Great Problems

Franklin Roosevelt recognized it plainly: the time had come this week when he had to take his problems to the people.

At home and abroad those problems were already in danger of getting out of hand.

So he spent long hours working on his radio address to the nation.

But turns of phrase were not his major difficulty. His difficulty was that on a dozen fronts the tide of events was all too evidently running against the U.S. Only with the people with him had he a chance of turning the tide.

P: Abroad the Germans were threatening U.S. and British command of the Atlantic: Dakar was already almost in Nazi grasp; one of Britain's proudest ships had gone down before a new German dreadnought off Greenland and the proudest ship of the German Navy had been sunk by the British off Brest (see p. 21); Germany's top admiral and the Japanese were talking of war if the U.S. gave further naval help to Britain (see p. 27). Unless the U.S. once again took a firm stand for freedom of the seas (see p. 14), the U.S. might not much longer be able to hold up Britain between itself and Hitler's assaults.

P: At home national defense was out of gear: priorities were in a jumble; however willing most of industry might be, defense production was far short of its urgent requirements; however patriotic most of labor might be, defense strikes still tied up production. A FORTUNE poll showed an overwhelming majority of the people in favor of legally forbidding strikes in defense industries (72.2% against jurisdictional strikes, 68.7% against strikes for a closed shop, 66.5% against strikes for shorter hours, 58.4% against strikes for better working conditions), but neither labor nor industry had yet translated such feelings into results.

P: Worst of all, men who held democracy and country dear were arguing instead of toiling on the means of preserving them.

Unless the U.S. felt its peril as Franklin Roosevelt felt it, national morale, although basically vigorous, would never rise to the problems before the nation. Only then would the nation understand the thing which was paramount in his own mind: that aid to Great Britain must be given not for Britain's sake but for America's.

Believing these things, Franklin Roosevelt had no choice but to turn to his countrymen as he turned to them in the dark hours of 1933. So far as he was concerned, Roosevelt, the President of many emergencies, had come to the greatest emergency of all, a real national emergency in which all the nation's efforts--and then more efforts--were required.

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