The Other 1/6 and the Fate of Democracy
Remembering and commemorating one of the most consequential days in American History
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
Donald Trump’s last public utterance on January 6, 2021 were the words “Remember this Day forever.”
Remembrance is an act that takes place in the future relative to a past event. When an event is remembered forever, especially one of such a public nature as 1/6, it is commemorated as a collective act, as is the case with July 4th, 1776, which celebrates the Declaration of Independence of a nation that twelve years later would become the first constitutional democracy in modern history. On that day we mindfully read and reflect on the words of that all-important document. When Donald Trump exhorted his “great patriots” to “remember this Day forever,” he was beseeching his supporters to collectively remember one of the darkest days in American history.
If Donald Trump wins the election on November 5, 2024, the first opportunity he will have to commemorate the anniversary of 1/6 as the nation’s President will be January 6, 2026, the fifth anniversary of that dark day. It is hard to imagine the unthinkable. If the disturbing and destructive events of 1/6 were unimaginable before they happened, their commemoration on their first historic anniversary is beyond unthinkable. Imagine a president and commander-in-chief presiding over the commemoration of a day that witnessed an armed and violent attack on our Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and nearly upend our constitutional democracy that he incited, inflamed, refused to denounce, declined to stop, and has since glorified and celebrated.
Incredulous, ludicrous, and painfully hard to envision.
There is certainly no analogue in American history for such an occurrence. One would have to create one. Imagine the following sequence of events. Jefferson Davis, as President of the Confederacy, wages a war against our constitutional republic that cost more than 600,000 lives and nearly destroyed our constitutional democracy. Which happened. He is then subsequently fielded as a candidate for president of the United States in 1868. He goes on to defeat his opponent Ulysses S. Grant, the triumphant general of the Union troops. Then on April 4, 1871 Davis presides over the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter, and celebrates it by going before a joint session of Congress to request the “abolition” of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments — the three most significant amendments since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution itself.
One can only speculate how Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States would commemorate the fifth anniversary of January 6. However dispiriting and nightmarish that would be to contemplate one can be certain that it would not be a remorseful day for him and his supporters. 1/6 has already been unofficially elevated as the holiest day in the MAGA calendar, much the same way Adolf Hitler declared 11/9 (the day of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch) the holiest day in the NAZI calendar. It should come as no surprise if Donald Trump made the historic anniversary of that dark day a theatrical occasion to celebrate the triumph of his will-to-power, praise the courageous efforts of the J6 putschists, convicted felons whom he has promised to pardon “on day one,” and eulogize Ashley Babbitt as a martyr for her “heroic and sacrificial acts.”
But how should “we the people of the United States,” who take pride in abiding by the core principles of the first constitutional republic in the modern world, and one formed to “establish Justice” and “insure domestic Tranquility” commemorate 1/6 on its fifth anniversary?
I have some thoughts on how it should be commemorated that are suggested at the end of this piece, but that first require us to remember the “Other 1/6,” whose historic anniversary fell on a day that nearly upended our constitutional democracy, and that we woefully overlooked, as well as neglected to commemorate.
January 6, 2021 was the 80th anniversary of one of the most consequential days in American history. What made it so consequential were two events. Eerily, both took place in the chamber of the House of Representatives before a joint session of Congress between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 2:48 p.m., the same time-period as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol eighty years later.
Both events were extraordinary. The first in its ordinariness, and the second in its momentousness.
Both occurred when western democracy, America’s national security and our democratic way of life faced their greatest threats in history.
Central to those two events were two heroic figures who displayed enormous courage, fortitude, and respect for the working of our constitutional democracy. One was the defeated Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie. The other was the incumbent Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To their combined efforts we owe our deepest gratitude in helping to save western democracy and the freedoms that are at the heart of our democratic way of life when their fates was never more in question.
What transpired during those historic 108 minutes on January 6, 1941, as much as during the infamous 187 minutes eighty years later when the then President Trump did nothing to stop the greatest assault on and desecration of our temple of democracy in our nation’s history, deserves to be told and deeply reflected upon. Remembering those 108 minutes and their seismic impact on the fate of democracy is incumbent on us as we take to the polls on November 5 to decide who will be our next president, so that its fifth anniversary can be solemnly observed in ways that celebrate our democracy and the freedoms it champions.
Peacefully transferring power in 29 minutes
The first event began punctually at 1:03 p.m. on January 6, 1941, when Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas gaveled to order a joint session of the newly-formed 77th Congress to certify the results of the 1940 Presidential election. Vice-President John Nance Garner, as President of the Senate, presided over the counting of the electoral college votes along with Speaker Rayburn. Garner’s role was purely ministerial. The New York Times went so far as to characterize his role as that of “master of ceremonies.” Procedures were dutifully followed as per the 12th Amendment and the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Four tellers were appointed by the House and Senate to count the electoral votes certified by each of the forty-eight states. Two of the tellers were Republicans, Senator Warren Austin and Representative George Tinkham, and two were Democrats, Senator Tom Connally and Representative Robert Ramspeck. The tellers dipped into the box of ballots cast by 531 Presidential electors, taking turns counting the electoral college votes of each of the forty-eight states. When the tallying was completed the parliamentarian of the House, Lewis Deschler, handed the four tellers four tally sheets each to sign. Moments later Vice President Garner announced the results. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party presidential candidate and Henry A. Wallace, its vice-presidential candidate both received 449 votes, and Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential candidate, and Charles L. McNary, its vice-presidential candidate both polled 82 votes. The entire process took just 29 minutes.
There was only one objection. The Republican Senator from Nebraska protested he was unable to hear the announcement of the vote results as they were being tallied state by state. There were so much chattering and side conversations in the House chamber that they drowned out the teller’s voices. Vice President Garner chastised the senators and congressmen, but to no avail. Unlike eighty years later, there was no temporary recess of the joint session and no retreat by senators and congressmen to their respective chambers to debate objections to the certification process. The only reassembling that took place was by senators who went back to their own chamber to hear Senator Connally, on behalf of the tellers, officially report the findings.
The entire certification went as smoothly as any in the history of presidential elections. However, it might not have gone that way.
Assuaging the spirit of revenge
Though the incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt won the election by an incontestably wide plurality, carrying 38 versus Willkie’s 10 states, and winning the popular vote by the sizeable margin of 54.7% versus Willkie’s 44.8%, the campaign that preceded it was one of the most brutal and vitriolic in American history.
Many issues were battled over but two dominated the campaign. The first was the decision by President Roosevelt to run for an unprecedented third term. At that time, nothing in the Constitution prohibited a third-term. Other presidential incumbents in history had attempted to do so, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt, though all failed in their efforts.
Serving two presidential terms was a hallowed 160-year tradition memorialized by George Washington in his famous Farewell Address when he announced his decision to step down after two terms. An extraordinarily popular president, Washington would certainly have won a third term had he chosen to run. Americans were very familiar with the Farewell Address, especially after Washington’s birthday had been established as a federal holiday sixty-one year earlier. After the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Washington’s Farewell Address was arguably the most widely-read and well-known document in American history. Though Washington’s decision to step aside after two terms had more to do with his wishes to retire, the lesson drawn from it was that Americans elect presidents for two terms, and not kings for life. Willkie made the most of that takeaway by lambasting Roosevelt as a power-hungry “third termer” dictator, heatedly contending that “if one man is indispensable, then none of us is free.” That inflammatory charge inflamed the passions of many voters.
There was another lesson to be drawn from Washington’s Farewell Address. It was his warning to the young nation to steer clear of foreign alliances that “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice.” Willkie played that warning to the hilt, exploiting it to appeal to the powerful isolationist sentiments of voters for whom the bloody catastrophe of World War I fueled the flames of communism, fascism, and another Great War that was then spreading like an uncontrollable forest fire across all of Europe. He denounced Roosevelt as a “warmonger,” admonishing the American voter that, “if you reelect ‘Mr. Third Term’ you may expect war in April” and “your boys will be sent overseas,” insinuating that “Mr. Third Termer” had hidden designs to embroil us in another catastrophic war in a generation. The nation was deeply and fiercely polarized, emotions were running dangerously high, and Willkie’s campaign rhetoric only inflamed them.
There was a third and arguably the most important takeaway from Washington’s Farewell Address. It was one that the “father of our nation” dwelled on at length and was by far his greatest concern. It was what Washington called “the spirit of revenge” in politics that he blamed on the excesses of the “spirit of party.” Washington reminded the young and vulnerable republic that throughout history the spirit of revenge had “perpetuated the most horrid enormities and despotism,” “kindled animosities that fomented riots and insurrection,” and posed the greatest threat to public liberty and the sacred laws of our Constitutional republic and fragile Union. He warned that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would exploit the spirit of revenge to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Washington urged that “the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it” and called for a “uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame lest instead of warming it should consume.”
Willkie took Washington’s wise counsel to heart. In a nationwide radio address the morning after the election Willkie conceded defeat, declaring that, “I accept the results of the election with complete good-will.” He celebrated the record voter turnout as an expression of “the vitality of our democratic principles and the adherence of our people to the two-party system,” and insisted upon the “removal of antagonisms in America.” He concluded his address saying he leaves the campaign “with no ill will or bitterness toward anyone.”
Further reflecting on the campaign six days later in an address on Armistice Day, he regretfully acknowledged that “many things were said which, in calmer moments, might have been left unsaid or might have been worded more thoughtfully.” Speaking to his fervent supporters he reiterated that, “I can truthfully say that no bitterness is in my heart and hope there was none in yours,” declaring “we have elected Franklin Roosevelt President. He is your President. He is my President. We all of us owe him respect due his high office. We give him the respect. We will support him with our best efforts for our country.” Willkie went on to talk about the need for loyal and watchful opposition to ensure the vitality of the two-party system and democracy itself, before closing his speech with the well-known quote “with malice towards none, with charity for all” from Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
Three weeks later Willkie gave a speech at the Hotel Commodore at the largest public dinner ever held in New York. In a front-page piece in The Times headlined, “Willkie asks for calm in weighing issues,” the defeated Republican candidate proposed a toast “to the President” to a standing ovation of 3,600 of his most avid supporters.
So, as titular head of the Republican Party, and one of the most popular candidates it had ever nominated for president, receiving a record 22 million votes and inspiring the creation of more than ten thousand avid, grass-roots “Willkie Chapters,” Willkie’s post-election respect and celebration of our constitutional democracy played no small role in calming partisan passions that were running dangerously high in the nation in the aftermath of the election. Had Wendell Willkie chosen a bitter and defiant path and demagogically abetted those passions during the two long months between the November 5 election and its certification on January 6, it is anyone’s guess how the rest of that historic day might have turned out. But Willkie chose the high road, and the extraordinary workings of our constitutional democracy on January 6 proceeded during those twenty-nine minutes in the most ordinary of ways, just as the founding fathers of our nation intended.
He also made it possible for the events of the day, that would make them so historic and consequential to take place peacefully, lawfully, and constitutionally.
The Sunshine Special versus the Beast
Confident that the results of the 1940 election would be certified on an orderly and timely basis, at just past 1:00 p.m. the incumbent and newly-elected President Roosevelt, with leg braces securely in place, stepped into his Presidential limousine, the four-door modified Lincoln convertible nicknamed the “Sunshine Special.” He did not need to command his Secret Service contingent to the U.S. Capitol as another President attempted to do in vain eighty years later almost to the minute inside his limousine nicknamed the “Beast.” On that January morning in 1941 Pennsylvania Avenue was as quiet and safe as ever, as were the grounds of the Capitol, though security was highly elevated. So, the Sunshine Special motored through the nation’s capital without incident. However, all was neither sunshine, quiet, safe nor without incident in the world. As if to emphasize that stark reality, President Roosevelt was accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Norway who had fled into exile after the Nazi invasion of Norway the previous April.
Sixteen months of descending darkness
In the sixteen months since the Nazi invasion of Poland that precipitated the Second World War, darkness had descended over most of Europe and Asia, threatening Africa, Latin America, as well as North America. Indeed, much of the earth. Nothing like it had happened in such a sudden and compressed time-frame in history. The ever-darkening clouds over the democracies of the world weighed heavily on President Roosevelt as they spread month-by-month.
Those sixteen months of descending darkness deserve to be retold and etched in memory.
In September 1939 Nazi Germany, in collusion with the Soviet Union, occupied, divided, and annexed Poland, carrying out massive executions and deportations.
In November, the Soviet Union invaded Finland with enthusiastic support of Nazi Germany, vanquishing it the following March.
On April 9th, Nazi Germany attacked and quickly occupied Denmark and Norway, instituting regime change and banning all parties but the Nazi Party.
On May 10th, the Nazi war machine blitzed into Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium, completing its occupation in just eighteen days.
On the heels of that unprovoked attack on the Low Countries the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe began their assault on France. By early June the Nazi war machine forced more than a third of a million British and French soldiers to make an emergency evacuation across the English Channel. By mid-June it occupied Paris, and a week later secured an Armistice agreement with the newly-installed French head-of-state and Nazi collaborator Henri Petain. The agreement ceded the northern 3/5th of France from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel, and encompassed the entire length of the Atlantic Coast.
A day after the Nazis marched into Paris in mid-June, the Soviet Union invaded the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia instituting regime change. Two months later they were incorporated into the Soviet Union based on previously agreed to secret agreements with Nazi Germany. In late June, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to the oil rich, southern European nation of Romania to cede its Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina territories. Relatively defenseless Romania duly complied. Occupation, forced deportations and annexation soon followed.
By the end of June, the Soviet dream of extending its sprawling and repressive empire from the “Baltic to the Black Sea” had become a reality. So too had Nazi Germany’s domination of the better part of Western and Central Europe, now fully supported by Fascist Italy, which had by then declared war on Great Britain.
Beginning in July, positioned with military bases in the Low Countries and Northern France and supported by stepped-up shipments of vital war-making supplies from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany launched all-out aerial and sea-based attacks on British ports, shipping convoys, airfields, and coastal radar stations, followed in August by relentless bombing of towns, cities and airfields across its south coast and the Midlands, and extending in early September to heavily-populated London.
In late September Italy and Japan joined Nazi Germany in signing a full-fledged military alliance. It was familiarly known as the Tripartite Pact, though officially named the Berlin Pact because it was signed in the Nazi Capital in the presence of its architect, Adolf Hitler. Propagandized as a defensive alliance, it was in fact an agreement among the three fascist powers to recognize and support each other in their mutual quest to divide the world into imperial spheres of influence and break the back of the last vestiges of Great Britain and the French pro-democratic resistance forces. The pact was a major complement to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet “Non-Aggression” Pact with its secret protocols to divide the European Continent, notwithstanding the strong antipathy of its signatories to the Soviet Union. However, as envisioned by Hitler the pact was above all a military alliance against the United States — his ultimate nemesis.
Almost in tandem with the signing of the Berlin Pact, and buoyed by the Nazi war machine’s electrifying victories across western and central Europe, forces from Japan’s recently formed military-dominated, authoritarian government, modeled in part after Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, invaded French Indochina and seized its air and naval bases. The latter were to serve as launching pads for attacking and absorbing the greater part of South and Southeast Asia with its oil-, rubber-, and tin-rich resources into its imperial sphere of influence. Those territorial designs, enthusiastically encouraged by Hitler, were to serve as staging grounds to decimate British and U.S. naval forces stationed in Singapore and Manila.
As the Berlin Pact was being inked, Italy’s ambition to turn the Mediterranean Sea into an Italian lake, absorb the Near East in its sphere of influence and seize control of the Suez Canal — Great Britain’s shipping lifeline to its worldwide resources that was essential to the defense of its homeland — was also revving up with the launch of its military campaign.
Despite setbacks for Germany in its aerial bombing in the “Battle of Britain,” as well as those of Italy in North Africa, Egypt and Greece during the fall, Nazi aggression and dominance only intensified. Beginning in late September and intensifying through the early winter, the Luftwaffe, supported by the Italian air force, began devastating nighttime raids on London, dropping bombs, mines, and incendiary explosives. Abandoning all pretense of attacking military targets, the “Blitz,” was designed to break the morale of British citizens and encourage a regime change and a negotiated settlement that would align it with Nazi Germany much like the puppet Petain government. The raids were devastating and costly in life, civilian infrastructure, and treasure. More than 40,000 civilians were killed during the eight month long “Blitz.”
In October, Nazi Germany established the Warsaw Ghetto that at its height would wall-in almost a half-million Jews, the most heavily-populated concentration camp in history, before its inhabitants were deported to the killing centers of Auschwitz and Treblinka several years later.
In November, Nazi Germany solidified its diplomatic and military position in Southeast Europe and the Balkans. Nearly a half-million German troops crossed into Hungary and amassed at the Romanian border. Before the month was out, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia signed Hitler’s Berlin Pact.
With these developments Nazi Germany’s political and military dominance stretched from the North Seas to the Black Seas and across Western Europe, complementing the Soviet’s reach from the Baltic to the Black Seas, and from Eastern Poland to the Pacific Ocean. As unprecedented was the breath of this rapacious land grab, it paled by comparison to the tyranny and terror, mass detentions and population transfers, and the staggering number of executions and killings of civilians based on religion, ethnicity and political persuasions that followed in its wake.
So, on the eve of January 6, 1941 only two democracies remained capable of resisting the madness consuming the continents of Europe and Asia: a weakened Great Britain and an insufficiently involved United States. It was far from a foregone conclusion that Great Britain would prevail, especially without substantially greater support from the United States.
Great Britain was in dire straits, its ability to survive the Nazi assault seriously compromised. It had no continental allies and no large army. British merchant vessels and convoys delivering vital food and military supplies were being ravaged by Nazi oceanic raids. Worse, its entire fleet was at risk of falling into German and Japanese hands. The coffers of the once financial center of the world were near empty. After sixteen costly months of war on multiple fronts, its ability to fund the purchase of ships, planes, tanks, and raw materials essential to its defense, most of which were being supplied by the United States on a “cash and carry” basis, was dangerously reaching its limits. And, most of all, despite its heroic valiant efforts to defend itself against months long aerial and sea born attacks against its homeland, it was an open question how much longer these efforts were sustainable. It is easy, in retrospect, to minimize the risk of Great Britain suffering the same fate as France, but not so at the time.
And though many Americans favored America becoming the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as Roosevelt had called for eight days earlier on December 29 in one of his informal fireside chats, isolationist and appeasement forces in Congress and the nation at large were powerful and vocal, and the grass-roots America First movement embraced by the legendary aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, who would soon become its chief spokesperson, was just beginning its nationwide mobilization campaign to fight against it.
Knowing sociopathic madness when you see it
No one more than Roosevelt appreciated the threat posed by Hitler, the Nazi war machine and its collaborators, the risks of Great Britain’s defeat, and the dire consequences for western democracy and civilization, as well as America’s national security should those forces prevail.
He knew those consequences when he led the fight in November, 1939 to modify the U.S. Neutrality Act to allow for supplying arms to Great Britain on a cash and carry basis.
He knew them in June, 1940 when six days after the Nazi occupation of Paris he created a bipartisan national coalition government by announcing the appointment of two prominent Republicans, Henry Stimson as Secretary of War and Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy.
He knew them when he led the fight to secure the largest defense budget and institute the first peacetime draft in American history during the summer of the Battle of Britain.
He knew them when in early July, 1940 he reversed his decision to retire to Hyde Park and chose to run for a third term, as George Washington would likely have done under a similar set of circumstances, driven by a sense of responsibility, and not by a quest for king-like power.
He knew them in September when he led the fight to provide Great Britain with desperately needed destroyers in exchange for military bases in the Western Hemisphere to get around the limits of the “cash and carry” restrictions of the modified U.S. neutrality act.
He knew them when at a mid-December press conference in his folksy manner he compared Great Britain to a neighbor whose home catches fire, and instead of telling him he will have to pay $15 for his hose to put it out, he just tells the neighbor to return it after the fire is extinguished.
He knew those consequences when on December 29th he gave one of the most powerful, timely, and impassioned addresses ever delivered to the nation, calling upon American to become the “Arsenal of Democracy.”
He knew them when on the morning on January 6 at 11:00 a.m. he met with industrialist William Knudsen, head of General Motors and labor leader Sidney Hillman, head of the Congress of Industrial Organization, and appointed them co-equal members of a soon-to-be announced Office of Production Management to oversee the most herculean rearmament program in the nation’s history. By enlisting these two giants of capital and labor to serve on the four-member board, along with Republican’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Henry Knox, Roosevelt was putting in place a national unity defense team embracing labor, capital, Democrats and Republicans.
Most of all he knew the threat posed by Hitler, the Nazi war machine with its ever-growing number of collaborators, and the dire consequences for western democracy, civilization, and America’s national security should Great Britain go the way of France. He knew them because he fully grasped the unbounded depravity, vileness, and sociopathic madness of Hitler and his limitless appetite for world domination. He had grasped it as early as November, 1938 when Hitler unleashed the most horrific pogrom in modern history known as Kristallnacht on the fifteenth anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and more so four months later when he ripped into shreds the Munich Agreement with his invasion of Czechoslovakia.
More than any other American public figure at the time, Roosevelt recognized the end consequences of Hitler’s sociopathic madness if it were not to be stopped, a lesson in foresight and leadership qualities to be heeded in our times.
Roosevelt also knew there were many decent Americans and legislatures who did not fully know or appreciate those end consequences, and that it was his monumental challenge and responsibility as Commander-in-Chief of the nation to make sure they did, and to let them know that he, like them, hoped and prayed that stopping Hitler and his sycophantic followers would not require the sacrifice of the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans.
All this knowledge weighed heavily on the President and Commander-in-Chief of the nation as he motored down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol to deliver the eighth and final draft of his State of the Union address before a joint session of the newly-elected 77th Congress.
What President Roosevelt did not or could not know at the time was that this speech would be the most historic and consequential State of the Union ever delivered in person before a Joint Session of Congress.
Nor did he know, nor could have possibly imagined at 2:03 p.m. when he began to deliver the address from the rostrum of the House Chamber, that eighty years later, almost to the minute, a mob led by armed thugs incited by a sitting president of the United States would violently break into the U.S. Capitol, desecrate it, beat up Capitol guards, threaten the lives of the Vice President and Speaker of the House, attempt to negate the will of the voters, stop the peaceful transfer of power, and upend more than two centuries of a sacred and constitutional democratic proceeding.
Taking on the Beast on behalf of the Four Freedoms in 45 minutes
The January 6, 1941 State of the Union Address is famously and deservedly known as the Four Freedoms Speech. It is so named because it spelled out the four freedoms that President Roosevelt hoped would become the inspiration guiding the world’s democracies as they emerged victorious from the human calamity of World War II and shape the contours of the peace to follow. Those higher ideals were the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — four freedoms that German Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese imperial nationalism and Soviet Communism were intent on violently erasing from much of the world.
However, Roosevelt only named those basic freedoms in five short minutes at the end of the forty-five-minute speech that focused on the grave threats to America’s national security and our democratic way of life — both external and internal — and what he proposed and expected Congress to do about them. It was the first forty-minutes of that speech that made it the most consequential State of the Union Address in American history for, without America stepping up to become the Arsenal of Democracy, those four freedoms would have remained dreams extinguished by worldwide Nazi barbarism and savagery.
Roosevelt began on an alarming note, describing the moment we were living in as unprecedented in history because never had American security been as seriously threatened, and the “democratic way of life in every part of the world” as ruthlessly assailed by powers whose end goal was to dominate the world. He pointedly reminded Congress that those “assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.”
Roosevelt praised the “armed defense of democratic existence” that was “being gallantly waged in four continents,” but he gravely warned that if that defense failed, and the population and resources of Europe and Asia, and Africa and Austral-Asia were to fall into the hands of those assailants they would dwarf those of the whole of the Western Hemisphere.
He exhorted “every member of the executive branch of government and every member of the Congress” to embrace with single mindedness, and “great responsibility and accountability,” actions and policy to meet the looming “foreign peril.”
He resolutely exclaimed that, “in fulfillment of this purpose we will not be intimidated by the threats of dictators,” nor be misled by appeasers and that “small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.”
Roosevelt then spelled out the steps that needed to be taken without regard to partisanship:
- The first was the “immediate need” for a “swift and driving increase in our armament production,” and “greatly increased new appropriations and authorizations” to enable it.
- The second, and in many ways the most challenging and demanding of his requests of Congress, was for authorization and funding for the manufacture of “additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now at war with aggressor nations.” Roosevelt was now asking Congress what eight days earlier he had asked of the American people, and that was, “to act as an arsenal for them as well as for ourselves.”
Roosevelt went on to explain that to fight the “foreign peril,” the remaining democracies, especially Great Britain, needed “billions of dollars’ worth of the weapons of defense.” He disclosed to the newly-elected Congress what he had soberly and privately learned from Winston Churchill the previous month, that Great Britain was running out of cash. He warned that if we failed to assist it our democratic way of life was at grave risk.
Roosevelt conveyed the urgency of the need to act, insisting that “the happiness of future generations of Americans may well depend on how effective and how immediate we can make our aid felt,” forcefully asserting that “the nation’s hands must not be tied when the nation’s life is in danger.”
He called upon all Americans “to make the sacrifices that the emergency…demands,” urging that “whatever stands in the way of speed and efficiency in defense, in defense preparations of any kind, must give way to national need.” He exhorted those who build our defenses to “have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending” and from the awareness of “their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America.”
Roosevelt concluded with a hope that “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms,” which he went on to enumerate before ending with a call for faith in freedom and human rights and “unity of purpose,” to which he exclaimed “there can be no end save victory.”
Those last words exuded a defiant confidence that would buoy the spirits of the millions of everyday Americans whom he hoped and expected to collectively become the arms, legs, and brain power of the Arsenal of Democracy.
The Finest Hour of any sitting president
To borrow a phrase associated with Winston Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” address before the House of Commons the previous May, when he became Prime Minister in the aftermath of the humiliating retreat of British troops from the beach of Dunkirk, it was Roosevelt’s “finest hour,” and among the finest of any sitting president and commander-in-chief in the nation’s history.
Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas lionized the speech as, “one of the greatest deliveries of all time, not merely of American history.”
Congressman William Schulte from Indiana acclaimed it as a “speech that went to the heights that showed himself [Roosevelt] as a beacon in this dark world that everyone is looking at.”
The Chicago Daily Times applauded it as one of President Roosevelt’s greatest speeches. “Speaking for a united people, soberly and with dignity,” the editors, drawing on the enduring words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address waxed with praise that, “he pledged to the democratic peoples of the world the full strength of this nation that government of the people, for the people and by the people shall survive.”
The next day The Times led with the front-page headline in bold caps that stretched across eight columns with the words, ROOSEVELT ASKS ALL-OUT AID TO DEMOCRACIES TO SEND THEM SHIPS, PLANES, TANKS AND GUNS. Describing the atmosphere in the House Chamber as one of “solemnity reflecting the seriousness of the times,” it was struck by the deep reflecting it had occasioned among senators and congressmen as they absorbed the immense responsibility they were asked to assume. It characterized the entire forty-five minutes as one of perfect decorum except when Speaker Rayburn called the Joint Session to order and banged the gavel so hard that it shattered in all directions.
Three days later Winston Churchill hailed President Roosevelt and expressed his boundless gratitude. He proclaimed the speech as “… a most fortunate occurrence that at this awe-striking climax in world affairs there should stand at the head of the American Republic a famous statesman, long versed and experienced in the work of government in whose heart there burns the fire of resistance to aggression and oppression, and whose sympathies and nature make him the sincere and undoubted champion of justice and of freedoms of the victims of wrongdoing wherever they may be.” He rejoiced “that this preeminent figure should newly have received the unprecedented honor of being called for a third term to lead the American democracies.”
More than a concept of a plan
Just past 3:00 pm after delivering his speech, Roosevelt motored back to the White House in the Sunshine Special. The mid-afternoon sun had taken the chill out of the D.C. winter air, almost enough to lower the convertible top. The world was still very dark, but on that day the sun was shining brightly with hope in D.C. Wasting little time, Roosevelt met with his Budget Director Harold Smith to review his new defense budget, and then with his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to review the status of the Lend-Lease bill, the first major “Arsenal of Democracy” piece of legislation. Harry Hopkins, his closest political adviser, and friend, was already halfway across the Atlantic, having been dispatched by Roosevelt on a mission to London to brief Winston Churchill on the details of the bill. The very next day Roosevelt sent the bill to Congress. In tandem he announced the establishment of the Office of Production Management, which promptly issued its first executive order urging “…the aid and the active, aggressive and enthusiastic cooperation of every man, woman and child in the United States if we are to make this arsenal (for the democracies) in America adequate to the successful defense of democracy and freedom.” All in a day’s work on the “Other 1/6,” and into the early hours of the next morning.
Three days later House Majority Leader John McCormick introduced the Lend-Lease bill as House Resolution 1776, one of the most significant and far-reaching pieces of defense legislation in American history. It empowered the president to sell, transfer, exchange, lease, lend and provision food, oil, information, and material resources “to any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
The House debated the bill in committee hearings and on the floor chamber for two weeks, then swiftly voted in favor of its passage on February 8.
The Senate began hearings at the end of January, and despite strong opposition from a vocal minority of Republican and Democratic Congressmen, as well as a massive campaign by the staunchly isolationist America First Committee ambassador Charles Lindbergh, who not only favored a negotiated settlement with Hitler but who forcefully testified against the Lend Lease bill at the hearings, the Senate passed it on March 8 by a vote of 60 to 31 with a few minor modifications.
Three days later, on March 11 the House passed it by a vote of 317 to 71. Within hours President Roosevelt signed the massive seven-billion-dollar aid package into law. The following day he requested appropriation of the full amount and duly received it from Congress.
With such overwhelming Congressional support for the Lend-Lease Act, Roosevelt was able to deliver a powerful message to the Nazis and Fascists, warning them not to question “our unanimity.” Addressing White House correspondents after its passage, he declared that “As a united nation…our democracy has gone into action.” Though acknowledging that “the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at…when the decision is made, it is proclaimed…with the voice of one hundred and thirty million…and the world is no longer left in doubt.”
A defeated Presidential candidate channeling the brooding Lincoln and beckoning a Party born of Freedom
Almost one-third of GOP Senators and fifteen percent of House Republicans had voted in favor of the Lend-Lease bill despite enormous pressure from isolationist forces made up mostly, though not entirely, of Republicans. A major factor in swaying Republican senators and House representatives in favor of the unprecedented legislation, and an almost singular force in creating the bipartisan unity of purpose in defense of democracy and America’s national security, was the defeated Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.
On January 13, Willkie issued a statement supporting its passage, despite reservations about the unlimited executive powers it conferred. “Democracy is endangered,” he stated, and made it abundantly clear that “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.” He went on to say that, “at the same time the people are virtually unanimous in their desire to build for the United States the strongest defense system in the world.” He declared that under “such dire circumstances” as democracy faced, “extraordinary powers must be granted to the elected Executive.” He insisted that democracy “cannot hope to defend itself from aggression in any other way,” concluding that “it is for this reason only that I favor grant of power at this time to the present Administration.”
Willkie warned that “appeasers, isolationists or lip-service friends of Britain will seek to sabotage the program for aid to Britain and her allies behind the screen of opposition to the bill,” emphatically arguing that “it makes a vital difference to the United States which side prevails in the present conflict,” categorically refuting “the statement that our national security is not involved in a British defeat.” Pleading mostly to his fellow Republicans, he insisted that “we must see the whole world, and we must recognize the dangers that face us, not alone from within but from without.”
Willkie concluded his statement by disclosing he was going to England to get a firsthand account of what it was up against and what “the American people will inevitably be faced [with] while democracy is under attack.” Though the trip was at his own initiative the mission was planned in coordination with President Roosevelt.
However, Willkie cut his trip short to help ensure enough Republican votes to secure passage of the Lend-Lease bill, worried that Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were presenting a united front to kill it, and that Lindbergh’s and fellow-appeaser Joseph Kennedy’s congressional testimonies against the bill would derail it.
Upon his return from England, Willkie reiterated his firm support for the Lend-Lease bill in a formal statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “American democracy,” he told the Committee members, “has a fateful decision to make at this time.” Speaking especially to the Republican isolationists on the Committee who had been wooed by appeasers and isolationists Kennedy and Lindbergh, Willkie voiced his concern that “perhaps the American people have not yet fully grasped the extent of the crisis, or their responsibility with regard to it,” insisting that “if we isolate ourselves, Britain may have great difficulty surviving” and warned “that if she is defeated, the totalitarian powers will control most of the world,” and that “the United States and Canada would be ringed about by totalitarian powers, using totalitarian methods of trade unfriendly to the United States and not reluctant to fight.”
That evening Willkie addressed members of the Republican Party at a Lincoln Day dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Referring to Lincoln as, “that man who could love those he fought,” he imagined “him now, the great brooding figure praying somehow that through these difficult times a united America will arise that will save us in this world of turmoil.” He reminded his audience that the Republican Party was “founded to preserve freedom,” and urged it to “say that here are free men like ourselves struggling to preserve themselves.”
As titular head of the Republican Party, Willkie’s two public addresses on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, as well as the cumulative effect of his three- months-long calls for unity of purpose in the face of an existential threat to world democracy and American national security since his defeat at the polls in November, helped considerably to shift public opinion in favor of the Lend-Lease bill. He courageously defied Republican leadership of both houses heavily swayed by a rank-and-file base that reviled bipartisanship, minimized the worldwide threat to democracy, and maligned Roosevelt as a dictator and warmonger.
Those Republican leaders did not take kindly to Willkie’s public utterances, to put it mildly. Their reaction was brutal and Willkie barely dodged a formal vote of expulsion from the Party by House Republicans. Offered a tidy sum by a major Republican donor and heavy-duty support from Republican news outlets to head up a nationwide campaign against the Lend-Lease bill, Willkie duly rebuffed it. Spinelessness was not an attribute of his genetic makeup.
Reflecting on Willkie’s impact on the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, and his championing of America becoming the Arsenal of Democracy, the eminent publicist Walter Lippman acutely observed that, “under any other leadership but his, the Republican party would have turned its back upon Great Britain, causing all who still resisted Hitler to feel that they were abandoned.”
And those embattled resistors were not to be abandoned thanks in no small part to Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate who took Washington’s wise counsel to heart, embracing “unity of purpose” over “the spirits of revenge.” Though Lend-Lease’s impact was not immediately felt in a material sense, its passage buoyed the spirits of the embattled Brits and catalyzed America’s defense mobilization in preparation for fighting a two-front world war that broke out when on December 7 — eleven months and one day after President Roosevelt’s Four Freedom’s speech - Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later Nazi Germany issued a declaration of war against the United States.
During the multiyear war the Lend-Lease program expended more than fifty billion dollars in support of Allied nations. The material transfers of vital military and civilian goods played no small part in fending off the greatest threat to the American democratic way of life and its national security in its history. All thanks to a President and Commander-in-Chief who took his oath of office to heart, and to a defeated presidential candidate of the opposition party who chose nation, constitution and freedom over party and ambition when it truly mattered.
“Remembering that day” another way
January 6, 2026 will be the eighty-fifth anniversary of the “other 1/6”, a day that well deserves to be remembered. How should it be commemorated?
There are many ways, but here are a handful of thoughts to consider. Perhaps, it could be commemorated by an act of Congress signed by the President of the United States that makes it a day of mindful reflection named “Freedom Day”;
So that it becomes a day of mindful contemplation of those freedoms that make American great and that binds us together as a nation, but are so easy to take for granted as we go about our daily routines;
So that it becomes a day to honor and celebrate great public figures in American history who have championed and defended our precious democracy and valiantly exhibited the courage and determination to stand up for it when it mattered;
So that it becomes a day when we read, and reflect on the meaning and significance of the Four Freedoms speech, Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy fireside chat, and Willkie’s Lincoln’s Day Dinner address, just as we read, and reflect on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech on their birthdays;
So that it becomes a day when we pay tribute to those who saved democracy on our generation’s 1/6 — a day, for example, to honor and celebrate former Vice-President Michael Pence (a fellow Indianian like Wendell Willkie), and former congressional representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, all three of whom had the courage and wisdom to do the right thing on 1/6 and thereafter and who:
- Passionately embraced America’s role as an Arsenal of Democracy when it came to defending Ukraine and its democratic way of life against the same megalomaniac madness that brought us World War II;
- Took to heart the meaning of Wendell Willkie’s idea of “loyal opposition”;
- Loudly heard George Washington’s prescient warning about the danger to our constitutional republic and fragile union arising from “spirit of revenge” exploited by “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who “kindled animosities that fomented riots and insurrection” and;
- Stepped up big-time to protect our democratic way of life when it truly mattered, despite enormous risks to their political careers, and even lives, but not to their legacies;
So that it becomes a day when we thank the men- and women-in blue who heroically defended our temple of democracy on 1/6, and mourn the lives of those who died doing so, as well as the tragic death of Ashley Babbitt who sadly was led astray by the big lie of a stolen election;
And may it be a day when the sun shines bright and strong, warms the D.C. winter skies, and illuminates the bronze statue of Lady Freedom that stands atop the dome of our temple of democracy proudly bearing the wreath of victory, just as it did eight-five years before when hope, courage and determination trumped fear, cowardice, and timidity.
Let not fear preside over our children’s memories
The American literary giant Philip Roth begins his fictional historical novel The Plot Against America with the words “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” The fear hanging over his main character’s childhood memories is a result of the horrors that transpired in the two years after Hitler-admirer Charles Lindbergh, the Republican candidate for President, defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt on November 5, 1940. Thankfully, Wendell Willkie was the actual Republican nominee and gracefully conceded defeat when Franklin Roosevelt won the election. Let us make sure our children and grandchildren are as thankful decades into the future, and that joy and relief instead of fear and trauma preside over their memories of the outcome of the presidential election on November 5, 2024 - and that the plot against America remains a work of fiction.
In Yours and My Discharge
In February 2021, on the eve of the Senate Impeachment trial of former President Trump, I concluded a piece entitled, Democracy on Trial, pleading that Senate jurors render a conviction that “prohibits Donald Trump from ever holding public office again,” and warning that the “failure to do so would leave the nation with little assurance that January 6th does not become prologue to even darker days.”
Darker days may well be fast approaching if on November 5 Donald Trump is elected the 47th President of the United States. The words “prologue to even darker days,” were borrowed from the great literary giant of tragedy William Shakespeare, who in his play The Tempest reflected through the voice of the treacherous character Antonio, “whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge.” Those words seethed with both murderous intent and devilish confidence in the inexorability of a crime yet to be committed. However, the words “in your and my discharge” that implied agency in the commission of a future, murderous crime, also implied the agency to call upon the courage, strength, and determination to forestall it and to create a better and more hopeful future. One murderous crime against our democracy was committed with devilish intent on 1/6 by the then sitting president of the United States. Another looms.
Who as President presides over the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, and the 85th anniversary of one of the brightest, on January 6, 2026 is “in yours and my discharge.”
Robert Leonard Berkowitz is the author of Darker than a Thousand Pogroms, 9/11 and the Holocaust, The Long Damn Summer of ’42 and Once Upon a Time in Queens, and other essays. They can be found on Medium.com
