The President leaned heavily on the rostrum, threw open the big black leather binder, straightway began his message to the 77th Congress on the State of the Union. Outside the Capitol, roped-off on the stretching plaza, stood hundreds of people. Many had been there since early morning. They could see and hear nothing in particular. They were just there.

"...At no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.... Today, thank God, 130,000,000 Americans, in 48 States, have forgotten points of the compass in our national unity....

"We need not overemphasize imperfections in the peace of Versailles. We need not harp on failure of the democracies to deal with problems of world reconstruction. We should remember that the peace of 1919 was far less unjust than the kind of `pacification' which began even before Munich, and which is being carried on under the new order of tyranny that seeks to spread over every continent today....

"As your President...I find it necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.

"Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia will be dominated by the conquerors....

"In times like these it is immature--and incidentally untrue--for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single- handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.

"No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion--or even good business.

"Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. `Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' (Benjamin Franklin, in Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.)...

"We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests....

"We learn much from the lessons of the past years in Europe--particularly the lesson of Norway.... The first phase of the invasion of this hemisphere would not be the landing of regular troops. The necessary strategic points would be occupied by secret agents and their dupes--and great numbers of them are already here and in Latin America....

"Our national policy is this: First, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to all-inclusive national defense.

"Second, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to full support of all those resolute peoples, everywhere, who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our hemisphere....

"Third, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to the proposition that principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers....

Mr. Roosevelt spoke clearly as ever, but there was no lightness in his voice, no touch of humor. As he went on, his big head thrown back, his voice gained depth and strength, and emotion.

At times the whole audience applauded. But through most of the speech the Republican side sat silent.

"Therefore, the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production.... I am not satisfied with the progress thus far made.... None of us will be satisfied until the job is done....

"I shall ask this Congress for greatly increased new appropriations and authorizations to carry on what we have begun. I also ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations....

"Let us say to the democracies: `We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.'

"In fulfillment of this purpose, we will not be intimidated by the threats of dictators that they will regard as a breach of international law and as an act of war our aid to the democracies which dare to resist their aggression. Such aid is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally proclaim it so to be.

"When the dictators are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on our part....

"Their only interest is in a new one-way international law....

"We must all prepare to make the sacrifices that the emergency--as serious as war itself--demands....

"As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and courage which come from an unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action which we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for....

"The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

"Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

"Jobs for those who can work.

"Security for those who need it.

"The ending of special privilege for the few.

"The preservation of civil liberties for all.

"The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living....

"I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call...

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

"The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.

"The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

"The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants--everywhere in the world.

"The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world....

"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is in our unity of purpose.

"To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

The President handed Messrs. Garner and Rayburn each a formal presentation copy of the speech, shook their hands, walked slowly down the ramp from the rostrum. The crowd still stood outside the Capitol a little while after he had driven away.

Last week millions of U.S. citizens, each in his own way, came to terms with the world crisis. They met it bitterly or without concern, sadly or stoically, with a vague conviction that they could see it through or with a dark foreboding of its outcome. But they met it. In Washington President Roosevelt sent to Congress a bill whose vast powers made the crisis unmistakable. Sometimes men were hesitant about the terms on which they met it. Sometimes they met it with an outburst of rage. More often they met it with tentative approval, coupled with a sidelong glance at the President on whom great powers to deal with it would be conferred.

No observer could pin down the vast mass of undefined reactions that followed each other, quick as thought, over the U.S. public mind. No single observer tried. Yet last week three men stood out like characters in a political drama who symbolized three different attitudes toward the crisis, three different ways to meet it.

One of the three men was President Roosevelt, who without fanfare asked Congress for greater powers than any President has held. One was Wendell Willkie, who accepted the need for a concentration of Presidential power but asked for assurance that it would be returned to the people, who gave it. One was Alfred Landon, normally the least bitter of U.S. speechmakers, who in a tense and impassioned address accused both Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, in the light of last week's events, of having deceived the people in the Presidential campaign. Not since the campaign itself had U.S. opinion swung and twisted so wildly.

Roosevelt. At his press conference President Roosevelt outlined the bill that would give him power to obtain and transfer war supplies to Britain and her allies. The bill would give him very broad powers, he said, but someone had to have authority to act quickly in the world crisis; he did not want the power it would grant, but someone had to have it so that quick action could be taken. Even as he went on to talk gravely to reporters of the need for speed, of the kind of action likely to be undertaken under the authority of the bill, of his hope that Congress would quickly pass it, the bill itself was read to a startled Congress.

The powers delegated to the President were enormous. Yet there was less discussion of them than of President Roosevelt. The issues and charges of the campaign--the fear of dictator- ship, the distrust of the Third Term, the charges that a continuation of the New Deal would mean a collectivized state--came back like echoes that blurred arguments before they were clearly heard. As in the last days before the election, the head- lines swam together: Wheeler Charges--War Plans Alleged--Hoover and Dewey Oppose--Capital Startled--Senator Johnson Calls Bill a Monstrosity. Now as then the acrimony was begotten by mutual distrust between the President and a substantial minority over his use of political power. Said distrustful Columnist Raymond Clapper: "When he is proposing to take power from Congress, Mr. Roosevelt is all eager for quick action. When it is for him to yield up some power, then the matter must be weighed very deliberately...."

Landon. Said Alfred Landon, who has backed the President in aid to Britain, who threw his delegates to Wendell Willkie at Philadelphia: "If Mr. Willkie had revealed (his position) before the Republican National Convention he would not have been nominated, and if Mr. Roosevelt had revealed it before election he would not have been re-elected."

Soft-spoken Alfred Landon, who ran to his own defeat almost without harsh words, had never made a more bitter charge than that. Last week voters, looking backward over the hectic days when they had made their decision between Roosevelt and Willkie--reviewing the arguments, remembering the atmosphere--found that the issues had not prepared them for the crisis they now faced. The campaign itself had gone through cycles of plain-speaking and warning, followed by periods when the emphasis was all on keeping out of war. There had been no time when Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt had declared that the U.S. should risk war to insure British victory, no time when they had said flatly that the course they advocated involved risk of war. Perhaps they deceived themselves. Certainly they deceived all those who wanted to be deceived. Although in his acceptance speech Wendell Willkie had warned that no man could foresee the future clearly enough to promise peace, and had promised to outdo Adolf Hitler in any contest Hitler chose ("Energy against energy production against production, salesmanship against salesmanship...") he did not preach an active crusade against Hitler, whose morals he deplored. Although Franklin Roosevelt had spelled out the menace to the U.S. in appeasing Hitler, he did not point out how far aid to Britain might have to go. Voters who could look back without rancor could find one reason for which they could hold neither candidate responsible: most of them had not wanted to hear it.

Willkie. In Manhattan Wendell Willkie made the first announcement of his plans: a forthcoming trip to England. But he had more to say. In characteristically forthright words he reminded and reassured many a fearful citizen that democracy could go into war-harness with its eyes open and its head clear.

"The so-called `lend-lease' bill now before Congress asks for an enormous grant of executive power. Under a democratic system, in which the people's power is preserved by limiting the powers of government, every such grant of power should be jealously scrutinized....

"I have examined this bill in the light of the current emergency and I personally have come to the conclusion that, with modifications, it should be passed....

"This is a critical moment in history. The United States is not a belligerent, and we hope we shall not be. Our problem, however, is not alone to keep America out of war but to keep war out of America. Democracy is endangered. And the American people are so aware of the danger that they have endorsed the policy of giving full and active aid to those democracies which are resisting aggression....

"It is the history of democracy that, under such dire circumstances, extraordinary powers must be granted to the elected Executive....

"However, there are certain considerations that ought to be taken into account.

"Congress must not be harried into passage of this bill...The bill should be subjected to thorough debate and such amendments should be made as Congress, representing the people, may deem necessary to retain in its own hands the fundamental power to declare war.

"In a democracy every grant of extraordinary power should contain a clause automatically giving that power back to the people....

"It is hoped the discussion of this bill does not take the form of opposition to granting power to this Administration just because it is this Administration. We could all wish that this Administration loved power less and that it more readily relinquished it when the purpose for which it was granted had ceased to exist. I think I can say without boast that no man in this country has done more to stress the record of this Administration in this regard or to paint the dangers of it. I was, moreover, perfectly serious in my charge that the re- election of this Administration would jeopardize the continuation of the democratic process in the United States. And I believe many of its acts since reelection sustain my position.

"Yet the people chose this Administration and we must abide by that choice. We must not fall into the fallacy of depriving it of powers necessary to defend us in order to preserve the mere forms of democratic procedure. We must give it the power to act in this emergency while at the same time assuring ourselves by competent amendments of a reversion of that power to us after the emergency is over."

News from Washington last week was news for the whole world. The Lend-Lease Bill had passed the House and the Senate. In 20 minutes it was delivered to the White House. Ten minutes later it had been signed by President Roosevelt, and had become law. Five minutes later the President approved a list of articles--what kind and to what amount he would not say--for immediate shipment abroad. Five minutes later, bright-eyed, tense and in high spirits, he called in the press to tell them that when the supplies were safely landed he would reveal how much had been sent, and where.

So the supplies were on the way. If the U.S. could turn itself into a workshop for democracy, the democracies were now financially able to use what it produced; if U.S. weapons, or U.S. food, could turn events in Europe or Asia, they could now legally be shipped. U.S. flags were broken out in the shattered streets of London. All over the world the news and its import were heard and realized.

The meaning of its own decision was brought home to the U.S., not by a historic scene but by a historic speech. At a crowded dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association, after the heavy-handed political clowning that marks newsmen's gatherings, President Roosevelt spoke for 34 minutes. All the national networks carried his voice. From Boston, short-wave broadcasts repeated it in 14 European languages. The British rebroadcast it and sent translations to the forbidden radios of Germany. Said he:

"I remember, a quarter of a century ago, that in the early days of the first World War the German Government received solemn assurances from their representatives...that the people of America were disunited; that they cared more for peace at any price than for the preservation of ideals and freedom; that there would even be riots and revolutions in the United States if this country ever asserted its own interests.

"Let not dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity now."

(The correspondents could remember only one Roosevelt speech like it: at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, when he had said before 100,000 people, on his acceptance of the nomination in 1936, that this generation had a rendezvous with destiny. The correspondent of the official German news agency, courteous Kurt Sell, had telephoned an advance text of the speech to Berlin, quietly left the hall before the President began to deliver it.)

"We know that although Prussian autocracy was bad enough in the first war, Naziism is far worse in this. Nazi forces...openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government...including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.

"Yet these men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order."

Again & again the President was stopped by applause that roared up from these professional non-enthusiasts. It broke spontaneously when he told how the Nazi plan for downing the democracies one by one had been stopped "by the unbeatable defenders of Britain." It rose again when he spoke of the debate on the Lend-Lease Bill--a debate that went on in Congress, in the newspapers, over the radio, over every cracker barrel, and which, though slow, meant that when the decision was made, "it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man, but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt."

But the applause came loudest when the President marked the responsibilities that the U.S. had accepted.

"We shall have to make sacrifices--every one of us.... Whether you are in the armed services; whether you are a steel worker or a stevedore; a machinist or a housewife; a farmer or a banker...--to all of you it will mean sacrifice in behalf of your country and your liberties.... You will have to be content with lower profits.... You will have to work longer at your bench, or your plow, or your machine or your desk....

"Upon the national will to sacrifice and to work depends the output of our industry and our agriculture....

"Upon that will depends our ability to aid other nations which may determine to offer resistance...."

The President outlined the purposes and conditions of a mighty task; he praised the British people and their "brilliant and great leader," Winston Churchill; he made specific the U.S. promise of aid ("The British people and their Grecian allies need ships. From America, they will get ships. They need planes. From America they will get planes. Yes, from America they need food.... They will get food."). He ended with a ringing pledge: "When...dictatorships disintegrate...then our country must continue to play its great part in the period of world reconstruction for the good of humanity.... We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood. We believe that the men and women of such nations...can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man's security, improve the standards of healthful living, provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every nation can insure its happiness, banish the terror of war, and abandon man's inhumanity to man.

Never, in all our history...have Americans faced a task so well worthwhile. May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children's children rise up and call us blessed."