American Experiment (314 page)

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said later to Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.” The President quickly pulled back—too quickly, according to some critics, for he appeared to have harbored undue expectations about the public response, then to have been disappointed by the mixed reaction, and then to have overreacted to that reaction.

And so Roosevelt marched forward two paces, retreated one, and sidestepped, meantime indulging in moral rhetoric and vague threats that unduly raised his followers’ expectations while markedly inflaming his isolationist opposition. It was not Roosevelt but Hitler who “marched straight to his objective” over political opposition at home and his divided adversaries in Europe. The Führer’s power, even within Germany, was by no means absolute; he too had to overcome foot-dragging and resistance in the state bureaucracy, in the Army, and in the party; sometimes he too had to pause or even retreat. But he found that audacious and aggressive acts abroad expanded his power base, while reducing his foes to sputtering indignation and rhetorical protest.

March
7,
1936
—Hitler thrust his troops into the Rhineland, against the advice of some of his generals. France hesitated, Britain equivocated, the League declared Germany guilty of breaching the Versailles treaty. No one acted. Though deeply disturbed, Roosevelt did nothing and said nothing. Later Hitler admitted that if the French had marched into the Rhineland, he and his troops would have had to withdraw “with our tails between our legs.”

November 6, 1937
—Hitler with Mussolini and the Japanese leaders proclaimed the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Anti-Comintern Pact. The Japanese
smashed deeper into China. The democracies remained united in rhetoric, divided over action.

March 12, 1938
—German troops and tanks swept across the Austrian border to be greeted by cheering crowds. Roosevelt was privately concerned, publicly silent.

September 12, 1938
—Before a frenzied crowd at Nuremberg, Hitler demanded “justice” for Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt appealed to all parties for peace, avoided replying to a plea from President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia that he urge Britain and France not to desert Prague, and declined to permit Chamberlain to broadcast a message directly to the American people. Mobilizing his troops and threatening war, bullying his adversaries through diplomatic notes and face to face, Hitler pressured Chamberlain, the French, and even the Czechs into granting him the Sudeten districts and the fortifications that lay within them. Suddenly the old city of Munich, site of the decisive conference, became a symbol of appeasement. While the President could not say with Winston Churchill, “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he was now profoundly pessimistic about the chances for peace in Europe.

The Ides of March 1939
—Skillfully wielding diplomacy, threat, and subversion, Hitler seized the rump of Bohemia and put Moravia under Nazi “protection.” Hungary, snatching at the bone tossed by the Führer, gobbled up Ruthenia. “Never in my life,” FDR wrote a friend, “have I seen things moving in the world with more cross currents or with greater velocity.” In early April, Mussolini invaded Albania, and a week later the President sent the appeal to which the Führer replied so mockingly before the jeering Reichstag deputies.

The President now redoubled his efforts to obtain repeal of the arms embargo from the Senate. Repeal was the best way to deter Hitler, he argued, and to safeguard national security in the event of war. The Senate isolationists were more stubborn than ever. Roosevelt tried to encourage Chairman Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to push repeal through by agreeing to boost the price for domestic silver; having been properly bribed, Pittman still could not deliver a solid majority from his committee. At a meeting in the President’s study in mid-July 1939, Senate leaders sat, drinks in hand, while FDR pressed his case. Finally Borah spoke up.

“There’s not going to be any war this year,” he said. “All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial.”

“I wish the Senator would come down to my office and read the cables,” Hull said. Borah waved him quiet.

“I have sources of information in Europe that I regard as more reliable
than those of the State Department.” Hull almost burst into tears; Roosevelt was silent; then Vice President Garner polled the senators on repeal. Then he turned to the President. “Well, Captain,” he said, “we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes; and that’s all there is to it.”

Roosevelt could not be so unruffled. He warned House leaders that Germany and Italy had at least a fifty-fifty chance of winning a war, after which they would threaten Latin America. Soon, he predicted, we would find ourselves surrounded by hostile states in this hemisphere. Further, the Japanese, who “always like to play with the big boys,” would probably go into a hard-and-fast alliance with the Germans and Italians. If the United States resisted this threat, the three Axis states would be tempted “to try another quick war with us.”

The President was not so prescient, however, about the likely effect on Hitler of a repeal of the arms embargo. To the Führer this would have been but a pinprick among the momentous events in the making in Europe. Stalin, after having been excluded from the Western decision to sacrifice Czechoslovakia, suspected that Munich was a Western plot to divert Hitler to the east. He could play that game too; he might divert Hitler to the west and let the fascists and capitalists fight it out. Cautious feelers between Moscow and Berlin about enlarging trade led to political discussions, then to the decision that the fierce ideological war between the two countries could be suspended for the sake of
Realpolitik.
Stalin dropped Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, the apostle of collective security with the West, in favor of Vyacheslav Molotov, a hard-liner.

Years later, at Yalta, Stalin would tell Churchill that decisive action by the Allies would have headed off Moscow’s turn to Berlin. But the Allies did not act; they diddled, fearful of the price that Stalin might exact for collaboration. Then came the last two scenes of the prewar drama:

August 23, 1939
—In the Kremlin, Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sealed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. During the evening festivities that followed, Stalin drank to Hitler’s health, saying, “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer.” The new era in German-Russian relations was repeatedly and royally toasted. On hearing the catastrophic news Roosevelt sent Hitler a last despairing plea for peace. Hitler replied with action, not words.

September 1, 1939
—Germany fell on Poland from the west; Russia invaded from the east over two weeks later. Britain and France indicated that they would live up to their treaty obligations to Poland.

September 3, 1939
—Britain and France declared war on Germany. In New York, amid crushed communist and left-wing illusions about the Popular Front, the English poet W. H. Auden wrote:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

In London, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy cried out, his voice choking: “It’s the end of the world … the end of everything.”

For Franklin Roosevelt, the coming of war in Europe was not the end of everything but the opening of new opportunities. At last Americans had to stop speculating about the possibility of war in Europe and start facing the reality of it. Congress did so by decisively repealing the arms embargo and authorizing “cash and carry” exports to warring powers—but only after the Administration conducted a massive propaganda effort on and off the Hill, and with the provision that American merchant ships must not enter combat zones. The noninterventionists, dreading the prospect of Americans being hornswoggled into a second world war, conducted their own campaign. Spearheaded by Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, and Borah & Co., a national radio campaign clogged congressional offices with a deluge of mail—a million letters, telegrams, and postcards, it was estimated. Roosevelt once again promised that he would be guided by “one single hard-headed thought—keeping America out of this war.”

By the time Congress passed the measure, at the end of October 1939, German and Soviet troops had overrun Poland and divided the spoils of war. There followed a curious and dispiriting period for the President. It was so quiet on the western front that people began to talk about the “Phony War.” One front was not quiet. Late in the fall Stalin’s troops and planes attacked Finland to bolster the northern defenses of the Soviet Union. Angry at “this dreadful rape of Finland,” the President could find no way to help Helsinki, in part because he feared taking action that would push the Soviets closer to Berlin and farther from London and Paris. After
a heroic three-month resistance Finland yielded territory and made other concessions.

Most irksome of all was Washington’s relationship with London itself. For some years Roosevelt and Chamberlain had had an icy contempt for each other—the Prime Minister viewing FDR as something of a dilettante overly given to personal diplomacy and overly fearful of his own electorate, Roosevelt seeing the British leader as rigid toward his American friends and conciliatory to his Nazi enemies. That each government had long suspected the other was seeking to advance its economic interests at the expense of its ally incidentally provided ammunition in each country to leftists who contended that both bourgeois governments were far more interested in protecting capitalism than in thwarting fascism.

For London “cash and carry” turned out to be a considerable disappointment; by taking American ships off the seas it helped the German blockade. To tighten their blockade of Germany the British searched American ships and violated American “neutrality zones,” arousing folk memories of historic encounters with Britain on the high seas. The President told his friend Winston Churchill, who had become First Lord of the Admiralty at war’s outbreak, “I would not be frank unless I told you that there has been much public criticism here.”

By early spring of 1940 the President was caught in a strategic stalemate abroad and a political bind at home. He had based his policy of “all aid short of war” so conspicuously on the supreme goal of keeping the nation out of war that any move on his part to help the allies beyond “cash and carry” brought down the wrath of isolationists. At home he faced a presidential election amid rising pressure from Administration Democrats— and from within himself—to be a candidate. But he could defy with no more impunity the tradition barring a third term than he could defy the almost hysterical popular fear of being sucked into another European war. “The country as a whole does not yet have any deep sense of world crisis,” he had written at the start of the year. Only a great crisis could resolve his strategic and political impasse. It came on April 9, 1940.

At dawn German infantry struck across the naked Danish border. Soon Hitler’s troops were disgorging from destroyers, barges, and troopships along the Norwegian coast. “Today we can have no illusions,” Roosevelt warned a few days later in a Pan American Day address. Nor, it soon developed, could there be any illusions about Britain’s capacity even to protect neighboring countries on the North Sea. The Nazis had laid their plans with thoroughness and imagination; the British response was improvised, ill planned, and inadequate. Amid bitter criticism Chamberlain
prepared to resign; Churchill would shortly lake his place. Then, on May 10, Hitler struck again.

At dawn a sheet of German fire and steel swept across the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. As siren-screaming dive bombers roared down through the spring air and parachutists seized airfields, 120 divisions of German assault troops poised for battle. And somewhere behind this stupendous power was the demoniac genius Hitler, proclaiming that the battle would “decide the destiny of the German people for a thousand years.” A half-million Allied troops moved up behind the Belgian troops. Then, advancing with shocking speed, German tanks and motorized troops cut around the Allied flanks in great encircling sweeps and converted Belgium into a vast trap for the defenders. Within five days German tanks burst through the ill-defended Ardennes hills and began their lightning dash across northern France.

“The scene has darkened swiftly,” Churchill cabled Roosevelt on May 15. “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.” He knew that Mussolini would hurry in to share the loot. “We expect to be attacked here ourselves.” The next few days brought news of disaster after disaster. Pouring through the Ardennes gap, German armor curved west toward the Channel, pinning masses of French and British troops against the sea. Soon Roosevelt was receiving desperate appeals for military aid from British and French leaders to prevent what Churchill called a “Nazified Europe.” As France neared collapse, Premier Paul Reynaud in a last, desperate appeal asked Roosevelt to intervene with force, or at least the threat of force. Otherwise France would “go under like a drowning man.”

Never in his whole political career did Roosevelt face a harsher test of his leadership under crisis conditions than in those spring days of 1940. He took the British and French warnings with the utmost seriousness, including the threat that the French fleet probably, and the British fleet possibly, would fall into Hitler’s hands if the two allies went under. But at home he still faced a Congress more skittish than ever about sending modern arms from America’s arsenal across the Atlantic; when David I. Walsh, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, discovered that twenty new motor torpedo boats were to be sent to Britain, the Massachusetts senator went into a towering rage and threatened to force legislation prohibiting the sale of
anything.
To be sure, public opinion surged toward support of the democracies after Britain evacuated its troops from Dunkirk, but it was still afflicted by the fateful reservation—all aid
short of war.
About two-thirds of those polled favored aid, but nearly two-thirds considered
it more important for America to stay out of war than to aid Britain at the risk of war. And the isolationists were still in full cry, though there were some defections in the ranks after the fall of France.