Worldmaking (31 page)

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It was in such inauspicious circumstances that Beard testified, on February 4, 1941, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against President Roosevelt's main strategy to defend Britain short of a formal military alliance: Lend-Lease. David Lilienthal, a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the New Deal's crowning achievements, wrote admiringly of the distinguished figure that Beard cut in Congress. He was “a grand-looking man with a mobile face that at times is gentle even to the point of seeming ‘harmless,' an impression that is heightened by his deafness and age. His eyes will darken and sharpen, his brows tighten, and a lowering hawklike expression takes over, and then he can lay on the whip in a way that is a joy to see.”
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Beard made good use of the whip in his testimony. Under the provisions of the Lend-Lease Bill, the United States promised to lend Britain significant military matériel without any need for up-front payment. The bill stipulated that after the war, the matériel would be returned to the United States or else “bought” at a 90 percent discount. FDR explained the rationale by observing that in the event of a fire at a neighbor's house, the appropriate response was not to say, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it,” but to say, “I don't want $15—I want my fire hose back after the fire is over.”
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Beard disputed the wisdom of the president's logic and contended that the program would bring America inexorably into the conflict; it would take more than a well-aimed garden hose to prevent the fire from spreading.

Before criticizing Lend-Lease, Beard extended an apology for previously overestimating the ability of France and Britain to repulse Hitler's Germany unaided, adding by way of self-excuplation that he was not alone in making this mistake. “Who among us in September 1939,” Beard asked the committee, “could foresee that the French nation, which had stood like a wall for four cruel years, would collapse like a house of cards in four cruel months?”
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His basic position was that Lend-Lease was unconstitutional. Given his views on the economic foundations of the Constitution, lending matériel without obvious recompense did indeed jar with the Founders' intentions. Beard urged Congress to vote against the bill “with such force that no president of the United States will ever dare, in all our history, to ask it to suspend the Constitution and the laws of this land and to confer upon him limitless dictatorial powers over life and death.” For Beard, Lend-Lease was “a bill for waging undeclared war. We should entertain no delusions on this point.”
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Looking forward to the possible defeat of Germany, Japan, and Italy, Beard wondered what America would do next: “After Europe has been turned into flaming shambles, with revolutions exploding left and right, will this Congress be able to supply the men, money, and talents necessary to reestablish and maintain order and security there?”
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It fell to later politicians and thinkers to mull the practical implications of Beard's final point. Roosevelt secured the bill and Beard lost the argument, further sullying his name in the process. His Senate testimony was the last time that Beard recorded a significant observation on U.S. foreign policy prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

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It was Beard's unfortunate fate to deploy relativism in opposing one of the few Manichaean conflicts in world history. Japan attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—sinking 4 battleships and 2 destroyers, destroying 188 aircraft, and killing 2,400 service personnel—and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days later. Pearl Harbor dealt the rationale for isolationism a mortal blow. Gardening was no longer an option. Privately, Beard felt vindicated that his mid-1930s prophesy about FDR inciting Japan to precipitate war had been borne out. In imposing an embargo on oil exports to Japan in July 1941, Roosevelt had more or less forced Tokyo's hand. Due to a paucity of oil reserves, Japan was immediately confronted with two options: either step back from the brink, or secure its own independent supply of oil through territorial acquisition. Tokyo opted for the latter option, deduced that the U.S. Navy was the only force that could frustrate its ambitions, and acted accordingly in attacking Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Japan could claim to be following a Beardian path to development. America had colonized a continent in creating conditions for self-sufficiency. Japan would attempt to colonize Southeast Asia and some of the Pacific islands to realize that very same aim. In awakening the United States, a slumbering giant, Imperial Japan had signed its own death warrant. As Admiral Hara Tadaichi observed in 1945, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”
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Advances in military technology rendered the world a much smaller place in the years that followed. During a war in which huge mobile fleets—including aircraft carriers, the dimensions of which Mahan could scarcely have conceived—operated with crushing lethality far from home shores, Beard's call for insularity was shown up as a failure of imagination. Instead of adjusting to a new reality, recanting some of the ideas that patently hadn't stood the test of time, Beard chose to revisit the history of the Roosevelt administration, identifying deception and executive skullduggery at every turn. Beard followed the logic contained in Dylan Thomas's villanelle that “old age should burn and rave at close of day,” although he directed his fury at Franklin Roosevelt, not his own mortality. From 1941 to his death in 1948, Beard raged at FDR's duplicity—and the dying of the isolationist light—shredding friendships as he strode proudly toward pariah status, hopeful, like Wilson, that vindication might come later. It was a sad end to the career of a pathbreaking scholar who possessed admirable traits in personality and who offered a well-intentioned rationale for geopolitical retrenchment as self-improvement. Yet these priorities have not entirely disappeared from view. From President Barack Obama's dedication to “nation building here at home” to Senator Rand Paul's valorization of geopolitical “modesty,” aspects of Beard's “continental Americanism” are returning to view.

 

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THE SYNDICATED ORACLE

WALTER LIPPMANN

Lippmann is a man of agile mind and great natural gifts … He thumps his tub as if he were God. He is handicapped only by his inability to emit fire and brimstone through the printer's ink of his column.

—CHARLES BEARD

The early summer of 1940 was harrowing for Great Britain. German victories in the Low Countries and France made certain that the nation—and the battle-ready components of its empire—would face the Axis alone. In six weeks in May and June, some 112,000 French soldiers were killed attempting to repulse the German advance—a rate of attrition that was too high for a nation still traumatized by the First World War.
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The advancing Nazi troops toyed with Paris, pondering when to strike. No decision was required, as it turned out, because the defending French chose to abandon Haussmann's elegant boulevards rather than see them mutilated by German bombers, artillery fire, and panzer divisions. At the French port of Dunkirk, the entire British expeditionary force of 200,000 men, plus 140,000 French soldiers, were trapped by the advancing Wehrmacht. Through a hastily improvised evacuation, in which private vessels sailed alongside the Royal Navy's destroyers, this vast defeated army was ferried safely back to England. Against all odds, the British soldiers would regroup, rearm, and resume battle at a later stage (the French troops, conversely, returned swiftly and bravely to the mainland and to defeat). But this miraculous deliverance could not hide the shame and humiliation. In an address to the House of Commons on June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill described Dunkirk as a “miracle,” but cautioned that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”
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Churchill recognized that the United States offered his nation the brightest prospect of salvation, and that securing American public support for the British cause was essential. As part of a no-stone-unturned diplomatic strategy, London turned to America's most powerful print journalist for help. Walter Lippmann's thrice-weekly column “Today & Tomorrow” was read by millions across the United States, and by millions more in syndication around the world. Successive presidents craved his approval, domestic and foreign politicians sought his counsel, and the American people relied on Lippmann to explain the world's complexities. He was immortalized by a
New Yorker
cartoon of the 1920s showing two elderly women dining in a railroad car, one saying to the other: “Of course, I only take a cup of coffee in the morning. A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need.”
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A “Talk of the Town” column on the reputed formation of a Monarchist Party reported that “many Americans would be glad to settle for Walter Lippmann” as their philosopher-king.
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As France confirmed abject surrender terms with Germany, the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, a keen admirer of Lippmann, asked him to visit the embassy on a matter of highest significance. Upon his arrival, Lothian warned Lippmann that if defeatist politicians ousted Churchill to sue for “peace” with Hitler, an Atlantic without the Royal Navy would become a Nazi lake. Britain's survival as an independent maritime power thus depended on the United States providing material assistance to shore up Churchill's position and keep the ocean in virtuous hands. Lippmann needed little by way of persuasion, asking, “What would make a difference?” “The difference will be arms and destroyers,” Lothian replied, “because the Royal Navy is woefully weak in destroyers, and we cannot defend the sea lanes to Britain without them.”
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Lippmann agreed with this logic but cautioned that American largesse on this scale would require Britain to give up something substantial in return. After considering this dilemma, the two men devised a plan through which Washington would provide destroyers in exchange for leases to British bases in the western hemisphere. On such clandestine ground was the “destroyers-for-bases” deal sewn. Yet Lippmann still had to convince the American people of its merits.
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Lippmann commenced his campaign in the
New York Herald Tribune
, warning readers of his celebrated column that Nazi domination of Europe would threaten America's own survival. If Germany assumed possession of the French and British fleets, Lippmann bleakly intoned, Hitler's military reach would henceforth extend to the northeast seaboard. All Americans had to come together to aid Britain in a cause that transcended partisan politics.
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For his part, Lothian took his plan to President Roosevelt, deploying a crack legal team to explain how a destroyers-for-bases deal could circumvent the Neutrality Acts through claiming a solely defensive purpose. FDR found the rationale and loophole compelling and convenient. Lippmann later wrote that Lothian “showed Roosevelt—and showed the country—the basis on which we would gradually intervene to save England.”
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To bring the American public decisively around to viewing Britain's defense as a top priority, Lippmann identified the ideal persuasive medium in General John Pershing, the heroic leader of American troops during the First World War. Over drinks at New York's Carlton hotel, Lippmann asked Pershing if he might be willing to deliver a radio address firmly connecting British survival with congressional passage of the destroyers-for-bases deal. Moved by the force of Lippmann's request, Pershing agreed, delivering a widely reported pro-intervention address—drafted in its entirety by Lippmann—which closed with an urgent plea: “Today may be the last time when by measures short of war we can still prevent war.” A living embodiment of bipartisan patriotism, Pershing's intervention had a significant effect on the voting public's willingness to assist Great Britain.
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The speech also made it difficult for Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee, to resist the passage of destroyers-for-bases. Opposing a man of Pershing's standing was either brave or foolhardy in a general election year. Willkie decided that it was not worth the risk.

Lippmann's maneuvering did not remain clandestine for long. After doing “his part” to fashion the deal, Lippmann traveled to Maine to take a vacation with his wife. His solitude was disturbed when a reporter from the staunchly isolationist
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
called to ask about what had transpired in recent weeks. He asked, “Is it true that you had a hand in Pershing's speech?” to which Lippmann replied, “I won't say anything for quotation. If you want to know off the record, I'll say ‘Yes, I did.'” The reporter replied, “We're trying to start a Congressional investigation of this plot to get America into the war, and you're in it. You're in the plot warmongering.” Panicked at the prospect of such a high-profile investigation, Lippmann turned to his extensive list of contacts to halt the reporter's momentum. He called Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the
Dispatch
, exclaiming, “For God's sake, Joe! Have you gone stark raving mad? Why don't you call off your lunatics down there!” Pulitzer did as requested, to Lippmann's considerable relief. “Nothing came of it,” he was pleased to report. “They did write a violent editorial, but they didn't start an investigation.”
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Lippmann successfully led a great cause close to his Atlanticist heart, though he had flown perilously close to the sun in doing so. That Pulitzer pulled the plug on the
Dispatch
suggested, in a small way, that the mood was changing, that isolationism was entering its endgame as a meaningful political force. From being friendly in the 1920s, for example, Charles Beard had grown to dislike Lippmann through the 1930s and beyond. Lippmann's political moderation, closeness to elite business interests, and advocacy of military preparedness all suggested to Beard that Lippmann was a saber-rattling stooge of the propertied classes. For his part, Lippmann viewed Beard and his isolationist brethren as operating on nonsensical assumptions regarding American self-sufficiency that applied—if indeed they ever did—only to the early years of the republic. In later years Beard poked fun at Lippmann for accusing isolationists of “cherishing ancestral prejudices.” He observed bitingly, in reference to Lippmann's nominal Judaism, that such remarks show “his lack of humor as a member of the ‘chosen people'—devoid presumably of ancestral prejudices.”
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