In the shadow of the Great Depression, America in the 1930s wrestled with deep unemployment and a fierce desire to avoid another world war. Memories of World War I’s horrors were fresh, inspiring a powerful isolationist movement led by voices like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. The “America First” committee rallied millions, convinced that oceans could protect us from the growing darkness in Europe. While the world watched Hitler’s Germany secretly build an alarming military, many Americans believed we could stay out of the fight, focusing on our struggles at home and hoping for peace.
Yet, as the global storm intensified, America found a new battlefield right at home. This isn’t a story of distant islands or muddy trenches, but of the extraordinary shift that turned our struggling nation into the “arsenal of democracy.” It’s about American factories buzzing to life, a pivotal battle fought by ordinary men and women who, with grit and determination, built the tanks, planes, and ships needed for World War II. From the darkest days of the Great Depression, the American people rose up, unified by a common purpose, proving that hope and hard work could forge the tools of freedom, and ultimately, change the course of history.
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00:00:36 Speaker 2: People should really understand what life was like, not just in America, but all over the world in the 1930s. Twenty percent unemployment, millions and millions of people living below the poverty line. People, you know, of all generations, who couldn’t find work, couldn’t find food, couldn’t support their children. And during that time, the American military really failed into oblivion. We were not investing in our military for a number of reasons. One, we didn’t have any money to spend on the military. Two, there was an extraordinary movement away from militarism. So a lot of people of all ages could remember World War I. Parents who had lost children, people who had lost brothers and sisters, and just the immense amount of destruction and death. And, of course, we went into the 1920s and had a rip rower in time and drank a lot of booze and did a lot of dancing. But by the 1930s, when people were really struggling and they couldn’t support their kids, they really did not want their government spending money, tax dollars, on military equipment of any kind. We can’t feed our children. Why would we be spending money on tanks and airplanes? People should also recall 1932/early 1933. Two very important new leaders came to power virtually at the same time.
00:02:00 Speaker 3: FDR in America.
00:02:01 Speaker 4: I, Frank Bendlano Roosevelt.
00:02:04 Speaker 2: We saw him with Swab and Adolf Hitler in Germany. And during the early days of Hitler’s regime, he did a couple of things that, you know, I hesitate to compliment him because, you know, for all the obvious reasons, probably the most, you know, horrible man who’s ever walked the planet in modern times. But he pulled Germany out of the Depression in certain ways that didn’t happen in America. Unemployment fell away, the factories were churning, the economy was improving, and one of the ways he did that was to secretly begin, secretly and then not so secretly, begin building a giant military and, most importantly, the first operational air force. And as he was doing this, nobody in America is really paying attention, because we thought, we’re not going to have a war.
00:03:07 Speaker 3: We’re not going to have to fight this guy. It’s not going to happen.
00:03:10 Speaker 2: The anti-war movement was so strong that huge numbers and surveys taken of Americans believed that we never should…
00:03:19 Speaker 3: …have gotten involved in World War I, to begin with.
00:03:26 Speaker 2: We had these great, big oceans on either side of the United States. And keep in mind, the bomber aircraft didn’t really exist at this time, and airplanes themselves were sort of new in warfare. They were used in World War I, but not in any major strategic way. They didn’t have a lot of range at that time, so it was hard for Americans to understand…
00:03:48 Speaker 3: …how we could be attacked.
00:03:49 Speaker 2: Nobody thought it was really possible. So there was this isolationist movement. Even after Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, there was a huge move in America for people to say, “We don’t want anything to do with this. This is not our problem.” It was incomprehensible to them that we could be involved in World War II, and the two most important Americans leading that movement were Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford.
00:04:18 Speaker 5: Has now been defeated, and despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing war. And I have been fourth for the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America Person Committee has been formed.
00:04:43 Speaker 2: Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford headed up what was called at the time the America First Committee, and that was an anti-war, anti-Roosevelt parade that traveled the country even in 1941, getting people on board, selling out arenas,
00:04:59 Speaker 3: saying, “Hey, let’s not get involved in this word. It’s going to be a disaster if we do.”
00:05:06 Speaker 2: Henry Ford was known to be an anti semi, so a lot of people were dubious of what his intentions were.
00:05:12 Speaker 3: They thought he was a Nazi.
00:05:14 Speaker 2: He had received a special medal from the German government and refused to give it back even when he was criticized for it.
00:05:22 Speaker 6: Here’s Professor Jonathan Sarno speaking to the Jewish Learning Institute in Brooklyn, New York, on Ford’s anti-Semitism. Every Ford dealer would distribute Henry Ford’s newspaper, known as The Dearborn Independent. And for ninety-one straight issues, The Dearborn Independent targeted Jews as “the world’s foremost problem,” as he said. And then Henry Ford repackaged those articles into a series of volumes entitled The International Jew. These books were sent free to every library in America and were very widely distributed. The city, modern music, new government programs, and whatever it was, he blamed on the Jews.
00:06:19 Speaker 2: If there’s one thing you can say about Henry Ford, yes, he was definitely an anti semi, but I don’t think—I don’t think he was in any way a Nazi, as he was accused at the time. What he was was very much a pacifist. He thought that there was absolutely no reason for the United States to get involved in a war. Lindbergh, the other member, also misunderstood.
00:06:43 Speaker 3: They called him a Nazi, and he wasn’t.
00:06:46 Speaker 2: And he was less of a pacifist than Henry Ford was. Because once the war began, both of these figures—ironically, both of them—became very key figures in US defeating the Nazis.
00:06:57 Speaker 3: In the end, World War II became…
00:07:09 Speaker 2: …really a contest of mass production and of horsepower, of weapons mounted on wings and wheels. It was a mechanized one.
00:07:21 Speaker 7: We must be the great arsenal of democracy. When we come back,
00:07:27 Speaker 1: more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here again. Our American Stories tries to tell the stories of America’s past and present to Americans, and we want to hear your stories too. They’re some of our favorites. Send them to us. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the “your stories” tab. Again, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the “your stories” tab. And we returned to Our American Stories and AJ Bame sharing the story of how America geared up for World War II. When we last left off, we learned what America was like before the war. Simply put, we weren’t only unprepared, but we didn’t want war. Chief among those voices were Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. A great irony of the story, considering what happens next. Here again is AJ…
00:08:34 Speaker 5: …Bain.
00:08:36 Speaker 2: In World War I, you began to see horses replaced with motor vehicles. You began to see airplanes flying, but for the most part, it was still guys with guns and trenches in the mud, duking it out. The more soldiers you could send to the front lines, the better off you were. By the time World War II started, Hitler had already revolutionized the whole program.
00:09:02 Speaker 3: I’m going to give you a quote.
00:09:03 Speaker 2: This is Britain’s spymaster, William Stevenson, whose code name was Intrepid. He confided in Franklin Roosevelt before the United States had joined the war. He said, quote, “The Führer is not just a lunatic. He’s an evil genius. The weapons in his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated. He has torn up the military textbooks and written his own.”
00:09:30 Speaker 3: And I think the easiest…
00:09:31 Speaker 2: …way to really put that in perspective, how do we really understand what that meant?
00:09:36 Speaker 3: I think what it…
00:09:37 Speaker 2: …meant was Hitler had come out of World War I, he was wounded in that war, and when he rose to power, full of vitriol, he understood the idea of Henry Ford, what Henry Ford had successfully done on assembly lines in America. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean just, “Wow, the Model T is incredible.” The genius of Henry Ford wasn’t the Model T. It was the factory that could build the Model T in massive numbers. That is what Hitler realized could revolutionize warfare in the future. It was the factory. It was the mechanical object that the factory could build. That’s what was going to win wars in the future. Before everybody else is thinking about these things, and the United States has mired the Great Depression, thinking that there’s no way that any of this is going to involve them. Hitler was making all that happen, and what that meant was trucks, tanks, and airplanes. And the moment he released all of that over Poland, this idea of Blitzkrieg, which meant ground forces, weapons in the air, all coordinated to deliver instant and sudden mass attack. He was thought of as invincible. You have to put yourself in the shoes of Americans at the time.
00:10:54 Speaker 3: What a shocker.
00:10:55 Speaker 2: This was the idea that airplanes could be so sophisticated. The screaming set of the dive bombers, the detonation of the bombs. This just terrifying people. And that terror itself was a weapon. Here’s Arthur L. Herman, courtesy of the National WWII Museum, with more.
00:11:18 Speaker 8: What I want you to do is to put yourself in the Oval Office…
00:11:23 Speaker 9: …in May of 1940.
00:11:25 Speaker 8: You’re the President of the United States, and your military advisors have told you, and your own guts, your own instincts told you, that your country is going to be at war, and it’s going to be a war unlike anything the United States has ever fought before, of something which your own military advisors themselves admit that they’re totally unprepared for.
00:11:45 Speaker 9: And you know that’s true.
00:11:47 Speaker 8: You know, for example, sitting there in the Oval Office, that right now, the United States has the eighteenth largest army in the world. Eighteenth. Just ahead of Holland. Argentina has a bigger army than you did. Hungary has a bigger army than you do. You’ve got an air force which consists of about fifteen hundred machines.
00:12:07 Speaker 9: And I use that word “machines” because that’s what they are. We’re talking about…
00:12:10 Speaker 8: If you throw together all of the fighters, obsolete trainers, biplanes, and so on, you come up with a force of about fifteen hundred aircraft. Now, fifteen hundred aircraft, that’s what the German Luftwaffe is flying every day. You’ve got a situation which you have no defense industry. It was all dismantled after World War I, hounded out of business by congressional investigations into what we’re called “the merchants of death”—Colt and Remington, General Electric and Sperry, and these other companies, DuPont. And so, they just got out. They said, “All right, we’re not going to get involved in this business anymore. The contracts aren’t worth us to us.” DuPont, which had been the largest manufacturer of gunpowder in the world in 1918. By 1940, it’s shrunk to two percent of its revenues.
00:13:00 Speaker 9: No defense industry.
00:13:01 Speaker 8: The Army’s Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, has said to you, “Mister President, if Adolf Hitler lands five divisions on the Atlantic coast, there’s nothing we can do to stop him. He can go from here to the Rockies. War’s coming. If not prepared, I have nothing.” What do you do?
00:13:20 Speaker 2: It was a pretty dismal Christmas in 1940 for a lot of Americans, because war was on our doorstep. There was a lot of uncertainty. Four days after, on December 29, 1940, Roosevelt gave a speech. The largest radio audience in all of history gathered to hear this speech. And why? Because the big question on everyone’s mind all over the world was, “Will the United States get involved in this war?” Because that meant basically, would there be any contest? Was Nazi Germany going to roll all over Europe uncontested and turn the entire continent into Nazified Germany, which is what most Americans believed was going to happen? All the world wanted to know what was FDR going to do? Was he prepared to stand up to Hitler? And if he was going to stand up to Hitler, how was he going to do it? And so, on December 29, 1940, a few months before 9 p.m., he wheeled himself in his wheelchair into the Diplomatic Reception Room on the first floor of the White House. He was wearing his favorite Harvard tie and a gray wool suit. There was all this recording equipment, and off he goes, and he gives the speech that pretty much changes the world.
00:14:37 Speaker 7: This is not a fireside chat on war.
00:14:41 Speaker 4: This is a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence. Never before, since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, has our American civilization been in such danger as now. The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.
00:15:35 Speaker 2: He begins to unravel for American people the way that the United States could step up against Hitler, to stand up to Hitler, whether that meant joining the war or not.
00:15:48 Speaker 7: The cost that I advocate involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace. The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting.
00:16:03 Speaker 4: They ask us for the…
00:16:05 Speaker 7: …implements of war: planes, the tanks, the guns which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.
00:16:16 Speaker 2: If the United States, a democratic nation, could put together our government, our military, and our free enterprise into one fighting force, nobody could stop us.
00:16:30 Speaker 7: I want to make it clear that it is the purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed every machine, every arsenal, every factory that we need to manufacture our defense material. We have the men, the skill, the wealth, and, above all, the will. So I appeal to the owners of plants, managers, to the workers, to our own government employees, to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
00:17:25 Speaker 2: The arsenal of democracy could supply the guns, the tanks, the ships, the airplanes to our allies who were fighting Germany and losing, and ultimately, if we got involved in the war, we would be prepared to win.
00:17:39 Speaker 1: When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the arsenal of democracy story here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of the making of, as Roosevelt coined it, the Great Arsenal of Democracy. When we last left off, we learned that despite a large amount of Americans thinking we’d never get involved in the war, Roosevelt saw things differently and set about convincing the American public and our business leaders to start building the tanks, planes, and guns for our European allies and eventually us. Here again are AJ Bame and Arthur L.
00:18:39 Speaker 8: Herman.
00:18:42 Speaker 2: So how do you get all of these companies and all of these people to pitch in and build this arsenal of democracy?
00:18:49 Speaker 3: This is a democratic nation.
00:18:51 Speaker 2: In a totalitarian nation, the leader of that country would just order everyone to do it and murder or jail you if you didn’t follow orders.
00:19:01 Speaker 8: Franklin Roosevelt was working against all of his instincts, leaving this as a bottom-up voluntary system that used the creative energies and drives of the free market system instead of trying to do a top-down, directed, command war economy. There were in Roosevelt’s camp advisors who very much thought that the Soviet model would be the way to go in terms of mobilizing for war.
00:19:24 Speaker 3: In America, it was different.
00:19:25 Speaker 2: This took a lot of convincing because it was really not in a lot of Americans’ best interest. Alfred Sloan, who was the head of General Motors, he didn’t want to set aside building Chevrolets and Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs to start making tanks.
00:19:39 Speaker 3: So how do you get everybody on board?
00:19:43 Speaker 8: Well, if you’re Franklin Roosevelt, what you do is you pick up the phone and you call your chief fundraiser, Bernard Baruch. And Baruch says to him, “The man you need to call is Big Bill Knudsen, President of General Motors.” Now, Bill Knudsen was a Motor City legend. He was a man who had, together with Henry Ford, really invented the modern automotive assembly line production.
00:20:07 Speaker 2: One guy turns the screw, but he doesn’t put the bolt on. The next guy puts the bolt on. Every single person had a highly specific job. And the idea was you could create a factory that used human labor and turn it into a giant machine.
00:20:24 Speaker 3: A factory could function…
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