by David Milne
Political expediency trumped fidelity to Wilson’s league during the nomination tussle in 1932, however, when FDR disavowed his previous support for league membership and the Democratic Party later dropped references to Wilson’s cherished project, eradicating nearly all mention of this pathbreaking two-term president. Repudiating Woodrow Wilson was cruel but perhaps vindicated in the nature of the campaign and its outcome: Roosevelt crushed Hoover on Election Day. FDR took 57.4 percent of the popular vote and left the incumbent president with just 59 electoral college votes from the states of the Northeast, whose long-standing affinity for the GOP would not survive the coming age of Roosevelt. Of course, the overwhelming manner of the Democratic Party’s victory might also suggest that dismissing Wilson’s legacy was unneccesary.
Charles Beard welcomed Roosevelt’s election for the president’s keen attention to the Depression. Both men shared a common optimism about America’s future and its capacity for evolution and improvability. Throughout his thirteen years as president, FDR led a step change in the purpose and reach of the federal government, implementing some of the statist policies Beard had advocated and whose implementation he celebrated. What was not to like in a presidency devoted to job creation, social security, large-scale public works programs, the promotion of labor union rights, and federal subsidy of the arts? Of course, the president rejected Beard’s counsel in refusing to centralize economic planning in a single source that would have brought the nation closer in affinity to the corporatism of fascist Italy than the ameliorative, paternalist state capitalism in, say, France or even Great Britain. But Beard forgave him that, recognizing that a change of that magnitude was out of reach for the present time—even for so gifted a politician as Roosevelt.
What worried Beard was the president’s affinity for the Navy. In this regard, and in this alone, he much preferred Hoover, who shared his aversion to Mahanian naval theory. FDR’s support for naval expansion seemed to portend an outward-facing foreign policy. And Beard worried that this foolish emphasis might result in the president proving susceptible to “a grand diversion—a diversion that might not be unwelcome, should the domestic recovery program fall far short of its aims”—a remarkably farsighted observation for Beard to have registered in 1933.91 At this juncture, Beard blamed some of Roosevelt’s hawkish advisers rather than the man himself. He identified a split in the administration between Jeffersonians who favored political and economic self-sufficiency, such as the president and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and dangerous Wilsonian internationalists like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who believed that the United States must promote order, spread democratic values, and continue to facilitate greater economic interdependence. Hoping to tilt the administration in a continentalist direction, Beard embarked on the task of convincing Roosevelt of his indispensability as an adviser.
In October 1933, Beard dined with Roosevelt at the White House. Like countless others, Beard had been thoroughly charmed by his presidential host and returned home in an optimistic frame of mind, hopeful that FDR might again prove receptive to his views on how to deal with the economic crisis and assure America a more modest place in world affairs.92 In 1932, the Social Science Research Council had awarded Beard a $25,000 grant to formulate a precise definition of that vexing term, “the national interest.” The result of this research program was two books published in 1934, “with the collaboration of” the lawyer and Yale academic George H. E. Smith. Put together, The Idea of the National Interest and The Open Door at Home represent Beard’s only attempts to emulate Alfred Mahan in formulating a foreign-policy vision that stood a realistic chance of being actioned. Realizing that time was not on his side, Beard was more forward than Mahan in identifying his intended audience. The core chapter in The Open Door at Home, titled “The Ethical Roots of Policy,” was addressed directly to President Roosevelt: “the statesman … the socially-minded, public personality engrossed in the public interest.” Beard described himself as a “scholar conscious of his role … a statesman, without portfolio, to be sure, but with a kindred sense of public responsibility.”93 In 1934, the stars were never better aligned for Beard to assume a position of policy influence.
Though published simultaneously, the two books are quite different in style and purpose. The Idea of the National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy is the most ostensibly Rankean book Beard ever wrote. His intention was to be “coldly factual throughout,” and the result is a dry reading experience so challenging to the reader’s forbearance as to make it positively un-Beardian.94 The yin and yang of the book are Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, whose conceptions of the national interest were starkly different. For Jefferson, the national interest was primarily agrarian in economic form. The United States should pursue a policy of expansion, but only within the continent, to create a self-sufficient population truly independent from the Old World. For Hamilton, America’s national interest was primarily urban and commercial. As the U.S. economy grew, through exploitation of its vast natural resources and technological innovation, a point would come when its political leaders would have to unshackle the nation from the continental sphere.
To Beard’s mind, the logical outcome of Hamilton’s elevation of overseas trade as the central driver of progress was reckless adventurism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, culminating in the Spanish-American War and its land-grabbing outcome. While Jeffersonianism was not without its flaws, Beard believed fidelity to Hamiltonianism was a greater danger for the United States, since implict in its rationale is a perpetual expansion of international commitments and a massive navy to protect them. It was in the nature of big business to urge a restless, expansive foreign policy, which was anathema to America’s true national interest. Where commerce went, so the military would be compelled to follow. This resulted in “outward thrusts of power” that damaged the United States, in neglecting its domestic sphere, nearly as much as the nation on the receiving end of the thrust.95
The Open Door at Home was more philosophically wide-reaching and friendlier to the reader. Beard argued that the Great Depression was the logical outcome of the type of economic interdependence extolled by the likes of Hamilton and Mahan. Following the analytical thread developed in The Rise of American Civilization, Beard celebrated America’s natural abundance, which permitted the nation to avoid the cataclysmic class struggles predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He recommended that the federal government assume absolute control of imports and exports, that peripheral territorial possessions be handed back to their rightful owners, that U.S. diplomatic contact be limited to the minimum necessary to avoid counterproductive rudeness, and that a radical “standard of life” budget be created so as to redistribute the nation’s vast wealth more equitably and to eliminate the cancer of unemployment that blighted the American body politic. Beard promised that this program would produce marvelous outcomes for the United States, and conceivably for the rest of the world too:
By domestic control over all foreign trade, by the relaxation of the capitalistic pressure of the United States on world markets in standardized manufactures and commercial investments, by concentrating national energies on the development of national resources and the efficient distribution of wealth at home, by deliberately withdrawing from the rivalries of imperialistic nations, the United States would take its official nose out of a thousand affairs of no vital concern to the people of the United States, would draw back its defense lines upon zones that can be defended with the greatest probability of victory in case of war, and would thus have a minimum dependence on the “strategic products” indispensable to war. And by multiplying many fold its outlays for scientific research in analytic and synthetic chemistry, it could steadily decrease its dependence on world markets for the essentials indispensable to our material civilization in time of peace …
In short, by cultivating its own garden, by setting an example of national self-restraint (which is certainly easier than restraini
ng fifty other nations in an international conference, or beating them in war), by making no commitments that cannot be readily enforced by arms, by adopting toward other nations a policy of fair and open commodity exchange, by refraining from giving them any moral advice on any subject, and by providing a military and naval machine as adequate as possible to the defense of this policy, the United States may realize maximum security, attain minimum dependence upon governments and conditions beyond its control, and develop its own resources to the utmost.96
This was a vision every bit as radical as Woodrow Wilson’s. Yet its premise was antithetical to nearly everything presented in the Fourteen Points. It was also unremittingly hostile to Mahan’s vision of the United States as a maritime trading empire ennobled and hardened, from time to time, by participation in necessary wars. Where Wilson and Mahan wanted America to make peace with the interlinked nature of world affairs, Beard instead believed that the nation should retreat and “cultivate its own garden.” Where Wilson believed America owed the world its leadership, Beard believed it owed it nothing—although other nations were welcome to test America’s developmental path if they so wished. In Darwinian terms, Beard believed that the United States was similar to places like Australia and the Galápagos Islands, remote enough from outside predators to support a unique and remarkable ecosystem. “Enthroned between two oceans,” Beard wrote, “with no historic enemies on the north or south, the Republic can be defended against any foes which such a policy may raise up against it.”97
Certain signs had suggested to Beard that the president might be sympathetic to this radical reimagning of America’s future. In July 1933, Roosevelt had withdrawn from the London Economic Conference, designed to hammer out a common global response to the economic depression—which by now affected every nation. To protect the trading benefits that accompanied a weak dollar, however, Roosevelt had refused to join a shared policy of currency stabilization. Beard applauded FDR’s actions, which he believed followed the Jeffersonian tradition, for imparting the lesson that foreign trade was not necessary for domestic recovery.98 In January 1934, the journalist Ernest K. Lindley, known to be close to FDR, reported that Beard was “one of the intellectual parents of the New Deal,” a welcome validation. In a generally warm review of The Open Door at Home in The American Historical Review, the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis observed that the book held the potential to become “a classic of American political thought” and that well-placed sources had informed him that President Roosevelt had read the book and jotted comments in the margins.99
Bemis was right about Roosevelt scribbling in his book, and indeed that the president “kept it in his desk for callers to see for three weeks!” But Beard also learned in time that one of FDR’s handwritten comments described the book as “a bad dish.” His feeling of disappointment was compounded when Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace penned an evenhanded but critical review of The Open Door at Home in The New Republic. Wallace observed that Beard “dreams a great dream of a beautiful and peaceful future of our great land,” to which “the heart thrills … [but] even Beard has not seen the whole problem. He is not so good an economic technician as he is a historian.” Rather than securing the United States a blissful future, Wallace believed it was impossible, and potentially very damaging, for the United States to abandon world trade in favor of domestic development alone. In another review, the historian Herbert Feis, then working as an economic adviser to the State Department, detected chauvinism in Beard’s recommendations and worried his model might invite the kind of reciprocal belligerency he deplored. If France viewed Hawley-Smoot as a declaration of war, what might Paris make of America’s move to autarky? Feis further worried that technological innovation would soon rob the United States of the protection offered by two great oceans.100 The United States might just about achieve self-sufficiency, but nations with formidable militaries and vast potential for further growth—Germany and Japan in particular—lacked the natural resources to follow a similar path. What would stop them from seeking redress from the bountiful United States when military technology permitted? Wallace and Feis detected significant shortcomings in Beard’s thesis. Put together, alongside FDR’s “bad dish” comment, their critiques might be described as the official administration response to Beard’s continentalist vision for his beloved United States. His hopes for policy relevance were crushed in 1934. Beard’s views on Roosevelt continued their trajectory from hope to concern to strident opposition.
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Like Germany and Italy, Japan felt it had been given a raw deal at the Paris Peace Conference. For fighting valiantly on the side of the Entente, winning important battles against the German fleet in the Pacific, Tokyo believed that the acquisition of the League of Nations’ South Sea Mandate—constituting what we know today as Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands—was inadequate recompense, particularly when compared to the mandate booty engineered and acquired by France and Great Britain. A nation for which Beardian autarky was a hopeless dream, lacking vital natural resources such as rubber and oil, Japan was a first-rank power implacably opposed to the territorially restrictive interwar status quo. And so Japan fell under the spell of militarists during the 1920s and 1930s, ambitious and ruthless men who believed the only way to secure Japan a more glorious future was to annex the rich northern regions of China and as much of Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies as its formidable military could conquer. This plan for expanding the Japanese empire at its neighbors’ expense was given an Orwellian title in 1940: “The Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
The first stage in creating this arc of prosperity was the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, in northern China. This was achieved in 1931 when the territory was invaded, declared independent from China, and renamed Manchukuo. Half a million Japanese men and women subsequently emigrated to settle and till the resource-rich land, with a view to alleviating some of the economic woes afflicting the homeland. In response, the Hoover administration promulgated what became known as the Stimson Doctrine—named after Secretary of State Henry Stimson—which held that the United States would not recognize Manchukuo as an independent nation, or indeed any other Chinese territory that Japan decided to hack off and subsume in its pursuit of self-sufficiency. The Stimson Doctrine was directly challenged in 1937 with Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, unleashing a brutal conflict in which Japanese war crimes were legion. Following the Japanese capture of Nanjing (Nanking), for example, its troops murdered some two hundred thousand Chinese civilians and soldiers, and raped tens of thousands of women.101 The “Rape of Nanjing” was a dark episode in Japan’s quest for regional dominance, and more were to come. Roosevelt’s response was critical but muted, influenced to some degree by the coldly realist advice he received from his adviser William C. Bullitt: “We have large emotional interests in China, small economic interests, and no vital interests.”102
Berlin and Rome were plotting a similarly destructive and expansionist path. Italy was the lesser of those irredentist powers—though a pioneer in embracing fascism first—and it invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 with ambitions of rekindling the glories of the Roman Empire. More plausibly, it hoped to exact revenge for the humiliating defeat that the Abyssinians had dealt the Italian army during the Battle of Adowa in 1896. This time the Italian military prevailed against the hopelessly outgunned Abyssinians—who nonetheless managed to deal some embarrassing blows to Benito Mussolini’s invading forces. In a shameful diplomatic episode, Britain and France combined in an attempt to placate Mussolini in the hope that he might ally Italy against Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The two nations refused to close the Suez Canal, which would have stranded the Italian army in the Horn of Africa, and proposed a plan devised by their foreign secretaries, Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, which ceded much of Abyssinia to Italy. When the details of this supine plan were made public, Hoare-Laval was torpedoed and the two men were forced to re
sign. A halfhearted League of Nations embargo was imposed in its place, which, fatally, did not include oil. But the damage to the reputations of both Britain and France was profound. Observing diplomatic adversaries that were irresolute at their core, an emboldened Hitler recognized that the time was opportune to attack the reviled Versailles Treaty.
Hitler’s challenge to the European status quo proceeded cautiously. First the führer ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland—which the victors at Versailles had shorn of military capabilities—in March 1936. Britain and France did nothing in response. During the summer, Hitler dispatched German troops, and state-of-the-art military hardware, to assist the efforts of fellow fascist General Francisco Franco to overthrow the democratically elected Popular Front government in Spain. Direct participation in the Spanish Civil War allowed Hitler to test new battlefield strategems, the blitzkrieg and indiscriminate aerial bombardment, which were deployed to devastating effect in all theaters during the Second World War. German support was also decisive in allowing Franco to prevail, leading to the establishment of another fascist nation on the European continent. A German “Axis” with Mussolini’s Italy was declared later that year—displaying the futility of Anglo-French efforts to lure Il Duce to their side. In February 1938, Germany gave up its hopes of reacquiring its Pacific territories and agreed to a formal alliance with Japan. In that same month, German troops entered Austria and a pan-German Anschluss was declared, later ratified by a plebiscite that registered Austrian approval at a suspiciously high level of 99 percent.
Confident that continued Anglo-French acquiescence to his assault on Versailles proved that those nations were irredeemably effete, Hitler turned next to Czechoslovakia, whose Sudetenland was peopled by a large proportion of ethnic Germans. While caving to German aggression had not worked well to that point, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain gave it one final go at the Munich conference in late September 1938. With Chamberlain as master of ceremonies, he, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Hitler hashed out an agreeement, signed on September 30, which gifted the Sudetenland—the industrial heart of Czechoslovakia—to Germany. With dubious grounds for self-congratulation, and infused with a large dose of Polyannaish optimism, Chamberlain hailed the Munich agreement for assuring “peace in our time.” This peace lasted until March 1939, when Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia and became a pro-Nazi satellite, and the remainder of the now impotent nation was incorporated into the Third Reich at the point of the German bayonet.