A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (118 page)

In 1922, Mussolini’s followers staged a march on Rome, handing him the Italian government, after which the Italian king named
Il Duce
(the leader) prime minister of Italy. Mussolini thus took by intimidation what he could not win at the ballot box. Within two years, after censoring press opposition (but not completely closing down antagonistic publishers) and manipulating the voting laws, he consolidated all power into his party’s hands, with himself as dictator, albeit one far weaker than the Nazi leader. Fables that he made the trains run on time and worked other economic miracles were more publicity and propaganda than fact, but they attracted the attention of many Americans, especially before the German Nazis started to enact their anti-Jewish legislation. Among those who lauded Mussolini was Breckinridge Long, ambassador to Italy, who called fascism “the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formulation of our Constitution.”
²⁷
Long praised the “Fascisti in their black shirts…. They are dapper and well dressed and stand up straight and lend an atmosphere of individuality and importance to their surroundings.”
²⁸
A young American diplomat named George Kennan, far from being repulsed by the Fascists, concluded that “benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good” than did democracy, and that the United States needed to travel “along the road which leads through consitutional change to the authoritarian state.”
²⁹
Meanwhile, Mussolini grew in popularity by promising the Italian people that he would restore the Roman Empire. With most of the former Roman Empire occupied by the French, Spaniards, Austrians, and others, Mussolini picked out the path of least resistance—parts of Africa not occupied by Europe, like Ethiopia. In 1935, Italian armies armed with the latest weapons, including aircraft, trucks, tanks, and machine guns, invaded a backward Ethiopia, whose emperor begged the League of Nations to intervene. Except for minor sanctions, the League turned a deaf ear, and Italian forces captured the Ethiopian capital in 1936. (Breckinridge Long, Il Duce’s cheerleader in the administration, referred to Italy’s crushing of backward Ethiopia as the “fruitful harvest of Mussolini’s enterprise.”)

Like Mussolini, Adolf Hitler had had a troubled childhood. The son of a customs inspector, Hitler had dropped out of high school and worked as an artist in Vienna prior to World War I. He proved a failure at art, was twice rejected for architectural school, then finally enlisted in the German army at the start of the Great War. After the war he joined the German Workers’ Party, a socialist but anti-Marxist organization that emphasized nationalism and anti-Semitism. There Hitler found his niche, developing the skills of a hypnotic speaker and emotional actor for the party, which had taken a new name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis.

Hitler toiled within the Nazi Party until the German hyperinflation of 1923 nearly caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Seeing his opportunity, Hitler led an attempted takeover, or
putsch,
but the police were ready for him. Arrested and sentenced to five years in prison, he wrote
Mein Kampf
(
My Struggle
) from behind bars. A rambling book that detailed his hatred for Jews; his intentions to create a new German Reich, or empire; and his economic policies—which were as contradictory and confused as Mussolini’s—
Mein Kampf
provided a road map for anyone willing to take it seriously. For example, he alerted everyone to his intentions of subjecting even the innocent to violence by stating that early in his political career, “the importance of physical terror became clear to me.” Hitler gained his release after only a few months in confinement, by which time the Nazis had emerged as a powerful force in German politics. He gained control of the party within two years. When Germany started to slide into the economic depression that gripped the rest of the world, Hitler had the issue he needed to appeal to large numbers of Germans, who responded to his calls for a socialist reordering of society along the lines of Mussolini’s corporatism.

The Rome/Berlin Axis used a revolution in Spain as a warm-up to test its weapons and armies in combat. Playing on Japan’s fears of an expansionist Soviet Union in the Far East, Hitler pulled Japan into the Axis as a de facto member with the Anti-Comintern Pact (1935). Japan thus threw her lot in with an ideological cause for which the Japanese people had no connection or affinity except for apprehension about Soviet Russia. Still, the Japanese warlords resembled the fascists in their utter brutality, and the European fascist states and Japan did have one important trait in common: a growing comfort level with totalitarianism. The United States certainly wanted nothing to do with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—a desert war over the questionable independence of some obscure African nation. Nor were the sides clear in Spain. How to choose, for example, between Hitler (who had yet to engage in mass murder) and Stalin (where reports of millions of deaths at his hands had already leaked out)? Still, hundreds of idealistic Americans volunteered to fight in Spain against Franco, who had Fascist ties but was no ally of Hitler’s. Official noninvolvement by the United States and Britain, however, set a pattern: the democracies would not intervene, no matter who the villains were or how egregious their atrocities.

The plea by Ethiopia to the League of Nations for help against Mussolini resembled an appeal two years earlier from halfway across the globe, from China, where American interests stood out more clearly. There the Empire of Japan had expanded its foothold in Manchuria (gained in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5). Although Manchuria, in theory, was independent, Japan occupied it as a protectorate. Then in September 1931 it ostensibly staged an attack on a Japanese railroad at Mukden as an excuse to send in the army. Within a few months, Japan had complete control over Manchuria (renaming it Manchukuo), which provided a jumping-off point for invading other areas of China, whose pleas for assistance the League ignored.

Japan’s actions came as its military was increasingly usurping civilian control of the government. Assassination of public officials began to match the levels associated with modern-day Colombia, but instead of criminal or drug gangs doing the killing, they were fanatical Japanese nationalists. In 1933 the emperor himself was nearly assassinated—a remarkable event, considering that the Japanese people viewed him as a god incarnate. Chicago-style gangsters often controlled the streets, replete with zoot-suit garb and Thompson-style submachine guns. The more dangerous gangsters, however, roamed the palace halls and the military barracks. After a temporary recovery of parliamentary government in 1936, the military staged a coup attempt during which assassination squads and regular infantry units surrounded the imperial palace and attempted to assassinate the civilian leadership of Japan. They killed the finance and education ministers, injured the chamberlain (Admiral Kantaro Suzuki), and killed several other administrators. They failed to kill the prime minister, whose wife locked him in a cupboard, but assassins shot his brother by mistake. Another prime target, the emperor, also survived, and within days order had been restored. But no civilian leaders forgot, nor did the military, which was now calling the shots. Indeed, many of Japan’s “saviors” merely looked for their own opportunity to grab power, which they saw increasingly as coming from expansion in China. It is significant that Japan—at a crossroads between expansion in China and Russia, her traditional rival to the north—chose China, which engaged Japanese forces in a quagmire.

By 1937, Japanese troops had ruthlessly destroyed Shanghai and Canton, and slaughtered 300,000 civilians in Nanking. At one point in the Rape of Nanking, as it was called in part because of the systematic atrocities against women, the Japanese marched some 20,000 young Chinese outside the city and machine-gunned them. In retrospect, the League’s refusal to intervene in China and Ethiopia proved to be a costly error. American policy was pro-China in sentiment, thanks to a large China lobby in Washington, but in action America remained steadfastly aloof from the atrocities. Even after reports that the Chinese were hunted like rabbits in Nanking and that anything that moved was shot, and despite the fact that in addition to Chiang’s pro-Western army, Mao Tse-tung had a large communist army dedicated to evicting the Japanese, the United States did not offer even token help.

As in Spain, several idealistic aviators, flying nearly obsolete P-40 War Hawks, went to China to earn enduring acclaim as the Flying Tigers, but a handful of fighter pilots simply proved inadequate against the Rising Sun. The democracies’ inaction only whetted the appetites of the dogs of war, encouraging Italy, Germany, and Japan to seek other conquests.

At one point in 1937 it appeared that the Japanese had become too brazen and careless: on December twelfth, imperial Japanese war planes strafed and bombed several ships on the Yangtze River. Three of them were Standard Oil tankers, and the fourth, a U.S. gunboat, the
Panay
, was sunk despite flying a large American flag and having Old Glory spread out on the awnings. Two crewmen and an Italian journalist were killed, and another eleven were wounded. Even with a deliberate attack in broad daylight, however, popular sentiment resisted any thought of war. Roosevelt only asked his aides to examine whether the Japanese could be held liable for monetary damages. Several admirals argued that Japan intended a war with the United States, but they were ignored by all except Harold Ickes, who noted, “Certainly war with Japan is inevitable sooner or later, and if we have to fight her, isn’t this the best possible time?”
³⁰
Upon reflection, the Japanese knew they had made a potentially disastrous miscalculation—one that could push them into a war with America years before they were ready. Consequently, Tokyo issued a thorough apology, promising to pay every cent in indemnities and recalling the commander of the Japanese naval forces. The measures satisfied most Americans, with newspapers such as the
Christian Science Monitor
urging its readers to differentiate between the
Panay
incident and the sinking of the
Maine.

Japan further saw that Britain would be tied up with Hitler, should he press matters in Europe, opening up Malaya and, farther to the southeast, Indonesia and the rich Dutch oil fields. If the cards fell right, many strategists suggested, the Japanese might not have to deal with Great Britain at all. In this context, America’s response would prove critical. The U.S. presence in the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, and Hawaii meant that eventually Japan would have to negotiate or fight to expand her empire to the south and west. Instead, the United States compounded the disarmament mistakes of the 1920s by slumping into an isolationist funk.

Isolationism Ascendant

The very fact that the British hid behind their navy, and the French behind their massive fortifications along the German border (the Maginot Line), indicated that the major Western powers never believed their own arms control promises. As in the United States, a malaise developed in these nations out of the Great Depression, producing a helplessness and lethargy. In many circles, a perception existed that nothing could be done to stop the Italian, German, and Japanese expansionists, at least within Europe and Asia. Moreover, the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee had investigated the munitions industry, the “merchants of death” that supposedly had driven the nation into World War I, adding to suspicions of those calling for military readiness.

Britain remained the most important trading partner for American firms in the 1930s, but overseas trade was relatively insignificant to the domestic U.S. market, and the loss of that trade, while undesirable, was not crucial except to the British, who desperately needed war goods. High tariffs remained the rule of the day, reflecting the prevailing doctrine that one nation could “tax” the work of another to its own benefit. That view changed sharply after Cordell Hull became secretary of state under Roosevelt. A free trader who favored lower tariffs, his views would have been entirely appropriate for the 1920s and might have provided a firewall against the economic collapse. But by the mid-1930s, with the dictators firmly entrenched, the circumstances had changed dramatically enough to work against the doctrine of free trade. Indeed, at that point the trade weapon had to be used, and events demanded that free nations play favorites in resisting aggressors.

As the economic expansion of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, even stronger impulses toward isolation arose, as symbolized by the First Neutrality Act (1935), issued in response to Ethiopia’s plea for help. Further congressional action in early 1937 prohibited supplying arms to either side of the Spanish Civil War. Isolationists of every political stripe tended to portray all sides in a conflict as “belligerents,” thus removing any moral judgments about who might be the aggressor. The ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, went so far as to suggest that the democracies and the Axis powers put aside their minor disagreements and, in so many words, just get along.

Cordell Hull was among the few who saw the unprecedented evil inherent in the Nazi regime. In the wake of the disastrous Munich Agreement of 1938, which ceded to Hitler the Sudetenland he got all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Speaking off the record to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hull bluntly warned them that the coming war would not be “another goddam piddling dispute over a boundary line,” but a full-scale assault on world order by “powerful nations, armed to the teeth, preaching a doctrine of naked force and practicing a philosophy of barbarism.”
³¹

Hull favored a cash-and-carry policy, which he thought would allow Britain to purchase whatever war materials were needed. In reality, however, at the time that the British desperately needed arms, food, and machinery, her accounts had sunk so low that she scarcely had the hard currency needed to actually purchase the goods. Hull’s policy seemed a magnanimous gesture, but by then, much more generous terms were needed. Indeed, the neutrality acts often punished the states (Ethiopia or China) that had attempted to resist the Italian and Japanese aggressors. Such was the case with the 1937 cash-and-carry legislation, which sold American goods to any belligerent that could pay cash and ship the materials in its own vessels. Clearly, Britain, with her navy, benefited from this legislation the most; but Italy, Japan, and Germany fared well too.