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Baldwin, “Problems of Defending Hemisphere Are Many,” New York Times (January 2, 1940), 70. “The Big Deal,” Time Magazine (September 16, 1940). Other generations would probably have called it the road of destiny, “manifest destiny.”įrancis Brown, The New York Times (September 15, 1940) 1įrancis Brown, “For America the Horizons Widen,” New York Times (September 15, 1940), 109. Whether for good or ill, the message revealed the isolationism that had dominated American thinking for two decades had been discarded, and the United States in the name of national defense had turned down a road that, whatever its ruts, bog holes or thank-you-mams, pointed toward greater influence and greater power. The scene was informal-the sitting room of a railway car, the President in suit of blue, his cigarette in the familiar ivory holder, the reporters around him, some sitting at his feet-yet present were the very stuff and drama of the historic moment. Some future painter of historical canvases, some Trumbull or Carpenter or Constantino Brumidi, seeking to record the epochal in the American story, may find worthy of his brush the press conference at which President Roosevelt read his Congressional message on the Anglo-American exchange of destroyers for air and naval bases. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Congress was being told about it as a fait accompli.” 3 Keywords
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A Congressional veto was out of the question. “What electrified the crowded roomful of correspondents,” Time Magazine reported, “was the audacity with which the deal was consummated: it would be presented to Congress for approval. As no appropriations were necessary, the president maintained that he did not need Congressional approval. 2 The House of Representatives would, he said, be informed of the deal in twenty-two minutes time.
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He grinned at his captive audience-“flourishing his ivory cigaret holder, professorial, relishing the historicity of the scene”-and told those gathered that the United States would send fifty aged destroyers to embattled Britain in exchange for base sites in the Western Hemisphere. His first words were to say that he was about to announce the most important event in the defense of the United States since Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana. president reveled in the history of the moment. By all accounts, the air was thick with expectation and the U.S. He waited for the newspapermen traveling with him to file into his small sitting room that normally sat seven or eight comfortably but now had to accommodate twenty. Roosevelt read his message to Congress inside his rail car only after it pulled out of Charleston, West Virginia, and rolled along the Kanawha River on September 3, 1940.