Roosevelt — Lend-Lease before Congress

Having prepared opinion with the 'arsenal of democracy' and the 'Four Freedoms,' Roosevelt now wants to turn aid to Britain into a lasting mechanism. London is out of hard currency and can no longer pay cash; without a new system, the flow of American arms will dry up. The solution the President has conceived is Lend-Lease: authority to supply, lend or lease war materiel to any country whose defense is deemed vital to the United States, without immediate payment.

The bill, laid before Congress on 10 January 1941 under the symbolic number HR 1776, unleashes a national debate. The isolationists — the America First Committee, Senators Wheeler and Nye, the aviator Lindbergh — see in it a decisive step toward war and an encroachment on the prerogatives of Congress; Wheeler compares it to 'ploughing under every fourth American boy.'

Roosevelt must decide how to carry the fight: throw all his political weight behind an ambitious bill, even at the cost of sharpening the confrontation with the isolationists; amend the text to make it more acceptable at the risk of weakening it; or temporize. The outcome will determine Britain's material capacity to survive.