by Conrad Black
13. JAPAN AND THE BEGINNING OF WAR
In September 1931, Japan occupied the principal cities of Manchuria, and systematically extended its control over southern Manchuria by January of 1932 and of the whole province by September, when Tokyo purported to recognize the puppet state of Manchukuo. This was a bare-faced violation of the Washington treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the League of Nations Covenant. This was the first serious test of the League’s ability to deter or roll back aggression. In January 1932, Stimson sent identical notes to China and Japan, stating that the United States would not recognize any arrangement or act that might “impair . . . the sovereignty, independence, or territorial and administrative integrity of . . . China” or, inevitably, flogging the same spavined horse as all his predecessors since Hay, “the Open Door.” Of course there had been no open door to China for years; it was just another figment of the roseate imagination of America’s diplomats. This became known, rather portentously, as the Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of any territories or agreements obtained by aggression.
The British government, four days after Stimson’s pronunciamento, announced that it had full faith in Japan’s assurances that the Open Door was intact; what would soon enough become the infamous British policy of appeasement of the dictators had begun. At the end of January, Japan bombarded and seized Shanghai, Chinas largest city. Stimson proposed to Sir John Simon, the British foreign secretary, a joint protest based on the Washington treaty, but Simon opted for action through the League. Stimson stated that the United States would stand on its treaty rights in the Far East, the beginning of what would prove a very durable practice of the United States taking a harder line against anti-Western and anti-democratic governments than the British or the French. (In what subsequent events and Stimson’s role in them would prove to be an irony, he publicly wrote the ambassador in London, Dawes, that the United States “does not intend to go to war with Japan.”) In October, in something of a victory for Stimson, the League adopted his doctrine, and in May, in a League victory achieved by the non-League U.S.A., Japan withdrew from Shanghai. This invites renewed consideration of whether the League of Nations could have been substantially more effective if the United States had adhered to it, instead of just to the Hughes-Kellogg aerated waffling about scrapping battleships and outlawing war.
In October 1932, the League’s Lytton Commission produced the report of its inquiry into the dispute in Manchuria. It condemned Japan’s aggression, but recognized Japan’s rights in Manchuria and indulged in the sophistry of recognizing Manchuria as an “autonomous” state under Chinese “sovereignty” but Japanese “control.” Words had lost their meaning in the placation of Japan, but despite this accommodation, Japan withdrew from the League in March 1933, a few weeks after the Lytton Report was adopted by the League of Nations’ general assembly. The disintegration of the world had begun again.
14. THE POLITICS OF DEPRESSION
As the election season began, it was clear that in the desperate economic circumstances, the administration was going to have a very difficult time. The Republicans met at Chicago in June 1932 and renominated President Hoover and Vice President Curtis without significant dissent, on a platform that called for sharp reductions in government expenses, the sanctity of the gold standard and a balanced budget, vague alterations to Prohibition, enhanced tariffs, and continued restraint of immigration. Hoover had given a lot of attention to a world economic conference that would open in London in the spring of 1933, and set great store by this. Preliminary indications were that it would be another effort by the governments of the world to agree that they were all blameless in the face of an economic whirlwind that was virtually an Old Testament plague. There was already a good deal of discussion about pegging the principal currencies together, which was both impractical and almost irrelevant to the main problems of the Depression. The administration’s leaders, including Andrew Mellon, who left the Treasury and replaced Dawes as ambassador in London, did not grasp that only expansion of the money supply, and liberalization of spending and trade, would alleviate the Depression, though it would also induce inflation. There was a grim choice between depression and inflation, but under no scenario could the United States go much longer without massive aid to the indigent and be confident of avoiding widespread disorder.
The Democrats met in Chicago a week after the Republicans had left the city, and struggled for the last time with their rule that required a two-thirds majority to nominate a candidate. The 1928 nominee, Alfred E. Smith, though he had not held a political office since being succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York, still had the support of the eastern urban party bosses. Roosevelt clearly had the lead, but there was a third candidate, Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, whose candidacy was invented by media owner William Randolph Hearst, because he was an ancient foe of Smith’s when Hearst had been active in New York politics himself, and believed Roosevelt was apt, as a Wilsonian, to be too much of an internationalist. Hearst was somewhat Anglophobic, and his newspaper chain published a regular column by Hitler (though Hearst was philo-Semitic and in his annual visits to Berlin through the thirties remonstrated with Hitler about the evils of anti-Semitism).
In the event of deadlock, there was much talk of a compromise candidate, such as former war secretary Newton D. Baker. Wilson’s son-in-law and Smith’s rival at the 1924 convention, William G. McAdoo, was the favorite-son candidate from California but was also under Hearst’s influence, as he was running for the Senate there and Hearst was the state’s largest newspaper publisher. Roosevelt led the first ballot, and his political operatives, Louis McHenry Howe and James A. Farley, had held back enough support to assure modest rises on the subsequent two ballots. At this point, financier and Roosevelt backer (and father of a future Democratic president) Joseph P. Kennedy succeeded in telephoning Hearst at his magnificent palace near San Luis Obispo, California, and warned him that if he did not wind down Garner and McAdoo, Baker or Smith might get the nomination. Roosevelt had already cravenly, his wife and some other intimates thought, made a rather isolationist speech clarifying his position in order to settle Hearst down. Hearst accepted Kennedy’s advice, and Garner withdrew and, with the help of veteran congressman Sam Rayburn, delivered the Texas delegation to Roosevelt.
When the balloting recommenced, the alphabet quickly brought on McAdoo, who delivered California’s entire delegation to Roosevelt, who was nominated at the end of the fourth ballot. In accord with the deal with Hearst, Garner was chosen for vice president, although he would have preferred to remain as Speaker. (And as he lived to be 98, he might have held the office for a very long time; he later dismissed the vice presidency as “not worth a pail of warm piss.” When asked by Roosevelt if he had any advice on how to win the election, he responded: “Stay alive until November.”) The party platform was a mélange of conservative and reform measures, including reductions in government expenditures and a balanced budget, unemployment and old-age insurance under state laws (without a hint of how to pay for them), participation in the international monetary conference that Hoover was touting, higher farm prices, flexibility on tariffs, the repeal of Prohibition, and the regulation of complex corporate structures and utilities and of securities and commodity exchanges.
The Socialists nominated Norman Thomas for president, and the Communists nominated William Z. Foster, neither for the first time nor the last.
Roosevelt had referred in a speech, while he was seeking the nomination, to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” and he broke a long tradition by coming in person, by airplane, to the convention to accept the nomination. He told the convention and the country: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.” It was an electrifying message. Roosevelt was a very talented orator and he ran an energetic and aggressive campaign that edged close to suggestions of profound changes to assure a more equitable distribution of wealth, but was careful to refer to such me
asures only as last resorts. In different addresses he called for both increases and reductions of tariffs, and finessed it with explanations that these were bilateral matters that varied with each country, product, and commodity.
Hoover campaigned doggedly, writing his own thoughtful speeches, excoriating Roosevelt as a charlatan and a radical and referring to his slipperiness on many policies as “the nightmare of the chameleon on Scotch plaid.” But Hoover was promising grim continuity, no change, and no believable hope. He was still claiming that the long forecasted and desperately awaited rally had started, and warned that the election of Roosevelt and the promulgation of his New Deal would mean that “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; weeds will overrun millions of farms.” Roosevelt described the shantytowns of the itinerant indigent on the edge of every city in America as “Hoovervilles” and accused the administration, unanswerably in the circumstances, of having failed, of having “worshipped the golden calf,” of having been manipulated by “the money-changers in the temple,” and of having lost all hope, imagination, and capacity to lead.
On election day, Roosevelt won 22.8 million votes, 57 percent of the total, and 472 electoral votes, to 15.8 million, 40 percent, and 59 electoral votes for Hoover. Thomas received 885,000 votes and Foster 103,000. These were very modest proportions of the vote for left-wing parties, compared with most other democracies, where radical parties were a serious threat.
Between Roosevelt’s election and inauguration, the German president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, was induced to name Adolf Hitler chancellor. The centrist parties and wealthy businessmen assumed that Hitler could be controlled and would be a useful bulwark against the Communists. The second assumption was correct, but Hitler effortlessly and swiftly outmaneuvered all other faction heads and established a totalitarian dictatorship, uniting Hindenburg’s position with his own as fuehrer in 1934, when the 86-year-old marshal-president died and the old Germany was laid in the grave with him. A process of remilitarizing Germany and putting what was left of the Treaty of Versailles to the shredder began at once.
The rise of Hitler had a very negative effect on Mussolini, who, having been fairly responsible, began to put on the airs of a conqueror. France elected a democratic socialist government in 1934, while former premier Laval sidled up to fascistic elements and the French Communist Party drew almost 20 percent of the vote. The Third Republic was less stable than ever. In 1936, Spain would erupt in a terrible, three-year civil war that would take a million lives, between fascists led by General Francisco Franco and a Communist-led coalition. In Britain, after the collapse of the Labour government, King George V had urged the rather plodding Labour Party prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to form a coalition government, which was mainly composed of Conservatives. Hitler and Stalin soon dominated or intimidated almost all of continental Europe except France, and they had no shortage of supporters in that country. Since the collapse of Wilson’s efforts to bring the United States into the League of Nations, the world had been on a strategic holiday. The failure to make a serious peace with Germany, to come to terms with Soviet Russia, to set up an international organization with any muscle, to get a grip on tariffs, or even manage the economies of the major countries responsibly soon laid low the economy of the whole world and brought forward threats to Western democracy far more worrisome than the overgrown child, Wilhelm II.
In the United States, the expansion of the stock-speculating population vastly beyond what it had been before World War I made the crash infinitely worse. And the chaos of war and depression had made aggressive dictatorships fashionable. Britain and France were about to be outgunned by the dictators. And more even than in 1917, when Russia, Italy, and Japan had all been allies, albeit tired or remote allies, they were all now hostile to the democracies, and the beseeching eyes of the British and the French, and the attention of all, would soon be fixed on America, beleaguered though it now was.
Roosevelt would be taking his place in a world suffering acute economic distress and where the democracies, for the security of which millions had died in a hecatomb of war that had ended less than 15 years before, were in full retreat. His promise of change, his uplifting oratory, and even the courage he had shown in overcoming polio to seem much more mobile and robust than he really was inspirited the world in this worst of times, when other democratic governments seemed so tired and ineffectual, especially compared with the dynamism of the dictators. As his inauguration approached, American economic conditions lurched to new depths. The index of industrial production fell to an all-time low of 56, barely half where it had been in 1928. In less than three years, more than 5,500 banks had closed, taking down with them deposits of over $3 billion. Banks began closing, by state order, starting with Louisiana in early February 1933, and by inauguration day on March 4 almost every bank in the country and all its economic exchanges were closed, or banks were reduced to minimal individual withdrawals. Hoover insistently asked Roosevelt to pledge publicly to abandon the embryonic New Deal program and pledge to uphold Hoover’s fetishistic attachment to the gold standard and the avoidance of major relief commitments. The president-elect declined. For his inauguration, there were army-manned machine-gun nests at the corners of all the great federal buildings in Washington for the first time since the Civil War. America and the world were in desperate straits.
THREE
THE INDISPENSABLE COUNTRY, 1933 -1957
CHAPTER NINE
Toward America’s Rendezvous with Destiny, 1933–1941
1. THE STRATEGIC HERITAGE AND PROSPECTS OF AMERICA IN 1933
The world was gasping and the great power of the New World was in danger of the complete collapse of its economic, and possibly even its political, system. Of Roosevelt’s 30 predecessors as president, only Abraham Lincoln had taken office in such daunting circumstances. This narrative has proceeded fairly densely through 175 years since the start of the Seven Years’ War, in which Benjamin Franklin had felt the need to urge Britain to ensure that the metropolitan French did not return to Canada. As the entire American project teetered, and the country brought in a new leader to try to resuscitate what had been 65 years of vertiginous expansion in every field and by any measurement since the Civil War, it is an opportune moment for a brief pause to assess the strategies of the rise and stall and prospects of America.
In the mid-eighteenth century, America was a haven for seekers of a freer and more prosperous life than was commonly available in Europe. As it had almost 30 percent of Britain’s population toward the end of that period, and a higher standard of living, it was an important geopolitical entity, but Britain got little from it, and protecting it was onerous. A few Americans of international stature, most conspicuously Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had an idea of what a powerhouse America could, relatively quickly, become. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, had the geopolitical vision to add to the British manipulation of the balance of power on the continent, traditional since the time of Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, 225 years before, the concentration on the navy and amphibious operations necessary to gain control of the world’s oceans and most desirable places of empire. He led Britain to victory in Canada and India, the Caribbean, West Africa, and everywhere on the high seas.
Chatham’s successors completely bungled the comprehensible need to get America to pay a representative share of the cost of clearing France out of North America. And Franklin, Washington, and other talented men, especially Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, John Jay, John Marshall, James Monroe, and even the revolutionary drummer boy Andrew Jackson, determined that America would do better without being a British dependency. In an astonishing sequence of individual accomplishments, Washington held an improvised, scarcely paid army together for seven years, identified some talented subalterns, and moved with genius at the beginning and end of the conflict and with agility and tenacity as required in between, while Franklin, incredibly, persuaded the absolute French monarchy t
o join a war for republican democracy and imperial secession.
Jefferson packaged up a tax and jurisdictional dispute as the dawn of human liberty and individual rights, and Madison and Hamilton and Jay wrote the new nation a brilliant and novel Constitution whose adoption was secured by the persuasive eminence of Washington and Franklin. Washington, by his character and sagacity, created a distinguished presidency, in which most of the above-mentioned followed him; Jay and Marshall built a strong federal state from the bench; and Hamilton foresaw and designed the economic destiny of a country that in barely a century would operate on an economic scale that the world had not imagined possible The strategy was to achieve and glorify independence and secure it with functional political institutions, and it was an entirely successful strategy, brilliantly executed.
The new republic was splendidly launched; Jefferson and Polk each added as much territory as the Thirteen Colonies had had at the nation’s outset, at minimal cost. The nation’s Achilles’ heel, even as it grew to be one of the world’s major powers, alongside centuries-old kingdoms, was slavery, symbol of the civilization of the southern half of the country. Jackson decreed the compromise of slavery’s legitimacy and the indissolubility of the Union, and his great rival, Henry Clay, helped produce compromises in 1820, before Jackson entered public life, and in 1850, after Jackson had died, that enabled the Union to survive until the slave-holding part of the country was reduced by natural growth to a quarter of the free population. The strategy was to preserve the Union, to exalt growth over internecine differences until the strength of the Union was insuperable within the country. It was a clever strategy, executed well up to the death of Clay, and was ultimately successful, though only by a hand’s breadth.