As the United States lurches towards the end of the Trump Administration, I’m looking forward to a time when our leaders again think about working with the leaders of other countries, particularly other democracies, to advance shared goals.
Today’s #stampoftheday – a 2-cent “Nations United for Victory” stamp issued on January 14, 1943 – highlights that promise in three notable ways.
The first is quite obvious. The stamp makes a clear statement about how the Allied forces would work together to defeat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Moreover, Pthe central image – an army of raised swords behind an uplifted palm branch of peace – was personally selected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt who had rejected more militaristic designs because he wanted the stamp that linked military victory with world peace and international cooperation.
Second, and perhaps most important, the stamp was issued on the first day of the 10-day Casablanca Conference, an important gathering where Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, along with other key officials from the US and British governments, met in secret to plan the Allies’ strategy for the next phase of World War II, particularly in Europe.
The conference was important for both substantive and symbolic reasons. Symbolically, it underscored how the allies were working together. This was underscored by the fact that until the conference no president had ever left the United States during wartime; no president had ever visited Africa while in office; and no president had ever travelled by airplane. Roosevelt’s journey, moreover, was far from simple. On January 9 he boarded his special train and headed north. While everyone thought he was heading to his home in Hyde Park, NY he secretly changed direction in Baltimore and headed south to Miami. Since German submarines made travelling by boat too dangerous, he boarded a plane for a ten-hour flight to Trinidad. After spending the night at a hotel he took a nine-hour flight to Belem, Brazil. After a brief stop for refueling he took an almost 20-hour flight across the Atlantic to Gambia. The next day, he took an all-day flight to Casablanca. (And he did all of this without the press learning about it.)
Substantively, the conference addressed many disagreements about how the war effort would proceed. And there were important issues to be worked out. Joseph Stalin, who had been invited but did not attend (because, he claimed, he could not leave Russia while the Battle of Stalingrad was underway) was pressing the Allies had to open a second front in Europe. The Americans didn’t want to overlook the need to fight vigorously in Asia and the Pacific. The British goal was to follow-up the Allies’ increasingly successful campaign in North Africa by invading Sicily and Italy, a move that would give the Allies control of the Mediterranean. To add to the complexity, there were two French factions represented at the conference, one led by Charles de Gaulle, the other by General Henri Giraud. (One British general claimed that the two hated each other more than they hated the Germans.)
On January 24, about 40 British and American war correspondents were flown from Algiers and Tunisia to Casablanca where they were stunned to learn that Roosevelt, Churchill, their combined Chiefs of Staffs and other military leaders had been meeting for the last 10 days.
Displaying his remarkable ability to shape public narratives, Roosevelt started his remarks by explaining why Stalin was not there and then turned to what became the most important (and famous message) from the talks. “Peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power” he said, using somewhat formal language. But then his tone changed. “Some of you Britishers know the old story ,” he said. “We had a General called U.S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the ‘unconditional surrender’ by Germany, Italy and Japan.”
With those two words, he summarized 10 days of work and hundreds of pages of documents.
Some claim that Churchill, who followed Roosevelt, was surprised by the call for unconditional surrender; others say he had agreed Germany but wanted to leave the door open for a negotiated settlement in Italy. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. Rather, he said, the meetings had been “the most important and successful war conference which I have ever attended or witnessed.” He then called himself FDR’s “active and ardent Lieutenant.” Churchill also used an odd metaphor to describe how British troops were going keep attacking Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, whose once formidable forces in North Africa were now falling back. “I can give you this assurance,” he said. “Everywhere that Mary went the lamb is sure to go.”
Substantively, the British agreed to provide more aid and assistance to their troops in Asia and the Americans agreed to the follow the British strategy of focusing on Sicily and Italy before trying to mount an attack across the English Channel targeted at France, Holland or Belgium.
The news of the conference and Roosevelt’s message meant the conference was an important symbolic success. As William Allen White, a Republican newspaper editor wrote, Franklin Roosevelt is…the most enemy-baffling President that this United States has ever seen…[He has] a certain vast impudent courage….We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.”
Finally, I think there’s a powerful message in the fact that the stamp was designed by Leon Helguera, a commercial artist at Fisher-McKenzie, Inc., a Manhattan agency, who had immigrated to the US from Mexico in the early 1900s, Higuera served as president of “Los Panamericanos,” a social club in New York City whose goal was to foster friendship, cooperation, and unity between the people of the U.S and Latin Americans. In 1942, he joined with other artists to offer their talents to the U.S. government on behalf of the war effort. As part of this effort, he submitted his design for what became today’s stamp.
Around the time the stamp was released, the US Office of War Information (OWI) hired Helguera to design a series of bi-lingual posters that aimed to reduce growing tensions in communities that were home to the many Mexican citizens then living and working in the US. Not long after that he was hired to design what became an iconic image of Uncle Sam with his fingers to his lips reminding people not to discuss war-related activities such as troop movements and ship sailings. Over a million copies of that image were distributed, and according to a letter OWI sent Higuera in June 1944, “the Uncle Sam insignia has been one of the most important features of the…campaign to control careless talk. We owe you a great debt of gratitude…”
In the last four years, the United States has turned its back on the kinds of international cooperation and coordination that, as today’s stamp shows, can lead to significant and important outcomes. Hopefully, we’re turning back to that important mode of operating.
Be well, stay safe, have “a vast, impudent courage,” fight for justice, and work for peace.