The few European democracies—the Scandinavian nations, an encircled Czechoslovakia, and a western European fringe consisting of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Ireland—fared little better than the authoritarian regimes in the American mind. The two important powers, Britain and France, were both absorbed with domestic problems, struggling to maintain a grip on their large overseas empires, and all but consumed by a common dread of war. Despite their liberal-democratic values, neither country had a particularly close relationship with the United States.
The authoritarian nations were in their terrible way impressive. Mussolini enjoyed recognition as a strongman who had imposed order on an undisciplined nation while carrying through much needed internal development projects. His relationship with Roosevelt was distant but not unfriendly. His deployment of the Italian army to the Brenner Pass had been instrumental in blocking a Nazi takeover of Austria in 1934. Not until 1938 would he be well aware of his subordinate position in the European power structure and let Austria fall without a quibble.3
Nazi Germany, far more frightening than Italy, radiated strength and purpose. While Mussolini squandered men and resources on the acquisition of Ethiopia, Hitler constructed the most formidable military establishment on the continent and effectively transformed Italy from rival into junior ally. Most Americans assumed that Nazi persecution of Germany’s Jewish population resembled the routine abuse of minorities in many authoritarian countries. Almost none grasped its genocidal potential. Hitler had few American admirers, but his regime laid claim to considerable respect for its growing might.
The fifth major European power, the Soviet Union, had looked inward since the revolution that established it in 1917. Its dictator, Josef Stalin, governed as ruthlessly as Hitler, consolidating power by “purging” any conceivable rival and instituting a system of nearly indiscriminate terror. Yet, in contrast to the Nazis, the Soviet Union officially proclaimed values of egalitarian democracy that belied its lethal totalitarianism. American liberals generally conceded that Stalin’s regime was harsh but also admired his efforts at modernizing a backward autocracy while erasing old distinctions of wealth and ethnicity. For many New Dealers and others on the left of American politics, the Soviet Union was, for all its shortcomings, a progressive force with enormous potential. Roosevelt chose his words carefully when he talked about the Soviet enterprise in public, but there is every indication that he shared in the liberal consensus.
The United States also faced westward across the Pacific to Japan, a potential adversary of intermittent concern to Roosevelt since his tenure as assistant secretary of the navy. In 1923, he had written a brief piece for Asia magazine, downplaying the possibility of a US-Japanese conflict in the Pacific. He permitted its re-publication eleven years later, albeit likely more as a diplomatic gesture than as a statement of core conviction.4
By 1934, Japan had conquered the important Chinese industrial and commercial province of Manchuria and renamed it Manchukuo. The Hoover administration had refused to recognize the new state; its secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, had reasserted the long-standing US policy that China should be open to trade and commerce with all countries. On this matter at least, Hoover and Stimson spoke for the vast majority of Americans.
Close observers understood that Japan intended to become the dominant power in East Asia. The Japanese had sided with the Allies in World War I and at Versailles had received the German economic concessions in China. The country possessed a formidable navy and rejected any treaty limitations that would keep its fleet inferior to those of Britain and the United States. Aggressive and violent expansionist forces increasingly dominated Japan’s internal politics. Peace advocates risked assassination. Jingoist imperialism had wide popular appeal. The Japanese Empire was the industrial powerhouse of East Asia. The Japanese people were among the world’s most disciplined, prone to believe that tireless, unrelenting effort could achieve almost any goal. Their emperor, Hirohito, to whom they were fiercely loyal, encouraged a sense of national destiny and allowed himself to be carried along by his aggressive military leaders.5
Not long after becoming president, Roosevelt read with interest—and surely with apprehension—a report from US ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. It painted a stark portrait of an emerging, aggressive great power. The Japanese Empire, including Manchukuo, covered a large area and possessed a population almost as large as that of the United States. The Japanese people were “intelligent, industrious, energetic, extremely nationalistic, war-loving, aggressive and, it must be admitted, somewhat unscrupulous.” The Japanese armed forces were “the most complete, well-balanced, co-ordinated and therefore powerful fighting machine in the world today.” They considered the United States their most likely potential enemy and possessed an esprit de corps akin to that of Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes. “The force of a nation bound together with great moral determination, fired with national ambition, and peopled by a race with unbounded capacity for courageous self-sacrifice is not easy to overestimate.”6
The advocates of isolationism were numerous and influential. Strongest in the Midwest and West, they included not just Republicans but many Democrats and independent progressives. Roosevelt himself had to contend with the widespread sense that he was too much like his cousin Theodore: prone to foreign adventures and just perhaps seeing war as a way to stay in power. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War generated a series of Neutrality Acts from Congress; the president had little choice but to sign them. Addressing the problems widely believed to have dragged the United States into World War I, they aimed to tie the hands of an activist chief executive. They forbade both loans and the sale of arms to warring nations. They further stipulated that American citizens traveled at their own risk on vessels carrying the flag of a belligerent.
Roosevelt understood that the world was dangerously close to an explosion. “These are without doubt the most hair-trigger times the world has gone through in your lifetime or mine,” he wrote to his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, in March 1935. “I do not even exclude June and July, 1914.” The apprehension was premature but prescient. The need to keep it private was urgent. Father Charles Coughlin had just blocked American adherence to the World Court. Anything that hinted of international involvement was politically toxic.7
In 1936, determined to seek reelection on domestic issues, Roosevelt inoculated himself from charges of internationalist warmongering with a notable speech in Chautauqua, New York. Proclaiming a determination to preserve the nation’s neutrality in international conflicts, even at the costs of forfeiting the profits and “false prosperity” that could come from war commerce, he emotionally asserted his resoluteness:
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.8
Although genuine, the sentiment was no substitute for a realistic policy. For Roosevelt’s first four years, dealing with the Depression was a necessary first priority. The glimmerings of an international strategy were nonetheless present from the beginning. Its three major points were consolidation of US dominance in the Western Hemisphere, naval expansion, and recognition of the Soviet Union.
Hemispheric dominance in the guise of a “Good Neighbor policy” was subtle and widely misunderstood. On the surface, this was a 180-degree turn away from Uncle Ted’s “Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” which had converted the Caribbean Sea into an American lake in which US marines enforced payment of international debt obliga
tions, maintained domestic order, and secured the Panama Canal. Under Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt had managed the policy firsthand as assistant secretary of the navy. If taken aback by its heavy-handedness, he had also boasted of having written the constitution of Haiti. In the 1920s, he and many other Democrats had criticized Republican interventions in the area.
The Hoover administration had in fact already rejected TR’s imperialism. FDR, in his inaugural address, assumed ownership of this unacknowledged development by promising that the United States would respect the rights of other nations in the hemisphere. In practice, his Good Neighbor policy consisted primarily of avoiding overt interference but maintaining hegemony in Caribbean countries by negotiating reciprocal trade agreements and supporting friendly dictators. The policy assumed as a matter of course that Latin American political culture was naturally authoritarian. While eschewing military occupations, the administration armed local dictators throughout Central America from Guatemala to Panama. With larger Latin American nations, the norm was accommodation and displays of respect. When the semiauthoritarian revolutionary government of Mexico nationalized US and other foreign oil holdings in 1936, the United States made no protest. Dealings with South American nations promoted hemispheric solidarity.
At the end of 1936, Roosevelt personally attended a US-arranged Inter-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro and also made visits to Argentina and Uruguay, basking at each stop in cheers of “Viva Roosevelt! Viva la democracia!” Five years later, at a small White House dinner, he regaled guests with his memories of riding in a motorcade alongside Brazilian president Getulio Vargas, who acknowledged the cheers, then leaned toward him saying, “Perhaps you’ve heard that I am a dictator.” Roosevelt responded lightheartedly, “Perhaps you’ve heard that I am one too.” Vargas replied, “But I really am!” FDR went on to explain that Brazil, a backward and illiterate nation, had to have a dictator. The tale reflected the instincts of a realist with idealistic sympathies. His international popularity and prestige lent credibility to a strategy that might rightly be characterized as “soft imperialism” but on the whole worked to the advantage of both its objects and the United States.9
The US Navy had long been a Rooseveltian hobby. FDR clearly saw it as the nation’s first line of defense, far more important than the army, which his administration kept on lean rations for years. Naval construction, unlike an army buildup, did not imply foreign expeditions and provided a lot of jobs. Given a strong White House push, despite sometimes vehement opposition from pacifist and isolationist groups, the navy grew steadily throughout the 1930s. By 1939, it was roughly at quantitative parity with the British Royal Navy, qualitatively second to none, and building rapidly for the possibility of simultaneous action in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.10
The United States recognized the Soviet Union toward the end of 1933. The most persuasive rationale for the decision was the simplest: the USSR, shunned since the revolution of 1917, was there to stay and controlled a vast territory with untold natural resources. To this hard fact the administration added the lure of lucrative trade agreements. Privately, Roosevelt and many New Dealers shared the liberal fascination with the Soviet experiment and the sense that, however unlovely it might be in practice, it was working toward a brave new world of progressive equality.
The prospect of trade was not entirely fanciful. Entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford and William Averell Harriman had struck deals with the Communist regime; however, a combination of Russian xenophobia and ideological paranoia that made agreements of any sort difficult and unreliable would disappoint those who expected a plethora of such undertakings. Roosevelt’s first ambassador, William C. Bullitt, went to Moscow with high hopes. He and his diplomatic staff quickly found these crushed by the atmosphere of unremitting hostility they encountered from their Soviet counterparts and the not-so-secret police who monitored their every move.11
Bullitt was named ambassador to France in 1936. His successor in Moscow, Joseph Davies, a Roosevelt friend since their days together in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington, was far more determined to see only the sunny side of life in the USSR. His disposition reflected administration attitudes that an emerging generation of Soviet experts in the Foreign Service found appallingly naive. A few months after Davies’s appointment, the State Department, apparently at White House instigation, dismantled its Eastern European Division, a wellhead of anti-Communist sentiment, and packed its head, Joseph F. Kelly, off to Turkey. It presented the move as an economy measure. A young Foreign Service official, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, saved the division’s reference collection of periodicals, newspapers, and other files by arranging for its transfer to the Library of Congress. At the time, Bohlen had the impression that Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins were behind the bureaucratic putsch, but many years later he was less certain. The president’s involvement, if any, remains unknown.12
From a strategic viewpoint, the most urgent motive for recognition of the USSR was the development of a relationship, however tenuous, with a potential ally hostile to both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The Soviet Union cared most about access to the technology of an advanced industrial society, sometimes secured through the purchase of needed equipment but often obtained by an ambitious program of industrial espionage, paralleled by spying and political subversion in various administration agencies. The president and his immediate circle seem to have discounted concerns about these efforts. Roosevelt, in fact, supported Soviet attempts in 1938 to contract with American suppliers for sixteen-inch guns, armor plate, and firefighting equipment in the construction of three planned super battleships. He likely saw these as the core of a mighty Russian surface fleet that could face off against the Japanese navy. The US Navy command, however, envisioned the project as a massive transfer of American military technology to a hostile power. The chief of naval operations, Admiral William D. Leahy, fought the project with every resource at his command and ultimately won.13
“I do not know that the United States can save civilization but at least by our example we can make people think and give them the opportunity of saving themselves,” Roosevelt told his ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, at the end of 1935. “The trouble is that the people of Germany, Italy, and Japan are not given the privilege of thinking.” Those three nations took the first step toward an alliance by signing the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, which affirmed their joint opposition to the spread of Soviet communism. In 1937, Germany sent its army into the hitherto demilitarized area between the Rhine River and the French border.14
Japan seemed the most urgent threat to the peace, and most US naval war planning centered on it. The Japanese fleet possessed a rough parity in capital ships, especially aircraft carriers, to that of the United States. Roosevelt had admitted openly in his 1923 Asia article that the United States could not defend its major possession in the western Pacific, the Philippines, against a Japanese attack. Still, the Philippines were an important strategic foothold in the region, and American interests, economic and sentimental, were large there.
The islands were scheduled for formal independence in 1944, but the widely held assumption was that they would remain an American protectorate. In 1935, the president assigned retiring army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur to build a Filipino force capable of resisting an outside attack. MacArthur departed Washington with his valued aide, Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, accepted the rank of field marshal of the Philippine army, and undertook the slow, tedious process of constructing a modern military culture in a nation-to-be.
In July 1937, the Japanese army launched a full-scale war against China. A deeply divided nation wracked by civil war between a quasi-fascist Nationalist Party and a Marxian Communist movement, China was a venue for numerous Western economic concessions extracted mostly by European nations in the nineteenth century. The United States had its share of business interests there and maintained a small military presence to protect them. Many Americans, moreover, felt a s
trong sentiment for the Chinese people, fed by American Christian missionary efforts and Pearl Buck’s acclaimed novel The Good Earth. Roosevelt felt he could not let the brutal Japanese invasion go unchallenged. Japan’s developing entente with the emerging axis between Hitler and Mussolini in Europe also worried him.
That October, he delivered his first major foreign policy address at the dedication of a bridge in Chicago, the center of heartland isolationist sentiment. He spoke not far from the offices of the Chicago Tribune; the newspaper’s owner, Colonel Robert McCormick, had been a class ahead of Roosevelt at Groton, heartedly disliked the president, and loathed the very idea of American engagement outside the Western Hemisphere. The United States and other peaceful nations, Roosevelt declared, had to view with “grave concern and anxiety” the collapse of world order. An epidemic of international lawlessness was spreading. While Roosevelt stopped short of using the word “quarantine”—a characterization coined by Harold Ickes and widely adopted—he clearly suggested that the United States should in some fashion isolate aggressor nations while actively advancing the cause of peace.15
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 39