In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  As in the good-neighbor policy, FDR was turning away from the approaches adopted by earlier administrations. Sending in the marines was the wrong thing to do when a Caribbean people chose a leader the President of the United States disliked. Refusing to recognize that a communist regime governed the Soviet Union was the wrong way to deal with a reality of which any participant in world politics would have to take account.

  While taking a more constructive approach to international affairs, FDR at the same time was advancing America’s national security interests. The good-neighbor policy helped make the Western Hemisphere more secure for the United States, and the recognition of Russia, with its implied warning to Japan, helped mitigate the threat to U.S. interests in the Pacific.

  This indeed was a foreign policy pursued at minimum cost. It was all the foreign policy the President felt the United States could afford while he devoted full time and resources to pulling America out of the Depression. But in life, if not in theory, it often happens that dangers materialize before we are ready for them. So it was in 1933. FDR was not to be given the time to cure the Depression before dealing with mortal dangers from outside. He was going to be called upon to save the country at home and abroad—at the same time.

  SECRETARY OF LABOR Frances Perkins, who had been a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet since Albany days, asked the President in 1933 to propose American membership in the International Labor Organization. He authorized her to take the initiative, but told her to stress that the ILO was distinct from the League of Nations. He cautioned her to work with Hull and with those in the Congress who took an interest in foreign affairs, and to keep in mind that she must avoid Wilson’s mistakes.

  In October 1933 FDR sent for ILO director Harold Butler, whom he had met in 1919. “I’m going to join the I.L.O.,” Roosevelt told him, but he could not say when. In politics timing is everything, he said. Throwing back his head and giving his roar of a laugh, the President said that “if you got your timing right you could do anything.”

  * For domestic political reasons, these were pledges that Roosevelt had to obtain; but it is not clear whether he ever expected the Soviets to honor them. Bullitt, who harbored illusions that the President did not, fully expected the Russians to keep their word, and was furious when it became clear years later that they had no intention of doing so.

  † Previous envoys had held ministerial rather than ambassadorial rank.

  40

  UNPREPAREDNESS AS A NATIONAL POLICY

  BERLIN. MIDDAY ON MONDAY, January 30, 1933. Eighty-four-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers (“Nazi”) party, chancellor of Germany. On February 3 Hitler went to the apartments of the army’s commander in chief to tell the assembled commanders of the German armed forces that, in disregard of the Treaty of Versailles, he would embark on a program of massive rearmament. He was going to claim in public that his aim in doing so was to solve the unemployment problem with which Germany, like other industrial industries, was plagued.* But in truth it was not in order to solve an economic problem that Hitler proposed to build a war machine; it was in order to wage war.

  Like many and perhaps most of his countrymen, Hitler desired to annex those neighboring territories in which large German minority populations were now ruled by others. Like the kaiser’s ministers during the First World War, he hoped to control Belgium and destroy the power of the French state. Like the younger Moltke, he pictured the politics of central and eastern Europe as a battle between Germans and Slavs.

  But for him these goals were mere stepping-stones: preliminaries to the real struggle to achieve what he saw as Germany’s destiny. For while his ranting and raving might sound incoherent, he brought with him, from the stagnant cesspools of race hatred in which he had been generated, an outlook different from that of the conservatives and reactionaries who were his political rivals on the Right. What was distinctive in Hitler’s vision was indicated by the name of his party newspaper: Volkischer Beobachter—“The Racist Observer.” Racism was not just his bias, but the core of his agenda; it was not a mere rhetoric, but a program of action. He proclaimed that Germans were not a nation, but a race—and not just a race, but the superior race. To realize itself, the German race would have to do three things: give total obedience to himself as its one leader (“fuehrer”); destroy the evil within it and purify its bloodstream by rooting out—by murdering, in the end—everyone of Jewish ancestry; and expand its living space by conquering eastern Europe and western Russia, killing or enslaving the Slavs who lived in those lands. Whether Hitler had formulated a further goal of world domination, for which he was to bid in 1941, is still debated, but it was at least implicit in his concept of the master race.

  When Hitler was appointed chancellor, Franz von Papen, his vice chancellor, was not alone in believing that the Nazi leader could and would be tamed, used (“We have hired him,” sneered von Papen), and then discarded. But like Lenin after the coup that brought him to power in Russia, Hitler moved immediately (through Hermann Goering, Prussian minister of the interior) to establish an overwhelming secret political police force to terrorize dissenters into submission. Within a year Hitler had destroyed Germany’s federal, parliamentary, and constitutional structure and taken full power into his own hands as dictator.

  The new German chancellor had been in office only several months, and the new American President only several weeks, when Roosevelt told the departing French ambassador to the U.S. that the situation in Germany was “alarming” and that “Hitler is a madman and his counsellors, some of whom I know personally, are even madder than he is.” But uncertain of Hitler’s ultimate intentions, the leaders of Germany’s neighbors were not so sure. Dismissing what Hitler and his lieutenants said and wrote as mere blustering and posturing, from 1932 until 1939 they would see in his step-by-step overthrow of the Treaty of Versailles—and in his annexation of neighboring German-inhabited territories—no more than what any normal mainstream politician would have aimed at accomplishing. Moreover, in their hearts western Europeans agreed that it was right for Germany to win on these issues, for by the 1930s it was widely admitted that the arrangements arrived at in Versailles in 1919 were in every sense indefensible.

  It was only in 1939, after Germany had taken all that could be viewed as hers by right, that the point was reached when a mainstream nationalist leader ought to have stopped—but that Hitler did not. It was only then that he proved by actions as well as words that he was not the man-you-can-do-business-with that Europeans had hoped he was; that instead he was the megalomaniac racist his writings and speeches proclaimed him to be. It was only then that there was hard proof that he was going to start a war to conquer Europe—but by then Germany had been rearming for six years, and it was plausible to argue, as defeatists did everywhere, that it was too late to stop him.

  To be strong enough to have deterred Hitler, Germany’s neighbors would have had to have begun rearming when Hitler did; to have stopped him thereafter, they would have had to have gone at least to the brink of war—and perhaps over it. But the democracies in the interwar years were unwilling to undertake such full-blooded policies. Everything they had learned in the trenches and on the slaughtering fields of the western front in 1914–18 disposed them not to do so.

  They thought that their experience had shown them that wars solve nothing. They now saw the 1914–18 conflict as one of the most terrible and costly mistakes of all time. For even from the point of view of Great Britain and the United States, countries that had won the Great War, the world was worse off than it had been before 1914. They had entered the war to defend against what they had believed to be a German assault on Western civilization; they now believed that they had been wrong about that, and were determined not to make the same mistake twice.

  In the words of the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, “Few educated people now believed that the war had been caused by a deliberate German aggression.” Indeed, it wa
s not until the 1960s that Fritz Fischer and his followers began publishing the evidence that some in the inner group of Germany’s leaders consciously had opted for war. “In the general opinion wars started by mistake.… Or they were caused by great armaments. Or they were caused by ‘grievances’; the clear moral here was that these, now predominantly German, should be redressed. Or finally they were caused by ‘capitalism.’ …”

  These British beliefs were shared in the United States, especially (paradoxical though it may seem) in the anti-English regions of the Middle and Far West, where Britain’s desire to disentangle itself from the Continent was paralleled by an American desire to disentangle itself from Britain.

  IN BRITAIN it was only the party out of power—George Lansbury’s socialist Labour party—that believed in disarming unilaterally. In America it had for many years been the policy of the government. The United States had disarmed itself on the ground and in the air, having reduced its army, in particular, to a skeleton force equipped only with antiquated weaponry. Traditionally Americans had believed that military expenditures impoverish a nation, so in the Great Depression, spending money on a military establishment seemed not just unnecessary but ruinous. Moreover, the notion that defense of the country’s interests might require it at some future point to go to war was thought to be wrong morally as well as practically.

  A poll of nearly 20,000 American Protestant clergymen published in 1931 showed 62 percent refusing to sanction or support any future war. Replying as army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur protested that patriotism, which is shown by fighting and perhaps dying for your country, always had gone hand in hand with religion; but he failed to persuade.

  Yet the experience of an international preparatory commission on disarmament that began work in Geneva in May 1926 provided some evidence that the pacifist goal was at best elusive. Members of the commission met and wrangled for five years before adjourning in January 1931 without having accomplished anything of note. Germany, meanwhile, secretly had been rearming the whole time.

  In 1932 the League of Nations called a new Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments. As Roosevelt took office in 1933, it was about to collapse: Hitler had instructed his delegates to agree to nothing that would stand in the way of his planned rearmament program, while France sought an accord that would provide her with security—that is to say, a pact (which the Germans would never accept) to set arms limitations at levels guaranteeing France a substantial margin of superiority over Germany.

  MacArthur offered Roosevelt a suggestion that American delegates to the conference might put forward in order to get the talks back on track: they might distinguish between defensive arms and offensive ones. If everybody would keep only the one kind and destroy the other, every country would be able to defend itself but no country would be able to attack another.

  Though a flawed idea,† it was appealing, and FDR seized upon it. He had been advised that Hitler planned a major address for May 17, 1933, that, unless headed off, might bring down the curtain on the disarmament conference. Roosevelt decided to speak to the peoples of the world, as Wilson would have done. His longtime adviser, Felix Frankfurter, was “excited by your suggestion of appealing, through the heads of states, to the peoples of Europe to save the Disarmament Conference. There is every reason for hoping that the peoples of Europe will respond. [Your address] would touch the imagination and hopes of men everywhere.”

  So on May 12 Roosevelt launched an appeal to the heads of the nations then meeting at the Geneva disarmament conference and at the London economic conference. In it he asserted that there are only two reasons why countries arm themselves. One, felt by “only a small minority” of countries, is a “desire to enlarge their territories.” For the overwhelming majority, however, “the fear of nations that they will be invaded” is the only reason to maintain armed forces. By agreeing to destroy all offensive weapons, the nations of the world could therefore achieve security. They would remain fully able to defend themselves, while at the same time securing the peace by eliminating the weapons that alone make aggression possible.

  Applause greeted the President’s speech everywhere in the world, and he congratulated himself; he told his friend Henry Morgenthau that “I think I have averted a war.” But if he really thought so, he deluded himself—and Morgenthau.

  On reflection, he recognized that since Germany could not be trusted, France should not be expected to disarm; off the record he told reporters at a press conference on August 25 that “if I were a Frenchman and were certain in my own mind that Germany was not living up to treaties, I wouldn’t scrap a thing and neither would any of us.… I would not disarm unless I had assurance that the other fellow is going to disarm.”

  In the autumn Roosevelt wrote to Ambassador Dodd in Berlin that “Walter Lippmann was here last week and made the interesting suggestion that about 8 per cent of the population of the entire world, i.e. Germany and Japan, is able, because of imperialistic attitude, to prevent peaceful guarantees and armament reductions on the part of the other 92 per cent of the world.” This way of looking at it struck the President, who now had a ready explanation for why schemes of general disarmament seem never to work: there are always a few troublemakers who spoil things for all the rest.

  In the autumn of 1933 Germany broke up the disarmament conference. In turn, that deprived FDR of the only excuse the U.S. public deemed valid for pursuing an active foreign policy in Europe.

  ROOSEVELT HAD CAMPAIGNED for the presidency on a platform that called for balancing the federal budget; in office he continued to take the orthodox view that cutting government expenses would restore the economy. So it was a challenging assignment for MacArthur and his aide Ike Eisenhower to persuade the President and the Congress to continue army appropriations at their current levels, low though they were.

  MacArthur and the army made themselves helpful in advancing one of FDR’s most innovative and successful programs: raising and training a civilian corps of unemployed young people to do conservation work in national forests. It was called the Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC. Colonel George Marshall, who established about a dozen and a half CCC camps in and around South Carolina,‡ proved particularly effective in these endeavors. The army was invaluable; in only two months, MacArthur signed up 275,000 recruits, trained them, and sent them to camps in almost every state of the union.

  In turn the CCC and such other New Deal programs as the Civil Works Administration and the Public Works Administration provided extra funding for the army, while other New Deal moneys for the unemployed went into naval construction to build up the fleet. Whether or not in pursuit of a deliberately deceptive plan, the President provided, under the heading of relief funds appropriated as such by Congress, the extra money needed to keep the armed forces in business.

  Considering the immense egotism of a number of the personalities involved, MacArthur developed a good working relationship with the administration. He enjoyed the privileges of an insider: he was allowed to slip into the White House by the back door and was accorded direct access to the President. But he was not able to fathom FDR, nor was he able to read what was in Roosevelt’s mind in regard to the issue that affected him personally: his future as chief of staff after 1934, when his term of duty was believed to run out.

  Contrary to the general view, there was no fixed term to the position (although people assumed it to be a four-year job, to which nobody had ever been reappointed). In the spring of 1934 MacArthur suddenly feared that he had lost his chance to stay on. Along with the war secretary, he had met Roosevelt to protest the Budget Bureau’s proposal to cut army appropriations for the next fiscal year; and carried away, in words repeated endlessly ever since by biographers and historians, he had abused and insulted the President.§

  As he denounced his commander in chief to his face, the general was seized by the nervous cramps that often came upon him when with surface calm he displayed reckless courage. The result was
the exchange of comments with the secretary of war that MacArthur later recorded. Though FDR had rebuked MacArthur, he had shown a willingness to compromise on the budget issue—and the secretary of war congratulated MacArthur:

  SECRETARY: “You’ve saved the Army!”

  MACARTHUR (trembling and retching): “But I just vomited on the steps of the White House.”

  As to MacArthur’s tenure as chief of staff, Roosevelt handled the issue adroitly. He extended MacArthur’s term without renewing it. The general would stay on, said the President, until a successor was chosen; yet no successor would be chosen until MacArthur had finished shepherding the army’s legislative program through Congress.

  Supporters of the controversial general were delighted that he was remaining, while opponents and enemies rejoiced that he was not nominated for a second term. Antimilitary congressmen may well have been more disposed to compromise on the substance of the army’s ambitious program in order to speed the day when it was enacted and MacArthur sent away.

  In the first half of 1935, the Congress was persuaded by MacArthur to increase military spending to levels unknown for more than a decade. The equipment of the armed forces would remain obsolete, but at least a start would be made on rebuilding manpower. “For the first time since 1922,” MacArthur proclaimed jubilantly, there was a reasonable prospect that the army might become large and efficient enough to meet “the country’s minimum needs.” According to The New York Times, it was “the prevalent war talk” that got the appropriations through Congress; but the persuasive chief of staff deserved credit, too. Roosevelt had reaped the rewards—in more ways than one—of extending MacArthur’s tour of duty.

  It was only when the name of his replacement was announced that MacArthur realized he had been kept in office just long enough so that his handpicked successor became too close to retirement age to be appointed. The President chose Malin Craig instead, an officer supported by Pershing and the “Chaumont clique” of which George Marshall‖ was a luminary and which MacArthur considered to be a nest of his personal enemies. MacArthur exploded in rage when he heard the news.