Worldmaking
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Beard made some questionable and contradictory calls on the darkening situation in Europe. But as this exchange suggests, his intellect remained supple enough to recoil from unsubstantiated assertions such as Mencken’s. Throughout the late 1930s, however, Beard’s continentalism placed him in unpleasant company. The isolationist camp was a broad church, but many of its members were regrettably on the side of the devil. The priest and radio demagogue Charles Coughlin was virulently anti-Semitic and didn’t expend much effort shielding his fascist sympathies. The chief spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, held ugly views on eugenics and the influence exerted by Jews. Lindbergh’s admiration for the Third Reich—and what he viewed as its irresistible Luftwaffe—led him to advise FDR to accommodate Hitler in America’s best interests. Isolationists drew their strength from a smorgasbord of sectional interests: draft resisters, anti-Semites, Irish Americans, pro-fascist German and Italian Americans, William Randolph Hearst and his credulous readers, midwestern xenophobes, pacifists, Quakers, and Bryanite Democrats. The sociologist Talcott Parsons observed that isolationists were consumed by something akin to social pathology, a variant on what Émile Durkheim labeled anomie: “the unbearable loss of normative regulation that signaled the breakdown of social structure and the disorientation of isolated individuals.”123 Beard operated in the midst of that cacophony of strident, chauvinistic, disoriented voices.
Compared to these unpleasant rationales for American noninvolvement, Beard’s continentalism was a paragon of humanity, driven by benign social-reformist statism. There is something laudable about his injunction to perfect the United States before attempting to export an unrealized model elsewhere. He wasn’t the only isolationist from the academic community. John Bassett Moore (Columbia), Edwin M. Borchard (Yale), Philips Bradley (Dartmouth), Harry Elmer Barnes (Smith), Robert M. Hutchins (Chicago), and Henry Noble MacCracken (Vassar) were all firmly opposed to American participation in a second world war. But Beard provided the most humane and intellectually compelling rationale for global noninvolvement. Although he defended Lindbergh against his detractors in 1940—refusing to attribute base, racist motives to such a hero—Beard also declined to offer public support for America First, writing to Matthew Josephson that “I wanted to speak out for peace. But I found that the wrong kind of people were in that camp, while those I like seem to be on the other side.”124
Beard’s final plea for geopolitical sanity was published as France fell to the force of German arms. In A Foreign Policy for America, Beard identifies two villains who combined to create a momentum for wrongheaded overseas entanglement that might eventually destroy the republic: Alfred Thayer Mahan and Woodrow Wilson—and the success of one led inexorably to the overstretch of the other. Beard describes Mahan as “the most successful propagandist ever produced in the United States,” lamenting that Theodore Roosevelt “made Mahan’s work his bible of politics for the United States.” In condemning Mahan with a full repertoire of vitriol, Beard displays almost virtuosic ability:
Perhaps in the whole history of the country there had never been a more cold-blooded resolve to “put over on the people” such a “grand” policy, in spite of their recalcitrance, “ignorance,” and “provincialism” … [Mahan] was a veritable ignoramus. He took such old works as suited his preconceived purposes, tore passages and fragments out of their context … In sum and substance, Mahan’s foreign policy for the United States was based on the pure materialism of biological greed, although it was more or less clouded by rhetorical confusion, religious sentiments, and a clumsy style … Much which passed for argument in the Mahan system was little more than the rationalized war passion of a frustrated swivel-chair officer who had no stomach for the hard work of navigation and fighting.125
Having put Mahan and Roosevelt to the sword, Beard turned to Wilson. For Beard, the segue was seamless: “From their participation in collective world politics, from the imperialistic theory of ‘doing good to backwards people,’ it was but a step to President Wilson’s scheme for permanent and open participation in European and Asiatic affairs in the alleged interest of universal peace and general welfare.”126 Beard clearly despised Mahan, but he had more sympathy for Wilson and his Fourteen Points:
It went beyond the fondest dreams of many pacificators. It raised some dubious issues. But it was a program for world peace, put forward by the highest authority in the country … In fine, historic wrongs are to be righted, nations put on a permanent footing, and the peace of all guaranteed by all. Never had the dream of universal and final peace seemed so near to realization … By President Wilson’s program the old foreign policies of the United States—continentalism and imperialism—were to be resolutely discarded and a new policy of internationalism was to be substituted. Active and continuous participation in the affairs of Europe was to take the place of non-intervention.127
Yet this fine-sounding plan was critically undermined by its insidious economic foundations. Wilson’s internationalism “placed its main reliance on laissez faire in international commerce as the chief economic support of the new order. Thus in every respect it was in flat and irreconcilable contradiction to continentalism for the United States, the program of peace for America in this hemisphere, and pacific relations elsewhere.”128 Mahan was driven by brute materialism, Wilson by self-deluding altruism, and both were operating against the Jeffersonian spirit of American continentalism:
Twice in American history the governing elite had turned the American nation away from its continental center of gravity into world adventures, ostensibly in a search for relations with the other countries or regions that would yield prosperity for American industry and a flowering of American prestige. First in 1898; second in 1917. But each time the main body of the people had resisted the propulsion, had found delusions in the false promises, and had returned to the continental orbit.129
It was in the American people that Beard found his greatest cause for optimism. He still hoped that a swell of public opinion would embrace his vision, making it impossible for FDR to realize the war plans that Beard believed he clearly now possessed.
On the inside cover of his personal copy of Beard’s A Foreign Policy for America, President Roosevelt wrote: “40 years’ hard and continuous study has brought forth an inbred mouse.”130 The book’s critical reception was scarcely more restrained. The Protestant theologian and noted foreign-policy realist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that Beard did not hide his “moral indifferentism.”131 At a time in which Nazi Germany had overrun the European continent and was setting itself for an invasion attempt against Great Britain, Niebuhr found Beard’s neglect of these events unconscionable. Allan Nevins echoed Niebuhr in decrying Beard’s “frigid indifference to moral considerations … The democratic world is slipping into dissolution and despair. Men are dying under bombs and machine guns to save part of it. They speak the language we speak, they hold our faith. But Mr. Beard turns away.”132 Once a firm admirer of Beard, Lewis Mumford believed that a serious threat to Western civilization rendered the author of continentalism “like a sundial [that] cannot tell the time on a stormy day.” “The isolationism of a Charles Beard,” Mumford wrote with utter comtempt, “is indeed almost as much a sign of barbarism as the doctrines of a[n Alfred] Rosenberg or a Gottfried Feder.”133 Attacked from all sides, with American public opinion falling in line with the administration, Beard was cutting an increasingly beleaguered figure. A July 1940 poll in Fortune magazine had found that two-thirds of respondents supported the president furnishing aid to any nation that opposed Germany and Japan.134
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It was in such inauspicious circumstances that Beard testified, on February 4, 1941, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against President Roosevelt’s main strategy to defend Britain short of a formal military alliance: Lend-Lease. David Lilienthal, a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the New Deal’s crowning achievements, wrote admiringly of the distinguished
figure that Beard cut in Congress. He was “a grand-looking man with a mobile face that at times is gentle even to the point of seeming ‘harmless,’ an impression that is heightened by his deafness and age. His eyes will darken and sharpen, his brows tighten, and a lowering hawklike expression takes over, and then he can lay on the whip in a way that is a joy to see.”135
Beard made good use of the whip in his testimony. Under the provisions of the Lend-Lease Bill, the United States promised to lend Britain significant military matériel without any need for up-front payment. The bill stipulated that after the war, the matériel would be returned to the United States or else “bought” at a 90 percent discount. FDR explained the rationale by observing that in the event of a fire at a neighbor’s house, the appropriate response was not to say, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it,” but to say, “I don’t want $15—I want my fire hose back after the fire is over.”136 Beard disputed the wisdom of the president’s logic and contended that the program would bring America inexorably into the conflict; it would take more than a well-aimed garden hose to prevent the fire from spreading.
Before criticizing Lend-Lease, Beard extended an apology for previously overestimating the ability of France and Britain to repulse Hitler’s Germany unaided, adding by way of self-excuplation that he was not alone in making this mistake. “Who among us in September 1939,” Beard asked the committee, “could foresee that the French nation, which had stood like a wall for four cruel years, would collapse like a house of cards in four cruel months?”137 His basic position was that Lend-Lease was unconstitutional. Given his views on the economic foundations of the Constitution, lending matériel without obvious recompense did indeed jar with the Founders’ intentions. Beard urged Congress to vote against the bill “with such force that no president of the United States will ever dare, in all our history, to ask it to suspend the Constitution and the laws of this land and to confer upon him limitless dictatorial powers over life and death.” For Beard, Lend-Lease was “a bill for waging undeclared war. We should entertain no delusions on this point.”138 Looking forward to the possible defeat of Germany, Japan, and Italy, Beard wondered what America would do next: “After Europe has been turned into flaming shambles, with revolutions exploding left and right, will this Congress be able to supply the men, money, and talents necessary to reestablish and maintain order and security there?”139 It fell to later politicians and thinkers to mull the practical implications of Beard’s final point. Roosevelt secured the bill and Beard lost the argument, further sullying his name in the process. His Senate testimony was the last time that Beard recorded a significant observation on U.S. foreign policy prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
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It was Beard’s unfortunate fate to deploy relativism in opposing one of the few Manichaean conflicts in world history. Japan attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—sinking 4 battleships and 2 destroyers, destroying 188 aircraft, and killing 2,400 service personnel—and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days later. Pearl Harbor dealt the rationale for isolationism a mortal blow. Gardening was no longer an option. Privately, Beard felt vindicated that his mid-1930s prophesy about FDR inciting Japan to precipitate war had been borne out. In imposing an embargo on oil exports to Japan in July 1941, Roosevelt had more or less forced Tokyo’s hand. Due to a paucity of oil reserves, Japan was immediately confronted with two options: either step back from the brink, or secure its own independent supply of oil through territorial acquisition. Tokyo opted for the latter option, deduced that the U.S. Navy was the only force that could frustrate its ambitions, and acted accordingly in attacking Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Japan could claim to be following a Beardian path to development. America had colonized a continent in creating conditions for self-sufficiency. Japan would attempt to colonize Southeast Asia and some of the Pacific islands to realize that very same aim. In awakening the United States, a slumbering giant, Imperial Japan had signed its own death warrant. As Admiral Hara Tadaichi observed in 1945, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”140
Advances in military technology rendered the world a much smaller place in the years that followed. During a war in which huge mobile fleets—including aircraft carriers, the dimensions of which Mahan could scarcely have conceived—operated with crushing lethality far from home shores, Beard’s call for insularity was shown up as a failure of imagination. Instead of adjusting to a new reality, recanting some of the ideas that patently hadn’t stood the test of time, Beard chose to revisit the history of the Roosevelt administration, identifying deception and executive skullduggery at every turn. Beard followed the logic contained in Dylan Thomas’s villanelle that “old age should burn and rave at close of day,” although he directed his fury at Franklin Roosevelt, not his own mortality. From 1941 to his death in 1948, Beard raged at FDR’s duplicity—and the dying of the isolationist light—shredding friendships as he strode proudly toward pariah status, hopeful, like Wilson, that vindication might come later. It was a sad end to the career of a pathbreaking scholar who possessed admirable traits in personality and who offered a well-intentioned rationale for geopolitical retrenchment as self-improvement. Yet these priorities have not entirely disappeared from view. From President Barack Obama’s dedication to “nation building here at home” to Senator Rand Paul’s valorization of geopolitical “modesty,” aspects of Beard’s “continental Americanism” are returning to view.
4
THE SYNDICATED ORACLE
WALTER LIPPMANN
Lippmann is a man of agile mind and great natural gifts … He thumps his tub as if he were God. He is handicapped only by his inability to emit fire and brimstone through the printer’s ink of his column.
—CHARLES BEARD
The early summer of 1940 was harrowing for Great Britain. German victories in the Low Countries and France made certain that the nation—and the battle-ready components of its empire—would face the Axis alone. In six weeks in May and June, some 112,000 French soldiers were killed attempting to repulse the German advance—a rate of attrition that was too high for a nation still traumatized by the First World War.1 The advancing Nazi troops toyed with Paris, pondering when to strike. No decision was required, as it turned out, because the defending French chose to abandon Haussmann’s elegant boulevards rather than see them mutilated by German bombers, artillery fire, and panzer divisions. At the French port of Dunkirk, the entire British expeditionary force of 200,000 men, plus 140,000 French soldiers, were trapped by the advancing Wehrmacht. Through a hastily improvised evacuation, in which private vessels sailed alongside the Royal Navy’s destroyers, this vast defeated army was ferried safely back to England. Against all odds, the British soldiers would regroup, rearm, and resume battle at a later stage (the French troops, conversely, returned swiftly and bravely to the mainland and to defeat). But this miraculous deliverance could not hide the shame and humiliation. In an address to the House of Commons on June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill described Dunkirk as a “miracle,” but cautioned that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”2
Churchill recognized that the United States offered his nation the brightest prospect of salvation, and that securing American public support for the British cause was essential. As part of a no-stone-unturned diplomatic strategy, London turned to America’s most powerful print journalist for help. Walter Lippmann’s thrice-weekly column “Today & Tomorrow” was read by millions across the United States, and by millions more in syndication around the world. Successive presidents craved his approval, domestic and foreign politicians sought his counsel, and the American people relied on Lippmann to explain the world’s complexities. He was immortalized by a New Yorker cartoon of the 1920s showing two elderly women dining in a railroad car, one saying to the other: “Of course, I only take a cup of coffee
in the morning. A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need.”3 A “Talk of the Town” column on the reputed formation of a Monarchist Party reported that “many Americans would be glad to settle for Walter Lippmann” as their philosopher-king.4
As France confirmed abject surrender terms with Germany, the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, a keen admirer of Lippmann, asked him to visit the embassy on a matter of highest significance. Upon his arrival, Lothian warned Lippmann that if defeatist politicians ousted Churchill to sue for “peace” with Hitler, an Atlantic without the Royal Navy would become a Nazi lake. Britain’s survival as an independent maritime power thus depended on the United States providing material assistance to shore up Churchill’s position and keep the ocean in virtuous hands. Lippmann needed little by way of persuasion, asking, “What would make a difference?” “The difference will be arms and destroyers,” Lothian replied, “because the Royal Navy is woefully weak in destroyers, and we cannot defend the sea lanes to Britain without them.”5 Lippmann agreed with this logic but cautioned that American largesse on this scale would require Britain to give up something substantial in return. After considering this dilemma, the two men devised a plan through which Washington would provide destroyers in exchange for leases to British bases in the western hemisphere. On such clandestine ground was the “destroyers-for-bases” deal sewn. Yet Lippmann still had to convince the American people of its merits.6
Lippmann commenced his campaign in the New York Herald Tribune, warning readers of his celebrated column that Nazi domination of Europe would threaten America’s own survival. If Germany assumed possession of the French and British fleets, Lippmann bleakly intoned, Hitler’s military reach would henceforth extend to the northeast seaboard. All Americans had to come together to aid Britain in a cause that transcended partisan politics.7 For his part, Lothian took his plan to President Roosevelt, deploying a crack legal team to explain how a destroyers-for-bases deal could circumvent the Neutrality Acts through claiming a solely defensive purpose. FDR found the rationale and loophole compelling and convenient. Lippmann later wrote that Lothian “showed Roosevelt—and showed the country—the basis on which we would gradually intervene to save England.”8