FDR ramps up help to Britain, June 20, 1940
On this day in 1940, with France having fallen under Nazi Germany’s war machine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his dual policy of U.S. rearmament and aid to a beleaguered Britain added bipartisan heft by naming two high-profile pro-interventionist Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, to his Cabinet as secretaries of War and of the Navy.
Stimson, who was born in 1867, had served as President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state. He had also served as secretary of war under President William Howard Taft from 1911 to 1913. During World War II, Stimson oversaw the conscription and training of some 13 million soldiers and airmen and the purchase and transportation to foreign battlefields of a third of the nation’s industrial output.Continue Reading
Knox, the publisher and part owner of the Chicago Daily News, was the Republican nominee for vice president in 1936. As secretary, Knox saw the Navy expand into a force capable of fighting in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He died of a heart attack on April 28, 1944, while still in office.
While FDR was bringing Stimson and Knox onto his Cabinet, Congress grappled with what would become the first peacetime draft in the nation’s history. It was presented to the lawmakers in the names of Sen. Edward Burke of Nebraska, an anti-New Deal Democrat, and Rep. James Wadsworth (R-N.Y.).
The legislation required men between the ages of 21 and 35 to register with local draft boards. FDR signed it into law on Sept. 16. If drafted under a lottery system, a man served for 12 months. Draftees could serve only in the Western Hemisphere or in U.S. overseas possessions or territories. The law provided that not more than 900,000 men were to be in training at any one time and it limited their service to 12 months.
SOURCE: “RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY,” BY MICHAEL FULLILOVE (2013)