In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

The Allies and the United States won a victory, but it was not, for America or Americans, a success. As a rough and generalized truth to which obviously there were many exceptions, the wartime experience of Americans was that they were too late. The economy was not mobilized in time to supply even the AEF with war matériel; the tanks and planes and ships were not ready to be sent out until 1919, when the war was over. Three-quarters of the American army had yet to see combat when the firing ceased. Even the quarter of the army who had been in the front lines had been there, for the most part, only for a few days; they had just arrived.

  So the war was over before the Americans could really get to it. The typical experiences were those of Eisenhower, in waiting for a year and a half to get orders sending him overseas and then having the orders canceled, or of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Eisenhower had trained, actually boarding ship at an American port before being sent back ashore.

  During their training at army camps in the United States, the young civilians who were becoming soldiers had acquired an aura of romance on which they traded at dance parties with the local girls. They had received romantic favors because they were going off to fight, perhaps to die. Posturing for family and friends, they had written letters (and the tone of letters and diaries from the period is indeed, or at least seems so now, stiff and self-conscious) filled with heroic sentiments. And then it had not happened after all!—so that in a sense, and through no fault of their own, they had been made into frauds.

  Fitzgerald’s regrets (he wrote later in The Crack-Up) “at not getting overseas during the war† … resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism.…”

  The regrets and the dreams were widespread; for the overwhelming majority of Americans who aspired to glory, it had not been a satisfying war. Nor had it been satisfying for the handful who had aimed at winning glory at the peace table rather than on the battlefield; indeed, for men like Lippmann and Bullitt, the First World War experience had been even more deeply disillusioning and embittering.

  But—and it helps explain Kennan’s observation about how electrifying the experience had been—it was a time when, for themselves, for their country, and for the world, Bullitt and the others had felt that everything was possible. In part it was because they were young, and in part it was because the war had destroyed so much of the old order in Europe as to make any new political scheme seem possible. Bullitt could believe he would usher in a world of justice and peace, John Reed could believe he would lead a world revolution, and F. Scott Fitzgerald could believe he was going to win fame as a war hero.

  One could become anyone, one could invent oneself: hence the great Gatsby. The excitement, the (in Kennan’s word) “electrifying” aspect of the experience, was that anything might happen. The special sensitivity to life’s possibilities, ascribed by Fitzgerald to Gatsby, was shared at that time by the generation to which Gatsby would have belonged.

  So two central experiences that shaped the emotional life of the generation were the excitement of having once lived through a magical time of limitless possibilities, and the bitter disappointment that so much that seemed possible had not in fact happened.

  TO HIDE THE HURT and the disappointment, they became tough. They learned the racy idiom of the gangster language that later—in the late 1920s and the 1930s—was picked up out of the gutters of the big cities by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The attitudes and postures they assumed were portrayed in the years to come by actors who played the role of tough guys in motion picture films: George Raft, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart.

  The overwhelming majority of Americans, including such responsible souls as Walter Lippmann, were going to watch terrible things happen throughout Europe during the 1930s while strongly protesting that they were not going to intervene: they were not going to fight anybody else’s battles.

  It was only much later that their political attitude was embodied on the screen—by Humphrey Bogart playing Rick in Casablanca (1942). “I stick out my neck for nobody,” he says. “I’m the only cause I’m interested in.” That was what the speakeasy generation had to say throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Victims of one catastrophe after another appealed for help, but Americans who had lost their faith either on the western front or in the plague year in Paris chose to stand aside: it was none of their concern. The personification of the generation was Rick, at the bar of a gin joint with only a shot of whiskey for company, closing his eyes to the wickedness closing in on civilization—or it was Bullitt, in the public rooms of the Crillon in Paris, bragging that he was going to do nothing but “watch the world go to hell.”

  * Earlier Pershing had cooled to the idea of marrying Patton’s sister, as he had long intended to do.

  † Ernest Hemingway, who always was competing against Fitzgerald, could brag of having been wounded in the war. But he was wounded in the course of a tame activity: distributing chocolate candies.

  PART SIX

  AMERICA GOES IT ALONE

  36

  THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

  THE WORLDWIDE BINGE of the 1920s had been America’s party. Round after round of drinks had been served to everyone in the house; but as Europe had lost its money in the war, it always was the United States that picked up the bill.

  Although America’s agriculture was in trouble, few saw the danger that a rural recession might pose for the rest of the economy, which boomed. A historian of the era tells us that “during the second half of the twenties the United States, with about 3 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 46 percent of its total industrial output. During the same period it produced 70 percent of the world’s oil and 40 percent of its coal.” It invested some of its profits abroad, largely in the form of short-term loans that kept Europe financially afloat. The Allies, impoverished by the war, had tried to recoup by forcing Germany to pay them a fortune in reparations; while the Germans, ruined by the peace settlement, borrowed from America the money to pay the Allies. So the countries of postwar Europe lived on America’s riches, passing around the largesse from one to the other.

  Then American investors and speculators lost their money in the Wall Street crash of 1929.* They no longer could afford to lend, so they did not renew Europe’s IOUs as they became due. As Europeans had little money of their own, the liquidity to finance world trade evaporated. The Congress believed it could save the American economy by keeping out competition; it enacted the protectionist Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which ironically helped to make everyone poorer, including the United States. America was going it alone.

  ON NOVEMBER 21, 1930, Douglas MacArthur—“a dashing, fascinating figure,” according to The New York Times—was sworn in as chief of staff of the U.S. Army, the eighth person in history to fill that position. His mother glowed in admiration of the four stars that denoted his new rank: “If only your father could see you now! Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be.”

  The fifty-year-old general and his mother moved into the chief’s redbrick mansion house, Quarters Number One, at Fort Myer in Virginia, across the Potomac from the capital city. He took luncheon with her there every day. His devotion to his mother was striking; More Merry-Go-Round, an anonymous book of political gossip, remarked that “he takes as good care of his mother as she once took of him.” But on his own side of the Potomac, in an apartment and later in a Washington hotel suite only a few blocks from his office, he kept an exquisite Eurasian mistress from the Philippines to whom he was “Daddy.”

  The habits of personal life he had brought back from the Far East tended to arouse distrust. From ancient history he ought to have remembered that the foreign tastes Caesar and Antony acquired in Egypt were held against them back in Rome; it was feared that they had forgotten their virtuous republican principles. MacArthur therefore should have known that his un-American ways would excite comment. It became common knowledge that in his office he dressed in the flowing comfort of a ceremonial Japanese kimono. More Merry-Go-Round reported, too, that �
�he uses a small Japanese fan, and an assortment of long ivory cigarette holders are always on his desk. Either through nervousness or affectation he uses a fresh holder with each cigarette.” Disquietingly, the authors added that “in recent years the office of Chief of Staff has come to be that of virtual dictator of the army.” MacArthur, who had started referring to himself in the third person, was not unlike such pharaonic contemporaries as Benito Mussolini. He projected a monumental image of himself by placing behind his office desk a mirror fifteen feet high.

  IN MAY 1931 an event occurred that shook the world: the failure of Austria’s largest bank triggered a European panic. Financial collapse in Germany followed. Great Britain was driven off the gold standard. Climaxing several years of dislocating shocks to the world’s trade and finances, and coming after the 1929 American stock market crash and the 1930 Hawley-Smoot tariff, the Austrian bank failure led within months to the worldwide depression of the 1930s. Economies collapsed; institutions went under, and the financial system disintegrated. Trade between countries ground to a halt. Tens of millions were thrown out of work, while governments tottered.

  In September 1931 MacArthur, after attending army maneuvers in France and Yugoslavia as an official observer, was called home by a crisis of a different sort: Japan, having staged a provocative incident at Mukden as a pretext, had invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria; and the government of President Herbert Hoover was uncertain what to do about it. Protecting the independence and territorial integrity of China had long been America’s doctrine. The doctrine originally had arisen out of a desire to keep the Chinese market open to the United States. It drew its moral strength from ties developed by generations of American missionaries, though it could have been aimed as well (had America’s leaders thought in such terms) at preserving a balance of power in Asia. But it was preachment rather than policy; America was reluctant to take action to back it up.

  MacArthur seems to have been inclined, as Secretary of State Henry Stimson may have been for a time, to impose economic sanctions on Japan. But the President would not hear of it; he felt that the public would not support an action that ran the risk of provoking a war.

  It was a private citizen, Walter Lippmann, who inspired the American response to Japan’s attack. Reading his new column in the New York Herald Tribune (“Today and Tomorrow,” which was syndicated throughout the country) “was becoming a matutinal rite as inevitable as coffee and orange juice,” writes a social historian of the period. In his column, the famous journalist—at the height of his profession and earning the then immense sum of $60,000 a year—proposed that the United States refuse to recognize the territorial changes brought about by Japanese aggression. After advancing his proposal in public print, Lippmann traveled to Washington to make his case in person to Hoover and Stimson. In the end they agreed and promulgated it; it became known as “the Stimson doctrine.”

  It would be wrong “even to consider the coercion of Japan,” Lippmann wrote. It was curious that he should have thought so; for, driven by ideological and economic imperatives, the Japanese surely were not going to stop unless they were coerced. Of refusing legal recognition, Lippmann wrote, “I don’t see how the policy can fail …”; but Willard Straight could have told him how. Straight had spent much of his young life in the Orient observing Japanese expansionism and warning that the United States would count for nothing in the shaping of Asia’s future—because American words were not followed by deeds.†

  Stimson, having expressed disapproval of Japan’s actions, regarded the episode as closed; he later told New York governor Franklin Roosevelt that there was nothing further to be done. But the episode proved to be no more than a prelude; the forces that drove Japan into Manchuria were to drive her further. A decade later it could be seen that the invasion of Manchuria was the first step on a road that led to Pearl Harbor, and that in one sense, the Second World War began in 1932.‡

  THE PATTERN OF POLITICS that MacArthur observed in Europe as he traveled to observe army maneuvers there in 1931 and again in 1932 was not unlike that in Japan—and was entirely different from that which had been envisioned by Woodrow Wilson when he brought the United States into the European war in 1917. The war had shattered states, governments, economies, and societies; but peace-loving, free-trading democracies had not arisen in their place. Instead the world was moving in the opposite direction. The United States and the Allies at great cost had won the Great War, but the world that had emerged from it was, by 1932, far more dangerous and terrible than the world they had set out to change.

  In Italy the once-socialist adventurer Benito Mussolini, who had taken power in 1922, had become dictator in 1926, giving the postwar world a new word: fascisti (the plural of fascio, a “bundle,” used to signify his bundles of supporters). The Russian revolutions, which had aroused so many false hopes, by 1922 had led to the primacy of Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin and, by the 1930s, to his totalitarian dictatorship. Stalin, even more than Mussolini, exerted a pull on loyalties outside the frontiers of his own country; and communism and fascism, despite or because of their similarities, were seen as rivals.

  By 1932 eyes had turned to Germany, economically the hardest-hit country in Europe. Versailles had crippled German industrial capacity; by the late 1920s the country’s prosperity was based on the American loans, which were withdrawn after the Wall Street collapse. So in 1932 6 million Germans were unemployed and, though other factors also were involved, were vulnerable to the demonic appeal of Adolf Hitler.

  Among the lesser European powers, dictatorship had become commonplace. Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja had made himself dictator of Spain in 1923. Marshal Józef Piłsudski took power in Poland in 1926. A military revolt in Portugal in 1926 eventually had led to the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Alexander I proclaimed Yugoslavia a royal dictatorship in 1929. Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya ruled Hungary. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, though he encouraged the forms of democracy, served as Turkey’s dictator. The chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, was in the process of destroying the country’s republican government and establishing his own authoritarian regime. Greece was only years away from the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas.

  Republics, parliaments, and politicians were discredited by their ineffectiveness. They were unable to deal with mass unemployment. They proved helpless in the face of the violence introduced into politics by extremists of Right and Left. Traditional society, with its restraints, had been destroyed by the war and the crash. Europe and Japan now lived in a dark age of coups and conspiracies in which ultranationalist killers assassinated the civilian leaders who might stand in their way, gunning down, among others, German foreign minister Walter Rathenau, Bulgarian prime minister Alexander Stamboliski, and Japanese prime minister Osachi Hamaguchi.

  The worldwide communist organization that served as an agency of the Soviet regime fought the militarist-nationalist-fascist networks with their own weapons: deceit, violence, conspiracy, and mass organization. Caught in the crossfire of Right and Left, those in the middle of the road evacuated their position: in large numbers, liberals looked to the Communist party to lead the fight against fascism while conservatives turned to the various fascist movements to protect them against communism. Secret police, street gangs, hired killers, and paramilitary troops replaced the debating hall and the ballot box.

  Europe’s politics were overshadowed by fear. To the extent that the Continent’s most dynamic leaders looked forward, it was to a final conflict that would cleanse Europe of her corruption, however defined. In observing army maneuvers overseas in 1931 and 1932, Douglas MacArthur heard from civilian and military leaders that if Germany went Nazi, there would be a war.

  In Great Britain, even though pacifist sentiment was strong, there was a party of militarist inclinations that aimed at dictatorship. Sir Oswald Mosley, a charismatic leader and the most creative mind in the Labour government, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 in slavish imit
ation of Hitler and his Nazi party and program.

  MacArthur understated the case in describing the Europe he visited in 1931 and 1932 as “troubled and confused.”

  MAJOR DWIGHT EISENHOWER—“Ike” to practically everyone—lived a life insulated from the world’s troubles. Stationed since 1929 in Washington, D.C., he lived with his wife and son in a block of apartments on Connecticut Avenue near Rock Creek Park. His youngest brother, Milton, who ranked high in the civil service, was a near neighbor; Ike and Mamie often were with Milton and his wife, Helen. The Dwight Eisenhowers also spent a great deal of time with the George Pattons, who were stationed at Fort Myer; the two men, who had plotted tank commander tactics together in the early 1920s, now often played golf together.

  Eisenhower worked under Major General George Van Horn Moseley in the office of the assistant secretary of war. Their job was to plan the mobilization of the American economy in the event of another war; but as nobody (other than a few fringe figures such as Patton) believed the United States would enter into another war, Eisenhower and Moseley lived in a world of their own, engaged in work almost universally regarded as irrelevant. MacArthur’s predecessor had made a point of having no contact with the two officers or their project.

  As chief of staff, MacArthur brought Moseley and Eisenhower back into the center of things. MacArthur was tremendously impressed by Eisenhower, and later was to appoint him as his only aide. It was a period when even MacArthur camouflaged himself by wearing civilian clothes to work, for the country was overwhelmingly antiwar.

  Earning a decent salary in an assured job at a time when prices were low and falling, Ike Eisenhower had no personal experience of what other Americans were going through in 1931 and 1932. Yet even he wrote, after the 1932 elections, that “things are not going to take an upturn until more power is centered in one man’s hands.… For two years I have been called ‘Dictator Ike’ because I believe that virtual dictatorship must be exercised by our President …”—and, he added, “I still believe it!”