In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Wehle finally succeeded in arranging a personal meeting between Bullitt and Roosevelt in Albany October 5. They charmed each other, and even though Roosevelt’s friend William Phillips, an assistant secretary of state under Wilson and soon to be FDR’s undersecretary, still blamed him for disloyalty in 1919, Roosevelt welcomed Bullitt back into the Democratic inner circle.

  ROOSEVELT WON THE NOVEMBER 8, 1932, election with more than 57 percent of the popular vote and 88 percent of the electoral vote. But in those times a new inaugural did not take place until March; for the next four months, the government would mark time, waiting for Roosevelt’s day to come.

  At Wehle’s suggestion, Roosevelt sent Bullitt on two private fact-finding trips to Europe after the elections. The focus of concern was repayment of the outstanding debts owed by the European countries to the United States. Bullitt was hopeful and wrong; he believed that Britain and France would pay. He also was optimistic about Germany: “Hitler is finished,” he wrote, and “Hitler’s influence is waning so fast that the Government is no longer afraid of the growth of the Nazi movement.”

  News of Bullitt’s mission leaked to the press, and there was a furor: by law (the Logan Act) private citizens are forbidden to conduct American foreign policy on their own. Irate remarks were made in the Senate, with the mention of stiff penalties. When Bullitt returned to Washington, he was teased at a cocktail party by Senator Huey Long with “Damn near sent you to jail for twenty years, hey, boy?”

  Nothing was to be done in policy making before March 4, 1933. Until then hope and the economy went down the drain, as the Hoover administration expired slowly.

  IN JANUARY 1933 President-elect Roosevelt revealed to a Hearst emissary the two-step approach he would take in dealing with the deepening economic crisis. He would be an economic nationalist in the Hearst mould “for the present emergency.” That meant doing whatever was necessary to raise price levels in the United States, no matter how unsettling that might be for foreign currencies. As he saw it, the United States had to be revived first; once that was done, it would be time to start working with others.

  Roosevelt candidly told Hearst’s envoy about step number two. When the emergency was over, he proposed to pursue a policy of tariff reduction and free trade, because in his view trade barriers hurt rather than helped. That had been Wilson’s view as well, and it was the view of Cordell Hull, the longtime congressman and senator from Tennessee and Wilson loyalist whom he was going to appoint secretary of state.

  These policies, explained in advance to Hearst, were those that Roosevelt outlined in his inaugural address on March 4. He explained that “I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first.” Though “I shall spare no effort to restore world trade,” first the country would have to deal with the “emergency here at home” by “the establishment of a sound national economy.” He was telling the country that he was an American nationalist who was taking a two-step approach to a Depression that he regarded as an emergency, like a flood or a hurricane. For the duration of the emergency, isolationism was the right policy. Once the emergency was over, the right thing would be to go back to economic internationalism.

  AT THIS DISTANCE IN TIME it is difficult to convey the extraordinary effect of Roosevelt’s inaugural address. It is true that he struck the right note: to a country that despaired of the do-nothing policies of Hoover and the long interregnum in which nobody was in charge, he pledged “action now,” and warned that he might have to exercise the emergency powers usually granted to a President only in wartime. That was the main thing people wanted; they wanted the government to do something.

  But the great effect was that of the new President’s personality. He enjoyed life. He loved power. As it turned out, he would never give an appointee undivided authority; he wanted always to have the final word himself. And as would be seen even later, he adored being President so much that he could never bring himself to give it up.

  He was serene and absolutely sure of himself. The sentence in his speech that put heart back into the country—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—must have had so powerful an effect because it so well expressed his outlook: he was without fear. He radiated the sense that once he took charge, there would be nothing to worry about.

  Never can one speech have made such a difference. It was a memorable occasion: a turning point because the country regained faith in itself and in its leadership. People who were at the 1933 inaugural never forgot it. A distinguished New Yorker journalist later remembered that as a boy of nineteen, he had been in Washington on that windy, misty winter Saturday. He had no ticket, and could not get close to the Capitol, where the ceremony would take place. So he found a tree without leaves and climbed it to see over the heads of the crowd. Other inhabitants of the tree were a woman in rags, an elderly man in patches, and a girl with red hair. The four of them sat on their branches and, along with tens of millions of other Americans whose clothes and lives were also in tatters, were reassured. As the four climbed down from their tree to go their ways, the redhead said: “I think we’ll live.”

  WALTER LIPPMANN WROTE in May 1933 that “the nation, which had lost confidence in everything and everybody, has regained confidence.…” Hearst told FDR, “I guess at your next election we will make it unanimous.” In the radio broadcasts that he made as “fireside chats,” the President restored the country’s faith in its institutions; and during the now-legendary first hundred days of the new administration, FDR saved the American banking, economic, and political systems.

  In a diary entry Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, suggested the sense of breezy improvisation with which the most important question of world finance—whether to stay with the gold standard—was resolved. “One night Bullitt was at the White House and found the President in the long corridor on the second floor.… He asked Bullitt what ought to be done and Bullitt said that we ought to go off gold. Then Senator Key Pittman”—the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from silver-producing Nevada—“came in and his opinion was asked. He said, ‘Go off gold.’ Raymond Moley”—a professor and a leading Roosevelt adviser—“was the third who came in and gave the same advice. There followed Secretary of the Treasury Woodin”—the cabinet officer within whose province the issue fell—“and the President waved cheerfully at him and said, ‘Hello, Will, we have just gone off gold.’ Woodin, taken aback, said: ‘Have we?’ ”

  Philadelphia banker Orville Bullitt was appalled to learn of the decision—and even more so that this question of high finance apparently had been decided on the basis of advice from such as his older brother, Bill, “whom I told that he had no right to an opinion as he had never even been able to balance his checkbook.”

  ROOSEVELT SOON MADE IT CLEAR that he meant what he said: in the first instance the United States would go it alone. A sixty-six-nation World Monetary and Economic Conference convened in London in June 1933. The official head of the American delegation was newly appointed Secretary of State Hull, but his authority was undercut by Roosevelt adviser Raymond Moley, who spoke as though he were the President’s personal representative, and also by Bullitt (special assistant to the secretary of state and executive officer of the American delegation), who communicated directly with the White House.

  In the end FDR undercut them all. The conference was jolted by a direct message from Roosevelt, apparently composed on the spur of the moment, saying that the United States was going to make decisions affecting its currency not in collaboration with the other countries, but on its own. He said flatly that the delegates were wasting time in seeking short-term stabilization of currencies when instead the governments should be curing “fundamental economic ills.”

  The conference lingered on for a short time afterward, but the Roosevelt message had aborted it. The foreign delegates were shocked by FDR’s attitude. The American delegates were left to reflect on how their President had pulled out the rug from under them in publi
c.

  Of course, in appointing Hull to head the American delegation to London, Roosevelt had told him that except in minor matters he was not to depart from written instructions without asking Washington for permission and that “neither you nor any other member of the Delegation is to carry on, formally or informally, any discussion of either war debts or disarmament. These two problems will be handled by me in Washington.” It ought to have been clear that FDR intended to be not only his own secretary of the Treasury but also his own secretary of state.

  THE PRESIDENT SEEMINGLY HAD no legal power to pump up American price levels—which is what he intended to do. He became impatient with the administration lawyers who told him so. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Hudson Valley neighbor he had brought into politics, obtained a written legal opinion saying the President had the authority to do what he had it in mind to do. Many were shocked, and young attorney Dean Acheson, undersecretary of the Treasury, resigned from the government; but FDR soon promoted Morgenthau to Treasury secretary.

  FDR reversed course on gold to some extent in 1934. He was an experimenter; he gave things a try, and then did what worked. A sailor since youth, he took pleasure in tacking with the wind. He took account of the tides in political affairs, and seized opportunities as they arose. To some his experiments in policy resembled the radical solutions being proposed by antidemocratic forces in Europe. Less than a year after FDR’s inaugural, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the quarterly Foreign Affairs, had occasion to write him that “the Administration’s social, economic and financial program (incidentally, I believe in it thoroughly) has unfortunately been interpreted in Europe as putting you in the ranks of the ‘dictators.’ I know that is not at all the case.… But the fact remains that in Europe it is commonly said that the American citadel of democracy has capitulated.… I suggest that you take an early opportunity to re-affirm publicly and emphatically, your belief in liberalism and democracy.… The peoples of Europe need to be reminded that the most powerful nation in the world has not yet decided that the only alternatives to choose between are communist dictatorship or fascist dictatorship.”

  But in a dangerous world (Bullitt had reported from London in the summer of 1933 that “the general opinion here is that war in Europe is inevitable”), the choices everywhere increasingly were between one dictator and another; therefore, in foreign policy an isolationist and disarmed United States had no effective strategy at hand except to play off one dictatorship against the other—a strategy of balance of power that Woodrow Wilson had denounced and Americans traditionally had abhorred as European and immoral. Here, too, FDR refused to be bound by the rules.

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  A FOREIGN POLICY AT MINIMUM COST

  IN A SENSE, any history of FDR’s foreign policy from the time he took office in 1933 until the Munich Pact in late 1938 is misleading. It misleads because it is unbalanced: it focuses on the 1 percent and leaves out the 99 percent. It ignores the main part of what Roosevelt was doing, which was entirely in the domestic sphere. He was battling the Depression; trying to put the country back to work; attempting to make the workings of society more fair; and restoring faith in American democracy. No external threat to the security of the United States seemed to loom on the horizon. Americans still imagined that the outside world could not touch them. Foreign policy in those years still was a sideshow, to which the President could devote only his spare time—and not even very much of that.

  Roosevelt believed that he could not afford the time or the resources to conduct a full-scale foreign policy until the economic emergency was over, but from the beginning he showed a sure understanding of the few foreign policy steps that it was absolutely essential to take and that could be taken at minimum cost.

  His world outlook had been shaped when he was young. The theories of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan were a formative influence on his generation. However he did so, he assimilated Mahan’s views. He looked at strategy in global terms. He was fascinated by geopolitics: the military and political consequences of geographical realities. With Mahan, he believed in the overriding importance of obtaining control of the seas; and later—long after Mahan’s death —he became a convert to the view that control of the air matters greatly. He took his views from Theodore Roosevelt and from TR’s intellectual and social set: Mahan, Cabot Lodge, and the Adamses. His first priority, like theirs, was clearing the Western Hemisphere of any threats to the United States; and his second, clearing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans of any such threats. But he departed from his mentors in his view of how to achieve the first goal.

  In his presidential inaugural speech, he proclaimed that “in the field of world policy, I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor.” The next month he told the governing board of the Pan-American Union that he committed the United States to the independence and equality of the states of the hemisphere. It transpired that this was not mere rhetoric. At the Montevideo conference of the Pan-American Union (December 1933) and afterward, the Roosevelt administration renounced the right of the United States to unilaterally intervene in the affairs of its Caribbean and Latin American neighbors, as it had done so conspicuously in the past.

  Roosevelt’s new approach—his good-neighbor policy—was to try to win the friendship, or at any rate dampen the enmity, of the other states of the Western Hemisphere. The promise of the new policy was that it would avert danger to the United States from within the hemisphere at the least possible cost.

  ROOSEVELT’S INTENTION was to see what could be accomplished in world affairs, without cost to the United States, by opening up communications with the Soviet Union. His problem was that the Department of State did not want to make the attempt. The East Europe desk head, Robert Kelley, was opposed to any such move. Moreover, it was under Kelley’s guidance that the younger Soviet specialists in the State Department had been trained and intellectually formed.

  So Roosevelt turned (as he was to do so often whenever the relevant executive department had to be gone around) to Henry Morgenthau, Jr.; then he asked Felix Frankfurter to use his contacts to find a Soviet official with whom Morgenthau could be in touch. But soon another possibility arose out of a conversation Roosevelt had with one of his campaign fund-raisers.

  Louis Wehle, pushing forward the claims of campaign contributor Bill Bullitt, asked FDR to appoint Bullitt ambassador to France. Roosevelt said the job already was spoken for; he had promised it to Jesse Straus, a much more major campaign contributor. Wehle then proposed Russia, citing Bullitt’s special qualifications, his friendship with Lenin, and his acquaintance with the current Soviet leaders.

  But the position of ambassador to the Soviet Union did not exist: the United States, alone among the world’s major powers, did not have diplomatic relations with Moscow. This was more of an inconvenience to Americans than to Russians—who could do business in the open society of the United States, without going through official channels, more easily than could Americans in the closed society of the USSR.

  Most Americans did not care whether the Soviet Union was recognized or not, but most of those who did care were in favor of recognition. A September 1933 poll of newspapers showed that 63 percent were in favor of recognition and only 27 percent were opposed to it. The Roman Catholic Church was a focal point of opposition, but FDR overcame it: he held an hourlong meeting with Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, the Catholic institution in Washington that functions as a training ground for the foreign service, after which Walsh stated in public that recognition of Russia was a decision that should be entrusted to the President in the exercise of his own good judgment. Thereupon, having escaped from his domestic political constraints, Roosevelt took the initiative in restoring relations with Russia.

  Bullitt was not only a natural candidate for ambassadorship; he was also the natural choice to negotiate the diplomatic recognition as a result of which an American ambassador would be appointed. He had been in favor of establishing normal relations with Moscow s
ince 1919; in 1933 he became, along with Morgenthau, FDR’s agent in dealing with the Bolsheviks, as years before he had been the agent of House and Wilson.

  The United States wanted Russia’s promise to repay at least some of her wartime debt, and a pledge that communist subversion in America would be halted.* The USSR desired American backing against the threat of war with Japan. These were among the objectives aimed at in the 1933 negotiations, which ended successfully in American recognition of the Soviet Union on November 16–17 and the appointment of Bullitt as America’s ambassador November 18.

  It was an appointment much remarked upon. In Great Britain, Bullitt’s behavior at the London economic conference had been thought shameful. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, though a personal friend, had discovered his secretary was being taken to dinner and courted by Bullitt, who asked her to reveal confidential information. When Bullitt’s appointment as ambassador was announced, a British Foreign Office official in London remarked that “I think Mr. Bullitt may do less harm in Moscow than in Washington, though he is the kind of man who does harm anywhere.” The British ambassador in Washington commented that “he may be regarded as thoroughly untrustworthy, and completely unscrupulous.”

  It was bad enough that in London he had been caught out by MacDonald; in Washington Bullitt, whether or not he was aware of it, maneuvered himself into an even more awkward situation.

  Unknown to most people at the time and to historians until relatively recently, the President and his wife remained married in name only. Historians, who seem to know everything, tell us that in 1933 it was almost two decades since the sexual relationship of the Roosevelts had come to an end. Now Franklin had at least one love of his own, and Eleanor had several. Since the tumultuous, youthful years when their marriage nearly broke up because of the Lucy Mercer affair, the two had learned to wish each other well in living separate personal lives; indeed, Roosevelt, who believed in making everybody happy, had arranged to build a house of their own for Eleanor and her lady friends on Roosevelt’s grounds. At the same time Franklin and Eleanor, publicly very much a couple, developed a political partnership of value to them both, in which her humanity and idealism complemented his practice of the art of the possible.