In January 1936 Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles came by the Berlin embassy. Dulles told Dodd: “My sister lives here. She is an enthusiastic Hitlerite.” Miss Dulles had taken her brother to see a motion picture film that showed Germany’s armed forces “defending” their country by devastating foreign cities. Dulles said that “such a display in the United States would be hissed off the screen.” According to Dodd, “Dulles said he had served in the State Department with Secretary Lansing when Wilson was President and that he was indignant at the charges of the Senate Committee that Wilson entered the World War to make money for the United States.”
On April 1 Dodd presciently wrote FDR that “Germany’s dictatorship is now stronger than ever. If she keeps the pace three more years she can beat the whole of Europe in a war.” Later (October 19, 1936) he reported to FDR that “Hitler and Mussolini intend to control all Europe.”
But the President was receiving contrary analyses and predictions from his increasingly anti-Soviet ambassador to Moscow, the world traveler William Bullitt, who often seemed to be reporting from every European capital other than the one to which he was accredited. (Bullitt, wrote Dodd in 1936 after a morning spent with him, is “not one whose judgment can be relied on. He is ambitious for promotion to high position but does not seem to me to appraise situations too well.”) Bullitt denounced Britain and France for trying to bring the Soviet Union into an alliance to deter Hitler from starting a war.
In 1936 Dodd looked into the future and foresaw that the Dutch ambassador to Germany was right in saying that “we shall probably never have another happy day in our lives.” Bill Bullitt envisioned things differently: He reported from London that British politicians had played up the German threat in order to justify their excessive military budget. He also ridiculed the view he had heard expressed in London that “within three years”—which was to say, by 1939—“England will have to choose between making war on Germany or permitting Germany to dominate Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Rumania preparatory to an attack on the Soviet Union”: in other words, exactly what was going to happen. Bullitt wrote FDR that “strangely enough, all the old anti-Bolshevik fanatics like Winston Churchill are trumpeting this Bolshevik thesis …!”
Both Bullitt and Dodd seemed to believe that FDR agreed with them. Indeed, he encouraged them to think so.
IN THE WINTER OF 1935 Roosevelt wrote to his old friend and ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, that “these are without doubt the most hair-trigger times the world has gone through in your lifetime and mine. I do not even exclude June and July 1914.…” To a skeptical friend, Ray Stannard Baker, FDR predicted that “in the near future” the public would see that foreign affairs questions had become even more vital than the nation’s domestic ones. But until that time came, Roosevelt in public would continue to be the nationalist isolationist leader intent on fostering economic revival and reform at home.
As the 1936 elections approached, the President found an astonishing variety of opponents arrayed against him. Huey Long had been removed from the scene by assassination, but his lieutenant Gerald L. K. Smith joined with Father Coughlin in promoting a third-party ticket headed by Congressman William Lemke that grouped populist, race-hatred, and religious-hatred movements from all over the country. Familiar figures of the Democratic old guard, embittered by the New Deal’s reforms, supported the Republicans, led by former presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis—though such younger critics of FDR as Dean Acheson remained loyal to the Democratic ticket. Walter Lippmann, who had hesitated to vote for Arthur Vandenberg for President,† switched to the Republican side when the senator’s candidacy faded and Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas won the nomination instead.
In the domestic sphere, Roosevelt had little difficulty in making his case; the voters knew that times were better and prosperity was returning. In foreign policy FDR aggressively seized the disarmament and isolationist issues as his own, claiming credit for having avoided the foreign entanglements into which the Congress in any event would never have let him enter, and allowing the public to understand that if reelected, he would launch a plan that might bring about world peace.
On November 3 FDR won reelection by the largest plurality in history, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote and carrying all but two states. His victory in the electoral college (523 to 8) was the greatest since 1820, when President James Monroe ran without an opponent and won with 231 votes out of 235.
A FEW MONTHS before the 1936 American elections took place, a group of Spanish generals led a revolt against their country’s elected government. The Spanish government asked France for aid; the rebels appealed to Italy. Taking the position that other countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of Spain, Roosevelt was able to present himself to the electorate as the man who was keeping the United States out of the war. Clearly the electorate approved.
* Though the invasion of Ethiopia was not one requiring discretionary power. Italy was in a position to buy arms and oil while Ethiopia was not, so to impartially embargo all sides in reality embargoed only Italy.
† See this page.
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STAYING OUT OF IT
IN THE 1930s Americans knew that the principles of morality and political justice in which they believed were being systematically violated abroad, and that deeds of sickening and heartbreaking cruelty were being perpetrated by predatory powers in Europe, Africa, and Asia; but they felt strongly that it was none of their concern. They read in their newspapers that Mussolini’s armies used poison gas and airplanes and a whole range of modern weaponry against native Ethiopians armed only with spears. They could have learned—had they inquired—that Germans committed terrible crimes daily against the half million among them of Jewish ancestry or belief.
It was not that Americans were ignorant of such things; it was that they chose to ignore them. Years earlier, Woodrow Wilson had persuaded his countrymen for a time that they could and should change the world, but his experience had taught them (or so they now believed) that it was a mistake even to try.
In its isolationism the United States of the 1930s was going back to the principles of its Founding Fathers, but not in its immigration policy. From the administration of George Washington to that of Woodrow Wilson, America always had welcomed whoever sought to enter. The interwar United States broke with that policy and therefore with its past. The country that once said, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,… Send these, the homeless …” now no longer welcomed them. The Immigration Act of 1924 introduced a permanent quota; it was fixed in 1929 at 150,000 people a year. Those who most urgently pressed against the gates were the masses of European Jews. There was no hope for them if they could not find a haven; but between 1933 and 1941, only 8,500 of them were admitted. President Roosevelt has been criticized for having found it politically inexpedient to try to help: for having abandoned hundreds of thousands and later millions to their horrifying fate in Europe. But he seems to have correctly gauged the prevailing American mood. Americans wanted to have nothing to do with the emerging tragedies overseas.
According to a public opinion poll taken in 1937, only 26 percent of Americans thought the United States should have joined the League of Nations after the world war. Even the beleaguered League of Nations Association, a dwindling band of Wilson’s disciples, now recognized that the League had failed. James Shotwell, one of the leaders of Wilson’s Inquiry, headed the association with the help of Clark Eichelberger, a lecturer and editor; their argument was that if the United States had joined the League in 1919, the League would have been effective. America, Britain, and France would not have gone their separate ways; in the 1930s they would have allied against the aggressors. Shotwell and Eichelberger missed the point that joining the League did not change a country’s foreign policy. For, when Roosevelt sent a delegation to the world economic conference in London in 1933, that did not pull him into collaboration with o
ther world leaders; on the contrary, his delegation went to London to explain that FDR’s America would go it alone. Similarly, if the United States had been a member of the League of Nations, the American ambassador to the League would have said in Geneva what American ambassadors said in Moscow and Paris and London: that the President and people of the United States refused to be drawn into the quarrels of countries outside the Western Hemisphere.
The American people had learned that righting international wrongs meant fighting, and they were determined not to do that. As they saw it, this was somebody else’s fight, not theirs.
NOBODY CAUGHT THE POPULAR MOOD better than did Arthur Vandenberg, who initially had been appointed to the Senate in 1928 to fill the unexpired term of a sitting senator who had died in office.* Bulky, bushy-browed, and an old-fashioned orator, the middle western Republican was the popular caricature of a senator. A onetime TR fan who had been won over by Wilson to the cause of American entry into the world war, he made an initial effort to be fair to the Democratic Roosevelt. Unlike the old guard in his party whose entire program seemed to the public to consist in voting no, he supported the New Deal when he felt he could, and tried to propose constructive alternatives when he could not. This led the Christian Science Monitor in 1936 to comment that “Senator Vandenberg more than anyone is keeping alive the two-party system in the Senate,” while Arthur Krock of The New York Times said that Vandenberg had become the de facto Republican leader in the Senate. In early press speculation about the 1936 and then the 1940 elections, his was the leading name mentioned for the Republican presidential nomination.
Vandenberg’s greatest achievement during FDR’s first administration was his enactment of Federal Deposit Insurance for bank accounts. It proved to be a major step in saving the American banking system. For unclear reasons, Roosevelt fought against the proposal all along the line. But once it was on the statute books and became an evident success, the President claimed credit for it. From that time on, Vandenberg, never the most temperate of men, felt a personal hostility toward FDR that time would not dim.
In foreign affairs Vandenberg, often inconsistent and sometimes incoherent, underwent a major change in beliefs during the 1930s. It was his membership in the Nye Committee that did it. The testimony that he heard convinced him that he had been wrong to support TR’s preparedness program and wrong to support Wilson’s call to arms in 1917. He became an isolationist; indeed, he was the leader of the isolationist bloc on Capitol Hill, assuming eventually the mantle of his older colleague Senator William Borah. Year after year Vandenberg stood alongside Nye in playing a major role in shaping the Neutrality Acts that, in overseas conflicts, deprived the President of the power to align the United States with either side.
ON AUGUST 25, 1936, FDR appointed William Bullitt U.S. ambassador to France. It made Bullitt happy on two counts: he was glad to leave the Soviet Union, which he had come to loathe for breaking its promises,† and he was delighted to be sent to France, his favorite foreign country. His tour of duty at the Paris embassy was to prove the zenith of his career.
Bullitt soon became in effect Roosevelt’s ambassador to the whole of Europe. James Farley, FDR’s campaign manager, wrote that “all diplomatic messages from the State Department to continental embassies and legations funneled through” Bullitt’s embassy. “Bullitt dispatched couriers throughout Europe, as telephone and telegraph wires were known to be tapped. The Embassy had a direct wire to Washington through which Roosevelt and Bullitt maintained constant communication. From what I saw, Bullitt was closer than anyone in the diplomatic service to the President.”
Bullitt allowed it to be understood that he and Roosevelt were old friends from the days of the Wilson administration, whose offices in those days had been only three doors away, and that he might well be FDR’s handpicked successor as President of the United States. He seemed to know everyone in European politics, and to be confided in by all of them: “Bullitt practically sleeps with the French Cabinet,” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted in his diary.
The American embassy off the Place de la Concorde, with its Louis XV facade, is a building of great beauty; and even the somewhat tasteless house at 2, avenue d’Iéna that then served as the ambassador’s official residence commanded a spectacular view over the Trocadéro gardens and the river Seine to the Eiffel Tower. Bullitt also kept a small apartment of his own near the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées, with a tiny room for his Chinese manservant; an alcove off the living/dining room served as a bedroom for himself.
Bullitt added to these facilities the eighteenth-century Château Firmin, rented from the Institut de France, with which came the use of the celebrated park of Chantilly (“I am very proud that my Ambassador has rented the Park and the Great Chateau of Chantilly. May the ghost of the Great Conde haunt you …,” wrote Roosevelt in a teasing letter) and proximity to the racetrack: a sporting man in so many ways, Bullitt had a passion for horse races.
Bald on top, but with a pink, boyish face and expressive features, a fresh carnation always in the buttonhole, the headstrong but irresistibly charming American ambassador whose ancestors were French provided some of the most splendid entertainments in Paris. His chef was superb. The wine cellar he swiftly assembled was magnificent. At a ball for 600 guests, he served almost that number of bottles of champagne—vintage 1928, the greatest year since the Franco-Prussian war. At intimate dinner parties, he poured Château Mouton 1858, the first great year under Rothschild ownership, and the year with which Bordeaux’s golden age began. He allowed the president of the Chamber of Deputies (the French equivalent of the Speaker of the House) to drink him out of the 1864s—another of Bordeaux’s legendary vintages. To the New Yorker, he revealed that he spent $12,500 a year more than his income—at that time, a quite considerable sum.
Bullitt had brought his State Department secretary with him to take dictation in the middle of the night, to rise before dawn to do the marketing as fresh produce poured into Paris from the countryside, to read through and organize all incoming communications for the ambassador, to manage the households, and to oversee the work of the embassy. This rough-cut, street-smart young hustler from the Pennsylvania coalfields who looked something like a weasel was named Carmel Offie. Bullitt delighted in polishing Offie and then showing him off, as did Henry Higgins with Eliza Doolittle; and like Henry with Eliza, he fitted Offie to move in the highest society.
“You will be pleased to learn,” Bullitt reported to Roosevelt in late 1936, “that last night Offie was the guest of honor at Maxim’s at a dinner given by the Marquis and the Marquise de Polignac, who are the greatest snobs in France. Inasmuch as de Polignacs habitually ignore everyone from this Embassy, including the Ambassadors, I think you will agree with me that our child is already going fast and far. The Marquise herself drove him home at midnight!”
Ever faithful, Offie served as a foreign service officer, a fixer, a go-between, a valet, a companion, a secretary, an adviser, and a procurer of anything that Bullitt wanted procured for himself or his guests. The seamy side of the life he led in the shadows may well have been unknown to Bullitt; only later did his name appear in police dossiers and intelligence files—and only much later was the information used against him by his, and Bullitt’s, enemies.
Meanwhile Offie’s doings were reported in the lively chronicle of society scandal and political gossip with which Bullitt, as a sort of latter-day Madame de Sévigné, regaled his President in frequent and chatty letters. The desk-bound, wheelchair-bound chief executive was enabled through them to live vicariously the Paris high life he once had been able to enjoy himself. They provided a distraction at an opportune moment; for during his second term of office, Roosevelt was having a rotten time.
HIS AIDE LOUIS HOWE, the only person from whom he would accept criticism and correction, had died; and the extent of Roosevelt’s personal triumph at the polls was so great as to go to anybody’s head. Even his wife now confided that “I realize more and more that
F.D.R. is a great man.” Perhaps the 1936 election results had been too overwhelming a success, for on the morrow of them, Roosevelt lost his political balance. In 1937–38 he embarked on a program of financial conservatism, deflating the economy and aiming at a balanced budget at a time when in retrospect just the opposite—reflation and deficit spending—was called for. His policies brought down the stock market and the economy; both crashed. Millions were thrown out of work. Many of the gains of his first term were wiped out.
The President lost control of Congress. For a time he was unable to secure the enactment of any proposed legislation. His longtime political ally James F. Byrnes, de facto Democratic leader in the Senate, opposed him not merely on an antilynching bill to protect blacks against mob killings (enactment of which would be “betraying the trust of the Southern people,” said one of Byrnes’s fellow southern Democrats), but also on economic legislation. Byrnes “has jumped over the traces and gone conservative,” noted Harold Ickes. And in the Senate, by and large, it was true that wherever Byrnes, a bellwether figure, went, the other senators went, too.
Much of FDR’s first-term program had been invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1935, and when in his second term the President asked to enlarge the Court in order to pack it with his own supporters, the Congress turned him down. Now the chief executive found himself losing a war against both the legislature and the judiciary.
Strife between labor union organizers and the corporations that shut them out burst into violence in Roosevelt’s second term. Employers used mobsters against union picketers while union men staged sit-in strikes to paralyze businesses. The public blamed the President for not putting an end to the riots and the sit-ins.
Roosevelt came to sense a gigantic plot against him, in which an array of business and allied interests were conspiring to bring down the government. As the 1938 midterm elections approached, he decided to try to purge his enemies within the Democratic party. In the elections he carried his case against disloyal senators and congressmen to the people—and mostly lost. Many of those whom he had attempted to purge were back in Washington with a mandate from the people to oppose him.
In the Time of the Americans Page 46
