Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Roosevelt listened to Hitler’s principal speeches in his office, with his entourage. The Fuehrer was interrupted frequently with massed shouts of “Sieg heil!” (Victory), and the Germans only provided the translation at the end of his remarks, sometimes in a sanitized form. While the Nazi crowds were screaming their support, Roosevelt would give his colleagues his own translation. He well knew how to stir an audience, but was appalled by what he described as Hitler’s “shrieks, and the huge crowd responding like animals.”100

  Italy invaded Ethiopia in May 1935, and the League of Nations again failed to take any action. The Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, was jeered disgracefully by Italian delegates when he addressed the League of Nations. Roosevelt urged Britain and France to intervene, but those powers, instead, placated Mussolini in the hope of wooing him away from the embrace of Hitler. The Hoare-Laval Pact, partitioning Ethiopia and deferring to Mussolini, was so distasteful in both countries when it was leaked by a French newspaper that both foreign ministers lost their jobs, but the policy of appeasement continued.

  The U.S. Congress was heavily influenced by western isolationists, who were fierce supporters of the New Deal but parted company with Roosevelt’s Atlanticist inclinations. As tensions increased in Europe and the Far East, Roosevelt deftly moved to conciliate the southern conservatives in his party who had been unenthused by the New Deal but favored a strong military and were, for reasons going back to the Civil War, well-disposed to the British and the French.

  Congress passed a Neutrality Act in 1935 and again in 1936, which urged the president to embargo arms shipments and loans to belligerents. Roosevelt signed the measures, but warned that they were more likely “to drag us into war than to keep us out.” There was a new Neutrality Act in 1937 that extended the law to the Spanish Civil War, as the previous acts were confined to wars between nations. Roosevelt was under heavy pressure from the liberal community, which was his principal constituency, to support the Republican Loyalists in Spain, the leftist parliamentary majority that resisted the fascist rebels led by Franco and were generally known as the Nationalists.

  About two-thirds of Americans supported Franco’s Republicans, who were very anti-clerical, but four-fifths of American Roman Catholics supported Roosevelt and almost 90 percent of them supported the Nationalists. Ever mindful of the need to preserve the strength of his governing coalition of American voting blocs, Roosevelt was privately happy enough to acquiesce in the naïve meddling of congressional isolationists; he did not judge Spain a sufficiently important issue, nor so clear a choice of preferred outcomes, to strain the unity of his party. Roosevelt went to great lengths to keep the Roman Catholic community, almost a quarter of Americans, and especially their episcopal leadership, on board. When Chicago’s George Cardinal Mundelein arrived by ship in Naples for an ad limina visit to the pope, Roosevelt had the U.S. ambassador’s train convey him to Rome, and on one occasion a visiting U.S. naval squadron at Naples fired a 17-gun salute in his honor, on orders from the president, via the navy secretary.

  The battle lines were already being drawn between Roosevelt’s view that the best guarantee of peace was to arm America and support the democracies, and the isolationist view that no belligerent should be supported and that any defense beyond an adequate navy was excessive and somehow an incitement to war. The absurdity of the isolationist position and the president’s unfailing skill at rallying opinion were bound to tell, but Roosevelt trod warily, but artfully, through the late thirties.

  In 1936, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler occupied the Rhineland militarily, and the French and Belgians did nothing. Roosevelt wrote a close cousin that if France did not occupy Germany up to the Rhine, “in two years, Germany will be stronger than France and it will be too late.”101 The British and the French rightly pointed out that all Roosevelt could supply was exhortations to a strong and hazardous policy by them, not tangible assistance. But Roosevelt responded, to the ambassadors of both countries, that he could not possibly rouse American opinion against Nazi and fascist aggression if the British and the French supinely accepted it. As always, geography, which put America far from any possible rival, was as friendly to it as it was unfriendly to the comparatively gentle countries that were proximate to Germany and Russia.

  4. ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM

  The Republicans met at Cleveland in June 1936, and nominated Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas for president and former Cuba Rough Rider and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, Colonel Frank Knox, for vice president. Their platform attacked the New Deal and accused Roosevelt of running roughshod over the rights of the Congress, of profligate spending, of unconstitutional legislation, and of usurpation of the role of private enterprise. No repeal of key legislation was proposed, though some tax reductions were promised, with unspecified expense reductions. The Democrats met at Philadelphia later in June and renominated Roosevelt and Garner, abolished the requirement of two-thirds approval of nominees (which had bedeviled so many conventions), and supported the administration with intense enthusiasm. In a fighting acceptance speech to more than 60,000 party loyalists in Franklin Field, Roosevelt said that “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  A third party of malcontents of left and right, calling itself the Union Party nominated Republican congressman William Lemke on a platform of conservative populism. The chief inspirations for this grouping had been the colorful and astute boss of Louisiana, governor and senator Huey P. Long, and the Michigan priest with a vast radio audience, Father Charles E. Coughlin. Long had been assassinated in September 1935, but Coughlin became so vituperative in his hostility to Roosevelt that representations were made to Rome. The second-highest figure in the Church (and next pope), Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, spent the entire 1936 election campaign in America, enforcing the Vatican’s gag on partisan commentary by Coughlin.

  Former Democratic presidential nominees John W. Davis and Alfred E. Smith, and Wilson’s last secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, supported Landon, but they were completely passé, and had had little national support anyway. In a New York campaign wind-up at Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt excoriated the familiar bogeymen of war profiteers, economic royalists, and so forth, claimed to “welcome their hatred,” and promised that he had “only just begun to fight.” The issue was never really in doubt, and Landon was reduced to claiming that the government would default on Social Security payments. Roosevelt parried his assailants by claiming to be a “true conservative” saving the free enterprise system by repairing its inequities. Roosevelt knew that America had to have generally contented working and agrarian classes or there would be civil disorder and chronic social injustice and wastage of human resources. On election day, he was returned to office in one of the greatest victories in the country’s history, 27.8 million votes (61 percent) and 523 electoral votes to 16.7 million votes (37 percent) and 8 electoral votes (Maine and Vermont) for Landon and 892,000 (2 percent) for Lemke. Roosevelt, who had gained strength in both houses of the Congress in the 1934 midterm elections, did so again in 1936, for the fourth consecutive time. He was deemed to have defeated the Depression and had an immense mandate to enact the rest of his program.

  In America, at least, democratic leadership was vigorous and purposeful, a strong rival in world opinion to the endless claims of success and predestination of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. These were the most arresting leaders of the Great Powers. To reinforce his insistence on repulse of totalitarian influences in the Americas, Roosevelt attended the Buenos Aires Inter-American Conference in December, and went on to Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, and was received by huge and wildly enthusiastic crowds in all three capitals. In his speeches there he celebrated inter-American solidarity in the rejection of any aggressive extra-hemispheric intrusions. When Brazilian president Getulio Vargas told Roosevelt as they motored through heavy crowds in Rio that some of his compatriots accused him of being a dictator, Roosevelt replied: �
�So do some of mine.” He assigned Welles to negotiate agreements with Vargas to displace any German influence in Brazil, and the United States declined to criticize Vargas’s assumption of nearly dictatorial powers in 1937, and pledged substantial economic assistance, effectively conditional upon the expulsion of any pro-German predilections, conditions that were accepted in treaties concluded in 1939. (Roosevelt’s suspicions of the ambitions of Germany were confirmed when he encountered an old German battleship in the Caribbean as he returned on his ship from Rio; his disquietude was only slightly alleviated when the German bridge noted the presidential standard flown by Roosevelt’s heavy cruiser, and sent all hands on deck in formation, and came about, and respectfully fired a 21-gun salute as Roosevelt’s squadron passed.)102

  The principal issue in the first year of the new term was Roosevelt’s assault on the Supreme Court, which had overturned key measures of the New Deal. Roosevelt was happy enough to see the last of the National Industrial Recovery Act, with its industrial codes and unenforceable regulations, but he was concerned that the justices might attack Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority, two of the greatest legislative accomplishments of his government. He produced the Judiciary Reorganization Bill, which called for the expansion of the Supreme Court from nine to up to 15 justices if the incumbents declined to retire at age 70; the addition of up to 50 judges of other federal courts; the direct evocation to the Supreme Court of all constitutional challenges to federal legislation; automatic rights of government attorneys to be heard in such cases; and the assignment of additional district judges to clear overcrowded dockets.

  This started out as a measure to alleviate overworked judges, but as it ran into difficulties in the Congress, Roosevelt took over direct championship of it and aggressively attacked the Supreme Court as a band of superannuated reactionaries who had no idea of the powers necessary for the Congress and the administration to defend the country against the ravages of the economic crisis, or to enact social policy for which there was a wide national consensus. One of the most conservative justices, Willis Van Devanter, retired, and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Social Security and a number of other New Deal measures. Roosevelt could have added a couple of justices, but he did not move until after the Senate majority leader, Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas (vice presidential candidate with Smith in 1928), died on July 14, 1937. Roosevelt agreed to some procedural reforms but abandoned the expansion of the courts. This fracas opened up deep fissures within the governing coalition, and slowed the momentum of Roosevelt’s legislative program. But he had the pleasure of appointing seven of the nine justices in the next four years, and the Supreme Court caused him no more problems.

  On October 5, 1937, on his way back by train from a trip to Hawaii, Roosevelt addressed a giant crowd of 750,000 people in Chicago and called for a “quarantine” of aggressive states. He espoused collective security by the democracies, and in a tactic that he was to pursue successfully for several years, he went out well ahead of public opinion, denied that anything had changed, and waited for opinion to close in behind him. The atmosphere was further inflamed on December 12, 1937, when the Japanese, as was clear from film shot by Americans, deliberately attacked the American gunboat Panay in a Chinese river, killing two Americans and wounding 30. Hull demanded a formal apology, reparations, and believable assurances that there would be no further provocations, on December 14, and the Japanese complied entirely the same day. The talented U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew, another school chum of Roosevelt’s, had already protested against Japanese violations of the wilted heirloom of the dying months of the previous century, the Open Door. The Japanese had the candor to reply on November 18 that the Open Door was an “inapplicable” dead letter, and Hull responded on the last day of the year that the United States did not recognize what Tokyo and Berlin (who were allied, along with Italy, as of November 1936) called “the new order.” (Roosevelt, who was the real leader of resistance to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo “Axis,” said: “It is not new, and it is not order.”)

  The new domestic political configuration was revealed in the controversy over the Ludlow Resolution in January 1938, which called for a constitutional amendment requiring a national referendum before war could be declared, other than after an invasion of the territory of the United States or its territories. Polls indicated that over 70 percent of Americans favored the measure, but Roosevelt violently attacked it as likely to facilitate the violation of “American rights with impunity,” and it was rejected.

  Roosevelt had always been reticent about deficit spending and only engaged in it to the extent he thought necessary for alleviating the Depression. Following the 1936 election victory, he endorsed the budget-balancing faction in his party, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and many of the southern Democrats in the Congress whom he now needed to support his foreign and defense policy. The workfare programs were scaled back in the hope that the private sector could now pick up the slack, but a relapse occurred and continued into 1938, in which the unemployment rolls again grew by several million. In April 1938, having given this policy option what he considered a fair try, Roosevelt relaunched the New Deal and immediately increased the public works and conservation employment programs by 1.5 million people, devoted up to $6 billion to new spending programs, and made the first of many major increases in defense outlays, including $1 billion for new battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers, totaling about 1.25 million tons of new heavy warships. There were also tax reductions on business, sponsored by Roosevelt’s adversaries but unopposed by him, in May 1938. All this activity quickly induced a resumption of economic growth and employment, and the ground lost was all regained and more by late 1939.

  5. RISING TENSIONS IN EUROPE

  In March 1938, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy passed an important test when Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the American and British oil companies in Mexico. Hull, on Roosevelt’s instruction, made it clear that he had no objection as long as reasonable compensation was paid. This was in marked contrast to the histrionics of the British, who threatened reprisals, although American sensibilities and international realities prevented them from going too far with such threats. Cárdenas expressed great relief and repeatedly praised Roosevelt in public, the first such occurrence in the 115-year history of relations between the two countries. Roosevelt was mindful of the complaint of his warmongering old friend Smedley Butler, ex-commandant of the Marine Corps, that he had been deployed around Latin America by American fruit and mining companies. He would end this system. Roosevelt had also approved a timetable for the independence of the Philippines in 1935, and Manuel Quezon was elected the country’s first president. It was intended that full independence would be achieved on July 4, 1946.

  Also in March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. It was clear from the almost delirious reception given him when he returned to the country of his birth that very many Austrians, and likely a sizeable majority, agreed to absorption of the truncated state into the German Reich. There had been a contentious meeting between Hitler and the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, who made massive concessions to Hitler’s bullying but announced a referendum when he returned to Vienna. Hitler professed to find this intolerable, and when Mussolini, who had blocked a German takeover of the country in 1934, approved Hitler’s action, Germany invaded and met no resistance. Hitler gave a fiery speech to a wildly enthusiastic crowd packed into the square in front of the Imperial Hotel, where he had worked as a sweeper of floors and steps for the coming and going grandees of the capital of the Habsburg Empire 25 years before. Again, the British and French failed even to protest. Roosevelt, on his own authority, gave asylum to 17,000 Austrians, many of them Jews, whose passports were canceled by Germany. (It was 88 years since Daniel Webster had dismissed the Habsburg Empire as trivial and decrepit in the Hülsemann letter. Chapter 5).

  Seizing Austria had merely whetted Hitler’s appetite, and there was not
the briefest respite before he began demanding the integration into the Reich of the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. His technique was to single out an offending neighboring country, especially if it had an irredentist German population that he would claim was being mistreated, as he did with the Sudetenland, like a lion selecting a wildebeest, then to terrorize it with belligerent speeches and threats and military maneuvers, and then to demand concessions (that usually meant the effective demise of the target country). In the spring of 1938, it was the turn of the Czechs, and Hitler started ramping up his complaints and demands.

  Czechoslovakia was an artificial state sliced out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the Paris Conference; Bohemia and Moravia (Czechs) and Slovakia were patched together in an elongated country that stretched from Bavaria to the Soviet border. It included approximately two million Sudeten Germans in the western tip of the country, adjacent to Germany, and in territory where the Czechs had built extensive fortifications, foreseeing from whence a challenge to the new country might come. There was no doubt that most of the Sudetenlanders preferred to be in Germany, but there was no significant discrimination against them where they were. Czechoslovakia and Austria were the only countries sliced out of the Habsburg Empire that were serious functioning democracies.