On Topic: Then as now

The upfront premise of political reporter Lynne Olson's latest book, 'Those Angry Days,” is about the struggle for public opinion - whether to fight or not to fight.

The book, just out in paperback, details the domestic debate, from 1939 until Japan's strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941, over what role America should take in the coming battle in Europe. On one side was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who worried over how to win this nation's public opinion to join in the growing foreign war.

(As Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said, 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.”)

On the other side was Charles Lindbergh, an international celebrity since his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Lucky Lindy, as the newsreels dubbed him, was an avowed isolationist and made no secret of his beliefs about the superiority of Germany's air force - he did know a thing or two about airplanes.

In a speech in Des Moines, for example, Lindbergh not only advised America to ally itself with Germany - this after that nation had invaded Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Denmark and Norway and still looked plenty hungry - he railed against the Jews, whom he viewed as 'a danger” because of 'their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Oh, my.

But there's another conflict being waged in Olson's book, one that continues today: the frequent animosity between big business and big government.

The antagonism between the captains of industry - and later the lieutenants and corporals, too - and the feds began way back, of course. Olson notes that while FDR was almost universally admired when he first took up residence in the White House in 1933, as he and Congress grappled with the Great Depression, over time:

…

the New Deal did draw increasing fire from business and industry executives, Wall Street bankers and other well-to-do Americans, who condemned its penchant for heavy government spending, stricter federal regulation of business and banking, and encouragement of labor unions.

FDR's detractors claimed he was 'intent on destroying ‘the American way of life.'”

Sound familiar?

By 1940, Olson writes, Roosevelt 'was still passionately hated by a substantial segment of the business community and that a number of prominent businessmen, fearing for their profits, had advocated a negotiated peace between the British and Hitler.”

And business wasn't alone in some of that stay-at-home sentiment. A Gallup poll as late as 1939 contended that 70 percent of Americans who responded believed the United States was wrong for getting involved in World War I, the author notes.

The Republican presidential candidate in 1940, Wendell Willkie, had been head of Commonwealth and Southern, an electric utility that held a monopoly over much of the South. But just as with well-fixed politicians of today, he presented himself as regular folk and the federal government as a mean old bully.

In 1993, when C&S had campaigned against FDR's plan to create the Tennessee Valley Authority, Willkie had claimed his giant company was 'locked in combat with the Goliath of an oppressive government.”

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, guiding hand of the New Deal, was convinced that if Willkie won the 1940 election, '…

the moneyed interests would be in full control and we could expect an American brand of fascism as soon as he could set it up.”

(After his defeat, Willkie became a supporter of a number of FDR's programs. What can I say? It's politics.)

Today, some three-quarters of a century later, business still has good reasons to view government intervention and regulation with wariness, not to mention occasional weariness.

But in 1939, as Olson's book explains, Uncle Sam was right about setting sail overseas.