A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (119 page)

The isolationist mood was encouraged by the intelligentsia, which, although supporting the procommunist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, otherwise viewed any overseas escapades as inherently imperialistic. American leftists Walter Duranty, Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, E. W. Scripps, Alger Hiss, and Edmund Wilson had made excuses for Lenin’s Red terror and Stalin’s “harvest of sorrow”—despite full knowledge that millions of Soviet citizens were being exterminated—and refused to engage in any public policy debates over the morality of one side or another.

International communist movements also condemned any involvement against the Axis powers as imperialistic, at least until the Soviet Union herself became a target of Hitler’s invasion in June 1941. For example, in 1940, communist-dominated delegations to the Emergency Peace Mobilization, which met in Chicago, refused to criticize the Axis powers, but managed to scorn the “war policies” of Roosevelt.
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Only after Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi advance into Russia, did the peace groups change their tune.

Against all these forces, solid leadership from Roosevelt’s advisers—especially in the diplomatic corps—still might have convinced him and Congress that the fascists and the Japanese imperialists only understood power. Ickes, for example, lobbied for more severe sanctions against the Japanese. Other appointments proved colossally inappropriate, particularly the ambassadors to Britain and the Soviet Union. Joseph P. Kennedy, for example, the “thief” that FDR had chosen as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission “to catch a thief,” received an appointment as ambassador to Britain, despite his outspoken anti-British views. Kennedy suspected every British move, convinced that England was manipulating Germany into another war.

Joseph Davies, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia, on the other hand, completely refused to criticize one of the most vile regimes on the planet. He said Joseph Stalin, despite exterminating all opponents within the Communist Party, “is the ‘easy boss’ type—quiet, self-effacing, personally kindly. Like all the other Soviet leaders, Stalin works hard, lives simply, and administers his job with complete honesty.”
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The ambassador’s naive characterizations extended to Stalin’s subordinates, who, like Stalin, worked hard and lived simply, performing their tasks without corruption. “It is generally admitted that no graft exits in high places in Moscow,” he claimed.
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Even where Roosevelt appointed capable men, they were ill suited for the time. Secretary of State Hull, a former judge and congressman from Tennessee, often seemed as anti-British as Kennedy, exactly at the time that the situation required the Western powers to resist aggression together. Instead of squarely facing the Axis threat in Europe, Hull sought to erode British trading influence in the Pacific to open more markets for U.S. goods. To his credit, treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau battled to sell both France and Britain top-of-the-line aircraft, to which Roosevelt finally agreed in late 1938, although whether Morgenthau favored the sales because they genuinely helped the Allies or because, as he put it, “Our aircraft industry desperately neede[ed] a shot in the arm [and] here was the hypodermic poised.”
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Between 1937 and 1940, then, Roosevelt, prompted by Hull and Kennedy, provided only a modicum of support to Britain under exorbitant terms compared to the boatloads of materials later handed out to the Soviets at much lower costs. Yet even that small level of support enabled Britain to hold out during 1940–41.

Desperate to avoid even the appearance of forming an alliance against the fascist powers, American diplomats blamed Britain and France for refusing to stand up to Hitler and therefore, in essence for saving Americans from having to confront the evil empires as well. Kennedy argued for giving Hitler a free hand in Eastern Europe; ambassador to France William Bullitt urged a Franco-German accommodation; and Breckinridge Long, the former American ambassador to Italy, blamed Britain for treating Mussolini unfairly. Roosevelt looked for any assurance from Hitler that he would behave, in 1939 sending a message asking Hitler and Mussolini if they would promise not to attack some thirty-one nations named in the letter. Hitler responded by reading it to the Reichstag, mockingly ticking off “Finland…Lithuania…Juden,” to howls of laughter from the delegates, few of whom would have guessed that in the next few years he would seek to control or capture parts or all of these nations and peoples.
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In September 1939, Hitler’s armies rolled into one of the nations he claimed to have no interest in invading—Poland. World War II had begun in Europe. America remained steadfastly neutral as the blitzkrieg, or lightning war, swept through the Polish armies, then turned on Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, all in less than a year. Even as Nazi tanks smashed French forces and trapped nearly half a million British and French troops at Dunkirk, Cordell Hull characterized French cries for U.S. support as “hysterical appeals,” and Joseph Kennedy bluntly told the British that they could expect “zero support.”
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Hull and Kennedy had their own agendas, but they probably reflected the fact that many, if not most, Americans wanted nothing to do with war.

Just two years after Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, had returned from Munich with an agreement with Hitler that, he said, ensured “peace in our time,” all of mainland Europe was under the iron grip of the Nazis, Italian Fascists, their allies, or the Communist Soviets, whose behavior in taking half of Poland, as well as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and part of Finland somehow escaped the ire of the West.
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Britain stood alone. Nearly broke, with national reserves down to $12 million, Britain could no longer buy war materials or food. Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged Roosevelt to “lend” fifty aged World War I destroyers for antisubmarine patrols, and FDR finally came around. “I have been thinking very hard…what we should do for England…. The thing to do is to get away from a dollar sign.”
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The answer was an exchange of weapons for long-term leases for several British bases, mostly in the Caribbean, although Roosevelt turned down a suggestion that would have included British ships in the West Indies, noting that they would be antiquated. He also rejected as too big a burden, both on himself and the nation, the suggestion that the United States take the West Indies themselves. The final legislation, which passed in March 1941, was known as the Lend-Lease Act. It assisted the British in protecting their sea-lanes.

Isolationists (more accurately, noninterventionists) claimed Lend-Lease would drag the United States into the war.
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Senator Burton K. Wheeler called it the “New Deal’s triple A foreign policy: it will plow under every fourth American boy.”
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Significantly, Roosevelt had rejected appeals from Norway and France, citing the fact that leasing ships to belligerents would violate international law. The destroyer deal reflected less a commitment to principle than an admission that the public mood was beginning to shift, and again demonstrated that far from leading from principle, FDR waited for the political winds to swing in his direction.

Those winds had a considerably stealthy boost from British agents in the United States. Believing the Nazis a menace to their very existence, the British hardly played by the rules in attempting to lure America into the conflict as an ally. The British used deception and craftily tailored propaganda to swing American public opinion into bringing the United States into the war, engaging in covert manipulation of democratic processes to achieve their ends.
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Backed by a number of American pan-Atlanticists in newspapers, Congress, and even polling organizations, British agents conducted a silent war to persuade U.S. lawmakers to enact a peacetime draft; support Lend-Lease; and, they hoped, eventually ally the United States against Hitler. The most shocking and effective aspect of British covert operations in America involved shaping public opinion through polls. It is important to note that polls, which were supposedly designed to
reflect
the public’s mood, in fact were used as tools to create a mandate for positions the pollsters wanted. Although this was the first documented time that polls would be used in such a way, it certainly wouldn’t be the last. British agents working for Gallup and Roper, as well as other American polling organizations, alternatively suppressed or publicized polls that supported America’s entry into the war. One American pollster, sympathetic to the British, admitted “cooking” polls by “suggesting issues and questions the vote on which I was fairly sure would be on the right side.”
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In November 1941 the Fight for Freedom Committee, an interventionist group, ran a rigged poll at the Congress of Industrial Organization’s national convention, taking “great care…beforehand to make certain the poll results would turn out as desired.”
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Another poll found 81 percent of young men facing the draft favored compulsory military service, an astoundingly high figure given that congressional mail ran “overwhelmingly” against conscription.
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On the other side of the argument were a few outright loonies, of course, including discredited socialists, and the entire front for the American Communist Party. The American Peace Mobilization Committee, for example, had peace marches right up to the day that Hitler invaded the USSR, when signs protesting American involvement in the war were literally changed on the spot to read
open the second front
!
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Where five minutes earlier American communists had opposed American involvement, once Stalin’s bacon was in the fire they demanded U.S. intervention.

Besides these fringe groups, however, were millions of well-intentioned Americans who sincerely wanted to avoid another European entanglement. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Republican of Michigan, aptly expressed the views of the vast majority of so-called isolationists when he wrote in his diary, “I hate Hitlerism and Naziism and Communism as completely as any person living. But I decline to embrace the opportunist idea…that
we
can stop these things in
Europe
without entering the conflict with everything at our command…. There is no middle ground. We are either
all the way in
or
all the way out.
”
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Indeed, the dirty little secret of the prewar period was that polls, when not doctored by the British, showed that most Americans agreed with aviator Charles Lindbergh’s antiwar position. A few months later, in February 1941, the “Lone Eagle” testified before Congress about his firsthand inspection of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Roosevelt, convinced the aviator was attempting to undermine his Lend-Lease program, launched a campaign through subordinates to convince Americans that Lindbergh was a Nazi.
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The entire saga showed how far the corruption of Hitler, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet communism had spread: the British conducted widespread spying and manipulations inside the borders of their closest ally; an American hero was tarred with the appellation Nazi for holding a position different from the president’s about the best way to
defeat
the Nazis; and the Roosevelt administration increasingly had to accommodate an utterly evil Stalinist regime in Russia for the sole reason that the Soviets were fighting the Nazis.

Roosevelt, then, governed a nation that wanted to remain out of the conflict, yet despised the Axis and possessed deep sympathies for the English. Public attitudes required a clear presentation of both the costs of involvement and the dangers of neutrality, but FDR’s foreign policy appointees lacked the skill to deal with either the British or the Axis.

In that context, by 1940 the isolationists certainly had drifted into a never-never land of illusion, thereby risking essential strategic advantages that, if conceded, could indeed have threatened the U.S. mainland. Isolationists, unfortunately, probably had a point when they complained that the French and Belgians “deserved” their fate. As Nazi tanks rolled over Europe, one European countess lamented that “these European peoples themselves have become indifferent to democracy…. I saw that not more than ten percent of the people on the European continent cared for individual freedom or were vitally interested in it to fight for its preservation.”
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Yet in many ways, the only difference between the French and the isolationist Americans, who obsessed about the depressed economy, was one of geography: France was “over there,” with Hitler, and Americans were not—yet. Thus, Roosevelt’s dilemma lay in controlling the British covert agents (whose methods were illegal and repugnant, but whose cause was just) while preparing the reluctant public for an inevitable war and demonstrating that the isolationists had lost touch with strategic reality (without questioning their patriotism or motives)—all the while overcoming ambassadorial appointees who sabotaged any coherent policies.

In any event, he had a responsibility to rapidly upgrade the military by using the bully pulpit to prepare Americans for war. Instead, he chose the politically expedient course. He rebuilt the navy—a wise policy—but by stealth, shifting NIRA funds and other government slush money into ship construction. The United States took important strategic steps to ensure our sea-lanes to Britain, assuming control of Greenland in April 1941 and, three months later, occupying Iceland, allowing the British garrison there to deploy elsewhere. But these, and even the shoot-on-sight orders given to U.S. warships protecting convoys across half of the Atlantic, never required the voters to confront reality, which Roosevelt could have done prior to Pearl Harbor without alienating the isolationists. By waiting for the public to lead on the issue of war, Roosevelt reaped the worst of all worlds: he allowed the British to manipulate the United States and at the same time failed to prepare either the military or the public adequately for a forthcoming conflict. In 1939 he had argued forcefully for a repeal of the arms embargo against Britain, and he won. But a month later FDR defined the combat zone as the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean from Norway to Spain. In essence, Roosevelt took American ships off any oceans where they might have to defend freedom of the seas, handing a major victory to the isolationists. He also delayed aid to Finland, which had heroically tried to hold off the giant Soviet army in the dead of winter, until a large chunk of that nation had fallen under Soviet tyranny.