Chapter 34: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Shadow of War

I. The London Conference 

1. The Sixty-nation London Economic Conference, meeting in the summer of 1933, revealed how thoroughly in the summer of 1933, revealed how thoroughly Roosevelt's early foreign policy was subordinated to his strategy for domestic economic recovery. 
2. Their goal was to organize an international attack on the global depression. 
3. Exchange rate stabilization was essential to the revival of world trade, which had all but evaporated by 1933.
4. President Franklin D. Roosevelt at first agreed to send Secretary
   of State Cordell Hull, but then withdrew from that agreement and
   scolded the other nations for trying to stabilize currencies.
5. As a result, the conference adjourned accomplishing nothing, and furthermore strengthening American isolationism.

II. Freedom for (from?) the Filipinos and Recognition for the Russians

1. Roosevelt matched isolationism from Europe with withdrawal from Asia. 
2. Remembering its earlier promises of freedom for the Philippines, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934.

• The act provided for the independence of the Philippines after a twelve-year period of economic and political tutelage-that is, by 1946.

1. In Tokyo, Japanese militarists were calculating rejoiced, because they were calculating that they had little to fear from an inward-looking America that was abandoning its principal possession in Asia. 

• In 1933, FDR finally formally recognized the Soviet Union, hoping
  that the U.S. could trade with the U.S.S.R., and that the Soviets would
  discourage German and Japanese aggression.

III. Becoming a Good Neighbor 

1. In terms of its relations with Latin America, the U.S. wanted to be
   a “good neighbor,” showing that it was content as a
   regional power, not a world one.
2. He proclaimed, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy to the policy of the Good Neighbor."
3. In 1933, FDR renounced armed intervention in Latin America at the
   Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, and the
   following year, U.S. marines left Haiti.
4. The U.S. also lifted troops from Panama, but when Mexican forces
   seized Yankee oil properties, FDR found himself urged to take drastic
   action.
• However, he resisted and worked out a peaceful deal.
• His “good neighbor” policy was a great success, improving the U.S. image in Latin American eyes.
• Cuba was released from the worst hobbies of the Platt Amendment, under which America had been free to intervene, although the United States retained its naval base at Guantanamo. 
• The tiny country of Panama received a similar uplift in 1936, when Washington partially relaxed its grip on the isthumus nation.

IV. Secretary Hull's Reciprocal Trade Agreements

1. Intimately associated with Good Neighborism, and also popular in Latin America, was the reciprocal trade policy of the New Dealers. 
2. Responding to the Hull-Roosevelt leadership, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934.
3. The Act also avoided the dangerous uncertainties of a wholesale revision; it merely whittled down the most objectionable schedules of the Hawley-Smoot law by amending them. 
4. Secretary Hull, whose zeal for reciprocity was unflagging, succeeded in dealing pacts with twenty-one countries by the end of 1939.

• It reversed the traditional high-protective-tariff policy that had persisted almost unbroken Civil War days and that had so damaged the American and international economies following WWI. 

V. Storm-Cellar Isolationism

1. After World War I, many dictatorships sprang up, including Joseph
   Stalin of the Soviet Union, Benito Mussolini of Italy, and Adolph
   Hitler of Germany.
   • Of the three, Hitler was the most dangerous, because he was a great
     orator and persuader who led the German people to believe his
     “big lie,” making them think that he could lead the country
     back to greatness and out of this time of poverty and depression.
   • The Communist USSR led the way, with the crafty and ruthless Stalin family emerging as dictator.
   • Disillusioned and desperate, millions of Germans in the 1930s looked to Adolf Hitler as their savior from the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had concluded WWI. There is a poster that says, "Our Lat Hope: Hitler."
2. In 1936, Nazi Hitler and Fascist Mussolini allied themselves in the Rome-Berlin Axis.
3. Japan slowly began gaining strength, refusing to cooperate with the
   world and quickly arming itself by ending the Washington Naval Treaty
   in 1934 and walking out of the London Conference.
4. In 1935, Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, conquering it, but the League
   of Nations failed to take effective action against the aggressors.
5. America continued to hide behind the shell of isolationism,
   believing that everything would stay good if the U.S. wasn’t
   drawn into any international embroilment's.
• The 1934 Johnson Debt Default Act forbade any countries that still owed the U.S. money from borrowing any more cash.
6. Mired down in the Great Depression, Americans had no real appreciation of the revolutionary forces being harnessed by the dictators. 
7. In 1936, Princeton University students began to agitate
   for a bonus to be paid to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFWs) while the
   prospective front-liners were still alive.

VI. Congress Legislates Neutrality 

1. As the 1930s lengthened, an avalanche of lurid articles and books condemning the munitions manufacturers as war-fomenting "merchants of death" poured from American presses.
2. A senate committee, headed by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, was appointed in  1934 to investigate the "blood business."
3. The neutrality of 1935,1936, and 1937, taken together stipulated that when the president proclaimed the existence of a foreign war, certain restrictions would automatically go into effect. 
4. The neutrality Acts were specifically tailored to keep the nation out of a conflict like WWI. 
5. If they had been in effect at that time, America probably would not have been sucked in- at least not in April 1917.
6. Congress was not one war too late with its legislation.

VII. America Dooms Loyalist Spain 

1. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-139- a proving ground and dress rehearsal in miniature for World War II-was a painful object lesson in the folly of neutrality-by-learning republican government in Madrid, were headed by fascistic General Francisco Franzo. 
2. In order to stay out of the war, the U.S. put an embargo on both
   the loyalist government, which was supported by the USSR, and the
   rebels, which were aided by Hitler and Mussolini.
3. Washington continued official relations with the Loyalist government.
4. It had been led to believe that huge fleets caused huge wars;it was also trying to spare the complainer taxpayer during the grim days of the Great Depression.
5. When President Roosevelt repeatedly called for preparedness, he was branded a warmonger.

Not until 1938, the year before WWII exploded, did Congress come to grips with the problem when it passed a billion-dollar naval construction act.

VIII. Appeasing Japan and Germany 

1. In 1937 the Japanese militarists, at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing (Peking), touched off the explosion that led to an all-out invasion of China.
2. Roosevelt shrewdly declined to invoke the recently passed neutrality legislation by refusing to call the China incident an officially declared war. 
3. In Chicago-unofficial isolationist "capital" of America-President Roosevelt delivered his sensational "Quarantine Speech" in the autumn of 1937.
4. During the Civil War, the U.S. just stood by while Franco smothered
   the democratic government. America also failed to build up its fleet,
   since most people believed that huge fleets led to huge wars.
5. In December 1937, the Japanese bombed and sank the American
   gunboat, the Panay, but then made the necessary apologies,
   “saving” America from entering war.
   • To vent their frustration, the Japanese resorted to humiliating white civilians in China through slappings and strippings.
   • The Panay incident further supports America’s determination to stay neutral.
6. Meanwhile, Hitler was growing bolder and bolder after being allowed
   to introduce mandatory military service in Germany, take over the
   German Rhineland, persecute and exterminate about six million Jews, and
   occupy Austria—all because the European powers were appeasing
   him.
   • They naively hoped that each conquest of Germany would be the last.
7. However, Hitler didn’t stop, and at the September 1938 Munich
   Conference, the Allies agreed to let Hitler have the Sudentenland of
   neighboring Czechoslovakia, but six months later, in 1939, Hitler
   pulled the last straw and took over all of Czechoslovakia.
9. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to England and
   gave his infamous claim that he’d achieved “peace in our

X.Hitler's Belligerency and U.S. Neutrality

1. Joseph Stalin, the sphinx of the Kremlin, was a key to the peace puzzle.
2. Within the summer of 1939, the British and French were busily negotiating with Moscow, hopeful of securing a mtual-defense treaty that would halt Hitler.
3. On August 23, 1939, the U.S.S.R. shocked the world by signing a nonaggression treaty with Germany.
   • Now, it seemed that Germany could engulf all of Europe, especially
     without having to worry about fighting a two-front war in case Russia
     fought back.
   • In essence, the nonaggression pact opened the door to Poland.
   • Consternation struck those wishful thinkers In Western Europe who had fondly hoped that Hitler might be sicced upon Stalin face that the wily Soviet dictator was ploting to turn his German accomplice against the Western democracies. 
   • With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact , WWII was only hours away. 
4. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and France and Britain finally
   declared war against Germany, but America refused to enter the war, its
   citizens not wanting to be “suckers” again.
   • Americans were anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi and wanted Britain and
     France to win, but they would not permit themselves to be dragged into
     fighting and bloodshed.
5. European powers needed American supplies, but the previous
   Neutrality Acts forbade the sale of arms to nations in war, so a new
   Neutrality Act of 1939 allowed European nations to buy war materials,
   but only on a “cash-and-carry” basis, which meant Europeans
   had to provide their own ships and pay for the arms in cash.
   • Since the British and French controlled the seas, the Germans couldn’t buy arms from America, as it was intended.
X. The Fall of France
1. The months following the collapse of Poland, while France and Britain marked time, were known as the "phony war."
2. Hitler shifted his victorious divisions from Poland for a knockout blowout at France. 
3. The debt-paying Finna, who had a host of admirers in America, were speedily granted $30 million by an isolationist Congress for monetary supplies. 
4. After the fall of Poland, Hitler positioned his forces to attack
   France which led to a lull in the war (so that men could move) that was
   pierced only by the Soviet Union’s attack and conquering of
   Finland, despite $30 million from the U.S. (for nonmilitary reasons).
5. Then, in 1940, the “phony war” ended when Hitler
   overran Denmark and Norway, and then took over the Netherlands and
   Belgium.
6. But despite that, Finland was finally flattened by the Soviet steamroller.
   • Blitzing without mercy, he then struck a paralyzing blow toward France, which was forced to surrender by late June of that year.
b. The fall of France was shocking, because now, all that stood
between Hitler and the world was Britain: if the English lost, Hitler
would have all of Europe in which to operate, and he might take over
the Americas as well.
1. Finally, Roosevelt moved and called for the nation to massively
   build up its armed forces, with expenses totaling more than $37
   million. He also had Congress pass the first peacetime draft in U.S.
   history on September 6, 1940.
   • 1.2 million troops and 800,000 reserves would be trained.
2. At the Havana Conference, the U.S. warned Germany that it could not
   take over orphan colonies in the Americas, as such action
   would not be tolerated.
XI. Bolstering Britain with the Destroyer Deal (1940)
1. Now, with Britain the only power fighting against Germany, FDR had
   to decide whether to remain totally neutral or to help Britain.
   • Hitler launched air attacks against the British in August 1940 and
     prepared an invasion scheduled to start a month later, but the
     tenacious defense of the British Royal Air Force stopped him in the
     aerial Battle of Britain.
2. Those who supported helping Britain formed the Committee to Defend
   America by Aiding the Allies, while those for isolationism (including
   Charles A. Lindbergh) were in the America First Committee, and both
   groups campaigned and advertised for their respective positions.
3. Britain was in dire need for destroyers, and on September 2, 1940,
   FDR boldly moved to transfer 50 old-model, four-funnel destroyers left
   over from WWI, and in return, the British promised to give the U.S.
   eight valuable defensive base sites stretching from Newfoundland to
   South America.
   • These would stay in American ownership for 99 years.
   • Obviously, this caused controversy, but FDR had begun to stop
     playing the silly old games of isolationism and was slowly starting to
     step out into the spotlight.
4.   XII. FDR Shatters the Two-Term Tradition (1940)
1. A distracting presidential election, as fate decreed, came in the midst of this crisis. 
2. In 1940, it was thought that Robert A. Taft of Ohio or Thomas E.
   Dewey would be the Republican candidate, but a colorful and magnetic
   newcomer went from a nobody to a candidate in a matter of weeks.
   Wendell L. Willkie, became the Republican against Democratic candidate
   Franklin D. Roosevelt, who waited until the last moment to challenge
   the two-term tradition.
   • Democrats felt that FDR was the only man qualified to be president, especially in so grave of a situation as was going on.
   • With the galleries in Philly wildly chanting "We Want Wilkie," the delegates finally accepted this political upstart as the only candidate who could possibly beat Roosevelt. 
   • Wilkie, an outspoken liberal, agances and inefficences. Democratic critics branded him "the rich man's Roosevelt" and "the simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer."
3. Willkie and FDR weren’t really different in the realm of
   foreign affairs, but Willkie hit hard with his attacks on the third
   term.
4. Still, FDR won because voters felt that, should war come, FDR was the best man to lead America.
XIII. Congress Passes the Landmark Lend-Lease Law
1. 1940, embattled Britain Britain was nearing the end of its financial tether;its credits in America were being rapidly consumed by insatiable war orders. 
2. Britain was running out of money, but Roosevelt didn’t want
   all the hassles that came with calling back debts, so he came up with
   the idea of a lend-lease program in which the arms and ships, etc. that
   the U.S. lent to the nations that needed them would be returned when
   they were no longer needed.
   • Senator Taft retorted that in this case the U.S. wouldn’t
     want them back because it would be like lending chewing gum then taking
     it back after it’d been chewed.
3. The lend-lease bill was argued over heatedly in Congress, but it
   passed, and by war’s end, America had sent about $50 billion
   worth of arms and equipment.
   • The lend-lease act was basically the abandonment of the neutrality policy, and Hitler recognized this.
   • Before, German submarines had avoided attacking U.S. ships, but
     after the passage, they started to fire upon U.S. ships as well, such
     as the May 21, 1941 torpedoing of the Robin Moor.
XIV. Hitler’s Assault on the Soviet Union Spawns the Atlantic Charter
1. On June 22, 1941, Hitler attacked Russia, because ever since the
   signing of the nonaggression pact, neither Stalin nor Hitler had
   trusted each other, and both had been plotting to double-cross each
   other.
   • Hitler assumed his invincible troops would crush the inferior
     Soviet soldiers, but the valor of the Red army, U.S. aid to the
     U.S.S.R. (through lend-lease), and an early and bitter winter stranded
     the German force at Moscow and shifted the tide against Germany.
2. The Atlantic Conference was held in August 1941, and the result was
   the eight-point Atlantic Charter, which was suggestive of Woodrow
   Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Main points included…
   • There would be no territorial changes contrary to the wishes of the natives.
   • The charter also affirmed the right for people to choose their rulers (self-determination).
   • It declared disarmament and a peace of security, as well as a new League of Nations.
3. Critics charged that “neutral America” was interfering, ignoring that America was no longer neutral.
XV. U.S. Destroyers and Hitler’s U-Boats Clash
1. To ensure that arms sent to Britain would reach there, FDR finally
   agreed that a convoy would have to escort them, but only as far as
   Iceland, as Britain would take over from there.
2. There were clashes, as U.S. destroyers like the Greer, the Kearny, and the Reuben James were attacked by the Germans.
3. By mid-November 1941, Congress annulled the now-useless Neutrality Act of 1939.
XVI. Surprise Assault at Pearl Harbor
1. Japan was still embroiled in war with China, but when America
   suddenly imposed embargoes on key supplies on Japan in 1940, the
   imperialistic nation had now no choice but to either back off of China
   or attack the U.S.; they chose the latter.
2. The Americans had broken the Japanese code and knew that they would
   declare war soon, but the U.S. could not attack, so based on what the
   Japanese supposedly planned, most Americans thought that the Japanese
   would attack British Malaya or the Philippines.
3. However, the paralyzing blow struck Pearl Harbor, as on December 7,
   1941, Japanese air bombers suddenly attacked the naval base located
   there (where almost the entire U.S. fleet was located), wiping out many
   ships and killing or wounding 3,000 men.
4. The next day, the one after “a date which will live in
   infamy” (FDR), the U.S. declared war on Japan, and on December
   11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S.
XVII. America’s Transformation from Bystander to Belligerent
1. Up until the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, most Americans still
   wanted to stay out of war, but afterwards the event sparked such
   passion that it completely infuriated Americans into wanting to go to
   war.
2. This had been long in coming, as the U.S. had wanted to stay out of
   war, but had still supported Britain more and more, and the U.S. had
   been against the Japanese aggression but had failed to take a firm
   stand on either side.
3. Finally, people decided that appeasement didn’t work against
   “iron wolves,” and that only full war was needed to keep
   the world safe for democracy and against anarchy and dictatorship.