Fear Itself (45 page)

The Seventy-fourth Congress adjourned on June 20, 1936. Less than a month later, the Spanish Civil War, which inflamed the American Left like no other international event, began. In mid-August, President Roosevelt pledged to “pass unnumbered hours thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation,” and he reiterated how “we shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connection with the political activities of the League of Nations. . . . We seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”
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Because Spain was experiencing a civil war between the Republican government and the Nationalist rebels, not a war between two or more separate countries, the Neutrality Act of 1936 did not technically apply, nor would it have been unlawful for the United States or American citizens to send arms, ammunition, or implements of war to another country for transshipment to either side in the civil war. When the Seventy-fifth Congress came into session in January 1937, it immediately took up consideration of this issue. There was, the
New York Times
reported, “a race between the President of the United States and Congress on the one hand and some American dealers and American exporters of arms, munitions, and other implements of war, including airplanes and airplane parts.” As Congress took up the neutrality question for Spain, the State Department was authorizing export licenses for machine guns, forty million rounds of ammunition, five hundred airplane engines, and forty-seven airplanes to Loyalist forces.
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Brought to the floor by Senator Key Pittman, the Nevada Democrat who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, a resolution was quickly passed that “simply makes it unlawful to export arms, ammunition, or implements of war from the United States or any of its possessions, or to export to a foreign country for transshipment, to Spain, or for the use of either of the opposing parties in Spain during the present internal strife in that country.”
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Pittman explained that “two forms of government are fighting in Spain in what is called a ‘civil war,’ but it is a fight of foreign theories of government, not involving democracy, in which the opposing forces are aided and sympathized with by great, powerful governments who espouse one cause or another.”
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Tennessee’s Samuel McReynolds, who chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House, expressed the overwhelming consensus on Capitol Hill: “I want to save this country from becoming involved in European wars,” he explained, “and I shall not be a party to the carnage and crucifixion that is going on in Spain, and I want to see the eyes of the men in this House who will. That is the way I feel about it.”
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Narrow and targeted, this legislation passed on the day it was introduced, unanimously in the Senate and by a 411–1 vote in the House.
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President Roosevelt swiftly signed the resolution. As he did, stopping the shipment of arms already loaded for export, J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation of whether the recruitment of American volunteers to serve the Loyalist cause violated federal prohibitions on enlistments in foreign armed forces.
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The United States had no appetite for war. Neutrality continued to elicit overwhelming support across regional and party lines when Congress considered the first permanent legislation in 1937. This law was tougher and more restrictive than the earlier acts. During the prior two years, the global arms race had gathered pace.
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Watching this acceleration of European military mobilization from afar, Congress extended the 1936 law by votes in March of 63–6 in the Senate, and 377–12 in the House.
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With the exception of the cash-and-carry provisions that were to expire on May 1, 1939, there was no termination date. Crucially, this law broadened neutrality’s scope to include all countries engaged in civil strife, and it applied equally to all belligerents once the president found they were in fact at war. It mandated the president to ban the shipment of all goods to belligerents, voided all export licenses for arms to countries at war, prohibited the arming of merchant ships, lest they attract attention by such nations, and widened the cash-and-carry provisions of the earlier law. The new statute, the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “serves notice on foreign countries that the United States will have nothing to do with their wars.”
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Underlying the near unanimity that characterized voting on neutrality legislation between 1935 and 1937 were two sets of alliances whose members supported these various bills for somewhat different reasons. The first congressional group was concerned with matters of national and international security. Exponents in this camp were both isolationists, keen to shield the country from foreign entanglements, and supporters of collective security who strongly preferred multilateral cooperation to unilateral action in order to prevent war and deter potential aggressors.
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The second group, equally interested in international political economy, joined representatives who were troubled about the prospects for global trade with others who wished to support humanitarian efforts during times of war. Both sets of representatives had to find common ground despite the diversity of motives. Their solution was cash and carry. The United States could safeguard its overseas commerce, protect its revenues, and provide access to necessary humanitarian supplies without taking sides in the conflict. California House Democrat Jerry Voorhis (later defeated by Richard Nixon in 1946) explained that this provision was “a compromise which we are compelled to accept because we believe we cannot succeed in cutting off all trade with belligerents, and it is a compromise because even if we could do so, we do not want to prevent even belligerents from getting food, medical supplies, and things like that. It is the best we can do.”
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IV.

A
S CIRCUMSTANCES
altered, these partnerships grew increasingly difficult to sustain, especially when it became clear during the course of 1937 that efforts by law to secure the widespread popular preference for peace and avoid the human and fiscal costs that had been paid in World War I were premised on assumptions and arrangements about global security that were no longer viable.

President Roosevelt signed the permanent Neutrality Act on May 1, 1937, but the law was already in crisis by July, tested by developments it had not been created to confront in an altogether different place. Skirmishes between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing began on July 7, and by late July the situation had escalated to a full-scale war on the Chinese mainland between these countries. By the end of the month, Beijing lay in Japanese hands; by mid-August, the battle for Shanghai had begun. China’s government desperately appealed to the League of Nations in late August. It rightly asserted that Japanese aggression violated both the League’s Covenant and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, championed by then Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, which had outlawed war as a means to settle international disputes by committing the signatory countries—including Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as the United States and France—to “renounce” war as an “instrument of national policy.” Although the Chinese representative was warmly received, the League took no meaningful action.

The implications of the Sino-Japanese War for American policy were unclear. Neither country had formally declared war, and the Neutrality Act would come into play only if President Roosevelt declared that a war had indeed begun. Writing in early August 1937, after Beijing had fallen to the Japanese (and just as Congress was considering Roosevelt’s proposal for the Fair Labor Standards Act), Anne O’Hare McCormick summarized the case that would soon begin to be made about the emerging conflict in Europe. Noting that FDR had not triggered the Neutrality Act by proclaiming the existence of a state of war in China, even though “several Americans have already been killed in the hell which has been let loose at Shanghai,” she made clear why “every day of fighting underlines the complications inherent in the neutrality policy.” Ironically, only by not invoking neutrality could the United States actually stay neutral, for the operation of the law clearly would have worked to the benefit of Japan by making any help of arms or credit to China impossible. Within weeks of having come into force, in short, the law had turned into an imposing burden, satisfying virtually no one. “The extraordinary point about our neutrality policy,” McCormick persuasively concluded, “is that practically nobody, at home or abroad, believes it will work.”
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When, in February 1938, Japan finally declared war to exist, largely in order to force Roosevelt’s hand, he continued to demur.
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Two months later, in replying to critics about the conduct of his policies in the Far East, the president defended the policy of neutrality, maintaining that it had kept the United States out of both the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War. But he conceded that while the law intended that the United States avoid giving aid or penalizing one side against the other when a foreign war broke out, that was proving “difficult of application.”
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Soon, isolationists in Congress were demanding that the president make a public accounting of this position, and a group of congressional anti-isolationists opened a drive to repeal the Neutrality Act.
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The center no longer held.

Official neutrality was plagued by persistent practical and conceptual problems. The peace treaties of 1919 had envisaged global arrangements based on universality and the peaceful settlement of disputes among countries that were democratic, as well as disarmament and collective security. Such positive international law as the source of a decent peace had been shattered. All its assumptions became nullified as Europe and Asia became embroiled in hostilities in the 1930s. Crisp distinctions between peace and war and between international and domestic affairs had become indistinct.
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Fascists did not include
peace
in their vocabulary, “except as a term of mockery or abuse.”
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Treaties were being violated without any sense of sanctity. Countries dissatisfied with the Versailles settlement announced that global law was merely a cynical cover for the vested interests of the victors of World War I. Wars, moreover, were being initiated without declaration, and they often were framed not as warfare but as police actions. And with changes to means and objects, the rules of warfare had become impossible to sustain, even though they continued to exist in numerous international documents.
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The world, in short, dramatically failed to conform to the neutrality legislation’s conditions and expectations. It soon became increasingly difficult to sustain the hypothesis that the results of overseas wars would not imperil the United States.
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It was, as one student of the period from 1937 to 1941 has put the point, a moment marked by “the reawakening” of the “dormant sense of fear.”
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Writing to introduce a 1939 volume of essays on “war in our time” by the refugee faculty at the New School’s Graduate Faculty, Hans Speier and Alfred Kahler observed how “today the word ‘war’ connotes less a memory than an apprehension. It is tomorrow’s war that governs the imagination.”
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The demise of collective security and “its graveyard of wishful resolutions,”
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and the rise of international anarchy and militarism, made the neutrality strategy too abstract, and thus remote from particular conflicts. It was also too prescriptive, because it reduced the scope for judgment and action on behalf of principles and friends.
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The world’s big conflicts were producing “less a war between nations than a war between ideologies.”
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Either by omission or commission, the United States would have to choose what stance to take. Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre pressed the American people in June 1938 to understand that “events have taken place which challenge the very existence of the international order,” threatening “international anarchy.”
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With force having replaced law, only active participation in an arms race and only a rejection of older ideas about global arrangements would make it possible for the United States to pursue policies that would protect and enhance democratic power.

It was in this difficult context, with Americans, as Walter Lippmann was writing, “seized by deep uncertainty” and “sick with nervous indecision,” that sharp congressional battles about neutrality and conscription unfolded.
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A growing chorus of voices in the late 1930s and early 1940s began to argue, as the international relations scholar Frederick Schuman did, that it had become imperative to set aside “the dominant mood since 1931, and indeed, since 1919,” which, in the United States, “has been one of fear and flight.” The United States, he counseled, must overcome its aversion to a global role and develop “a design for power” in which its “central task” is not “passive defense or acquiescence to a world-environment created by others but to remake that environment . . . by the world-wide use of their own power.”
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The chances for such policies of engagement did not seem promising. There were no guarantees that the United States would prove equal to “the cruel necessities” by which the balance of democracy and dictatorship would be decided.
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Ideas about isolation, which later came to seem cranky, were based on historical traditions, global agreements, and an idealistic wish never to repeat the carnage of 1914–1918. Over the course of American political development, geopolitical isolation from European affairs arguably “formed our most fundamental theory of foreign policy.” From the nation’s founding until World War I, it was a truism in the country’s political life that it was in the interest of the United States to stay clear of Europe’s conflicts and, in turn, to keep European governments out of North and South America. What shifted during and after World War I was the status of isolation, which swung from being the fundamental premise of foreign affairs based on British sea power and global hegemony to being one policy possibility among others after the United States “became the decisive weight” in the global balance of power.
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During the early Roosevelt years, the core premise of American foreign policy was the isolationist idea that the United States did not have a stake in European conflicts. It was just this view that former president Hoover articulated upon returning from a fourteen-nation tour of Europe in March 1938, when, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, he urgently warned the United States not to join the formation of any democratic alliance with Britain and France against the Fascist dictatorships. “We should have none of it,” he cautioned, adding that “the forms of government which other peoples pass through in working out their destinies is not our business.”
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