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

What Figure 4.1 does not show is whether the right economic strategy would have been the right reelection strategy for the Franklin Roosevelt who pursued—and won—a third term. That, we contend, was Roosevelt’s dominant consideration and it was one that did not encourage a bold experiment in the defense of freedom. Had he defanged Hitler in late 1939, he might have had good reason to worry that he wouldn’t be reelected (as we will show). Could he have used his success against Hitler to reshape public opinion in his favor? We cannot know the answer, but the persuasive record of the first FDR and the great popularity he took into 1940 suggest his caution on these points was misplaced and most unfortunate. True, public opinion was set against entering the war in Europe, but equally true, the president was doing almost nothing to alter that perspective. He had led the nation to the promised land of the New Deal; he did no such thing when faced with the destruction of freedom.

Waiting for War

OUR ACCOUNT BEGINS IN 1940 WHEN PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DECIDED to pursue a third term. Although he was the only US president to succeed in that undertaking, there was plenty of precedent for the effort. Grant had sought his party’s nomination for a third term, as had Cleveland and Roosevelt’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt. What is remarkable about FDR’s decision is the extent to which the justification he offered for a third term deviated from his actual course of action. To understand Roosevelt’s decision and its significance for our understanding of this American president’s approach to war we need to set the global stage.

Today we think of the Second World War as having begun with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but many people at the time saw the invasion of Poland as the beginning of a limited German-Polish war. Even Hitler doubted that the British and French were serious about defending Poland, despite their having declared war against Germany. Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, reports that “Hitler . . . quickly reassured himself . . . that England and France had obviously declared war merely as a sham, in order not to lose face before the whole world. He was convinced of that.”8 Still, the larger danger was not lost on anyone paying attention anywhere. While the New York Times headline for the day reported in bold print “German Army Attacks Poland,” in a separate, high-profile article it noted that the British navy was being mobilized to its full strength. Hitler may have doubted Britain’s sincerity, but the British government undertook serious, costly actions to indicate that it intended to respond to the changed course of European affairs.

The threat that Hitler’s Germany represented had already long been the subject of discussion and negotiation starting at least when the German army marched into the Rhineland, essentially throwing away the Versailles Treaty’s restrictions on the use of German military force. By 1938 the danger that Hitler represented in Europe was evident to anyone paying the slightest attention. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, having had a face-to-face summit with Hitler in Munich, received a hero’s welcome on his return, announcing, “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”9 Sleep might have been quiet on that night, but it was not to be quiet in Britain for many long, painful years to come.

Of course, now we know that it was not peace for our time, but one can forgive the optimistic mood on Chamberlain’s return. Allied forces’ having concluded “the war to end all wars” less than twenty years earlier, the hope for peace was surely remarkably strong. Back in the United States, geographically remote from the drama in Europe, it is easy to understand that the focus of attention was squarely on rebuilding the economy, with relatively scant attention to or fear of another great war on the horizon. Little had changed since the redesign of the continent at the end of the First World War. The American people certainly might be forgiven for not contemplating the great danger that was to befall Europe and the world a short time later. But Roosevelt did contemplate that danger and he conveyed his concern—and his tragically cautious approach—to the American public in a fireside chat on September 3, 1939, a speech that could have paved the way for restoring world peace but didn’t.

The president’s radio address to the nation started out in a manner that could easily have been turned toward the importance of American participation against the evil spreading in the world. As FDR said,

Until four-thirty this morning I had hoped against hope that some miracle would prevent a devastating war in Europe and bring to an end the invasion of Poland by Germany. . . . And it seems to me clear, even at the outbreak of this great war, that the influence of America should be consistent in seeking for humanity a final peace which will eliminate, as far as it is possible to do so, the continued use of force between nations. . . . You must master at the outset a simple but unalterable fact in modern foreign relations between nations. When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.

With these words, constituting the first half of his fireside chat, the president seemed to be laying the foundation for an active US role to restore world peace and stop German aggression by highlighting to the American people that “when peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries is in danger.” But then the conservative, public opinion–minded FDR took command of the microphone. He goes on to the climax of his speech, “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality. This would have been done even if there had been no neutrality statute on the books, for this proclamation is in accordance with international law [emphasis added] and in accordance with American policy. . . . As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States.”10

If, as is generally taken to be true, FDR personally desired to enter the war in defense of Britain and of other democratic nations, here was the golden opportunity to turn American opinion in that direction. He chose not to do so, electing to echo the public’s reticence to become involved instead of building on his introduction of the danger faced by the United States, to convince the nation that there was no way to stop the threat of tyranny while sitting on the sidelines. We will return in particular to the italicized part of this speech when we turn shortly to the president’s declaration of neutrality two days later.

In June 1940, one month before Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for a third term as president and nine months after he reassured the American people that there was no prospect of American soldiers in European fields, all of continental Western Europe, other than neutral Sweden and Switzerland, both continuing to trade with Germany, and profascist Portugal and Spain, was now controlled either by Hitler’s Germany or by Mussolini’s Italy. This could not have been a more alarming change to anyone who cared to see liberty preserved in the world. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini was shy about their ambitions and neither had a reputation as a man who kept his word.

By now, anyone reflecting on Hitler’s claims back in 1938 could not have been more convinced of Hitler’s utter falsity. Franklin Roosevelt, even from the safe remove of Washington, DC, could not have misunderstood the stark contrast between what was happening in Europe and what Adolf Hitler had declared in Berlin in 1938: “I extended a hand to England. I renounced voluntarily ever again joining any naval conference so as to give the British Empire a feeling of security, not because I could not build more—and there should be no illusion about that—but exclusively for this reason: to safeguard permanent peace between both nations. . . . I have gone further. Immediately after the Saar had been returned to the Reich by plebiscite, I told France there were no more differences between France and us. I said: Alsace-Lorraine does not exist anymore for us. . . . And we all do not want any more war with France. We want nothing of France, absolutely nothing.”11 By the early morning of May 10, 1940, when Germany began its assault on France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, Hitler’s words were obviously revealed as lies. And on that day, as Winston Churchill became the new prime minister of Great Britain, Hitler’s close adviser, Hermann Göring, understood “the war is really on.”12