Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (16 page)

Unilateralists were happy, isolationists were content, the consciences of American pacifists were relatively clear. None of this, however, could obscure what Churchill was to call “the gathering storm.” Roosevelt and his colleagues saw war coming and didn’t think the United States would be able to keep out of it. While the neutrality acts were being discussed and enacted, the Rhineland was remilitarized, Austria forcibly integrated into the Reich, and Czechoslovakia occupied. On the other side of the world, an aggressive Japan was busy constructing the Asian empire it had begun with the annexation of Manchuria in 1931. The problem for the president was how to prepare his reluctant constituents for what might be asked of them.

America First

Roosevelt’s task became even more urgent when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and the principal democracies—France and Britain—declared war. His first act was to affirm U.S. neutrality. His second, just weeks later, was to ask Congress to remove the arms embargo, his obvious intention being to regain the ability to supply Britain and France. Congress agreed. The game now was for Roosevelt to edge America further toward standing alongside the democracies while simultaneously presenting this as the best strategy for preventing direct U.S. involvement in a European war. By mid- 1940, with the crushing German victories in Scandinavia and France, public sentiment—sympathetic to Britain but unwilling to fight—was supportive of this dubious compromise. Such feelings helped Roosevelt to win his third term in the presidential election that autumn. Soon after reelection, in one of his broadcast “fireside chats,” while describing America’s role as the arsenal of democracy, Roosevelt further elaborated his idea of the trade-off: “This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your president is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”
¹⁰

Meanwhile, John T. Flynn was becoming one of the most strident advocates of American neutrality. His experience on the Munitions Investigating Committee with Nye had helped turn him from a financial journalist to an antiwar crusader. In 1938, he had participated in the formation of the Keep America Out of War Congress (KAOWC), alongside the socialist leader Norman Thomas, former editor of
The Nation
Oswald Garrison Villard, and a historian of rising reputation named Harry Elmer Barnes. Many well-known left-of-center intellectuals, social activists, and union leaders also signed up. Flynn warned his countrymen that fighting a war would wreck America. “Our economic system will be broken,” he wrote, “our financial burdens will be insupportable. . . . The streets will be filled with idle men and women. The once independent farmer will become a government charge . . . and amidst these disorders we will have the perfect climate for some Hitler on the American model to rise to power.”
¹¹

A year later he might have regretted the comparison, given the extreme bellicosity of the original Hitler. Even so, in the face of Germany’s obvious and seemingly implacable expansionism, isolationists continued to warn their compatriots that any involvement at all could lead only to a hecatomb. “Did we have anything to do with the promises Britain and France made to Poland? No we didn’t!” said Smedley Butler, before taking a fabulous swipe into empty air, and demanding, “Are
we
culpable in any way because Hitler started before the other side was ready?”
¹²
But the questionable relevance of this argument to the issue of whether America would be able to tolerate the total defeat of the democracies was balanced by Butler’s much more effective appeal to the parents of the nation. “After you’ve heard one of those speeches and your blood is all hot and you want to go and hit someone like Hitler,” he advised, “go upstairs to where your boy is asleep. Go into his bedroom. You’ll find him lying there, pillows all messed up, covers all tangled, sleeping away so hard.”
¹³

Some of those boys themselves decided to move against their possible conscription into another conflagration. In early 1940, a petition was circulated in Yale University Law School, demanding that “Congress refrain from war, even if England [
sic
] is on the verge of defeat.” The idea of the petition’s sponsors was to set up a national organization of students to oppose involvement in the European conflict; instead they created something that became much bigger and endlessly controversial. By the end of July 1940, the movement had been backed by several Chicago businessmen, and was being presided over by the respected chairman of Sears Roebuck, General Robert E. Wood. In August the organization became the America First Committee (AFC).

It is interesting that these days membership in America First is consistently left out of obituaries, curricula vitae, and accounts of regional religious and peace organizations. In 1940, however, commitment must have been enormous, because the organization grew with tremendous rapidity. Its early supporters included novelists and poets like Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, and e. e. cummings. There was the First World War air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, actress Lillian Gish, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and American flying hero Charles Lindbergh, possibly the most celebrated American then alive. Among its student partisans were two future presidents, Gerald R. Ford and John F. Kennedy (who donated a hundred dollars to the cause), and future novelist Gore Vidal. In Congress it could number among its supporters a large number of midwestern and western progressives, men like senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, Robert Taft of Ohio, William Borah of Idaho, and Gerald Nye. The New York branch, which at its zenith was to claim a membership of 135,000, was chaired by John T. Flynn.

The AFC’s public position was that America should build up its defenses at home so that it would be impregnable, while desisting from offering any kind of aid to the belligerents—the implication being that the United States would then be able to contemplate in safety whatever kind of world emerged from the ashes of Europe. What was needed in the short term was that Americans “keep their heads amid the rising hysteria in times of crisis.”
¹⁴

Through the second half of 1940 and most of 1941, a public struggle of predictable bitterness ensued between isolationists and interventionists. Seen from London, the AFC and its supporters were in many ways as much of an existential threat as Hitler. Essentially a coalition that included friends of Germany as well as enemies of war, America First was open to accusations of appeasement and pro-Nazism. In retaliation, the rhetoric of AFC campaigners was just as impassioned in their claims that the administration and its financier friends were attempting to manipulate the American people into war.

Impassioned and increasingly desperate. Gradually, as the Battle of Britain was fought and won, and as Churchill came to personify defiance in the face of tyranny, Roosevelt was winning his political battle to supply America’s democratic ally. Polls showed that a large majority of Americans wanted to see the defeat of Nazism, even if they didn’t actually want to fight. Symbolizing this, the Lend-Lease Bill was passed in Congress in March 1941 by 60 to 31 in the Senate and 260 to 165 in the House. In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh, the effective leader of America First, fought back with a speech in Iowa. It expressed, in the most developed way, his sense of who exactly was behind the disastrous slide into armed confrontation:

The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire . . . These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence . . . It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany . . . But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.
¹⁵

The speech was a disaster. It included sentiments that might be commonly expressed in private but were too ugly for public consumption. Years afterward, the American writer, academic, and muscular liberal Arthur Schlesinger was asked whether in his opinion the Des Moines speech had destroyed America First. He replied that the movement had been shaken “very severely.” He went on, “There are a lot of people in the America First Committee, like John T. Flynn for example, Norman Thomas, others who were really shocked by that speech and by its implications.”

Shocked perhaps, but not necessarily by the sentiments. Lindbergh’s own journals, published in 1970, suggest that his colleagues weren’t as far away from sharing his opinions as Schlesinger suggests. Take this paragraph from the entry for Thursday, September 18, 1941:

John Flynn came at 11:00, and we talked the situation over for an hour. Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn’s attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done.
¹⁶

Flynn’s dissent from Lindbergh’s demonology then was not about the facts but about the advisability of stating them publicly. In fact, Flynn, too, thought that there was a concerted and underhanded attempt at work to seduce the United States into armed struggle. In December 1940, he had told an AFC rally in Chicago, “The plain and terrifying fact is that this great and peaceful nation is in the grip of one of the most subtle and successful conspiracies . . . to embroil us in a foreign war.”

And there was almost nothing, in the view of Lindbergh, Flynn, and others, that the infinitely unscrupulous Roosevelt was not prepared to do. Three weeks after Des Moines, Lindbergh confided to his journal that “regardless of the attitude of our people, it is a question as to whether the president will force us into war by actions and incidents which will make it unavoidable. He is in a position where he can force war on us whether we want it or not.”
¹⁷
When, nine weeks later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh wrote in his journal, “Phoned Gen. [Robert] Wood in Boston. His first words were, ‘Well, he [President Roosevelt] got us in through the back door.’ ”
¹⁸

Roosevelt Knew

According to Flynn and many like him, Roosevelt had finally achieved the world war he had always wanted, the war he had been plotting for the last eight years. But the consequences of Pearl Harbor for America First were disastrous. It was now the AFC—the prophets, the enlightened peacemakers—not Roosevelt who were being reviled for their lack of patriotism. Pearl Harbor took some explaining, even to themselves. Furthermore, there could be no chance of rehabilitation, let alone eventual political victory, if the true nature of Roosevelt’s duplicity were not exposed. There had been defeats for the movement along the way, of course, including the obstinate public sympathy in America for its anglophone relation across the Atlantic. But the one event that, by itself, had meant war had dropped on them all from out of the blue heavens of a mid-Pacific sky, and had blown America First apart as surely as it had destroyed the
Arizona
, the
Utah,
and the
Oklahoma
. It was with Pearl Harbor that the assault on the seemingly invincible Roosevelt would have to start.

Such an assault was never going to be easy. For the American people, Japanese perfidy was to blame for the disaster of what we might now call 12/7. Even so, war or no war, the Republicans had elections to fight in 1944, and Pearl Harbor had been, at the very least, a chapter of incompetencies. And while early inquiries had discovered the fault to be largely that of the local commanders, Admirals Kimmel and Short, the subsequent agitation by these men and their supporters against this conclusion suggested a possible line of attack. By the summer of 1944, a decision had been made by the Republicans to make Pearl Harbor an election issue. On September 11, 1944, a Republican congressman from Indiana even claimed that Washington had known from Australian sources that a Japanese carrier fleet had been heading for Hawaii but had neglected to inform the hapless admirals.

In October of the same year, shortly before the election, John T. Flynn published a thirty-two-page pamphlet,
The Truth About Pearl Harbor
, which he then expanded a year later, after the death of Roosevelt in April 1945. Flynn’s thesis was important in that it added an extra dimension to the charge of presidential incapacity. It had, of course, been a blunder to “bottle” the fleet up in a vulnerable anchorage, a blunder to “strip” Pearl Harbor of its defenses, and a blunder not to warn Kimmel and Short that the serious deterioration in relations between Japan and America made some kind of attack quite likely. But Flynn added a new ingredient on top of incompetence, one that went beyond even deliberate carelessness. He charged Roosevelt with the specific intention of procuring just such a Japanese attack in order to bring America into the war. In other words, Roosevelt had conspired to provoke the exact action that he publicly so desired to avoid. Specifically, Flynn charged: