American Experience

Historian Robert Dallek on Lend-Lease

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ROBERT DALLEK: Well by the winter of 1940-41, Churchill had come to Roosevelt and told him that the British were out of money, they were busted. They had no way to continue paying for the supplies which they so desperately needed from the United States. Also there were still on the statute books those neutrality laws which said we couldn't lend the British the money to buy the supplies from us.

So Roosevelt needs to find a means to keep supplying the British without antagonizing the isolationists and particularly the Congress of the United States. The idea that he would go through the Congress was unacceptable to him because he knew it would be hung up in some kind of long-winded and painful debate. And this would demoralize the British more than help them. So he invents this thing called Lend-Lease. And he's marvelous at selling it again to the public.

In essence, Lend-Lease was a way to give the British planes, tanks, guns, artillery, ammunition without them really paying for it. And Roosevelt calls it Lend-Lease. And reporters at a press conference ask him, what does this mean? What does Lend-Lease mean? Well essentially what it meant was we were simply giving them the supplies and they were going to use it to defend themselves and Roosevelt felt it was in defense of the United States.

But Roosevelt invokes a marvelous homily. He says, well you know it's like you have a neighbor whose house is on fire. And the neighbor comes running to you and shouts over the garden fence, "Neighbor, neighbor, my house is on fire, help me out, lend me your garden hose." Well of course you're a good neighbor, you lend the garden hose to your neighbor and he puts out the fire and then he gives you the hose back.

Well of course it was patent nonsense. What were the British going to do, give us the tanks back that were blown up, the planes that were shot down, the ships that were sunk? I mean there was no way they were going to be able to resupply us or return this materiel to us. But Roosevelt's invocation of this homily about the neighbor and the garden hose is a wonderful way for him to sell it to the public and that was his political genius. That was something that he had a kind of sixth sense for. You can't understand it, you can't define it, you can't put it under any scientific rubric, it simply was something that the man had as a brilliant politician in the United States.

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