The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  But would Roosevelt act? Slowly he came round during 1933 to some kind of trade agreements program; when, however, he set up a committee to co-ordinate foreign trade relations, he picked as head a vigorous opponent of tariff reductions, George N. Peek. At the same time that the President was pushing ahead with a trade agreements bill he named Peek foreign trade adviser. Hull was stunned by this appointment. A few months after the bill became law, the President allowed Peek to negotiate a barter agreement with Germany. When Hull and Peek disagreed over the most-favored-nation clause, Roosevelt asked Hull to spend “a couple of hours some evening” with Peek talking things over. “In pure theory you and I think alike,” Roosevelt wrote Hull, “but every once in a while we have to modify a principle to meet a hard and disagreeable fact!”

  Such a tug of war could not last. Under heavy pressure from Hull, the President finally swung against Peek and his barter plans. Later Peek resigned with a bitter statement.

  Hull also took the lead in applying the Good Neighbor doctrine to the rest of the Americas, but here he had full backing from the President. Torn by strife and discontent, resentful of the years of interference by its Big Brother of the North, Latin America was skeptical toward Democratic party promises of no more meddling in its internal affairs. The real test of the new line could come only in a concrete situation, and Cuba, long a ward of the United States, provided such a test. When palace revolt followed revolt in Havana during 1933, the ugly situation seemed to threaten American commercial interests in the island. Worried by the rioting and army mutinies, Ambassador Sumner Welles in Cuba proposed a “strictly limited intervention,” but Hull and Roosevelt refused. Later they erased a festering sore by abrogating the Platt Amendment, which had restricted Cuba’s sovereignty. As further proof of the Good Neighbor policy Roosevelt also withdrew marines from Haiti and eased relations with Panama. Capping the whole program was the patient nurturing of friendly relations by Hull at the seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, the first such meeting that an American Secretary of State had attended as a delegate. By 1936 Roosevelt could call the Good Neighbor policy “a fact, active, present, pertinent and effective.” Yet it was notable that the foreign policy on which he took the most fixed and principled stand was essentially a negative policy—one of noninterference—whatever positive results might flow from it. To be sure, persistent noninterference was not easy, but it was far easier than a persistent policy of intervention or collective security.

  In any event, Roosevelt did not put all his bets on treaties and noninterference as a basis for good neighborliness, at least outside the Americas. Good fences, too, made for good neighbors, and some of his fences bristled with spikes and spears. Within a week of Roosevelt’s inauguration Swanson announced that the navy would be built up to treaty strength, and three months later the President allotted almost a quarter billion from NRA appropriations for this purpose. But the build-up of armed strength during the first term was slow and quiet. Roosevelt did not want to publicize defense unduly. When McIntyre told him early in 1934 that patriotic organizations were asking him to proclaim “National Defense Week,” Roosevelt answered tersely, “Don’t do it.”

  STORM CLOUDS AND STORM CELLARS

  In the white marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building late in 1934 sat the stage managers of a carefully planned, elaborately staged drama. In the center behind the long table was the hero of the drama, a stern, hard-faced young senator named Gerald P. Nye; flanking him were other idols of American isolationism—Arthur H. Vandenberg, Bennett Champ Clark, Homer T. Bone. Of villains in this drama there were many: evil, bloodsucking “merchants of death,” who paraded before the committee day after day to confess their sins. Of heroines there was only one: an ethereal being, always appealed to but never seen, a figure named Peace. Crowded behind the villains was the chorus, the spectators who craned their necks and muttered with indignation as the play unfolded.

  Such was the Nye committee investigating the munitions industry. Like many other famous Senate investigations, the Nye probe was less a search for data than a dramatization of things already known or rightly suspected. But the charges were dramatic and shocking. Arms makers had bribed politicians, shared patents, divided up business, reaped incredible profits, evaded taxes—all in the sordid trade of death weapons. Even worse, munitions makers helped foment wars to boost their profits.

  Rarely have Senate hearings fallen with such heavy impact on the stream of American opinion. Horrendous titles suddenly blazoned forth in book stores and magazine stands: “merchants of death” were deep in “iron, blood and profits”; it was “one hell of a business.” The timing was flawless. The revelations coincided with and contributed to a deep revulsion against entanglement in European quarrels. Writers were busy showing that 1917 was not due to German submarines or a conception of neutral rights, but to a few greedy capitalists. Germany was not so guilty after all. The Americans had been saps and suckers.

  With war clouds piling up again in Europe, millions of Americans vowed, “Never again.” Women organized peace societies. College students formed the “Veterans of Future Wars” to collect their bonuses now, before they had to fight and die. Isolationism was strong everywhere, but especially in the Midwest, Northwest, and Rockies; in election after election these sections sent to Congress men like William E. Borah of Idaho, Key Pittman of Nevada, Burton Wheeler of Montana, young Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, and Nye of North Dakota, who championed the isolationist cause. This cause, charged with emotion and bitterness, had now become a force of awesome, almost primeval power.

  Where was Roosevelt in all this? Certainly he had a deep stake in preventing a mobilization of public opinion that might in turn shackle him in making foreign policy. But the President’s relation to the Nye investigation was a passive one. Largely by default, Nye, a Republican isolationist, was allowed to chair the committee. Gliding with the current of opinion favoring the probe, Roosevelt not only joined the chorus denouncing the arms trade but allowed Nye access to executive papers that were greatly to aid the Senator’s efforts to dramatize the skulduggery of bankers and diplomats. Even more, he tolerated—and to some extent encouraged—the Nye committee in its ambition to use intensifying disgust with arms makers as an anvil on which to beat out a rigid policy of isolationism for the United States.

  At this crucial juncture Roosevelt offered little leadership. It was not inevitable that popular hatred of arms makers and war profiteers should deepen popular feeling that America ought to isolate itself from foreign entanglements and thus from foreign wars. That hatred might as well have bolstered a public desire to work with other nations in order to stop war and hence end the grim accouterments of battle, including merchants of death. But such a channeling of opinion demanded an active program of education— in short, leadership. Roosevelt only drifted.

  Given the powerful ground swell of isolationist feeling, the brilliance of the isolationists in marshaling their forces, the passivity of the administration, and the tension in Europe, only one outcome was possible—a national stampede for a storm cellar to sit out the tempests ahead. During the second Hundred Days, the isolationists on Capitol Hill were pressing for legislation requiring the President, in the event of war abroad, to embargo export of arms to all belligerents. Roosevelt and Hull favored such embargo authority, but they wanted to empower the President to discriminate between aggressor and victim by embargoing exports of arms only to the former. Such discretionary power, they reasoned, would help deter aggressors.

  But the isolationists would have none of it. Such discretion, they shouted, would mean sure entanglement in alien quarrels. Pittman was hostile and surly. The President was riding for a fall, he warned the White House, if he insisted on “designating the aggressor in accordance with the wishes of the League of Nations.” The senator said he was willing to introduce such a discretionary provision, but the President would get “licked.”

  The President did get licked. Mandatory arms emb
argo legislation passed both chambers by almost unanimous votes. Roosevelt dared not stand against the tide; he had urgent domestic bills to get through, and the isolationists were threatening to filibuster. The President signed the measure, but he warned that the inflexible provisions might drag us into war instead of keeping us out.

  Why, then, did Roosevelt sign the bill? He acted mainly out of expediency. For one thing, the mandatory arms embargo section of the act was to expire in six months, and Roosevelt and Hull reasoned that they might gain discretionary power in the revision. For another, they both liked one feature of the bill—the setting up of regulation of arms traffic. Most important, Mussolini for months had been making plans for an attack on Ethiopia. A mandatory arms embargo against both nations would hurt Italy, with its need for modern arms and its possession of ships to transport them, far more than it would hurt Haile Selassie’s flintlock-armed native troops. When Roosevelt told reporters dryly that the measure met the “needs of the existing situation,” he was more than hinting at his almost Machiavellian expediency.

  And so it was that Roosevelt, at the very moment that dictators girded for war in Europe and Asia, was stripped of power to throw his country’s weight against aggressors.

  As Roosevelt scrawled his name on the Neutrality Act at the end of August 1935, Italian troops, tanks, and airplanes were pouring through the Suez Canal toward Ethiopia. To military and diplomatic strategists in chancelleries of great nations, the Neutrality Act came as confirmation of America’s refusal to throw its weight into the balance of world politics. Yet Roosevelt could not stay clear of the looming conflict.

  For months he and Hull had been watching the approach of that conflict. So had politicians and diplomats in Europe: Prime Minister Baldwin and Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare of Britain, and Foreign Minister Pierre Laval of France. The precise nature of the division in Europe during 1935 was shrouded in the rhetoric of collective security and the murk of secret negotiations, but two things were clear. One was the reluctance of France and Britain to antagonize Mussolini irretrievably as long as they feared Hitler more and hoped to keep the two dictators apart. The other was Mussolini’s determination to grab Ethiopia, preferably through an act of violence.

  Roosevelt had had a measure of grudging admiration for Mussolini; and the dictator had responded with some friendly words for the President and his New Deal. Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Rome wrote enthusiastically in 1933 about the rejuvenation of Italy, including the punctuality of the trains. Even on the very eve of invasion, Long was drawing up elaborate plans for giving Italy large slices of Ethiopia as part of a general European settlement. Roosevelt’s reaction to Mussolini’s war preparations during 1934 was more equivocal. On the one hand, he believed that war would be a threat to peace everywhere, and thus America was involved; on the other hand, he shied away from any involvement in the situation by refusing to do more than urge Mussolini to settle the issue peacefully. When Mussolini said it was too late—Italy had mobilized a million men and spent two billion lire—Roosevelt still hoped Italy would take the “magnificent position” of settling the issue by arbitration. But more than moral support to Ethiopia or to the idea of collective security he would not offer. Hull made clear that the United States would not join the League of Nations in imposing sanctions.

  “I am very much more worried about the world situation than about the domestic,” Roosevelt wrote to Senator Josiah Bailey at the end of August 1935. “I hope that there will be no explosion before I take my trip on the boat”—a reference to a long cruise that the President planned to take on the U.S.S. Houston. But the explosion was imminent. On October 3, 1935, Mussolini’s legions thrust into Ethiopia. What now?

  News of the attack came to Roosevelt on the Houston as the cruiser plowed along serenely off the California coast. His attitude toward Italy hardened at once. “Good!” he exclaimed loudly when news reports favorable to Ethiopia were flashed to the ship. The sympathies of Hopkins, Ickes, and his other companions were with Ethiopia. The President had left a draft neutrality proclamation with Hull, and he waited impatiently while Hull tried to find out whether hostilities formally existed. “They are dropping bombs on Ethiopia—and that is war,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Why wait for Mussolini to say so?”

  In Washington, Hull had problems of his own. Some of his advisers were urging him not to issue a neutrality proclamation because it might prejudice action by the League Council, which was preparing to name Italy as an aggressor nation. But Hull wanted to act before the League did. His reason stemmed directly from the decisive element in American foreign policy making—the isolationists’ hostility toward American co-operation with Geneva. Roosevelt wired him to act immediately. They both recognized that much depended on staying clear of the League.

  By an extraordinary conjuncture of two events—the passage of the Neutrality Act and the invasion of an agrarian country by a nation badly needing imports of the sinews of war—Roosevelt was in the happy situation where the more he sought to cut off exports to Italy in the name of neutrality, the more he was able to assist in the imposing of economic sanctions against the aggressor. This whole tactic depended, however, on keeping Geneva’s actions separate from Washington’s in the public eye. The President and Hull were equal to the task. When Hoare sounded them out on some kind of action under the Kellogg Pact, they coldly rejected the idea. And so worried were they that the League might ask them to co-operate formally in sanctions, thus inviting a refusal that might throw cold water on the League’s efforts, that they warned Geneva not to issue such an invitation. The British and French agreed not to.

  The Neutrality Act, however, embargoed only arms and munitions; it did not embargo raw materials that Italy could convert into weapons for her warriors. From the start Roosevelt and Hull recognized this massive shortcoming. The President asked the State Department to study the possibility of adding copper and steel to the list, in case League sanctions should include these items, and he was even ready to limit sharply the transshipment of our exports by neutrals. Informed that the Neutrality Act could not be stretched this far, Roosevelt fell back on a “moral embargo” based on the “spirit” of the act. On October 30 he denounced profiteering in Italian trade that might help prolong the war.

  Despite these appeals, exports of war materials to Italy mounted. On November 15, with League sanctions slated to take effect three days later, Hull warned stiffly against an increase in such exports as oil, copper, trucks, and scrap steel. His warning covered more materials than the League sanction list, which omitted the crucial item of oil. Menaced on its most vulnerable flank, Italy hotly protested Hull’s action.

  But that action was still only “moral.” Would the administration put teeth into it? Britain especially was eager to know the answer to this question. Her “businessmen’s government” feared that if the League imposed an oil embargo against Italy, American oilmen, scorning Hull’s moralities, would grab the whole Italian oil market. Britain also had the problem of dealing with the slippery figure of Laval, who had long wanted to appease Mussolini by jettisoning Ethiopia and who had stalled off a League oil embargo.

  So Britain’s Ambassador put the question straight to Hull. Would the United States stop increased oil exports to Italy if the League embargoed oil? Hull hesitated. Only Congress could take such action, but to appeal to Congress to embargo oil in conjunction with the League was to establish the fearful link between American policy and League collective security that he and Roosevelt had fought so hard to avoid. “We have gone as far as we can,” he replied. He could not speak for Congress.

  Frustrated by the administration’s fear of the isolationists, the resourceful diplomats of Downing Street turned to other expedients. Hoare and Laval in Paris agreed on a plan to end the war by dismembering Ethiopia and handing over large chunks to Mussolini. Publication of the agreement set off a storm of denunciation; Hoare was sacked, and the plan was killed. But the sordid proposal also killed the high hopes for e
ffective sanctions. The League continued to equivocate. The war went on. Italian troops struck deeper into Ethiopia, burning, bombing, spraying poison gas from the clouds.

  The Hoare-Laval plan caught Roosevelt and Hull by surprise. The President was outraged; “our British friends,” he said, “have come a sad cropper.” For months Haile Selassie’s natives fought on. Forsaken by the League, the emperor made a last appeal before he fled his country. Did the people of the world realize that he had fought on to protect not only his people but also collective security? Were they blind to his fight for the whole of humanity? Where were his tardy allies?

  “If they never come, then I say prophetically and without bitterness, ‘The West will perish.’ ”

  THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

  Ethiopia’s betrayal left American internationalists in a sea of uncertainty and despondency. Isolationists jeered that once again Uncle Sam had been gulled by European diplomats. Most Americans were merely confused. As for Roosevelt, not since entering the White House had he been so perplexed and worried by developments abroad.

  “The situation changes so fast from day to day that it is hard to do more than make wild guesses in regard to the European future,” he wrote his minister in Bucharest late in January 1936. To Ambassador Straus in Paris he wrote in even more pessimistic vein. The whole European situation, the President said, was black.

  “I have been increasingly concerned about the world picture ever since May, 1933. There are those who come from England and France and Germany who point to the fact that every crisis of the past three years has been muddled through with a hope that each succeeding crisis will be met peacefully in one way or another in the next few years. I hope that point of view is right but it goes against one’s common sense.”

  To Congress the President addressed an urgent warning: “Not only have peace and good-will among men grown more remote in those areas of the earth during this period, but a point has been reached where the people of the Americas must take cognizance of growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of increasing armaments, of shortening tempers—a situation which has in it many of the elements that lead to the tragedy of general war.” People in such nations might wish to change aggressive policies, but lacking freedom, they were following blindly and fervently those who sought autocratic power. Such nations had not shown patience in trying to solve their problems.