Roosevelt and Churchill

By Manuel E. Yepe
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
”Roosevelt’s freedom ideals live on to inspire, ironically, those now fighting American Imperialism.”
This is the conclusion of the official paper, Daily Observer, of Gambia in its issue of February 14, 2008. Gambia is a former British colony on the western coast of Africa. The paper reviews a book by the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1968 James MacGregor Burns, entitled “Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom". The book is based on the testimonial "How I Saw Him" by Elliot Roosevelt, third son of the former US president, and his wife Eleanor.
It is an idealized interpretation - favourable to Franklin Delano Roosevelt - of his differences with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that are a true view of the contradictions between the decadent British Empire and the rising imperialism of the United States.
Elliot reports that his father would say: "When you take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements- all you're doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war”.
Referring to the Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, Roosevelt told Elliot: “I'm talking about another war. I'm talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery! Don't think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn't been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again?''
According to the book, on January 5, 1941 Roosevelt presented to Congress an economic letter on rights based on the following principles:
• Equality of opportunity for youth and for others
• Jobs for those who can work
• Security for those who need it
• The ending of special privilege for the few
• The preservation of civil liberties for all
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
According to the author, the first series of discrepancies between Churchill and Roosevelt occurred in August of 1941 during a meeting they held in Argentia, aboard the Terranova, before the entrance of the United States in the war.
There were heated discussions concerning the insistence of Roosevelt to assure that, at the end of the conflict, sovereignty be restored to nations under colonial control while Churchill insisted on maintaining the oppressive colonial system.
Churchill was literally forced by Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter which expresses the principles of freedom and economic development needed to assure peace "after destruction of Nazi tyranny".
"Mr. President - Churchill told Roosevelt - I believe you intend to put an end to the British Empire. All your ideas on the post war world demonstrate it. But, in spite of it all, we know that you are our only hope. And you know that we know it. You know that without the United States, the Her Majesty's Empire cannot last."
Churchill, however, made a famous comment in answer to these considerations. It spread throughout the English colonial system regarding the Atlantic Charter article which guaranteed self-determination and the self-government of British colonies after the war: I was not designated Her Majesty's Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the empire."
A large part of the information quoted in the Gambian paper refers to Roosevelt's visit to British Gambia in 1943 to meet with Churchill in that nation's capital, Bathurst, today Banjul, capital of the Republic of The Gambia.
Roosevelt was strongly impressed, his son Elliot narrates; "It is the most horrible thing I have seen in my life. The natives have five hundred years of backwardness in comparison to us. Diseases are rampant. For every dollar that the British, who have been there for two hundred years, leave in Gambia they take away ten. It's just plain exploitation of those people.''
According to his son, Roosevelt threatened the British with publicly exposing what they were doing in Gambia. He never failed to remind Churchill of what he had seen in Gambia and, years later, when he was victim of a terrible disease, he joked with Churchill that he was sick of "Gambian fever" acquired in "that hell hole of yours called Bathurst.”
At the Casablanca Summit of 1943, Roosevelt clearly announced what he proposed for the future. "When we win the war I will work with all my strength and effort to assure that the United States is not influenced to support or stimulate the colonial ambitions of France or the British Empire."
Several days later he told Elliot: I have tried to make Winston see – and all the others - that they should never believe that, because we are allies in victory, we will join up with the archaic medieval imperial ideas.
"Great Britain signed the Atlantic Charter. I expect they understand that the government of the United States intends to have it complied with," President Roosevelt said.
In December of 1944, before the Yalta Conference where he would meet with Roosevelt and Stalin to set plans for post war, Churchill made it known to his two counterparts that he would accept nothing that affected British sovereignty over its dominions or colonies. "Don't touch the British Empire is our dictum", he warned.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and in a tragedy for humanity, the most brilliant potentialities for the post war era died with him when "little man" Harry Truman assumed the presidency of the United States.
All Roosevelt's plans to dismantle the British colonial empire as well as those of France, Holland and Belgium and his view of a new era of development that would arise with the end of colonialism instantly disappeared with his death.
And as history has shown, post-war United States became the new exploiting imperial power, promoting wars and destruction around the world to comply with the American corporate greed, the Gambian paper concludes.
Note: Manuel E. Yepe is a lawyer, economist and professor of the International Relations Institute of Havana