Lend-Lease Act

About the Author

There are good reasons to conclude that the main author of the Lend-Lease Act—or at least the lend-lease idea—was President Roosevelt himself. By the late summer of 1940, Roosevelt was indicating to his advisers that he was interested in lending war goods to Britain. Certainly, by December 1940, when he gave his “garden hose” press conference and “Arsenal of Democracy” fireside chat, Roosevelt had taken the lead in presenting the lend-lease idea to the public.

Like many modern laws, however, the Lend-Lease Act itself had several authors, many of them rather obscure. At the end of December, President Roosevelt described the outlines of what he wanted to Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury. The first draft of the bill was written on January 2, 1941, by a small group of Treasury Department lawyers, including Edward Foley, Oscar Cox, Stephen Spingarn, and Ernest Feidler. Over the next several days, the document was revised after consultations with a number of influential men in Washington, including the Roosevelt adviser Ben Cohen, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as well as several cabinet members and British purchasing officials. Because there were few significant changes to the bill after it was introduced in Congress, it is fair to say that its lead authors were the treasury lawyers, none of whom was especially well known to the American public at the time or especially well remembered today.