Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The isolationist point of view had been enacted into American statute law, not only in the 1920’s by restrictions on contact with the League of Nations and other international organizations but also later, in the Roosevelt administrations, in the so-called Neutrality Acts. These misnamed laws sought to avoid any repetition of the events of 1914-1917 by curtailing loans and munition sales to belligerent countries. Originally enacted in 1935, and revised in the next two years, these laws provided that export of arms and munitions to belligerents would cease whenever the President proclaimed a state to be a participant in a war outside the Americas. Any materials, including munitions, named by the President had to be sold on a “cash-and-carry” basis, with full payment and transfer of title before leaving the United States, and had to be transported on foreign ships. The “cash” but not the “carry” provision also applied to all other trade with belligerents. In addition, loans to belligerents were forbidden, and American citizens could be warned not to travel on belligerents’ ships.

An early statute, the Johnson Act of 1934, prevented loans to most European Powers by forbidding such loans to countries whose payments were in arrears on their war debts of World War I. Moreover, by a so-called “moral embargo” the Roosevelt Administration sought to restrict export of war materials on ethical or humanitarian grounds where no legal basis existed for doing so. Under this provision, for example, airplane manufacturers were asked not to sell planes to countries which had bombed civilians, as Italy had done in Ethiopia, Japan had done in China, or the Soviet Union had done in Finland.

In the years 1935-1939 the neutrality laws proved to be quite unneutral in practice, and a considerable encouragement to aggressors. The Italian attack on Ethiopia showed that an aggressor could arm at his leisure and then, by making an attack, prevent his victim from purchasing from the United States the means to defend himself. These laws gave a great advantage to a state like Italy, which had ships to carry supplies from the United States or which had cash to buy them here, in contrast with a country like Ethiopia which had no ships and little cash. By special legislation the Neutrality Acts had been extended to civil wars to cover the Spanish uprising of 1936 and had cut the recognized government of Spain off from purchasing munitions while the rebel regime continued to obtain such munitions from the Axis Powers.

The obvious unfairness of these laws in the Sino-Japanese crisis of 1937 persuaded President Roosevelt to refrain from proclaiming a state of war in East Asia, although in fact it was clear to everyone that a war was going on there. Above all, by 1939, it was obvious that the Neutrality Acts were encouraging Nazi aggression, since Germany, by making war on Britain and France, could cut them off from American armaments. For this reason, the Roosevelt Administration tried to get the Congress to repeal the embargo provision of the Neutrality Acts but was unable to overcome isolationist opposition led by Senator William E. Borah of Idaho (July 1939).

As soon as the war began in Europe, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to revise the neutrality laws so that the Entente Powers could obtain supplies in the United States. Under the resulting revision of these acts, in November 1939, the embargo on munitions was repealed and all purchases by belligerents were placed on a “cash-and-carry” basis; loans to belligerent Powers were forbidden, Americans were excluded from travel on belligerent ships, and American ships were not to be armed, to carry munitions, or to go to any areas the President had proclaimed as combat areas. Under this last provision, all European ports on the Baltic or the Atlantic from Bergen south to the Pyrenees were closed to American ships. As the war spread, these areas were extended by proclamation.

The collapse of France in June 1940, combined with the arrogant Japanese demands on the Netherlands East Indies and French Indochina (August-September 1940) and the signing of the Tripartite Pact, gave rise to a severe crisis in American foreign affairs. We have already indicated the danger to American security which could arise from the French fleet or Dakar falling into German hands or from a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. This danger raised the controversy over American foreign policy to a feverish pitch and widened the extremes of public opinion. These extremes ranged from the advocates of immediate intervention into the war on the side of Britain on the one hand to the defenders of extreme isolationism on the other. The extreme interventionists insisted that Britain could be saved only by an immediate American declaration of war on Germany, not because of America’s ability to fight at once, which was recognized to be small, but because British morale needed such a declaration to provide it with the strength to go on fighting. The isolationists, on the other hand, argued that it was no concern of the United States whether Britain collapsed or survived, since Hitler had no desire to attack America, and, even if he did, the Western Hemisphere could withdraw into itself and survive with security and prosperity. Most American opinion, in the summer of 1940, was undecided or confused but tended to incline to a point of view somewhere between the two extremes.

In order to unify America’s political front, Roosevelt took two outstanding leaders of the Republican Party (both interventionists) into his Cabinet as secretaries of war and of the navy. Henry L. Stimson had been secretary of war in the Taft administration and secretary of state in the Hoover Administration, and Frank Knox had been the Republican candidate for Vice-President in 1936; both were promptly repudiated by the Republican leaders, but played a major role in the Roosevelt Administration thereafter. In combination with the secretary of the treasury (Henry Morgenthau), the secretary of state (Cordell Hull), and the secretary of the interior (Harold Ickes), this gave Roosevelt a preponderantly interventionist Cabinet. Roosevelt himself was sympathetic to this point of view, but his strong sense of political realism made him aware of the powerful currents of isolationism in American public opinion, especially in the Midwest. As a consequence, Roosevelt, who seemed to the outside public to be an advanced interventionist, was definitely a restraining influence inside the Administration. In his own mind his role clearly was to act as a brake on his Cabinet colleagues while he used the prestige and publicity of his office to educate American public opinion in the belief that America could not stand alone, isolated, in the world and could not allow Britain to be defeated if any acts of ours could prevent it.

Outside the Administration, American public opinion was being bombarded by paid and volunteer agitators of all shades of opinion from inside the country and from abroad. Many of these were organized into lobbying and pressure groups of which the most notable were, on the interventionist side, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and, on the isolationst side, the America First movement. The controversy reached its peak during the presidential campaign of 1940 and subsequently, as Congress enacted into law the vital defensive measures desired by the third Roosevelt Administration.

The international crisis led Roosevelt to violate the constitutional precedent against a third term. In spite of the fact that the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, was in general agreement with Roosevelt’s position on foreign affairs, his desire to win the election had led him to indulge in what he subsequently called “campaign oratory” and to make violent accusations against his opponent. Among others, he assured the American people that Roosevelt’s reelection meant that “we will be at war.” To counteract these charges and to win back antiwar voters who might have been attracted by the generally isolationist outlook of the Republican Party, especially of its senior congressional leaders, Roosevelt replied with some campaign oratory of his own. Some of his assurances were thrown back in his face later: in New York he said, “We will not send our army, navy or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack”; and in Boston he said most emphatically, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”