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Burton Kendall Wheeler was born in Hudson, Massachusetts on 27th February, 1882. He was admitted to the bar after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1905 and worked as a lawyer in Silver Bow County, Montana.
A member of the Democratic Party, Wheeler was elected to the Montana house of representatives (1910-1912) and was district attorney for Montana (1913-1918). Wheeler was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Montana in 1920 but was elected to the Senate two years later.
In 1924 Wheeler and Robert LaFollette became the candidates of the Progressive Party in the 1924 presidential election. Although they gained support from trade unions, the Socialist Party and the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, La Follette and Wheeler, only won one-sixth of the votes.
Returning to the Democratic Party Wheeler was elected to to the Senate in 1928, 1934 and 1940. In September 1940, Wheeler helped Charles A. Lindbergh and Norman Thomas to form the America First Committee (AFC). I t soon became the most powerful isolationist group in the United States. The AFC had four main principles: (1) The United States must build an impregnable defense for America; (2) No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America; (3) American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European War; (4) "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.
The AFC influenced public opinion through publications and speeches and within a year had over 800,000 members. The AFC was dissolved four days after the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor on 7th December, 1941.
Burton Kendall Wheeler died in Washington, on 6th January, 1975.
Second World War Discussions
John McCloy, Richard Gehlin and the CIA
Nazism and Communism
Who won the Second World War?
(1) Burton K. Wheeler of Montana led the attacks on Lend-Lease in the Senate when it was debated on 12th January 1941.
The lend-lease policy translated into legislative form, stunned a Congress and a nation wholly sympathetic to the cause of Great Britain. The Kaiser's blank check to Austria-Hungary in the First World War was a piker compared to the Roosevelt blank check of World War II. It warranted my worst fears for the future of America, and it definitely stamps the President as war-minded.
The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal's triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy. Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give so bounteously and so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation. Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any President to violate international law. Never before has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses. Never before has a Congress coldly and flatly been asked to abdicate.
If the American people want a dictatorship - if they want a totalitarian form of government and if they want war - this bill should be steam-rollered through Congress, as is the wont of President Roosevelt.
Approval of this legislation means war, open and complete warfare. I, therefore, ask the American people before they supinely accept it - Was the last World War worthwhile?
If it were, then we should lend and lease war materials. If it were, then we should lend and lease American boys. President Roosevelt has said we would be repaid by England. We will be. We will be repaid, just as England repaid her war debts of the First World War - repaid those dollars wrung from the sweat of labor and the toil of farmers with cries of "Uncle Shylock." Our boys will be returned - returned in caskets, maybe; returned with bodies maimed; returned with minds warped and twisted by sights of horrors and the scream and shriek of high-powered shells.
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