From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (82 page)

Hull also took the lead in implementing the economic arm of the Good Neighbor policy. A passionate advocate of free trade throughout his career, with Roosevelt's blessings he helped push through Congress in 1934 a Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act that gave the executive broad authority to negotiate with other nations a lowering of tariffs by up to 50 percent. Hull's pet project helped to eliminate the customarily fierce congressional battles over tariffs and the log-rolling that went with them. It
has remained the basis for U.S. tariff policy since 1934.
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Under his careful management, the agreements had special application for Latin America. In the case of Cuba and the Central American nations, they encouraged the export of U.S. finished goods and the import of agricultural products like coffee, sugar, and tobacco, thus solidifying a quasi-colonial relationship that stunted their economic development and increased their dependence on the United States. Along with the Export-Import Bank, which provided loans to other nations to purchase goods in the United States, the reciprocal trade agreements helped triple U.S. trade with Latin America between 1931 and 1941. They strengthened the dominant role of the United States in hemispheric commerce.

The Good Neighbor policy was far more than policies and programs; it was also deeply personal and closely identified with Franklin Roosevelt. His genuine affection for people carried over into his foreign policy, as did his ability to identify with what he would call the "common man," something that especially resonated in Latin America. Once as overbearing as cousin Theodore, FDR retained a certain condescension, but he had long since concluded that it was diplomatically expedient—and good politics—to cultivate friendship among the good neighbors. He went out of his way to demonstrate that Latin America counted through such occasions as Pan-American Day in U.S. schools. His commanding presence combined with his populist instincts appealed to Latin Americans, making him the most popular U.S. president ever within the hemisphere at large.
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In 1934, he continued the new tradition of personal diplomacy by visiting South America, even showing up in Haiti, Panama, and Colombia. His arrival at an inter-American conference in Buenos Aires shortly after his overwhelming reelection in 1936 was nothing short of triumphal, a national holiday that drew huge enthusiastic crowds. The Latin American press hailed him as "
el gran democrata
" whose New Deal served as a model of the kind of reform Latin America needed.
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Buenos Aires represented the capstone of the first phase of the Good Neighbor policy. In a markedly changed climate, FDR had introduced significant changes, most notably a formal end to military interventions and deliberate efforts to cultivate good will, without changing the essence of a patron-client relationship. As the world's attention shifted after 1936 toward the impending crises in East Asia and Western Europe, the Good Neighbor policy would increasingly focus on hemispheric defense.
⁴⁴

As the threat of war mounted in the 1930s, Americans responded with a fierce determination to stay out. A minority of internationalists still favored collective security to prevent war, but most Americans preferred to concentrate on domestic issues, shun international cooperation, retain complete freedom of action, and avoid war at virtually any cost. The term
isolationism
has often—and mistakenly—been applied to all of U.S. history. It works best for the 1930s.
⁴⁵
To be sure, the United States never sought to cut itself off completely as China and Japan had done before the nineteenth century. Americans took a keen interest in events abroad, maintained diplomatic contact with other nations, and sought to sustain a flourishing trade. But their passionate 1930s quest to insulate the nation from foreign entanglements and war fully merits the label isolationist.

Isolationists did not share the same ideology or belong to any organization.
⁴⁶
They ran the political gamut from left to right. Such sentiment was strongest in the middle western states and among Republicans and Irish and German Americans, but it cut across regional, party, and ethnic lines. Isolationists did share certain basic assumptions. They did not make moral distinctions among other nations. European conflict in particular they viewed as simply another stage in a never-ending struggle for power and empire. When the United States was grappling with limited success to resolve the economic crisis at home, they had no illusions about their ability to solve others' problems. Like Americans since the middle of the nineteenth century, they believed that the crises building in Europe and East Asia did not threaten their security. Although they disagreed, often sharply, on domestic issues and in their willingness to sacrifice trade and neutral rights to avoid conflict, they shared a faith in unilateralism and a determination to stay out of war.

Such views sprang from varied sources. The United States since 1776 had made it a cardinal principle to avoid "entangling" alliances and Europe's wars. In this sense, Americans were simply adhering to tradition. But the Great Depression gave 1930s isolationism a special fervency. With breadlines lengthening and the economy at a standstill, most Americans agreed they should concentrate on combating the depression. Foreign policy fell to the bottom of the national scale of priorities. The depression also shattered the nation's self-confidence, standing on its head the Wilsonian notion that the United States had the answer to world problems. Bitter
conflicts over tariffs and Allied default on war debts exacerbated already strained relations with Britain and France, nations with whom cooperation would have been necessary to uphold the postwar order. Hostility toward the outside world increasingly marked the popular mood. "We do not like foreigners any more," Representative Maury Maverick of Texas snorted in 1935.
⁴⁷

Unpleasant memories of the Great War reinforced the effects of the depression. By the mid-1930s, Americans generally agreed that intervention had been a mistake. The United States had no real stake in the outcome of the war, it was argued; its vital interests were not threatened. Some "revisionist" historians charged that an innocent nation had been tricked into war by wily British propagandists. Others blamed Wilson and his pro-British advisers for not adhering to strict neutrality. More conspiratorially, still others argued that bankers and munitions makers—the "merchants of death" theory popularized by a Senate investigating committee headed by North Dakota's Gerald Nye—had pressed Wilson into abandoning neutrality by permitting a massive trade in war materials. When these investments were threatened by a German victory in 1917, it was alleged, these same selfish interests drove him to intervene. Americans generally agreed that their participation had neither ended the threat of war nor made the world safe for democracy.
⁴⁸
Revisionist history provided compelling arguments to avoid repeating the same mistake and historical "lessons" to show how.

Above all, the threat of another war pushed Americans toward isolationism. From 1933 to 1937, Japan consolidated its gains in Manchuria and began to exert nonmilitary pressure on North China. In the spring of 1934, a Foreign Office official publicly proclaimed that Japan alone would maintain peace and order in East Asia. This so-called Amau Doctrine directly challenged Western interests in East Asia and raised the possibility of conflict. In Europe, Benito Mussolini sought to recapture Italy's lost glory by conquering Ethiopia. In a January 1935 plebiscite, the people of the Saar Basin dividing Germany and France voted to join the former. Several months later, Hitler announced that Germany would no longer adhere to the disarmament limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. As the threat of war increased in East Asia and Europe, the nation responded with near unanimity. "Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred," the
Christian Century
proclaimed in January 1935, "would today regard as an
imbecile anyone who might suggest that, in the event of another European war, the United States should again participate in it."
⁴⁹
Scientific surveys of public opinion were just coming into use, and a February 1937 poll indicated that a stunning 95 percent of Americans agreed that the nation should not participate in any future war.

Peace activism flourished. In its heyday, the organized peace movement had an estimated twelve million adherents and an income of more than $1 million. Protestant ministers, veterans, and women's groups led the opposition to war. Pacifists and anti-war internationalists joined forces in 1935 to form an Emergency Peace Campaign that held conferences and conducted study groups across the nation. Its No Foreign War Crusade opened on April 6, 1937, the twentieth anniversary of U.S. entry into World War I, with rallies in two thousand cities and on five hundred campuses. College students formed the vanguard of the antiwar opposition. In April 1935, 150,000 students on 130 campuses participated in anti-war protests; the following year the number increased to an estimated 500,000. Students lobbied to get the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) off campuses. They formed organizations such as Veterans of Future Wars, which, with tongue only partially in cheek, demanded an "adjusted service compensation" of $1,000 for men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six so they could enjoy "the full benefit of their country's gratitude"
before
being killed in battle.
⁵⁰

This mood was quickly manifested in policy. In April 1934, Congress passed an act introduced by and named for arch-nationalist and hard-core isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson of California forbidding private loans to nations in default on war debt payments. The Johnson Act was popular at home but mischievous in its consequences. By declaring token payments illegal, it gave debtor nations a handy excuse not to pay. By restricting U.S. freedom of action, it would later impede an effective response to the emerging world crisis.
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Spurred by the right-wing radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and Hearst newspapers, the Senate in January 1935 stunned an unwary and even complacent FDR by once again rejecting U.S. membership in the World Court, a result primarily of continuing hostility to the League of Nations and rising anti-foreignism. "To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations!" a Minnesota senator screamed.
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The defeat left Roosevelt battle-scarred and notably cautious for the struggle ahead.

When German rearmament and Italy's October 1935 attack on Ethiopia transformed issues of war and peace from the abstract to the immediate, the United States sought legislative safeguards for its neutrality. Isolationists were prepared to sacrifice traditional neutral rights and freedom of the seas to keep the United States out of war. An internationalist minority believed that the best way to avoid war was to prevent it and saw neutrality as a means to that end. Working with the League and the Western democracies, they reasoned, the United States could employ its neutrality as a form of collective security to punish aggressors and assist their victims and thus either deter or contain war. Even Roosevelt believed that the United States needed legal safeguards to avoid being dragged willy-nilly into war as in 1917. In early 1935—unwisely as it turned out—he encouraged isolationist senators to introduce legislation.
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FDR's move backfired. He had hoped for a flexible measure that would permit him to discriminate between aggressor and victim, but the Senate legislation imposed a mandatory embargo on shipments of arms and loans to belligerents once a state of war was declared to exist. "You can't turn the American eagle into a turtle," the Foreign Policy Association howled, and Roosevelt sought to alter the legislation to suit his needs.
⁵⁴
But the Italo-Ethiopian conflict heightened fears of war, and Senate leaders warned that if the president tried to buck the tide he would be "licked sure as hell."
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FDR did secure a six-month limit on the legislation, and he may have hoped to modify it later. Preoccupied with the flurry of crucial domestic bills such as Social Security that constituted the so-called Second New Deal and in need of isolationist votes for key measures, he signed in August 1935 a restrictive neutrality law based squarely on perceived lessons from World War I. Once a state of war was determined to exist, a mandatory embargo would be imposed on arms sales to belligerents. Belligerent submarines were denied access to U.S. ports. Remembering the
Lusitania,
the first step on the road to World War I, Congress also instructed the president to warn Americans that they traveled on belligerent ships at their own risk. The following year radical isolationists tried to extend the embargo to all trade with belligerents, while FDR sought discretionary power to limit trade in critical raw materials and manufactured goods to prewar
quotas, a device that in war would favor Britain and France at the expense of Germany. Again unwilling to risk his domestic programs and sensitive to the upcoming presidential election, Roosevelt in March 1936 grudgingly accepted a compromise extending the original act and adding an embargo on loans.
⁵⁶

Historical lessons are at best an imperfect guide to present actions, and, as with the War of 1812 and the Great War, it was much easier for the United States to proclaim a neutrality policy than to implement it. Americans continued to disagree, often heatedly, about the intent of their neutrality. Should it be strictly applied and designed mainly to keep the nation out of war? Or should it allow the president to support collective security by punishing aggressors and assisting victims? Such debates even tore apart pacificist internationalist groups like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
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Not surprisingly, some Americans took sides in the wars that erupted in the mid-1930s and pressed the government to implement a neutrality favorable to their cause. As in earlier wars, even constitutional safeguards could not shield the United States from influencing world events. Whatever it did or did not do, its actions could have significant results, sometimes in ways that Americans did not like. Amidst all the complexity and confusion, FDR struggled to curb aggression without risking war and provoking an isolationist backlash, using the restrictive Neutrality Acts ingeniously and sometimes deviously and seeking ways outside of neutrality to influence world events.