Roosevelt (45 page)

As for American participation in international organizations, Roosevelt continued to play a most cautious game. Speaking to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation shortly after Christmas 1933, he paid tribute to the League as a common meeting place for international discussion, as a means of settling disputes, and as an aid in labor, health, and other matters. The United States was cooperating openly in using its machinery. But, he continued, “we are not members and we do not contemplate membership.” At one time he thought of appointing an American ambassador to the
League, but he feared the reaction of the isolationists. And he was cautious even on technical co-operation. When Phillips told him that the Department of Agriculture wanted to have a representative on a committee of League experts on the international meat trade, Roosevelt replied: “What would be the effect of this? Is it perhaps going too far toward official membership in a direct official committee of the League itself?”

Of a milder political coloration than the League were two other world agencies: the International Labor Organization and the Permanent Court of International Justice. It was on Miss Perkins’ initiative that the Senate and House passed by simple majority vote a joint resolution authorizing membership in the ILO. Roosevelt had said to her, “I may be President of the United States, I may be in favor of the ILO, but I can’t do it alone.” The result was that Miss Perkins did it alone. On Roosevelt’s advice and with his blessing—but with no other help from him—she trudged from Pittman to Johnson to Borah explaining that the ILO had existed before the League, was not part of it, and no loss of sovereignty was involved. After thus patiently lining up virtually every member of the Foreign Relations Committee, she got the resolution through.

Joining the World Court also seemed politically feasible. Both party platforms in 1932 had called for adherence to the watered-down protocols that safeguarded United States sovereignty. Largely on Hull’s initiative, Roosevelt decided to push ratification at the beginning of the 1935 session. Trouble loomed from the start. Roosevelt’s cabinet was divided, and Chairman Key Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was so lukewarm that he asked the President to get Robinson to lead the fight. For a while Roosevelt and Hull thought they had the needed two-thirds of the senators. But a lightning mobilization of isolationist opinion commanded by Hearst, Father Coughlin, Will Rogers, and others unloosed a flood of telegrams onto Capitol Hill, and enough senators wavered to defeat the measure.

Although Roosevelt had not thrown himself into the fight as had Hull, he was stung by the rebuff. Ickes at a cabinet meeting noticed a bitter tinge to his laughter, and a hint that he wanted to hurt the thirty-six dissenters. If the thirty-six ever got to heaven, Roosevelt wrote Robinson, “they will be doing a great deal of apologizing for a very long time—that is if God is against war—and I think He is.” But Roosevelt’s chief reaction was a feeling that he had to wait out public opinion. Adherence would come eventually, he wrote Elihu Root, “but today, quite frankly, the wind everywhere blows against us.” And to Stimson he sent somber words:

“Thank you for that mighty nice note. It heartens me. You are right that we know the enemy. In normal times the radio and other
appeals by them would not have been effective. However, these are not normal times; people are jumpy and very ready to run after strange gods. This is so in every other country as well as our own.

“I fear common sense dictates no new method for the time being —but I have an unfortunately long memory and I am not forgetting either our enemies or our objectives.”

Most internationalist of all the administration’s foreign policies was the trade agreements program. Chiefly responsible for the program, however, was Hull, not Roosevelt, who remained perched between isolationists and internationalists in his own administration and party.

In his maiden speech to Congress at the age of thirty-six Hull had called for lower tariffs; he had fought for them ever since; and now, as Secretary of State, the tenacious old Tennessean saw his great opportunity. Roosevelt had given him the impression during the years before 1932 that he favored reciprocal tariff agreements between nations. But when Hull tried to push his ideas during the first Hundred Days, he ran straight into the nationalistic emphasis in AAA and NRA. His trade program was sidetracked. On one thing, though, Hull and Roosevelt were fully agreed. No substantial tariff reduction could be achieved unless power was delegated to the President. To run a low tariff bill through the congressional gantlet was to expose it to decimation by congressmen with special interests. Only the President could act for a more general interest.

But would Roosevelt act? Slowly he came round during 1933 to some kind of trade agreements program; when, however, he set up a committee to co-ordinate foreign trade relations, he picked as head a vigorous opponent of tariff reductions, George N. Peek. At the same time that the President was pushing ahead with a trade agreements bill he named Peek foreign trade adviser. Hull was stunned by this appointment. A few months after the bill became law, the President allowed Peek to negotiate a barter agreement with Germany. When Hull and Peek disagreed over the most-favored-nation clause, Roosevelt asked Hull to spend “a couple of hours some evening” with Peek talking things over. “In pure theory you and I think alike,” Roosevelt wrote Hull, “but every once in a while we have to modify a principle to meet a hard and disagreeable fact!”

Such a tug of war could not last. Under heavy pressure from Hull, the President finally swung against Peek and his barter plans. Later Peek resigned with a bitter statement.

Hull also took the lead in applying the Good Neighbor doctrine to the rest of the Americas, but here he had full backing from the President. Torn by strife and discontent, resentful of the years of
interference by its Big Brother of the North, Latin America was skeptical toward Democratic party promises of no more meddling in its internal affairs. The real test of the new line could come only in a concrete situation, and Cuba, long a ward of the United States, provided such a test. When palace revolt followed revolt in Havana during 1933, the ugly situation seemed to threaten American commercial interests in the island. Worried by the rioting and army mutinies, Ambassador Sumner Welles in Cuba proposed a “strictly limited intervention,” but Hull and Roosevelt refused. Later they erased a festering sore by abrogating the Platt Amendment, which had restricted Cuba’s sovereignty. As further proof of the Good Neighbor policy Roosevelt also withdrew marines from Haiti and eased relations with Panama. Capping the whole program was the patient nurturing of friendly relations by Hull at the seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, the first such meeting that an American Secretary of State had attended as a delegate. By 1936 Roosevelt could call the Good Neighbor policy “a fact, active, present, pertinent and effective.” Yet it was notable that the foreign policy on which he took the most fixed and principled stand was essentially a negative policy—one of noninterference—whatever positive results might flow from it. To be sure, persistent noninterference was not easy, but it was far easier than a persistent policy of intervention or collective security.

In any event, Roosevelt did not put all his bets on treaties and noninterference as a basis for good neighborliness, at least outside the Americas. Good fences, too, made for good neighbors, and some of his fences bristled with spikes and spears. Within a week of Roosevelt’s inauguration Swanson announced that the navy would be built up to treaty strength, and three months later the President allotted almost a quarter billion from NRA appropriations for this purpose. But the build-up of armed strength during the first term was slow and quiet. Roosevelt did not want to publicize defense unduly. When McIntyre told him early in 1934 that patriotic organizations were asking him to proclaim “National Defense Week,” Roosevelt answered tersely, “Don’t do it.”

In the white marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building late in 1934 sat the stage managers of a carefully planned, elaborately staged drama. In the center behind the long table was the hero of the drama, a stern, hard-faced young senator named Gerald P. Nye; flanking him were other idols of American isolationism—Arthur H. Vandenberg, Bennett Champ Clark, Homer T. Bone. Of villains in this drama there were many: evil, bloodsucking “merchants of
death,” who paraded before the committee day after day to confess their sins. Of heroines there was only one: an ethereal being, always appealed to but never seen, a figure named Peace. Crowded behind the villains was the chorus, the spectators who craned their necks and muttered with indignation as the play unfolded.

Such was the Nye committee investigating the munitions industry. Like many other famous Senate investigations, the Nye probe was less a search for data than a dramatization of things already known or rightly suspected. But the charges were dramatic and shocking. Arms makers had bribed politicians, shared patents, divided up business, reaped incredible profits, evaded taxes—all in the sordid trade of death weapons. Even worse, munitions makers helped foment wars to boost their profits.

Rarely have Senate hearings fallen with such heavy impact on the stream of American opinion. Horrendous titles suddenly blazoned forth in book stores and magazine stands: “merchants of death” were deep in “iron, blood and profits”; it was “one hell of a business.” The timing was flawless. The revelations coincided with and contributed to a deep revulsion against entanglement in European quarrels. Writers were busy showing that 1917 was not due to German submarines or a conception of neutral rights, but to a few greedy capitalists. Germany was not so guilty after all. The Americans had been saps and suckers.

With war clouds piling up again in Europe, millions of Americans vowed, “Never again.” Women organized peace societies. College students formed the “Veterans of Future Wars” to collect their bonuses now, before they had to fight and die. Isolationism was strong everywhere, but especially in the Midwest, Northwest, and Rockies; in election after election these sections sent to Congress men like William E. Borah of Idaho, Key Pittman of Nevada, Burton Wheeler of Montana, young Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, and Nye of North Dakota, who championed the isolationist cause. This cause, charged with emotion and bitterness, had now become a force of awesome, almost primeval power.

Where was Roosevelt in all this? Certainly he had a deep stake in preventing a mobilization of public opinion that might in turn shackle him in making foreign policy. But the President’s relation to the Nye investigation was a passive one. Largely by default, Nye, a Republican isolationist, was allowed to chair the committee. Gliding with the current of opinion favoring the probe, Roosevelt not only joined the chorus denouncing the arms trade but allowed Nye access to executive papers that were greatly to aid the Senator’s efforts to dramatize the skulduggery of bankers and diplomats. Even more, he tolerated—and to some extent encouraged—the Nye committee in its ambition to use intensifying disgust with arms makers
as an anvil on which to beat out a rigid policy of isolationism for the United States.

At this crucial juncture Roosevelt offered little leadership. It was not inevitable that popular hatred of arms makers and war profiteers should deepen popular feeling that America ought to isolate itself from foreign entanglements and thus from foreign wars. That hatred might as well have bolstered a public desire to work with other nations in order to stop war and hence end the grim accouterments of battle, including merchants of death. But such a channeling of opinion demanded an active program of education— in short, leadership. Roosevelt only drifted.

Given the powerful ground swell of isolationist feeling, the brilliance of the isolationists in marshaling their forces, the passivity of the administration, and the tension in Europe, only one outcome was possible—a national stampede for a storm cellar to sit out the tempests ahead. During the second Hundred Days, the isolationists on Capitol Hill were pressing for legislation requiring the President, in the event of war abroad, to embargo export of arms to all belligerents. Roosevelt and Hull favored such embargo authority, but they wanted to empower the President to discriminate between aggressor and victim by embargoing exports of arms only to the former. Such discretionary power, they reasoned, would help deter aggressors.

But the isolationists would have none of it. Such discretion, they shouted, would mean sure entanglement in alien quarrels. Pittman was hostile and surly. The President was riding for a fall, he warned the White House, if he insisted on “designating the aggressor in accordance with the wishes of the League of Nations.” The senator said he was willing to introduce such a discretionary provision, but the President would get “licked.”

The President did get licked. Mandatory arms embargo legislation passed both chambers by almost unanimous votes. Roosevelt dared not stand against the tide; he had urgent domestic bills to get through, and the isolationists were threatening to filibuster. The President signed the measure, but he warned that the inflexible provisions might drag us into war instead of keeping us out.

Why, then, did Roosevelt sign the bill? He acted mainly out of expediency. For one thing, the mandatory arms embargo section of the act was to expire in six months, and Roosevelt and Hull reasoned that they might gain discretionary power in the revision. For another, they both liked one feature of the bill—the setting up of regulation of arms traffic. Most important, Mussolini for months had been making plans for an attack on Ethiopia. A mandatory arms embargo against both nations would hurt Italy, with its need for modern arms and its possession of ships to transport them, far
more than it would hurt Haile Selassie’s flintlock-armed native troops. When Roosevelt told reporters dryly that the measure met the “needs of the existing situation,” he was more than hinting at his almost Machiavellian expediency.

And so it was that Roosevelt, at the very moment that dictators girded for war in Europe and Asia, was stripped of power to throw his country’s weight against aggressors.