Roosevelt in Boston: “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”

On the evening of 30 October 1940, six days before the election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke in the packed hall of the Boston Garden. He talked about the navy, the air force and the army, and at one point he addressed himself directly to the parents of the young men who were just beginning to be called up: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” This sentence, spoken without the qualification with which the President usually accompanied such assurances, became the most famous promise of the 1940 campaign and one of Roosevelt’s most frequently quoted utterances. It came the day after another event that had brought home to Americans how close the war was: on 29 October the first numbers were drawn in Washington in the first peacetime draft in the country’s history.

The lottery in the Departmental Auditorium

The Selective Training and Service Act, which Roosevelt had signed on 16 September, did not provide for calling up everyone who registered, but only some of them, in an order determined by lot. On 16 October more than 16 million men aged 21 to 35 registered across the country. Each of the roughly 6,500 local draft boards gave its registrants serial numbers, from 1 up to a maximum of 7,836. A nationwide lottery was to determine the order in which those numbers would be called. The same number was therefore held by a different man on every board, and the drawing of a single number moved several thousand men across the country up the queue for service at once.

The drawing took place on 29 October in the Departmental Auditorium on Constitution Avenue in Washington, and it was a carefully staged spectacle, broadcast on the radio. The opaque capsules containing the numbers were brought in under an escort of First World War veterans and poured into a large glass bowl – the same one from which draft numbers had been drawn in 1917. They were stirred with a wooden ladle made from a beam taken from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, was blindfolded with a strip of linen cut from the covering of a chair that had been used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. All this was meant to emphasise that the new draft continued an American civic tradition and was not militarism alien to the country.

Roosevelt opened the ceremony with a short radio address. It was, he said, a most solemn ceremony, accompanied by no fanfare, no bugles and no drums – and there should be none. He explained to his listeners how the lottery worked: only the first ten per cent of the numbers drawn, about 1.64 million men, were regarded as “drawn first”, and 800,000 of them were to go into training in the first year. More than 95 per cent of those registered would therefore not be called up that year. The President read out passages from letters from representatives of the three great faiths – the Protestant Federal Council of Churches, the Jewish Synagogue Council of America and the Catholic Archbishop Francis Spellman, military vicar of the army and navy – and addressed the draftees themselves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces: the army they were joining had always existed for one purpose only, the defence of freedom, and it was for that purpose alone that they were being called.

Then Stimson reached into the bowl, took out the first capsule and handed it to the President. Roosevelt read out: 158. According to press reports, a woman in the hall cried out so loudly that listeners to CBS radio heard it – her son held that very number on his board. Across the country some 6,175 men held number 158. The subsequent numbers were read out by officers, and the drawing, in which every capsule had to be taken out of the bowl, went on for many hours. The ceremony deliberately echoed 20 July 1917, when the then Secretary of War, Newton Baker, also blindfolded, drew from the same bowl the first number of the draft for the army that was to fight in France – 258.

On the basis of the order established by the lottery, the local boards sent out questionnaires, classified the men and sent those fit for service for medical examinations. The first draftees put on uniform on 18 November 1940.

The campaign for a third term

The lottery and the Boston speech fell in the last week of a campaign unlike any America had yet seen. Since the days of George Washington, who in 1796 had declined to seek re-election, an unwritten rule had held that a president served no more than two terms. Roosevelt kept his intentions to himself for a long time, and when in July the Democratic Party convention in Chicago nominated him for the third time, he explained that in the face of the war in Europe he could not refuse to serve his country. He also announced that he would not conduct an ordinary campaign, because his duties did not allow him to leave Washington, and that if he did travel, it would be to inspect armaments plants and bases.

His opponent was Wendell Willkie, a lawyer and president of a large utility company, until recently a Democrat, who had never held public office. The Republican Party chose him at the end of June in Philadelphia, a few days after the fall of France, in preference to the opponents of involvement in European affairs, Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft, precisely because he favoured aid to Britain. Willkie opposed neither the draft nor the transfer of destroyers to the British as such; he criticised only the way in which the President had concluded the destroyers-for-bases deal, without the participation of Congress. All summer, therefore, he attacked above all the New Deal – its cost, its bureaucracy and its hostility to business – and the third term itself. “If one man is indispensable, then none of us is free,” he repeated.

Such a campaign, however, was getting nowhere. Gallup polls at the beginning of October showed a clear lead for Roosevelt, whose standing had risen after the destroyers deal in September. Willkie’s advisers, among them the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Joseph Martin, urged him that the voters really cared about only one issue: the war. Willkie changed his tone. He began to portray Roosevelt as a warmonger who was secretly binding the country with commitments to foreign powers and would drag it into the war, while promising that as president he would keep America out of it. The press attributed to him the barbed remark that if the President’s promise to keep the boys out of foreign wars was worth no more than his promise to balance the budget, the boys were almost on the transports already. The Battle of Britain was drawing to a close, a German invasion of the British Isles no longer seemed imminent, and the fear of being dragged into the war was growing. The argument struck home with voters, especially in the Midwest and among Americans of Irish, German and Italian descent. Roosevelt’s lead in the polls began to melt away.

Other opponents of the President joined Willkie. On 25 October the labour leader John L. Lewis, head of the great Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and an isolationist, called on workers in a radio address to vote for Willkie and announced that if Roosevelt won he would step down as leader of the CIO. Democratic politicians from the big cities sent alarming telegrams to the White House: mothers were afraid of war, and the President had to tell them plainly. Roosevelt therefore decided to take to the road after all. In the last two weeks of the campaign he delivered a series of major speeches, all broadcast on the radio: on 23 October in Philadelphia, on 28 October at Madison Square Garden in New York, on 30 October in Boston and on 2 November in Cleveland.

In Philadelphia he called the charge that the government had secretly concluded agreements with foreign states the worst “fear bomb” the Republicans had thrown, denied it emphatically and quoted his party’s platform: “We will not participate in foreign wars, and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack.” In New York he listed how the Republicans in Congress had voted against successive bills on defence and aid to threatened countries, and coined the rhythmic formula “Martin, Barton and Fish” – from the names of three Republican congressmen, Joseph Martin, Bruce Barton and the isolationist Hamilton Fish – which from then on the crowds at his rallies chanted along with him.

An evening in the Boston Garden

On 30 October Roosevelt toured New England. In Hartford, Connecticut, he visited the Pratt & Whitney aero-engine works, which had increased production tenfold in a year, and in the evening he stood before the crowd in the Boston hall. In his speech he called Boston, through which he had passed often since his student days at Harvard in nearby Cambridge, his “old stamping ground”, but it was also a city particularly susceptible to Willkie’s arguments. For Massachusetts’s numerous voters of Irish descent, aid to Britain had unhappy associations, and news of the previous day’s lottery was fresh in every home where a young man lived.

The speech was for the most part a defence of the administration’s record on defence. The President recalled that since 1933 the number of ships in commission had risen from 193 to 337 and the navy’s manpower from 106,000 to 210,000 men, that in the last two months the country had acquired bases on British possessions from Newfoundland to South America, and that the purpose of it all was to keep a potential aggressor as far as possible from American shores. He reproached the Republicans for voting against the construction of battleships and against funds for the Army Air Corps. He also announced – “using Boston instead of the White House” – that in the last few days the British had asked for permission to order a further 12,000 aircraft from American factories, which would raise their orders to more than 26,000 machines, and that he had asked the officials responsible for production priorities to give the request sympathetic consideration. He praised “a Boston boy”, the ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, who had just returned from England and the day before, despite his scepticism about British chances, had endorsed the President in a radio address.

He devoted most attention to the draftees. He said that the officers and men of the army and the National Guard would form the core around which the 800,000 young men selected that year from the nearly 17 million registered – fewer than five per cent – would be trained. The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, had reportedly told him that training them was a “profound honour” for the army. He called the most “inexcusable and unpatriotic” falsehood of the campaign the claim that the men called up would have nowhere to live: by 5 January, he assured his audience, quarters for 930,000 soldiers would be ready across the country. He assured mothers and fathers that every one of their sons would be well housed and well fed. And straight away he added: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” They were going into training, he went on, to form a force so strong that by its very existence it would keep the threat of war far from American shores. “The purpose of our defense is defense.”

Missing from that sentence were the words “except in case of attack”, which a week earlier in Philadelphia the President had quoted from the party platform. According to the recollections of his speechwriters, Samuel Rosenman and the playwright Robert Sherwood, the qualification was dropped under pressure from politicians who demanded the simplest possible assurance for anxious mothers. When the omission was pointed out to the President, he reportedly replied that it was not needed, because it was implicit in the very meaning of the sentence: if America were attacked, the war would no longer be foreign. Sherwood wrote years later that those words, and especially “again and again and again”, still made him burn with shame. Willkie, listening to the speech on the radio, reportedly exploded, according to journalists: “That hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me!”

Roosevelt returned to this theme until the end of the campaign. On 2 November in Cleveland, in his last major speech before the election, he explained that he and the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, were staying close to Washington “solely in the interest of peace”, and presented his administration’s foreign policy as consistent service to the cause of peace. Willkie ended his campaign the same day with a rally at Madison Square Garden. The polls put him a few points behind, but indicated that the gap was narrowing.

Significance

On 5 November 1940 Roosevelt won the election, becoming the first and only president to win a third term. He received about 27.3 million votes, just under 55 per cent, against 22.3 million for Willkie, and 449 electoral votes against 82, carrying 38 of the 48 states. It was a clear victory, but more modest than in 1932 and 1936. Willkie, although defeated, did not become the leader of opposition to aid for Britain; on the contrary, in 1941 he backed Roosevelt in the dispute over the Lend-Lease Act, which made America the “arsenal of democracy”. His nomination meant that in the year of greatest danger for the British both of the great American parties supported aid to them, and the draft and the first steps towards war did not become the object of party strife.

The Boston promise, however, became a burden for Roosevelt. Over the following year the United States, still formally neutral, took on one task after another in the Atlantic – from escorting convoys to the order, issued in September 1941, to fire on German submarines – and the President’s critics reminded him of his words of October 1940. Japan settled the matter: after the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 the war ceased to be “foreign” in exactly the sense in which Roosevelt had explained it to his advisers, and four days later Germany and Italy declared war on America. The sons of the audience in the Boston Garden, among them hundreds of thousands called up thanks to the lottery of 29 October, went on to fight in Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

Historians still argue over how to judge this promise: as ordinary electioneering rhetoric, as a deliberate deception of the voters by a president who already regarded America’s entry into the war as increasingly likely, or as the price he had to pay in a country full of isolationist feeling to stay in power and continue aid to Britain. Roosevelt’s third term, and then his fourth, also provoked a lasting reaction: in 1947 Congress passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1951, which limits a president to two terms.