Martha Gash Boswell Papers, PC.1675

In 1940-1941 Martha Gash Boswell was an unpaid traveling secretary for the southern division of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, whose chairman was Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Miss Boswell kept a scrapbook of form letters, policy statements, newsletters, and pub­lished literature (brochures and newspaper clippings) of the Committee to Defend America until her resig­nation in November, 1941. Included in the collection are three letters from U. S. senators and a newspaper clipping pertaining mostly to hunger in America, 1969.

The Committee to Defend America was founded in May, 1940, and supported President Roosevelt's foreign policy to aid England, gain time for America's rearmament, and restrain Japan's encroachment in the Pacific by diplomacy and naval strength. By September, 1940, America had its first peacetime conscription (registration of men between 21 and 35 and induction of 800,000 draftees) and had trans­ferred to Britain fifty destroyers in return for 99-year leases on naval and air bases in the British West Indies, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Although the destroyer-bases exchange met with general approval, Roosevelt's foreign policy divided American opinion. Critics charged that it was dragging the U. S. into an "imperialistic" war with which we had no legitimate concern; supporters insisted that only by helping Britain defeat Hitler could we save democracy from destruction and ourselves from ultimate attack. This issue was fought out in Congress, in the press, over the radio, on public platforms, in bars, offices, and homes. Party lines were shattered, labor organizations split, business relations strained, old friendships broken. William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies organized branches in a thousand towns, sent out hundreds of speakers and millions of letters and pamphlets to arouse the nation to its danger. The opposition organization, the America First Com­mittee, "top-billing Charles Lindbergh, paraded, picketed, protested, and preached an amalgam of isolationism and pacificism."

After Roosevelt's election to a third term in November, 1940, his anything "short of war" policy escalated. After a bitter debate in Congress the Lend-Lease Act was passed (March 11, 1941), which autho­rized the president to sell, transfer, exchange, lease, lend any defense articles to any country whose defense was vital to the de­fense of the United States. The facilities of American shipyards were available to such countries. After passage of Lend-Lease, the U. S. seized all Axis shipping in American ports, took Greenland under protection, and announced that the Navy would patrol the Atlantic. In May fifty oil tankers were transferred to Britain after the sinking of an American freighter by a U-boat and an "unlimited national emergency" was proclaimed. By June all Axis assets in this country were frozen, their consulates were closed, and lend-lease was extended to a new ally--Russia. After a battle on September 4 between a U-Boat and the USS Greer, the president ordered the navy to shoot on sight any German sub-marine encountered.

From that date America was engaged in a de facto naval war with Germany.[See Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People, 1965] According to Wayne S. Cole in America First, The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1953) the traditionally conservative South was easily the most inter­ventionist major region in the nation. Letterheads in this collection list North Carolina officials for the Preliminary Southern Organization Committee as George Watts Hill, Durham, chairman; W. D. Carmichael, Jr.; Alice M. Baldwin; and W. T. Couch, Chapel Hill, secretary. Others were Frank Porter Graham, Chapel Hill, southern chairman; Martha G. Boswell, southern traveling secretary; L. P. McLendon, Greensboro, state chair­man; C. B. Robson, Chapel Hill, state secretary; and Roland McClamroch, Chapel Hill, state treasurer. Also in the collection are three letters from U. S. senators and a newspaper clipping pertaining mostly to hunger in America, 1969.

Arrangement of Papers

Folder Contents:

1. Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies
Official policy statements:

November 26, 1940 (legal powers to declare national emergency to mobilize industry; supply Britain with merchant vessels; British shipping operate in Atlantic and American shipping in Indian and Pacific oceans; permit recruiting by Canada; aid to China; extend embargoes on war materials to Japan; U. S. and England share Pacific bases.)

March 17, 1941 [Lend-Lease Bill passed March 11, 1941] (full mobilization of industry, labor; adequate ap­propriations for Lend-Lease; transfer additional naval craft; naval convoys; freeze assets to control Nazis in western hemisphere; increase aid to China and naval strength in Far East; prevent conquest of Singapore
and Dutch East Indies; combat Nazi propaganda in Americas)

May 7, 1941 (use of naval and air forces to safeguard life­line between British Isles and western hemisphere; unite military resources with Britain to safeguard Atlantic and Pacific against Axis; aid to China; embargo against Japan; freeze assets; sever diplomatic relations; intent in future to organize enduring peace on basis of political, social, and economic justice.

September 16, 1941 ("Today our nation must recognize that economically, industrially, financially, and in the use of our diplomatic and naval power we are already in the war.")

2. Correspondence:
February 27, 1941. George Watts Hill, Durham. To Membership. Re Lend-Lease Bill in Congress. [Note: Letter head lists among sponsors Thurmond Chatham, Gov. J.C.B. Ehringhaus, Carl Goerch, Louis Graves, Archibald Henderson, John Sprunt Hill, Gov. Clyde R. Hoey, Mrs. Vance Jermone, McDaniel Lewis, Capus Waynick, Gertrude Weil.] Form letter.

April 18, 1941. Clark M. Eichelberger, national director, New York. To Membership. Call for full mobilization of industry and delivery of material to allies; British govern­ment warns its resistance will be broken in nine months unless aid forthcoming. Form letter.

April 18, 1941. Clark M. Eichelberger, New York. To Membership. Re Far Eastern Situation. Petroleum products still being shipped to Japan; stocks will be used against China and perhaps against United States. Increase aid to China. Form.

May 22, 1941. Clark M. Eichelberger, New York. To Membership. Gallop poll shows half of Americans favor use of naval convoys to England; reference to Rudolph Hess's defection (or propaganda effort) in England and to Charles Lindberg's place as hero of noninter­ventionist America First Committee. Form letter with attached newspaper clipping.

June 16, 1941. Clark M. Eichelberger, New York. To Membership. Enclosure re instructions for local Fourth of July meetings (Freedom Rallies). Form.

June 26, 1941. James M. Hull, acting chairman of August, Ga. chapter. To Martha Boswell, Atlanta, Ga. Enclosing petition to President of U. S.

November 26, 1941. Frank P. Graham, UNC-CH. To Martha Boswell. "I feel that you did more than any of us to promote the cause in the State and in the South. If you work on the paid job half as well as you did on the free one, happy is the employer." Carbon typescript.

3. Committees, lists of names for national committeemen in southern states, national headquarters (New York), and North Carolina. Some prominent names not cited previously are Clarence Poe, John Temple Graves, Philip Wylie, J. W. Fulbright, Ellen Glasgow, Louis Jaffee, Ellsworth Bunker, M. Ashby Jones, Ernest W. Gibson, Jr.

4. Organization plans, fund-raising suggestions, ideas for women's divisions, etc.

5. Newsletters of Committee to Defend America by aiding the Allies.
"Common Sense, Defend America Now," Atlanta, May 7, 1941, Vol. I, No. 1.

6. "Progress Bulletin," New York headquarters. No.14, December 2, 1940
No. 20, March 3, 1941 No. 21, March 19, 1941 No. 23, April 16, 1941 No. 24, April 30, 1941 No. 25, May 15, 1941 No. 26, June 4, 1941

7. "Washington Office Information Letter," prepared by Livingston Hartley and Donald Blaisdell.
No. 10, March 21, 1941 No. 16, May 2, 1941 No. 17, May 9, 1941 No. 18, May 16, 1941 No. 21, June 6, 1941
No. 42, October 31, 1941

8. "News from the Outpost," Americans-in-Britain out­post of the Committee to Defend America, London. Letter No. 11, January 1, 1941. Re opening of American Eagle Club for Americans in Canadian uniform, etc.­

9. Brochures, pamphlet, etc.:
"Why?: Questions and Answers on National Policy," by Henry F. Pringle (No. 5, America in a World at War, 1941).
"Colored People Have a Stake in the War" "Organized Labor! 's Stake in the War" "Singapore," by Livingston Hartley
"Help China for Peace in the Pacific," by W. S. Howe "Axis Alliance Aimed at the United States," by E. Guy Talbott
"Keys to the South Atlantic," by Livingston Hartley "We the Students"
[Price list of publications, including those cited above]

10. Flyers:
Mass Meeting, May 24, 1941, endorsed by Painters Branch, Trade Union Division of Committee to Defend America. "Speed Production"
"We Must Deliver the Goods to Britain Now" "The Truth About the Lease-Lend Bill"

11. Reprints:

"As I see It," by Charles Benedict, January 25, 1941, Magazine of Wall Street. Refers to Ambassabor Joseph Kennedy's isolationist speech and Russian-German relations.

"John L. Lewis Linked Through Daughter to Hitler Appeasers," December 2, 1940, _PM magazine, Attack on America First Committee and Henry Ford, Alice Roosevelt Longworth,

Robert E. Wood, Eddie Rickenbacker, etc.
"Who Owns the British Empire," by Norman Angell, May, 1941, Readers' Digest.Re speeches by Charles Lindberg and Senator "Champ" Clark.

12. Miscellaneous, Committee to Defend America:

Stamps, Committee to Defend America (not postage). Newspaper clippings by Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, etc. concerning Hitler's victories, British and American seapower, oil exports, America First Committee, support for an English-speaking union.
Magazine article, Saturday Evening Post. Description of S.S.S. (Soldier's Social Service) of Savannah, June 28, 1941. [Later called the United Service Organizations - USO].
Miscellaneous items commenting on Lindberg, mental balance of Germans (comment made at American Neurological Association meeting), Freedom Rally in Madison Square Garden, etc.

13. Miscellaneous:
Correspondence from Senator B. Everett Jordan (September 20, 1968), re nominations of Abe Fortis for chief justice and Homer Thornberry for associate justice of U. S. Supreme Court; from Senators Ernest F. Hollings (March 10, 1969), and Edward M. Kennedy (March 1969) re problem of hunger and malnutrition in America, with related newspaper clipping.

Martha Gash Boswell

Graham, Frank Porter

Edward M. Kennedy

America First Committee

Committee To Defend America By Aiding The Allies Malnutrition In America

World War, 1939-1945

Hunger

Women in war

Gift