In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Saying farewell, FDR awarded MacArthur another medal and told him, “Douglas, if war should suddenly come, don’t wait for orders to come home. Grab the first transportation you can find. I want you to command my armies.” Pershing sent him an autographed photo. The time had come for him to accept the gold watch, bid the company good-bye, and retire.

  By prior arrangement, MacArthur, bringing along his aide Eisenhower (who did not want to go), went back in 1935 to the land with which he and his father were so closely associated: the Philippine Islands, a commonwealth scheduled to become independent in 1946. He went there as head of the American military mission. His mother followed him back to the Orient; she died and was interred there, later to be reburied at Arlington National Cemetery.

  MacArthur lived a lordly life in the Eastern splendor of his retirement: he occupied the air-conditioned, six-room penthouse of the Manila Hotel. In 1936 the Philippines made MacArthur a field marshal, and he designed a uniform for himself of black pants, white tunic, and gold braid to go with the title. At the end of 1937 he retired from the U.S. Army, but stayed on as the Philippines’ military adviser. He married again and became a father. Though he sometimes spoke of returning to Milwaukee, Manila had become more his first than his second home.

  He was back at the spot where he and his generation had come up against their first great foreign policy challenge—and had refused to face it. Annexing the Philippines (and Hawaii) in the 1890s had moved America’s security frontier from the near side of the Pacific to the far, from the coast of California to that of Asia. It had brought the United States into a line with which an expansionist Japan would collide. So Washington should have thought through some policy for either averting or else dealing with the clash with Japan—but it had not.

  Having chosen to draw the line where they had, Americans should have developed a strategy to defend it; instead they decided it was indefensible. Early in the century, the army had concluded that in the event of war U.S. forces in the Philippines would have to be abandoned to their fate in case of invasion. America’s vulnerable garrison ought therefore to have been withdrawn as soon as possible, before any such invasion could materialize; but Washington, in its nationalist pride, was unwilling to consider that. The incoherent American military doctrine for the Philippines in case of war was “no improvements, no reinforcements, no withdrawal.”

  In his musical-comedy field marshal’s uniform, with a make-believe military command, MacArthur was carrying out an assignment that made sense only in the let’s-pretend world of Americans who believed that if their country was sufficiently defenseless, it (and its far outlying territories) would never be attacked.

  So the foreign policy situation of Americans in the early and middle 1930s was this: They were living through exceptionally dangerous years. Abroad, aggressive dictators and militarists were on the march. Even at home democracy seemed, at least in the early thirties, to be at some risk, however small; and across the oceans democracy was visibly under siege. On the face of it the United States should have been mobilizing its armed strength to defend the American democracy against whatever perils lay ahead. But instead—paradoxically—Americans sought safety in showing the world that they had disarmed and in trusting the outside world to therefore leave them alone.

  * Indeed, rearmament did solve the problem, and in 1936 the British economist John Maynard Keynes would publish a treatise that explained, among other things, why a program that created a massive demand for goods and services would have that effect.

  † When a similar proposal was made a year earlier by British foreign secretary Sir John Simon, Winston Churchill demolished it in a House of Commons speech, citing specific examples of weapons that could be used for either offense or defense. It is not the weapon itself, Churchill showed, but the use to which it is put that makes it either offensive or defensive. This had been shown, too, in the course of the proceedings of the 1926–31 Disarmament Commission, which had bogged down in unresolvable disputes about which weapons were offensive.

  ‡ The friendship Marshall developed in the course of this work with South Carolina Senator Byrnes later was to prove a pivotal relationship for him in his dealings with Congress.

  § “When we lose the next war, and an American boy with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat spits out his last curse, I want the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt!”

  ‖ In 1933 a political lawyer who was commander of the Illinois National Guard asked MacArthur to send him an infantry colonel to serve as senior instructor. Strikes and riots were expected in Illinois, and the services of an outstanding professional military man were required. MacArthur personally chose Marshall (“Suggest Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall. He has no superior among Infantry Colonels”), pulling him off his CCC assignment in South Carolina. MacArthur denied Marshall’s appeal to be left where he was, despite a personal telephoned plea from General Pershing in support of Marshall’s request. Former Vice President Charles G. Dawes cried: “What! He can’t do that. Hell, no! Not George Marshall. He’s too big a man for this job. In fact he’s the best goddamned officer in the U.S. Army.”

  PART SEVEN

  THE LAST, BEST HOPE

  If Italy, Germany and Japan at some critical moment move at the same time in their spheres, I cannot see any way to stop dictatorships. One of the Ministers here said to me today: “In that case I would commit suicide; your country alone can save civilization.”

  —William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, in a letter from Berlin, October 31, 1935

  41

  CURBING THE PRESIDENT’S POWERS

  IN THE EARLY 1930s Mussolini’s Italy intrigued to create openings for conquest in the Balkans. It also staked out a claim to control Austria, and in 1935–36 invaded Ethiopia to carve out an African empire. Hitler’s Germany, withdrawing from the League of Nations in October 1933, took back the Saar from France after a plebiscite in January 1935. In March 1935 it reintroduced conscription and renounced the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, and the following year marched into and remilitarized the Rhineland.

  Never had it seemed more evident to Americans that their proper role was to keep as much distance as possible between themselves and Europe, to provide an example to others, and to keep the flame of civilization alive on their side of the water.

  With Europe moving ever closer to war, the tide of pacifism in the United States rose ever higher. Such powerful works as Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the John Dos Passos trilogy USA, and Walter Millis’s popular history The Road to War reinforced the widespread view that the world war had been wicked and pointless, that American entry into it had been a terrible mistake, and that either Woodrow Wilson had misled the country or his advisers had misled Wilson. The leaders of the Wilson administration were pictured as a cabal of guilty men by writers and journalists who argued that not only the suffering and deaths in combat, but also the economic misery of the Depression of the 1930s, flowed directly from the war—and a Gallup Poll showed that 71 percent of the public agreed.

  THE TWO LEADERS who were putting millions of people back to work in the 1930s were Adolf Hitler and Harry Hopkins. Hitler was employing his people in the war industry. Hopkins was employing his people in public works—which somehow did not seem equally legitimate to the critics of the New Deal, who became increasingly vocal from 1934 onward: to them public payroll jobs were not real jobs.

  In 1933 the whole of America seemed to support FDR. But once he had revived the country’s financial institutions (by 1934 banks were sound and stock exchanges were liquid), many of those with jobs or wealth were angered that he did not stop. He did not surrender the extraordinary powers with which he endowed the presidency. Nor did he regard the emergency as having ended. He had solved the problems affecting people who had money, but not those of people who had none and had no jobs.

  The President saw mass unemployment as a problem tha
t government should deal with, and saw it as a part of the emergency that required emergency presidential powers. He also seemed to regard extreme poverty and social injustices as problems governments should solve. Starting in 1934 even within his own Democratic party, there was a conservative revolt against these views. People who did not object to FDR’s cutting corners in 1933 called it illegal, unconstitutional, and dictatorial in 1934 and 1935. They objected strongly to his tax and other proposals that tended to redistribute wealth.

  Harry Hopkins, with his eternally rumpled suits, became the personification of the Roosevelt New Deal, and was especially loathed by the President’s critics. He had come from Iowa, where his father had owned a harness store. He was a professional social worker, and FDR had brought him along from the state government in Albany.

  It was Hopkins who spearheaded the government’s public works program. He was a superb administrator. By the middle of FDR’s second term, he had overseen the public spending of almost $10 billion, and had made sure that the money was spent honestly.

  It was a mark of the New Dealers that they worked hard and enjoyed their work. The President set the example. At 8:30 a.m., taking breakfast in bed, he already was busy reading the newspapers. After being wheeled into the Oval Office at 10 a.m., he would work all day, taking lunch at his desk, and stopping only after a 5 p.m. session with his staff. He met once a week with his cabinet and twice a week with the press.

  In still photos one sees his face tilted upward, and his cigarette holder tilted upward, at an angle everyone calls jaunty. In newsreel photos he tosses his head from side to side, like a thoroughbred on show. His most characteristic gesture was to throw back his head and roar with laughter. He enjoyed living—and governing—hugely.

  Those who feared that FDR was becoming a dictator at home overlapped with those who feared that presidents have too much power in foreign affairs. The Great War had been a tragic mistake; the United States had been brought into it by presidential leadership, so no future President should be allowed, like Wilson, to mislead or be misled—such was a common view. Legislation to restrict the powers of the President was pressed by a bewildering variety of groups. Roosevelt’s objective was to hold the line against them.

  Antimilitary movements were formed on university campuses across the country. A third of college students said they would not fight in a future war unless America was invaded; more than another third said they would not fight even then. A letter to President Roosevelt on May 15, 1934, from the presidents of nearly 200 colleges and universities asked him to support legislation that among other things would embargo all trade with or loans to belligerents in foreign wars, and would nationalize the armaments business.

  The Hearst press kept to its isolationist theme, but FDR tried to hold the support of the eccentric magnate himself. When Hearst returned from a European trip in the autumn of 1934, Roosevelt sent him a friendly note: “Dear W.R.: I am delighted to hear from Joe”—Joseph P. Kennedy—“that you are coming down to see me on Monday. If you have not made other arrangements, I hope you will stay with us Monday night at the White House.”

  Kennedy, though bitterly disappointed that FDR had not yet rewarded him with high office, continued to function as the President’s link not only with Hearst, but also with FDR’s even more dangerous former supporter, Father Charles E. Coughlin.

  Coughlin was a priest whose church was located in a suburb of Detroit, but who spoke to the whole country every week, at first over the CBS network and later over his own. He was a cleric who had discovered a vocation as a radio speaker; with his extraordinary voice, he had become the star of the new medium of mass communication. When the “radio priest” appealed for funds, he received more than a million envelopes in reply. “So great was his weekly harvest of currency,” writes a historian of those years, “that he had become the country’s principal speculator in silver”; and “his flock had become the largest in the history of Christianity.” By 1934 he was receiving more mail than anybody else in the United States. Seven and a half million people signed up for membership in his National Union for Social Justice. By 1936 Coughlin’s radio audience was estimated to be 46 million people, a shade more than the total number of voters in the presidential elections that year. His message was hatred and violence, especially of and against Jews.

  Coughlin, like Hearst and Huey Long, was an important supporter of Roosevelt in 1932 who now joined with a strange assortment of allies to curb the President’s power to involve the United States in international affairs. Within the Congress the chief leaders of the movement were former Progressive Republican supporters of TR or Robert La Follette, Sr., from the West, including Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. Among those who in 1932 had broken with the Republican party to form the National Progressive League for Franklin D. Roosevelt were Senators Hiram Johnson of California, Robert La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, and Burton Wheeler of Montana. Such isolationist allies of theirs as Senator William Borah of Idaho were prepared to support at least parts of FDR’s domestic program.

  These were supporters whom Roosevelt could not afford to alienate, even when they curbed his foreign policy powers, as they did by enacting Hiram Johnson’s law (1934) forbidding American loans to countries that had not repaid loans from the world war (i.e., all borrower belligerent countries except Finland).

  THE FELLOWSHIP OF CONCILIATION, the National Council for the Prevention of War, World Peaceways, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom were among the pacifist organizations that in 1932 and 1933 demanded that the U.S. Senate investigate the role of the armaments industry in fomenting international strife; but it was the executive secretary of the Women’s International League, Dorothy Detzer, who actually pushed the Senate into action. It was she who arranged a crucial alliance between her chosen Senate leader, Gerald Nye, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the former TR enthusiast and newspaper editor from Michigan. With the support of the veterans’ organization the American Legion, Vandenberg was trying to see that war profiteering was curbed in any future conflict. Detzer shaped the Nye-Vandenberg resolution steering the hearings away from the Foreign Relations Committee and into a more pliable special committee, and she engineered the selection of Nye as chairman. The publication of two widely read exposés of the arms trade and an article along similar lines in Henry Luce’s new Fortune magazine, in addition to a massive nationwide lobbying campaign, made it difficult for Roosevelt to oppose the holding of Senate hearings, even though they seemed likely to spin out of the control of the administration and its Senate allies.

  The Nye Committee (1934–36) uncovered nothing new, but it won headlines in sensationalizing existing information about the profits made by munitions firms, and in propagating conspiracy theories about the eastern banks and their ties to the Wilson administration. Nye and his colleagues tried to prove that arms firms foment wars in order to sell more product.

  Roosevelt wrote to Colonel House (September 17, 1935) that “you may be interested to know that some of the Congressmen and Senators who are suggesting wild-eyed measures to keep us out of war are now declaring that you and Lansing and Page forced Wilson into the war! I … explained that I was in Washington myself the whole of that period, that none of them were there and that their historical analysis was wholly inaccurate.… The trouble is that they belong to the very large and perhaps increasing school of thought which holds that we can and should withdraw wholly within ourselves and cut off all but the most perfunctory relationships with other nations. They imagine that if the civilization of Europe is about to destroy itself through internal strife it might just as well go ahead and do it and that the United States can stand idly by.”

  But FDR was defeated in his maneuvers against the Nye Committee. His plan to supersede it by appointing an executive committee of his own, dominated by respected elder statesman Bernard Baruch, miscarried. Soon Baruch found himself under attack by Long and Coughlin, and was obliged to enlist h
is senatorial ally James F. Byrnes of South Carolina to defend his own record.

  Isolationism was at floodtide, and starting in 1935 the Congress enacted Neutrality Acts that required the President to embargo arms traffic to all sides in the event of war. FDR maneuvered to obtain language that would allow him discretionary power, sufficient at least to allow him to embargo only one side—to aid the League of Nations, for example, if it really could bring itself to take a stand against Italy for invading Ethiopia.* It was precisely to keep the President from committing the United States to the side of the democracies against the dictators that the Congress curbed his powers.

  FROM BERLIN Ambassador Dodd reported to Washington on November 5, 1934, that “there is great preparation for war.… [T]he object is to put France out of business. The result … will of course mean annexations and the predominance of the whole of Europe.” To the President, he wondered (May 9, 1935), “What can anyone now do to change the fixed drift everywhere towards war?” He pointed out that in Germany “children at ages of eight to twelve are taught … to throw bombs; from twelve to eighteen they practice with rifles.…” He also noted that “Germany and Japan have some entente” and that “every leading diplomat here” believes that Hitler’s “fixed purpose” is war. At the outset of 1936, Dodd sensed that “a dictatorial front” had been formed by Germany, Italy, and Japan: an alliance potentially so powerful as to threaten everyone else.