Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

What do we mean when we say that the country was not reunited? The facts seem to contradict that claim. The North won the war and the Confederate states rejoined the nation in short order. That is true, but it is also true that America’s electoral picture was fundamentally changed by Lincoln’s election. To see that letting the South go might have been the better alternative, let us consider the changed American electoral picture.

We already know that the southern states voted as a bloc against the Republican presidential candidates Frémont and Lincoln in 1856 and 1860. If we look at the presidential elections from 1860—Lincoln’s first—through the end of Herbert Hoover’s term seventy-three years later, we see that there really were two countries, not one. Of the eighteen presidential elections from Lincoln through Hoover, the Republican candidate won fourteen times. Only Democrats Grover Cleveland (twice) and Woodrow Wilson (twice) won the presidency, and Wilson’s first election was largely due to Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy that divided the Republican vote. If there were one united country, then we might reasonably expect that the South would have looked pretty much like the North in its voting pattern. Yet we see that of the fourteen times a Republican won the presidency, the South voted as a bloc for the Democratic Party candidate eleven times, and split three times across the southern states (1868 and 1872—the two Grant elections—being elections in which southern politics was captured by Reconstruction and carpetbaggers, and 1928). The southern states were uniformly on the winning side only when Cleveland or Wilson was the victor. We would see a similar picture if we looked at elections to the House or Senate.

Lincoln’s victory did not give America a united nation. Rather, it replaced slavery with the only somewhat lesser evil of Jim Crow segregation in the South and persistent regional tension, largely over civil rights, for more than a century. How long slavery would have persisted in an independent Confederate States of America, no one can say. Surely it would have persisted beyond 1865. Against this, if the United States declined to purchase southern goods, the plantation cotton industry would have been—as it was during the Civil War—under great pressure, as European demand was probably not sufficient to sustain the CSA’s economy. Perhaps then, some of the CSA states, especially where the secession vote was deeply divided, would have sought voluntarily to rejoin the United States. That might have led to a less sectionalized nation and would have avoided the devastation of the Civil War at the price of some—possibly not very long—delay in the collapse of slavery.

Chapter 4

Roosevelt’s Vanity: Avoiding War for Domestic Gain

Make a beginning by putting some good Negro bands aboard battleships.

—Franklin Roosevelt

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S FOUR ELECTIONS AS PRESIDENT GAVE THE PEOPLE of the United States two remarkably distinct Franklin Roosevelts. One, the Roosevelt of 1933, became president during the most challenging economic times in US history. That Roosevelt was a visionary leader who showed himself willing to lead mainstream American thinking to a new understanding of human nature. He asked people to abandon their materialism in favor of what he deemed deeper moral values. Implicitly comparing himself to Jesus, he proclaimed in his first inaugural address, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”1 Memorably, he awakened the depressed American people to the realization that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The messianic, visionary Roosevelt resurrected these same themes in his second inaugural address, inspirationally assuring the American people that the democratic process had brought them to an era of good feeling, noting, “We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.”2 Wow, who could fail to listen to such a leader! Love him—as most did—or hate him—as some did—there was no doubt that he was a force of nature and that, because the country followed his lead, nothing would ever be the same again.

The second Franklin Roosevelt, seemingly born as the German army marched into Poland in September 1939, was elected to a third (and then a fourth) term as a worldwide crisis challenged the very survival of democracy. It was an even more profound and far-reaching threat than the economic collapse of the Great Depression. By his third inauguration in January 1941, the inspirational first Roosevelt seems to have utterly disappeared. Whereas bold new ideas, captured in unforgettable phrases about fear and good feeling had characterized his first two inaugural messages, his third was a flatter speech, neither inspirational in its message nor memorable in its phrasing. In the campaigns of 1932 and 1936 he declared that he would lead the way to a morally better country, a country of people dedicated to doing good rather than merely enriching themselves. In 1940, however, his commitment was to follow rather than to lead; there was no promise of bringing the United States to a better place. Rather, he looked back in US history, back to Lincoln, back to Washington, for inspiration, barely looking ahead or envisioning a better future. The core of the speech can be summarized by the president’s decision to borrow from George Washington’s first inaugural address. As FDR said, “The destiny of America was proclaimed in words of prophecy spoken by our first President in his first inaugural in 1789—words almost directed, it would seem, to this year of 1941: ‘The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered . . . deeply, . . . finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.’”3

The second Roosevelt proved true to his words, entrusting America’s destiny to American public opinion. This new Roosevelt was a cautious disciple of the polls; a follower of the mainstream voter; a dangerously slow, reluctant foreign policy plodder rather than the innovator of his first incarnation. At a time when the nation—and the world—needed, as it had in 1932, a leader with courage to shape opinion, it got, instead, a president shaped by opinion. Both Franklin Roosevelts, like so many political leaders, were vain men. The difference was that the first believed deeply in his ability to make others see the world as he saw it. The second apparently believed that the nation needed him at the helm in times of crisis even if he no longer had a clear vision and message about what needed to be done. Geoffrey C. Ward’s explanation for the origins of Roosevelt’s vanity traced his self-image back to his childhood: “FDR was supremely confident. . . . His mother taught him that he was the center of the universe and that he was the sun around which everything revolved. He never lost that attitude.”4 Maybe that is right; maybe not. Whatever the source, the strength of his vain self-confidence seems beyond question. The crucial difference between the Roosevelt of 1932 and of 1940 was that the vanity of the first was bolstered by illuminating ideas; the vanity of the second failed to define the nation’s destiny in the maelstrom of war in Europe and Asia, leaving the world and America the worse for it.

The second FDR was so devoted to his own electoral ambition that he sacrificed his great opportunity to persuade the American people of the importance of a swift and decisive war against tyranny. He seems to have held back solely in the interest of his reelection. An early, decisive war was not the war that the third-term candidate Roosevelt was prepared to fight. He may have wished to do so, appears to have believed it was the “right” thing to do, and certainly seems to have understood the global importance of standing up against tyranny. However, whatever his personal sentiments may have been, they were trumped by the simple fact that the American voter was not persuaded of any of these beliefs. The first Franklin Roosevelt would have convinced the American people of his vision; the second Roosevelt was content to win election even at the risk of losing democracy and freedom. Our concern here is squarely focused on this second Roosevelt, a man utterly unlike his earlier self—a wartime president who feared the voter more than he feared the enemy and hesitated to promote the efficient advancement of US and global security. His caution, we believe, came at a heavy price: millions of human lives.