by FDR
Scarcely before Austria was digested, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia. Three million ethnic Germans lived adjacent to the Bavarian border in the Sudetenland, an old Bohemian enclave folded into Czechoslovakia after World War I. The führer demanded that they be added to the Reich. What Clemenceau had once called the anarchic principle of national self-determination had come home to roost. When Hitler threatened military action to effect the union, Czechoslovakia’s guarantors capitulated. The Russians refused to act without the French, the French refused to act without the British, and the British were feckless and indifferent. It was a replay of August 1914 with the film running in reverse. Determined to avoid the thoughtless mistakes that had led to World War I, the powers of the old Triple Entente erred on the side of caution. As Neville Chamberlain phrased it, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”39 At Munich on September 29, 1938, Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini signed the Four Power Agreement, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler avowed no further territorial ambition; Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time”; Mussolini boasted that “democracies exist to swallow toads.” Churchill, from the Tory backbench, said simply, “The Government had to choose between shame and war. They chose shame and will get war.”40
As a result of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia lost one third of its population, 29 percent of its territory, its most important industrial area, and the most formidable defense line in Europe. Roosevelt viewed Munich with mixed feelings. He appreciated that war had been avoided but lamented the price that had been paid. England and France, he told Ickes, “will wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands.”41 As the Czech crisis played itself out, Roosevelt had urged Hitler and Chamberlain to find a peaceful solution. He tried to bolster British resolve but had little to offer in the way of tangible support. With an army of 185,000 men—ranked eighteenth in the world—the United States was essentially unarmed.42 It was diplomatically isolated, still in the throes of the Roosevelt recession, and divided over its role in the world. As more than one historian has noted, America’s lack of involvement was the handmaiden of European appeasement.43
Roosevelt and, to a lesser degree, Hull and Stimson worked to reshape American opinion. Speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, on August 18, 1938, FDR pledged American support if Canada were attacked. “We are no longer a far away continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no harm. The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.”44
After Munich, Roosevelt ratcheted the rhetoric higher. “No one who lived through the grave hours of last month,” he told a national audience, “could doubt the need for an enduring peace.”
But peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword.
We in the United States do not seek to impose on any other people either our way of life or our internal form of government. But we are determined to maintain and protect that way of life and form of government for ourselves.45
American public opinion was moving, and perhaps faster than Roosevelt anticipated. A Gallup Poll in October 1938 indicated that 92 percent of Americans doubted Hitler’s assurances that he had no further territorial ambitions. Seventy-seven percent believed his demand for the Sudetenland unjustified; 60 percent thought the Munich Agreement was more likely to lead to war than peace.46
Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) in Germany, November 10, 1938, helped solidify American opinion against Hitler. On November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish refugee, shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan was protesting the summary expulsion from Germany of ten thousand long-resident Polish Jews, without notice and without legal recourse. He had intended to assassinate the German ambassador to France and shot Rath by mistake. In response to Rath’s death, the Nazi leadership ordered a night of vengeance. Storm troopers burned synagogues, smashed Jewish businesses, and vandalized private homes. The New York Times correspondent in Berlin called it “A wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years’ War.”47 Nearly 200 synagogues were burned, 7,500 shops broken into and looted, countless houses destroyed. Twenty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. By government decree German insurance companies were absolved of liability; the nation’s Jewish community was fined $400 million to atone for Rath’s death; and all Jewish retail establishments were shuttered and closed. Jews were barred from attending schools and universities, denied admission to concerts and theaters, and prohibited from driving automobiles.48
“I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization,” said FDR.49 The American press was unanimous in condemning Nazi brutality. Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Harold Ickes, and various religious leaders spoke to express their horror. Roosevelt summoned Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador in Berlin, home for consultation. The United States did not sever diplomatic relations, but Ambassador Wilson never returned to Germany.
At his press conference on November 15, 1938, Roosevelt was asked whether he had given any thought to where Jewish refugees from Hitler might be resettled. “I have given a great deal of thought to it,” said FDR.
Q: Can you tell us any place particularly desirable?
FDR: No, the time is not ripe.
Q: Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions?
FDR: That is not in contemplation; we have the quota system.50
Roosevelt was referring to the 1924 National Origins Act, passed in a fit of American exclusivity after World War I, which effectively closed the nation’s borders. The act imposed a ceiling of 150,000 immigrants a year, with quotas allocated by country based on that country’s proportional presence in the United States in the 1920 census. Great Britain, the most significant country of origin, was granted 65,721 places; Germany was accorded 25,957; Austria 1,413. Quotas were not transferable: for example, an unfilled British quota could not be transferred to Germany. Nor could a country’s future quotas be tapped in the current year. Immigration regulations also forbade issuing visas to persons “likely to become a public charge” and made no provision for offering asylum to victims of religious or political persecution.51 Since Jews fleeing Germany and Austria were stripped of their assets, few could qualify for the limited number of visas available. Unless Congress amended the law or, at a minimum, provided for refugee status, Roosevelt’s hands were tied.
The economic situation made congressional action unlikely. Persistent unemployment, exacerbated by the Roosevelt recession, presented an insurmountable obstacle to raising immigrant quotas, regardless of the country of origin. Roosevelt was also at the nadir of his popularity. The recession, combined with the Court-packing fiasco and the attempted purge of congressional Democrats, left him little political capital to expend on what in all probability would be a losing effort. A Fortune survey in 1938 indicated that less than 5 percent of Americans were willing to raise immigration quotas to accommodate more refugees.52 When Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Edith Nourse Rogers co-sponsored legislation to admit 20,000 German children in 1939, two thirds of the respondents in a Gallup Poll reported themselves opposed.53 Anti-Semitism lurked beneath the surface. A Roper Poll in July 1939 indicated that only 39 percent of Americans believed Jews should be accorded equal rights. Thirty-two percent thought they should be restricted economically, 11 percent favored social segregation, and 10 percent advocated deportation.54
Roosevelt did what he could. After the Anschluss he stretched executive authority and unilaterally ordered the merging of German and Austrian immigration quotas and the expediting of Jewish visa ap
plications, measures that permitted an additional 50,000 Jews to escape.55 He modified immigration regulations to permit American residents to guarantee the support of relatives seeking visas and extended that to permit orphaned and handicapped children to enter under the sponsorship of Jewish charitable organizations.56 One week after Kristallnacht he advised his press conference that all German and Austrian citizens in the United States on visitor permits—as many as fifteen thousand—would be allowed to stay after their permits expired. “I don’t know, from the point of view of humanity, that we have a right to put them on a ship and send them back to Germany under the present conditions.” Roosevelt said that under the law the secretary of labor could grant six-month extensions.
Q: Do you understand that you may at the end of the first six months, extend for another period of six months?
FDR: Yes.
Q: And on and on?
FDR: I think so.… I have no doubt Congress will not compel us to send these people back to Germany.57
Roosevelt believed that Hitler could be contained through airpower. It was a presidential idée fixe that would bedevil military planners for the next three years. Air supremacy was vital. But without supporting ground and naval forces, without the thousands of ancillary items that modern war entailed, airplanes alone could not ensure victory. On November 14, 1938, four days after Kristallnacht, FDR convened a high-level meeting in the Oval Office to launch his plan for a massive expansion of American airpower.58 “Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did … if the United States had five thousand warplanes and the capacity to produce ten thousand more within the next few months,” said the president.59 According to Roosevelt, the Western Hemisphere was in grave danger. To defend it, America needed an air force of 20,000 planes. Since it was unlikely that Congress would appropriate the money, FDR said he would settle for half that number together with a substantial expansion of production capacity. “Hopkins could build these plants without cost to the Treasury because it would be work relief.”60 Roosevelt was jawboning to impart a sense of urgency. He did not intend for his figures to be taken literally. When the military followed through with a supplemental budget request for $1.8 billion, FDR slashed it to $525 million.61
Roosevelt became consumed with defense and foreign policy. The economy was perking along, on five cylinders if not six, and the social revolution had receded in importance. As the president’s attention shifted, a new coalition formed on Capitol Hill. Southern Democrats and Wall Street Republicans rallied to FDR’s side. Isolationist progressives and western populists—men like Hiram Johnson, Burton K. Wheeler, and Robert La Follette—fell away. After almost two years of uninterrupted reverses, Roosevelt was back on his game. At Chapel Hill on December 5 he moved adroitly to soothe domestic critics, the avuncular Dutch uncle once again taking the nation into his confidence:
You undergraduates who see me for the first time have read and heard that I am at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.… You have heard for six years that I was about to plunge the nation into war; that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe; that I was driving the nation into bankruptcy; and that I breakfasted every morning on ‘grilled millionaire.’
Actually, I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalist system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.62
In late December, after six years in office, FDR undertook a cabinet shake-up. Homer Cummings was the first to walk the plank. At Roosevelt’s request, Cummings submitted his resignation so that he might “return to private practice.” He was replaced as attorney general by Michigan governor Frank Murphy, a longtime New Deal favorite who had been narrowly defeated in his bid for reelection. The second casualty was seventy-one-year-old Daniel Roper at Commerce, who graciously made way for the long-anticipated elevation of Hopkins to the cabinet. A lightning rod for Republican opposition, Hopkins was confirmed in a straight-party-line vote, 58–27. The departure of Cummings and the elevation of Hopkins strengthened Roosevelt’s cabinet significantly. The War and Navy departments were ripe for change, but FDR chose to move slowly. Woodring was informed that the president would accept his resignation but was placed under no immediate pressure. At Navy, Claude Swanson, another septuagenarian, was in poor health and had become increasingly feeble. His time was growing short, and Roosevelt did not have the heart to force him out.
By the end of 1938 Hopkins had succeeded to the place in Roosevelt’s confidence that Louis Howe had occupied. Like Howe, he was one of the president’s few intimates who moved confidently between Franklin and Eleanor, and ER was the guardian of Hopkins’s young daughter, Diana.* Frequently Hopkins would join FDR at Warm Springs, where he and Missy were the president’s only companions. Roosevelt’s routine had changed remarkably little. According to Hopkins:
The President wakes up about eight-thirty—breakfasts in bed—reads the morning papers and if left alone will spend a half hour or so reading a detective story. I would go in about nine-thirty—usually much talk about European affairs—Kennedy and Bullitt our ambassadors in London and Paris would telephone—Hull and Welles from the State Department so we had the latest news of Hitler’s moves in the international checkerboard.…
Lunch has usually been F.D.R. with Missy and me—these are the pleasantest because he is under no restraint and personal and public business is discussed with the utmost frankness. The service incidentally is as bad as the food.…
He will sleep a bit after lunch—visit his farm—look at the tree plantings—back around four thirty for an hour’s dictation. Dinner at seven. The ceremonial cocktail with the President doing the honors. He makes a first rate “old fashioned” and a fair martini.…
After dinner the President retreats to his stamps—magazines and evening paper. Missy and I will play Chinese checkers. George Fox comes in to give him a rub down and the President is in bed by ten.63
FDR sought to deter Hitler without tipping his hand. Nevertheless, his airpower program encountered turbulence shortly after takeoff. One of Roosevelt’s goals was to lay the groundwork for a rapid expansion of aircraft production should an emergency arise. Another was to provide planes immediately for Britain and France. Because those nations were at peace, the restrictions of the Neutrality Act did not apply. But Secretary of War Woodring and the Army general staff opposed the sale of weapons abroad. Woodring, an ardent isolationist, was against American overseas involvement in any context. The Army staff resisted because they wanted the material to equip American forces. Roosevelt bypassed the opposition by assigning responsibility for foreign arms sales to Morgenthau and the Treasury. Just as the State Department had been shut out of FDR’s decision to recognize the Soviet Union, the War Department was overridden in order to provide planes for America’s potential allies. In both instances Roosevelt called the shots, and the details were closely guarded.64
The president’s cover was blown in January 1939, when an experimental Douglas A-20 bomber crashed in California with a French purchasing agent aboard. Asked about it at his press conference on January 27, Roosevelt dissembled. The plane was not really an American military plane, he said, but a private model that Douglas was trying to peddle. French purchases would provide a shot in the arm for the aircraft industry, and the Treasury was involved because it wished to promote American exports.65
When the firestorm did not abate, Roosevelt invited the members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee to the White House. “I cannot overemphasize the seriousness of the situation,” he told the senators. All of Europe was threatened. If England and France went down, the other countries “would drop into the basket of their own accord.” Africa and South America would follow. The United States would be encircled. “This is not a pipe dream. Would any of you have said six years ago, when this man Hitler came into the control of the German Governmen
t, Germany busted, Germany a complete and utter failure, a nation that owed everybody, disorganized, not worth considering as a force in the world, would any of you have said that in six years Germany would dominate Europe, completely and absolutely?”66
Roosevelt told the senators it didn’t matter whether Treasury or the War Department authorized the bomber sale. “I am frankly hoping that the French will be able to get the fastest pursuit planes we can turn out. I hope they will get the best heavy and medium bombers they can buy in this country. And I hope to God they get the planes and get them fast.… That is the foreign policy of the United States.”67
Gallup Polls taken at the time indicated that 65 percent of the respondents supported the sale of warplanes to Britain and France, while 44 percent favored legislation prohibiting such sales to Germany. In the event of war in Europe, 69 percent advocated providing the Allies all the aid possible short of entering the conflict. When Gallup asked whether the United States would be next on Hitler’s list, 62 percent answered yes; 38 percent said no.68
With every month the possibility of war heightened. On March 15, 1939, Hitler annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia, not only breaking the pledge he had made at Munich but negating the principle of self-determination. The Czechs and Slovaks, unlike the residents of the Sudetenland, were not German. The rationale—Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer—regardless of how self-serving it had been, did not apply. When German troops marched into Prague, Hitler destroyed the last remaining illusion that his ambitions were limited. One week later, on March 23, the government of Lithuania surrendered the port city of Memel to Germany. Hitler arrived on the battleship Deutschland to preside at the takeover. Within the month, Mussolini occupied Albania, General Francisco Franco captured Madrid, and Japan claimed sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, seven hundred miles southwest of Manila.
Roosevelt moved to meet the crisis on two fronts: revision of the Neutrality Act to permit the sale of war materiel to Britain and France in case of war and a long overdue change of command in the Army. General Malin Craig, whose four-year term as chief of staff was about to expire, had served the administration faithfully but was eager to retire, a spent force worn down by incessant feuding between Woodring and Johnson.69 To replace Craig, FDR turned to Brigadier General George C. Marshall, thirty-fourth on the Army seniority list, former chief of war plans at the War Department and Craig’s deputy since October.* Marshall, who had attended Virginia Military Institute, not West Point, was a meticulously organized, self-controlled, no-nonsense soldier with a well-established reputation for generously rewarding success and ruthlessly punishing failure—exactly the leader the Army needed on the threshold of war. Frosty to the point of incivility in personal relations (only Mrs. Marshall called him “George”—and there were some who doubted that even she did), Marshall enjoyed the support of both Harry Hopkins and General Pershing, the nation’s hero from World War I. Of the two, Marshall believed that Hopkins had the greater influence in his selection.70 He assumed office on July 1, 1939.
