The Unnamed War

What the country needed, Mr. Roosevelt announced briskly, was a name for its war. The thought the name should convey: a struggle to preserve the democracies and the small people of the world. "War With the Axis Powers," which someone suggested, was too long. The President did not like "Second World War," "World War II." Not enough zip, Mr. Roosevelt declared.

The people scratched their heads. What, indeed, was a good name for the war? Asked for his suggestion, onetime Isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler declared: "There is far too much pending now to permit anyone to stop and ponder anything like the name for this war. Moreover it is far better to wait until it is over. Then it can be more appropriately named." Snapped Senator Robert Taft: "I am no zipper."

Said Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University: "I call it the 20th-century World War." Said onetime Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey: "That's a tough one. Let me think a minute. How about Fight to Live?" Letters poured into the White House carrying monosyllabic, polysyllabic, clever, solemn, simple, erudite, zippy and non-zippy words.

Said Historian Hendrik Willem van Loon: "The names of wars, like war slogans and war songs, are not made, they are born. Something may happen at a moment's notice which will give us the name. Until then we can't create one artificially."

Mr. Roosevelt, nevertheless, wanted to try. In 1917, it was The War to Save the World for Democracy. The phrase, understood or not, had fired a crusade. Obviously that old, good phrase would not do today. Times and minds had changed. Democracy was a word freighted with as much argument about what it is as hope, of what it might be. Besides, the phrase had come from above, from the scholarly mind of Woodrow Wilson. Mr. Roosevelt wanted the idea this time to come from below.

On Good Friday, the Navy Department had a somber message to interpose: three more U.S. warships had been sunk in the month-old battle off Java (see p. 25). On Easter Sunday the Christian nation went heavily to its churches, celebrated the resurrection of Jesus, who had died to save the world. Death and the war, whatever its right name might be, hung heavy over the country.

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