Roosevelt (63 page)

The plan died aborning. Hull was utterly opposed to it. He feared that a short day or two of open deliberations would arouse false hopes, unduly provoke the dictators, and produce little practical good. The very features that appealed to the President—a colorful White House assemblage suddenly convened as a world forum for a dramatic Rooseveltian pronouncement—troubled this most undramatic of men. Yet actually, since he believed strongly in the basic principles the President would espouse, the reasons for Hull’s opposition lay deeper than this. Part of the trouble was Welles’s key role in the project. More important, Hull feared that forthright presidential action would arouse Congress. An old hand at wheedling and appeasing the lawmakers, he was alarmed lest his efforts to bring Congress around to internationalism would be set back. Reluctantly Roosevelt dropped the plan for the time being.

While democratic leaders diddled, dictators acted. In November 1937 they formally established the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Japanese troops drove even deeper into China. The Brussels Conference failed utterly to alleviate the crisis in the Far East. Everywhere the arms rush was intensifying. And on November 5 Hitler summoned his generals to the Reichstag, told them of his plans for the conquest of eastern Europe, and ordered them to prepare for inevitable war. The generals knew that Austria was first on their Fuehrer’s list.

Shortly after New Year’s Day 1938, Roosevelt again turned to his plans for an international conference. This time, however, he followed Hull’s suggestion of sounding out Britain first. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s reply was like a douche of ice water. The President’s plan, he wrote, would cut across his own efforts at “a measure of appeasement” of Italy and Germany. He had been working for months
toward this end, he protested, and the stage had been carefully set. Would the President hold up action for a time?

The President would and did. But he was anxious over certain revelations in Chamberlain’s letter: the prime minister had indicated that to appease Mussolini he was prepared to recognize Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. Roosevelt promptly urged Chamberlain not to take this step—for it would seriously affect American public opinion. Hull told the British Ambassador bluntly that recognition would be a corrupt bargain that would rouse a feeling of disgust in America.

Chamberlain’s rebuff of Roosevelt and the ensuing rift shocked a keen student of world affairs watching from the wings. The rejection of the President’s proffered hand, Churchill wrote ten years later, was the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war. Yet Chamberlain, unlike Roosevelt, was pursuing a calculated course of action, designed at best to turn the Axis away from attacking the democracies and at least to spar for time to rearm. And a key element in his calculations was that, owing to isolationist feeling in America, Roosevelt could not be relied on to back up his principles with action. “It is always best and safest,” Chamberlain said acidly, “to count on nothing from the Americans but words.”

As it turned out, Chamberlain later sent a second, more cordial letter to Roosevelt welcoming the President’s proposal. The prime minister’s hand was forced by his young foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who had returned to London from a vacation trip to hint at his resignation unless Chamberlain altered his policies. But it was now too late. Hitler was already moving resolutely ahead.

Early in February the Fuehrer consolidated his military position at home by ousting the generals who had spoken out against his war program and appointing himself commander in chief. At once Hitler turned his eye to the south where lay the glittering prize of Austria, portal to Czechoslovakia and the lands beyond. Summoning Austrian Chancellor von Schuschnigg to his retreat just over the border in Berchtesgaden, Hitler scolded and bullied him for hours. “Perhaps I shall be suddenly overnight in Vienna, like a spring storm,” he ranted. “Do you want to turn Austria into another Spain?” Schuschnigg gave in to Hitler’s demands, but he tried to strengthen his hand by holding a plebiscite on the issue of Austrian independence. This Hitler would not brook. With Mussolini acquiescent and Britain passive, he knew that he could afford to strike. On March 12 German tanks and troops swept across the border, and within a few hours Austria was his.

The news brought a quick flare-up of public opinion in America. Newspaper editorials were indignant. Roosevelt was silent, but a
few days later he wrote “Grand!” on a speech of Hull’s that served as a kind of official statement. The secretary’s statement, however, was the same old litany—a bold stand against “international lawlessness,” a warning against isolationism, and a shying away from American commitments.

Roosevelt was silent—but not passive. “I am in the midst of a long process of education—and the process seems to be working slowly but surely,” he wrote a friend. But how slow would education be? Always his thoughts returned to the isolationists and their leaders on Capitol Hill. He was amused to read a letter from an Englishman, sent on to him by a Boston schoolmaster.

“That is a delightful letter,” he wrote back. “Is it not a funny thing that no European has the foggiest notion of our system of government or of our public thought in regard to European politics? His suggestion that the President should present 500 aeroplanes to Great Britain is particularly joyous. Almost it makes me feel like a dictator! Can you see the expression on the face of the Congress or on the face of the Editors of the Boston Transcript and the Boston Herald if I were to ask for such authority from Congress? I am not even considering what the Boston Irish or the Kansas New Englanders would do.…”

Editors and congressmen, Irishmen and Kansans—could they be educated in time by Roosevelt, or would they be educated too late by events?

Events were hurrying on at an ever dizzier pace. By 1938 Spain had become a cockpit of international combat. Tens of thousands of Italian “volunteers,” thousands of German officers and technicians, quantities of Axis tanks, artillery, and aircraft braced Franco’s attacks. The government, with the help of its International Brigade and later of Soviet arms, had twice staved off heavy attacks on Madrid. But the Loyalists’ Aragon offensive failed in the summer of 1937; Italian forces captured Bilbao; Santander and Gijou fell. The League Assembly announced that “veritable foreign army corps” were operating in Spain. By 1938 Loyalist chances looked dim.

Roosevelt from the start had favored the Loyalist cause. He understood the international character of the war; he looked on the Madrid government as the constitutional authority, under the control of a popular-front coalition that included the Communists. Publicly, however, the President was adamantly neutral. His first decisive step—taken significantly during the 1936 campaign—was to put a moral embargo on the export of arms to both sides. When several American exporters readied shiploads of war material, the President asked Congress to extend the arms embargo of the Neutrality Act to Spain. In all Congress only one person—a
Farmer-Laborite—voted against the measure. One load of planes cleared the three-mile limit just in time, only to fall later into Franco’s hands.

As the months passed Roosevelt felt increasingly distressed over the course of events in Spain. Noninterference became in effect “non-noninterference,” for Franco benefited from the policy. A savage bombing of the Basque shrine city of Guernica by German and Italian planes aroused American opinion. From Spain Ambassador Bowers warned the administration that the embargo was playing into the hands of Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Ickes was outspokenly indignant about what he called America’s shameful role in Spain. In the State Department, Welles was gravely troubled; he saw that a Franco victory would mean a decisive strategic advance for Italy in the Mediterranean. Even some ardent noninterventionists—men like Norman Thomas and Senator Borah—opposed Roosevelt’s policy as unjust and, indeed, unneutral.

There were arguments and forces on the other side. Great Britain, France, and a score of other nations were following a policy ostensibly of strict nonintervention, designed to localize the conflict in Spain. Roosevelt feared to undertake action that cut across these efforts. Any inclination he had to shift policy ran into the stubborn opposition of Hull, backed by a group of career officials who were eager to follow the British lead on the question. Roosevelt’s hands were tied also by the sweeping endorsement that administration and Congress had given to neutrality at almost any cost.

Beset by these pressures, Roosevelt wavered. At one point in the spring of 1938 he considered raising the embargo on arms to Madrid. Senator Nye himself had introduced a resolution to raise the embargo, and the New York
Times
reported that Roosevelt was on the verge of acting.

But nothing happened. “A black page in American history,” Ickes told the President. Roosevelt argued that lifting the ban would be pointless, for munitions could not go across the Spanish frontier. When Ickes showed how these difficulties could be overcome, the President shifted his ground. He had discussed the matter with congressional leaders that morning, he told Ickes. To raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote in the coming fall election, Roosevelt said, and Democratic congressmen opposed it.

So the cat was out of the bag—the “mangiest, scabbiest cat ever,” Ickes barked into his diary a few days later. “This proves up to the hilt,” Ickes went on, “what so many people have been saying, namely, that the Catholic minorities in Great Britain and America have been dictating the international policy with respect to Spain.”

Ickes was only partly right. Not merely the caution of
congressmen but Roosevelt’s own indecision was involved in policy toward Spain. Indeed, the President wavered again later in 1938 as the rebel forces pressed on to Madrid, and once again Hull had to dissuade his chief from acting. Still, Ickes had put his finger on the heart of the problem. The men on Capitol Hill and the minority groups behind them had their grip on levers of action or obstruction that touched directly the balance of power and the flow of events far outside the country’s borders. Unredeemed by decisiveness in the White House, the congressional deadlock on the Potomac cast its shadow across the world.

T
HE SCENE WAS THE
livestock pavilion of the University of Wisconsin. The time was late April 1938. Under a huge banner emblazoned with a circle around a cross, a slim, gray-haired man with a boyish face was orating before a rapt audience of several thousand. Football players sporting huge W’s patrolled the aisles. The speaker was Governor Philip La Follette of Wisconsin, scion of the great Fighting Bob, brother of young Senator Bob. The occasion was the launching of a new party, National Progressives of America.

By the time La Follette finished, hair tousled and coat awry, reporters were sure that history had been made—perhaps even to the degree it had been at Ripon, Wisconsin, eighty-four years before, when the Republican party was founded. The young Progressive, they said to one another, had hit Roosevelt where it hurt. He had scored New Deal economics and New Deal politics at their weakest points. For ten years, according to La Follette, “the Republicans and the Democrats have been fumbling the ball.” The people had had enough of relief and spoon feeding and scarcity economics. They wanted jobs and security. The new party would be no popular front, “no conglomeration of conflicting, opposing forces huddled together for temporary expediency.” It was an obvious fling at Roosevelt and his personal coalition. How would the New Deal’s chief respond?

The President, it seemed, was inclined to scoff. While the crowd was carried away with the enthusiasm of the moment, he wrote Ambassador William Phillips in Rome, most people seemed to think La Follette’s new emblem was just a feeble imitation of the swastika. “All that remains is for some major party to adopt a new form of arm salute. I have suggested the raising of both arms above the head, followed by a bow from the waist. At least this will be good for people’s figures!”

Actually Roosevelt had mixed feelings toward the new party. He knew that La Follette had planned his move carefully, with assiduous cultivation of farm and labor leaders. The movement
could not be dismissed. Roosevelt hoped, though, that it might serve as a useful warning to conservative Democrats that their party was in danger of losing liberal support. Everything depended on Phil and Bob not going too far. To keep them from going too far, Roosevelt told Ickes, he would invite Bob on a Potomac cruise; he would suggest to the Senator that after 1940 he could have the secretaryship of state, and Phil could take his place in the Senate.

It was a typical Rooseveltian stratagem, but it seemed too late for stratagems. Phil went serenely ahead, courting progressive groups and third-party leaders throughout the northern Central states. Nor did his efforts have any discernible influence as a warning to conservative Democrats. In Congress, which adjourned in mid-June, they kept on jabbing and thundering against the New Deal. Aside from the spending bill, the chief accomplishments of the Seventy-fifth Congress had been the revived agricultural program for farmers and the weak wage-hour bill for workers. A new housing program had been authorized, but one that would hardly touch the mass of the “ill-housed.” The New Deal, as a program for the general welfare, had been little advanced—certainly not when compared with the glowing promises of January 1937.

Slowly Roosevelt came to his decision—the time had come for a party showdown.

The idea of purging the party of conservative congressmen was not a new one. For months at the White House there had been talk of a purge, especially on the part of Corcoran, Ickes, and Hopkins. But the fact that Roosevelt could embrace this ultimate weapon was a measure of his true feelings in the spring of 1938. Not only was a purge directly contrary to the President’s general first-term policy of noninterference in local elections, but even more, it forced him into the posture he hated most—the posture of direct, open hostilities against men who were in his party and some of whom were his friends, of almost complete commitment to a specific method and a definite conception of party.