Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (66 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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From January to April 1930, a resumed naval disarmament conference sat at London, attended by the five main naval powers and victorious principal allies of the Great War. Stimson headed the U.S. delegation, accompanied by, among others, Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams, descendant of two presidents and grandson of Lincoln’s minister to London. France refused to agree to parity for Italy, but the U.S., U.K., and Japan agreed on a continuation of a 10–6 ratio on capital ships and 10–7 on other vessels, except submarines, where parity was agreed. As a result that was shortly to prove to have been unwise, the British scrapped five capital ships, the Americans three, and the Japanese one. A decade later, there would be ample reason to regret this false measure of peace promotion. The League of Nations convened a follow-on disarmament conference in Geneva in February 1932, where the U.S., demonstrating the continued prevalence of the delusional Republican faith in the uncomplicated attainability of world peace, proposed the abolition of all offensive weapons. Naturally, this proposal sank without trace (Japan had already begun its aggressive war in China), and Hoover countered with a proposal for a 30 percent reduction in all armaments.
In October 1933, Germany, under Hitler’s new government, had announced its withdrawal from the conference and from the League of Nations. The conference finally broke up in the spring of 1934, having failed to accomplish anything. There would be another attempt in 1936, where Britain, France, and the U.S., which should long since have been rearming themselves, agreed on a few limitations that were easily evaded because of the aggressive build-up of Japanese, Italian, and German naval forces. There would be little talk of arms control after that for nearly 40 years.
Even these early efforts at limiting the size of battleships were not successful. The powers, except Japan, who renounced its adherence at the end of 1934, were pledged not to exceed 35,000 tons in the displacement of new battleships. The British
King George V
class, American
North Carolina
class, French
Richelieu
class, German
Bismarck
class, and Italian
Littorio
class ships all exceeded that limit, by from 10 percent (Americans and British) to nearly 20 percent (the Germans). The Japanese, having had the decency to renounce this hypocrisy entirely, constructed the two largest battleships in history, the
Musashi
and the
Yamato,
each 73,000 tons. It proved impossible even to verify the size of these huge ships of the treaty countries, which required years to build. Verifying arms-control agreements in respect of aircraft and missile-launchers, relatively small, mobile, and concealable weapons, would be a desperately complicated matter in the next generation, when some reciprocal effort was made at control of these much more compact and destructive armaments.
13. JAPAN AND THE BEGINNING OF WAR
 
In September 1931, Japan occupied the principal cities of Manchuria, and systematically extended its control over southern Manchuria by January of 1932 and of the whole province by September, when Tokyo purported to recognize the puppet state of Manchukuo. This was a bare-faced violation of the Washington treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the League of Nations Covenant. This was the first serious test of the League’s ability to deter or roll back aggression. In January 1932, Stimson sent identical notes to China and Japan, stating that the United States would not recognize any arrangement or act that might “impair . . . the sovereignty, independence, or territorial and administrative integrity of . . . China” or, inevitably, flogging the same spavined horse as all his predecessors since Hay, “the Open Door.” Of course there had been no open door to China for years; it was just another figment of the roseate imagination of America’s diplomats. This became known, rather portentously, as the Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of any territories or agreements obtained by aggression.
The British government, four days after Stimson’s pronunciamento, announced that it had full faith in Japan’s assurances that the Open Door was intact; what would soon enough become the infamous British policy of appeasement of the dictators had begun. At the end of January, Japan bombarded and seized Shanghai, Chinas largest city. Stimson proposed to Sir John Simon, the British foreign secretary, a joint protest based on the Washington treaty, but Simon opted for action through the League. Stimson stated that the United States would stand on its treaty rights in the Far East, the beginning of what would prove a very durable practice of the United States taking a harder line against anti-Western and anti-democratic governments than the British or the French. (In what subsequent events and Stimson’s role in them would prove to be an irony, he publicly wrote the ambassador in London, Dawes, that the United States “does not intend to go to war with Japan.”) In October, in something of a victory for Stimson, the League adopted his doctrine, and in May, in a League victory achieved by the non-League U.S.A., Japan withdrew from Shanghai. This invites renewed consideration of whether the League of Nations could have been substantially more effective if the United States had adhered to it, instead of just to the Hughes-Kellogg aerated waffling about scrapping battleships and outlawing war.
In October 1932, the League’s Lytton Commission produced the report of its inquiry into the dispute in Manchuria. It condemned Japan’s aggression, but recognized Japan’s rights in Manchuria and indulged in the sophistry of recognizing Manchuria as an “autonomous” state under Chinese “sovereignty” but Japanese “control.” Words had lost their meaning in the placation of Japan, but despite this accommodation, Japan withdrew from the League in March 1933, a few weeks after the Lytton Report was adopted by the League of Nations’ general assembly. The disintegration of the world had begun again.
14. THE POLITICS OF DEPRESSION
 
As the election season began, it was clear that in the desperate economic circumstances, the administration was going to have a very difficult time. The Republicans met at Chicago in June 1932 and renominated President Hoover and Vice President Curtis without significant dissent, on a platform that called for sharp reductions in government expenses, the sanctity of the gold standard and a balanced budget, vague alterations to Prohibition, enhanced tariffs, and continued restraint of immigration. Hoover had given a lot of attention to a world economic conference that would open in London in the spring of 1933, and set great store by this. Preliminary indications were that it would be another effort by the governments of the world to agree that they were all blameless in the face of an economic whirlwind that was virtually an Old Testament plague. There was already a good deal of discussion about pegging the principal currencies together, which was both impractical and almost irrelevant to the main problems of the Depression. The administration’s leaders, including Andrew Mellon, who left the Treasury and replaced Dawes as ambassador in London, did not grasp that only expansion of the money supply, and liberalization of spending and trade, would alleviate the Depression, though it would also induce inflation. There was a grim choice between depression and inflation, but under no scenario could the United States go much longer without massive aid to the indigent and be confident of avoiding widespread disorder.
The Democrats met in Chicago a week after the Republicans had left the city, and struggled for the last time with their rule that required a two-thirds majority to nominate a candidate. The 1928 nominee, Alfred E. Smith, though he had not held a political office since being succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York, still had the support of the eastern urban party bosses. Roosevelt clearly had the lead, but there was a third candidate, Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, whose candidacy was invented by media owner William Randolph Hearst, because he was an ancient foe of Smith’s when Hearst had been active in New York politics himself, and believed Roosevelt was apt, as a Wilsonian, to be too much of an internationalist. Hearst was somewhat Anglophobic, and his newspaper chain published a regular column by Hitler (though Hearst was philo-Semitic and in his annual visits to Berlin through the thirties remonstrated with Hitler about the evils of anti-Semitism).
In the event of deadlock, there was much talk of a compromise candidate, such as former war secretary Newton D. Baker. Wilson’s son-in-law and Smith’s rival at the 1924 convention, William G. McAdoo, was the favorite-son candidate from California but was also under Hearst’s influence, as he was running for the Senate there and Hearst was the state’s largest newspaper publisher. Roosevelt led the first ballot, and his political operatives, Louis McHenry Howe and James A. Farley, had held back enough support to assure modest rises on the subsequent two ballots. At this point, financier and Roosevelt backer (and father of a future Democratic president) Joseph P. Kennedy succeeded in telephoning Hearst at his magnificent palace near San Luis Obispo, California, and warned him that if he did not wind down Garner and McAdoo, Baker or Smith might get the nomination. Roosevelt had already cravenly, his wife and some other intimates thought, made a rather isolationist speech clarifying his position in order to settle Hearst down. Hearst accepted Kennedy’s advice, and Garner withdrew and, with the help of veteran congressman Sam Rayburn, delivered the Texas delegation to Roosevelt.
When the balloting recommenced, the alphabet quickly brought on McAdoo, who delivered California’s entire delegation to Roosevelt, who was nominated at the end of the fourth ballot. In accord with the deal with Hearst, Garner was chosen for vice president, although he would have preferred to remain as Speaker. (And as he lived to be 98, he might have held the office for a very long time; he later dismissed the vice presidency as “not worth a pail of warm piss.” When asked by Roosevelt if he had any advice on how to win the election, he responded: “Stay alive until November.”) The party platform was a mélange of conservative and reform measures, including reductions in government expenditures and a balanced budget, unemployment and old-age insurance under state laws (without a hint of how to pay for them), participation in the international monetary conference that Hoover was touting, higher farm prices, flexibility on tariffs, the repeal of Prohibition, and the regulation of complex corporate structures and utilities and of securities and commodity exchanges.
The Socialists nominated Norman Thomas for president, and the Communists nominated William Z. Foster, neither for the first time nor the last.
Roosevelt had referred in a speech, while he was seeking the nomination, to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” and he broke a long tradition by coming in person, by airplane, to the convention to accept the nomination. He told the convention and the country: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.” It was an electrifying message. Roosevelt was a very talented orator and he ran an energetic and aggressive campaign that edged close to suggestions of profound changes to assure a more equitable distribution of wealth, but was careful to refer to such measures only as last resorts. In different addresses he called for both increases and reductions of tariffs, and finessed it with explanations that these were bilateral matters that varied with each country, product, and commodity.
Hoover campaigned doggedly, writing his own thoughtful speeches, excoriating Roosevelt as a charlatan and a radical and referring to his slipperiness on many policies as “the nightmare of the chameleon on Scotch plaid.” But Hoover was promising grim continuity, no change, and no believable hope. He was still claiming that the long forecasted and desperately awaited rally had started, and warned that the election of Roosevelt and the promulgation of his New Deal would mean that “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; weeds will overrun millions of farms.” Roosevelt described the shantytowns of the itinerant indigent on the edge of every city in America as “Hoovervilles” and accused the administration, unanswerably in the circumstances, of having failed, of having “worshipped the golden calf,” of having been manipulated by “the money-changers in the temple,” and of having lost all hope, imagination, and capacity to lead.
On election day, Roosevelt won 22.8 million votes, 57 percent of the total, and 472 electoral votes, to 15.8 million, 40 percent, and 59 electoral votes for Hoover. Thomas received 885,000 votes and Foster 103,000. These were very modest proportions of the vote for left-wing parties, compared with most other democracies, where radical parties were a serious threat.
Between Roosevelt’s election and inauguration, the German president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, was induced to name Adolf Hitler chancellor. The centrist parties and wealthy businessmen assumed that Hitler could be controlled and would be a useful bulwark against the Communists. The second assumption was correct, but Hitler effortlessly and swiftly outmaneuvered all other faction heads and established a totalitarian dictatorship, uniting Hindenburg’s position with his own as fuehrer in 1934, when the 86-year-old marshal-president died and the old Germany was laid in the grave with him. A process of remilitarizing Germany and putting what was left of the Treaty of Versailles to the shredder began at once.
The rise of Hitler had a very negative effect on Mussolini, who, having been fairly responsible, began to put on the airs of a conqueror. France elected a democratic socialist government in 1934, while former premier Laval sidled up to fascistic elements and the French Communist Party drew almost 20 percent of the vote. The Third Republic was less stable than ever. In 1936, Spain would erupt in a terrible, three-year civil war that would take a million lives, between fascists led by General Francisco Franco and a Communist-led coalition. In Britain, after the collapse of the Labour government, King George V had urged the rather plodding Labour Party prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to form a coalition government, which was mainly composed of Conservatives. Hitler and Stalin soon dominated or intimidated almost all of continental Europe except France, and they had no shortage of supporters in that country. Since the collapse of Wilson’s efforts to bring the United States into the League of Nations, the world had been on a strategic holiday. The failure to make a serious peace with Germany, to come to terms with Soviet Russia, to set up an international organization with any muscle, to get a grip on tariffs, or even manage the economies of the major countries responsibly soon laid low the economy of the whole world and brought forward threats to Western democracy far more worrisome than the overgrown child, Wilhelm II.

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