After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  As the train rattled back to Washington on that sultry September night, Welles stayed up drinking. All but two of his cabinet colleagues had gone to bed. Welles sat with Roosevelt’s electoral running-mate as Vice President, Henry Wallace, and Federal Works Administrator John M. Carmody. His theme of themes, as the alcohol coursed through his blood and as the train clacked and swayed, was the European tour on which the President had sent him in the spring of that year, 1940.

  Roosevelt had decided to send Welles to Europe ‘on impulse’.4 He also dispatched James D. Mooney, chief of General Motors’ overseas division, to visit Germany, where GM had substantial investments, to sound out the Nazi leadership and report back on the situation there. What FDR was trying to find out at first hand was whether there was a chance, in those first months of the war between European powers, to broker a peace.

  This was very definitely not what the British wanted the Americans to be doing. Hitler, having occupied the Sudetenland, then Austria, and taken Czechoslovakia, had finally invaded Poland. The British had at long last decided that enough was enough and they had declared war, as had France. But there had then ensued the ‘Phoney War’ in which both sides perhaps contemplated the enormity of their situation; and there were certainly those in all countries who hoped, even at this late stage, for a negotiated peace.

  Mooney, who was the recipient of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle as well as being a decorated American veteran of the last war, came home to tell his President that he should not get involved in European affairs. The highly lucrative American trade with Nazi Germany should continue.

  This, incidentally, had been the view of the great American aviator Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh Jr, who had flown the Atlantic singlehanded in 1927. Married to the heiress Anne Morrow, daughter of a Wall Street millionaire, in 1932 he had suffered the appalling fate of having his baby kidnapped and murdered. When this prominent American hero had visited Germany, Goring himself had pinned the Service Cross of the German Eagle to his chest. He had been hugely impressed when Goring showed him the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the basic fighter aircraft of the Luftwaffe.5

  Unlike Mooney or Lindbergh, Sumner Welles was not an instinctive isolationist, but his European tour had left him convinced that America should avoid war with Germany. His mission to Europe as he himself called it6 was primarily contrived to persuade Italy to remain neutral, but it was also a publicity exercise directed at an American Congress and still more an American public, that did not want to become involved in another European war. As such, the ‘mission’ achieved enormous publicity throughout the world and was seen by the dismayed British as an indication that if any countries were to defeat Hitler, it was to be Britain and France together without American help.

  Welles sailed on the Italian liner Rex on 17 February. Whatever his chances of persuading the European belligerents to speak peace, his departure caused rage in American diplomatic circles, with the ambassador to France, Welles’s arch enemy William Christian Bullitt, especially furious that Welles should have so high-profile, if essentially meaningless, a role at this juncture of world history For what exactly was he meant to be doing on this ‘mission’? There was a value in having the ‘total situation surveyed by one mind’,7 but this was pretty nebulous. The Americans, concluded Sir Robert Vansittart of the British Foreign Office, ‘are a strange people and pursue strange methods’.8

  Welles was greeted by a red carpet as he disembarked at Naples. Italy’s foreign minister, Count Ciano, a chubby smiling figure, thought the toweringly tall American a ‘gentleman’, altogether preferable to the German officials who were ‘presumptuous barbarians’. The next day Ciano introduced Welles to his father-in-law, the Duce himself. It is perhaps not surprising that Welles, the diplomat who established Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, should have concluded that Mussolini was a ‘genius’. Ciano felt the meeting at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome was glacial; Welles felt it had been cordial, but Ciano was perhaps not used to Welles’s formality of manner. Mussolini chatted to him about tennis, which he had lately begun to play.9 He did not let on that he was about to have a decisive meeting with Hitler which would force Italy into the war against France and Britain. Instead Welles had been able to draft a report to FDR from Zurich that if the Duce could only meet the President, Italy would be persuaded to remain neutral.

  Welles could not at once visit Paris, where he would be guaranteed a hostile reception by Ambassador Bullitt, so he took the train to Berlin. There both Ribbentrop and Hitler insisted that the keystone of their foreign policy had been to make peace with England. Instead, the British had declared war and clearly wished to destroy the Third Reich. Evidently forgetting the fact that he had just invaded Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland and was on the verge of invading Scandinavia, Hitler, who had been planning a war since he wrote the first page of Mein Kampf in 1924, confided in Welles: ‘I did not want this war. It has been forced upon me against my will. It is a waste of my time.’10

  Mein Kampf rises to its foaming, semi-literate peroration by invoking ancestral Teutonic voices and prophesying war. ‘Just as our ancestors did not receive the soil on which we live today as a gift from Heaven, but had to fight for it at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish grace will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword.’11 The entire raison d’être of Hitler’s political and economic programme, its huge increase of armament manufacture, its promise of conquest to east and to west, its military parades, the language and music of its rallies, was posited on overt warmongering. He himself said that war was the ‘ultimate goal of politics’.12 ‘Every generation needs it own war and I shall take care that this generation gets its war,’ Hitler had said on 9 November 1937 to Captain Wiedemann, his company commander in the First World War.13 It is true that by a propaganda feat of dazzling audacity the National Socialists had persuaded the German people that the wars, like the revolutions, could be all but bloodless; and that on the day war was declared against Poland, Hitler was disappointed to see no cheering crowds in the streets of Berlin. The American journalist William Shirer in Berlin noted that, unlike the crowds in 1914 who cheered the announcement of war, the people of Berlin heard the news of Britain’s declaration of war in ‘shocked silence’.14

  For a thoughtful foreign observer to believe the Führer’s protestations of peace in the spring of 1940 is somewhat surprising. Believe them, however, Sumner Welles did. It is yet another tribute to Hitler’s phenomenal plausibility when he wished to impress foreign visitors. One reason for this was that Hitler, like many lesser politicians, had a chameleon quality: in intimate tête-à-têtes he could become the person that his interlocutor wished him to be – witness his convincing Ramsay MacDonald’s first ecclesiastical appointee, Dean Duncan-Jones of Chichester, a perfectly intelligent, liberal man with fluent German and no glimmering of Nazi sympathy, who visited the Reichs Chancellery in April 1934, that the German churches were safe in National Socialist hands.”‘ Welles believed him. In his descriptions, incidentally, Sumner Welles had a vivid eye for the physical appearance of the gangsters at that time in charge of Europe. Mussolini seemed ‘fifteen years older than his actual age of fifty-six. He was ponderous and static rather than vital’ … ‘He was heavy for his height and his face in repose fell in rolls of flesh. His close-cropped hair was snow-white. During our long and rapid interchange of views he kept his eyes shut a considerable part of the time.’15 Hitler by contrast was taller than Welles had expected, while Göring’s ‘thighs and arms were tremendous’.16

  Presumably, it was with such reminiscences that Welles regaled his cabinet colleagues on that sweltering night train to Washington. Somewhere near 4 am when the last of his friends had retired, Welles, by now extremely intoxicated, summoned the steward, a black man called John Stone, and offered him money for sex. Stone said no. Welles then began summoning other porters and made such a nuisance of himself that Luther Thomas, Southern Railways’ special assistant for secu
rity, made complaints to Dale Whiteside, the chief of the President’s Secret Service.

  They were just seven weeks away from the election. Roosevelt hushed the matter up. Ambassador Bullitt continued to pursue the case, until his own fall from grace – when he urged the US government, after the fall of France, to side with Pétain’s Vichy government against the Free French.

  Roosevelt’s personal liberalism was not in question, nor his commitment to decency in public life. But how far could he wear such credentials on his sleeve without exacerbating the hostility of the American electorate? His reaction to Crystal Night had been on one level uncompromising, on another a demonstration of the powerlessness even of a great nation such as the United States when another country chose to behave savagely towards its own citizens. FDR ordered the American ambassador home, and publicly denounced the outrages. ‘The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States … I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.’17 But the American government, short of invading Germany and replacing its government, could not stop the Nazis from persecuting the Jews, and the American public objected to accepting Jewish refugees. In 1939, 67 per cent of Americans opposed the admission of 10,000 European refugee children (religion unspecified) to the United States. As late as 1946, when the extent of the death-camps was known, 72 per cent of Americans were against allowing in more Jews.18 Millions of Americans tuned in to listen to the inflammatory broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Irish-Canadian father, whose wireless talks and articles in his periodical Social Justice were stridently anti-Semitic. Roosevelt in Coughlin’s view was simply an instrument of the Jews, the British, the East Coast bankers. ‘I oppose the Jew bankers – what’s wrong with that?’ he asked.19

  Coughlin’s broadcasts and journalistic activities built him up assets of over half a million dollars. There were millions of Americans, Irish or German in origin, who enthusiastically tuned in to hear him denounce the Jews. He predicted that Washington DC would be renamed Washingtonski and there were politicians such as the right-wing congressman for New York, Hamilton Fish, who rallied to Coughlin’s support. Roosevelt, according to Coughlin, was ‘a power-mad dictator who would place upon his own brow the crown of World Messiah’. The only people, according to this point of view, who wanted America mixed up in a war were the Jews, or those in their pocket. Social Justice archly pointed out that 70 per cent of those who wanted war came from the eastern states and 45 per cent from New York, ‘which used to be an Irish town’.20 Lest it should be thought that such views belonged entirely with the lunatic fringe of American life – such as the Daughter of the American Revolution, Mrs Schuyler, who revealed to the public that Pope Pius XI had been a Jew controlled by international bankers21 – it is worth while to note the popularity of General George Van Horn Moseley, who believed that the Jews were responsible for plotting to bring America into the war. This man’s views were indistinguishable from those of the European fascists. He believed that the dear old America of his youth had been destroyed by the New Deal, the Jews and the trade unions, as well as by Big Business. He ‘continued to enjoy the respect’ of former President Hoover, though Hoover drew the line at Moseley’s suggestion that all Polish Jews should be sterilized.22

  It was against the background of extreme antiwar feeling among the American public that the 1940 election was fought. Both sides exploited war terror. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate, accused FDR of being like the European dictators. Former President Hoover thought that war would lead inevitably to the expansion of world communism, which in turn would mean that ‘our country must be mobilized into practically a Fascist government’.23 The Democrats were not above a few dirty tricks. They put it about that Wendell Wilkie was really Wendelle Wilcke – this German surname had been found on a gravestone in the Wilkie family burial plot. It was said that Wilkie’s sister, in fact married to a US naval attaché stationed in Berlin, was the wife of a Nazi naval officer.24

  Throughout that year, Roosevelt, as President, was having to discover the right way forward by a means of positively Hegelian thesis and antithesis. On the one hand was to be weighed his visceral hatred of Nazism, on the other his distrust of England, and his understandable dismay at the incompetence with which they appeared to be waging the opening stages of their war. ‘The thing that made me hopping mad’, he told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, ‘is where were the British Fleet when the Germans went up to Bergen and Oslo?’ The First Lord of the Admiralty, that stinker Churchill – discovered very drunk on whisky by the by no means sober Sumner Welles during his spring visit to London – was the master intelligence behind the Dardanelles-style fiasco in Norway. By one of the major paradoxes in history, it was through the failure of this Churchill-inspired operation that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was forced by a collapse of parliamentary confidence to resign. Churchill became his successor.

  Apart from having unpleasant memories of Churchill personally, and no reason to admire his performance as first lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt was bounded by concerns which were both smaller and larger, during the middle and closing months of 1940, than the immediate ones of the American alliance with Britain.

  The smaller concern – but in political terms the most immediate – was how he could sell himself to the electorate for a third term, and how he could quell the war fears being whipped up by the Republicans. Roosevelt was a consummate politician and a realist. There was no use his being an anti-Nazi in opposition. If he was to make a difference to the world scene, then he could do so only as President; and he could not be elected as a warmonger. It was not just Wilkie and the Republicans who were against the war. John L. Lewis, labour leader and chief of the United Mine Workers, had radio audiences of over 30 million Americans. In the light of Roosevelt’s preparedness to send American destroyers to the assistance of the British, Lewis ranted: ‘You, who may be about to die in a foreign war, created at the whim of an international meddler, should you salute your Caesar? May I hope that on election day [the mothers of the nation] with the sacred ballot [will] lead the revolt against the candidate who plays at a game that may make cannon fodder of your sons?’25 In spite of this alarming talk from his many opponents, Roosevelt won the election, becoming the first in American history to be President for a third term in succession.

  He had been wrestling, as well, not merely with the immediate, the parochial – if one can use such a word of so vast a political entity as the American public – issue of the election, but also with the much greater conundrum, What was America’s role to be, not merely in the war now being waged on a world scale, but in the postwar world?

  In the most famous of all his informal radio talks known as Fireside Chats, the one delivered on 29 December 1940, the newly elected President asserted that America was to be the ‘arsenal of democracy’. He still hedged his bets over the question whether any American should actually be required to fight, but he was uncompromising about appeasement. ‘A tiger could not be tamed into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.’ If Britain were to be defeated, ‘all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun’.

  It was clear from this Fireside Chat, which made an enormous and cheering impression in Britain as well as in the United States, that the American moment of History had arrived. But quite what the Fates had in their store was concealed even from the major figures in the drama – from Churchill, from Roosevelt, from Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

  History viewed from the Malthusian or Darwinian point of view would perhaps see wars less as ideological struggles than as great culls. The overpopulated world, its economies in turmoil, turns to the one form of activity which ‘solves’ all the problems of the 1930s – hunger, idleness and overpopulation. The world war, with all its requirements of huge armament manufacture, could provide a boost to the American econo
my such as Hitler had apparently achieved in Germany. The dole queues could be put in uniform. The hungry could be filled, not with good things, but with bullets.

  No one is suggesting that Roosevelt or Churchill were so cynical as to see the war in these terms. But war obviated the need for ideology – or even for explanation. The Thirties had seen the great impersonal movements of history as phenomena only to be resolved in terms of ideology. Ideology believed that the solution, like that of a mystery story or a crossword, could be found if worried at hard enough. Suddenly war, in its crude basic way, swept ideology away, allowing a solution through mechanics, through technology, through movement, through bloodletting.

  If the great Hegelian moment of historical change had come, if America was about to emerge not merely as a big country with a huge economy but as a world power involved profoundly in the affairs of Europe and Asia, then inevitably there was to be no room on the same rung of the ladder for Britain. Even as he gave his Fireside Chats and saw Britain as holding the pass, Roosevelt was beginning to see what had been apparent to many of his entourage for years, that whatever happened to Germany, the factor which stood in the way of American hegemony was British imperialism. Luck, or Destiny, more than devious Machiavellianism, presented this state of things to the American President. By alliance, or quasi-alliance, to Britain, America could kill two birds, not one. They could hope to rid Europe of a dangerous German dictatorship, but in so doing they could also reduce British power to negligible levels. The Stinker could get his comeuppance. ‘Fatty’ could have his revenge on Lord Paddington.