World War II and the Cold War: The Rhetoric of Hearts and Minds, Volume VIII
544
World War II and the Cold War: The Rhetoric of Hearts and Minds, Volume VIII
544eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628953398 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Rhetorical History of the United States |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 544 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Great Debate: The United States and the World, 1936–1941
Mary E. Stuckey
There is no doubt that between 1920 and 1940, the United States was determined to mind its own business in the world and to avoid armed intervention in European conflicts at almost all costs. It is less clear what factor or combination of factors led the nation from its reluctance to become involved in the affairs of Europe to its increasing willingness to do so. Scholars have argued that Roosevelt overcame his own isolationism to lead the nation to a more activist stance in the world; that he was always an internationalist and merely waited until events allowed him to move the country in that direction; that he was not a prime mover at all, but that events themselves forced Americans, however unwillingly, into participating in the world war and assuming global leadership. These issues remain unsettled and I am not going to litigate them here. I am instead going to argue that what was referred to at the time as the "Great Debate" over the United States' role in the world was based in and reveals a good bit about domestic politics. Politics, at least in this case, did not end at the water's edge, but that edge provides a vantage point from which we can make those politics visible. The "Great Debate" thus reveals as much about the politics of coalition building and about arguments over American national identity as it does about foreign policy. That is to say that this set of debates, like all important political disputes, entailed both policy differences (among which political coalitions are rooted) and deeper differences about what it meant to be Americans and what those competing definitions implied for the role the United States would play in the world at large.
This is true not least because the United States traditionally dealt with the world on its own terms. It is important to remember, for instance, that World War II was the first war in which the United States truly acted as an ally of any other nation. The country had been an "Associated Power" World War I, and American troops functioned as a separate command. The United States had no experience in managing an alliance such as the one that operated among the Allies in the years between 1941 and 1945 and no real starting point for the forging of such an alliance. What the nation did have was a history of suspicion of European democracies and their intentions and a cultural memory of the previous war, which had begun with idealistic aims and ended in disillusionment. The "Great Debate" over American neutrality, then, was a debate about national goals, national politics, and national identity every bit as much as it concerned American actions abroad.
The starting point for this argument is therefore the prevailing political context in which the debate took place. From there, I move to discussions of intervention as they played out in its three most important forums: the presidency, the Congress, and the mass public. All of these are treated separately as a matter of analytic convenience, but all of them interacted with one another as well, and these interactions are the focus of the argument, for it is here that the contours of domestic politics are most clear.
The American Political Context in the 1930s and Early 1940s
While conventional thinking is that the United States was strongly "isolationist" in the years between the world wars, this term is somewhat misleading. At no time in the nation's history was it ever actually isolated from the rest of the world. As an independent nation no less than as a confederation or loosely organized set of colonies, the United States depended upon Europe for trade and maintained a variety of political and economic relations around the world as well. While the history of these relations is as complex as it is long, it is useful to understand American foreign policy in this period as governed by three paradigms. In Asia, the umbrella policy was the vaguely defined "Open Door," which simply meant that the United States wanted to see no one power dominate the region. In the Americas, FDR's framework was the "Good Neighbor Policy," which promoted trade and eschewed intervention by the United States in the internal issues of the various hemispheric nations. In Europe, nonintervention was the rule. Thus, in the years before World War II, as during its entire history, the United States was always involved with the world but also demanded that this involvement be on its own terms.
This insistence was all the stronger because of the American reaction to the Great War. Having entered that war on the wings of idealism, the "fanatical patriotism" of the war gave way in its aftermath to a more cynical understanding of American involvement in war and in foreign affairs more generally. There was considerable sentiment that the American involvement in the war had been a devastating — and avoidable — mistake. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, presidents, the public, and the Congress were united in their unwillingness to engage in any policies that smacked of "internationalism." Anti-interventionists especially argued that Europe had been and always would be at war, and that involvement in these matters would only forfeit American freedom of action and American liberty.
In the early 1930s, of course, the nation's most proximate concern was the Depression. The American economy was hit harder than the economies of many other nations; Fiona Venn likened the American situation to that in Weimar Germany. While Americans did not react to the crisis in the same ways as the Germans, the extent and the degree of suffering and the risk that suffering posed for capitalism and democracy are hard to imagine. When asked if he knew of anything comparable to the Depression, for instance, economist John Maynard Keynes replied affirmatively, adding, "It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt as a partial response to the unprecedented crisis. His mandate was to take action against the Depression; foreign affairs had played a negligible role in the 1932 election and were not expected to be a significant element in the new administration.
The initial days of his first term were characterized by the near unanimity that allowed for the Hundred Days, but the rest of his time in office witnessed the slow disintegration of that support and the formation and reformation of Roosevelt's electoral and governing coalitions. At no time were the balances among and between those coalitions' constituent elements far from his calculus in either foreign or domestic political contexts.
American attitudes on foreign affairs were muddled, complicating the presidential calculus. In November 1935, only 11 percent of the respondents in a Gallup poll thought the most important issue facing the nation was foreign policy. The third most important priority, however, was "maintaining neutrality." In an institutional expression of the widespread commitment to remaining politically aloof from Europe, that same year the Senate rejected American membership in the World Court. Congress, backed by American public opinion, had decided that sovereignty was more important than any voluntary internationalism. That decision was solidified within months as the first of several pieces of neutrality legislation was enacted. As the nations that would become the Axis began the international incursions that eventually led the world to war, the American experience in the 1930s centered on three things: the construction of the American state as a means of combating the domestic economic crisis; the increasing threat of war in Europe and its final bloody arrival at the end of the decade; and the president whose cheerful confidence epitomized the national response to both these events.
FDR and American Neutrality Roosevelt and his administration never ignored foreign policy, although the domestic crisis received far more public attention in his first two terms. The Good Neighbor Policy was the only specific policy mentioned in his first inaugural, and within weeks of taking office, FDR fleshed out the details of that policy, recognized the Soviet Union, and signed the first of several pieces of neutrality legislation. His aim seems to have been to strengthen the presidential hand vis-à-vis Congress, a fact that did not always go over well with members of that august body. After 1939, as the world situation worsened, the balance began to shift inexorably toward foreign matters. Joseph P. Lash argues that Roosevelt's perception of the need for national unity in the face of the growing international threat lay behind his efforts to conciliate business that also began in 1939. Whatever motivated his willingness to reconcile his administration with Wall Street, FDR consistently acted on the principle that a successful foreign policy depended on domestic consensus as to the direction of that policy. He sometimes worked for that consensus, sometimes allowed others to do so, and at other times merely waited for it to develop. But he rarely acted without it.
FDR'S POLITICAL COALITION
Roosevelt's approach to influencing public opinion on American neutrality was cautious, evolutionary, and based on the rhetorical power of definition. In engaging his interlocutors in the "Great Debate," FDR first established vague moralizations. He then moved to more specific definitions that reinforced and extended those moralizations, labeling the combatants and depicting the conflict as a war between good and evil. Where his opponents saw no real moral issues at stake in the European war, Roosevelt defined the war primarily in terms of moral issues. As the conflict widened, he began to connect American values and interests to those of the Allies and to construct them in opposition to the Axis. His opponents understood "Europe" as monolithic and opposed to "America," but FDR increasingly understood the conflict as one of "civilization" versus "barbarism." As the stakes of neutrality escalated, the vehemence of the president's rhetoric escalated as well, and he began associating domestic and foreign enemies with one another, calling his opponents' motives and character into question. With his third term secure and the international scene becoming more dangerous, FDR allowed his definitions to do his political work, making it plain that events in Europe had only one reasonable interpretation and that there was only one rational response to those events. His opponents, increasingly on the defensive, had less and less room to maneuver.
Through his entire time in office, Roosevelt displayed a remarkable rhetorical and political agility, adapting his definitions to circumstances and suiting his arguments to prevailing conditions. That agility, which was a matter of tactic rather than strategy — the president had a clear moral vision for the nation and the world — allowed him to reshape his political coalition, ensuring that he was not trapped by specific policies or specific policy preferences. Instead, he offered a definition of American national identity as one that responded to changing events by applying a consistent set of principles. He could thus apply those principles to specific policies in whatever ways were most useful to him. His opponents, lacking this agility, had fewer and fewer inventional resources from which to craft a coalition and thus found fewer and fewer adherents to their cause.
Early on, Roosevelt benefited from a certain lack of specificity. In the early to mid-1930s, for example, the United States responded to German, Italian, and Japanese aggression with moralizing rather than offering any indication that action would be forthcoming. In fact, Roosevelt's tone in both foreign and domestic policy tended to the sermonic, and he reserved statements of policy for private conversations rather than public discourse. During the first term his foreign policy was much more a matter of private diplomacy than public debate. Elements of his political coalition had specific and narrow interests in particular policies — Catholics were concerned with the anticlericalism in Mexico, for instance — but the president preferred to exert private rather than public pressure in these cases, while also ensuring that the constituency in question knew of his efforts on behalf of their interests. He kept a watchful eye on foreign events and was not reluctant to moralize about them, but throughout the first term especially, his attention was focused on the demands of domestic policy and the creation of a modern bureaucracy rather than on America's place in the world order. In 1935, for instance, he spent considerably more time on problems created for him by the Supreme Court than on the ones posed by Germany.
Following his landslide reelection in 1936, he might have had more flexibility regarding public opinion and American neutrality, but his attention remained fixed on the problems of state-building at home. His "solutions" to those problems — packing the Supreme Court, the congressional purge, and his attempts to reorganize the federal government — all lent credence to the claims that he was seeking dictatorial power. Just as Roosevelt was most in need of congressional and public trust to manage the nation's response to international events, that trust was at its lowest ebb. One citizen telegraphed the White House, for example, taking exception to Roosevelt's tendency to equate himself with Andrew Jackson and charging, passionately if somewhat ungrammatically, that "the Democratic party today are the enemies of Jackson, Jackson was not a socialist, communist, bolsheviki [sic], now the Democratic party stand for this Jackson did not ask Congress to make him a dictator, Jackson was not a self styled dictator." Democrats like this man posed a real problem for Roosevelt, who had to keep them in the New Deal fold through the next election, and whose disaffection was becoming increasingly evident.
While neither court packing nor the purge led to a total breach between FDR and the western Progressive isolationists who had been among his strongest supporters in domestic matters, they did increase anxiety among this important constituency. Worried about what he perceived as FDR's increasing penchant for exercising executive power, Hamilton Fish (R-NY) argued in favor of one of the plethora of Neutrality Acts on the grounds that "power to name the aggressor properly resides with Congress and not the Executive." For Fish, and for many other anti-interventionists, both the substance of policy and the policy process itself were at stake in the debate over neutrality, and, for them, losing the battle on neutrality also meant losing their ability to restrain presidential power in general and Roosevelt's power very much in particular.
Consequently, in the wake of his travails in domestic politics and the rise in importance of foreign affairs, Roosevelt found himself reshaping his political coalition. As he lost the support of western Progressive isolationists, those who had been formerly suspicious of him, such as southern Democrats, rallied to his side. The famous New Deal coalition took its final form: ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, urban dwellers, and other liberal factions joined forces with conservative southern Democrats and some eastern elites. Liberals were attracted to FDR's domestic policies; conservatives in the South and East supported his stance in foreign affairs. Together, they forged one of the least likely, most enduring, and fractious coalitions in American political history.
Scholars have the freedom to treat foreign and domestic issues as analytically distinct. Roosevelt had no such luxury. As biographer James MacGregor Burns points out, "The fitful rush of events would allow no simple shift. While Roosevelt was struggling with recession in March 1938, the Nazis overran Austria. While he was still trying to purge conservative Democrats later that year, Hitler thrust into the Sudetenland. While the President was jousting with a rebellious Congress early in 1939, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia and turned his eyes in new directions." At all times, Roosevelt had to be aware that any action overseas affected the potential to effect legislation at home; domestic politics never stopped influencing and constraining his ability to act abroad. FDR thus engaged in ambiguous rhetoric concerning foreign affairs, arguing always that he sought peace and that even his most belligerent actions were taken in the hope of avoiding war. At the same time, he offered a clear vision of the war and of its participants, consistently making the case that if the United States became involved in the war, it would be because national defense, national interest, and national ideals were all at stake. Historian Michael Beschloss describes Roosevelt's rhetoric in these years as "tortuously ambiguous," for he sought to align political forces at home in such a way that war, if and when it came, could be fought on the basis of shared principles and would be prosecuted by a unified nation.
(Continues…)
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