Excerpt From Radio Bulletin No. 176, Issued by the White House on July 25, 1941
Volunteer Participation Committee. President Roosevelt yesterday received at the White House the Volunteer Participation Committee made up of representatives from all parts of the country who have volunteered for civilian defense activities. Speaking informally to this group President Roosevelt said in part:
“There are lots of things that people don’t quite understand. You are an information bureau to all of them. And I will give you the example.
“Here on the East Coast, you have been reading that the Secretary of the Interior, as Oil Administrator, is faced with the problem of not enough gasoline to go around in the East Coast, and how he is asking everybody to curtail their consumption of gasoline. All right. Now, I am—I might be called an American citizen, living in Hyde Park, N. Y. And I say, ‘That’s a funny thing. Why am I asked to curtail my consumption of gasoline when I read in the papers that thousands of tons of gasoline are going out from Los Angeles—West Coast—to Japan; and we are helping Japan in what looks like an act of aggression?’
“All right. Now the answer is a very simple one. There is a world war going on, and has been for some time—nearly two years. One of our efforts, from the very beginning, was to prevent the spread of that world war in certain areas where it hadn’t started. One of those areas is a place called the Pacific Ocean—one of the largest areas of the earth. There happened to be a place in the South Pacific where we had to get a lot of things—rubber—tin—and so forth and so on—down in the Dutch Indies, the Straits Settlements, and Indochina. And we had to help get the Australian surplus of meat and wheat, and corn, for England.
“It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was—trying to stop a war from breaking out down [Page 265] there. At the same time, from the point of view of even France at that time—of course France still had her head above water—we wanted to keep that line of supplies from Australia and New Zealand going to the Near East—all their troops, all their supplies that they have maintained in Syria, North Africa and Palestine. So it was essential for Great Britain that we try to keep the peace down there in the South Pacific.
“All right. And now here is a nation called Japan. Whether they had at that time aggressive purposes to enlarge their empire southward, they didn’t have any oil of their own up in the north. Now, if we cut the oil off, they probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war.
“Therefore, there was—you might call—a method in letting this oil go to Japan, with the hope—and it has worked for two years—of keeping war out of the South Pacific for our own good, for the good of the defense of Great Britain, and the freedom of the seas.
“You people can help to enlighten the average citizen who wouldn’t hear of that, or doesn’t read the papers carefully, or listen to the radio carefully—to understand what some of these apparent anomalies mean. So, on the information end, I think you have got just as great a task as you have in the actual organization work.
“Now on this organization—to come back to that for a minute—it is amazing the number of letters I get here in the White House—and my wife in the White House—from men and women in literally every County in the United States—who are pleading to be told what they can do to help. They honestly are ready to work.
“So my message to you is: Act as starters of this ‘horse race’.”