Lend-Lease Act

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Sections 1–3

The first section of the act provides its title. At first glance this may seem unimportant, but the language of the title was significant. It emphasizes the national security of the United States without referring to the welfare of other nations and peoples who stood to benefit from the legislation, as an earlier version of the act had done. This language, which appears to have been suggested by Justice Frankfurter, was designed to deflect the charges of those critics who would claim that Lend-Lease would undermine national security.

The second section lays out broad definitions of the goods and intelligence that could be supplied under Lend-Lease. In practice, it served to authorize shipments of food, steel, petroleum products, machinery, and trucks as well as weapons. Huge quantities of all these products would be shipped to America's allies under Lend-Lease.

Section 3 is the longest and most complex part of the document. It explains what the act allows the president to do. Subsection (a) authorizes the president to direct members of his cabinet to provide goods, services, and information to any country designated by the president as “vital” to American defense. As critics of the act pointed out, this gave the president considerable new powers over the shape of American foreign policy. Significantly, it does not limit Lend-Lease to specific countries, nor does it exclude any countries. This flexibility would make it easier, later in the year, for Roosevelt to declare the Soviet Union eligible for Lend-Lease. Even this part of the act establishes important limits to presidential power, however. The most important of these limits was Congress's retention of the power of the purse: Lend-Lease orders could be placed only “to the extent to which funds are made available” by Congress. This subsection also imposes a limit of $1.3 billion on the total value of goods ordered before the act's passage that could be treated as Lend-Lease items. This clause, which was added to the bill in the House in February, disappointed the British, who had wanted the act to cover all orders placed since the beginning of the year.

Although it is only one sentence long, subsection (b) of Section 3 of the act is an important one: It explains how, if at all, the United States would arrange to be reimbursed for Lend-Lease aid. Here again the act granted the chief executive broad discretion. It would be up to the president to determine conditions attached to the aid. The president was free to decide what the United States would ask in return for Lend-Lease shipments. This repayment might be “in kind or property”; it might be “direct or indirect.” Especially after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and many other Americans understood that much of the repayment took the form of costly fighting against enemies of the United States. Other considerations were also expected, however. In the case of Britain, the most important of these were agreements to lower trade barriers.

Section 3(c) of the act sets time limits for its operation. It allows the act to run through the end of the 1943 fiscal year while giving Congress the right to cancel it early with a concurrent resolution. This subsection also sets up a three-year window in the postwar period for the completion of Lend-Lease contracts or agreements made during the war. In early 1943 Congress passed the first of what would be three one-year extensions of the act. The only significant revision of the original act came in the 1945 renewal, when Congress altered Section 3(c) to order that Lend-Lease could not be used for postwar relief or reconstruction regardless of any agreements that might be signed during wartime. This revision disappointed Britain and other allies, which had been expecting to use Lend-Lease for postwar rebuilding.

The last two parts of Section 3, which were added to the bill as it went through Congress, state that the act does not provide any new authority that would permit the sending of any American ships into combat areas or the use of U.S. Navy ships to protect convoys of merchant ships. These subsections lessened the concerns of the many members of Congress who believed that the United States should keep trying to avoid joining the war. The language was not of great concern to President Roosevelt and his advisers, because they believed the president already had ample powers over the deployment of American vessels.

Sections 4–7

The brief fourth section prohibits recipients of Lend-Lease goods from transferring them without the president's approval. This helped protect the United States by keeping Lend-Lease goods out of the hands of its enemies.

Section 5 demands that Lend-Lease operations be carefully tracked and reported. Subsection (a) calls upon any agency involved in exporting Lend-Lease goods to report the details of the shipment to the department or agency charged with tracking such goods under the Export Control Act of 1940. Subsection (b) requires the president to submit regular reports to Congress on the operations of the Lend-Lease program.

Section 6 charges Congress with appropriating funds for the Lend-Lease program. Congress would do so for the first time on March 24, 1941, when it provided $7 billion. This section also establishes a budgetary mechanism for receiving any funds or goods received from other nations in return for Lend-Lease aid.

The act demands, in the seventh section, that the patent rights of American citizens be respected and that Americans be paid royalties for use of their patents in Lend-Lease orders. This is an example of how Americans' private property and profits were protected even as Lend-Lease and the growing demands of war called for great altruism and sacrifice.

Section 8–10

Section 8 allows the army and navy to buy arms from countries designated by the president as eligible for Lend-Lease. In section 9 the act makes it clear that the president is allowed to take those actions necessary to carry out the work authorized by the legislation.

Like the end of section 3, section 10 of the act emphasizes that it does not give the president additional authority to send the army and navy to war. During the second week of December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, Congress would overwhelmingly approve the declarations of war that removed existing constraints on the president's ability to direct the armed forces.

Section 11

The act’s final section attempts to protect it from unforeseen problems in the courts. If the Supreme Court were to rule that one part of the act violated the Constitution by improperly limiting Congress's powers over foreign commerce or treaty making, for example, the rest of the act might be preserved. Ironically, given the wide powers that the act granted to the chief executive, some observers—including President Roosevelt himself—believed that its only unconstitutional provision was the clause in Section 3(c) that provided for a kind of congressional veto by concurrent resolution.