by Oliver Stone
By 1920, Americans had wearied of Wilsonian “idealism.” They were ready for what Warren G. Harding labeled a “return to normalcy,” which, in terms of the decade’s first two Republican presidents, meant a return to mediocrity. The Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations sought ways to expand U.S. economic interests in Latin America without resorting to the heavy-handed gunboat diplomacy that marked the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson regimes. During the 1920 presidential campaign, Harding seized upon vice presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s remark that as assistant secretary of the navy, he had personally written the constitution of Haiti to assure listeners that as president, he, Harding, would not “empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by United States Marines.” He enumerated other things Wilson had done that he would not repeat: “Nor will I misuse the power of the Executive to cover with a veil of secrecy repeated acts of unwarranted interference in domestic affairs of the little republics of the Western Hemisphere, such as in the last few years have not only made enemies of those who should be our friends, but have rightfully discredited our country as their trusted neighbor.”145
The Venezuelan dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez’s brutal and rapacious reign made his country a favorite of American and British oil companies. While amassing his own fortune, Gómez employed local caudillos (strongmen), an army staffed by his loyalists, and a network of domestic spies to ensure that Venezuela remained stable and hospitable to Western oil interests.
In fact, Harding and his Republican successors made more friends among U.S. bankers than among the inhabitants of those little republics. In May 1922, The Nation reported, revolutionaries sparked an uprising against “Brown Bros.’ extremely unpopular President of Nicaragua.” When the revolutionaries captured a fort overlooking the capital, the U.S. marine commander simply alerted them that he would use artillery if they didn’t relinquish control. The Nation saw this as typical of what was happening throughout Latin America, where U.S. bankers ruled through puppet governments backed up by U.S. troops. The magazine inveighed against this deplorable situation:
There are, or were, twenty independent republics to the south of us. Five at least—Cuba, Panama, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua—have already been reduced to the status of colonies with at most a degree of rather fictitious self-government. Four more—Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Peru—appear to be in process of reduction to the same status. Mr. Hughes is not treating Mexico as a sovereign, independent state. How far is this to go? . . . Is the United States to create a great empire in this hemisphere—an empire over which Congress and the American people exercise no authority, an empire ruled by a group of Wall Street bankers at whose disposal the State and Navy Departments graciously place their resources? These are the questions which the people, the plain people whose sons die of tropic fever or of a patriot’s bullet, have a right to ask.146
Far from having become isolationist following the Great War, the United States found more effective ways than warfare to expand its empire. In fact, the war left an increasingly bitter taste in the mouths of most Americans. Although U.S. involvement in the First World War had been relatively brief and, by most measures, enormously successful, the nature of the fighting, marked by trench and chemical warfare, and the shaky postwar settlement combined to undermine the glory of the war itself. In its aftermath, Americans became increasingly disillusioned. A war fought to make the world safe for democracy seemed to have failed in its purpose. Nor was there much hope that this war would end all wars. Though some people nevertheless clung to the belief that the United States had engaged in a great crusade for freedom and democracy, for others the phrase rang hollow. A postwar literature of disillusionment emerged in the works of E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thomas Boyd, William Faulkner, Laurence Stallings, Irwin Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, Dalton Trumbo, and other writers as the nation learned once again that the initial euphoria of war would be erased by the reality of what the war actually achieved. In Dos Passos’s 1921 novel Three Soldiers, his wounded protagonist, John Andrews, suffers through a visit from a YMCA representative, intent on lifting his spirits, who says, “I guess you’re in a hurry to get back at the front and get some more Huns. . . . It’s great to feel you’re doing your duty . . . [Huns] are barbarians, enemies of civilization.” Andrews recoils at the notion that “the best that had been thought” was reduced to this. Dos Passos wrote, “Furious, hopeless irritation consumed him. . . . There must be something more in the world than greed and hatred and cruelty.”147
Some expressed anger at the war. Others just expressed a profound sense of postwar malaise. In 1920, in This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Amory Blaine and his young friends that “here was a new generation . . . grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”148 Gertrude Stein saw that same sense of ennui in Ernest Hemingway and his drunken friends and commented, “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”149
Not to be outdone, Hollywood produced several successful antiwar movies, some of which are still classics. Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) brought instant stardom to Rudolph Valentino. King Vidor’s The Big Parade was the top box-office draw in 1925. William Wellman’s Wings (1927) was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Lewis Milestone’s powerful All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) remains one of the great antiwar films of all time.
The war proved demoralizing in a myriad of subtle ways as well. The prewar march of civilization grounded in a faith in human progress had been negated by a war that seemed to showcase barbarism and depravity. Put simply, the faith in human capability and human decency had disappeared. This was understandably evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Sigmund Freud, who became a household name in the United States during the 1920s, is a case in point. Freud’s prewar emphasis on the tension between the pleasure principle and the reality principle gave way to a postwar pessimism about human nature grounded in his focus on the death instinct.
Negative views of human nature were reflected in a loss of faith in essential human capabilities. The army presented psychologists with a vast laboratory on which to conduct experiments in human intelligence and the 3 million inductees provided an extraordinary pool of human guinea pigs. Working with army personnel, many of whom were trained in testing at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, psychologists administered intelligence tests to 1,727,000 recruits, including 41,000 officers. The data accumulated about educational levels were eye-opening. Some 30 percent of the recruits were illiterate.150 The amount of education varied widely among the different groups, ranging from a median of 6.9 years for native whites and 4.7 years for immigrants to 2.6 years for southern blacks. The results of intelligence tests were even more sobering. The tests—albeit crude and culturally biased—found an astounding 47 percent of white draftees and 89 percent of blacks to be “morons.”151
Nowhere was the subsequently degraded view of human intelligence more evident than in postwar advertising. The 1920s is often viewed as the golden age of advertising—the decade in which the industry really blossomed into the principal capitalist art form. As Merle Curti showed in his study of the advertising industry journal Printer’s Ink, before 1910, advertisers, by and large, assumed that consumers were rational and self-interested and could be appealed to on that basis. Between 1910 and 1930, however, the majority of comments indicated that advertisers were viewing consumers as nonrational. As a result, advertisements increasingly abandoned the reason-why approach and appealed to fantasies and emotions.152 A speaker at a 1923 advertising convention in Atlantic City captured this sense when he warned, “Appeal to reason in your advertising, and you appeal to about four percent of the human race.”153 This sentiment became accepted wisdom among advertisers. William Esty of the J. Walter Thompson agency instructe
d colleagues that all experts believed “that it is futile to try to appeal to masses of people on an intellectual or logical basis.”154 John Benson, the president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, observed in 1927, “To tell the naked truth might make no appeal. It may be necessary to fool people for their own good. Doctors and even preachers know that and practice it. Average intelligence is surprisingly low. It is so much more effectively guided by its subconscious impulses and instincts than by its reason.”155
Nowhere was this postwar pessimism more apparent than in the writings of Walter Lippmann, who was, in many respects, the nation’s outstanding public intellectual during the decade. A leading socialist and progressive in the prewar period, Lippmann’s faith in human rationality steadily declined after the war. In his 1922 classic Public Opinion, he introduced the term “stereotypes” to describe the images in people’s minds that did not correspond to reality. He proposed substituting scientifically trained experts for the democratic public, for whom the world had become too complex. By the time he published The Phantom Public two years later, his faith in democracy had eroded further. The best people could do, he believed, was choose good leaders to guide them. Then, in his 1929 classic A Preface to Morals, he despaired over the very purpose of human existence in a meaningless universe, a view reflective of the United States’ broader existential crisis of 1929–1930.
The most acerbic of democracy’s critics was certainly H. L. Mencken, “the sage of Baltimore.” Mencken referred to the common man, mired in religion and other superstitions, as a “boob,” a member of the species “boobus Americanus.” He expressed contempt for the same yeoman farmers whom Jefferson anointed the backbone of democracy, exclaiming “we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as . . . the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the state! . . . To Hell with him, and bad luck to him.”156
By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s failures, in many ways, provide a fitting capstone to a period in which the United States’ unique mixture of idealism, militarism, avarice, and realpolitik propelled the nation toward becoming a world power. Wilson proclaimed, “America is the only idealistic nation in the world” and acted as if he believed it were true.157 He hoped to spread democracy, end colonialism, and transform the world. His record is much less positive. While supporting self-determination and opposing formal empire, he intervened repeatedly in other nations’ internal affairs, including Russia, Mexico, and throughout Central America. While encouraging reform, he maintained a deep mistrust of the kind of fundamental, and at times revolutionary, change that would actually improve people’s lives. While championing social justice, he believed that property rights were sacrosanct and must never be infringed upon. Though endorsing human brotherhood, he believed that nonwhites were inferior and resegregated the federal government. While extolling democracy and the rule of law, he oversaw egregious abuses of civil liberties. While condemning imperialism, he sanctioned the maintenance of the global imperial order. And while proclaiming a just, nonpunitive peace, he acquiesced in a harsh, retributive peace that inadvertently helped create the preconditions for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Wilson’s stunningly inept performance at Versailles and his combative intransigence upon his return home contributed to Senate defeat of the treaty and the League.
Thus the war would have consequences that went far beyond the horrors on the battlefield. The United States never joined the League of Nations, rendering that body impotent in the face of Fascist aggression in the 1930s. Revelations that the United States had entered the First World War on false pretenses, while bankers and munitions manufacturers—later labeled “merchants of death”—had raked in huge profits, created widespread skepticism about foreign involvements at a time when the United States needed to contend with a real “axis of evil”: Germany, Italy, and Japan. By the time the United States acted, it was much too late. The necessity of finally combating fascism would, however, afford the United States an opportunity to reclaim some of that democratic, egalitarian heritage on which its earlier greatness and moral leadership had rested. And, though late in entering World War II, the United States provided crucial assistance in defeating Europe’s fascists and played the decisive role in defeating Japan’s militarists. But by setting off the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war, the United States, once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.
Chapter 2
THE NEW DEAL:
“I Welcome Their Hatred”
The world Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted when he was inaugurated president on March 4, 1933, bore strikingly little resemblance to the one in which he ran for vice president thirteen years earlier. In 1920, the world was on the mend following the Great War. In 1933, the problems seemed insurmountable. The United States was mired in the fourth year of the worst depression in its history. Unemployment stood at 25 percent. GNP had fallen by 50 percent. Farm income plummeted by 60 percent. Industrial production was down by more than 50 percent. The banking system had collapsed. Breadlines formed in every town and city. Homeless walked the streets. Misery was ubiquitous, despair pervasive.1
Most of the world was in even worse shape than the United States. Unlike the United States, which had experienced a period of relative prosperity in the 1920s, most belligerents had never fully recovered from the devastation of the world war. Their citizens had less of a cushion to buffer them from the impact of the global economic meltdown. Trouble loomed everywhere.
Benito Mussolini was firmly ensconced in power in Italy after eleven years of dictatorial rule. Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists had come to power in Germany by exploiting both postwar grievances and economic hardship. Only a week before Roosevelt took office, Hitler had used the Reichstag fire to consolidate his dictatorial stranglehold over the country, unleashing vicious attacks on German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and left-wing intellectuals.
Trouble was also brewing in Asia. In September 1931, Japanese forces had seized Manchuria, a resource-rich and contested region situated between the Soviet Union, China, and Korea, and renamed it Manchukuo in 1932. In response to international protests, Japan left the League of Nations in 1933.
Despite the devastation wrought by the Depression, the mood was decidedly more upbeat in the United States. On the day of Roosevelt’s inauguration, a New York Times editorial captured the excitement that surrounded the change of administrations:
Americans are a people of invincible hope. . . . But seldom can their eagerness to see a new President inaugurated have equaled that of this year. . . . they have exhibited an extraordinary patience in enduring hardships which millions of them have somehow come to believe will be mitigated or removed by the mere fact of Mr. ROOSEVELT’S entering the White House. . . . Mr. ROOSEVELT has . . . given an impression of buoyant optimism in the face of a great complex of knotty problems awaiting him. . . . Even citizens sunk in gloom . . . will preserve a remnant of admiration for a President who begins his turn by acting on the belief that “nothing is impossible for the United States.” . . . no President of the United States ever came to greater opportunities amid so great an outpouring of popular trust and hope.2
Roosevelt decided to act boldly. The country was behind him. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and people wanted action. Will Rogers commented on the president’s early days: “If he burned down the capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’ ”3
Roosevelt’s much-anticipated inaugural address rallied the nation to the fight. His declaration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” seems, in retrospect, to have been out of touch with reality, given the magnitude of the problems. But Roosevelt connected with a deeper reality: Americans’ desperate
need for renewed hope and confidence. And that he set out to restore.
He identified those responsible for the current dismal state of affairs: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” He called for “strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments” and “an end to speculation with other people’s money.”4
Roosevelt had given little indication of the kind of policies he would adopt once in office. At times, during the campaign, he attacked President Herbert Hoover from the right for spending too aggressively and unbalancing the budget. At other times, he acknowledged the suffering of the people and called for a “new deal.” Now he had to solve some very real and very practical problems. Hoover accused him of deliberately making a bad situation worse by ignoring Hoover’s pleas for joint action during the four-month interregnum between the election and Roosevelt’s taking office in March. Now the waiting was over. First up was the banking system.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover en route to the U.S. Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration, March 4, 1933. The inauguration incited much optimism. Will Rogers commented on Roosevelt’s early days, “If he burned down the capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’ ”