Lend-Lease Signed: America Ends Isolationism to Aid Allies

Fifty billion dollars in war supplies flowed from American factories to Allied nations under a single piece of legislation that Franklin Roosevelt sold to a skeptical public as nothing more than lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, effectively ending two decades of American isolationism without firing a single shot. The political groundwork had been laid carefully. Britain was running out of money to buy American weapons, and Churchill had written Roosevelt a blunt letter in December 1940 warning that the British Empire could not sustain the war effort without American industrial support. Roosevelt bypassed the politically toxic idea of loans by framing the policy as a temporary lending arrangement, telling reporters the program was no different than lending a neighbor your garden hose during a fire. Congress passed the act 60-31 in the Senate and 317-71 in the House after two months of fierce debate. The legislation gave the president unprecedented authority to transfer defense materials to any nation whose security he deemed vital to American interests. Britain received $31.4 billion, the Soviet Union $11.3 billion, France $3.2 billion, and China $1.6 billion. In total, $50.1 billion worth of supplies shipped overseas, roughly equivalent to $656 billion today, representing 17 percent of total U.S. war expenditures. The program transformed the American economy into what Roosevelt called the "arsenal of democracy." Factories retooled overnight, unemployment plummeted, and the industrial base that would later overwhelm the Axis powers was already running at full capacity before American soldiers entered combat. Reverse Lend-Lease sent $7.8 billion in services back to the United States, mostly British-provided base access. Lend-Lease demolished the fiction of American neutrality and committed the nation to Allied victory long before the first American combat casualty fell in Europe.