Fear Itself (46 page)

Events would now make Hoover’s position untenable. The Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 had been designed to keep the United States out of war. What would happen, the administration began to ask, should powerful armed countries determine that it would be advantageous to violate American assertions of neutrality when “the only protection of the position and interests of a neutral in such a situation is its ability to make its possible entry into the war on one side or the other a serious factor in the military calculations of the belligerents?”
⁹⁸
Ironically, it was the three powers—Germany, Italy, Japan—that had joined to form an Axis in 1937 which were most favorably disposed to U.S. laws on neutrality, because the provision for an automatic embargo on shipments of arms and ammunition sharply favored those who had militarized and who already possessed facilities to manufacture weapons. Yet ever since 1935, American policy had tried to insulate the United States from global warfare irrespective of how it evaluated the contending countries and their prospects for challenging American values and threatening national security.

The United States had steered itself, with good intentions, into a dead end. If a U-turn was required, its execution would not be easy. After all, the Neutrality Acts had done much to reassure Americans who, like mid-century Europeans, stood, as Denis Brogan put the point, “in the shadow of a great fear, and if the angel of death is not yet abroad in the land, we can hear the beating of his wings.”
⁹⁹
Threatening development after development in Ethiopia, Spain, central Europe, and the Chinese mainland was forcing new decisions, including rearmament and confrontation with the forces resisting even the possibility of war. As fear grew and a sense of drama heightened, the New Deal swiftly had to move into a zone of action it had long sought to keep at a remove. Neutrality provided the key first test. Could it be made compatible with taking sides?

V.

P
RESIDENT
R
OOSEVELT
delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on January 4, 1939. It was a charged moment. He spoke nearly ten months after the Anschluss had swallowed an all-too-pliant Austria into the Third Reich, nine months after both Mussolini and Hitler had rebuffed his call for a declaration of nonaggression to last for ten years, some six months after the Evian Conference had failed to cope with the growing problem of stateless Jewish refugees, just over three months after the Munich agreement had conceded the Sudetenland to Germany, two months after Kristallnacht, and in the context of alarming press reports about growing Nazi influence in Latin America. Moreover, Adolf Hitler had just greeted the New Year by pledging to accelerate the buildup of German military might and by committing his government to “forging the complete National-Socialist unity of the German people.”
¹⁰⁰

The president’s talk, which had been expected to avoid controversy and focus primarily on the military buildup, made clear that he no longer stood behind the neutrality laws he had once supported. “All about us rage undeclared wars—military and economic,” President Roosevelt intoned. “All about us grow more deadly armaments—military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression—military and economic.” Organizing the speech around contrasts between the dictatorships and the democracies, he warned that the United States “cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness anywhere,” and “cannot forever let pass, without effective protest, acts of aggression against sister nations.” In addition to preparing the country for an impending request to increase spending on defense radically, he signaled the need to deal with what had been learned about the country’s neutrality legislation. “At the very least,” he contended, “we can and should avoid any action, or any lack of action, which will encourage, assist or build up an aggressor.” Underscoring how “when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim,” he called on Congress “not to let that happen any more.”
¹⁰¹

Now an alternative course to strict neutrality had to be considered: quarantining aggressor states. At a press conference on March 7, the president “expressed the belief that neutrality legislation enacted in recent years had encouraged war threats instead of contributing to the cause of peace.”
¹⁰²
Undeterred by the Munich agreement or world opinion, Germany marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15. The next day, Roosevelt told Texas senator Tom Connally that the correct response was an elimination of the arms embargo, for without that, “we will be on the side of Hitler by invoking the act.”
¹⁰³
By April, rumors were rife that Hitler soon planned to march against Poland.
¹⁰⁴
With the cash-and-carry provisions of the 1937 act about to expire on May 1 in any event, vital decisions had to be made about the future character of neutrality. The law Congress passed at the urging of the president did not break with the notion that restrictions on the behavior of American citizens, prohibitions on their presence in zones of combat, and the preservation of neutrality in wars between foreign belligerents could help keep the United States at peace. The Neutrality Act was not repealed, as Democratic Representative Asa Allen of Louisiana proposed (garnering 68 votes, almost exclusively southern, against a majority of 195). But it was changed significantly by the elimination of the embargo on arms, a makeover that moved the United States “toward a more evident willingness to ‘take sides’ and to consider the cause and effect of American neutrality upon impending conflict.”
¹⁰⁵

At first, the effort to change the law failed. The bill passed by the House included an amendment by John Vorys, an Ohio Republican, that renewed an embargo on arms and ammunition but, in a compromise gesture, permitted the export of other implements of war.
¹⁰⁶
This proposal passed by a 159–157 vote on June 29. An attempt to reverse this decision by a maneuver led by Luther Johnson, the Texas Democrat, failed the next day on a 176–180 vote. The now-weakened bill, which still faced isolationist opposition because it had slightly relaxed the embargo, survived a vote to recommit the legislation by only a 194–196 margin
¹⁰⁷
before it passed by a close 201–187 vote. The South was the driving force in securing this limited victory for a less isolationist policy. When the House voted on the measure, Republicans overwhelmingly sought to sink it, and nonsouthern Democrats were divided. Only the stalwart southern bloc made passage possible.
¹⁰⁸

A leading isolationist campaigner, Republican Hamilton Fish of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reacted strongly to the House action by using the imagery Denis Brogan had deployed three years earlier. “You can almost hear the beating of the wings of the angel of death as she hovers over England, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland tonight. . . . To pass a law without an arms embargo, that will put us exactly where we were 22 years ago, and launch us into another World War.”
¹⁰⁹
Though Fish and his colleagues who favored a strict embargo had not prevailed in the House, even the watered-down bill that chamber had passed failed to emerge from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which opted on a 12–11 vote to delay consideration on the floor until 1940 after it became clear that a bloc of more than forty senators was prepared to mount a filibuster.
¹¹⁰
The absence of an invasion of Poland by July had made it difficult to push the neutrality-repeal fight to success. Back from Europe, Walter Lippmann told the president that the prospects for peace were favorable, that “France and Britain are much stronger,” and “there is a growing disgust with Hitler.”
¹¹¹
On July 18, at a three-hour White House meeting with both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders marked by angry exchanges, Roosevelt was told the cause was hopeless. The Senate would not act. D
EFEAT
C
ONCEDED
read the
New York Times
headline; P
RESIDENT
Q
UITS
A
RMS
F
IGHT
shouted the
Chicago Daily Tribune.
¹¹²

Germany’s lightening attack on Poland transformed legislative possibilities. Noting how “the unbelievable has become reality,” and how “the outcome . . . for everything we hold most dear is utterly unpredictable,” the
Washington Post
’s page-one editorial of September 2 argued that neutrality was no longer possible. This war, it claimed, differed from the prior global conflict “not only because it threatens to be even more horrible” but even more because “it is essentially an ideological war.”
¹¹³
Not long thereafter, this once-contentious view became common wisdom.

Naming Germany, Poland, France, and Britain as belligerents,
¹¹⁴
a presidential declaration of neutrality banning direct and indirect exports to these countries was issued on September 5. But in the radio address announcing that he would take this course as required by the 1937 Neutrality Act, a law he termed “the so-called Neutrality Act,” Roosevelt made clear that he wanted an end to the arms embargo, a policy in which “our neutrality can be made a true neutrality.”
¹¹⁵
Six days later, he wrote to Neville Chamberlain, still Britain’s prime minister: “I hope and believe that we shall repeal the embargo next month, and this is definitely a part of the Administration’s policy.”
¹¹⁶
On the twenty-first, the president addressed a joint session of Congress; special precautions were taken to protect his security.
¹¹⁷
Never once speaking in his “solemn message” of the need to arm Britain and France, he declared that all Americans belonged to the peace bloc, not just the supporters of existing neutrality legislation. He thus identified the reason to end the embargo on arms as a means to keep America out of the war. He called on Congress to prohibit American ships from entering war zones, and to require belligerents purchasing any American commodities to take possession of them before they left U.S. shores. He also endorsed the existing law’s prohibitions on citizens traveling on belligerent ships, and on extending credit to nations at war. But the heart of the matter was his strong request to repeal the arms ban, the only nonnegotiable item in the president’s package of suggestions.
¹¹⁸
N
AZIS
C
RITICIZE
, B
RITONS
H
AIL
R
OOSEVELT
’
S
P
LEA
, ran the headline in the
Washington Post.
¹¹⁹

Southern Democrats in Congress quickly rallied. “A great speech,” said Missouri senator Harry Truman. “It was a splendid statement of international policy,” remarked Tom Connally of Texas. Alabama congressman George Grant reviewed how the speech had provided “convincing reasons why the Neutrality Act should be repealed,” and his colleague Carl Vinson of Georgia, whose more than fifty-year tenure in Congress lasted until 1964, announced, “I favor repeal of the Neutrality Act. If we can’t repeal it, I favor modifying it to eliminate the arms embargo.” Even FDR’s southern critics on domestic policy rallied around. Walter George of Georgia, a target of Roosevelt’s electoral purge effort in 1938, thought the president had mounted “a very strong plea,” a remark that heralded his emphatic endorsement. Virginia’s Carter Glass pronounced the speech “very fine, very pungent, very conclusive. I don’t see how anybody could take any other attitude.”
¹²⁰
These were popular views in the region. George Gallup quickly reported that support for the president, which was increasing overall, had grown especially in the South.
¹²¹

But many others did take the opposite view. Anticipating the call to end the embargo, Roosevelt’s isolationist opponents already were charging that such a retraction would lead directly to American intervention in Europe’s war. Speaking less than a week before the president’s speech, and just one day after he had left military service, Charles Lindbergh warned on September 15 in a speech carried by all three radio networks that “if we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end by losing it at home.” Cautioning against letting sentiment or ideological sympathies set the course, he further cautioned that the United States stood to “lose a million men, possibly several millions—the heart of American youth. We will be staggering under the burdens of recovery during the rest of our lives.”
¹²²
Within days of the president’s call, Lindbergh was joined by Charles Beard, Henry Ford, and Herbert Hoover to launch a “stay neutral” drive.
¹²³

With huge public mobilizations and mail campaigns under way on both sides, Congress proceeded to consider the question. On September 29, the Foreign Relations Committee voted 16–7 to send the bill to the Senate floor. A month later, on October 27, after protracted discussion, with more than one million words of debate in the
Congressional Record,
¹²⁴
that chamber passed a bill that decisively ended the embargo by a 63–30 margin. Eight Republicans supported the bill; twelve Democrats were opposed. A nearly unanimous South made victory possible, preventing a potential filibuster by what the
Wall Street Journal
was describing as a “formidable opposition.”
¹²⁵

The House was embroiled in furious debate. The key vote concerned the Vorys amendment, which the chamber had passed in June. Would the House stand firm on this formulation that would keep the embargo intact when its representatives would be meeting in conference with delegates from the Senate? The House voted on this proposition on June 30; 196 voted to insist, but 228, including a nearly undivided southern bloc, voted no. The bill thus was returned from conference with the Senate’s stipulations intact.