Penguin History of the United States of America (104 page)

World peace was already in great danger when Franklin Roosevelt took office. Adolf Hitler had become German Chancellor just over a month previously, and Japan was continuing her conquest of Manchuria. It is clear that Roosevelt hoped to redeem this state of affairs, and he never gave up trying. He was influenced by the example of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and he had a deep personal revulsion from the horrors of modern warfare, which he had seen on a visit to the Western Front in 1918. In an election speech in 1936, he said:

I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

In this he spoke perfectly for his fellow-citizens, and his speech was acclaimed. At the same time his sense of himself as a man of destiny made his duties as Commander-in-Chief attractive to him rather than otherwise. He wanted to take the lead in a vigorous search for world peace, but failing that he was happy to look after America’s defences. He devoted a good deal of highly successful effort to his ‘Good Neighbor’ policy: to safeguarding America’s rear by cultivating good relations with Canada and Latin America. The United States withdrew its troops from Haiti, which they had been occupying since 1914; it renounced the notorious Platt Amendment, which
gave it the right to intervene at will in Cuba; it began the long process of dismantling its unilateral control over the Panama Canal; and it renounced the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the western hemisphere. Theodore Roosevelt would not have approved of his cousin’s activities, but the Latin Americans did: FDR became stupendously popular south of the Rio Grande, which was a good thing for his country during the Second World War. As a former naval person he was happy to build up the US navy to the modest degree allowed by the Washington Naval Treaty, using PWA funds to do so; but he had to take care, for when in 1936 he presented the largest peacetime naval budget in American history the pacifists made a loud and vigorous, though unsuccessful, protest. He neglected the army. He was happy to let his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, ride his hobby-horse of free trade, once the collapse of the London Economic Conference had made the exercise futile. The world’s central problem, the policies of the aggressor nations, remained untouched.

Institutional reasons partly determined this. Foreign policy and its execution were still the more or less exclusive prerogative of the State Department: the White House had not yet sprouted its modern jungle of auxiliary offices, such as the National Security Council, to supplement, duplicate or, in some administrations, supersede State; the Pentagon was a thing of the future; so was the Central Intelligence Agency. And during the first five years of his Presidency Roosevelt had little time for foreign affairs. So his interventions in the field were almost inescapably impulsive, ill-informed, ill-thought-out and transitory. On the whole it is surprising that they were no worse. This was in part due to Roosevelt’s own concern and intelligence, in part to his effective collaboration with the State Department team. But between them FDR and his advisers shaped one of the feeblest eras of American diplomacy.

Hull was a Congressional veteran who had drafted the first income tax law under the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, had led the ‘dry’ faction at the 1932 Democratic convention (he came from the godly state of Tennessee) and was picked for his post in the same way as Vice-Presidents are. He had been an outstanding supporter of Roosevelt-for-President among the Southern Democrats; he had been a life-long campaigner for the good old Democratic cause of lower tariffs; and he had useful links with his former colleagues in the Senate. He was an able and tenacious negotiator when given the chance; a dignified figure, who was prepared to stick stubbornly to his view if he thought it correct, but nevertheless always showed a becoming deference to his chief. He entirely lacked the vision and energy which might have helped Roosevelt to face reality himself and induce his countrymen to do likewise. As the long train of disaster unrolled, Cordell Hull could always find a reason for not doing anything this time. On the other hand he was always prepared to say something, especially if he saw a chance to lecture unreceptive ears (Japanese for choice) on the sanctity of treaties, the importance of the peaceful resolution of international
disputes and the glories of free trade. Otherwise his chief skill was that of ousting his rivals from the President’s councils, and even there he usually took his time. Nor were his deficiencies made good by his officials. True, American ambassadors were often perceptive – Dodd at Berlin, Messersmith at Vienna, Grew at Tokyo, all sent wise and frequent warnings – but it was not convenient to pay them any attention. Instead (for instance) Hull publicly disowned Hugh Johnson when in 1934 the General said that events in Germany (he was thinking of the Jews) made him sick – ‘not figuratively, but physically and very actively sick’. So little did Hull share this feeling that he rejected every opportunity to rescue Hitler’s victims: between 1933 and 1941 some 75,000 German Jews only were allowed into the United States, although even under the restrictive arrangements of the 1924 Immigration Act something like 180,000 might have come. In this matter, as in too much else, Hull and the State Department’s responses were timid, unimaginative and legalistic.

This might have mattered less if Roosevelt had seen his way to being more imaginative himself; but he too was constrained by a circumscribed vision. Even as late as the 1940 elections he seems to have thought that America might contrive to stay at peace without handing victory in the Second World War to Hitler; and there is no reason to question the solidity of his earlier commitment to the base policy of peace at any price. Furthermore, as he showed again and again during the thirties, he would not allow foreign policy considerations of any kind to interfere with his domestic programme. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia; the Spanish Civil War; the German occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia – in every one of these crises Roosevelt felt himself unable to take any effective action because of possible adverse repercussions in Congress. He loathed the turn the world was taking, but did not feel he could do anything about it.

To judge from the response of Congress and the people to the deepening crisis, he was right in his assessment. Between 1933 and 1935, when comparatively little was happening, he was allowed a fairly free hand; but after the outbreak of the Ethiopian War and Hitler’s announcement of German re-armament, he was put on a very short rein by various Neutrality Acts. For the American people did not see the rise of fascism as a signal for action; rather they took fright and did all they could to stay out of trouble. Their state of mind is commonly spoken of as isolationist, but this label, though convenient and emotionally accurate, obscures the point that at least two tendencies were at work. One was unilateralism: the conviction that America must remain a free agent, as she had been ever since her treaty with France was ended during the French Revolution. Unilateralism took no account of the technological and economic changes which had made physical isolation impossible and permanent collaboration with friendly nations essential. It was strongly nationalistic and well entrenched in the Senate. It was a convenient rationale, not just for the widespread dislike and distrust of foreigners, those benighted creatures who did not enjoy the
benefit of American institutions, but for the steadily increasing resentment, in Congress and among conservatives generally, of the steadily increasing power of the Presidency. It was easy enough to argue that unless Roosevelt was closely watched he might drag America into a war so that he could, as war leader, gratify his well-known dictatorial tendencies and overthrow American democracy. Nonsense, of course; but nonsense which all the enemies of that man in the White House found it very easy to accept. Most of the more contemptible manifestations of isolationism grew from this root.

The other tendency was pacifism, a more honourable but no less foolish persuasion. It had given the world the Kellogg-Briand Pact in the twenties; its proponents were incapable of acknowledging that conditions in the thirties demanded a different sort of response. The Depression took its toll. Domestic economic problems seemed more pressing, more real, than any foreign scare, and diminished confidence that America had answers for the world’s difficulties. Above all there was the memory of the trenches. Modern war was horrible, and getting more so. Every bomb dropped by the Japanese on China, or by the fascists on Guernica, was one more argument for steering clear of it; the pacifist mentality found it too painful, as well as too humiliating, to admit that America might no longer have the power to do so. There is something moving about the way in which these citizens and their representatives, whether in Congress or in such bodies as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, laboured for peace, not out of weakness or cowardice, but because it was a value they cherished. Their pacifism contrasts finely with the war-mania of imperial Japan or Hitlerite Germany. But it was no less self-defeating, for by weakening America it made an attack upon her more likely, not less.

All isolationist tendencies were strengthened by the inquest which Congress and revisionist historians conducted on the First World War during the thirties. The conclusion was reached that America had been dragged into it solely by the wiles of financiers who had invested in an Allied victory. The invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the
Lusitania
, unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann telegram, were all discounted; and Woodrow Wilson’s belief that the Allied cause, being that of democracy and legality, must also be that of America, was derided or ignored, like his beliefs that only through international organization could further war be averted, and that the world was now so closely knit that the United States could not stand aloof any more, even if it wanted to. Wilson’s reputation has probably never stood lower than in the thirties (the increasing futility of the League of Nations did not help it); and among the consequences were the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937. The last of these made earlier, temporary arrangements permanent. Among the actions it outlawed were the sale of arms or loan of funds to belligerents, the arming of American merchant vessels and sailing on belligerent ones. Belligerents wishing to buy non-contraband goods must pay for delivery and ship them themselves – the so-called ‘cash and carry’ provisions. Above all the President was
given no freedom of choice. When war broke out he was required to invoke the Act, and he was not allowed to discriminate between aggressor and victim: neither might receive armaments from the United States. It is not surprising that the
New York Herald-Tribune
said that the act should have been called ‘an act to preserve the United States from intervention in the War of 1914–18’. Roosevelt, with the battle over the Supreme Court on his hands, did not wish to make more trouble for himself by vetoing the law, so he signed it, an action he bitterly regretted a year or two later. The chief consequence was that the conduct of American diplomacy, already difficult enough, became nearly impossible: only the outbreak of war in 1939 made repeal possible, and even then it was a slow and piecemeal business. Meanwhile Roosevelt had more or less lost control of foreign policy. He did not even try very hard to induce Congress to relax the immigration laws to admit Jewish refugees, for the opposition to any such liberalization was blindly, cruelly obstinate. A widespread, erroneous impression was that the faltering economy, of which mass unemployment seemed to be so permanent a feature, could not stand the strain of an influx of penniless refugees; and uglier forces were at work. Anti-semitism was active and vocal, finding expression in such demagogues as the ‘radio priest’, Charles Coughlin, and the professional rabble-rouser, Gerald L. K. Smith, and in such organizations as the German-American Bund, which was lavishly supported by Hitler. As a result of all this America, at the time of the Munich crisis, was impotent. All Roosevelt could do was bombard the Europeans with messages urging them to make peace on just and liberal principles – messages which Hitler ostentatiously ridiculed and which unconsciously bore out an earlier remark of Neville Chamberlain’s: ‘It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words.’

The worst consequence was that when war broke out American neutrality positively favoured the Nazis, since it was not they who needed to procure ships, planes, guns and other military supplies from the United States. Roosevelt had foreseen this, but his efforts to enlighten Congress were for long entirely in vain. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was Key Pittman of Nevada, who cared for nothing but the silver lobby: among his other disqualifications for the post was his habit of drinking himself into a stupor. Senator Borah of Idaho was still active: when, in August 1939, Roosevelt told him that war in Europe was imminent, he blandly contradicted the President. His own sources, he said, were better than the State Department’s, and assured him that there was not going to be a war.

The best that can be said for the Americans is that they were no more foolish than the British, and were infinitely less so than the Germans or the Japanese or J. V. Stalin. Nor should it be forgotten that one of the minor constraints on Roosevelt was the attitude of the other democratic governments. Whenever he proposed a course of action the British were certain to find it too risky. Not the least shocking consequence of Chamberlain’s
appeasement policy was that it kept the British at arms’ length from the Americans. Roosevelt’s offers of help were coolly declined, and he was reduced to watching while a policy in which he did not believe failed utterly.

Even so late as 1940 only 7.7 per cent of all Americans were ready to enter the war;
¹
in May 1941, according to a Gallup poll, 79 per cent of the people were still opposed to a voluntary entry, though by then most of them expected to be forced in. But too much should not be made of this state of mind; as the shrewd German ambassador had observed previously, if the Americans were frightened enough they might change from isolationists to interventionists in one jump. Nor was that all. As the circumstances which had driven Woodrow Wilson to go to war reappeared, worse than ever, Wilsonian ideology came to life again. Roosevelt, for instance, had been an isolationist perforce throughout the first six years of his Presidency; but after Munich he changed his stance decisively. The world had come right to the brink of war and been saved only by the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. A month later Hitler unleashed a furious terror against the German Jews. They were beaten up by Nazi thugs, their property was looted, they were stripped of their civil rights: tyranny let loose an obscene madness. ‘I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization,’ said Roosevelt. Peace, democracy and justice were in danger while Hitler ruled, and the President began to plan accordingly. Suppose the Nazis began to meddle in Latin America? FDR renewed his courtship of the southern republics, and began the long job of expanding, training and equipping the armed forces of the United States, lest Hitler try to come in by the back door. He still had to move warily, because of isolationist opinion, and by September 1939 was not visibly in a much stronger position, either internationally or politically, than he had been a year before; but in fact the gathering of America’s strength had begun, and was not to be reversed.