Roosevelt (46 page)

As Roosevelt scrawled his name on the Neutrality Act at the end of August 1935, Italian troops, tanks, and airplanes were pouring through the Suez Canal toward Ethiopia. To military and diplomatic strategists in chancelleries of great nations, the Neutrality Act came as confirmation of America’s refusal to throw its weight into the balance of world politics. Yet Roosevelt could not stay clear of the looming conflict.

For months he and Hull had been watching the approach of that conflict. So had politicians and diplomats in Europe: Prime Minister Baldwin and Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare of Britain, and Foreign Minister Pierre Laval of France. The precise nature of the division in Europe during 1935 was shrouded in the rhetoric of collective security and the murk of secret negotiations, but two things were clear. One was the reluctance of France and Britain to antagonize Mussolini irretrievably as long as they feared Hitler more and hoped to keep the two dictators apart. The other was Mussolini’s determination to grab Ethiopia, preferably through an act of violence.

Roosevelt had had a measure of grudging admiration for Mussolini; and the dictator had responded with some friendly words for the President and his New Deal. Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Rome wrote enthusiastically in 1933 about the rejuvenation of Italy, including the punctuality of the trains. Even on the very eve of invasion, Long was drawing up elaborate plans for giving Italy large slices of Ethiopia as part of a general European settlement. Roosevelt’s reaction to Mussolini’s war preparations during 1934 was more equivocal. On the one hand, he believed that war would be a threat to peace everywhere, and thus America was involved; on the other hand, he shied away from any involvement in the situation by refusing to do more than urge Mussolini to settle the issue peacefully. When Mussolini said it was too late—Italy had mobilized a million men and spent two billion lire—Roosevelt still hoped Italy would take the “magnificent position” of settling the issue by arbitration. But more than moral support to Ethiopia or to the idea of collective security he would not offer. Hull made clear that the United States would not join the League of Nations in imposing sanctions.

“I am very much more worried about the world situation than about the domestic,” Roosevelt wrote to Senator Josiah Bailey at the end of August 1935. “I hope that there will be no explosion before I take my trip on the boat”—a reference to a long cruise that the President planned to take on the U.S.S.
Houston.
But the explosion was imminent. On October 3, 1935, Mussolini’s legions thrust into Ethiopia. What now?

News of the attack came to Roosevelt on the
Houston
as the cruiser plowed along serenely off the California coast. His attitude toward Italy hardened at once. “Good!” he exclaimed loudly when news reports favorable to Ethiopia were flashed to the ship. The sympathies of Hopkins, Ickes, and his other companions were with Ethiopia. The President had left a draft neutrality proclamation with Hull, and he waited impatiently while Hull tried to find out whether hostilities formally existed. “They are dropping bombs on Ethiopia—and that is war,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Why wait for Mussolini to say so?”

In Washington, Hull had problems of his own. Some of his advisers were urging him not to issue a neutrality proclamation because it might prejudice action by the League Council, which was preparing to name Italy as an aggressor nation. But Hull wanted to act before the League did. His reason stemmed directly from the decisive element in American foreign policy making—the isolationists’ hostility toward American co-operation with Geneva. Roosevelt wired him to act immediately. They both recognized that much depended on staying clear of the League.

By an extraordinary conjuncture of two events—the passage of the Neutrality Act and the invasion of an agrarian country by a nation badly needing imports of the sinews of war—Roosevelt was in the happy situation where the more he sought to cut off exports to Italy in the name of neutrality, the more he was able to assist in the imposing of economic sanctions against the aggressor. This whole tactic depended, however, on keeping Geneva’s actions separate from Washington’s in the public eye. The President and Hull were equal to the task. When Hoare sounded them out on some kind of action under the Kellogg Pact, they coldly rejected the idea. And so worried were they that the League might ask them to co-operate formally in sanctions, thus inviting a refusal that might throw cold water on the League’s efforts, that they warned Geneva not to issue such an invitation. The British and French agreed not to.

The Neutrality Act, however, embargoed only arms and munitions; it did not embargo raw materials that Italy could convert into weapons for her warriors. From the start Roosevelt and Hull recognized this massive shortcoming. The President asked the State
Department to study the possibility of adding copper and steel to the list, in case League sanctions should include these items, and he was even ready to limit sharply the transshipment of our exports by neutrals. Informed that the Neutrality Act could not be stretched this far, Roosevelt fell back on a “moral embargo” based on the “spirit” of the act. On October 30 he denounced profiteering in Italian trade that might help prolong the war.

Despite these appeals, exports of war materials to Italy mounted. On November 15, with League sanctions slated to take effect three days later, Hull warned stiffly against an increase in such exports as oil, copper, trucks, and scrap steel. His warning covered more materials than the League sanction list, which omitted the crucial item of oil. Menaced on its most vulnerable flank, Italy hotly protested Hull’s action.

But that action was still only “moral.” Would the administration put teeth into it? Britain especially was eager to know the answer to this question. Her “businessmen’s government” feared that if the League imposed an oil embargo against Italy, American oilmen, scorning Hull’s moralities, would grab the whole Italian oil market. Britain also had the problem of dealing with the slippery figure of Laval, who had long wanted to appease Mussolini by jettisoning Ethiopia and who had stalled off a League oil embargo.

So Britain’s Ambassador put the question straight to Hull. Would the United States stop increased oil exports to Italy if the League embargoed oil? Hull hesitated. Only Congress could take such action, but to appeal to Congress to embargo oil in conjunction with the League was to establish the fearful link between American policy and League collective security that he and Roosevelt had fought so hard to avoid. “We have gone as far as we can,” he replied. He could not speak for Congress.

Frustrated by the administration’s fear of the isolationists, the resourceful diplomats of Downing Street turned to other expedients. Hoare and Laval in Paris agreed on a plan to end the war by dismembering Ethiopia and handing over large chunks to Mussolini. Publication of the agreement set off a storm of denunciation; Hoare was sacked, and the plan was killed. But the sordid proposal also killed the high hopes for effective sanctions. The League continued to equivocate. The war went on. Italian troops struck deeper into Ethiopia, burning, bombing, spraying poison gas from the clouds.

The Hoare-Laval plan caught Roosevelt and Hull by surprise. The President was outraged; “our British friends,” he said, “have come a sad cropper.” For months Haile Selassie’s natives fought on. Forsaken by the League, the emperor made a last appeal before he fled his country. Did the people of the world realize that he had
fought on to protect not only his people but also collective security? Were they blind to his fight for the whole of humanity? Where were his tardy allies?

“If they never come, then I say prophetically and without bitterness, ‘The West will perish.’ ”

Ethiopia’s betrayal left American internationalists in a sea of uncertainty and despondency. Isolationists jeered that once again Uncle Sam had been gulled by European diplomats. Most Americans were merely confused. As for Roosevelt, not since entering the White House had he been so perplexed and worried by developments abroad.

“The situation changes so fast from day to day that it is hard to do more than make wild guesses in regard to the European future,” he wrote his minister in Bucharest late in January 1936. To Ambassador Straus in Paris he wrote in even more pessimistic vein. The whole European situation, the President said, was black.

“I have been increasingly concerned about the world picture ever since May, 1933. There are those who come from England and France and Germany who point to the fact that every crisis of the past three years has been muddled through with a hope that each succeeding crisis will be met peacefully in one way or another in the next few years. I hope that point of view is right but it goes against one’s common sense.”

To Congress the President addressed an urgent warning: “Not only have peace and good-will among men grown more remote in those areas of the earth during this period, but a point has been reached where the people of the Americas must take cognizance of growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of increasing armaments, of shortening tempers—a situation which has in it many of the elements that lead to the tragedy of general war.” People in such nations might wish to change aggressive policies, but lacking freedom, they were following blindly and fervently those who sought autocratic power. Such nations had not shown patience in trying to solve their problems.

“They have therefore impatiently reverted to the old belief in the law of the sword, or to the fantastic conception that they, and they alone, are chosen to fulfill a mission and that all the others among the billion and a half of human beings in the world must and shall learn from and be subject to them.”

Brave words—but they masked a central ambiguity in Roosevelt’s approach to neutrality. Outwardly he took the isolationists’ position that arms and trade embargoes would keep America out of war
by keeping American merchants and others disentangled from war. Privately he took the internationalists’ position that such embargoes—if they could be administered with discretion—could keep America out of war by discouraging aggressors from starting war. Between the two approaches a vast difference loomed. But the President made no effort to educate the people on this cardinal difference. He hoped that they would be educated by events. Unhappily for the President, events such as the Hoare-Laval agreement seemed to educate the people in the wrong direction.

And time was running out. In February of 1936 the Neutrality Act of the previous September was to expire. Roosevelt and Hull hoped to gain from Congress both legal standing for the “moral” embargo of war materials and—crucial to their whole strategy—presidential discretion in applying such an embargo. When Hull appealed to Congress for these two new provisions, he ran into a stone wall. Within a few weeks the battle was lost. Why?

The immediate reason was the power of the isolationists on Capitol Hill. Johnson and Borah lashed Hull’s bill mercilessly. They were riding high on a massive wave of isolationist feeling whipped by the failure of collective security in Europe, and by new revelations of the indefatigable Nye at home. Led by Nye, Johnson & Co., the isolationists forced Roosevelt and Hull to accept an extension of the 1935 act, with some changes. Lacking guidelines from the administration, the internationalists stood by helplessly.

As Americans huddled in their storm cellars, dictators turned to the sword.

At dawn on March 7, 1936, advance units of the German army thrust into the Rhineland. In Berlin a few hours later Hitler addressed cheering members of the Reichstag, while foreign diplomats looked on in stony silence. His troops had moved, the Fuehrer announced, but Germany wanted peace. He proposed a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with France; reciprocal demilitarization of the frontier (
i.e.,
scrapping of France’s famed Maginot Line); and bilateral nonaggression pacts with Germany’s eastern neighbors (but not with Soviet Russia). For ninety minutes he shouted and beseeched; then, surrounded by hundreds of armed men, he strode out of the hall.

France hesitated, and was lost. Later it became known that some of Hitler’s generals had opposed the move, and that Hitler’s troops would have turned back had France resisted. But the Quai d’Orsay did not dare act alone, and Downing Street equivocated. Other nations only fumed and sputtered. The League declared Germany guilty of breaching the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Roosevelt and Hull privately took a grave view of the step. But no one acted.

Throughout Roosevelt’s first term Japanese soldiers, merchants, and bureaucrats were consolidating positions on the Asiatic mainland. Like a great musty fruit lying in the sun, China was decomposing on its exposed edges. In 1933 Jehol was annexed to Manchukuo, in 1935 Japanese troops seized Chahar, in 1936 they penetrated Suiyuan. Having shaken off the old naval treaties, Tokyo was now building up its fleet. Ominous as these events seemed to Roosevelt and Hull, even more fateful was the merciless struggle in Japan of militarist extremists against the moderates.

Only a month after taking office Roosevelt had written House that he wondered if a Japanese diplomat’s criticism of the President’s decision to keep the fleet in the Pacific had stemmed from a desire to “ingratiate himself against assassination by the Junker crowd when he gets home.” The remark was prophetic. On a night late in February 1936, Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo was showing the film
Naughty Marietta
to former Premier Saito and Grand Chamberlain Suzuki; a few hours later Saito was shot dead and Suzuki wounded. The insurgents were rounded up and executed but Japanese politicians had a frightening glimpse of the explosive forces breaking through the surface.

Tension was mounting in Europe. In July 1936, an Italian bomber squadron was alerted for duty in Spain. A few days later General Francisco Franco took command of revolting Moors and Foreign Legionnaires in Spanish Morocco. People’s militia put down army uprisings in Madrid and other centers, but the revolt gained momentum in the north and south. Iberia quickly became a European battleground, with Italy and Germany taking the initiative. Italian troops and airmen, Nazi agents and technicians poured into rebel territory by the thousands. Within a few weeks Rome and Berlin simultaneously recognized Franco as Spain’s ruler.