements created a demand for leadership that the AFC, not yet a membership organization, was ill equipped to supply. Many contributors asked how they could join the organization, something that caught the committee totally unprepared. (A year later the organization that had begun with a one-room office and a lone stenographer ended up with ten rooms and sixty-eight employees.)²⁴

As Christmas 1940 grew closer, fear of war had not lessened. Although the Greeks were driving the Italians out of Albania and the British were taking the initiative in Libya, Germany had made significant gains in the east. Hungary, Romania, and the rump state of Slovakia announced their adherence to the Tripartite Pact, joining the alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Britain was relying on a blockade of the European continent and a massive bombing of Germany. Once Britain received the assistance needed to match the strength of the Axis, Churchill told Roosevelt, it would land troops on the continent and, it hoped, deliver the telling blow. With the possibility that Britain could hold out, perhaps even win the war, interventionists demanded all-out aid. Immediately after the 1940 elections, Roosevelt started speaking—both privately and publicly—of allotting to Britain half of all the munitions and the latest bombers being produced in the United States.²⁵

In the eyes of the anti-interventionists, however, Britain was in worse shape than ever, and talk of massive aid only made the AFC leadership more apprehensive. People are waking up to the fact that we have drifted terribly close to the brink of war, Stuart wrote. Britain is about at the end of her rope. Her shipping losses are higher than in 1917. The interventionists are desperate and are launching a whirlwind attack on the Neutrality Act. [Document 5]

The retired diplomat William R. Castle, a member of the AFC's national committee and a confidant of former president Herbert Hoover's, shared Stuart's suspicions. He was convinced that Roosevelt sought U.S. involvement. He hoped that through its press contacts the AFC would scotch the rumor that U.S. warships would escort British merchantmen to England. Roosevelt, he feared, would try to get around the neutrality law by using British ships and ordering the navy to protect them, something—Castle claimed—the president had a right to do as commander in chief.²⁶

Stuart too saw trouble ahead. He noted that Britain's heavy shipping losses might cause the United States to enter the forbidden combat zone, that is, the seas surrounding Britain that had been banned to U.S. shipping since November 1939, when the Neutrality Act was passed.²⁷ The next sixty days will tell the tale, he wrote Wood. [Document 6]

The committee also prepared to oppose credits to Great Britain. The 1939 Neutrality Act had forbidden all credits to belligerents. In addition, the Johnson Act of 1934 prohibited private loans to governments in default of their obligations to the U.S. government and its citizens, a category that certainly included Great Britain. William Benton, vice president of the University of Chicago and a retired advertising executive, went so far as to say that he would approve loans only if the treasures of the British Museum were put up as collateral. [Document 7]

Although Benton's proposal did not get much hearing, the AFC strongly debated the credits issue. Meeting on December 17, it decided not to oppose loans to belligerents. Although such a position appears a bit incongruous for an anti-interventionist body, Stuart noted that his uncle, Edward L. Ryerson, Jr., an AFC national committeeman who had been vocal in opposing any ban on credits, was board chairman of Inland Steel, a firm doing a tidy little steel business with the British.²⁸

By early December, Time reported that the AFC had 60,000 members, eleven local chapters, and an organization drive that was going like a house afire. Just before Christmas, Stuart could report to a major donor that the organization had able personnel and clear lines of command.²⁹

Amid its anxieties over Roosevelt policy and its efforts to become a mass organization, the AFC experienced trouble with a rival organization. On December 17, 1940, at New York's Hotel Lexington, Iowa editor Verne Marshall announced the formation of the No Foreign War Committee (NFWC). Originally the NFWC was intended to serve simply as a coordinating body for various pacifist, civic, business, and veterans groups. O. K. Armstrong, a leader in the American Legion, agreed to head the group, but Marshall created an entirely new and militant organization. Thus, instead of the No Foreign War Campaign headed by the moderate and conciliatory Armstrong, the No Foreign War Committee emerged, led by the strident and volatile Marshall.³⁰

Stuart believed that Marshall's backers were undermining the AFC by organizing a rival group. [Document 8] At first, the AFC attempted to cooperate with the NFWC, but a unity meeting between Wood and Marshall left the general convinced that Marshall was in a state of nervous exhaustion. As Ruth Sarles writes of the meeting, It terminated with the two factions severing negotiations completely. By January 24, 1941, the AFC felt compelled to inform its chapters that it had no connection with Marshall's NFWC.³¹

Organization

For the AFC to succeed, respected leaders were essential, both to lend their prestige and to contribute their wealth and talents. Recruitment for the national committee, however, was not easy, even among those sympathetic to the anti-interventionist cause.

Some individuals, particularly those from the world of publishing, claimed to be in general agreement but wanted to keep their independence. Others—such as the New York district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, a leading presidential contender in 1940—pleaded too many responsibilities.³² Still others sought to avoid controversy. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, replied, I am in as much trouble as the University can stand already.³³ Several figures disagreed with what they saw as the AFC's emphasis. The historian Will Durant responded, We should not enter the war and should stick to international law; but I can't reconcile myself to the replacement of the British empire—vicious in its origins, but liberal in its development—by a despotism so openly hostile to the liberties that have made Western civilization. Former U.S. vice president Charles G. Dawes, board chairman of Chicago City Bank and Trust Company, withdrew from the embryonic national committee in August 1940. Though initially suspicious of Roosevelt's interventionist measures, he soon found himself advocating all-out aid to Britain short of war.³⁴

The AFC's political conservatism also alienated some potential allies. Many of its most publicized contributors had attacked the New Deal, and the AFC often advanced arguments that appealed to big business. As the liberal economist Stuart Chase observed, General Wood's outfit is undoubtedly splendid but I just don't want to appear on the same letterhead with some of his buddies.³⁵

Then there was the matter of isolationism. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century, wished to see the United States assume a pacific responsibility in world affairs, something he feared may not be congenial to the leadership of America First. [Document 9] Others found the AFC too nationalistic. The international lawyer John Foster Dulles wrote that he was

very much opposed to our getting into war; on the other hand I am not an isolationist. I believe strongly that our present troubles are primarily due to the inevitable break-down of a world order based on super-nationalism.³⁶

Dulles was not alone. Felix Morley, former Pulitzer prize–winning editor of the Washington Post and president of Haverford College, sympathized with most AFC aims and even spoke at an AFC luncheon. But he declined membership on the national committee on the grounds that he had been a staunch supporter of the League of Nations; in addition, he opposed the various neutrality acts for failing to distinguish between aggressor and victim.³⁷

In February 1941, when Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, there were more rejections. Hugh R. Wilson, a former ambassador to Germany, argued that head-on opposition to intervention was doomed to failure and moreover would give a false impression of national disunity.³⁸

Occasionally a possible recruit said he could do more good elsewhere. Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University and Herbert Hoover's secretary of the interior, told Wood he had joined the CDAAA to keep it from running to extremes.³⁹ As late as September 1941, Professor Edwin M. Borchard, who had influenced the original Yale group, claimed his influence with Congress would be greater if he remained aloof. [Document 10]

Some prominent Americans, such as Democratic wheelhorse James A. Farley, apparently never responded. Other suggestions the AFC itself vetoed. For example, in December 1940 one AFC staff member wrote Stuart: On second thought Frank Lloyd Wright may not be a good man to have on the committee. He is a great architect but he has quite a reputation for immorality.⁴⁰

It would, however, be a mistake to dwell on those who decided not to join the committee. The list of national committee members is impressive. Some resigned for various reasons, but others remained steadfast.⁴¹ Upon joining, Ryerson expressed alarm at the prowar hysteria he perceived in the summer of 1940.⁴² General Hugh Johnson pointed graphically to the horrors of war: Why do I shrink from a new crop of faceless, armless, legless men? [Document 11]

New York advertising executive Chester Bowles also remained, despite his liberal domestic views, saying: Obviously we cannot build a wall around ourselves in an attempt to exist regardless of what goes on in other parts of the world. [Document 12] He was so strongly opposed to entering the war that he supported Senators Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio) and Burton K. Wheeler (D-Mont.) as presidential candidates.⁴³ In July 1941 Bowles critically appraised possible war objectives. [Document 13]

But some national committee members defected. Two leading pacifists resigned almost immediately after the group was formed. The prominent liberal editor Oswald Garrison Villard denied that the AFC's focus on defense was either necessary or desirable: I believe it carries within it the seeds of death for our democracy. Similarly, Albert W. Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, submitted an entire brief for Christian pacifism, one that went so far as to claim that all wars in U.S. history had been bad and unnecessary.⁴⁴

AFC leaders attributed some resignations to interventionist pressure. When Eddie Rickenbacker withdrew in February 1941, Wood suspected that the World War I ace feared losing valuable mail delivery contracts for Eastern Air Lines, the firm he headed. Actress Lillian Gish told Wood she had been blacklisted by both Hollywood and the legitimate theater, but said she had been promised a $65,000 film contract if she severed her ties with the AFC without revealing why she resigned.⁴⁵

Occasionally the AFC dropped national committee members it found embarrassing. Avery Brundage, prominent Chicago builder and president of the American Olympic Association, had aroused suspicions that he was pro-Nazi. Henry Ford seemed tainted by his sponsorship of an anti-Semitic weekly, the Dearborn Independent, during the 1920s. Although the famous auto manufacturer publicly repudiated his earlier views, the committee found it too risky to retain his name on its masthead.⁴⁶

Some prominent Americans, though untapped for the national committee, were rumored to be sympathetic to the AFC position. They included St. Louis manufacturer Stuart Symington, later secretary of the air force and a Democratic senator from Missouri, and Bernard M. Baruch, the famed financier who headed the War Industries Board in 1918. With others, such as Maj. Albert G. Wedemeyer, support for the AFC was never in doubt.⁴⁷

Occasionally the AFC benefited greatly from what, in effect, was a silent partner. Herbert Hoover did not formally join America First, for he was spearheading the National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies, an effort to feed some 27 million Europeans, mostly women and children. Five nations under German occupation—Norway, Holland, Belgium, Poland, and France—should, Hoover argued, have the right to import food. A neutral international organization would protect food supplies from the Germans. Because such a proposal involved lifting Britain's blockade, most interventionists attacked Hoover's efforts. He nonetheless attracted support from some of them, including Gen. John J. Pershing and Sen. John H. Bankhead (D-Ala.). They undoubtedly recalled that in World War I a similar Hoover effort had not interfered with waging the war.⁴⁸

Hoover did not want to tie his relief efforts to those of the AFC, so he used his close friend William Castle as an informal liaison. In addition, in July 1941 Hoover attempted in vain to have Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speak on the radio against intervention. During 1941 Hoover tapped millionaire Jeremiah Milbank to contribute to the AFC, and the AFC in turn reprinted Hoover's speeches and endorsed his relief efforts.⁴⁹ Although the AFC never gave any reason for the endorsement, its motives were obvious: the food plan would relieve suffering, reduce tensions between the Axis and the Allies, and bring Hoover, a prominent anti-interventionist, into international policy making.

The AFC's national chairman and board of directors were no mere figureheads but made the crucial decisions. Chairman Wood appeared at committee headquarters in Chicago almost daily; he personally approved every significant decision. Yet he always sought to surrender his post, and at the outset he hoped Eddie Rickenbacker, Verne Marshall, or financier Joseph P. Kennedy would accept the leadership. The seven-member board of directors, or executive committee, usually made major policy; the national committee seldom met.⁵⁰

The twenty-four-year-old Stuart and the Chicago staff executed the policies formulated by the directors and the national committee. At first Stuart was national director, but in April 1941 the directors changed his post to a less exalted one: executive secretary and assistant to the chairman. He was in charge of local chapters, speakers, and advertisements and of supervising the Washington research staff and lobby. Some senior AFC leaders sharply criticized him, in particular AFC vice chairman and former Democratic party organizer Janet Ayer Fairbank, but he possessed what historian Wayne S. Cole calls selfless idealism. More pertinent, Stuart was a good executive, with the ability to grow in the job.⁵¹ His staff was by and large a young one and in some cases politically liberal as well.⁵²

Several individuals exercised a supervisory function in local areas. In a sense, they were deputies of the national headquarters.⁵³ John T. Flynn, chairman of the New York chapter and national committeeman, was undoubtedly the most important of these. A noted journalist and writer on economics, Flynn had long attacked Wall Street speculation and proposed to curb war profits. By 1939 he suspected that Roosevelt sought to bolster the nation's sagging economy by undertaking ventures abroad. Flynn served as national chairman of the Keep America Out of War Congress, a coordinating body composed primarily of pacifists and socialists. In November 1940 the New Republic dropped his weekly column because of its anti-interventionism, but he retained a forum in the Scripps-Howard papers.⁵⁴ A staunch liberal, he was particularly alert to the danger that fascists might infiltrate the AFC. [Document 14]

Certain divisions of the AFC were particularly important. The speakers bureau arranged some 126 public addresses in thirty-two states. The bureau for research and congressional liaison contributed a series of position papers entitled Did You Know? which gave the anti-interventionist perspective on disputed issues. The bureau was directed by Ruth Sarles, a young woman who held a master's degree in international relations from American University and who had edited Peace Action, the monthly bulletin of the National Council for the Prevention of War.⁵⁵

Local chapters were in many ways the nucleus of the committee, though they could often be its curse as well. They were invaluable in arranging rallies, distributing literature, and launching mail campaigns. But national headquarters could not always exercise the needed supervision, much less assure itself of competent chapter leaders. Even the Washington, D.C., chapter had trouble recruiting an able executive.⁵⁶

Politically, the AFC had a conservative cast. Although it was officially neutral, Republicans everywhere predominated. Many rally speakers directly attacked Roosevelt and the New Deal.⁵⁷ Moreover, Stuart, Wood, and Fairbank supported Scribner's Commentator, a monthly publication rightist enough to include articles praising France's Marshal Pétain and Portugal's Doctor Salazar. The AFC even lent them a mailing list.⁵⁸

Although strongly critical of Roosevelt, the AFC never sought to impeach him. In a letter to all chapter chairmen, Stuart said such talk tends to make the Committee seem partisan, political, and personally hostile to Mr. Roosevelt. Much AFC support, he went on, was drawn from Roosevelt backers, and the polls showed that his popularity had reached its zenith. Besides, impeachment was a legal matter, involving formal charges.⁵⁹

AFC conservatism was in part determined by the nature of the contributors. Initially Wood and Regnery underwrote the organization. Donors of a hundred dollars or more provided two-thirds of the national committee's income. Eight businessmen alone supplied over $100,000: they included Regnery; Harold L. Stuart, a Chicago investment banker and national committeeman; and H. Smith Richardson of the Vick Chemical Company of New York.⁶⁰ Particularly revealing is the roster of large contributors, and here several things should be noted. First, major parts of the Chicago business orbit gave extremely heavily.⁶¹ Second, manufacturing was disproportionally represented in contributions as compared with finance, communications, and transportation. Third, an usually large number of family-owned firms were donors. Fourth, agriculture-based enterprises, such as meat packing, were heavily represented. Fifth, many contributors were from industries far more dependent on civilian consumers than on military orders. To all such interests, war would accelerate higher taxes and promote industrial unionism. Lying ahead were the risks of postwar reconversion and the sudden draining of federal credit and contracts. Not only would socialism be the road ahead—a phrase John Flynn later made popular—but depression was inevitable. Conversely, if the nation did not enter the war, the survival of capitalism in the United States could well be ensured. In addition, an economic link between agriculture and industry would ensure U.S. self-sufficiency.⁶²

To focus on big business alone, however, would give a misleading picture. Most individual contributions, particularly to local chapters, were quite small, and donating was a real sacrifice for some supporters.

Several donors sent notes with their gifts. Young John F. Kennedy mailed a hundred dollars, adding, what you are all doing is vital. Stuart asked Kennedy, about to travel to Latin America, to work full time for the committee. "Everyone seems to be against us but the people," Stuart wrote to the future president.⁶³

Certain groups were deliberately recruited. Richard A. Moore, later the AFC director of publicity, organized College Men for Defense First (CMDF), a group that included actor José Ferrer and New Frontiersman R. Sargent Shriver. In practice the CMDF acted as an AFC conduit, and it formally merged with the committee the day before the Pearl Harbor attack.⁶⁴ Veterans also were targeted, although in 1941 the AFC could not dissuade the American Legion from backing Roosevelt's foreign policy, including aid to the Soviet Union. The AFC was able to prevent the 1940 convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation from adopting a pro-war resolution, but it found direct recruiting of farmers difficult. Labor participation, if anything, was even sparser, and few leaders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the American Federation of Labor, or the railroad brotherhoods were listed as AFC sponsors. Stuart did tap Kathryn Lewis, daughter of CIO president John L. Lewis, for the national committee; she obviously represented that most prominent U.S. labor leader. There were some sporadic efforts to recruit blacks, and late in the summer of 1941, Washington attorney Perry Howard, Republican patronage broker, organized a Negro division.⁶⁵

Despite its conservative cast, America First contributed to several pacifist and socialist groups.⁶⁶ Socialist party leader Norman Thomas did not join, but he spoke at two massive AFC rallies, received AFC funds for Sunday broadcasts, and undertook two college tours sponsored by the committee. In May 1941, defending himself to a fellow socialist, Thomas claimed it a grave mistake to retire to some monastery to preserve our purity. If socialists were to avoid war, they must reach the masses, and here is where the AFC was so crucial. Suggestions to organize anti-interventionist New Dealers as a distinct body, however, were never acted on.⁶⁷

The Committee's General Position

Once money was raised and leaders recruited, the AFC wasted no time in publicizing its views. In a series of instructions for speakers drafted during the lend-lease debate, America First offered its own interpretation of the nature and causes of what was to become World War II. It is not the least of ironies that an organization backed by believers in capitalism advanced in part a modified Leninist argument: namely, that the conflict was fundamentally a struggle between competing empires. Expressing a viewpoint popular in the 1930s, the AFC speakers bureau still thought in terms of imperialist war and have-not powers. Of course, unlike the communists, the AFC saw the Soviet Union as simply another imperialist regime.

The war, said the speakers bureau, was simply another chapter in the series of conflicts between European states that have been going on in war and peace for hundreds of years. A new German empire was attempting to compete with well-established ones, and when Britain learned that Germany would be expanding at Britain's expense, not that of the Soviet Union, it declared war on the Third Reich. [Document 15] The bureau denied that Nazism embodied a worldwide revolution. In fact, if the United States preserved its democracy, it would insulate itself from National Socialism. [Document 16] Even if Britain were victorious, it would be unable to restore the governments destroyed by Germany. Moreover, any restored states would be too small to defend themselves, and the unstable political order created by the Versailles peace would simply continue. [Document 17] One thing remained clear: neither the survival of democracy nor the preservation of the global balance of power was at stake.

The speakers bureau drafted questions designed to embarrass CDAAA speakers. For example, the AFC denied that war could destroy the ideologies of Nazism, fascism, or communism. How can philosophies be stamped out? it asked. In an effort to show that the mere existence of a hostile ideology contained no threat, the bureau noted that the United States had enjoyed quite amicable trade relations with the German and Italian dictatorships until war broke out in 1939. [Document 18]

The AFC accused the Roosevelt administration of participating in the war without the consent of Congress or the people. [Document 19] In so doing, it said, the United States was neglecting its two primary concerns: preserving a democratic form of government and building an adequate national defense. [Document 20] Certainly there was no indication that U.S. belligerence would preserve democracy. [Document 21] And it was equally certain that the American people had made no commitment to fight outside the Western Hemisphere. [Document 22]

The AFC staff also promoted specific books, including Charles A. Beard's A Foreign Policy for America (1940), Norman Thomas's We Have a Future (1940), and Maj. Gen. Johnson Hagood's We Can Defend America (1937). [Document 23] It also kept tabs on friendly elements within the press and held Hanson W. Baldwin, military columnist for the New York Times, in particularly high esteem. Occasionally it praised specific articles, even if they appeared in such interventionist magazines as Life and Collier's.⁶⁸

If the AFC had a solution to the international crisis, it lay in a negotiated peace.⁶⁹ Negotiation was the one real alternative to the continuous fighting—and to what it saw as the perilous interventionism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the popular slogan V for Victory was suspect, and Lindbergh and Stuart suggested an alternative, A is for America. Although the AFC as an organization did not officially endorse the position, it promoted pleas for negotiation made by others.⁷⁰

Furthermore, its individual leaders were far from silent on the whole matter of war and peace aims. In January 1941 General Wood claimed a victorious Germany would seek economic control of Europe but would leave most states politically independent.⁷¹ Two weeks later, Clay Judson claimed that a compromise peace would give the world a chance to recover from the wreckage of war. [Document 24] In February, Castle noted that John Cudahy, a former ambassador to Belgium, had told him a negotiated peace was Britain's only hope. [Document 25]⁷²

Sarles kept careful tabs on any peace talk. In late May 1941 she suspected that John Winant, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, had come home with Hitler's latest peace proposal. [Document 26] In July she noted that any peace could be made only on Hitler's terms. Hence, for America First publicly to urge peace in the abstract, or to make specific peace proposals, would be self-defeating. It was better, she wrote Stuart, to have local chapters study peace aims. [Document 27] Another month later, she was even more pessimistic. The president, she said, had decided on a limited war, not involving mass numbers of army troops but drawing upon American marines and sailors.⁷³ [Document 28]

The German invasion of the Soviet Union led to more peace talk. In October 1941, Sarles suspected that a victorious Hitler might propose a peace, while resigning as chancellor because his work was done. Bowles thought that Britain, seeing ahead the possibility of the Soviet Union's defeat, might make peace in return for German restoration of the Western democracies. Stuart, also looking at the Russian front, asked Robert Hutchins to launch a mediation movement. [Document 29] In November, Flynn predicted that if the Soviet Union fell, Roosevelt would abandon Britain. America First, he continued, should support prominent clergy in an independent peace effort. [Document 30] Wood, however, was uncertain whether the time was ripe, and the matter of negotiation was not raised again.⁷⁴

The Roosevelt administration had continually stressed that Germany posed a devastating military threat. Many historians have concurred, claiming that Hitler's goals far surpassed rectification of the Versailles treaty. His Greater Germany was merely a way station to larger aims—hegemony in Europe, including the Soviet Union; the projection of German power overseas; a broader global struggle with the United States.⁷⁵ But even though Hitler had continually expressed hostility toward the United States, the AFC denied that Hitler could conquer it. To America First there was a great difference between intention and capability, and it focused on what it saw as great weaknesses in the German war machine.

On this point, materials prepared for speakers raised important questions: Was the United States next on Germany's list of conquests? [Document 31] Would it not be better to fight now, with allies, than later without them? [Document 32] Could the prestige acquired by a victorious Nazism bring fascism to the United States? [Document 33] What damage could a German fifth column do? [Document 34]

Another series of questions centered on German designs overseas: Could Germany invade the continental United States from any European base? [Document 35] From the Caribbean or Central America? [Document 36] From any base south of the Caribbean? [Document 37] What would happen if Germany defeated Britain and then sought Canadian and Caribbean outposts? [Document 38] Or sought French and Dutch colonies as bases for an assault on the United States? [Document 39]

A third group of questions centered on naval defense. Excluding the British navy, was not the combined tonnage of the Axis powers greater than that of the United States? [Document 40] If Germany captured the British fleet and used the shipbuilding facilities of the nations it had conquered, could it isolate the United States from the rest of the world? [Document 41] Was the British fleet the first line of a U.S. defense? [Document 42]

America First had to confront other arguments as well. Interventionists warned constantly that an Axis victory would result in a crippling loss of U.S. markets and raw materials. Therefore the AFC had to devise rebuttals on such questions as How dependent is the U. S. economy on foreign trade? [Document 43] Could Germany capture world commerce and thereby strangle American industry? [Document 44] Must the United States fight in order to secure needed tin and rubber? [Document 45] Could Germany cause the world to abandon the gold standard, thereby making U.S. currency valueless? [Document 46]

The speakers bureau stressed that the United States already held the lion's share of Latin American trade and was doing as much business as Germany, Italy, England, France, and Japan together. It noted that needed raw materials were located in the Western Hemisphere, an area the U.S. Navy could protect. [Documents 47–49]

In addition, the position papers of the AFC's research bureau argued that even if Hitler were victorious over Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, he could not destroy U.S. trade; that Germany might well find victory over the Soviet Union counterproductive; and that within the Western Hemisphere lay all raw materials needed for U.S. industry. [Documents 50–52] While denying the administration's claim that the United States faced an oil shortage, the AFC sought economic integration of the entire hemisphere. [Documents 53 and 54]⁷⁶ The research bureau was especially critical of Roosevelt's economic policies. Accusing the administration of poorly allocating raw materials and misinterpreting the Lend-Lease Act, it found the United States on the verge of another depression. [Documents 55 and 56]

General Wood maintained that the United States could always dominate the trade of the upper half of Latin America. The products of the continent's temperate zone, however—Brazil's cotton, Chile's copper and nitrates, and Argentina's meat, cotton, and wool—were bound to compete with U.S. goods. We cannot sell unless we buy, the general said, and that is a far greater obstacle than all nazidom.⁷⁷

The anti-interventionist economic argument at its most sophisticated level can be found in excerpts from an eighty-four-page manuscript, The Economic Consequences of American Intervention, written by Lawrence Dennis. Dennis was a journalist and economist who advocated what he called a desirable fascism, by which he meant nationalization of banks and major monopolies, redistribution of wealth and income through progressive taxation, subsidization of small enterprises and farming, one-party rule, and reorganization of the Congress on vocational lines. Two weeks before Pearl Harbor, Wood sought to raise funds for the publication of Dennis's manuscript, possibly under the signature of someone better known and less controversial.⁷⁸

Hitler, said Dennis, could not deprive the United States of its Latin American markets. Neither, for that matter, would Japan be able to withhold rubber from the United States even if it conquered Southeast Asia. Moreover, by skillful use of the economic weapon of barter, the United States would be able to build a powerful economic presence in the Western Hemisphere. If Germany dominated all the Near East and Africa and Europe to the Urals, the United States could not only ward off German economic penetration, it could actually emerge, claimed Dennis, a much stronger power. [Document 57]

If Dennis's manuscript had been published under AFC auspices, it would have constituted the most extensive public challenge yet to the interventionist economic arguments popularized by columnist Walter Lippmann and diplomat Douglas Miller. Lippmann had claimed that Germany would undersell the United States, Miller that the United States would become a Nazi economic colony. Publication of the manuscript would also have shown the AFC was willing to sponsor, at least surreptitiously, the views of a man who espoused a corporate state and who would soon be branded in the popular press as America's No. 1 fascist author.⁷⁹

From Lend-Lease to Draft Extension

Most AFC attention did not focus on such broad theories. Instead it centered on Roosevelt's specific legislative proposals. On December 7, 1940, Churchill wrote the president, claiming that Britain could no longer pay cash for U.S. arms. Within ten days, Roosevelt said publicly that the United States must keep aid flowing; moreover, he would soon show how this could be done. In his fireside chat of December 29, the president foresaw disastrous consequences if Britain fell, and on January 6, he outlined his program to provide lend-lease