“They have therefore impatiently reverted to the old belief in the law of the sword, or to the fantastic conception that they, and they alone, are chosen to fulfill a mission and that all the others among the billion and a half of human beings in the world must and shall learn from and be subject to them.”
Brave words—but they masked a central ambiguity in Roosevelt’s approach to neutrality. Outwardly he took the isolationists’ position that arms and trade embargoes would keep America out of war by keeping American merchants and others disentangled from war. Privately he took the internationalists’ position that such embargoes—if they could be administered with discretion—could keep America out of war by discouraging aggressors from starting war. Between the two approaches a vast difference loomed. But the President made no effort to educate the people on this cardinal difference. He hoped that they would be educated by events. Unhappily for the President, events such as the Hoare-Laval agreement seemed to educate the people in the wrong direction.
And time was running out. In February of 1936 the Neutrality Act of the previous September was to expire. Roosevelt and Hull hoped to gain from Congress both legal standing for the “moral” embargo of war materials and—crucial to their whole strategy—presidential discretion in applying such an embargo. When Hull appealed to Congress for these two new provisions, he ran into a stone wall. Within a few weeks the battle was lost. Why?
The immediate reason was the power of the isolationists on Capitol Hill. Johnson and Borah lashed Hull’s bill mercilessly. They were riding high on a massive wave of isolationist feeling whipped by the failure of collective security in Europe, and by new revelations of the indefatigable Nye at home. Led by Nye, Johnson & Co., the isolationists forced Roosevelt and Hull to accept an extension of the 1935 act, with some changes. Lacking guidelines from the administration, the internationalists stood by helplessly.
As Americans huddled in their storm cellars, dictators turned to the sword.
At dawn on March 7, 1936, advance units of the German army thrust into the Rhineland. In Berlin a few hours later Hitler addressed cheering members of the Reichstag, while foreign diplomats looked on in stony silence. His troops had moved, the Fuehrer announced, but Germany wanted peace. He proposed a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with France; reciprocal demilitarization of the frontier (i.e., scrapping of France’s famed Maginot Line); and bilateral nonaggression pacts with Germany’s eastern neighbors (but not with Soviet Russia). For ninety minutes he shouted and beseeched; then, surrounded by hundreds of armed men, he strode out of the hall.
France hesitated, and was lost. Later it became known that some of Hitler’s generals had opposed the move, and that Hitler’s troops would have turned back had France resisted. But the Quai d’Orsay did not dare act alone, and Downing Street equivocated. Other nations only fumed and sputtered. The League declared Germany guilty of breaching the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Roosevelt and Hull privately took a grave view of the step. But no one acted.
Throughout Roosevelt’s first term Japanese soldiers, merchants, and bureaucrats were consolidating positions on the Asiatic mainland. Like a great musty fruit lying in the sun, China was decomposing on its exposed edges. In 1933 Jehol was annexed to Manchukuo, in 1935 Japanese troops seized Chahar, in 1936 they penetrated Suiyuan. Having shaken off the old naval treaties, Tokyo was now building up its fleet. Ominous as these events seemed to Roosevelt and Hull, even more fateful was the merciless struggle in Japan of militarist extremists against the moderates.
Only a month after taking office Roosevelt had written House that he wondered if a Japanese diplomat’s criticism of the President’s decision to keep the fleet in the Pacific had stemmed from a desire to “ingratiate himself against assassination by the Junker crowd when he gets home.” The remark was prophetic. On a night late in February 1936, Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo was showing the film Naughty Marietta to former Premier Saito and Grand Chamberlain Suzuki; a few hours later Saito was shot dead and Suzuki wounded. The insurgents were rounded up and executed but Japanese politicians had a frightening glimpse of the explosive forces breaking through the surface.
Tension was mounting in Europe. In July 1936, an Italian bomber squadron was alerted for duty in Spain. A few days later General Francisco Franco took command of revolting Moors and Foreign Legionnaires in Spanish Morocco. People’s militia put down army uprisings in Madrid and other centers, but the revolt gained momentum in the north and south. Iberia quickly became a European battleground, with Italy and Germany taking the initiative. Italian troops and airmen, Nazi agents and technicians poured into rebel territory by the thousands. Within a few weeks Rome and Berlin simultaneously recognized Franco as Spain’s ruler.
“What an unfortunate and terrible catastrophe in Spain!” Roosevelt wrote Ambassador Claude Bowers. But United States neutrality, he added, would be “complete.” Britain and France forbade their citizens to sell arms to the Spanish government; Hull put a moral embargo on American exports, although the Neutrality Act did not apply to civil war. Italy and Germany agreed not to intervene, and kept on intervening.
In the fall of 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. The Axis could now forge strategic plans of united action. The democracies, divided and irresolute, were hamstrung by isolationists and appeasers in strategic positions. The West was still floundering.
THE POLITICIAN AS FOREIGN POLICY MAKER
The record is clear. As a foreign policy maker, Roosevelt during his first term was more pussyfooting politician than political leader. He seemed to float almost helplessly on the flood tide of isolationism, rather than to seek to change both the popular attitudes and the apathy that buttressed the isolationists’ strength.
He hoped that people would be educated by events; the error of this policy was that the dire events in Europe and Asia confirmed the American suspicion and fear of foreign involvement rather than prodding them into awareness of the need for collective action by the democracies. In short, a decisive act of interpretation was required, but Roosevelt did not interpret. At a minimum he might have avoided the isolationist line about keeping clear of joint action with other nations. Yet at a crucial moment—when he approved the Neutrality Act shortly before Italy’s attack on Ethiopia—he talked about co-operating with other nations “without entanglement.”
The awful implications of this policy of drift would become clear later on when Roosevelt sought to regain control of foreign policy making at home as the forces of aggression mounted abroad. But the immediate question is: Why did Roosevelt allow himself to be virtually immobilized by isolationist feeling? Why did he not, through words or action, seek to change popular attitudes and thus rechannel the pressures working on him?
The enigma deepens when Roosevelt’s private views are considered. In his private role he was an internationalist. He believed, that is, in the proposition that America’s security lay essentially in removing the economic and social causes of war and, if war threatened, in uniting the democracies, America included, against aggressive nations. But in his public role he talked about keeping America disentangled from the political affairs of other nations; he often talked, in short, like an isolationist.
The mystery deepens still further when one considers that the President had emphatic, though perhaps ill-defined, ideas about the need for leadership in a democracy. He must have recognized the potential in leadership when, in addressing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the end of 1933, he asserted roundly that the “blame for the danger to world peace lies not in the world population but in the political leaders of the population.” At the same time he was concerned about the perennially weak leadership that the politicians gave France. He was perhaps aware, too, that simply following a line of policy lying at the mean between two extremes would not necessarily lead to the wisest course. In the case of Ethiopia, for instance, the British and French through their indecisive maneuverings succeeded neither in keeping Mussolini out of Germany’s orbit
nor in vindicating the ideals of collective security. Washington’s foreign policies were equally muddled.
The reasons for the sharp divergence between Roosevelt’s private and public roles in foreign policy making were several. In the first place, the President’s party was cleft through the middle on international issues. The internationalist wing centered in the southern and border states was balanced by isolationists rooted in the West and Midwest. To win the nomination Roosevelt had given hostages to both groups. Part of the price of success in 1932 had been categorical opposition to United States co-operation with the collective security efforts of the League, and a cautious policy of neutrality based on nonentanglement. In the second place, Roosevelt in his campaign had so ignored foreign policy, or fuzzed the issue over when he did touch on it, that he had failed to establish popular attitudes on foreign policy that he could later evoke in support of internationalism. Moreover, during his first term the President gave first priority to domestic policies; a strong line on foreign affairs might have alienated the large number of isolationist congressmen who were supporting the New Deal. Indeed, many isolationists seemed to believe that any marked interest in foreign affairs by the President was virtually a betrayal of progressivism.
In addition, the President had surrounded himself with men from both sides. Men like Hull and Howe and Morgenthau were generally on the international end of the spectrum, but others like Moley and Hopkins and Hugh Johnson and Ickes were at the opposite end. Ickes had been so pleased by the Senate action on the World Court that he had telephoned and congratulated Hiram Johnson, whom he found “as happy as a boy.” The development of the New Deal’s policies of economic nationalism, tinged with the rhetoric of international good will and economic co-operation, resulted from and reinforced this division.
But the main reason for Roosevelt’s caution involved the future rather than the past. The election of 1936 was approaching, and at this point he was not willing to take needless risks. It was significant that after he and Mackenzie King had signed a trade agreement in Washington—and a rather moderate one at that—Roosevelt wrote to King in April 1936 that “in a sense, we both took our political lives in our hands.…” The immediate goal of re-election was the supreme goal; the tasks of leadership, he hoped, could be picked up later.
FOURTEEN
1936: The Grand Coalition
STUDYING THE RULERS of foreign lands, Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times found that they had shriveled or aged during these tortured years. “On the faces of Mussolini, Hitler, Stanley Baldwin, even the rotating governors of France,” she reported, “strain and worry have etched indelible lines. Caught off guard, when they are alone, they are tired and baffled men who have paid a heavy price for power.”
Not so Roosevelt. Home again, Mrs. McCormick marveled that he was so little shaken by the seismic disturbances over which he presided. “On none of his predecessors has the office left so few marks as on Mr. Roosevelt. He is a little heavier, a shade grayer; otherwise he looks harder and in better health than on the day of his inauguration. His face is so tanned that his eyes appear lighter, a cool Wedgwood blue; after the four grilling years since the last campaign, they are as keen, curious, friendly, and impenetrable as ever.”
If other leaders bent under the burdens of power, Roosevelt shouldered his with zest and gaiety. He loved being President; he almost always gave the impression of being on top of his job. Cheerfully, exuberantly, he swung through the varied presidential tasks: dictating to Miss Tully pithy, twinkling little notes for friends and subordinates; splashing in the White House pool for the delighted photographers; showing off the incredible gewgaws that littered his desk; greeting delegations of Indians, of Boy Scouts, of businessmen, of Moose, of 4-H Club leaders, of Democratic ladies; relating long anecdotes about his ancestors to luncheon guests; scratching his name on bills with a dozen pens and carefully awarding each to a congressional sponsor solemnly standing behind the President’s big chair; conferring genially with congressional leaders, agency heads, party leaders, foreign emissaries; poking fun at reporters while deftly turning aside their questions.
The variegated facets of the presidential job called for a multitude of different roles, and Roosevelt moved from part to part with ease and confidence. He was a man of many faces. Presiding over meetings of chiefs of his emergency agencies, he was the brisk administrator investing the sprawling bureaucracy with pace and direction, and patiently educating his subordinates on the Realpolitik of administrative management. Entertaining visitors on a yacht, he was the quintessence of sociableness and charm. Addressing a party meeting, he was the militant political leader, trenchant, commanding, cocky, assertive. Motoring through the woods at Hyde Park, he was the country squire, relaxed, casual, rustic. Attending Harvard’s tercentenary in top hat and morning coat, he was the chief of state, august, sedate, and solemn.
Watching the President perform at a press conference midway through the first term, John Gunther was struck by the incredible swiftness with which he struck a series of almost theatrical poses. In twenty minutes, Gunther noted, Roosevelt’s features expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, sympathy, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. And when the reporters roared at Roosevelt’s remarks, he was clearly pleased at this audience response; after one such burst of laughter, the President took a sort of bow with a tilt of his huge head.
In all these roles Roosevelt gave an impression of directness and simplicity, and winning qualities these were. Ushered into the presidential bedroom one morning, Ickes found him shaving in the adjoining bathroom. Roosevelt invited him to sit on the toilet seat while they talked; the President was then wheeled to his bed where he reclined, still talking, while being dressed. He had his braces put on to greet a delegation, then returned to his room to take his braces off and relax again. “I was struck all over again,” Ickes exclaimed that night, “with the unaffected simplicity and charm of the man.” But this apparent simplicity was most deceiving—as Ickes himself was to discover.
The staff, as the last year of the first term arrived, reflected some of the change in Roosevelt’s political posture and in the alignment of forces amid which he operated. Howe had died in April, until the end toying with great schemes for Roosevelt’s triumphant re-election. Douglas, Acheson, and most of the other conservatives had long since left. By 1936 only Moley remained from the right wing of the original brain trust—and the graying, anxious professor was not to stay long. For months he had watched with rising alarm as the New Deal veered left. In turn captivated by Roosevelt’s charm and pained by his policies, Moley somehow stayed on until a night in June when the President in a small gathering began taunting him about his new conservatism. Moley replied with heat, an angry quarrel followed, and the old relationship was over.
New faces in the White House took the place of old. There was Stanley High, a smooth-mannered, bespectacled young man whose religious background helped him supply the President with what his more irreverent White House aides called “inspirational messages.” There was Tommy Corcoran, a brash, engaging lawyer, only thirty-six years old, whose role as White House court jester with his jokes, Irish ballads, and mimicry seemed to belie his growing reputation as a tough-minded puller of governmental wires and manipulator of politicians and bureaucrats. There was Corcoran’s “Gold Dust twin,” Ben Cohen, a dreamy intellectual who had shown brilliant powers in drafting New Deal bills and coping with legal technicalities. Others fluttered in and out of the White House limelight: Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, Isador Lubin—militant legal and economic technicians of a changing social order.
The President steered his kitchen cabinet with an easy rein. Its members in fact made up his staff for legislative, propaganda, and election campaigns, but he never institutionalized it. He casually borrowed personnel from agencies as he needed them. Presidential business was carried on in a catch-as-catch-can turmoil of person
al conferences, sudden telephone calls, handwritten chits circulated among key advisers. The most valuable member of the kitchen cabinet was still Eleanor Roosevelt, who not only reached millions of people with her endless trips and with a newspaper column on “My Day,” but continued to bring a stream of new faces and new ideas into the White House.
Yet to single out even this half-dozen or so White House personalities is to risk underestimating the vital role that the others in the executive establishment would play in 1936. For, as convention and election time approached, it became clear that Roosevelt would campaign squarely on the basis of the new benefits and the new hope that the New Deal administrators and their alphabetical agencies had brought to America.
THE POLITICS OF THE DEED
Perhaps it was Roosevelt’s grasp of the cardinal fact of New Deal benefits to the people that largely explains his optimism about re-election. “We will win easily next year,” he told his cabinet in November 1935, “but we are going to make it a crusade.” His steady optimism continued into the early months of 1936. And well it might. For the New Deal program, partly by design and partly by chance, was coming to a climax in the election year.
By almost any test the economic surge since 1932 had been remarkable. Unemployment had dropped by about four million since the low point early in 1933; at least six million jobs had been created. Pay rolls in manufacturing industries had doubled since 1932; stock prices had more than doubled. Commercial and industrial failures in 1936 were one-third what they had been four years before. Total cash income of farmers had fallen to four billion in 1932 and recovered to almost seven billion in 1935. Capital issues had shot up sixfold since 1933. The physical volume of industrial production had almost doubled.
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