A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Roosevelt’s Second Hundred Days promised to exceed the ambitions of the first term, building on the huge congressional majorities and his reelection landslide. The president proposed a new set of radical taxes and redistributionist measures aimed at ending inheritance, penalizing successful corporations, and beginning a steady attack on top-bracket individual fortunes.21

  It is worth reiterating, however, that New Deal policies were only aimed in part at restoring the American economy, just as Reconstruction policies were only directed, in part, at helping the freedmen. One important objective always lurked just below the smooth waters of Roosevelt’s rhetoric, and that was the ability of his policies to maintain the Democratic Party in power for the next several generations. Virtually every one of the New Deal programs in some way made people more dependent on government—not more independent, or self-sufficient—and when the government was run by Democrats, the logical conclusion voters had to draw was that whatever they “got” from government “came” from the Democrats. Social Security, farm subsidies, special favors for labor—they all targeted separate groups and played on their specific fears, and all problems were “solved” only through the efforts of Democratic politicians in Washington. Merely to raise the question of whether such policies were wise invited attack at election time, usually in the form of a question to the (usually Republican) opponent: “Why do you want to (fill in the blank with ‘take food away from the elderly,’ ‘keep farmers poor,’ and so on).” Roosevelt had created a sea change, therefore, not only in dealing with a national economic crisis, but also by establishing an entirely new political culture of Democratic dominance for decades to come.

  The New Deal Stalls

  Just as it appeared that the New Deal might enter a higher orbit in the universe of policy making, several events brought the Roosevelt administration down to earth. First, the Supreme Court, with a string of rulings, found that many components of the New Deal, including the NRA, the AAA, and a number of smaller New Deal acts, or state variants of New Deal laws, were unconstitutional. Seeing the Supreme Court as standing athwart the tide of progressive history, FDR found an obscure precedent in the British system that, he thought, allowed him to diminish the relative vote of the four hard-core conservatives on the Supreme Court by simply adding more members—the judicial equivalent of watering down soup. Roosevelt justified his bold attempt by arguing that the justices were overworked, proposing that for every justice of at least ten years’ experience over the age of seventy, the president should be allowed to appoint a new one. Here FDR not only alienated many of his congressional supporters, who were themselves in their sixties and seventies, but also positioned himself against the checks-and-balances system of the federal government.

  The issue threatened to erode much of Roosevelt’s support in Congress until, abruptly, the Supreme Court issued several decisions favorable to the New Deal, and at the same time one of the conservative justices announced his retirement. A more pliable court—in the eyes of the New Dealers—killed the court reform bill before it caused FDR further damage. Over the next three years, Roosevelt appointed five of his own men, all Democrats, to the Supreme Court, making it a true Roosevelt Court and further molding Washington into a one-party town.

  Roosevelt was preparing to launch another round of legislation when a second development hammered the administration on the economic front. In 1937, the nation had finally squeaked past the output levels attained before the crash, marking seven years’ worth of complete stagnation. Then, suddenly, the business index plummeted, dropping below 1935 levels. Steel production dropped from 80 percent of capacity to below 20 percent, and government deficits shot up despite all-time-high levels of taxation. Some in the Brain Trust rightly perceived that business had been terrorized, but the timing wasn’t right. No particular act had just been implemented. What had so frightened industry? The answer was that the cumulative effects of the minimum wage law, the Wagner Act, high taxation, and Keynesian inflationist policies all combined with what now appeared to be unchecked power in FDR’s hands. Hearing a new explosion of heated antimonopolist rhetoric by Roosevelt’s advisers, business began to question how long it could absorb further punishment. Although in the early 1930s American business had supported some of the relief programs to keep from being the scapegoats of the Depression, by late in the decade, the business community feared that even the most radical social and political reorganization was not beyond consideration by the New Dealers. Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson singled out by name leading industrialists and criticized their salaries; Harold Ickes charged that “sixty families” sought to establish control over the nation and that the struggle “must be fought through to a finish.”22 Roosevelt’s New Dealers had taken Reconstruction-era sectional antagonisms, repackaged them as class envy, and offered them up on an apocalyptic scale that was the Great Depression equivalent of “waving the bloody shirt” or, perhaps more fittingly, waving the unemployment compensation check.

  The New Dealers’ comments made business more skittish than it already was, and precipitated the Roosevelt recession. Between October 1937 and May 1938, WPA relief rolls in the auto towns in the Midwest swelled, increasing 194 percent in Toledo and 434 percent in Detroit. St. Louis, Cleveland, Omaha, and Chicago all eliminated or drastically curtailed welfare and unemployment payments. Nationally, unemployment rose from near 12 percent back to 19 percent. The ranks of organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposed the New Deal, started to swell. Roosevelt, nevertheless, remarked, “We are on our way back…we planned it that way.”23 What FDR did not understand was that although many people accepted some New Deal programs as necessary, they saw them as only temporary expedients. Meanwhile, “the New Dealers were never able to develop an adequate reform ideology to challenge the business rhetoricians.”24 A third shift against the New Deal came at the ballot box. The public grew concerned enough about the unchecked power of the Democrats that in the 1938 midterm elections the Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and thirteen governorships. It was a stinging rebuke to New Deal excesses and was achieved despite the fact that the Democrats had started to call in their patronage markers. This meshing of politics and jobs during the 1938 congressional elections raised another unsettling aspect of the New Deal. Allegations that WPA funds had been used in a Kentucky campaign prompted a Senate investigation, which raised questions about the potential abuse of federal offices for electioneering. As a consequence, the Hatch Act, prohibiting political activity by federal officials or campaign activities on federal property (and named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico), was passed in 1939.

  Fourth, Roosevelt had caused more than a little concern when he introduced a benign-appearing reorganization bill in Congress. At first it appeared to be a routine reshuffling of bureaucratic agencies. But by the time Congress (which was now more Republican) debated the bill, in 1938, the Court-packing scheme was fresh in the legislators’ minds, as was the fascist takeover of the Weimar Republic in Germany. No one thought FDR was Hitler, but papers were increasingly using the term “dictator” when they referred to the president. Congress decided that Roosevelt had started to infringe on constitutional separation of powers. Shocking the president, 108 Democrats crossed the aisle to defeat the reorganization bill in the House, prodded by thousands of telegrams from home.

  Reaction to Roosevelt’s power grab revealed how deeply entrenched values regarding private property, opportunity, and upward mobility still were. Despite six years of controlling the American economy, of dominating the political appointment process, of rigging the system with government bribes to special interest groups, and of generally favorable press, the public still resisted attempts to socialize the industrial system or to hand the president more power. It was a healthy sign—one not seen across the oceans, where dark forces snuffed out the light of freedom.

  Demons Unleashed

  As the nation struggled in its eco
nomic morass, events in Europe and Asia had posed an additional and even more serious threat than the Depression. For more than a decade, Americans had enjoyed relative peace in foreign affairs and had taken the lead in forging so-called arms control agreements. This was not out of altruism or pacifism, but out of a practical awareness that in the Atlantic the United States could keep up with Great Britain, but only at the expense of ceding the Pacific to the rising Empire of Japan.

  America’s relationship with Japan had been deteriorating for years. In 1915, Japan had stated in its Twenty-one Demands that it had a special position in China. Two years later, with the United States at war in Europe, Japanese negotiators upped the ante in their bid for dominance of China when Viscount Kikujiro Ishii met with Robert Lansing, the secretary of state. In the resulting Lansing-Ishii Agreement, the United States acknowledged that Japan had special interests in China, essentially abandoning the Open Door won just twenty years earlier. Reining in the Japanese in China had to involve obtaining naval parity in the Pacific. That proved to be no small task.

  The Empire of Japan had emerged victorious in two major naval actions in the Russo-Japanese War. Although the Japanese also captured Port Arthur on the Russian Pacific coast, the victory had come at a terrible cost, revealing that Japan would face severe difficulties if it ever engaged in a full-scale land war with Russia. Although Japan had courted both British and American favor during the first decade of the 1900s, by the 1930s, stung by what it viewed as discriminatory treatment in the Washington Conference agreements, Japan increasingly looked to herself.

  America had competitors—and perhaps enemies—on each ocean, and the most practical method of leveling the playing field was to restrain naval construction. That was the thought behind the Washington Conference. Ever since Lansing-Ishii, Japanese strategy had emphasized large-scale naval battles that sought to bring the enemy into one climactic engagement. But Japanese planners recognized that it would be years before they could produce a fleet comparable to that of either the British or the Americans, and so although they chafed at the inequitable provisions of the Washington Conference, “arms limitations” temporarily provided a means to tie up potential adversaries in meaningless agreements while quietly catching up technologically where it really mattered.

  All signatories to the Washington Pact accepted as fact the continued dominance of the battleship in future naval actions. In doing so, they all but ignored a series of critical tests in 1921 when an Army Air Force colonel, William “Billy” Mitchell, staged a demonstration that flabbergasted army and navy brass. Using the Ost-friesland, a German battleship acquired by the U.S. Navy in the Treaty of Versailles, as a target, Mitchell managed to sink the ship with bomber aircraft while the vessel was steaming in the open sea. Many, if not most, of the “battleship admirals” considered this an impossibility, and even after the fact, the astonished naval officers still refused to believe that it was anything other than a trick.

  Four years later, in 1925, navy aircraft attacked a U.S. fleet in simulated bombing runs and “destroyed” some sixty ships, all without the antiaircraft guns scoring a single hit on the towed targets. This pathetic performance occurred despite the fact that naval gunners fired off 880 rounds against the attackers.25 The episode so embarrassed the navy that in subsequent tests antiaircraft guns scored a large number of hits, only to be exposed by Colonel Mitchell as bunk because the aircraft had been limited to flying at a mere thirty-three miles per hour. Mitchell was later court-martialed for his comments on the culpability of the government when it had failed to provide weather stations after the lightning-induced destruction of the blimp Shenandoah. Mitchell also outlined how an Asian enemy—he said, “the Empire of Japan”—could launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and expect complete success. Japan took notes on Mitchell’s concepts, and the attack on Pearl Harbor bore an eerie resemblance to his scenario.

  By the time of his death in 1936, few besides Mitchell considered Japan any kind of serious threat. And no one thought much could come from a revived Italy led by Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party. Mussolini was the son of a blacksmith and, in all respects, a problem child who was expelled from school. A Socialist Party member, Mussolini had taught school, served at the front in World War I (where he was wounded), and become a newspaper editor. Along with Antonio Gramsci, Mussolini formed a new political movement—a hybrid of state corporatism, nationalism, and socialism—called fascism.

  The Fascists’ economic doctrines lacked any cohesion except that they wedged a layer of corporate leaders between state planning and the rest of the economy. There was no operation of the free market in fascism, but rather the illusion of a group of independent corporate leaders who, in reality, acted as extensions of the state and were allowed to keep impressive salaries as a payoff. Even there, however, the Italian state bought large stock holdings in the major banks and other companies, making it the leading stockholder in ventures controlling 70 percent of iron production and almost half of all steel production. It was as close to communism as one could get without collectivizing all industry, and fascism certainly shared with communism a bent for terrorism and violence. There was “no life without shedding blood,” according to Mussolini.26

  Mussolini himself had not broken with the Socialists over economic issues, but over Italy’s participation in World War I, and he seized as the symbol of his Fascist Party the Roman fasces—a bundle of sticks tied around an ax, representing authority and strength. From its origins, fascism was never anything but convoluted socialism—a point obscured still further by Adolf Hitler in Germany with his incessant attacks on both capitalism and communism. Seeing Jews behind each allowed him to conceal fascism’s close similarity to Stalin’s Soviet system.

  In 1922, Mussolini’s followers staged a march on Rome, handing him the Italian government, after which the Italian king named Il Duce (the leader) prime minister of Italy. Mussolini thus took by intimidation what he could not win at the ballot box. Within two years, after censoring press opposition (but not completely closing down antagonistic publishers) and manipulating the voting laws, he consolidated all power into his party’s hands, with himself as dictator, albeit one far weaker than the Nazi leader. Fables that he made the trains run on time and worked other economic miracles were more publicity and propaganda than fact, but they attracted the attention of many Americans, especially before the German Nazis started to enact their anti-Jewish legislation. Among those who lauded Mussolini was Breckinridge Long, ambassador to Italy, who called fascism “the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formulation of our Constitution.”27 Long praised the “Fascisti in their black shirts…. They are dapper and well dressed and stand up straight and lend an atmosphere of individuality and importance to their surroundings.”28 A young American diplomat named George Kennan, far from being repulsed by the Fascists, concluded that “benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good” than did democracy, and that the United States needed to travel “along the road which leads through consitutional change to the authoritarian state.”29 Meanwhile, Mussolini grew in popularity by promising the Italian people that he would restore the Roman Empire. With most of the former Roman Empire occupied by the French, Spaniards, Austrians, and others, Mussolini picked out the path of least resistance—parts of Africa not occupied by Europe, like Ethiopia. In 1935, Italian armies armed with the latest weapons, including aircraft, trucks, tanks, and machine guns, invaded a backward Ethiopia, whose emperor begged the League of Nations to intervene. Except for minor sanctions, the League turned a deaf ear, and Italian forces captured the Ethiopian capital in 1936. (Breckinridge Long, Il Duce’s cheerleader in the administration, referred to Italy’s crushing of backward Ethiopia as the “fruitful harvest of Mussolini’s enterprise.”)

  Like Mussolini, Adolf Hitler had had a troubled childhood. The son of a customs inspector, Hitler had dropped out of high school and worked as an artist in Vienna prior to World War I. H
e proved a failure at art, was twice rejected for architectural school, then finally enlisted in the German army at the start of the Great War. After the war he joined the German Workers’ Party, a socialist but anti-Marxist organization that emphasized nationalism and anti-Semitism. There Hitler found his niche, developing the skills of a hypnotic speaker and emotional actor for the party, which had taken a new name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis.

  Hitler toiled within the Nazi Party until the German hyperinflation of 1923 nearly caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Seeing his opportunity, Hitler led an attempted takeover, or putsch, but the police were ready for him. Arrested and sentenced to five years in prison, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) from behind bars. A rambling book that detailed his hatred for Jews; his intentions to create a new German Reich, or empire; and his economic policies—which were as contradictory and confused as Mussolini’s—Mein Kampf provided a road map for anyone willing to take it seriously. For example, he alerted everyone to his intentions of subjecting even the innocent to violence by stating that early in his political career, “the importance of physical terror became clear to me.” Hitler gained his release after only a few months in confinement, by which time the Nazis had emerged as a powerful force in German politics. He gained control of the party within two years. When Germany started to slide into the economic depression that gripped the rest of the world, Hitler had the issue he needed to appeal to large numbers of Germans, who responded to his calls for a socialist reordering of society along the lines of Mussolini’s corporatism.