VOLUNTEER PARTICIPATION COMMITTEE

Excerpt from Radio Bulletin No. 176, Issued by the White House on July
25, 1941 [Observations Concerning Trade with Japan].

From Japan, 1931-1941, Vol. II, pp.

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 Indo-china. 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 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'."