The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's an old saying. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. There was a lot of talk around this election about how it was the most vicious election in our history. I hate to tell you, but it wasn't even close to that. There have been quite a few real corkers along the way.
Take 1940. (Or, “take 1940, please.” It was a nerve wrecking mess, and we wouldn't miss it if it was gone.)
Well, you have your modern Republicans, and the less said about them, the better. It's always good to be reminded, however, that they didn't just lose their minds yesterday, or in 2016, or in 2000, 1980. They've had a lot of practice with this crazy act of theirs.
Between having COVID time on my hands, worrying about COVID, and being depressed in the first place, I am reading way too much. Almost all non-fiction for a while now. History is somehow more distracting than just reading a story. History must be dovetailed into the facts that you already know about whatever topic is under discussion. Right now I'm reading a wonderful book again, my second run through the 900 pages of Volume I of Richard B. Frank's proposed three volume series on World War II in the Pacific. (I know that I've talked about this on multiple occasions, and I'm not showing off. Nor am I plugging the professor's work. Maybe I'm just sharing my fascination. Forgive my redundancy.)
1940 was a bad, bad year. By about the half-way mark, the list of countries invaded, absorbed, and defeated by Nazi Germany included Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and half of Poland. The other half of Poland had been invaded and absorbed by the Soviet Union. President Roosevelt was an incurable optimist and a hard-nosed realist at the same time. Sure, things looked bleak for “England,” but Roosevelt took a broader view and saw the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, the British Empire, and, having counted their actual naval ships, and the manpower and resources available from the whole British world, he figured they were still in it. Especially with the backing of the United States, which he was anxious to provide.
Popular opinion in the United States was to stay out of the war, that much is certainly true. FDR could see that. But helping out an ally is the American way, so sending material support was acceptable to most people. They really did not want to see another generation of American boys getting caught up in Europe's new mess, and who could blame them? They had good old Uncle Frank sitting on his mom's couch smoking a Camel with a shaky hand, blind in one eye and a little nutsy from the poison gas in World War I.
Pessimism had more adherents at the time, and most of them were Republicans. They, and their powerful newspaper backers, never shut up about it. They were sure that England was going to be absorbed any second. They were “anti-interventionists,” “isolationists,” and “America Firsters.” They opposed aid to England as a lost cause that would only piss off the Nazis. They opposed the draft as an act of provocation that would piss off the Nazis and the Japanese too.
There was a lot of overt pro-Nazi sentiment at the time. You may have seen the film from that big American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. (Reminiscent of Trump, many people liked the Nazis because the Nazis hated the people that the admirers hated.) Henry Ford was a Nazi fan and backer. He advised Hitler on industrial production matters. Charles Lindbergh was a fan, and a big America Firster.
Now we can easily see that FDR was in no hurry to get into the war. He saw it coming, and he was trying to get ready, but he would have been just as happy to see other boys doing the fighting. In the event, America never did voluntarily enter the war; the United States never declared war on anybody. Until, that is, the Japanese unilaterally declared war on America, the British, and the Dutch, simultaneously. Still, we didn't declare war on Japan's ally, Germany. Hitler stupidly declared war on us a few days later. Like it was a personal favor to Churchill! Old Winston had never been so happy! It was the best day of his life! (He said to his top aide after Germany's declaration of war on America, “we are saved!”)
All of that is old news. What was added to the story in Professor Frank's new book?
Talking about the election of 1940, Prof. Frank describes the Republican “apoplexy over the New Deal.” Sound familiar? They've been working against the New Deal ever since, and have gotten dangerously close to getting their way on several occasions. They're still harping on it now.
A big Republican talking point in 1940 was that “Roosevelt's real ambition was to overthrow democracy and install a dictatorship in America.” (Sorry that I cannot provide page numbers for these quotes. I'm on a Kindle.) They pulled that one straight out of their asses in 1940, and they were still accusing the Democrats of the same thing last year. Like a broken record, these guys.
They also hammered on Roosevelt's imaginary “[intent] to take America into the war against the wishes of a clear majority of Americans.” Au contraire! If the opponents had never declared war on America, we might have been perfectly content to allow the Brits, the Russians, and the Chinese to destroy the foes, while giving them prodigious amounts of war materials to do it with.
Both sides in 1940 were accusing the other of being traitors to America. It was all quite acrimonious. FDR made a relatively innocuous deal with the English to trade them some obsolete destroyers for military basing rights in British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. If that deal was one-sided, it was one-sided in America's favor. The destroyers weren't worth much, and the basing rights were a considerable advantage. We were charged with protecting shipments of petroleum products from Venezuela and Columbia to England. Wendell Willkie, running against FDR in 1940, said that the destroyers for bases deal was “[t]he most dictatorial and arbitrary act of any president in the history of the United States.”
The point is, the Republicans have been behaving like Republicans for a long time, and 2020 was not our first presidential election where things got a bit out of hand.
Let me finish on a personal note, or at least with a bit of first-hand knowledge about people's opinion of Wendell Willkie in 1940. My former father-in-law was born in 1918, and had joined the U.S. Navy in 1939 or 1940. He was a Seabee, and he served in the Pacific until 1945. He voted in the 1940 election, for FDR. He was as conservative as a Swiss bank, that guy, built like a tank and tough as nails. He told us a little song they sang during the run up to the election of 1940:
“The horse's tail is long and silky,
And beneath it you'll find Wendell Willkie.”
People knew how to treat a Republican in those days, and they knew who their friends were. FDR won that election with 27 million votes to Willkie's 22 million. (The population of America was 130 million at the time.)
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