American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Then Hitler came to his peroration:

  “Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere.…” He had sought only to serve the German people.

  “I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production in all branches of our national economy.” Boasting of finding useful work for “the whole of 7,000,000 unemployed,” doubtless as a contrast with Roosevelt’s partial success at recovery, he went on: “Not only have I reunited the German people politically, but I have also re-armed them” and destroyed “sheet by sheet” the Versailles treaty containing the “vilest oppression” in history. “I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919; I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery; I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood.…

  “You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich.” Roosevelt headed “one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world.” His own world, the Führer concluded, was much smaller but “more precious than anything else,” for it comprised his own people.

  This masterpiece of defense and demagoguery, which the Nazis arranged to be fully publicized in the United States and elsewhere, was greeted by Roosevelt’s enemies at home as a deserved put-down for his naïve and provocative meddling. “Hitler had all the better of the argument,” said the isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson. “Roosevelt put his chin out and got a resounding whack.” While neither the President nor Hull had been optimistic about the outcome, in his first widely publicized encounter with Hitler, Roosevelt had come off a clear second best.

  But Hitler’s speech was far more than a collection of debater’s points, far more than a tissue of lies about Hitler’s pacific policies; ominously—by two omissions—it presaged the future. The first was Hitler’s crafty skimming over Poland in his list of nations he was not threatening. The other was the absence of his usual diatribe against Russia. Like most observers, Roosevelt was hardly aware of the omission. Within four months, on the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he would understand. He would also understand that, as the leader of a constitutional democracy, he was challenged not by Hitler alone but by Stalin as well—by two dictators who could move with speed, decision, and power, unrestrained by the peoples they led.

  Once upon a time Hitler had been more friendly. “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt,” the Führer had said in mid-1933, “because he marches straight to his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.” Hitler was describing the FDR of the Hundred Days; he could hardly have been more wrong about the real Roosevelt, who rather than marching straight to his goals, almost invariably skirmished, sidestepped, retreated, feinted, parried, danced and pirouetted as he picked his way through the minefields toward his goal of security and survival.

  The Zigzag Road to War

  In heritage and upbringing Franklin Roosevelt was internationalist to the bone. Some of his forebears had been world travelers who traded and invested in Asian and South American enterprises. First taken to Europe at the age of three, during the 1890s he stayed almost every year in France, England, and Germany for a few months. During these years, European governesses at Hyde Park tutored him in French and German, which he would retain workably if not fluently for the rest of his life. Weekly the Illustrated London News brought news and pictures of the top-hatted statesmen in London and the other capitals, of the glamorous social doings in the cosmopolitan worlds of spas and fox hunts and society balls.

  The years at Groton and Harvard broadened young Roosevelt’s world-view. He debated international issues—naval expansion, or the Boer War, or Hawaiian or Philippine self-rule—with his fellows; he gloried in the Cuban exploits of Cousin Ted, who brought his robust activism to Groton, where he spoke to the boys; he fully supported the Square Deal President’s foreign policy, whether pacific or belligerent. Lodged in the Wilson Administration in the spring of 1913, less than a year and a half before war broke out in Europe, he was at times more the Wilsonian internationalist than Wilson himself. Later in the 1920s the onetime big-navy man, still an internationalist, not only supported the five-power Washington Treaty for naval reduction but berated Coolidge for wishing to rebuild the Navy on “an enormous scale.”

  During the late 1920s, however, FDR’s internationalism waned—in part a political response to the defeat he and Cox had suffered in 1920 on the League of Nations issue, partly an acquiescence in the decade’s reaction against the idealism and utopianism of Wilsonian days, but altogether a reflection of FDR’s rising presidential ambitions. His switch on the League issue was only the most evident example of his general shift to a more nationalist position.

  Still, the electorate had long been accustomed to candidates’ opportunism as they faced the ordeal of running for President. The test of Roosevelt’s basic beliefs would come when he exercised the considerable powers of the presidency. The Hundred Days proved his drive and sense of direction in domestic policy. Could he lead in foreign policy making too? His recognition of the Soviet Union demonstrated some boldness, at least, and his intervention in the London economic conference was at least a decisive act, whatever its nationalist impact.

  But the mid-1930s were a tough time for any kind of internationalist leadership as Americans retreated to their psychological storm cellars in the face of trouble abroad. Since public-opinion polling was still in its infancy, and other indicators were partial and impressionistic, we do not have wholly reliable guides to opinion during the mid-1930s, but one poll result in February 1937 was so emphatic as not to be doubted. Asked if another war like World War I came in Europe, “should America take part again?” 95 percent of the sample answered “No!” The next month the same percentage favored “doing everything possible to keep us out of foreign wars,” as against doing “everything possible to prevent war between foreign countries, even if it means threatening to fight countries which start wars.”

  Behind this emphatic affirmation of isolationism lay a fluid, negative, uninformed public opinion that provided an unstable foundation for a consistent and coherent foreign policy. In this broth lay hard lumps of isolationist feeling, composed largely of millions of Americans in the more rural, insular areas of the nation and other millions of Americans of German, Irish, and Italian descent hostile to Britain, and still more millions of persons who were prisoners of ancient fears and shibboleths—that wily foreign diplomats always played Uncle Sam for a sucker, that the nation had never lost a war or won a peace conference, that salvation lay in keeping free of permanent alliances, just as George Washington had urged.

  Besides needing to gauge the currents of public opinion and public ignorance, the President had to assess political forces in other lands. The thrust of the Nazi ideology, the balance of power in the French Chamber of Deputies, the foreign policy attitudes of British labor, the paranoia and lethal struggles within the Kremlin, the fortunes of Chinese warlords, nationalistic strivings in southern Asia, were all elements in the equation of world power. Reading long letters from his ambassadors, lunching with foreign envoys, quizzing his unofficial agents who had just seen Göring or Mussolini or a Chinese or Japanese diplomat, leafing through thick State Department studies, Roosevelt had to make judgments from day to day on mighty imponderables imperfectly understood. No wonder that he moved warily on the darkling terrain of foreign policy.

  “In the present European situation I feel very much as if I were groping for a door in a blank wall,” he wrote a friend early in 1934. “The situation may get better and enable us to give some leadership.”

  Leadership? That was precisely what
FDR’s critics, both interventionists and isolationists, felt he was not providing during the years when action by an American President might make the difference. Others were providing their own kind of leadership—the isolationist bloc in the Senate headed by men like William Borah and Burton Wheeler; out in the country, the increasingly rabid “America Firsters” glued to the radio for the sermons of Father Coughlin, who could be depended on to berate the red devils, foreign and domestic; pacifists led by such prestigious figures as Norman Thomas; belligerently isolationist press lords such as Hearst and McCormick. But the President had to deal with problems of ways and means they could hardly imagine or did not care to. In Washington he confronted a Congress deeply divided over the mechanics of neutrality but leaning sharply toward isolationism; a Democratic party leadership internationalist by heritage but fragmented in region and ethnicity; and even a divided set of advisers ranging from the internationalists in the State Department like Hull, William Phillips, and Sumner Welles to moderate unilateralists like Moley and Ickes, and an economic nationalist, George N. Peek, a “foreign trade adviser” until the implacable Hull forced him out.

  The President’s responsibility transcended all these partial views and interests. Somehow he had to speak for the American people as a whole, to take a “reasonable” and representative stance in foreign relations however erratic or mystifying at times, to avoid the “veto traps” set for him on the Hill and even in his own Administration, and above all to win national—presidential and congressional—elections. And he had to do all this amid intellectual confusion. He and his adversaries at home had a common goal—national security. But whether this goal could be achieved through collective efforts with allies abroad or by the unilateral efforts of a Fortress America was a biting issue.

  Each side was fragmented in turn by internal quarrels. Even the terms of discourse were clouded; some “isolationists” did not wish at all to isolate the nation from certain parts of the world, notably the Far East; some “internationalists” had little interest in certain parts of the world, notably the Far East. As to Latin America, almost all sides backed the Monroe Doctrine in some form. Isolationists were selectively unilateralist, wary of international commitments. “They did not oppose all American activity abroad,” according to Wayne S. Cole, “but they wanted to leave Americans free to determine for themselves when, where, how, and whether the United States should involve itself abroad. They did not want to be bound by prior commitments in alliances or international organizations.”

  If in heritage Roosevelt was an internationalist, at heart he was an interventionist, as instinctively activist in redressing problems abroad as in helping people at home. Moreover, he was worried about the weaknesses of democratic leadership, as in the French parliamentary system; addressing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, he asserted roundly that “the blame for the danger to world peace lies not in the world population but in the political leaders of that population.” Yet his own leadership during these critical months responded far more to the isolationist pressures in the electorate than to his activist, worldly instincts. Whatever his deeper feelings—and these were obscure to biographers even decades later—he strengthened the isolationist cause by virtually joining it. Any President during this period, given the confused state of public opinion and political combat, would have had to pick his way cautiously through the foreign policy maze of the mid-thirties. But Roosevelt appeared to mirror the general confusion and division rather than to transcend it.

  The Senate investigation of the munitions industry, an egregious case in point, was one of the best planned, most spectacular, most effective antiwar efforts during the thirties. In the white marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building, flanking the stern young chairman, Gerald P. Nye, Republican populist from North Dakota, sat other stalwarts of American isolationism, including Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Democrat Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. The mission of the committee was beyond reproach: to expose the evil machinations of arms makers in fomenting strife and to “take the profits out of war.” The villains in the drama were delectably evil: Du Ponts, Morgan partners, and other bloodsucking “merchants of death” who day after day confessed their sins. The heroine was an ethereal figure called Peace. Crowded into the big room was the chorus, muttering with indignation as the sordid story unfolded. Intensively covered and dramatized by the press, the committee dominated headlines for months.

  Roosevelt was no innocent bystander. He had publicly urged the Senate to appoint such a committee; he gave the committee full access to executive papers that disclosed the skulduggery of bankers and diplomats; he endorsed Nye’s drastic proposals to curb arms makers’ profits. Hull was deeply disturbed by the Administration’s cooperativeness with the committee. The President—and the Secretary of Slate too, he admitted to himself—were marking time, unwilling to stand against the isolationist wave until it abated. Indeed, Hull himself had offered to supply information to the investigators.

  The President’s volatile stand on neutrality legislation was an even more significant sign of his—and his nation’s—uncertainty over the effective response to international aggression. Probably at no other time in his presidency did FDR confront such a tangle of perplexities, both moral and operational, as in the struggle over neutrality.

  The key issue was not neutrality in itself—almost all Americans favored it, or said they did—but how much discretion the President should have in cutting off arms and other supplies to nations at war. Paradoxically the Supreme Court was recognizing at this time, in the Curliss-Wright case, the “very delicate, plenary and exclusive power” of the President “as the sole organ of the Federal government in the field of international relations.” So it was not formal authority that the Chief of State lacked, but a leadership strategy to cope with his adversaries at home and abroad. He had had great luck with the mandatory 1935 act that required him to ban arms both to Italy and to Ethiopia, thus potentially hurting Italy, with its need for modern arms, far more than Ethiopia. For months thereafter his foreign policy consisted essentially of juggling as he faced the isolationist opposition in the Senate with its special weapon of the filibuster, his own advisers with their varied counsels, the often irresolute democracies, the all too resolute pacifist and isolationist groups at home, unpredictable “enemy” nations abroad, and the shifting fortunes of diplomacy and war. So uncertain was the President over fundamental strategy that during an early phase of congressional debate over neutrality measures he changed his mind on important issues, according to Robert Dallek’s analysis, no less than four times within a short period. And his luck ran out in Spain, where the mandatory law—and the vociferous feelings of many Catholic leaders—made it impossible for him to help the beleaguered Republican armies, increasingly dominated by communists, against Franco’s attacks.

  No other American could have juggled more skillfully than did Roosevelt, but juggling was not enough. Some urged him to apply the magic touch of the first and second Hundred Days, but the President had run out of magic, especially following the domestic political setbacks early in his second term. Since no one abroad appeared able to supply effective leadership, he told reporters in midsummer 1937, people were looking for someone outside Europe “to come forward with a hat and a rabbit in it.” Well, the President went on, “I haven’t got a hat and I haven’t got a rabbit in it.”

  Others called on the President to educate the public on the gravity of the situation abroad and the measures necessary to deal with it. But the best way to educate is to exert strong leadership in speech and action on foreign policy—something Roosevelt had found virtually impossible during his first term, and prospects for leadership appeared little improved in the first year of his second term. Early in October 1937, in a major speech in Chicago, he proclaimed that the “peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of internat
ional anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” and he called for a quarantine of lawbreaking nations similar to quarantine against the spread of disease. Although the President was vague about the kind of quarantine, the need for collective action, and other specifics, his speech set off an uproar. The AFL resolved against involvement in foreign wars. Isolationist congressmen threatened FDR with impeachment. And few in the Democratic party or even in his Administration backed up the President, except for ardent interventionists.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” he said later to Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.” The President quickly pulled back—too quickly, according to some critics, for he appeared to have harbored undue expectations about the public response, then to have been disappointed by the mixed reaction, and then to have overreacted to that reaction.

  And so Roosevelt marched forward two paces, retreated one, and sidestepped, meantime indulging in moral rhetoric and vague threats that unduly raised his followers’ expectations while markedly inflaming his isolationist opposition. It was not Roosevelt but Hitler who “marched straight to his objective” over political opposition at home and his divided adversaries in Europe. The Führer’s power, even within Germany, was by no means absolute; he too had to overcome foot-dragging and resistance in the state bureaucracy, in the Army, and in the party; sometimes he too had to pause or even retreat. But he found that audacious and aggressive acts abroad expanded his power base, while reducing his foes to sputtering indignation and rhetorical protest.