The speech drew attention but on close reading was unsatisfactory. What had Roosevelt done other than state his disapproval of aggression? What would a “quarantine” imply? Most observers understood the talk as primarily directed against Japan’s war on China, but few expected it to deter the Japanese. Critics depicted the address as a step on the road to war. “Does not Mr. Roosevelt’s policy invite the coming of the day when he, too, may have no alternative but resort to arms?” asked the Chicago Tribune. The Portland Oregonian suggested that the president had “hit upon the idea of becoming aggressive internationally to divert attention from mounting domestic problems.” Roosevelt refused to elaborate at a subsequent press conference. The quarantine address was a warning shot fired with a cap pistol.16
The Japanese soon displayed their contempt. By December 1937, their forces had overrun Shanghai and were approaching Nanking. From the beginning, they had proclaimed two goals: domination of East Asia and expulsion of Western imperial powers from the region. On December 12, 1937, a Japanese commander, perhaps operating without authorization from Tokyo, launched an air attack on the US gunboat Panay, two nearby British gunboats, and some Standard Oil tankers, all on the Yangtze River just east of Nanking. The Panay sank in shallow waters; three Americans were killed, eleven wounded. Two of the tankers were destroyed. The British gunboats also went down with loss of life.
Roosevelt made no public statement but let it be known that he had directed Secretary of State Cordell Hull to send directly to the emperor of Japan a protest and a demand for both an apology and reparations; the move implied that the civilian regime could not control its military. The possibility that the incident might lead to war revealed a fundamental split in American opinion that cut across party lines. Republican senator Gerald Nye condemned the president for refusing to withdraw the American military presence in China. Democratic congressman Louis Ludlow of Indiana, a dedicated peace advocate, filed a petition to force a vote in the House of Representatives on a constitutional amendment requiring a national referendum on a declaration of war.17
Ludlow quickly got the signatures of a majority of his colleagues. For nearly a month, his amendment dominated discussion of the Far Eastern crisis. Roosevelt denounced it as inconsistent with representative government. The Democratic leadership in the House worked hard to turn signers of the petition around. Most foreign affairs commentators backed the administration. So did the president’s 1936 Republican foes Alf Landon and Frank Knox, along with former secretary of state Stimson. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, grandson of the Senator Lodge whom Roosevelt had known in the Wilson years, introduced resolutions that would have effectively nullified the Neutrality Acts. A new isolationist-internationalist narrative that cut deeply across party lines was complicating the old story of conservatism versus progressivism.18
On January 10, 1938, the House voted 209 to 188 against consideration of the Ludlow amendment. The minority included one-third of House Democrats, nearly three-fourths of the Republican delegation, and every congressman from the Progressive and Farmer-Labor parties. If eleven congressmen had changed their votes, the administration would have lost. The victory, such as it was, underscored the limits to presidential freedom of action in foreign affairs.19
At the beginning of the crisis, Roosevelt had dispatched naval attaches to London for talks with Royal Navy counterparts, raising the possibility of a common military response by the world’s two greatest sea powers. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain privately expressed the hope that at last Britain might get something more than words from the United States. Japan, however, quickly issued multiple apologies and agreed to pay an indemnity eventually fixed at $2.2 million. The administration accepted the settlement on Christmas Day, 1938. The US-British talks subsequently came to nothing. Chamberlain surely put the incident in his mental lessons-learned file.
The Japanese, having taken Nanking and apparently believing that they could subdue an occupied people only through wanton, random terrorism, subjected the residents of the city to a six-week orgy of rape, torture, and killing that shocked the civilized world. By the time they ended their rampage, they had slaughtered perhaps 250,000 Chinese.20
The resolution of the Panay crisis and suspension of naval cooperation talks with Britain confirmed an effective stalemate in American politics between those who wanted the United States to play a strong stabilizing role in an increasingly dangerous world and those who embraced isolation as the only refuge from war. Politically, the mounting world crisis came at the weakest point of Roosevelt’s presidency. Having suffered the Court-packing reversal, he now grappled with a serious economic recession and was considering whether to attempt a purge of Democratic conservatives. For the moment, it was impossible to launch an activist foreign policy.
Roosevelt’s preferences, expressed most candidly in the quarantine speech, were obvious to all; so were the constraints he felt. “The words may mean little,” declared a hopeful Manchester Guardian editorial, “but affirmation of a great faith is never futile.” New York Times foreign policy writer Edwin L. James anticipated the coming year far less optimistically. His summing up of world politics over the previous twelve months, headlined “Democracy Lost in 1937 . . . Totalitarian States, Using Force and Threats of Force Forged Ahead,” correctly predicted more of the same for 1938.21
By the end of 1939, the Japanese would control most of China’s commercial-industrial Northeast and the important Pacific seacoast cities to the south. The interior was far too big for them to occupy and digest. Most of the country’s area remained under either Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who established a Nationalist government at Chungking in the South, or the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung at Yenan in the North. Neither Chiang (recognized by the United States and western European nations) nor Mao (recognized by the Soviet Union) was capable of taking the offensive against the invaders. It seemed likely that Japan’s expansionist dynamic would, when the time was right, focus on the rich possessions of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands to the south and west.
For the moment, most American attention focused on Europe. In Spain, right-wing Falange forces under General Francisco Franco, backed by Italy and Germany, were winning a savage civil war against the left-wing Spanish Republicans, supported far less adequately by the Soviet Union. In realistic geopolitical terms, the Spanish conflict was a sideshow, but it equally manifested the great Left-Right ideological rift that divided the Western world. Catholics overwhelmingly favored Franco, a fervent defender of the church’s privileged position. Most liberals—the Jews among them were especially visible to critics—backed the republic and either shared in or overlooked the lethal anticlericalism of its partisans. Politically then, Spain divided two core Democratic constituencies. Roosevelt obliquely referred to the German Luftwaffe’s April 1937 destruction of the Spanish village of Guernica in his quarantine speech but generally steered clear of the fight.
On March 12, 1938, German troops entered Austria unopposed. A few days later, cheering throngs greeted Adolf Hitler in Vienna. Local Nazis, released from all previous restraints, declared open season on Jews, whom they subjected to public abuse and theft of property. As the democratic leaders of Europe looked on passively, Hitler integrated the once independent nation into the Third Reich. The Führer had established himself as the continent’s purpose-driven leader. “He has plans and he has force,” New York Times correspondent Edwin James commented. “Others have force but no plans.” It was not hard, Walter Lippmann ventured, to guess that Hitler would next target Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt’s public comments were cautious but firm. Receiving a delegation of young radicals decrying “American militarism” on March 13, he brandished a newspaper headline on the Austrian takeover and warned that some nations did not observe treaties.22
The president could do little about an unopposed annexation. Nor did he have much leeway to deal with the refugee crisis it created. Au
strian Jews desperately sought entry to the United States. In an era of continuing mass unemployment, most Americans opposed any large-scale immigration from Europe—and perhaps felt especially strongly about Jews. In any case, quotas established by the National Origins Immigration Act of 1924 sharply limited the movement of Europeans to the United States. Roosevelt ordered that the quotas for Germany and Austria be combined and set aside for Jewish refugees, established an advisory committee on immigration, and promoted an international conference on the refugee question that met in Evian, France, that July. The conference could do little more than expose Nazi outrages. Half of all immigrants admitted to the United States after 1936 were Jewish, but hundreds of thousands remained trapped in the Nazi empire.23
According to a Gallup poll, nearly 50 percent of Americans felt as early as April 1938 that a war with Germany was likely. They sympathized with England and France by 20–1 margins but also narrowly favored staying out of any future European conflict. Such sentiments—self-contradictory and emotionally wishful—defined the parameters within which Roosevelt had to lead the nation.24
That the president had to provide leadership for more than the United States, moreover, was increasingly apparent. By 1938, the only other democratic great powers were France and Britain, the former led by a shifting series of coalition governments, the latter headed by Neville Chamberlain, a humane conservative ill equipped by experience and temperament to manage foreign relations and halfhearted in his preparations for a possible conflict. Roosevelt had clearly become Hitler’s nemesis on the world scene. But whereas Hitler had militarized a nation and brought it to the brink of a general war, Roosevelt presided over a country obsessed by the supposed failures of the last conflict and in denial about the dangers of a world dominated by an emerging German-Italian-Japanese alliance.
Speaking in Kingston, Ontario, on August 18, 1938, Roosevelt made clear that his hemispheric strategy looked north as well as south. “The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” At one level, the speech asserted the United States’ preeminent influence in the Western Hemisphere. At another, it signaled to London as much as to Ottawa that the United States would permit neither Japanese domination of the eastern Pacific nor German control of the western Atlantic. The pledge itself, sharply criticized in Germany, was noncontroversial in the United States.25
The president’s next face-off with Hitler came quickly. By September 1938, having rapidly absorbed and digested Austria, Germany was demanding the border portion of Czechoslovakia that Germans called the Sudetenland. The region—heavily German, highly industrialized, and an arms manufacturing center—had become part of the new nation of Czechoslovakia after World War I. Rugged in its terrain and well fortified, it provided a defensible boundary against a German incursion. Without it, Czechoslovakia was fatally exposed.
The German government, which controlled a strong Sudetenland Nazi movement, applied relentless pressure. Hitler saw the Czech project as a test of his will against that of Czechoslovakia’s primary guarantors, Neville Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier. He also hoped to lay bare the impotence of Roosevelt and the United States.
The crisis came to a head in September with Germany mobilizing for war despite the palpable reluctance of its people. Chamberlain telegraphed his own impulses by declaring in a radio broadcast that Czechoslovakia was a faraway country of which Britain knew nothing. The irresolute Daladier refrained from any French commitment. Roosevelt, at a low political ebb after the failure of his attempted purge of dissident Democrats, could play no role in the crisis. At the end of September, with Chamberlain and Daladier planning to meet Hitler (now backed by Mussolini) in Munich, the president felt able to do little except send Hitler a public communication pleading for continued negotiation and a peaceful settlement. The debacle that followed—democratic capitulation to Hitler and the first step in the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state—met at first with a sense of overwhelming relief, followed rather quickly by revulsion and expectation of eventual war in both Britain and the United States. With the absorption of the Sudetenland, Hitler’s Third Reich was bigger in terms of area, population, and industrial strength than Kaiser Wilhelm’s pre–World War I empire.26
Roosevelt had been a minor actor in a humiliating democratic defeat. Yet the growing world crisis enhanced his stature and overshadowed his domestic failures. A majority thought, as one Gallup poll respondent put it, “Maybe I shouldn’t be for Roosevelt, but with Europe the way it is, he’s the only man for the job.” Gallup revealed a brief upward surge in Roosevelt’s popularity after his peace plea to Hitler and, more tellingly, also recorded a sense that war with Germany was likely in the future, that the president was the public figure most capable of dealing with Hitler, and that his preparedness program was urgently needed. “You have to carry a big gun,” the president told New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick, “even to sit at peace tables.” Privately anticipating continued aggression by Hitler, he told a cabinet meeting that he expected the German leader to demand colonies from Britain and France, that the two countries might agree to hand over Trinidad and Martinique in the Western Hemisphere, and that if they did, he would order the American navy to seize both islands.27
One could imagine the ghost of TR looking on approvingly.
Six weeks after the Western surrender at Munich, the Nazis unleashed an astonishing pogrom against the German Jewish community in retaliation for the murder of a minor Reich diplomat in Paris. The ensuing rampage was the most horrifying manifestation of anti-Semitism in Europe since the Middle Ages, involving random mass murder, 20,000 persons arrested and sent to concentration camps, two hundred synagogues and eight hundred Jewish-owned shops destroyed, and a collective fine of $400 million levied against the whole Jewish people. The least of it was the wholesale smashing of windows in Jewish houses, businesses, and places of worship that gave the event its name, Kristallnacht.
While the Nazis reveled in their thuggery, shock and anger spread across the democratic world. In Britain, Chamberlain attempted to show statesmanlike restraint in the hope of salvaging his foreign policy. British outrage was nevertheless vehement and stoked by German charges that three leading dissenters in the British Conservative Party—Alfred Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, and Winston Churchill—had instigated the Paris assassination. Any thought of colonial transfers to Germany, then under serious consideration, was shelved. The British government’s naval building program and enlargement of the army became more urgent than ever.28
Roosevelt’s response was sharp and to the point. He opened his press conference of November 15, 1938, with a prepared statement: “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization. . . . I asked the Secretary of State to order our Ambassador in Berlin to return at once for report and consultation.” Just a step away from severance of diplomatic relations, Roosevelt’s declaration indicated that, as a Washington Post editorial put it, “between the United States and Germany a completely irreconcilable cleavage is developing.”29
But public opinion remained wracked by internal contradictions: Americans saw war as likely, feared it, and hoped against hope to avoid it. The administration’s enlargement of the navy, justifiable as a defensive measure, was not terribly controversial. Building a large army, which even in a persistent depression might require conscription, was quite another matter. By the same token, decrying wanton persecution of Jews was one thing; providing refuge was something else. Neither the United States nor any other nation wanted a massive influx of needy immigrants. In London, US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy floated a vague plan for resettlement of German Jews in underpopulated precincts of the British Empire. Quite a few observers suspected that Kennedy proposed the idea to bolster his presidential ambitions by a
ppealing to the growing Jewish constituency within the Democratic Party.30
Roosevelt understood that he had to tread carefully. The United States was already engaged in a war of words with Germany. A scathing attack on the Nazi regime by Harold Ickes drew a formal protest from the German government; the State Department refused to accept it. America was also an arms merchant to Britain and France. In January 1939, newspapers learned that a French pilot had been onboard a new Douglas Aircraft attack bomber that crashed in California. Sales to friendly nations not involved in a state of war were of course within the bounds of neutrality legislation. Still, isolationists were outraged.31
Roosevelt held a supposedly secret meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee shortly afterward, hoping to convince his congressional critics that western Europe was vital to American security. One senator promptly leaked to the press that the president had said that America’s frontier lay on the Rhine. Roosevelt labeled the attribution a “deliberate lie,” although it surely conveyed the import, if not the precise language, of his remarks.32
Just weeks later, Hitler again altered the map of Europe. On March 15, 1939, Germany annexed the western half of the truncated Czech nation, redesignating its constituent provinces by their historical names, Bohemia and Moravia. The remainder of Czechoslovakia became the puppet state of Slovakia. The Nazis also seized the Lithuanian port city of Memel. On March 28, the Spanish Civil War ended with General Franco’s capture of Madrid. The following month, Mussolini sent the Italian army to take control of Albania. On the other side of the world, Japanese leaders ostentatiously consolidated their alliance with Germany and Italy. They minced no words in demanding further sacrifices from their people in, as Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye put it, “emancipating the Far Eastern races from the chains riveted on them before Japan played an important part in the world.”33
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 40