The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  March 1936

  Supreme Court challenge to New Deal reaches peak

  Formation of Rome-Berlin Axis

  October 1936

  Reelection campaign

  Sino-Japanese War begins

  July 1937

  Labor strife

  Austrian Anschluss

  March 1938

  Recession

  The men who went down with the Panay were not forgotten, but the time to speak for them had not arrived, as the President had discovered two months before the incident. On the way back from his “look-see” trip he had stopped in Chicago to dedicate the Outer Link Bridge, a PWA project. He stayed overnight in the home of George William, Cardinal Mundelein, the first prelate to speak against totalitarianism. (It was Mundelein who had called Hitler “an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that.”) Next day, in his dedication speech, Roosevelt floated a trial balloon: “The epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. 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.” Peace-loving nations, he said, must act in concert with other nations of the world community. The colorful homily was typical of him. It caught the country’s attention, as he had hoped, but the howls of protest were deafening. Editorials and his personal mail charged him with warmongering. Quarantine aggressors? It sounded like Woodrow Wilson. A typical wire to the White House read, IF YOU “HATE” WAR DO NOT TRY TO INCITE IT BY SUCH APPEALS. He had touched one of the country’s most sensitive nerves. Overnight he was driven to the defensive. Later he confided to a friend, “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and to find no one there.”

  Some of his constituents were there. Cardinal Mundelein was; so were Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York and Henry L. Stimson, who had been Hoover’s Secretary of State. After the quarantine proposal was shot down, Stimson wrote, “Mr. Roosevelt seemed to conclude that the country was not ready for strong political medicine.” Certainly the President was warier. Although the League of Nations condemned Japanese aggression, the State Department blandly joined Japanese diplomats in a conference on the situation in the Far East, which could hardly be construed as an act of quarantine. Ickes thought the President had “the appearance of a man who had more or less given up.”

  It was deceptive. The quality of FDR’s leadership was complex, and consistency was not his strong suit. He was no Winston Churchill, a lone voice in the darkness. He had to remain in the cockpit of action, and therein lay his genius: he rarely let the distance between himself and the American consensus grow too wide. But he never retracted the quarantine speech. On the contrary, he quietly hewed to the same line. On December 21 he said American isolation from the twentieth century was impossible—he wouldn’t want peace at any price—and in Kingston, Ontario, he promised that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were attacked.

  Every now and then he reaffirmed his hatred of war, or even claimed credit for neutrality legislation which he detested. He was the first President since Wilson to assert American presence in world affairs, and he was making his historic pivot when isolationist enthusiasm stood at flood tide. Any presidential move abroad, in any direction, provoked outcries. Liberal senators of both parties—Wheeler, Hiram Johnson, Pittman, Borah—were united in their stand for Fortress America. To Borah diplomacy was “power politics.” Time, then staunchly isolationist, expressed anxiety over “Roosevelt’s bent for international power politics,” admired Borah, and for a time carried all foreign news under the standing head “Power Politics.” Americans who had fought Franco in Spain lost their passports. American firms continued to provide half of Japan’s oil and scrap iron needs—without which the war with China would have been impossible—and the National Council for the Prevention of War even tried to ban newsreels of the sinking Panay because they had “the unquestioned effect of arousing the American temper.”

  These were the months when the Dies committee discovered that the New Deal was Communistic while ignoring Father Coughlin, who gave a Nazi salute at a rally in the Bronx and shouted, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” Dies seemed to be blind to the activities of the Coughlin “Crusaders,” the Citizen’s Protective League, the Christian Front, American Patriots, Inc., and the German-American Bund. Right-wing organizations were trying to intimidate Congress, and sometimes they succeeded; the House rejected Roosevelt’s request for funds to defend Guam because Tokyo might interpret it as a provocative gesture. At the final vote, 205 to 168, Congressman-adman Bruce Barton merrily cried out, “Guam, Guam with the wind!” Guam was gone, all right; the Japanese were to seize it the week after Pearl Harbor, and its recapture in August 1944 would cost the Marine Corps nearly eight thousand casualties.

  Late in April 1937, when Congress extended the Neutrality Act, the New York Times observed editorially, “The passage of this misnamed neutrality bill may mark the high tide of isolationist sentiment in this country.” The Times was too optimistic. The crest came nine months later, in a piece of legislative inanity introduced by Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana. The Ludlow resolution stated that the authority of Congress to declare war could not become effective until confirmed by a majority vote in a nationwide referendum. President Roosevelt wrote Speaker William B. Bankhead that such an amendment would make the conduct of foreign affairs impossible. Nevertheless, a national poll reported that 73 percent of the people favored the idea, and only a second poll, showing support had dropped to 68 percent, sent the resolution back to the committee. At that, the House vote was 209 for the Ludlow resolution and 188 against it. A two-thirds majority being required, the country was saved from a situation in which, as Roosevelt had told Bankhead, other nations could have mistreated the United States with impunity.

  “Democracy is sand driven by the wind,” Mussolini said that year. At times it certainly looked that way. Shackled by neutrality legislation, the State Department watched helplessly while a Japanese general seized Kwangsi province, reached the border of Indochina, and shook hands with a French officer in Lang Son—Lang Son, the mountain pass through which munitions would pour into Vietnam for the next third of a century. Isolationists, always hypersensitive, sometimes seemed paranoid. The President’s simplest moves were misinterpreted. When the king and queen of England decided to visit America (to heal the scars of what was known in polite society as “l’affaire Simpson”), Congressman Hamilton Fish predicted that America would revert to its status as a British colony, Congressman George Holden Tinkham of Boston said that “a sinister secret diplomacy is now directing American foreign policy,” and Senator Borah suggested that the President wait until there was a lull in the conversation and then ask casually when it would be convenient for Their Majesties to repay the $21,385,000,000 borrowed from Americans in 1914–18.

  It is important to remember the character of this opposition. Because of it, and because the President knew America to be in jeopardy, he was caught in a historic dilemma. In the coming months he would be driven to set new precedents—extensions of executive authority which would later be abused by other chief executives who forgot that the power to declare war is vested in Congress. Yet had Roosevelt acted otherwise he would have been false to his oath, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s opinion, and would have deserved impeachment. Unlike critics on the Hill, Roosevelt and Hull had access to European diplomatic cables. In 1938 they saw the Czechoslovakian crisis coming, saw through Hitler, and saw little fiber or imagination in the British and French governments. The fear of another war had infected Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay. Certainly Roosevelt’s Washington was not without its defeatists; in the last fiscal year the Army’s plans for new equipment had been limited to 1,870 more Garand rifles. Perhaps the generals were only being realistic; they would have had a difficult time getting much more on the Hill. Bu
t Roosevelt saw an alternative. The most resolute hard-core isolationist, believing only in Fortress America, conceded the need for a strong Navy. Therefore the President rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on January 28, 1938, and asked for a billion-dollar “two-ocean” Navy.

  He got it, in the Vinson Naval Act. At the same time he sent Hopkins to the Pacific Coast for a survey; he wanted to know how quickly aircraft factories could convert to the production of warplanes. As Hopkins later noted, the President felt certain that war was coming to America “and he believed that air power would win it.” His statement in 1938 that the United States needed 8,000 planes distressed almost everyone, including generals and admirals. An exception was Air Corps General Arnold. Briefing the commander in chief, Arnold had estimated that Germany then had 8,000 bombers and fighters. America had 1,650 pilots, a few hundred obsolete planes, and thirteen B-17s on order, to be delivered at the end of 1938. The general added pointedly that the lead time for modern weapons was very long. Roosevelt gave him the green light for expansion. Without that sanction, Arnold declared after the war, the sky over Normandy could not have been cleared of the Luftwaffe in 1944, and D-Day could not have been scheduled for June 6.

  Lacking a military establishment in those years of the locust, Roosevelt was left with the power of persuasion, which had never been conspicuously successful in increasing the comity of nations. Still, he could try. His attempts to replace aggression with international understanding had failed in Spain and China. Undaunted, he wrote Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proposing a great conference at which treaties would be altered without resorting to force and all nations assured access to raw materials. Chamberlain declined. He had his own plan. Roosevelt’s conference, he replied, would merely undermine Great Britain’s new policy to grant “a measure of appeasement” to the dictators.

  He didn’t say how large the measure would be, but the world was about to find out. In the spring of 1938 the German Führer screamed that Germans living in the Sudetenland—mountainous, heavily fortified Czech territory along the German frontier—were being mistreated. Goebbels further accused Prague of harboring Soviet warplanes and permitting the Russians to build airdromes on Czechoslovakian soil. Despite Czech protests, these accusations were repeated, and at the height of the Nazi campaign of denunciation, former President Thomas Masaryk died. Prague police suppressed Sudeten demonstrations during the funeral, Sudeten deputies boycotted the Czech parliament, and Hitler rattled his saber. Suddenly Europe was in the middle of a desperate crisis—and the American public, thanks to radio, had a ringside seat.

  There had been few precedents for the transatlantic radio coverage of contemporary history. NBC and CBS had sent home shortwave summaries of the London Naval Conference of 1930; six BBC announcers had described the coronation of George VI; early in 1938 London and Chicago had exchanged signals; and that same year Americans heard their first coast-to-coast broadcast, between Al Goodman’s orchestra in New York and W. C. Fields in Hollywood. Regularly scheduled commentators such as Lowell Thomas and rapid-fire Floyd Gibbons (he delivered a fantastic 217 words a minute) took their material right off the wire service tickers. CBS didn’t even have a regular Washington correspondent; when one was needed, Senator Lewis B. Schwellenbach filled in. There had been nothing approaching serious radio coverage of a big European story until the Nazis lunged into Austria six months before the Czech crisis. With all Europe in an uproar, Paul White, a CBS executive in New York, called William L. Shirer in London and asked for a half-hour Paris-Rome-Berlin-Vienna-London “roundup.” He asked, “Can you do it?”

  There was every reason to say no. Ed Murrow was six hundred miles away in Vienna, and with the German armies marching, vital lines could be cut at any time. Shirer and Murrow would have to recruit inexperienced commentators in five great capitals, hire engineers, lease transmitters, and coordinate a live broadcast down to the second. Furthermore, there was almost no time. New York wanted the roundup that evening—and the day was a Sunday; offices were closed, technicians were on holiday, and responsibility for communications was in the hands of caretakers who had no authority and could scarcely understand sophisticated radio jargon in their own language, let alone in English. Technically the challenge was almost insurmountable. The very idea was madness. Shirer said they would try.

  He got through to Murrow, who was watching gangs of Seyss-Inquart thugs racing between the chestnut trees and shouting, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” Bit by bit the two young Americans put a skeletal framework together: Frank Gervasi of INS in Rome, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News in Paris, a newspaper friend of Shirer’s in Berlin, and a lady M.P. who agreed to leave her weekend in the country and speak from a BBC studio. All transmitting problems were solved except Rome’s—the Italians couldn’t figure out a way to “landline” Gervasi’s voice across the Swiss border to a big transmitter in Geneva. They could put him through to London via radiophone, however, so he read his account from a booth, and Shirer reread it to New York. Such were the humble beginnings of the world news “roundup,” with all its implications for the future and American public opinion.

  In July 1914 Karl von Wiegand of the United Press had cabled 138 words on Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia which set off World War I, and he had been reprimanded for wasting money. Now, despite the strength of isolationism, Americans wanted to know what was happening overseas. There was a lull in late spring; the Czechs stood firm and Hitler backed down, agreeing to negotiations. His absorption of Austria, however, had altered the strategic complexion of central Europe; the expanded Reich now threatened Czechoslovakia from three sides. Prague continued to be refractory, and thus an embarrassment to England and France, who were committed to the Czechs by treaty and were beginning to wish they weren’t. But the talks dragged on all summer. Apparently nothing was going to happen.

  ***

  Then came the German chancellor’s September 12 address to the annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg. As Variety explained, America’s two big networks were handling the event differently. NBC would carry the speech live, but had adopted a policy of “playing down the current agitation and tension in Europe.” CBS decided it was history and built it up. On that Monday morning CBS announcers reminded listeners that “the entire civilized world is anxiously awaiting the speech of Adolf Hitler, whose single word may plunge all of Europe into another world war.” At 2:15 P.M. an announcer cut into the net to say, “We interrupt the program of Enoch Light in order to bring our listeners the world-awaited talk on Germany’s foreign policy to be delivered by Adolf Hitler to the Nazi Congress at Nuremberg…. We take you now to Nuremberg, Germany.” The address, relayed by a shortwave station in Berlin, came through clearly. Next day Variety was to comment: “A dynamic, spellbinding speaker, the broadcast was most impressive when he worked up the thousands of Nazis in attendance to frenzied cheers, ‘Heil Hitlers’ and ‘Sieg Heils’ (‘Hail Victory’).”

  Kurt Heiman of CBS’s New York staff translated passages of the address as it ran along, with some help from Kurt von Forstmeyer in Nuremberg. Variety complained that NBC’s man “appeared to be soft-pedaling” and that he refrained from editorial comment. CBS’s commentary came from an obscure, sixty-year-old Harvard graduate of German descent named Hans von Kaltenborn. At 3:36 P.M., after Hitler had finished speaking, Kaltenborn came on with a thorough analysis: “Adolf Hitler has spoken and the world has listened…. There was in it, and through it all, a very definite declaration that Germany would no longer tolerate the oppression, as he called it, of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, and that Czechoslovakia would have to reach a settlement with the Sudeten Germans or the Germans would see to it that a settlement was reached.” Kaltenborn didn’t miss a detail, noting all such new information as Hitler’s revelation that 280,000 Germans were working around the clock on the Siegfried Line.

  American newspapers, which had not yet come to terms with radio journalism, published special editions when a big story broke. The
se were hurriedly printed and newsboys were sent into the streets calling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Suddenly they were on every corner shouting about mobilization in Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, France, and England. Great troop movements were under way. Fleets were at sea. Aircraft had been sent to camouflage fields. Smudged newsprint photographs showed Chamberlain, always carrying an umbrella, scooting back and forth between Godesberg, Berchtesgaden, and London. English children carrying tiny gas masks were being taken into the country, Frenchmen were digging trenches in public parks, and Europe was expected to burst into flame at any moment.

  Millions of Americans, hearing Hitler for the first time over shortwave, were shaken by the depth of his hatred; on his lips the Teutonic language sounded cruel, dripping with venom. Those fluent in German—Franklin Roosevelt was one—could take it straight. The rest depended upon translators, and especially on CBS’s chief analyst, who, Variety reported, was drawing “the greatest and most profoundly interested listening audience in radio history, next to the English king’s abdication address.” It was an exhausting ordeal for a man of Kaltenborn’s age. During eighteen days starting that Monday he delivered eighty-five extemporaneous broadcasts from Studio Nine on the seventeenth floor of the CBS Building in New York, dozing on a deskside cot whenever the tension eased. On the nineteenth day he emerged, rumpled, haggard, and with a slight alteration in his name which had been made earlier because of the public animosity toward Germany. He was now plain H. V. Kaltenborn, and at that moment he was one of the most famous men in the United States.

  ***

  At 7:30 that Monday evening, when the Czechoslovakian countdown began, Robert Trout had taken over the CBS network:

  TROUT: Tonight, as nations of the world digest the long-anticipated talk of Chancellor Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg, we will hear in rapid succession from London, Berlin, Prague, and Paris…. The four speakers are to be: Edward R. Murrow, chief of Columbia’s European staff, speaking from London; Melvin Whiteleather of the Associated Press, speaking from Berlin; William L. Shirer, Columbia’s Central European representative, speaking from Prague; and John T. Whitaker, of the Chicago Daily News Syndicate, speaking from Paris. Mr. Murrow will speak to you from London, England….