by Hugh Brogan
Hull was a Congressional veteran who had drafted the first income tax law under the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, had led the ‘dry’ faction at the 1932 Democratic convention (he came from the godly state of Tennessee) and was picked for his post in the same way as Vice-Presidents are. He had been an outstanding supporter of Roosevelt-for-President among the Southern Democrats; he had been a life-long campaigner for the good old Democratic cause of lower tariffs; and he had useful links with his former colleagues in the Senate. He was an able and tenacious negotiator when given the chance; a dignified figure, who was prepared to stick stubbornly to his view if he thought it correct, but nevertheless always showed a becoming deference to his chief. He entirely lacked the vision and energy which might have helped Roosevelt to face reality himself and induce his countrymen to do likewise. As the long train of disaster unrolled, Cordell Hull could always find a reason for not doing anything this time. On the other hand he was always prepared to say something, especially if he saw a chance to lecture unreceptive ears (Japanese for choice) on the sanctity of treaties, the importance of the peaceful resolution of international disputes and the glories of free trade. Otherwise his chief skill was that of ousting his rivals from the President’s councils, and even there he usually took his time. Nor were his deficiencies made good by his officials. True, American ambassadors were often perceptive – Dodd at Berlin, Messersmith at Vienna, Grew at Tokyo, all sent wise and frequent warnings – but it was not convenient to pay them any attention. Instead (for instance) Hull publicly disowned Hugh Johnson when in 1934 the General said that events in Germany (he was thinking of the Jews) made him sick – ‘not figuratively, but physically and very actively sick’. So little did Hull share this feeling that he rejected every opportunity to rescue Hitler’s victims: between 1933 and 1941 some 75,000 German Jews only were allowed into the United States, although even under the restrictive arrangements of the 1924 Immigration Act something like 180,000 might have come. In this matter, as in too much else, Hull and the State Department’s responses were timid, unimaginative and legalistic.
This might have mattered less if Roosevelt had seen his way to being more imaginative himself; but he too was constrained by a circumscribed vision. Even as late as the 1940 elections he seems to have thought that America might contrive to stay at peace without handing victory in the Second World War to Hitler; and there is no reason to question the solidity of his earlier commitment to the base policy of peace at any price. Furthermore, as he showed again and again during the thirties, he would not allow foreign policy considerations of any kind to interfere with his domestic programme. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia; the Spanish Civil War; the German occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia – in every one of these crises Roosevelt felt himself unable to take any effective action because of possible adverse repercussions in Congress. He loathed the turn the world was taking, but did not feel he could do anything about it.
To judge from the response of Congress and the people to the deepening crisis, he was right in his assessment. Between 1933 and 1935, when comparatively little was happening, he was allowed a fairly free hand; but after the outbreak of the Ethiopian War and Hitler’s announcement of German re-armament, he was put on a very short rein by various Neutrality Acts. For the American people did not see the rise of fascism as a signal for action; rather they took fright and did all they could to stay out of trouble. Their state of mind is commonly spoken of as isolationist, but this label, though convenient and emotionally accurate, obscures the point that at least two tendencies were at work. One was unilateralism: the conviction that America must remain a free agent, as she had been ever since her treaty with France was ended during the French Revolution. Unilateralism took no account of the technological and economic changes which had made physical isolation impossible and permanent collaboration with friendly nations essential. It was strongly nationalistic and well entrenched in the Senate. It was a convenient rationale, not just for the widespread dislike and distrust of foreigners, those benighted creatures who did not enjoy the benefit of American institutions, but for the steadily increasing resentment, in Congress and among conservatives generally, of the steadily increasing power of the Presidency. It was easy enough to argue that unless Roosevelt was closely watched he might drag America into a war so that he could, as war leader, gratify his well-known dictatorial tendencies and overthrow American democracy. Nonsense, of course; but nonsense which all the enemies of that man in the White House found it very easy to accept. Most of the more contemptible manifestations of isolationism grew from this root.
The other tendency was pacifism, a more honourable but no less foolish persuasion. It had given the world the Kellogg-Briand Pact in the twenties; its proponents were incapable of acknowledging that conditions in the thirties demanded a different sort of response. The Depression took its toll. Domestic economic problems seemed more pressing, more real, than any foreign scare, and diminished confidence that America had answers for the world’s difficulties. Above all there was the memory of the trenches. Modern war was horrible, and getting more so. Every bomb dropped by the Japanese on China, or by the fascists on Guernica, was one more argument for steering clear of it; the pacifist mentality found it too painful, as well as too humiliating, to admit that America might no longer have the power to do so. There is something moving about the way in which these citizens and their representatives, whether in Congress or in such bodies as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, laboured for peace, not out of weakness or cowardice, but because it was a value they cherished. Their pacifism contrasts finely with the war-mania of imperial Japan or Hitlerite Germany. But it was no less self-defeating, for by weakening America it made an attack upon her more likely, not less.
All isolationist tendencies were strengthened by the inquest which Congress and revisionist historians conducted on the First World War during the thirties. The conclusion was reached that America had been dragged into it solely by the wiles of financiers who had invested in an Allied victory. The invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann telegram, were all discounted; and Woodrow Wilson’s belief that the Allied cause, being that of democracy and legality, must also be that of America, was derided or ignored, like his beliefs that only through international organization could further war be averted, and that the world was now so closely knit that the United States could not stand aloof any more, even if it wanted to. Wilson’s reputation has probably never stood lower than in the thirties (the increasing futility of the League of Nations did not help it); and among the consequences were the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937. The last of these made earlier, temporary arrangements permanent. Among the actions it outlawed were the sale of arms or loan of funds to belligerents, the arming of American merchant vessels and sailing on belligerent ones. Belligerents wishing to buy non-contraband goods must pay for delivery and ship them themselves – the so-called ‘cash and carry’ provisions. Above all the President was given no freedom of choice. When war broke out he was required to invoke the Act, and he was not allowed to discriminate between aggressor and victim: neither might receive armaments from the United States. It is not surprising that the New York Herald-Tribune said that the act should have been called ‘an act to preserve the United States from intervention in the War of 1914–18’. Roosevelt, with the battle over the Supreme Court on his hands, did not wish to make more trouble for himself by vetoing the law, so he signed it, an action he bitterly regretted a year or two later. The chief consequence was that the conduct of American diplomacy, already difficult enough, became nearly impossible: only the outbreak of war in 1939 made repeal possible, and even then it was a slow and piecemeal business. Meanwhile Roosevelt had more or less lost control of foreign policy. He did not even try very hard to induce Congress to relax the immigration laws to admit Jewish refugees, for the opposition to any such liberalization was blindly, cruelly obstinate. A widespread, erroneous im
pression was that the faltering economy, of which mass unemployment seemed to be so permanent a feature, could not stand the strain of an influx of penniless refugees; and uglier forces were at work. Anti-semitism was active and vocal, finding expression in such demagogues as the ‘radio priest’, Charles Coughlin, and the professional rabble-rouser, Gerald L. K. Smith, and in such organizations as the German-American Bund, which was lavishly supported by Hitler. As a result of all this America, at the time of the Munich crisis, was impotent. All Roosevelt could do was bombard the Europeans with messages urging them to make peace on just and liberal principles – messages which Hitler ostentatiously ridiculed and which unconsciously bore out an earlier remark of Neville Chamberlain’s: ‘It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words.’
The worst consequence was that when war broke out American neutrality positively favoured the Nazis, since it was not they who needed to procure ships, planes, guns and other military supplies from the United States. Roosevelt had foreseen this, but his efforts to enlighten Congress were for long entirely in vain. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was Key Pittman of Nevada, who cared for nothing but the silver lobby: among his other disqualifications for the post was his habit of drinking himself into a stupor. Senator Borah of Idaho was still active: when, in August 1939, Roosevelt told him that war in Europe was imminent, he blandly contradicted the President. His own sources, he said, were better than the State Department’s, and assured him that there was not going to be a war.
The best that can be said for the Americans is that they were no more foolish than the British, and were infinitely less so than the Germans or the Japanese or J. V. Stalin. Nor should it be forgotten that one of the minor constraints on Roosevelt was the attitude of the other democratic governments. Whenever he proposed a course of action the British were certain to find it too risky. Not the least shocking consequence of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was that it kept the British at arms’ length from the Americans. Roosevelt’s offers of help were coolly declined, and he was reduced to watching while a policy in which he did not believe failed utterly.
Even so late as 1940 only 7.7 per cent of all Americans were ready to enter the war;1 in May 1941, according to a Gallup poll, 79 per cent of the people were still opposed to a voluntary entry, though by then most of them expected to be forced in. But too much should not be made of this state of mind; as the shrewd German ambassador had observed previously, if the Americans were frightened enough they might change from isolationists to interventionists in one jump. Nor was that all. As the circumstances which had driven Woodrow Wilson to go to war reappeared, worse than ever, Wilsonian ideology came to life again. Roosevelt, for instance, had been an isolationist perforce throughout the first six years of his Presidency; but after Munich he changed his stance decisively. The world had come right to the brink of war and been saved only by the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. A month later Hitler unleashed a furious terror against the German Jews. They were beaten up by Nazi thugs, their property was looted, they were stripped of their civil rights: tyranny let loose an obscene madness. ‘I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization,’ said Roosevelt. Peace, democracy and justice were in danger while Hitler ruled, and the President began to plan accordingly. Suppose the Nazis began to meddle in Latin America? FDR renewed his courtship of the southern republics, and began the long job of expanding, training and equipping the armed forces of the United States, lest Hitler try to come in by the back door. He still had to move warily, because of isolationist opinion, and by September 1939 was not visibly in a much stronger position, either internationally or politically, than he had been a year before; but in fact the gathering of America’s strength had begun, and was not to be reversed.
Hitler’s brutality and recklessness were bringing about a great change in American opinion. People were beginning to realize that he would never stop while there was a frontier to cross or a statesman to double cross. Ambassador Messersmith held that the logic of the dictator’s career would drive him on to fight the world, so the United States should resist him at once, while it could still have some allies. Cordell Hull and other good Wilsonians who had pinned their faith on international law were outraged and frightened chiefly by Hitler’s lies, by his contempt for treaties and all the machinery of conciliation. If they were not yet ready to relinquish the dream of peace, they, and soon most other intelligent Americans, with their profound commitment to democracy and the idea of progress, found the prospect of a world in which such a creature as Hitler was dominant so revolting that even if he had been no sort of threat to their more material interest they would still have felt it necessary to thwart and defeat him if they could. For the interests of great nations, and of that humanity of which great nations are only a part, cannot be reduced to the calculations of a balance-sheet – though some of the great corporations, which had kept Mussolini supplied with oil during the Ethiopian War and which went on trading profitably with the Nazis to the very eve of war, in the teeth of their government’s protests, seemed to think otherwise. Standard Oil, New Jersey, actually formed a cartel with IG Farben, the great Nazi petrochemical company, and refused to develop ioo-octane aviation fuel for the US army because that institution, fussily, would not let it share the secrets of its research with Farben.
Other Americans were still unconvinced. The isolationists kept up a loud chorus of denunciation and formed the America First Committee to make sure that the ‘mistake’ of 1917 was not repeated. America First had an amazing range of supporters, from proto-Nazis to socialists – even to the Communist party, which vigorously opposed all American involvement in the ‘imperialist’ war from the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 1939) to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). Apart from such cynical or merely deluded elements the America Firsters all seem to have believed that the war was just another power struggle, Hitler’s victory in which, though no doubt deplorable, would not seriously affect America; that intervention in the war, on the other hand, would infallibly destroy American democracy, wreck its economy, bring about a totalitarian government, lead to persecution of the Jews, the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans, or, alternatively, to a Jewish dictatorship, or to communism, or to millions dead, or anyway, to rationing; and that it was impossible that Hitler would or could attack the impregnable United States, shielded by its oceans and its huge military strength (the possibility of attack from Japan was never mentioned). In other words, the frightful consequences that the internationalists expected from further appeasement would come, the isolationists believed, from intervention in any form; and they resisted all the measures of the administration for dealing with the emergency, though they never succeeded in stopping them. They simply did not believe that, in the words they attributed to Franklin Roosevelt (not very inaccurately, in spite of his denials), America’s frontier was on the Rhine.
The President was undeterred. When, in the spring of 1940, Hitler let loose the blitzkrieg and the nations of Western Europe went down before him like ninepins (Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France), Roosevelt’s policy became one of all aid to the Allies short of war. The Republicans, convening in Philadelphia, nominated Wendell Willkie for the Presidency. Willkie was of German descent and had been a leading opponent of the New Deal throughout the thirties: as head of a huge electricity company he had been particularly opposed to the TVA. The nomination of such a man, and the dominance of isolationists in the Republican party, seem to have decided Roosevelt to defy tradition and seek a third term in office. Willkie himself, a renegade Democrat, turned out to be both an internationalist and comparatively liberal domestically; he had an appealing personality, and in Roosevelt’s opinion was the strongest candidate the Republicans could have chosen. So it was necessary for the Democrats to field their own strongest man, and there could be no doubt who that was: ‘WE WANT ROOSEVELT!’ roared the galleries at the Democratic
convention in Chicago. FDR had been talking wistfully for a year and more of the charms of retirement, but he did not propose to leave the field to his enemies and the enemies of the New Deal, whether within or without the Democratic party. The 1940 election thus became a referendum on the Roosevelt years. The President ensured that by choosing Henry Wallace, the most liberal member of his Cabinet, as his running-mate. He had grown weary of the antics of ‘Cactus Jack’ Garner, who had exploited the Vice-Presidency to become the unofficial leader of the opposition in the Senate; by forcing Wallace on a very reluctant convention he showed that, whatever might be the case in Congress, he was master of the Democratic party nationally, and his were the policies it would have to support. Foreign policy was not neglected. Although in his speeches Roosevelt stressed his commitment to peace (one statement, ‘Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,’ was to come back to plague him), in his actions he showed himself the staunch friend of Britain, now fighting desperately for her life, and the resolute enemy of Hitler. As the election campaign began he traded fifty old destroyers for military bases in British possessions in the western hemisphere, by-passing Congress (and thereby provoking new cries of ‘dictatorship!’ from the isolationists, and from Irish-Americans such as Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, who blindly hated Britain); and as it roared to its climax he signed the Selective Service Act, which conscripted young men in peacetime, an unheard-of breach with tradition. Willkie denounced him as a warmonger, accused him (rather inconsistently) of having neglected America’s defences, and pointed out that the Depression had not been ended by eight years of the New Deal; but he was answered by events. The new defence programmes created a huge industrial demand (Roosevelt had called for the building of 50,000 planes a year); suddenly, at last, there was work again for everybody, and every front page of every newspaper in the country could not help reporting every day the efforts that the administration was making to improve America’s security. America First was answered by the bipartisan Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Roosevelt took two Republicans into his Cabinet: Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War and Frank Knox, who had been Landon’s Vice-Presidential candidate, as Secretary of the Navy. The landslide was not quite on the scale of 1932 and 1936; FDR’s popular vote held steady, but the Republicans gained heavily, so that his majority was no more than five million (out of fifty million voting), but he carried thirty-eight states. Meantime the staunch resistance of the British people and the heroism of the Royal Air Force had dealt Hitler his first defeat. In October he called off his invasion plan (Operation Sea Lion) until the spring. It was never renewed.