Worldmaking (29 page)

Hitler's challenge to the European status quo proceeded cautiously. First the führer ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland—which the victors at Versailles had shorn of military capabilities—in March 1936. Britain and France did nothing in response. During the summer, Hitler dispatched German troops, and state-of-the-art military hardware, to assist the efforts of fellow fascist General Francisco Franco to overthrow the democratically elected Popular Front government in Spain. Direct participation in the Spanish Civil War allowed Hitler to test new battlefield strategems, the blitzkrieg and indiscriminate aerial bombardment, which were deployed to devastating effect in all theaters during the Second World War. German support was also decisive in allowing Franco to prevail, leading to the establishment of another fascist nation on the European continent. A German “Axis” with Mussolini's Italy was declared later that year—displaying the futility of Anglo-French efforts to lure Il Duce to their side. In February 1938, Germany gave up its hopes of reacquiring its Pacific territories and agreed to a formal alliance with Japan. In that same month, German troops entered Austria and a pan-German Anschluss was declared, later ratified by a plebiscite that registered Austrian approval at a suspiciously high level of 99 percent.

Confident that continued Anglo-French acquiescence to his assault on Versailles proved that those nations were irredeemably effete, Hitler turned next to Czechoslovakia, whose Sudetenland was peopled by a large proportion of ethnic Germans. While caving to German aggression had not worked well to that point, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain gave it one final go at the Munich conference in late September 1938. With Chamberlain as master of ceremonies, he, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Hitler hashed out an agreeement, signed on September 30, which gifted the Sudetenland—the industrial heart of Czechoslovakia—to Germany. With dubious grounds for self-congratulation, and infused with a large dose of Polyannaish optimism, Chamberlain hailed the Munich agreement for assuring “peace in our time.” This peace lasted until March 1939, when Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia and became a pro-Nazi satellite, and the remainder of the now impotent nation was incorporated into the Third Reich at the point of the German bayonet.

On March 31, France and Britain, finally conceding the failure of their appeasement of Hitler, pledged their full support for an independent Poland, which by now was hemmed in by Nazi Germany to the west and Stalin's Soviet Union to the east. Britain further solidified its commitments when it signed an Anglo-Polish military alliance in August, which Chamberlain promised to honor. A few years too late, a line had finally been drawn in the sand, not that its permanence much convinced Hitler, who had reason to doubt that Britain would risk war over Poland. A million and a half battle-ready German troops flooded across the Polish border on September 1, exactly one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This pact of convenience between two of the twentieth century's worst mass murderers promised nonaggression between Germany and the Soviet Union as their armies feasted on Polish territory, visiting hellish destruction as they went. Holding true to their word this time, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Conditioned to Anglo-French pliability, Hitler was genuinely surprised when he received the news.

With such audacity and brutality did Adolf Hitler destroy almost all that had been drawn up by Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in Paris. In fact, Hitler could even claim to be following the logic of ethnic self-determination—he was gathering all German peoples under the benign control of the Third Reich. Totalitarian governments in Japan, Germany, and Italy were taking what they believed was rightfully theirs, and the rest of the world—with Britain and France sharing most of the blame—seemed to lack the will and ability to stop them. A strong, unified Anglo-French response to these Versailles transgressions might have halted his momentum, shattering the cult of personality he and his propagandists so capably developed, and encouraging his opponents to launch a coup of the type that Hitler had tried in Munich in 1923 and Berlin in 1933.

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The parameters of President Roosevelt's response to these harrowing geopolitical events were circumscribed by the isolationist tenor of the times, which Beard, through his voluminous writings in national newspapers and magazines, helped in small part to create. In 1934, however, it was H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen's sensational
Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry
that truly captured the public's imagination. A national bestseller, widely circulated by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club,
Merchants of Death
argued that the armaments industry played a major role in bringing the world to war in 1914 and provoking American participation three years later. Responding to the apparent plausibility of some of the claims, and the furor they created, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota led a congressional investigation charged with establishing the true origins of the First World War. Nye offered dramatic and incendiary conclusions, laying blame at the feet of reckless, internationalist American banks—whose interests were dangerously intertwined with those of the arms industry—that extended credits to Britain and France that could be redeemed only if Germany and its allies were defeated. The Nye Committee's findings were published at the beginning of 1935 and soon began to exert significant influence on congressional and public opinion. A 1936 straw poll revealed that 95 percent of Americans opposed participation in any future war with Hitler's Germany. Roosevelt understood that he confronted “a public psychology of long standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying ‘peace at any price.'”
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Congress passed three major neutrality acts with sweeping majorities. The first, passed in 1935—as Mussolini prepared to attack Abyssinia—required that during a state of war the U.S. should impose an arms embargo on
all
belligerents and warned Americans against traveling on belligerent-owned ships. The second neutrality act was passed in February 1936. Taking its direct cue from the Nye Committee, it prohibited war loans and credits for belligerents. The third act, passed in May 1937, renewed the earlier restrictions and made American travel on belligerent ships unlawful, rather than simply cautioning Americans against it. The rationale behind all these acts was clear: an isolationist congressional majority wanted to foreclose to Roosevelt all the maneuvers that Wilson allegedly deployed in bringing the United States into war in 1917. On a visit to the United States, the sister of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain described her host nation as “hardly a people to go tiger shooting with.”
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It was Japan's invasion of China in 1937, and fear that a resurgent Congress, if not contained, could derail Roosevelt's broad political agenda, that convinced the president to reassert authority and lead public opinion with a major speech on international affairs. As the New Deal faltered in the face of renewed recession, and FDR's efforts to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices ran into an almighty political/judicial roadblock, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled that in this context of political crisis he “was becoming increasingly worried over the growth of isolationist sentiment in the United States.” He urged the president to challenge his tormentors in Congress and in the media by delivering a major speech on the efficacy of “international cooperation in the course of his journey.” Roosevelt agreed to Hull's request and delivered an address in Chicago on October 5, 1937—the famous “Quarantine Speech.”
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Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the sidewalks, framing the president's leisurely route through Chicago, desperate to catch a glimpse of a leader still viewed as a potential savior. In a powerful speech, FDR referred directly to the wars raging in China and Spain, observing that world civilization was threatened by the terror that authoritarian regimes were visiting upon the earth. He attacked those well-intentioned but dangerous idealists who argued that America's comfortable perch in the western hemisphere was distant enough from the world's travails to avoid involvement and attack. It was a remarkable speech that exerted a profound influence on the future course of world affairs:

The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy, instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality … 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 … We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.
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The crowd's response was ecstatic. On the train back to Washington, the president, seeking further affirmation, asked his secretary, “How did it go, Grace?” When she nodded appreciatively, Roosevelt mused, “Well, it's done now. It was something that needed saying.”
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While it might have needed saying, it also provoked a backlash. As news of Roosevelt's speech reached Washington, D.C., Congressmen Hamilton Fish and George Tinkham called for the president's impeachment. Cordell Hull recalled that the “reaction against the quarantine idea was quick and violent. As I saw it, this had the effect of setting back for at least six months our constant educational campaign intended to create and strengthen public opinion toward international cooperation.”
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FDR's line in the sand had been drawn as quickly as his political survival permitted.

In January 1938, Congressman Louis A. Ludlow sponsored a constitutional amendment that would have required a national referendum on the declaration of war, except in the event of a direct military attack on American territory. This proposal was defeated in the House by 209 votes to 188. Sensing that momentum was now on his side, Roosevelt requested a substantial increase in military preparedness expenditure, which was duly authorized. Through 1939, FDR grew bold enough to challenge the neutrality laws. After Germany's invasion of Poland, a fourth neutrality act was passed, which repealed the blunt-instrument nature of the three that preceded it. Passed in November 1939, the fourth act allowed belligerent nations (meaning all those that opposed Hitler) to purchase American arms on a cash-and-carry basis—a lifeline that Britain and France grasped as long as financial reserves permitted. On May 10—a day that was auspicious only in the sense that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister—Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The defensive Maginot Line, in which French hopes were mainly vested, was outflanked, and one by one, in rapid succession, each nation fell to the German blitzkrieg within five weeks. Paris fell to the Germans on June 14. The British Empire was the only force that remained to thwart Hitler's ambitions, and it desperately needed American supplies. But how could America supply a nation that couldn't afford its wares?

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Beard was relaxed about Japan's acquisitive ambitions in its Pacific backyard. In a speech delivered at the University of Southern California, one week after the establishment of Manchukuo in 1931, Beard observed that Japanese expansionism was the natural outgrowth of a system in which the navy and army operate outside the reach of civilian authority and are accorded too much institutional respect. He further cautioned that what Japan did to China was of no real concern to the United States, occupied as it was with defending its “continental heritage” in arduous economic circumstances.
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He despaired of the internationalist rationale presented by Walter Lippmann in 1933, who argued that “this damnable crisis is international whether we like it or not … It is international in spite of all prejudices, preferences, and wishes to the contrary, and the man who tries to act as if it weren't is trying to put out a great fire with one bucket of water.”
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Beard believed that Lippmann was wrong, and the public opinion he so disparaged would present the strongest bulwark against internationalist-led expansionism: “With much twisting and turning the American people are renewing the [George] Washington tradition and repudiating both the Kiplingesque imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the universal philanthropy of Woodrow Wilson.”
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But the public still had to be on their guard. Beard strongly suspected that President Roosevelt was seeking participation in a foreign war to deflect attention from continued depression at home. “The Jeffersonian party gave the nation the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and its participation in the World War,” Beard wrote in February 1935. “The Pacific War awaits.”
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Following Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, Beard turned fire on those observers sanctimonious enough to pin the label of “good” or “bad” on Italian actions, and who recklessly “employ the risk of war to prevent war” in fidelity to such distinctions.
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In an asymmetric war that pitted the narcissistic, bellicose Benito Mussolini against the noble, diminutive Haile Selassie, Beard's denigration of the good-bad dichotomy seems difficult to fathom, let alone agree with. But his broad motivation—to avoid American entanglement in a larger war precipitated by Italy's interest in a godforsaken part of a godforsaken continent—is clear enough. Following this line of reasoning, in September 1937 Beard observed that Roosevelt, ill-advisedly emulating Woodrow Wilson, was still following “the creed that the United States must do good all around the world.”
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