Authors: Ira Katznelson
74
The Foreign Policy Association reported in February that, having doubled between 1934 and the end of 1936, world expenditures on weapons stood “at three times the figure on the eve of the World War.” Nazi Germany’s 1936 expenditure of $2,660,000,000 was seven times that of 1934, and the Soviet Union’s $2,983,100,000 represented a tripling during that period. U.S. spending had remained nearly flat, increasing from $710,000,000 in 1934 to $964,000,000 in 1936, roughly the same as Italy’s $871,000,000, itself a jump from the $272,000,000 in 1934. See
Washington Post,
February 15, 1937. In all, global arms expenditures between 1931 and 1936 had topped $60 billion, a spending rate four times as great as on the eve of World War I, and “about 8 billion dollars more than the world production of gold since Columbus discovered America.” See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
May 23, 1937.
75
The House passed the conference report on April 29 by a voice vote; the Senate passed it by a 41–15 margin.
76
Los Angeles Times,
April 30, 1937.
77
For discussions, see Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
p. 102; Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality,
p. 95. For a contemporaneous consideration of the era’s heterogeneous peace movement, see Arthur Deerin Call, “The Contribution of the War Policies Commission to the Peace Movement,”
Advocate of Peace through Justice
93 (1931): 87–94.
78
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 1st sess., March 16, 1937, p. 2298. For an extended discussion, see Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality,
pp. 162–99.
79
Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Foreign Policy: The Neutrality Act and the Reciprocal Trade Compact,”
New York Times,
August 9, 1937.
80
Los Angeles Times,
February 3, 1938. There had been much speculation that the president would be unable to avoid an absolute ban on arms shipments under the terms of the act once Japan had declared war.
Los Angeles Times,
January 11, 1938.
81
New York Times,
April 23, 1938.
82
Ibid., March 20, 1938.
83
Emil Lederer, “Domestic Policy and Foreign Relations,” in
War in Our Time,
ed. Hans Speier and Alfred Kahler (New York: W.W. Norton, 1939), pp. 43–57.
84
Michael Howard,
The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order
(London: Profile Books, 2000), p. 68.
85
A superb account of these changes that was written at the time can be found in W. Friedmann, “International Law and the Present War,”
Transactions of the Grotius Society
26 (1940): 211–33.
86
For this formulation, I am indebted to John Thompson’s views about conceptions of American security before World War II.
87
Frank Ninkovich,
The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 119.
88
Hans Speier and Alfred Kahler, “Introduction,” in
War in Our Time,
ed. Speier and Kahler, p. 11.
89
As an indicator of how completely the hopes for collective security, especially by smaller states, had been dashed, the Oslo Powers (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg), which met in Copenhagen in July 1938, “expressed their willingness to cooperate in the work of the League of Nations, but made it understood at the same time that . . . the provisions of Article XVI concerning the sanctions to be applied against an aggressor state to have acquired a non-compulsory character.” See Eric Hula, “The European Neutrals,”
Social Research
7, no. 1 (1940): 151, 157.
90
With Nazi domination in Europe and Japanese domination in Asia, “present actuality,” the émigré legal scholar Eric Hula remarked in an article written in 1939, “is the abuse of the word neutrality, whenever and wherever an outrageous act is committed and tolerated.” See Hula, “The European Neutrals,” p. 168.
91
Friedmann, “International Law and the Present War,” p. 229.
92
Cited in Georg Schwarzenberger, “The Rule of Law and the Disintegration of the International Society,”
American Journal of International Law
33 (1939): 57–58.
93
Walter Lippmann, “The American Destiny,”
Life,
June 5, 1939, p. 47.
94
Frederick L. Schuman, “World Politics and America’s Destiny,” in
The Future of Government in the United States: Essays in Honor of Charles E. Merriam,
ed. Leonard D. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 245, 250, 251.
95
“If we merely
want
victory, making no great effort to find the price or disputing the bill,” Denis Brogan, the Scottish student of the United States, wrote in 1942, “we go the way of admirable societies which died because they were politically inadequate to the cruel necessities of the times in which their fate was decided.” See D. W. Brogan, “A Political Scientist and World Problems,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
222 (1942): 20.
96
DeConde, “On Twentieth-Century Isolationism,” pp. 3–4, 8.
97
Washington Post,
April 1, 1938.
98
Lawrence Preuss, “The Concepts of Neutrality and Nonbelligerency,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
218 (1941): 101.
99
D. W. Brogan, “Omens of 1936,”
Edinburgh Review
139 (1936): 1–2; cited in Richard Overy,
The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939
(London: Penguin, 2009), p. 315.
100
Cited in Martin Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century,
vol. 2,
1933–1951
(New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 225.
101
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, in
Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932–1945,
ed. B. D. Zevin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 163, 165. These themes were not entirely new. In an October 5, 1937, Chicago speech, FDR had recommended a “quarantine” of aggressor nations in circumstances of growing lawlessness and military buildup by the dictatorships.
102
Washington Post,
March 8, 1939.
103
Tom Connally (as told to Alfred Steinberg),
My Name Is Tom Connally
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954), p. 226.
104
Atlanta Constitution,
April 9, 1939.
105
Francis O. Wilcox, “American Government and Politics: The Neutrality Fight in Congress 1939,”
American Political Science Review
33 (1939): 825.
106
It excluded more remote implements of war, a move Congressman Vorys argued was a fair compromise.
107
With a southern Democratic-Republican likeness score of just 6, a nonsouthern Democratic-Republican likeness score of 22, and intraparty likeness for all Democrats at the level of 84.
108
When the House voted on the proposal to recommit, Republicans were unanimous, achieving a maximum cohesion score of 100, but nonsouthern Democrats were divided, with a cohesion score of just 57. By contrast, southern Democratic cohesion scored a high 88. When the bill passed, Republican cohesion was at a lofty level of 93, but nonsouthern Democrats remained divided at 56. Passage required southern cohesion in favor, scored at 92.
109
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 1st sess., June 30, 1939, p. 8509.
110
New York Times,
July 8, 1939;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 12, 1939.
111
Washington Post,
July 13, 1939.
112
New York Times,
July 19, 1939;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 19, 1939.
113
“Is Neutrality Possible?”
Washington Post,
September 2, 1939. The importance to congressional action of the start of the European phase of World War II is discussed in Porter,
The Seventy-sixth Congress and World War II,
pp. 173–74.
114
Australia and New Zealand as well, for they went to war when Britain did.
115
Washington Post,
September 4, 1939. He spoke of the “proclamation required by the existing neutrality act. I trust that in the days to come our neutrality can be made a true neutrality.”
116
Franklin D. Roosevelt to Neville Chamberlain, in
F.D.R.: His Personal Letters,
vol. 2,
1928-1945,
ed. Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950), p. 919.
117
Los Angeles Times,
September 21, 1939.
118
New York Times,
September 22, 1939;
Los Angeles Times,
September 25, 1939.
119
Washington Post,
September 22, 1939.
120
New York Times,
September 22, 1939. On Senator George, see
Atlanta Constitution,
September 26, 1939.
121
The percentage of voters approving Roosevelt’s performance stood at 52 percent in the mid-Atlantic and 53 percent in the Midwest, but at 72 percent in the South. See
Atlanta Constitution,
September 22, 1939.
122
Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 16, 1941.
123
Ibid., September 23, 1939.
124
New York Times,
October 28, 1939.
125
Wall Street Journal,
October 2, 1939.
126
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 2nd sess., November 2, 1939, p. 1339.
127
Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality,
p. 330. The positive vote gained support from 220 Democrats, 21 Republicans, 1 Farmer-Labor member, and 1 American Laborite. The negative vote was backed by 36 Democrats, 143 Republicans, and 2 Progressives.
128
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 1st sess., June 30, 1939, p. 8059.
129
Ibid., 2d sess., October 14, 1939, p. 438; October 20, 1939, pp. 653, 654.
130
Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality,
p. 334.
131
New York Times,
November 10, 1939; for an overview of the act, see Guerra Everett, “The Neutrality Act of 1939,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
211 (1940): 95–101.
132
Edward R. Stettinius Jr.,
Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory
(New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 89–108; Warren F. Kimball,
The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939–1941
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 57–118; Max Hastings,
Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945
(New York: Vintage, 2011), pp. 147–49; Roberts,
Masters and Commanders,
p. 46.
133
Mark Sullivan, “Lend-Lease Status,”
Washington Post,
February 1, 1941.
134
Kimball,
The Most Unsordid Act,
pp. 207, 217.
135
See http://historicalresources.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/franklin-delano-roosevelt-on-land-lease-march-15-1941/.
136
Walter Lippman, “Today and Tomorrow: If the Worst Happens,”
Washington Post,
February 6, 1941.
137
Wall Street Journal,
May 24, 1940, p. 1; Stettinius succeeded Cordell Hull as secretary of state in 1944, chaired the American delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization in the spring of 1945, and served as the country’s first ambassador to the UN. In August 1939, President Roosevelt had created a War Resources Board (WRB), which was chaired by Stettinius and included Walter Sherman Gifford, the head of AT&T; John Lee Pratt, who served on the board of General Motors; Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck; Harold Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution; and the physicist Karl Compton, who was president of MIT. This group was short-lived; on November 24, the president thanked its members for their service, bringing it to a close. For a discussion, see Paul A. C. Koistinen, “The Industrial-Military Complex in Historical Perspective: The Interwar Years,”
Journal of American History
56 (1970): 836–38.
138
Janeway,
The Struggle for Survival,
p. 100.
139
Ibid., p. 12.
140
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 3d sess., May 24, 1940, p. 6837.
141
Ibid., p. 6829.
142
Ibid., June 10, 1940, p. 7823.
143
Ibid., June 6, 1940, p. 7650.
144
This near unanimity fell apart in votes on naval appropriations, which included a big investment in facilities in Guam. Republicans balked, proposing amendments to confine naval spending closer to home. In the House debate, Arthur Jenks of New Hampshire found it “beyond me to understand why we would want or need to have either Navy or Army planes scouting for purposes of protection some 5,000 miles away from the Pacific coast line of our country,” and Robert Rich of Pennsylvania complained about the “item in the bill to improve Guam, near the Chinese coast. Let us give the island away before our improvements and fortification gets us into war. Let us stay away from Europe, Asia, and Africa in any possessions of real estate.” See
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 3d sess., February 13, 1940, pp. 1437, 1421. On a straight party-line vote, the House rejected isolationist amendments by votes of 158–230 and 156–234.
145
“Arming America,”
New York Times,
June 2, 1940.