Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (67 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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In the United States, the expansion of the stock-speculating population vastly beyond what it had been before World War I made the crash infinitely worse. And the chaos of war and depression had made aggressive dictatorships fashionable. Britain and France were about to be outgunned by the dictators. And more even than in 1917, when Russia, Italy, and Japan had all been allies, albeit tired or remote allies, they were all now hostile to the democracies, and the beseeching eyes of the British and the French, and the attention of all, would soon be fixed on America, beleaguered though it now was.
Roosevelt would be taking his place in a world suffering acute economic distress and where the democracies, for the security of which millions had died in a hecatomb of war that had ended less than 15 years before, were in full retreat. His promise of change, his uplifting oratory, and even the courage he had shown in overcoming polio to seem much more mobile and robust than he really was inspirited the world in this worst of times, when other democratic governments seemed so tired and ineffectual, especially compared with the dynamism of the dictators. As his inauguration approached, American economic conditions lurched to new depths. The index of industrial production fell to an all-time low of 56, barely half where it had been in 1928. In less than three years, more than 5,500 banks had closed, taking down with them deposits of over $3 billion. Banks began closing, by state order, starting with Louisiana in early February 1933, and by inauguration day on March 4 almost every bank in the country and all its economic exchanges were closed, or banks were reduced to minimal individual withdrawals. Hoover insistently asked Roosevelt to pledge publicly to abandon the embryonic New Deal program and pledge to uphold Hoover’s fetishistic attachment to the gold standard and the avoidance of major relief commitments. The president-elect declined. For his inauguration, there were army-manned machine-gun nests at the corners of all the great federal buildings in Washington for the first time since the Civil War. America and the world were in desperate straits.
THREE
THE INDISPENSABLE COUNTRY, 1933 -1957
CHAPTER NINE
Toward America’s Rendezvous with Destiny, 1933–1941
The world was gasping and the great power of the New World was in danger of the complete collapse of its economic, and possibly even its political, system. Of Roosevelt’s 30 predecessors as president, only Abraham Lincoln had taken office in such daunting circumstances. This narrative has proceeded fairly densely through 175 years since the start of the Seven Years’ War, in which Benjamin Franklin had felt the need to urge Britain to ensure that the metropolitan French did not return to Canada. As the entire American project teetered, and the country brought in a new leader to try to resuscitate what had been 65 years of vertiginous expansion in every field and by any measurement since the Civil War, it is an opportune moment for a brief pause to assess the strategies of the rise and stall and prospects of America.
In the mid-eighteenth century, America was a haven for seekers of a freer and more prosperous life than was commonly available in Europe. As it had almost 30 percent of Britain’s population toward the end of that period, and a higher standard of living, it was an important geopolitical entity, but Britain got little from it, and protecting it was onerous. A few Americans of international stature, most conspicuously Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had an idea of what a powerhouse America could, relatively quickly, become. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, had the geopolitical vision to add to the British manipulation of the balance of power on the continent, traditional since the time of Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, 225 years before, the concentration on the navy and amphibious operations necessary to gain control of the world’s oceans and most desirable places of empire. He led Britain to victory in Canada and India, the Caribbean, West Africa, and everywhere on the high seas.
Chatham’s successors completely bungled the comprehensible need to get America to pay a representative share of the cost of clearing France out of North America. And Franklin, Washington, and other talented men, especially Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, John Jay, John Marshall, James Monroe, and even the revolutionary drummer boy Andrew Jackson, determined that America would do better without being a British dependency. In an astonishing sequence of individual accomplishments, Washington held an improvised, scarcely paid army together for seven years, identified some talented subalterns, and moved with genius at the beginning and end of the conflict and with agility and tenacity as required in between, while Franklin, incredibly, persuaded the absolute French monarchy to join a war for republican democracy and imperial secession.
Jefferson packaged up a tax and jurisdictional dispute as the dawn of human liberty and individual rights, and Madison and Hamilton and Jay wrote the new nation a brilliant and novel Constitution whose adoption was secured by the persuasive eminence of Washington and Franklin. Washington, by his character and sagacity, created a distinguished presidency, in which most of the above-mentioned followed him; Jay and Marshall built a strong federal state from the bench; and Hamilton foresaw and designed the economic destiny of a country that in barely a century would operate on an economic scale that the world had not imagined possible The strategy was to achieve and glorify independence and secure it with functional political institutions, and it was an entirely successful strategy, brilliantly executed.
The new republic was splendidly launched; Jefferson and Polk each added as much territory as the Thirteen Colonies had had at the nation’s outset, at minimal cost. The nation’s Achilles’ heel, even as it grew to be one of the world’s major powers, alongside centuries-old kingdoms, was slavery, symbol of the civilization of the southern half of the country. Jackson decreed the compromise of slavery’s legitimacy and the indissolubility of the Union, and his great rival, Henry Clay, helped produce compromises in 1820, before Jackson entered public life, and in 1850, after Jackson had died, that enabled the Union to survive until the slave-holding part of the country was reduced by natural growth to a quarter of the free population. The strategy was to preserve the Union, to exalt growth over internecine differences until the strength of the Union was insuperable within the country. It was a clever strategy, executed well up to the death of Clay, and was ultimately successful, though only by a hand’s breadth.
When the Union was strong enough to suppress an insurgency, a new leader, at the head of a new party, was elected on the promise that the rights of slaveholders would be protected but that slavery could not expand into areas where it was uneconomic and foreign, and when this was confirmed as unacceptable to the South, proceeded with judicious cunning until the South initiated hostilities. In a prolonged masterpiece of sage and benign execution, Lincoln kept foreigners at bay, built a mighty army, promoted outstanding generals, emancipated the slaves (prospectively, as 95 percent of them were in rebel states), so that the abolitionists and those who cared only for the Union were both satisfied, as the proclaimed emancipation incited slave resistance in the South. Lincoln won, slavery was abolished, the Union was saved and automatically became one of the most powerful nations in the world, just 82 years after its independence was achieved. A providential leader appeared with an unassailable intellectual and moral position and applied adequate pressure for long enough to crush the forces of disunion and start to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” The tactics of founding the new party, taking it over, and leading it to victory, and the strategy of formulating the issue and the execution of the conduct of the war, were all masterpieces of surpassing brilliance and nobility.
There followed a third of a century in which the national leadership was almost irrelevant; there was no need for a providential Washington, Jackson, or Lincoln. Immigration was open, the economy was unfettered, and millions of people poured from the bowels of European famine and oppression and pogroms into this astoundingly fecund country. They pledged allegiance to Madison and Hamilton’s Constitution, and they or their children made their way in the English language, and the organic growth of America, in its sustained swiftness and scale, surpassed anything in human history. The strategy was to let America be itself, and it was a brilliant strategy, the more so because it required almost no execution at all.
Just 50 years after the United States had crushed Mexico, it even more easily routed Mexico’s former colonial master, Spain, albeit only in overseas outposts. Theodore Roosevelt seized Panama and built the inter-ocean canal, arbitrated between the Russians and Japanese, pacified the Philippines, built up the United States Navy to be the third in the world after only the British and German Empires, and painted that navy white and sent it round the world.
And Woodrow Wilson, the desiccated but erudite and eloquent intellectual, intervened to assure the victory of the democracies in history’s bloodiest war, and created a vision of international cooperation, collective security, and the evangelization of democracy and national self-determination that briefly inspirited the war-ravaged world. More durably, he inserted a requirement in U.S. foreign policy of reasonable virtue as well as clear national interest. Without both those ingredients, ambitious foreign undertakings by American administrations are not really possible. Both Roosevelt and Wilson emphasized that the United States would now be an influence in the whole world, by its power and its moral authority. Roosevelt carried a big stick; Wilson at least had a big stick to hand, and both, in different ways, fired the imagination of the world. The strategy was the tentative assertion of American influence in the whole world, notice that the American era was imminent. Neither strategy had been thought out and Wilson’s execution was faulty, but they were both on to something, and the unnatural abstention of America from the world had to end.
Wilson lost his health and his judgment and was repudiated, and there followed a false era of hedonism and foreign policy posturing, and economic insouciance. By 1933, the economy had crashed, and the American idea was more violently afflicted than ever in its history The Civil War had threatened the nation’s integrality, but not the future of its constitutional democracy in 70 percent of the country. Now, the whole laissez-faire economic system that had fueled the meteoric rise of the nation and the individualistic philosophy that had idealized it were at risk.
There came now Franklin Delano Roosevelt to revive American optimism, reassert the nation’s exceptionalism, reform the system sufficiently to renew it and revive its inexorable rise, to restore America’s exalted destiny, and to lead it to its rightful place, as Benjamin Franklin had foreseen 175 years before, at the head of all the nations and peoples of the world. Up to now, there had been incremental strategies to create and conserve the nation, to preserve it against insurrection and the evils of slavery, and to bring it to the attention of the world and show the world some of the power of American industry and idealism. Now there was a grave challenge, and meeting the challenge would take America to the summit of the world, as a Manichaean struggle was approaching between the conservators and evocators of Western democracy and Judeo-Christian values, and the totalitarian apostles of racism, paganism, and Marxist materialism. American strategic thinking up to this point had been designed to build and promote America. Now, all that had been achieved had to be redeemed from the depths of economic and psychological depression and swiftly deployed to hold the battlements of the West in a world approaching a mortal crisis. America’s rendezvous with what no longer seemed a manifest destiny was almost at hand.
2. THE NEW DEALAt his inauguration on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt said that his primary task was “to put people to work.” He promised bold experimentation, celebrated “the warm glow of national unity,” and observed that “There is plenty, but a generous use of it languishes at the very source of the supply.” And he rejoiced that “Our problems, thank God, concern only material things,” having asserted that “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.... The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, needless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” He declared a general bank holiday, arranged for special banknotes to be available to cover excessive withdrawals, and began the reopening of the banks in stages by the district Federal Reserve banks, as they reached a point of designated invulnerability. Within three days of the end of the four-day bank holiday, three-quarters of the country’s banks had reopened. The Federal Reserve merged some banks and the RFC eventually became a preferred shareholder in many of them, withdrawing as conditions allowed. In the first of a great many such occasions, Roosevelt addressed the nation by radio in what were called “fireside chats,” in which he explained government policy in simple, familiar, and even intimate terms, and carried the country with him. The banking measures were an unqualified success and were shortly reinforced by a federal government guarantee of bank deposits.
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