Rah, Rah, Roosevelt!

Roosevelt and family.

 Back in his day, President Franklin Roosevelt called Europe an incubator of wars.  I wonder if, looking at the latest European war, occurring so many decades after he said that, would he be dismayed that it was still so, or would he merely make a face and nod. 

And when Europeans have wars with each other, boy do they war, slaughtering and killing combatants and civilians however they may, smashing cities, destroying crops, livestock and farms to induce famine in the survivors.  When they finally exhaust themselves and quit, they hold grudges and can't wait to raise another generation to hurl at each other, renewing the butchery with sword and pistol, no quarter ask or given.

It's interesting to study FDR's evolving views on Europe and its role in promoting perpetual warfare.  Shortly after he was inaugurated in 1933, he had some kind words to say about Hitler, apparently thinking him a new, progressive type of politician.  Also that year, when Dwight Eisenhower approached him to provide funds to modernize the army, especially its armor, noting that the US Army only had 12 modern tanks, Roosevelt told him there was no need; in fact, he was considering abolishing the army entirely, turning over homeland defense to National Guard units.  After all, there certainly would never be a major war again.  The Europeans had finally learned their lesson in the Great War and would never be so foolish as to turn to war to solve their problems ever again.  So why have an army?

Eisenhower told him, in polite terms, that he was being naive.  The Europeans had not and never would change and there would be another great war in Europe by 1940.  What Eisenhower  told him dovetailed with what Henry Stimson, Taft's Secretary of War and Hoover's Secretary of State, told him in a private meeting, that it was time, even past time, for the United States to seize the world cockpit from the Europeans, telling them to settle down and behave, play fair, share their toys and no hitting! Don't make us come over there!  That's kind of a flip way of saying that Roosevelt was beginning to realize what a mistake had been made at the end of what was not yet called World War I, that as historian Edward H. Carr would write a few years later, "in 1918 world leadership was offered, almost by universal consent, to the United States and was declined." (The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939)  It was time to rectify that mistake.  But how to do it when the American people wanted no part of foreign slaughterhouses?  Foreign entanglements?  Get real.  Foreign abattoirs, charnel houses, foreign cemeteries filled with American youth? No.  No!

How the international interventionism of Henry Stimson and his confreres not only won over Roosevelt (who gets praised -- or blamed -- for the policy) is a long and fascinating story but by 1937 Roosevelt was warning of the danger of Nazi Germany in his famous Chicago speech and calling out British and French complacency.  It's actually quite amazing that he actually did get America to become not merely an interventionist power, but the enforcer (emphasis on force) of an Americanized planet, with mighty Europe being a sullen, resentful has-been.  An example of what a stunning change FDR engineered is that at the beginning of 1935, when Roosevelt proposed that the United States join the World Court, basically a symbolic gesture of solidarity with European efforts to prevent another war among themselves by creating an adjudicating body to resolve disputes, the senate revolted, epitomized by Minnesota senator Thomas Schall's literal shout during debate over the issue, "To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations!"  I found that quote in Time magazine's contemporary coverage of the senate debate.  Schall represented the vast majority of the American electorate's thinking.  When Italy invaded Ethiopia later that year, the League of Nations tried to impose an economic embargo but Roosevelt, understanding how hostile the American voter was to any foreign entanglement, would not commit the United States to participating.  In fact, US oil exports to Italy tripled and the League's efforts to punish Italy collapsed, the League powers blaming America.  But in December, 1937, it was discovered that Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, the British and French foreign ministers, had signed an agreement to partition Ethiopia between their two countries. The America public reaction was profound cynicism and disgust for the European so-called democracies, which were really nothing more than gangster nations, their statesmen nothing but snooty-accented, tuxedo-clad Al Capones, Lucky Lucianos and Dutch Schultzes, their flag-waving, drum-beating patriotic wars nothing but fights between mobsters for control of the rackets. 

When the Japanese bombed the US gunboat Panay as it patrolled the Yangtze River near Nanking, along with three Standard Oil tankers, the same month as the Ethiopia revelation, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, echoing widespread Roosevelt Administration feeling, said, "War with Japan is inevitable and if we have to fight her, isn't now the best possible time?"  I don't know why he thought December, 1937, was the best possible time, but the American public and a press which then followed closely that opinion, did not agree.  "The gunboat Panay is not the battleship Maine," editorialized The Christian Science Monitor, and Minnesota Senator Henrik Shipstead demanded, "What are they doing there?" of American naval vessels on Chinese inland waterways, echoing the questioning of the majority of Americans who did not want to fight Japan but to get our sailors out of China.

The upshot of the Panay incident was that the Ludlow Amendment introduced by Indiana congressman Louis Ludlow, stating that except in case of direct invasion of American soil, the United States could only engage in war if a majority of the voters agreed in a national referendum, which had been bottled up in the House Judiciary Committee, got all the signatures needed for a discharge petition and the amendment was brought to the house floor for a vote.  President Roosevelt strongly fought the amendment, noting that in 1898 the public, propagandized by the Hearst newspapers and other media, would have voted for war, "in all probability an unnecessary war," (!) "one which a strong, unencumbered president could have prevented."  The amendment was defeated 209-188, a pretty narrow margin, considering how radical the amendment was.

It was around this time FDR began thinking of why Europe was so warfare prone, deciding their empires were a major cause of friction, even compelling Japan to adopt their ways to avoid becoming colonized itself, and concluding that they all had to be dismantled, along with the European armies and navies, and a new world order (that phrase), a one-world system, had to be instituted to suppress European aggression, liberate the peoples exploited by their imperial policies and ensure peace.  Thus, while anti-interventionist Americans thought that Roosevelt was in league with the British Empire and Jewish foreign interests, selling out America for unfathomable reasons other than that he was in league with Satan as Woodrow Wilson, the president blamed for getting us into the Great War, is depicted to have been in John Dos Passos' novel 1919, part of the USA trilogy, in which Wilson is described as having, " a terrifying face, I swear it's a reptile's face, not warm-blooded...,"  he actually had his own agenda, one of vast ambition: to end war, destroy all empires, free colonial peoples, bring prosperity and peace to the whole world.  And to do that he would use the economic and  military power of the United States.  Of course, even if Roosevelt could accomplish this, he was committing America and its people to being what would later be termed the world's policeman, essentially forever, without asking Americans if they agreed with his agenda or wanted such a role.  He was just going to do it, even if he had to lie to the America people to do so.  In 1940, campaigning in Boston for an unprecedented third term, he told a crowd, "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers I give you my assurance once more -- I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."  Well, how was he going to achieve his dream for a remade world without American involvement in wars overseas?

In any case, despite dying only about two months into his fourth term, with much of his plan for the new world he envisioned still unaccomplished, the postwar world did, in fact, resemble fairly closely what Roosevelt envisioned.  The European empires dissolved, the  colonial peoples became independent and world peace, more or less, was enforced by the might of the United States.  Of course, some things FDR did not imagine, most especially the Cold War, developed to produce a world Roosevelt would not have wanted.  Two allies of convenience, Stalin and Churchill, largely brought the Cold War about, Stalin because he had his own world agenda and Churchill because he saw that a world divided between the USSR and the USA had no room for the British Empire, so he set about fomenting dissension between the two, not that Stalin needed much help with that.  But I do wonder if Roosevelt had lived and been of sound mind if he could have managed the postwar world much better than Truman did -- not to bad mouth Truman, who achieved a lot, all things considered.  And the efforts of the colonial powers to hang on to their empires, most especially the French, led to wars that never should have been, and American involvement that never should have happened.  And the freed colonial peoples have not prospered as much as Roosevelt imagined they would.  And this...and that....  Still, Roosevelt did a lot to change the world for the better. We've had no wars between great powers, as was routine when Europe ran the world, and however much we can attribute that to FDR, he is to be thanked.  And, although I haven't mentioned it, with his domestic policies he radically changed America itself, I personally think in ways that were necessary and helpful.  I'll let the following documentary review the domestic scene under Roosevelt.

Life in the Thirties, produced by NBC Television's Project XX, first broadcast October 16, 1959.  It's a look back at that decade by those who lived through it.  America was one sort of country when the decade began, and another altogether when it ended. It was a terrible decade and it led to a world war, and on into the world we inhabit today. The one-hour documentary is here divided into two parts. Narrated by the wonderful Alexander Scourby, it focuses on Roosevelt's first two terms and how he changed the American domestic scene, not his foreign policy.  It's a good reminder that for Americans America is what's really important, and what a president does to improve America and solve its problems is what really counts.