<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "...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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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.)...
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> At times the whole audience applauded. But through most of
the speech the Republican side sat silent.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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.'
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "When the dictators are ready to make war upon us, they will
not wait for an act of war on our part....
</p>
<p> "Their only interest is in a new one-way international law....
</p>
<p> "We must all prepare to make the sacrifices that the
emergency--as serious as war itself--demands....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "The basic things expected by our people of their political
and economic systems are simple. They are:
</p>
<p> "Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
</p>
<p> "Jobs for those who can work.
</p>
<p> "Security for those who need it.
</p>
<p> "The ending of special privilege for the few.
</p>
<p> "The preservation of civil liberties for all.
</p>
<p> "The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a
wider and constantly rising standard of living....
</p>
<p> "I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the
willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call...
</p>
<p> "In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look
forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
</p>
<p> "The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere
in the world.
</p>
<p> "The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his
own way--everywhere in the world.
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<list>
<l>January 20, 1941</l>
<l>THE PRESIDENCY</l>
<l>Three Views</l>
</list>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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...."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "It is the history of democracy that, under such dire
circumstances, extraordinary powers must be granted to the
elected Executive....
</p>
<p> "However, there are certain considerations that ought to be
taken into account.
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "In a democracy every grant of extraordinary power should
contain a clause automatically giving that power back to the
people....
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "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."
</p>
<list>
<l>March 24, 1941</l>
<l>THE PRESIDENCY</l>
<l>Decision</l>
</list>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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:
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "Let not dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity
now."
</p>
<p> (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.)
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> "Yet these men and their hypnotized followers call this a
new order. It is not new and it is not order."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> But the applause came loudest when the President marked the
responsibilities that the U.S. had accepted.
</p>
<p> "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....
</p>
<p> "Upon the national will to sacrifice and to work depends the
output of our industry and our agriculture....
</p>
<p> "Upon that will depends our ability to aid other nations
which may determine to offer resistance...."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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
