From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (83 page)

The Italo-Ethiopian War illustrates the problems. That war evoked an especially strong response among African Americans.
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Ethiopia had a special symbolic importance for them because of its place in biblical lore and because it was one of the few areas of Africa not colonized by whites. Involving themselves for the first time in a high-profile foreign policy debate, they vigorously protested Italian aggression and demanded embargoes on trade with Italy, boycotted Italian American businesses in the United States, petitioned the U.S. Catholic hierarchy and the pope, organized mass rallies in major cities, raised funds for Ethiopia, and even in small numbers volunteered to fight in the war until warned that such service violated neutrality laws.
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On the other side,
Italian Americans generally backed Italy and protested when the government interpreted the Neutrality Act to favor Ethiopia.

Roosevelt struggled with limited success to implement U.S. neutrality in ways that would stop Italy and deter other aggressors. He invoked the Neutrality Act in recognition that it might hurt Italy more than Ethiopia and in hopes that an arms embargo would support League sanctions against Italy. The government also warned Americans against traveling on belligerent passenger ships, in an effort to hurt the Italian tourism industry. The administration subsequently imposed a "moral embargo," urging businesses to limit trade with Italy to prewar levels. When that failed, it threatened to publish the names of firms trading with Italy.
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Although a clever use of the Neutrality Act, these moves neither bucked up the League nor thwarted Italy. The League did declare Italy the aggressor and imposed limited sanctions. Largely because of British and French fear of war, however, vital items like oil were omitted from the restricted list. This huge loophole significantly mitigated the effects of the already ineffectual moral embargo. The sanctions annoyed Italy without stopping it. Collective security was further undermined when it was revealed that British foreign minister Sir Samuel Hoare and French prime minister Pierre Laval had worked out a plan that would have bought peace by giving two-thirds of Ethiopia to Italy. Undeterred by the weak Western response and using all the instruments of modern war including poison gas, Italy completed its conquest in eight months and then left the League of Nations. The absence of the United States from the League gave the Europeans a handy excuse for inaction; their weakness, in turn, confirmed American distrust and fed isolationist sentiments.
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The Spanish Civil War was equally complex, and the policies developed, for many Americans, were just as unsatisfactory. Right-wing rebels led by fascist Francisco Franco and assisted by Germany and Italy set out to topple militarily a democratic government supported by socialists, Communists, and anarchists, and backed by the Soviet Union, in an especially nasty civil conflict that captured the world's attention. The Spanish Civil War became for many Americans a cause célèbre, an epic struggle between good and evil. Most citizens, to be sure, remained uninformed and indifferent, but groups on each side of the political spectrum took up the cause with near fanatical zeal. Alarmed by the government's treatment of the Spanish church, American Catholics, an increasingly potent political lobby, rallied to Franco. Liberals and radicals, including writers, movie
stars, journalists, intellectuals, and left-wing agitators, passionately supported the Loyalists. Some 450 Americans even formed an Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight for the government. Thrown into battle in early 1937 without adequate preparation, they suffered horrific casualties in what many viewed a noble cause.
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The administration again cooperated with the Western democracies, at least indirectly, but its policies were unpopular at home and had harmful results abroad. Seeking to contain the Spanish Civil War, the British and French naively adopted a policy of non-intervention. The United States went along, refusing to invoke the Neutrality Acts, which, it claimed, did not apply to civil wars, and again proclaiming a moral embargo on the sale of war supplies to both factions. When exporters ignored it, Congress legislated an arms embargo against both sides. With Germany and Italy generously backing the rebels, the moral embargo worked against the Loyalists, which, as a recognized government, could normally expect to procure war supplies from abroad. This so-called malevolent neutrality was designed to keep the United States out of the war and appease American Catholics. It also reflected concern in government circles, especially in the top echelons of the State Department, that a Loyalist victory would lead to a Communist takeover of Spain that might have spillover effects elsewhere in Europe and threaten U.S. trade and investments. Some conservative diplomats termed the war a conflict of "Rebel versus Rabble," "between nationalism on the one hand, and Bolshevism naked and unadorned on the other."
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On the other hand, liberals, even isolationists like Senator Nye, increasingly feared that the United States was abetting a fascist victory. The brutal bombing and shelling of civilians by German and Italian air squadrons at Guernica in April 1937, later immortalized in Pablo Picasso's stunning mural, caused international outrage, an act of "fiendish ferocity" according to one U.S. newspaper.
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The administration nonetheless clung to its policy until Franco triumphed in the spring of 1939, in large part because Roosevelt was immobilized over opposition to his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices and refused to risk another defeat. Franco later praised the United States for a "gesture we Nationalists will never forget"; FDR conceded a "great mistake."
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The difficulties of implementing neutrality produced in 1937 demands for revision of the legislation. Internationalists still opposed the mandatory arms and loans embargo and sought presidential discretion to support collective security. Increasingly concerned with the threat of war, some members of Congress wanted to close a large loophole by extending the embargo to all goods. Even isolationists like Borah protested the surrender of traditional neutral rights as "cowardly" and "sordid." Still others worried that a total embargo would damage the U.S. economy.

Financier and sometime presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, czar of industrial mobilization during World War I, came up with a clever solution. Insisting that the entanglements of loans and the risk of shipping war materials posed the greatest threats to neutrality, he proposed that the United States "sell to any belligerent anything except lethal weapons, but the terms are '
cash on the barrel-head and come and get it.
'" Baruch's scheme offered the allure of peace without sacrificing prosperity. FDR favored cash and carry, recognizing that it could help Britain and France in the event of war. He sought discretionary authority to apply the principle. This time, remarkably, he succeeded. On May 1, 1937, while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, he signed a measure that retained the embargo on arms and loans and prohibited Americans from traveling on belligerent ships. It also gave the president broad discretionary authority to apply cash-and-carry to trade with belligerents. This compromise permitted Americans to have their cake and eat it too, presumably minimizing the risk of war without abandoning U.S. trade altogether. The
New York Herald-Tribune
dismissed the 1937 legislation as "an act to preserve the United States from intervention in the War of 1914–'18."
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In fact, by continuing to tie American hands in crucial areas it probably encouraged further aggression and ultimately helped bring on a war the nation could not avoid.

FDR also worked outside the Neutrality Acts in sometimes inscrutable ways in a futile effort to shape world events. He shared the determination of most Americans to stay out of war. The best way to do that, he believed, was to prevent war. He seems early to have concluded that Germany, Italy, and Japan threatened the peace. Recognizing the limits on his own freedom of action, he sought means to "put some steel in the British spine," even regaling British representatives with tales of his time spent in a German school when he had stood up to the local bully. Seeking to "get closer . . . with a view to preventing a war or shortening it if it should come," from 1934 to 1937 he floated various schemes to encourage British resistance to the Axis and build a basis for Anglo-American partnership.
He proposed exchanges of information on weapons and industrial mobilization. He approved the Royal Navy keeping in service overage destroyers beyond treaty limits and suggested exchanging sailors on navy ships. As early as 1934, he proposed "united action" to prevent or localize war. He later suggested expanding the doctrine of effective blockade to include land traffic, a means to isolate aggressors that would evolve into his quarantine speech. His major proposal was for an international peace conference to be held under U.S. auspices that would encourage participants to agree upon a set of principles. Should they refuse or agree and later break their promises, they could be branded as outlaws. FDR hoped in the process to educate Americans for the international role they must play.
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Such efforts produced no tangible results. The gap of distrust was too deep to be bridged by small gestures. Whatever FDR might say privately, the British viewed the Neutrality Acts as an insuperable impediment to cooperation with the United States and a sharp limit on the president's ability to keep commitments. They dismissed some of his proposals as "dangerously jejune" and "a little too naive and simplistic." His unorthodox style also caused problems. His proposals were often transmitted in oblique and elliptical fashion and shrouded in secrecy. On occasion, the British missed the signals. In any event, they feared the United States would "let us down or stab us in the back after having thrust us forward to our cost." The ascension of Neville Chamberlain to the prime minister-ship precisely when Roosevelt proposed an international conference was especially bad timing. Chamberlain trusted neither the United States nor Roosevelt. In any event, he was disposed to avoid war through negotiation. FDR's embarrassing defeat in the Court fight made the British even more wary of his ability to follow through on any commitments.
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Just two months after Roosevelt's signing of the 1937 Neutrality Act, war erupted in East Asia. An incident at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing on July 7, 1937, sparked fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops that quickly escalated into full-scale war. Unlike Mukden in 1931, the Japanese did not stage this incident. This time it was the civilian government in Tokyo that used the clash to eliminate the Kuomintang threat to Japan's hegemony over an area deemed vital to its security and prosperity.
The conflict soon fanned out over North China and spread south. Using modern weapons with ruthless precision, Japanese forces seized Shanghai, China's largest city. They followed with the notorious "rape of Nanking," six weeks of terror marked by rampant burning and looting, the mass execution of prisoners of war, and the merciless slaughter of civilians, women and children included. Countless women were brutally raped and forced into prostitution. In all, as many as three hundred thousand Chinese may have been killed.
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Even these horrific methods could not bring China to heel. Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Chungking in the hinterland. Bogged down in a more difficult struggle than anticipated, the Japanese fought on to terminate what they euphemistically called the "China Incident."

Reactions in the United States to the Sino-Japanese War varied. Many Americans still saw Japan as a bulwark against Soviet Russia and even against Chinese revolutionary nationalism. Some Americans valued a flourishing trade with Japan. On the other hand, many increasingly took sides. Missionaries who remained to help the Chinese reported the horrors of Japanese aggression; accounts of the rape of Nanking caused particular outrage. Warning that the United States must not be intimidated by "Al Capone nations," missionaries pushed for a "Christian boycott" of Japanese goods and stopping the sale of war materials to Japan. Novelist Pearl Buck and Time-Life mogul Henry Luce, both children of missionary parents, complemented their efforts. Millions of Americans read Pearl Buck's novel
The Good Earth
, first published in 1931, and identified with the Chinese peasants whose story it told. The movie version appeared in 1937. Luce's increasingly popular high-circulation magazines and March of Time newsreels also presented highly idealized pictures of China and Chiang Kai-shek, a recent convert to Christianity. Over time, such images swayed U.S. opinion against Japan and toward China. Whatever their sympathies, Americans in late 1937 staunchly opposed going to war.
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The official U.S. response to the Sino-Japanese War reflected the nation's ambivalence. As with Ethiopia and Spain, Roosevelt manipulated U.S. neutrality to influence events in ways that he—and most Americans—favored. Recognizing that cash-and-carry would benefit the Japanese and exploiting the absence of a declaration of war, he refused to invoke the Neutrality Acts. But he would go no further, and his subsequent actions were characteristically elusive. In October 1937 in Chicago, a stronghold
of isolationism, he briefly heartened internationalists with his famous speech calling for a quarantine of the contagion of aggression, at least hinting at sanctions. Apparently misreading a surprisingly positive national response or uncertain what to do once he received it, he quickly backtracked, affirming the next day that " 'sanctions' is a terrible word to use. They are out of the window." In dealing with the war in Asia, as with other issues, Americans and Europeans brought out the worst in each other. When a League-arranged meeting of the Nine-Power Pact signatories (without Japan) met in Brussels in November 1937, the mere hint of sanctions drew from Hull's State Department a strong disclaimer and call for adjournment. Briefly buoyed by FDR's quarantine speech, the Europeans were no more willing than the United States to risk sanctions. Once again, U.S. unreliability gave them a handy excuse to do nothing. "Hardly a people to go tiger shooting with," Chamberlain's sister sneered.
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