Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (105 page)

The isolationists stood firm. “Roosevelt wants to fight for any little thing,” a suspicious Hiram Johnson told his son, and the California Republican judged it the responsibility of Congress to see that the president couldn’t. The Senate foreign relations committee leaned toward easing the restrictions on the president, but when Pittman held hearings on the neutrality law, the testimony simply splintered the administration’s allies. “We have eighteen members present at this hearing, and so far we have eighteen bills,” Pittman told Roosevelt.

Roosevelt invited committee members to the White House, where he and Cordell Hull argued that an arms embargo would make war more likely by diminishing the usable influence of the United States. As a concession Roosevelt said he could tolerate a cash-and-carry amendment. He added—and indeed emphasized—that he had no intention of sending American troops to Europe in the event of a war there.

He resorted to extraneous inducements as well. Nevada’s Pittman had lobbied for the silver interests of his state almost since the Populist era; Roosevelt persuaded the Senate to boost silver subsidies. He took comparable care of other legislators.

When even this strategy failed, he brought the leaders of both parties in the Senate, along with Vice President Garner, back to the White House. “It was a desperate effort,” Hull acknowledged, “but both the President and I felt we had to make one last, supreme attempt to prevail on the Senate leaders to recognize fully and clearly the perils to our own nation that were just ahead if war should come to Europe.”

Roosevelt opened the meeting with criticism of Gerald Nye, the arch-isolationist, and suggested that if Nye could be circumvented the arms embargo might be lifted.

William Borah interrupted. “There are others, Mr. President,” the Idaho Republican asserted.

“What did you say, Senator Borah?” Roosevelt asked.

“There are others, Mr. President.” Borah asserted his own opposition to repeal of the embargo, and he said the president was exaggerating the likelihood of war in Europe.

Roosevelt turned to Hull. “Cordell, what do you think about the possibility of danger ahead?”

“If Senator Borah could only see some of the cables coming to the State Department about the extremely dangerous outlook in the international situation, I feel satisfied he would moderate his views.”

Borah snorted. “I have my own sources of information,” he said. “And on several occasions I’ve found them more reliable than the State Department.”

Hull grew hot. “Never in my experience had I found it nearly so difficult to restrain myself and refrain from a spontaneous explosion,” he recalled. “I knew from masses of official facts that piled high on one another at the State Department that Borah was everlastingly wrong.” He said almost as much to Borah’s face: “I scarcely know what to think about anything in the light of the complacent way Senator Borah has brushed aside the whole mass of facts we have at the State Department, which completely disprove his theory that there will be no war.”

Whether the others present agreed with Borah or with Hull on the danger of war, the senators backed Borah on the politics of neutrality. Roosevelt polled the group, and to a man they said the arms embargo could not be repealed. “Well, Captain,” Garner told Roosevelt, “we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.”

P
ERHAPS HIS DEFEAT
on the arms embargo inclined the president to indulge himself at congressional expense when the opportunity arose. The same session of the legislature that refused to untie his hands on foreign policy provided him a minor victory on government reorganization—in particular by authorizing the establishment of an administrative office for the federal judiciary. Amid the thunder out of Europe and Asia and the fight for control of foreign policy, almost no one paid any attention to the measure. But Roosevelt did, and he made the country pay attention, too.

“Today, August 7, 1939, deserves special recognition,” the president declared upon signing the judiciary bill, “because it marks the final objective of the comprehensive proposal for judicial reorganization which I made to the Congress on February 5, 1937.” Other Democrats groaned that the president was reminding the country of the court-packing debacle, but Roosevelt, still stinging from that embarrassing defeat, insisted on raising it. And he insisted that it wasn’t a defeat after all. He reiterated several parts of the reform bill that had been lost in the furor over the issue of additional justices, and he congratulated himself for their successful incorporation in subsequent measures.

But these were the filler of his court-reorganization scheme, as everyone knew. The nut of the matter was the hostility of the Supreme Court to New Deal legislation. “Measures of social and economic reform were being impeded or defeated by narrow interpretations of the Constitution,” Roosevelt recalled, “and by the assumption on the part of the Supreme Court of legislative powers which properly belonged to the Congress.” On this point his victory was sweetest. “It is true that the precise method which I recommended, was not adopted, but the objective, as every person in the United States knows today, was achieved. The results are not even open to dispute.”

He was right. The Supreme Court’s reversals in the spring of 1937, upholding the constitutionality of the Wagner Act and other pro-labor legislation, had been followed by the retirement of Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter. Roosevelt nominated Alabama senator Hugo Black to replace the conservative Van Devanter, and although Black’s nomination evoked protests over his former membership in the Ku Klux Klan, his Senate connections and Roosevelt’s stature sufficed to win Black the approval of the upper house. Roosevelt got another nomination in 1938 and two more in 1939, by which time the court was more Roosevelt’s than Charles Evans Hughes’s. Conservatives admitted as much by their cries of complaint. Roosevelt relished the distress. “Attacks recently made on the Supreme Court itself by ultraconservative members of the bar indicate how fully our liberal ideas have already prevailed,” he said in his August 1939 signing statement. Speaking at a press conference the next day, he added: “I think it is very important to stress the fact that out of the seven objectives—and they are all very, very important objectives—six were obtained by legislation, and the seventh by the opinions and decisions of the Supreme Court itself.”

“A thousand per cent,” a reporter remarked. “It is a good batting average, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt nodded his head and smiled.

T
HE SAME REPORTER,
Richard Harkness, asked what the president thought about the refusal of Congress to repeal the arms embargo. Roosevelt interrupted: “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, say ‘The Congress,’ but a substantially unanimous Republican minority in both Houses, both the House and Senate, plus about twenty per cent, twenty-two per cent of the House and twenty-five per cent of the Senate.”

Roosevelt’s point, of course, was that the isolationists were a minority, albeit one that had managed to stymie the administration. He went on to assert another point. “They made a bet,” he said, referring to the isolationists’ prediction that there would not be a war in Europe.

They bet the nation, made a large wager with the nation, which may affect, if they lose it, about a billion and a half human beings. Now, that is pretty important. They have said, “There will be no war until sufficiently long after we come back in January so that we can take care of things after we come back.” I sincerely hope they are right. But if they are not right and we have another serious international crisis they have tied my hands, and I have practically no power to make an American effort to prevent such a war from breaking out. Now that is a pretty serious responsibility.

It grew more serious—very much more serious—within weeks. For two decades the principal enemy of the German National Socialists had been the German Communists and their ideological kin in other countries. The Communists had provided the foil for the Nazis, the specter they conjured to elicit the support of German industrialists and bankers. In time the German Communists—intimidated, assassinated, or incarcerated—lost credibility as a threat, and the Nazis turned to the Jews. But foreign Communists continued to stir the fascist blood, which flowed hot in the Spanish civil war. By the time the Spanish conflict ended, with a fascist victory in early 1937, the Nazis appeared primed to take on the Bolsheviks directly.

For their part the Bolsheviks—which was to say, the Communists of the Soviet Union—had tried to stiffen the spine of the democracies against the Nazis. Whatever Roosevelt’s intentions in offering recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933, Stalin had accepted the American president’s conditions in the hope, however vague and distant, of outflanking the Germans. That same year the Soviet government ratified a nonaggression treaty with France. In 1934, not long after Germany walked out of the League of Nations, the Soviet Union walked in, to enhance its international respectability and its prospects of linking up with the Western Europeans. In 1935 Stalin ordered the Comintern, the ostensibly independent but obviously subservient (to Moscow) international congress of Communist parties, to support the “Popular Front,” a tactical alliance of the Communist parties of the Western democracies with Socialists and other anti-fascist groups. In 1938 Stalin strove to steel the Western democracies against Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia, offering military assistance to the Czechs and lobbying for a seat at the table in Munich.

But the West rebuffed his overtures, accounting them as cynical as they certainly were. Yet cynical or not, they were more substantial than anything Czechoslovakia was getting from the West, and their rejection by the democracies caused Stalin to reconsider his strategy. The Popular Front failed to warm up the West, where many conservatives—among others—still spoke of communism as being a greater threat than fascism and openly endorsed a strategy of provoking a fight between the two authoritarian ideologies, the better to destroy both. Stalin’s cynicism took a new direction as he pondered an ideological truce with Hitler, perhaps embodied in a nonaggression pact.

Hitler found his own path to the same destination. The Nazi leader had never considered Poland’s borders any more legitimate than those of Czechoslovakia, in that the resurrected Polish state contained territory taken from the second German reich after the World War. The Polish Corridor, separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, was an especial abomination. The plains of Poland meanwhile offered the “lebensraum,” or living space, for which Hitler had lusted since composing
Mein Kampf
in the early 1920s. Almost incessantly the Nazi government and its propaganda machine conducted a psychological war against the Poles. Yet Hitler reasonably assumed that any German military thrust into Poland would provoke a Soviet response, perhaps drawing Germany into a war it wasn’t ready to fight.

Hitler may or may not have been as cynical as Stalin, but he was at least as shrewd. He took note when Stalin fired his cosmopolitan (and Jewish) foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, and replaced him with the provincial (and ethnic Russian) Vyacheslav Molotov. And he responded positively when, in August 1939, Stalin suggested the possibility of a nonaggression pact.

The deal was concluded in short order. On August 22 Berlin stunned the world by announcing that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would travel to Moscow to sign the agreement. Special editions of German papers carried the news, extolling as a masterstroke what would have been accounted treason just weeks before. Ribbentrop was the author of the 1937 Anti-Com-intern Pact, marrying Germany and Japan in everlasting enmity to the Soviet Union; now Ribbentrop was being feted in the very homeland of the Bolshevik beast.