Thomas Carlyle once opined that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” And that is certainly true in the case of Myron C. Taylor, whose consequential life helps explain a great deal about the 20th Century.
Taylor was born in 1874, and grew up in the small, upstate town of Lyons (in Wayne County), just south of Lake Ontario. Taylor went to the Cornell Law School in Ithaca, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1894. Returning to Lyons, he established a small law practice, but shortly transitioned to helping his father’s tannery business. That quickly led to bigger things.
Taylor soon became America’s leading industrialist: first as the “czar” of the textile industry; and later, in the 1920s and 30s, as CEO of U.S. Steel. Thereafter, he became a key diplomatic participant in some of the most important geopolitical events of the World War II era. Taylor is little remembered today, however, because of his intense personal dislike for self-promotion and publicity; for much of his business career, the national media called him “the man nobody knows.”
C. Evan Stewart explains.
Myron Taylor in the Vatican. Image provided by the author.
Ambassador Extraordinary
Having literally saved U.S. Steel from ruin during the depths of the Depression and then restoring it to its position as the country’s most important corporation, Taylor stepped down as CEO in April of 1938; he hoped to enter a “sabbatical period of life” with his wife, Anabel. But his friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked him to take on an assignment: could Taylor help solve the crisis of Jews who were attempting to flee persecution in Nazi Germany. Taylor’s efforts actually led to a deal with Hitler and Germany, whereby 150,000 “able-bodied” Jews were to be permitted to emigrate, with their dependents to follow later. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles told the president it was “better than we hoped for.” Unfortunately, with the Nazi invasion of Poland (which led to World War II), that deal came to naught.
Then, right before Christmas 1939, FDR called on Taylor again, asking him to be the president’s personal representative to Pope Pius XII (with the rank of “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary”). This very controversial appointment, which FDR undertook for multiple reasons (e.g., domestic politics; his wanting a third term; trying to influence Church policy (and its internal politics) in the United States; getting international-diplomatic information at the Vatican; influencing the Vatican on geopolitical issues; etc.), led to what was widely known as the “Taylor Mission.” And in fulfilling that Mission over the next eleven years, Taylor was at the heart many of the era’s critical matters, including: (i) efforts to keep Italy, Spain, and Portugal out of the war on the Axis side; (ii) ensuring that Lend-Lease aid got to the Soviet Union in 1941, which at that point was about to be overrun by the German army; (iii) bringing the first documented proof of the Holocaust to the Vatican in September of 1942; (iv) ensuring that the Church would support the Allies’ policy of unconditional surrender (and later, not break with that policy); (v) helping to broker Italy’s surrender and Mussolini’s departure; (vi) blocking German attempts to have the Vatican broker a peace; (vii) helping to godfather the Bretton Woods agreement and the United Nations; (viii) almost single-handedly helping Italy recover from the war; and (ix) under President Truman, engaging in an effort to have all the world’s religions unite against atheistic communism (i.e., the Soviet Union).
Lend-Lease to Russia
To cover all the foregoing (and more), readers will have to pick up Myron Taylor: The Man Nobody Knows (Twelve Tables Press). For the remainder of this article, the focus will be on Taylor’s critical role in ensuring Lend-Lease aid got to Russia in 1941.
On March 11, 1941, FDR signed the controversial Lend-Lease legislation. Premised on the president’s campaign pledge in 1940 for America to be the “great arsenal of democracy,” it was understood - by Congress and the American public - to apply only to providing assistance to Great Britain, then isolated and under the German attacks known as the “Blitz.”
On June 24, 1941, the geopolitical world was up-ended when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The German army’s advance through Russian territory was swift; FDR and his top advisors feared that the if the USSR were to be overrun and conquered, then stopping the Nazi regime when (not if) the United States became a belligerent might well provide impossible. (Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, told FDR that Russia might not last three months.) The president was determined to provide substantial military assistance to Joseph Stalin, but there was a very significant roadblock.
In 1937, the Vatican had issued the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris - issued by Pope Pius XI (but authored by his Secretary of State, who would succeed him as Pope Pius XII). That Encyclical condemned in no uncertain terms the Soviet Union and expressly forbade all Catholics from having anything to do with supporting that nation-state. Given the 1937 Encyclical and the strong isolationistic sentiments of many American Catholics, FDR feared that the political backlash would prove too great if he tried to extend Lend-Lease aid to Russia. (For example, the Bishop of Buffalo had publicly stated that Catholics would be justified in not serving in the U.S. military if the country were allied with the Soviet Union.) In the words of Robert Sherwood (an FDR speechwriter and later biographer), “[a]s a measure for coping with serious Catholic opposition to aid for the Soviet Union, Roosevelt decided to send Myron C. Taylor … on another mission to Rome.”
Myron Taylor shares a letter from FDR with the Pope. Image provided by the author.
Threading the Needle
Before his trip, Taylor, together with two Church officials in the United States and Sumner Welles, devised a strategy to thread the needle of the 1937 Encyclical: that any U.S. aid would not constitute supporting communism, but would instead be directed at alleviating the suffering of the Russian people, for whom the Pope and the Church always had special affection. But that nuanced approach to the problem got off to a rocky start at Taylor’s first meeting with the Pope on September 9, 1941. FDR had asked Taylor to present a hand-written letter to the Pope, a document which went to great lengths to assure him that “the churches in Russia are open” and that “freedom of religion” was a likely outcome of the Nazi’s invasion. The Pope and his advisors were incredulous; at least seven Vatican memoranda were prepared in response to FDR’s letter, many of them questioning the president’s mental state and his grasp on reality.
Notwithstanding FDR’s blunder, Taylor, over a number of days and multiple sessions with the Pope and his advisors, was able to get the Vatican to agree to the concept of delinking the Russian people from the Soviet Union; but this message could not be seen as being issued from or dictated by the Pope or the Vatican. Instead, guidance would be sent to the Apostolic Delegate in Washington to have the message delivered by a high-ranking member of the Church in America.
Once Taylor returned to America, in consultation with the Apostolic Delegate and other Church officials, it was decided to effectuate the Vatican’s hidden-hand strategy by having an outspoken isolationistic Church leader - Archbishop McNicholas of Cincinnati - deliver the message. With time of the essence - not only were German troops closing in on Moscow, but a second Lend-Lease appropriations bill was pending in Congress and over 90% of available Lend-Lease funds had already been allocated - McNicholas was summoned to Washington and given his marching orders.
On October 30, 1941, McNicholas published a pastoral letter (which received broad national coverage and was printed in toto in the Congressional Record) explicitly endorsing the need for America to help the “persecuted people of Russia, deprived of freedom and put in bondage.” That same day, FDR cabled Stalin that he had approved $1 billion of war materials to be shipped to the USSR. But the president waited a week for the McNicholas letter to sink in and take effect in the American body politic (and Congress). As Sherwood wrote: “It is an indication of Roosevelt’s concern for public opinion that he did not formerly include the Soviet Union among the recipients of Lend Lease until November 7.”
In the words of the leading historian on the decision to aid the USSR in 1941, because of “Myron Taylor’s special mission to the Vatican” - which had secured the Church’s overt approval of such aid, “[s]o perished the great dread of the President that the encyclical of Pius XI would provide a sanction for equating aid to Russia with aid to communism and thereby permit his opponents to insist with telling force that his program was in conflict with the doctrines of the Church.” Ultimately, eleven billion dollars in aid was sent to the Soviet Union to help them repulse the Nazis. And at the Tehran Conference, Stalin toasted that, without the U.S.’s war materials, the USSR would have been overrun. In reflecting upon Taylor’s contribution to this historic result (which was “given no great amount of publicity”), Sherwood wrote: “Taylor was one who truly deserved the somewhat archaic title of ‘Ambassador Extraordinary.’”
The Taylor Archives
Myron C. Taylor donated his papers to his alma mater, Cornell University, and I drew upon these papers (in the University’s Olin Library) for this article. Other archival sources with important Taylor documents include the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York; the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library to Independence, Missouri; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; in addition, the Baker Library at Harvard University (papers of Thomas Lamont) and the Oral History Project at Columbia University (including oral histories of Frances Perkins, George Rublee, etc.) contain many valuable materials on Taylor’s life and career. The Vatican has made many, but not all, archival materials covering the World War II era available for scholars.
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