Kennedy asks Roosevelt a favor;
the bargain between fixing the economy
and staying out of foreign wars.
ONE AFTERNOON IN the fall of 1937, behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, President Franklin Roosevelt asked his friend the businessman, stock trader, and movie mogul Joseph P. Kennedy, “Would you mind taking your pants down?” The request was met with a blank stare. “We couldn’t believe our ears,” recalled the president’s son James, who had arranged the meeting. “Did you just say what I think you said?” asked Kennedy. The president replied, “Yes, indeed.”
James Roosevelt recalled that “Joe Kennedy undid his suspenders and dropped his pants and stood there in his shorts, looking silly and embarrassed.” The president told Kennedy, “Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true. Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bow-legged man I have ever seen.”
According to the president, bandy legs were a deal-breaker in Kennedy’s bid to become America’s top envoy in London. “Don’t you know that the ambassador to the Court of St James’s has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee britches and silk stockings?” asked the president. “When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughingstock.”
Kennedy dearly wanted to become the first Irish American ambassador to London and was not sure whether the president was kidding.1 After a moment’s thought, he said he could ask the Brits whether tails and striped pants would be acceptable to Buckingham Palace instead of the traditional fancy dress.
Roosevelt, chuckling as Kennedy pulled up his trousers, was not sure. “You know how the British are about tradition,” he said. “There’s no way you are going to get permission, and I must name a new ambassador soon.”2 If the Brits were prepared to bend protocol and Kennedy could get a response within two weeks, the president suggested that perhaps Kennedy could after all go to the ball.
The Oval Office striptease was a typical Roosevelt prank to let Kennedy believe he was an intimate, one of his inner circle. But it was also a humiliating ritual that showed who was boss. After twenty years of knowing the president, the red-haired, chalk-skinned Kennedy was still unsure when the president was joking and when he was in earnest, whether he was in or out. Just six years apart in age, the two seemed close. They met several times a week to talk politics and spent weekends together in Marwood, Kennedy’s mansion at Potomac, outside Washington, modeled after Château de Malmaison, the home of Josephine Bonaparte. But the two men deeply distrusted each other. Roosevelt liked to play on Kennedy’s lack of social confidence, while his own embrace of the presidency was absolute. As one observer put it, he enjoyed “a love affair with power. . . . Almost alone among our presidents, [he] had no conception of the office to live up to; he was it. His image of the office was himself-in-office.”3 The ambassadorship was the latest battle in a war of attrition that had already lasted nearly a decade.
Whether Kennedy went to London was hardly the president’s top priority. The nation faced three interwoven problems and Roosevelt had set himself specific goals in response. The first was to improve the depressed economy, so that the 10 million still out of work could find jobs. The second, at a time when Adolf Hitler,4 the Nazi dictator of Germany, Benito Mussolini,5 leader of Italy’s Fascist government, and the Japanese military were stampeding the world toward war, was “to get the American people to think of conceivable consequences without scaring the American people into thinking that they are going to be dragged into war.”6
Preparing the nation for war would require wooing Americans away from the isolationism in which they had found comfort, which in turn meant defeating, by fair means and foul, leaders of the movement who thought the troubles of the world were none of America’s business. High among them was Kennedy, a Democratic presidential contender, whose Irish American roots and business sensibility persuaded him that there was nothing to be gained by siding with the democracies.
Others included “yellow press” newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst7 and Father Charles Coughlin,8 the anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest who counted his weekly national radio audience in millions and urged, “Keep America safe for Americans.”9 There was the transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh,10 a national hero with links to the Nazi high command, and Henry Ford,11 the anti-Semitic industrialist whose Model T had transformed America into a car-driving democracy.
A third, related aim for the president was to rearm America as quickly as possible. And, because he felt he alone was capable of achieving all three goals, Roosevelt was slowly coming to the conclusion he would need a third presidential term. The next presidential contest would occur in November 1940. As he pondered whether to permit Kennedy to go to London, Roosevelt weighed up whether the overweening ambition of his multimillionaire rival could be put to good use in achieving one or more of his cardinal aims.
A great deal had taken place since Roosevelt had championed Wilson’s League of Nations as vice presidential candidate in the election of 1920, primarily the collapse of the economy following the Wall Street crash of October 1929. In the 1932 campaign that won Roosevelt the White House, the failed economy was the voters’ overriding concern and foreign affairs was hardly an issue. As the historian Selig Adler put it, “Debts, taxations, the foreclosing of mortgages, wholesale bankruptcies, bank failures, plummeting farm prices, and the fruitless hunt for jobs occupied the American mind.”12
For most the choice was simple: between the incumbent, Herbert Hoover,13 who had presided over the crash and America’s slide into the Great Depression and appeared to have little grasp of how or even whether the federal government should play a role in helping a recovery, and Roosevelt, a fresh face who railed against Hoover’s inaction and suggested, without offering many specifics about his “New Deal,”14 that he could get the country back to work. Hoover’s self-professed impotence in the face of the financial crisis gave Roosevelt the feeling that victory was his if he did not make an error. So he avoided saying anything about foreign policy.
Mindful that the mood of America was isolationist, both sides counseled caution in foreign matters. The Democratic ticket demanded the “settlement of international disputes by arbitration” and “by consultation and conference in case of violation of treaties,” but was careful not to mention the League of Nations nor Wilson’s defeat at the hands of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans rejected outright “alliances or foreign entanglements.”15 On election day, November 8, 1932, Roosevelt trounced Hoover by 23 million votes to 16 million (57 percent to 43 percent) and by 472 electoral college votes to 59. He was sworn in on Saturday, March 4, 1933.
American intervention in the Great War was still a painful memory and the desire to stay out of any war was widespread. Isolationism came in many forms. In the Midwest, in the upper Mississippi valley, living at great distances from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, farmers of Scandinavian or German descent tended to believe the Great War had been cooked up by Wall Street and munitions peddlers. Some subscribed to a “devil theory” which held that, when it seemed German forces might take Paris, American arms dealers and financiers who were owed money by the Allies—Britain, France, and Italy—had forced Wilson into the conflict to safeguard their money.16 Only in the rural South, settled largely by Anglo-Saxon immigrants who populated it with slaves, was isolationism largely absent.
In the cities it was a different story. Many German and Austrian Americans believed that Versailles had imposed humiliating conditions upon their home countries and were appalled by Wilson’s decision to fight alongside the Allies. Some, particularly those from former British colonies, resented Britain and its imperial ways. Among the hyphenates, few were more hostile than Irish Americans, who had witnessed from afar the bloody suppression of the armed Irish rebellion of 1916. They asked, how could Wilson at Paris demand self-determination as an eternal right for every oppressed nation in the world but the Irish?17
“The bare fact that the [Treaty] had proved acceptable to the British Empire aroused the instant antagonism of the ‘professional’ Irish-Americans, the ‘professional’ German-Americans, the ‘professional’ Italian-Americans, and all those others whose political fortunes depended upon the persistence and accentuation of racial prejudices,” wrote Wilson’s public relations chief, George Creel.18
As well as those who opposed war for nationalist reasons, pacifists and liberals were appalled by the scale of the slaughter between 1914 and 1918. Senator Homer T. Bone19 of Washington state spoke for many when he declared that “the Great War . . . was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all.”20 In the decade after the Armistice, popular peace groups formed, among them the National Council for Prevention of War, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, and S.O.S. (Stop Organized Slaughter).
The most bizarre manifestation of this pacific thread of isolationism was Veterans of Future Wars. Founded in 1936 by eight Princeton undergraduates, VFW demanded, only half in jest, that the government pay every man of conscription age $1,000. Since they would not survive the next war, they argued that they deserved to be compensated in advance. VFW members paraded in military caps worn at right angles and saluted with palms outstretched, as if demanding their pay. The female equivalent of the VFW was the Future Gold Star Mothers, who demanded widows’ pensions so they could visit their future husbands’ graves. In a display of strength at Columbia University, one hundred and fifty Mothers clutching “war orphan” dolls marched behind a drum majorette twirling an invalid’s crutch.21
Added to these ostensibly light-hearted isolationists were earnest liberals who, when the Great War was raging, railed at Wilson’s treatment of domestic opponents of the conflict. Perhaps the most prominent victim of this crackdown was the perennial socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, dubbed a “traitor to his country” by Wilson for urging resistance to the draft, found guilty of sedition, and given a ten-year prison sentence.22 There were also progressives who believed that the war was a distraction from necessary and urgent domestic reforms.
At the core of isolationism was a band of nationalists who coagulated around ultra-patriotic societies such as the League of Loyal Americans, out of Boston, whose motto was “One Tongue, One Ideal and One Flag,” the Sentinels of the Republic, and the American Flag Movement, whose aim was to have the Stars and Stripes flying above every home. At the far edge of such nationalist fervor was the Ku Klux Klan, five million strong at its most terrifying, who led the clamor for laws to limit immigration to 150,000 white northern Europeans or Anglo-Saxons per year. Their campaign culminated in the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act, which severely restricted immigration.
Fiscally conservative isolationists blamed the Great Depression on America’s participation in the war. It was widely believed that the prosperity enjoyed in wartime and the boom of the Roaring Twenties had stoked prices too high, a state of affairs that had to be corrected by deflation in the 1930s. Never mind that this made little economic sense. As the slump began to take hold, “We had it coming” became a common expression. Senator George W. Norris23 was not alone in linking domestic economic troubles to Wilson’s involvement in the war. He read out in the Senate a plea from a bankrupt Nebraska constituent, who complained, “[We] are being driven from our homes by ‘Writs of Assistance’ [instructions to evict] in the hands of our sheriffs. It is the tragic heritage that has come down to us from this so-called ‘war to end wars.’ ”24 The best way to avoid a repetition of the boom and bust that was blighting the country was to avoid involvement in future wars.25
Among the increasingly determined congressional isolationists, the old battle cry “Keep out of the League” was superseded by “Keep out of War.” In a letter to Gerald P. Nye,26 Republican senator from North Dakota, one man explained why he favored isolation. “As a potential soldier, I object to the prospect of becoming cannon fodder in the ‘next war’; as a future taxpayer, I object to enriching arms manufacturers by impoverishing my fellow Americans; and, most important, as a Christian, I object to preparing to run a bayonet through my brother from another country.”27
Riding this wave of isolationism was a clutch of senators led by “The Irreconcilables,” the sixteen who had most fiercely opposed ratification of the Versailles Treaty and had insisted that America should stay out of the League of Nations.28 Some were isolationists pure and simple, others were internationalists who nonetheless thought America should avoid intervening in others’ wars. Chief among Wilson’s opponents was Henry Cabot Lodge, the prickly Republican senator from Massachusetts, who believed that America should avoid commitments and in doing so remain free to counter threats to its own shores. He thought the League a well-meaning diversion but showed considerable prescience about where a threat was likely to emerge. “We would have this country strong to resist a peril from the West, as she has flung back the German menace from the East,” he said. “We would not have our country’s vigor exhausted, or her moral force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel great and small, which afflicts the world.”29
Lodge was rivaled in the bitterness of his opposition to interventions abroad only by Senator William Edgar Borah, the “Lion of Idaho,” who in 1917, like Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, was a leading war hawk.30 When peace came and Wilson presented the Versailles Treaty for ratification, Borah spelled out his reservations. “It is in conflict with the right of our people to govern themselves free from all restraint, legal or moral, of foreign powers,” he told the Senate.31 Other opponents of the League, such as Senator Hiram W. Johnson, a former Democratic governor of California, had also backed American entry into the war.32
During the battle against the Treaty, this group of senators was funded by a pair of Pittsburgh industrialists, the banker and aluminum smelter Andrew W. Mellon33 and the coke and steel king Henry Clay Frick.34 They were supported by a gang of press magnates, among them Frank A. Munsey,35 with his trio of New York papers (the Sun, the Telegram, and the Herald), Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, and William Rockhill Nelson,36 proprietor of the Kansas City Star.
The prize, however, was William Randolph Hearst, whose personally penned front-page rants were disseminated through the largest media company in the world. Hearst boasted thirty newspapers read by more than twenty million people daily, including the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Daily Mirror, seven magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar, and news wire and syndication services.
When Roosevelt was elected, the prospect of America becoming involved in another war seemed remote. Just days before the stock market crash in September 1929, Hoover wrote to his secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson,37 “It seems to me there is the most profound outlook for peace today that we have had any time in the last century. . . . The dangers of war during the next six or ten years for [the United States or Britain] in any direction are inconceivably less than they have been at any period since the Great War.”38
The only cloud on the horizon had emerged the previous year in Manchuria, a Chinese province long under the influence of the Japanese, who considered it key to their prosperity. Not only were 90 percent of Japanese foreign investments in Manchuria, but it was rich in raw materials that Japan lacked, such as coal, iron, and timber, and produced a great proportion of the soybeans that were a staple of the Japanese diet. When Chinese nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek began to loosen Manchuria from the Japanese grip, a bellicose military clique in Tokyo overruled the civilian government and ordered a full-scale invasion.
In September 1931, 10,400 Japanese troops poured into Manchuria and fanned out across the province. The invasion provided the first major test of the Treaty of Versailles. America and the European powers declared that they would not recognize the Japanese claim to Manchuria and the Europeans considered economic sanctions. After demanding a ceasefire, the League insisted that the Japanese withdraw. Tokyo countered by bombing the British commercial redoubt of Shanghai, 700 miles south of Manchuria.
America and Europe did nothing. No one was in a mood for embarking on another war, starting with Hoover, who told his cabinet that as the Japanese actions “do not imperil the freedom of the American people . . . we shall not go along on war or any of the sanctions economic or military for those are the roads to war.”39 The Philadelphia Record reported, “The American people do not give a hoot in a rain barrel who controls North China.”40
Taking offense at a mild reprimand delivered by the League, the Japanese withdrew from the world body, “taking as a souvenir the Pacific islands held under League mandate.”41 The Japanese incursion in Manchuria served notice on countries that bordered the Pacific, America included, that the regime in Tokyo was prepared to back its expansionist ambitions with force.
Just as threatening were events unfolding in Germany. By November 1932, when Roosevelt trounced Hoover at the polls, the German economy was near collapse. Industrial production had slumped by 60 percent since before the war and half the nation’s adults were jobless. With extremists of left and right agitating to exploit the misery, the new Weimar Republic tottered. In 1932, the eighty-five-year-old World War One hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg42 beat Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler in a presidential election, but before long the Nazis won control of the German parliament, the Reichstag, and began disrupting ordered government. Afraid that the economic cataclysm would invite a Communist revolution, industrialists joined with the military and the aristocracy to persuade Hindenburg to ask Hitler to lead the government.
On January 30, 1933, three months after Roosevelt was elected, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, promising to overturn the Versailles Treaty, to wrest back German territory awarded to other nations, to reoccupy the demilitarized Rhineland, and to place the economy under state control in order to put the nation back to work.
Some in America thought a more immediate threat to peace was a continuation of the Great Depression that offered political extremists a rare chance to exploit the human misery that stemmed from six million being without work. At the depth of the slump, a quarter of Americans were without jobs; by the end of 1932, a million were jobless in New York City alone. Food lines at soup kitchens became a common sight in Chicago and Philadelphia, where one in four went to bed hungry. More than 11,000 of the nation’s 24,000 banks had failed, taking with them the life savings of thousands of families.
The land built by immigrants became a land of emigrants as Americans fled to find work abroad. Even those with jobs found their wages cut as the prices of the goods they made spiraled downward. The collapse in prices was particularly savage in country areas, where sinking crop prices led to the eviction of thousands of farmers.
A lot was riding on the simple optimism Roosevelt’s election had provided. But if he were to be awarded a second term four years later, he had to deliver stability and jobs without delay. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt compared the task the nation faced to that of waging war:
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army. . . . I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.43
Starting with a hectic hundred days of action, Roosevelt needed to juggle votes to pass New Deal legislation. Southern Democrats were mostly fiscally conservative and doubted the wisdom of many aspects of the New Deal’s spending measures, while congressmen from the prairies were largely progressive isolationists who supported federal intervention in the economy. An unstated bargain was struck whereby isolationist congressmen from the Midwest gave the president a more or less free hand to stimulate the economy so long as he did not prevent them from passing new laws to prevent America becoming involved in war. In early 1933, Roosevelt thought it a bargain worth making.
The president had an early chance to make clear that he put domestic recovery before internationalism when in June 1933 the London Economic Conference opened. The British sent a long memorandum saying what they expected of Roosevelt, penned by Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay,44 who warned that the Depression was “essentially international in its character” and could not “be remedied by isolated action on the part of individual Governments” but only by “international action on a very broad front.”45
Roosevelt, however, had no intention of becoming embroiled in arrangements that would prevent him introducing measures he believed essential to restore the nation to health. He had pledged at his inauguration, “The emergency at home cannot wait.”46 Before he was prepared to start negotiating trade, currency, and other issues, let alone the war debt amnesty that Britain and other European nations were demanding, he wanted to give the New Deal a chance to work.
As a first step, the Europeans proposed pegging currencies to gold, a move that would prevent Roosevelt from manipulating the value of the dollar. Since the Depression, domestic prices in America had collapsed. By adjusting the dollar price, Roosevelt hoped to end crippling deflation and raise prices so farmers and manufacturers could sell their goods at a profit.
To the dismay of the other sixty-five nations at the conference, Roosevelt, relaxing aboard the USS Indianapolis off Maine, sent what came to be known as his “Bombshell Message” to secretary of state Cordell Hull47 in Paris, making clear that he intended to put American recovery first. Railing at the “old fetishes of the so-called international bankers,” he said, “The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency” and he ruled out fixing the dollar to gold. The Europeans were appalled that the president had dared put America first.
While Roosevelt began pushing his raft of New Deal measures through Congress, isolationists began a slow march through the House and Senate to outlaw involvement in conflicts that might arise from the growing belligerency in Europe and Asia. The first, in 1934, was the Johnson Act. The law made it illegal for Americans to lend money to foreign governments in default of their debts to American creditors. The act was a response to widespread public anger about the failure of the wartime Allies to repay $10.5 billion borrowed from Wall Street to fund World War One. In 1934, twenty years after the money had been lent, the debt remained unpaid.
The war debt issue had not long before caused the French to reinvade Germany. The Versailles Treaty demanded that the Germans and Austrians should compensate the Allies some $33 billion for destruction wrought during the war. By 1922, however, the Weimar government could no longer afford to pay and defaulted. The Allies, in turn, declared that because Germany had not paid them, they could not afford to repay their American debts. Drawing upon a nonpayment of reparations clause in the treaty, the French and Belgians invaded the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heart, to exact their pound of flesh.
German workers went on strike rather than accommodate their new French masters. Anxious that events in the Ruhr might ignite another war, President Harding’s secretary of state, Charles Hughes,48 had urged acceptance of the Dawes Plan, under which the US would lend $200 million to Germany. This merely stemmed the anguish for a while, and in 1929 a second effort was made to solve the war debt/reparations dispute: the Young Plan, which reduced the sum Germany owed from $33 to $8 billion and extended the term of repayment to fifty-nine years. It was against this background that the Johnson Act was passed. Roosevelt duly signed it into law.
In the spring of 1934, in response to a best-selling book, Merchants of Death by Helmuth C. Engelbrecht, which asserted that America’s entry into World War One was a conspiracy of Wall Street bankers and arms manufacturers, the tenacious Republican senator from North Dakota, Gerald Nye, launched a Senate inquiry, the Munitions Investigation Committee. Roosevelt and Hull were at first anxious that the Senate inquest, packed with isolationist lawmakers from the Midwest, would limit their ability to rearm. They reluctantly offered support in the hope that the Senate would recommend federal government control over the arms industry—useful in the event of war.
The munitions makers mounted a persuasive defense of their actions, even though, as Selig Adler wrote, “the armament companies welcomed world disarmament as much as bootleggers welcomed the end of prohibition.”49 When the Nye committee offered its verdict in seven reports written over 14,000 pages, it was with some reluctance that it found the charge of criminal complicity between bankers and arms makers not proven.
At the end of June 1934, Hitler liquidated his Nazi rivals in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, and in August, on Hindenburg’s death, he combined the roles of president and chancellor, pronouncing himself Der Führer. One of his first actions was to remove Germany from the League of Nations, which brought to a premature end the stalled General Disarmament Conference in Geneva, intended to limit each nation’s military spending.
Stirrings of war across the Atlantic prompted two contradictory responses in America. A growing number of realists urged rearmament, in the belief that if war broke out in Europe it would be impossible for America to remain above the fray. The isolationists, who believed that World War One had demonstrated there was nothing to be gained by becoming involved in foreign conflicts, doubled down. Roosevelt did not know what to make of what was going on in Europe. “Things are moving so fast,” he said in 1935, “I feel my opinion of the situation today may be completely changed tomorrow.”50 The novelist Ernest Hemingway, who was to make his name reporting from war-torn Europe, wrote:
No European country is our friend nor has been since the last war and no country but one’s own is worth fighting for. Never again should this country be put into a European war through mistaken idealism, through propaganda, through the desire to back our creditors.51
Roosevelt, ever wary of showing his hand, privately sided with the realists. On January 16, 1935, he sent to the Senate a proposal that had been lingering in Washington since 1929, that America join the World Court (the International Court of Justice) to put the settlement of international disputes on a legal footing. The president sent a message to the Senate stressing that the “sovereignty of the United States will in no way be diminished or jeopardized” and that binding the world together in a worldwide legal framework would allow America to “throw its weight into the scale in favor of peace.”52
Johnson responded that it was “the worst moment” to join the Court, “for Europe sits over a volcano, and America will be dragged into war.”53 Nonetheless, the measure looked likely to be approved until senators began receiving a barrage of anti-Court propaganda inspired and orchestrated by Hearst and Coughlin. Correspondence from constituents opposing America’s entry into the World Court was so heavy that it was delivered in wheelbarrows. The measure was ultimately defeated. However, the fact that the president was in favor of the Court suggested to isolationists that Roosevelt could not be trusted. As Adler explained, “While [Roosevelt] had not tried too hard to have his way, he had said enough to indicate to them that his hands needed to be tied to the isolationist steering gear.”54
To prevent Roosevelt from backsliding, senators began to introduce neutrality measures. The first Neutrality Act, of August 31, 1935, obliged the president, in the event of an outbreak of a war abroad, to define it as such and make illegal the supply of American arms to all combatants. American ships were prevented from delivering war supplies to participants and a National Munitions Board was set up to place the armaments industry under federal control. Roosevelt signed the measure into law. Within two months, war broke out in Ethiopia and the new legislation was put to the test.55
Sensing the weakness of the League of Nations and eager to boost his standing at home, in October 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia to capture its mineral wealth. The League responded more aggressively against Italy than it had against Japan, banning the sale to Italy of key commodities such as oil, iron, steel, coal, and coke so long as the war continued. But none of the banned goods were essential for Italy to wage war, and they were also freely available from countries that did not belong to the League.
When it transpired that two senior British politicians had attempted to mollify Mussolini by agreeing to Italy retaining the two-thirds of Ethiopia he had already overrun, it was clear that even Britain had decided not to resist the dictator’s demands. The League was impotent. Appeasement was born. Fighting in Ethiopia was horribly one-sided, Mussolini’s superior troops and sophisticated equipment easily overcoming the poorly armed Ethiopian forces. America’s new neutrality law made little difference to the outcome. Italy did not need American arms and Ethiopia was in no position to buy them on the scale and at the speed required.
Even when the US neutrality legislation lapsed half way through the Ethiopian conflict, the return to the status quo ante made no difference. Not long after his forces had in May 1936 deposed the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, and marched through the streets of Addis Ababa in triumph, Mussolini withdrew Italy from the League.
The second Neutrality Act, of February 1936, extended the ban on shipping arms to combatants for a further fourteen months and added a ban on financial loans to belligerents. More troubling to Roosevelt was the obligation to declare as combatants countries who merely sided with a nation involved in a war, a provision that undermined efforts of noncombatant League members who attempted to enforce a peace.
With Britain and France reluctant to embark on a war, with the League proving itself powerless, and with America determined to stay out of war, the dictators were free to do as they wished. It did not take long before Hitler took advantage. A free pass given to Japan in Manchuria and the rout in Ethiopia suggested that there was no longer the international will to prevent landgrabs. In March 1936, Hitler marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. Again London, Paris, and Washington stood by as aggression triumphed.
Then, in July 1936, came the Spanish Civil War. When the elected Loyalist government of Spain, supported by Communists and bolstered by Stalin’s Soviet regime, came under attack from conservative forces in the Spanish military, led by Francisco Franco,56 a general serving in Spanish Morocco, the democracies again washed their hands of it. Even France, at risk of being surrounded by Fascist governments, failed to act. The Spanish conflict soon became a bloody proxy battle between the competing ideologies of communism and fascism. Spain became a testing ground for the effectiveness of Hitler’s weaponry and the German high command’s military strategies.
On October 25, 1936, Hitler and Mussolini signed an anti-Communist mutual defense pact, and the following month Germany and Japan combined to form an anti-Soviet pact. The following year, Italy joined them, completing the triangle of aggressors that became known as the Axis. The ominous maneuverings of the dictators only stoked the fires of isolationism in America. As Adler explained, “Isolationism always becomes virulent when armed intervention is imminent, for the policy promises a reprieve from the horrors of war.”57
In November 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in a landslide on the boast that he had helped calm the nation’s jittery nerves after the collapse of the economy and had made progress toward restoring America to economic health.58 On the campaign trail, he continued to stress his devotion to peace. At a rally in New York he declared, “The nation knows that I hate war, and I know that the nation hates war. I submit to you a record of peace, and on that record a well-founded expectation for future peace.”59
His grand bargain with the isolationists to accede to their demands if given a free hand to manage the economy had paid off. But it came at a price. America remained woefully ill-prepared for war. From 1935 onward, however, as the drumbeat of war began to be heard around the world, Roosevelt asked for and was granted by Congress more funds for the armed forces and, with General Douglas MacArthur60 as army chief of staff, he began preparing for a war very different from the trench-bound stasis of World War One. The newly equipped US forces would fight in tanks and airplanes.
Roosevelt was intrigued by Hitler’s solution to unemployment: public works and putting men in uniform. “When this man Hitler came into control of the German Government, Germany [was] busted . . . a complete and utter failure, a nation that owed everybody, disorganized, not worth considering as a force in the world,”61 he said. “There is no one unemployed in Germany, they are all working in war orders.” He added, “eventually they will have to pay for it.”62 Even at this early stage, it was clear to Roosevelt that war was a means for Hitler to distract attention from his domestic difficulties. “Hitler—bad shape—war as way out,”63 he noted.
In May 1937, the third Neutrality Act made permanent the elements of the previous neutrality acts and, in light of the still unresolved Spanish Civil War,64 gave the president the right to declare internal conflicts a state of war. There was, however, a new element. Combatants were allowed to buy war goods from America so long as they were prepared to pay cash and could haul the arms away in non-American ships. This “cash-and-carry” provision revealed a mercenary side of the isolationists, who, under the pretext that they were against war, were happy to sell arms if there was money to be made. As Borah explained, “We seek to avoid all risks, all danger, but we make certain to get all profits.”65
The weight of opinion in favor of the new law was so overwhelming66 that Roosevelt made no attempt to halt it. The New York Herald Tribune mocked the measure as it would neither keep America neutral nor prevent another world war, describing it as “an act to preserve the United States from intervention in the war of 1917–18.”67 As Adler explained, “The congressional isolationists, so anxious to keep out of the war, actually helped invite a foreign catastrophe of such immense proportions that no nation could have escaped its consequences.”68
This was evident to Roosevelt, who, after years spent biting his tongue rather than risk the success of the New Deal, determined to take a stand. In July 1937, the Japanese and Chinese once again went to war, but this time it was to be war to the bitter end. Japan started on a campaign of territorial expansion with the whole of the western Pacific seaboard in its sights. It was the final straw for the president, who, in Chicago on October 5, abandoned gentle warnings for plain speaking. He told his audience:
the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened. . . . Civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. In times of so-called peace, ships are being attacked and sunk by submarines without cause or notice. Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm.
He took aim at those hampering America’s efforts to maintain the peace by passing neutrality laws:
The peace, the freedom and the security of 90 percent of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining 10 percent, who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law. . . . When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. . . . War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared.69
IT WAS A FORLORN HOPE, perhaps, but the president had given public notice that he was prepared to halt the dictators if given enough support. But would it be forthcoming? He was aware that he was up “against a public psychology of long standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying, ‘Peace at any price.’ ”70 Sensing the mood of the audience and the nation, Roosevelt confided to his speechwriter, Samuel I. Rosenman,71 “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.”72