Whatever the president’s rationale for offering him the post, Winant, who believed that the United States must break out of its isolationist shell, had no misgivings about taking it. Despite its emergence as the world’s leading economic power after World War I, America had been unwilling to accept any of the inherent responsibilities that came with its newly dominant international position. “Most Americans,” Time magazine remarked, “still thought of international diplomacy with all the repugnance of a Victorian lady contemplating sex.” The country refused to join the League of Nations and, when the world depression struck in the early 1930s, insisted that its wartime allies must repay their debts to the United States in full. At the same time it raised its tariffs, making repayment of the debts impossible and helping to push Europe into an even greater economic decline. “Since the war, our attitude is that we do not need friends, and that the public opinion of the world is of no importance,” Franklin Roosevelt, soon to be elected governor of New York, wrote in a 1928 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. According to historian Warren Kimball, “Americans dipped in and out of the European scene seemingly at whim,” wanting “to lead by distant example instead of active commitment.”
In America, the belief took hold that the country had been tricked into World War I by British propaganda and by U.S. bankers and arms buyers who had acted on Britain’s behalf. As another war loomed in Europe, an increasingly isolationist Congress, in an attempt to protect the United States from future conflicts, passed the Neutrality Acts and prohibited loans and investments to countries at war. Giving voice to the national mood, Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935: “Of the hell broth that is brewing in Europe we have no need to drink…. We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.”
The International Labor Organization was the only offshoot of the League of Nations that the United States would join. A longtime supporter of the agency’s mission to improve the pay and working conditions of laborers throughout the world, Winant moved to Geneva to take up his job. His stay at ILO headquarters, however, was brief. After only five months, on the recommendation of Frances Perkins, Roosevelt summoned him back to Washington to assume one of the most important posts in the government: chairman of the new Social Security Board.
IN AUGUST 1935, despite bitter Republican opposition, Congress passed the Social Security Act, the most sweeping piece of social legislation ever enacted in the United States and the New Deal’s most striking achievement. In making unemployment compensation and old-age benefits available to all qualified Americans, it redefined and broadly expanded the government’s responsibility to its citizens. It was so revolutionary that the administration feared it would be sabotaged by its many critics before it could take effect. Because of the ferocity of the GOP opposition, Roosevelt insisted that a prominent liberal Republican—Winant—head the three-man Social Security board that would administer the new law.
For the next year and a half, Winant and his fellow board members worked tirelessly to set up and promote the unprecedented new program. With a Senate filibuster holding up their funds, they functioned on a minimal budget for the first several months, borrowing offices in the new Labor Department building and operating with a skeleton staff, much of it lent by other government agencies. During the New Deal, many government agencies were hotbeds of energy and experimentation, but none hovered on the brink of bedlam as much as the makeshift Social Security offices, where “men rush in and out and fume at the slowness of the elevators.”
In the middle of the frenzy was Winant, who drove himself as relentlessly in Washington as he had in Concord, snatching only a few hours of sleep each night in his rented Georgetown mansion. “He had no sense of time, or meals, or sleep, or anything to do with the conservation of his own strength,” recalled one associate. “He would work right through the meal hour and not know he had missed a meal.”
By all accounts, he was a terrible administrator, the despair of his staff and the other board members for his inefficiency and lateness. His desk was piled high with letters awaiting his signature, the room outside his office crammed with people waiting to see him; his filing system consisted of stuffing important papers in his pockets. But even Winant’s severest critics acknowledged that he was an extraordinary leader, a visionary with the ability to inspire. “He was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of the great characters in American public life during the past twenty years,” Frank Bane, Social Security’s first executive director, declared. “Few people have made as significant an impression upon government as it should be, as did Governor Winant.”
As the public face of Social Security, Winant became a familiar figure on Capitol Hill and throughout the country, making repeated trips to the hinterlands to educate his fellow Americans about the new program. Under his leadership, the Social Security board, despite its lack of funds and minuscule staff, created in little more than a year a far-flung national organization, with 12 regional offices and 108 field offices, and, during that period, disbursed more than $215 million in old-age benefits to thirty-six states. All the important work of creating the Social Security program as it exists today was carried out under Winant’s chairmanship.
Nonetheless, the GOP and much of the nation’s business community were intent on killing Social Security. Hoping to convince Alf Landon, the progressive governor of Kansas and the Republicans’ 1936 presidential nominee, to support it, Winant provided him with confidential information about the program. But Landon had lost control of his campaign to the party’s conservative diehards, and in late September 1936, he made a slashing attack on Social Security, promising to repeal it if elected.
Feeling betrayed, Winant decided he could not remain silent; he would resign from the Social Security board and speak out against Landon. His colleagues on the board and other close advisers did their best to talk him out of committing what they saw as political suicide. Repudiating the GOP, they argued, would mean the end of his political career and any hope of his winning higher office. Even the president tried to dissuade him. But Winant was adamant. After submitting his resignation, he crisscrossed the country giving speeches and making broadcasts in support of Social Security.
In the final week of the campaign, the Republican National Committee supplied employers with millions of flyers, designed to look like official government notices, to stuff into workers’ pay envelopes. The flyers warned that a future Congress would divert Social Security funds to other purposes and intimated that workers could look forward to a one percent reduction in pay—the cost of their Social Security contribution—unless they took action against Roosevelt on election day. Winant was so offended by the last-ditch smear that he made a nationwide radio address two days before the election, attacking the Republican move as “shoddy politics” and endorsing Roosevelt for reelection.
His support of the president was the last straw for the GOP and did indeed end any chance of his running for president as a Republican. But it also proved, according to one friend who wrote to him, that “at least one man in high office possesses genuine convictions and the courage to stand by them come what might…. I realize that many will call what you did a hopelessly idealistic move, and call it that with a sneer. But idealism is one quality this disordered world needs desperately.”
The president apparently agreed. After his landslide victory, he sent Winant back to the ILO in Geneva; in 1939, the former New Hampshire governor became the organization’s director. With war looming, Winant also served as an emissary for FDR on the Continent, dispatching frequent reports to the White House about his travels and meetings with European leaders. “More than any other American in public life whom I know, he understands the social forces and changes that have been at work in the last decade, both at home and in Europe,” William Shirer, CBS’s Berlin correspondent, wrote in his diary after a lunch with Winant. Shirer added: “I think he would make a good president to succeed Roosevelt in 1944 if the latter gets his third term.?
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When the Nazis occupied all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Winant went to Prague as a gesture of solidarity and sympathy with the Czechs. He was in France during Hitler’s 1940 blitzkrieg, leaving Paris just a few hours before the Germans marched in. After France’s fall, Roosevelt asked him to test the mood of England, the one country still standing against Germany. After a quick tour during the Battle of Britain, he replied that public morale was unbroken: “They will take all the bombing that comes.” Ernest Bevin, the British labor minister, would later say that Winant was the only American he met during that period who “gave me the feeling that some people in the world still had faith in Great Britain.” Noting Britain’s critical shortage of arms and supplies, Winant urged the president to send help as soon as possible: Britain’s war, he said, was America’s war. It was advice that directly contradicted the cables and letters that Roosevelt had received from Joseph Kennedy.
Following Kennedy’s resignation as ambassador, Roosevelt took his time (too much time, in the opinion of many of his associates) to appoint his successor. He wanted someone who was sympathetic to Britain, who could win the trust of Churchill and other government figures and persuade them to be patient while the president did what he could to further their cause. At the same time, FDR, with an eye to the future, wanted the new envoy to establish strong ties with the Labour Party, which he believed would take over leadership of the country during or after the war. Felix Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, and other prominent New Dealers told Roosevelt there was only one man with the necessary qualifications for such a varied, complex portfolio: John Gilbert Winant.
In late January 1941, a few days after his third inaugural, Roosevelt brought Winant to Washington. During their meeting in the Oval Office, the president questioned the ILO director about the European leaders he had met and conditions in Britain and the Nazi-occupied countries. But there was no mention of the ambassadorship. With Winant, as with other officials, Roosevelt’s boyish love of secrecy and prankish sense of fun prompted him to withhold news of the appointment. He would let Winant learn about his new job, as others had learned about theirs, from the press.
A few days later, the nation’s leading newspapers reported that FDR was sending Winant’s name to the Senate for confirmation as ambassador to the Court of Saint James. Within three weeks, he was on his way to London.
IN BRITAIN, NEWS of Winant’s appointment was greeted with elation. Anyone who was not Joseph Kennedy undoubtedly would have received an enthusiastic reception, but the reaction to Winant was particularly jubilant. “There is no name that could have been more welcome,” wrote the News Chronicle. The Manchester Guardian declared: “He is an American for whom an Englishman feels an immediate liking, and few Americans have a warmer admiration and regard than he for this country and its people.” The Times of London noted: “There is something of the knight errant about him. He believes in his principles with almost romantic passion.”
As a result of Winant’s ILO work, British newspapers pointed out, he was already well acquainted with several leading members of Churchill’s government, including Bevin and the new foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. The papers went on to underline the dramatic differences between Winant and Kennedy in personality and outlook. “One has often felt in the past that … American Ambassadors, while enjoying the freedom of the best country houses, have seen too little of the real Britain,” the Star pointedly noted. “But the sterling metal of John Winant’s character will make him reach out to wider fields…. Today he will see plain people on the march, and his heart will be with them.”
When Winant’s train pulled into London’s Paddington station after his visit with George VI, he could take satisfaction in the warm welcome he had received both from the king and the British press. But his first encounter with Britain’s most daunting figure was yet to come. How would Winston Churchill, still upset over America’s foot-dragging, respond to the new U.S. envoy?
Two days later, when Churchill invited him for dinner at his reinforced war rooms in Whitehall, Winant had his answer. Showing no trace of the bulldog belligerence for which he was famed, the prime minister was obviously in a conciliatory mood. Throughout the dinner, he and Winant discussed the latest problem bedeviling Anglo-American relations: Britain’s reluctance to complete its part of the destroyers-for-bases deal, announced almost six months before. Although Britain had received the destroyers, its government had not yet formally agreed to one provision of the quid pro quo—the lease of bases in British colonies in the Caribbean. Resentment of the deal in Whitehall, the House of Commons, and the colonies themselves had been too overwhelming.
Churchill assured Winant he would resolve the impasse. The following day, he called a meeting of several cabinet ministers at Downing Street, with Winant present as an observer. As the others debated the issue, Winant watched Churchill—”this stocky figure with a slight stoop”—pace up and down the room, “completely unconscious of any presence beyond his own thoughts.” Suddenly, just minutes into the discussion, the prime minister swept aside all objections as immaterial and overruled the concerns voiced by his military advisers. In Churchill’s view, it was far more important to stretch America’s neutrality policy to the breaking point than to “maintain our pride and to preserve the dignity of a few small islands.” Not long afterward, a British-U.S. negotiating commission gave final approval to the deal.
TWO WEEKS AFTER his arrival in Britain, Winant, his head slightly bowed, threaded his way through the packed ballroom of London’s Savoy Hotel, following Churchill and the Earl of Derby to the head table. The occasion was a gala luncheon in Winant’s honor, sponsored by the Pilgrim Society, an organization aimed at promoting closer Anglo-American relations. Seated before the ambassador, Churchill, and Lord Derby, who was president of the group, was the elite of the British government and business worlds—virtually all the cabinet, as well as the country’s leading military figures, industrialists, and newspaper editors and publishers.
Near the end of the luncheon, Churchill rose to his feet and, turning to the ambassador, left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he meant to make Winant an ally in his wooing of America. “Mr. Winant,” he rumbled, his words carried to the nation over the BBC, “you come to us at a grand turning point in the world’s history. We rejoice to have you with us in these days of storm and trial because, in you, we have a friend and a faithful comrade who ‘will report us and our cause aright.’ ”
At the conclusion of his speech, the prime minister declared: “You, Mr. Ambassador, share our purpose. You’ll share our dangers. You’ll share our interests. You shall share our secrets. And the day will come when the British Empire and the United States will share together … the crown of victory.” The audience erupted in cheers, and as he sat down, the “lord of language,” as one newspaper called Churchill, knew he had done it again. “Every word was alive with meaning, every phrase was an expression of faith and courage,” the Sunday Times wrote. “On this occasion, he could not have been better.”
Now it was time for Winant to respond. He rose, tightly clutching the pages of his speech, and looked out over the audience, moving his weight from foot to foot, “rather like a small boy saying a piece at his first party,” according to one onlooker. There was a long pause. Then, quietly, hesitantly, he began to speak. Unlike Churchill, he was “not an orator,” the Daily Herald noted the following day. “He read, and not too well, every word, looking down at his script. But his words were more than oratory. They were a declaration of faith.”
America, Winant said, had finally shaken off its lethargy and “gone into action. With its labor and resources, it will provide the tools—the ships, the planes, the guns, the ammunition and the food—for all those here and everywhere who defend with their lives freedom’s frontiers.” Yet, although he pledged America’s support to Britain, he made clear he had not come to praise his own country for its laggard help. He was there to pay tribute to the resoluteness and courage of Britain a
nd its citizens. “Today it is the honor and destiny of the British people to man the bridgehead of humanity’s hopes. It is your privilege to stand against ruthless and powerful dictators who would destroy the lessons of two thousand years of history. It is your destiny to say to them: ‘Here you shall not pass.’ ”
At that point, Winant paused, his eyes sweeping the room. His voice growing stronger, he declared: “The lost years are gone. The road ahead is hard. A new spirit is abroad. Free peoples are again cooperating to win a free world, and no tyranny can frustrate their hopes.” The Allies, he said, “with the help of God shall build a citadel of freedom so strong that force may never again seek its destruction.”
The audience’s reaction to the ambassador’s halting yet passionate address mirrored that of the crowds in New Hampshire during his first campaign for governor: they began by feeling sorry for him and ended by giving him a standing ovation. Like the citizens of his state, the Britons attending the luncheon seemed to find in the reserved, awkward Winant a kindred spirit, and they demonstrated that sense of kinship with loud cheers and applause.
The following day, British newspapers were equally outspoken in their enthusiasm. Using “language of simple grandeur,” the Evening Standard wrote, Winant had “achieved a feat which few orators can equal. He spoke after Mr. Churchill with complete success.” In a large front-page headline, the Daily Mirror exclaimed: “U.S. ENVOY SPEAKS TO YOU—THE BRITISH PEOPLE!” A columnist for the Star wrote: “Nearly everyone I spoke to this morning was asking, ‘Did you listen to the Winant broadcast?’ I did—and was moved.”