NINETEEN
What America does or fails to do in the next few years has a far greater bearing and influence on the history of the whole human race for centuries to come than most of us who are here today can ever conceive.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, DECEMBER 5, 1938
REPUBLICAN VICTORIES IN 1938 did not represent a return to Hooverism or a repudiation of the achievements of the New Deal. As the country had changed, so had the GOP. New leaders like Thomas Dewey in New York, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, even Robert Taft in Ohio did not advocate turning the clock back. It was time to digest and assimilate: a period of thermidor after six years of upheaval. “We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” Roosevelt told Congress in his annual message on January 4, 1939. “Our full energies may now be released to invigorate the process of recovery in order to preserve our reforms.”1
FDR had sought to refashion the Democratic party into a permanent progressive force. But the resistance proved overwhelming. Southern Democracy remained the ball and chain that hobbled the party’s move to the left.2 The purge failed. And in the curious way of American politics, it would be those same disaffected Southern Democrats who would provide the president bedrock support to resist aggression and prepare the nation for war.
Until 1939 Roosevelt’s involvement in foreign affairs had been sporadic. In 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, the president was running for reelection. When Japan invaded China in 1937, FDR was consumed by the Court-packing fight. When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, it was the “Roosevelt recession” on the front burner. The Czech crisis in September played out against the backdrop of the purge. And during the Spanish Civil War—which commenced in 1936 and would ultimately cost the lives of 650,000 combatants—the United States stood on the sidelines.3
Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy was similar to his conduct of domestic affairs: intuitive, idiosyncratic, and highly personalized. Just as he divided the New Deal’s relief effort between Ickes and Hopkins, he split diplomacy between Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles. As secretary of state, Hull had titular responsibility. As undersecretary, Welles exercised operational control. Like Ickes and Hopkins, they competed for FDR’s attention. Unlike Ickes and Hopkins, they shared an abiding dislike. In the War Department Roosevelt presided over a similar rivalry. Secretary Harry Woodring and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson detested each other. Woodring, a low-wattage Kansas banker, was cautious, provincial, and strongly isolationist. Johnson, a former commander of the American Legion, was a glad-handing ball of fire, vigorously internationalist in outlook. The Navy did not require a division of authority because FDR, to the extent he wished, ran it directly through the chief of naval operations, Admiral William D. Leahy. In each case—State, War, and Navy—Roosevelt kept the reins in his own hands. The method was not what textbooks teach, but neither Hull nor Welles, nor Woodring or Johnson, for that matter, could presume to act without clearance from FDR.
Roosevelt distrusted the career diplomats in the State Department. The seven hundred members of the foreign service, primarily prep school progeny with Ivy League pedigrees, were predisposed to political conservatism. Prone to the prejudices of their wealthy WASP backgrounds, they were anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, antiblack, and anti–New Deal. For the most part FDR ignored them. When he recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the State Department was fenced out of the negotiations. By the same token, Roosevelt’s principal ambassadorial appointments reflected measured contempt for the striped-pants set. To Mexico he sent his old mentor Josephus Daniels—whom he still addressed as “Chief.” To Russia he dispatched William Bullitt and then Joseph E. Davies, both sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Joseph P. Kennedy, an unapologetic Irish Catholic, went to the Court of St. James; Jesse Isidor Straus, a Jew (shades of the Dreyfus Affair), was sent to Paris; and Professor William E. Dodd, an outspoken anti-Nazi, to Berlin. Each of these ambassadors enjoyed direct access to FDR. That minimized State Department input and ensured that the president’s views would be accurately represented. When war came, the State Department was shunted to a siding. Roosevelt’s cable communications with foreign leaders were handled by the Navy; Hopkins and other special emissaries undertook delicate diplomatic missions; and the department was absent from major wartime conferences.
During the 1930s Americans concentrated on domestic recovery. The problems of Europe and Asia appeared remote: of little more than passing interest when a third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Much as they may have sympathized with victims of aggression, Americans had no desire to repeat their entry into World War I. Influenced by an isolationist press, revisionist historians, and the much-ballyhooed revelations of the Nye Committee, which had investigated the role of munitions makers in fomenting war, they eschewed involvement in foreign affairs. Mussolini’s 1935 subjugation of Ethiopia caused scarcely a ripple. “The policy of the United States is to remain untangled and free,” Walter Lippmann wrote in January 1936. “Let us follow that policy. Let us make no alliances. Let us make no commitments.”4*
Roosevelt swam with the isolationist tide. He acquiesced in the passage of a series of neutrality acts that denied American arms to aggressors and their victims alike, kept the Army on a starvation budget, and, like Britain and France, refused assistance to the duly elected republican government in Spain.5 In his speeches and letters during the mid-1930s he repeated his belief that the United States should avoid being drawn into another war. At Chautauqua in August 1936 he revealed the depth of his feeling. “I have seen war,” he said. “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed.… I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”6
Japan’s incursion into China in the summer of 1937 caused FDR to hesitate. Like most Americans he favored China (the historic ties of the Delano family ensured FDR’s sympathy),7 and he refused to invoke the Neutrality Act on the somewhat specious grounds that neither side had actually declared war. That benefited China, which needed weapons more than Japan did. On October 5, with the Japanese war machine advancing full tilt, Roosevelt tested the water. Speaking in Chicago, the heartland of American isolationism, he sounded the first notes of a still uncertain trumpet. “Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power which is devoid of all sense of justice,” he said.
When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.
War is a contagion.… The peace of the world is today being threatened.… We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement.8
Reaction was mixed. “Stop Foreign Meddling; America Wants Peace,” bellowed The Wall Street Journal.9 The Chicago Tribune and the Hearst press were equally caustic. But The New York Times, The Washington Post, and most national chains were supportive. A press survey by Timereported “more words of approval … than have greeted any Roosevelt step in many a month.”10 Overseas reaction was enthusiastic (save in Tokyo and Berlin), and White House mail ran 4 to 1 in favor of the president’s remarks. But on Capitol Hill it was a different story. While isolationist members rushed to the barricades, Democrats hunkered down and said nothing. Fearful of a fickle electorate, the president’s supporters passed up the opportunity to place themselves on the record. “It’s a terrible thing,” FDR told Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.”11
At his press conference the following day Roosevelt pulled back. “Do you care to amplify your remarks at Chicago, especially where you referred to a possible quarantine?” the president was asked.
“No,” he replied dismissively.
Ernest K. Lindley of the Herald Tribune, who had covered FDR for years, persisted. “I think it would be very valuable if you would answer a few questions or else talk for background.”
Roosevelt demurred. “All off the record.”
Q: Is anything contemplated?
FDR: No, just the speech itself.
Q: Doesn’t [quarantine] mean economic sanctions?
FDR: No. “Sanctions” is a terrible word to use. They are out the window.
Q: Is there a likelihood that there will be a conference of the peace-loving nations?
FDR: No; conferences are out the window.12
The president sparred with reporters for another ten minutes, and it was clear he had no new policy in mind. “Mr. Roosevelt was defining an attitude and not a program,” reported The Times of London.13 Isolationism remained the order of the day. FDR had commenced the laborious process of changing the nation’s course. In typical fashion he had taken two steps forward and one step back. “I am fighting against a public psychology of long standing,” he wrote Rector Endicott Peabody at Groton. “A psychology which comes very close to saying, ‘Peace at any price.’ ”14
The nation’s calm was shattered on Sunday, December 12, 1937, when Japanese warplanes bombed, strafed, and sank the gunboat USS Panay, lying at anchor in the Yangtze River, twenty miles above Nanking. With the Panay were three Standard Oil Company tankers, which were also sunk. The attack lasted more than an hour. Shore batteries joined in, and at one point Japanese soldiers boarded the vessels. Three persons were killed and fifty injured, including Panay’s captain, Lieutenant Commander James Hughes.15
The attack bore every earmark of being premeditated. The Panay, which had been on station since its construction in Shanghai in 1928, was part of the Asiatic Fleet’s Yangtze Patrol, assigned to protect American commercial and missionary interests.* It was plainly marked with abundant insignia, including two large American flags, eighteen feet by fourteen feet, painted horizontally across the canvas shading her top deck. The flags were clearly visible from the air at any angle. The attack occurred shortly after twelve noon; the day was bright and clear, the visibility unlimited. A Universal Pictures newsreel photographer who happened to be on board during the attack filmed the incident showing the planes strafing the vessel at masthead level: so low the pilots’ faces could be seen clearly.16 The American flags could not have been overlooked or mistaken, and when Panay returned fire it would have been abundantly clear what was at stake.
At a meeting of the cabinet immediately afterward, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson, supported by Vice President Garner and Harold Ickes, clamored for war. “Certainly war with Japan is inevitable sooner or later,” Ickes noted. “If we have to fight her, isn’t this the best possible time?”17 Roosevelt steadied the ship. The Navy was not ready for war, and the country was not prepared. “The gunboat Panay is not the battleship Maine,” chided The Christian Science Monitor.18 Arizona senator Henry Ashurst told FDR that a declaration of war would not win one vote on Capitol Hill.19 Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota spoke for many when he asked that all American forces in China be withdrawn. “How long are we going to sit there and let these fellows kill American soldiers and sailors and sink our battleships?”20
Roosevelt directed Hull to demand an apology from the Japanese government, secure full compensation, and obtain a guarantee against a repetition of the attack.21 He instructed Morgenthau to prepare to seize Japanese assets in the United States if Tokyo did not pay and mused about the possibility of an Anglo-American economic blockade. The day after FDR’s demand, Japan’s foreign minister, Kiki Hirota, patently embarrassed by the military’s action, tendered the official apologies of his government and promised full restitution for the losses sustained. Ten days later Hirota informed Washington that orders had been issued to ensure the future safety of American vessels in Chinese waters and that the commander of the force that had launched the attack had been relieved. On April 22, 1938, the Japanese government provided a check for $2,214,007.36, paying in full the claim submitted by the United States.22
The Panay incident ended agreeably. But it energized isolationist efforts to keep America out of war. In 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Representative Louis Ludlow, a five-term Democrat from Indianapolis, introduced a constitutional amendment in the House that would require a national referendum before the United States could go to war.23* It was referred to the Judiciary Committee, where the chairman, Hatton Sumners of Texas—who had “cashed in his chips” over FDR’s Court-packing scheme—loyally kept it off the committee’s agenda. By 1937 a discharge petition to bring the amendment to the House floor had obtained 205 of the necessary 218 signatures. Twenty-four hours after the attack on the Panay, an additional thirteen members signed on. A Gallup Poll recorded that 73 percent of Americans approved of the amendment.24 “You can cast your ballot for a constable or a dogcatcher,” Ludlow told a national radio audience, “but you have absolutely nothing to say about a declaration of war.”25
With the discharge petition in place, Ludlow’s resolution to bring the amendment to the floor became the first order of business when the House reconvened in January 1938. The administration pulled out all the stops. Farley called every Democrat in the chamber, party whips visited each member in his or her office, and FDR wrote a personal letter to Speaker Bankhead.26 “The proposed amendment would be impracticable in its application and incompatible with our representative form of government,” said Roosevelt. It “would cripple any President in his conduct of any foreign relations, and it would encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.”27 Alf Landon and his 1936 running mate, Frank Knox, weighed in against the amendment, and former secretary of state Henry L. Stimson, speaking for the East Coast Republican establishment, attacked the proposal in a lengthy letter to The New York Times.28
Debate began January 10, 1938. The Rules Committee allotted twenty minutes. Speaker Bankhead, departing from custom, left the chair to lead the opposition. After Bankhead spoke, Majority Leader Sam Rayburn made one of his rare appearances in the well of the House. He was followed by Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, the ranking member of the Committee on Veterans’ Legislation. “This is the gravest question that has been submitted to the Congress of the United States since I became a Member of it more than twenty years ago,” said Bankhead.29 Speaking on behalf of the resolution were Ludlow; Hamilton Fish of New York, the ranking Republican on Foreign Affairs; and Democrat Caroline O’Day of New York, an old friend of Franklin and Eleanor. When the yeas and nays were called, Ludlow lost, 188–209. The vote, like the debate, crossed party lines. Democrats split 188–111 against the resolution; Republicans were 64–21 in favor. Support for the resolution was strongest among members from the Middle West and the Plains states. All thirteen Progressives and Farmer-Laborite members—who usually went down the line for FDR—voted with Ludlow. Southern Democrats, a majority of whom were now aligned against the New Deal, backed the president 74–14.30*
Shortly after the defeat of the Ludlow Amendment, the international picture darkened. On March 11, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, not only overturning a key element of the post–World War I treaty structure but unleashing a virulent strain of pan-Germanism not seen in Europe since well before the time of Bismarck.31† The Nazi slogan used to justify the Anschluss—“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—would provide the kindling that would bring the world to the brink of war. France, which was without a government when the German Army crossed the Austrian frontier, said nothing.32 Mussolini, who had rushed four divisions to the Brenner Pass in 1934 to prevent Austria’s incorporation into Germany, this time acquiesced.33 The Neville Chamberlain government in Great Britain continued to look upon Hitler as an important bulwark against communism and chose not to make an issue of the takeover.34 The League of Nations, which had treaty responsibility to protect Austria’s independence, did not even hold a meeting on the question, and the Catholic Church, represented by Theodor Cardinal Innitzer in Vienna, gave its blessing to the Anschluss.35 Since those closest to the annexation accepted it as a fait accompli, Roosevelt felt nothing could be gained by stirring up domestic opinion in a lost cause. At his press conference on March 11 he was noncommittal.36 Privately he deplored Chamberlain’s eagerness to appease Hitler. “If a Chief of Police makes a deal with the leading gangsters and the deal results in no more hold-ups, that Chief of Police will be called a great man—but if the gangsters do not live up to their word the Chief of Police will go to jail.”37
In April the president’s mood soured when Great Britain gave formal recognition to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. As Chamberlain explained it, by appeasing Mussolini, Italy might become sated, the Mediterranean pacified, and Britain’s Suez gateway to India secured. To Roosevelt, such recognition merely rewarded aggression and would have a ruinous effect on the situation in the Far East “and upon the nature of the peace terms Japan may demand of China.” To Winston Churchill, watching events in political exile at his Chartwell estate, Chamberlain and the British cabinet were “feeding the crocodiles.”38
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 applications, 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 Government, 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.
Roosevelt fared less well in his effort to repeal the Neutrality Act. The administration bill, introduced by Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, passed the House 200–188, but with a crippling isolationist amendment that would continue the embargo on “arms and ammunition” while permitting the sale of airplanes and other war materiel.71 In the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee, despite frantic administration efforts, voted 12–11 to delay consideration of the House bill until the next session of Congress, which would not convene until January 1940. Purge survivors Walter F. George of Georgia and Guy Gillette of Iowa, who normally would have supported repeal, George especially, voted against the president.
The highlight of the Washington summer was the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In September 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, FDR invited the King to Washington as a goodwill gesture to cement Anglo-American relations. “You would, of course, stay with us at the White House. You and I are fully aware of the demands of the Protocol people, but, having had much experience with them, I am inclined to think you and Her Majesty should do very much as you personally want to do—and I will see to it that your decision becomes the right decision.”72
The King and Queen arrived in the United States June 7, 1939. After a ceremonial reception in Washington,* the Roosevelts and Windsors adjourned for a summer weekend at Hyde Park. FDR, who personally planned every detail of the trip, treated the King as a fellow head of state: no bowing, no curtsies to the Queen, hot dogs on the lawn at Top Cottage, informal dinner at Springwood. Sara had urged Franklin to dispense with the usual cocktail hour. “My mother says we should have tea,” Roosevelt told the King. “My mother would have said the same thing,” His Majesty replied—at which point FDR reached for the martini shaker. After dinner the King and the president talked privately well into the night. About one-thirty FDR placed a fatherly hand on the King’s knee. “Young man, it’s time for you to go to bed.” Not only had Roosevelt covered the gamut of world affairs, but his combination of charm, respect, and paternal guidance won George’s admiration. “Why don’t my Ministers talk to me as the President did tonight?” he asked Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King before retiring. “I feel exactly as though a father were giving me his most careful and wise advice.”73
The King’s visit provided a momentary distraction from the deteriorating situation in Europe. After incorporating the Baltic port of Memel into East Prussia, Hitler turned his attention to Danzig and the Polish Corridor. The Treaty of Versailles, in the process of creating an independent Poland, had not only stripped a large slice of Silesia from Germany but granted landlocked Poland access to the sea by establishing a corridor along the Vistula River terminating in the port city of Danzig. Danzig, one of the four principal cities of the Hanseatic League and demonstrably German since the Middle Ages, was made a Free City tied economically to Poland. Even more onerous, the Vistula corridor split East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Hitler demanded the immediate return of Danzig and an extraterritorial road and rail link across the Corridor. Paradoxically, these demands were among the least unreasonable Hitler had made. When Poland refused, war became inevitable.
On August 23, 1939, Hitler achieved his final diplomatic triumph—a surprise Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union. A secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.74 At first light on the morning of September 1, forty-two German divisions, including ten armored divisions, stormed across the Polish frontier.75 Roosevelt was awakened at 2:50 A.M. Washington time by a phone call from Ambassador Bullitt in Paris relaying a message from Anthony Drexel Biddle in Warsaw that war had begun. “Well, Bill, it has come at last,” said the president. “God help us all.”76
* A Fortune magazine poll taken at the time Lippmann wrote indicated that fewer than 25 percent of the respondents would be willing to go to war to defend the Philippines if they were attacked. “The Fortune Survey,” Fortune 46–47 (January 1936).
* U.S. forces were in China under the provisions of the Sino-American Treaty of 1858. In 1937 the Yangtze Patrol consisted of thirteen vessels (nine of which were gunboats), 129 officers, and 1,671 enlisted men. In addition, 814 soldiers from the 15th Infantry were stationed in Tientsien; 528 marines in Peking; and another 2,555 marines in Shanghai. Secretary Hull to Vice President Garner, January 8, 1938, 83 Congressional Record 261, 75th Congress, 3rd session (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938).
* The operative portion of what came to be known as the Ludlow Amendment provided:
Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its Territorial possessions and attack upon the citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a Nationwide referendum.
The amendment also provided that Congress, by joint resolution, could refer the question of war or peace to the electorate “when it deems a national crisis to exist.” 75th Congress, 1st Session, House Joint Resolution 199. See Jean Edward Smith, The Constitution and American Foreign Policy 245 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1989).
* The 188 votes Ludlow received were for his resolution to bring the amendment to the floor, not for the amendment itself. Even if those 188 members were to vote for the amendment (which was not guaranteed), it would have fallen 102 votes shy of the 290 (two thirds of 435) required for passage.
† In a plebiscite on April 10 Austrians voted 99.75 percent for union with Germany. Historians of the Third Reich have often noted that Hitler took advantage of the euphoria surrounding the Anschluss to consolidate his hold on the German Army. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was relieved as war minister (Hitler himself assumed the office), General Freiherr von Fritsch was replaced as commander in chief, sixteen older generals (including Gerd von Rundstedt) were retired, and forty-four were transferred to less sensitive posts. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 489 ff. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945 365–368 (London: Macmillan, 1961); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler 542–550 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
* Hopkins’s second wife, Barbara, Diana’s mother, died of cancer in the summer of 1937, when Diana was five years old. Until Hopkins remarried in July 1942, he and Diana lived off and on in the White House, where ER supervised Diana’s activities. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 106–107 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* Though Marshall ranked thirty-fourth, the rule that no one be appointed chief of staff who could not complete the four-year term before reaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five ruled out all but four general officers senior to Marshall. Of those, the odds-on favorite of military prognosticators was Major General Hugh A. Drum, commander of the First Army at Governors Island and the senior officer on active duty.
* As a child of seven I was privileged to watch from the window of my mother’s eighth-floor office in the Farm Credit Administration the parade escorting President Roosevelt and the King from Union Station to the White House. The crowd lining the parade route, estimated at 750,000, was the largest ever assembled in Washington. Will Swift, The Roosevelts and the Royals: Franklin and Eleanor, The King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History 113–114 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).