home | 1901-World War II | Pearl Harbor and War in Southeast Asia

Franklin Roosevelt

The Economy, Politics and Questions of War, 1937-38

Roosevelt was frustrated by his inability to help the Chinese against Japanese aggression, and he worried that China had lost faith in the United States. Roosevelt was frustrated too concerning Europe. He wished to encourage Britain and France to rejoin their alliance as a disincentive against Hitler. He wanted to prevent war in Europe, and in October 1937, Roosevelt proposed that the United States lead the "peace loving nations" in placing aggressive nations - Japan, Germany and Italy -  under quarantine. It was his first speech in which he warned the nation of approaching peril. What he meant by quarantine he did not say. He did not want to say anything that contravened the Neutrality Act, which he was duty-bound to uphold. But the speech raised a storm of criticism from isolationists that lasted for weeks. The isolationists wanted clarification from Roosevelt, and they complained that distinguishing between "peace-loving" and "warlike" nations was not neutrality but taking sides.

Jews, understandably, saw Hitler's malevolence more readily than did others, and they tended to support Roosevelt and to oppose the isolationists. Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin of New York was among those who spoke out in support of Roosevelt's position. In Germany, Dr. Joseph Goebbels was watching and spoke of a internationalist Jewish conspiracy.

Taking a stand in opposition to Roosevelt's position was the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which began circulating antiwar petitions. Senator Nye - the father of the Neutrality Act - spoke of events in Europe being similar to the drift toward war in 1914. Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana joined Nye, announcing that war would be no remedy for what he called "international anarchy." To deny Roosevelt powers concerning the declaration of war, a few congressmen were working on a bill that would make a declaration of war possible only through a nationwide referendum.

The U.S. economy had been in decline since the spring of 1937, and by the fall of that year the decline was perceptible. By October, industrial production had fallen 14 percent, and in October alone more than one-half million people were thrown out of work. With Roosevelt's approval, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., continued to support the old economic orthodoxy that conservatives cherished: he attacked deficits and urged Roosevelt to pursue a balanced budget.

Contrary to Morgenthau, another man close to Roosevelt, Marriner Eccles, who headed the Federal Reserve, urged deficit spending. Eccles was a maverick businessman from Utah, a wealthy Mormon who had saved his banks from collapse. He saw absurdity in contemporary economic dogma - namely in Say's law, which equated demand with production. Eccles did not buy into the analogy between the economy of a household and that of a government. The government should go into temporary debt, he believed , to stimulate demand and to get investors investing again. And, influenced by Eccles, Roosevelt cautiously began to move toward increased spending.

In December, Japanese airplanes destroyed three oil tankers and sank the U.S.S. Panay as it was motoring down the Yangzi River away from Nanjing - recently overrun by the Japanese. The sinking of the U.S.S. Panay frightened more Americans into signing a petition favoring a national referendum before war could be declared. And joining the clamor for peace was the association called American Artists, which on December 20, mustered their wisdom on international affairs and urged avoidance of war.

Politics, Joe Louis and the Economy

The downturn in the economy - called the Roosevelt Recession - was bringing a drop in Roosevelt's popularity.  Roosevelt's recent attempt to pack the Supreme Court added to his unpopularity, his approval rating registering in polls at barely above a majority. But, in January 1938, in his annual message to Congress, Roosevelt focused on international developments. He described the threat to peace as coming from the dictatorships, and he spoke of the need for involvement in Europe to help prevent war.

Some Americans complained that Roosevelt was too interested in foreign affairs. Associations were made between Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Dorothy Day began a movement absolute in its opposition to any sort of war. In April 1938, the Socialist Party announced that Roosevelt liberalism was "a prelude to war." Their leader, Norman Thomas, spoke against collective security as a way of stopping fascist aggression, and he spoke of staying out of war as a way of avoiding fascism in the United States. The American Federation of Labor joined the isolationists, its executive council announcing its opposition to any step that might lead to war. And the Catholic Press Association joined in the opposition against "entanglements."

In June, 1938, Joe Louis made his comeback by knocking out Germany's Max Schmeling, and there was joy in the United States - especially among blacks. Blacks had not been a part of professional boxing since Jack Johnson, but Louis had been good enough as box office potential that moneyed interests had been eager to use him. Because of the Louis victory, some young blacks were calling themselves African-Americans, and they were more willing to fight for their rights.

In September came the crisis over Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt tried to show the public his desire for peace and appeared happy with the agreement at Munich. But in private he expressed his doubts and his displeasure at what he called the capitulation of France and Great Britain.

He was in trouble politically. That  November, largely in response to Roosevelt's failure to end the depression, the Republicans made substantial gains, adding eighty-one seats in the house, gaining eight seats in the Senate and electing eleven governors.

Jews and Immigration

A few days after the elections came Kristallnacht in Germany. Roosevelt spoke out publicly, expressing his dismay and horror. He sent a protest to Germany and brought his ambassador to Germany home for consultations. The American Legion endorsed Roosevelt's statement, as did the CIO labor organization. Prominent movie stars - Fred Astaire, Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis - spoke out against the brutalities, Bette Davis suggesting that the U.S. sever all economic ties with Hitler's Germany. Support among U.S. citizens for the appeasement policy of Britain's prime minister, Chamberlain, diminished. In a Gallup poll that month, 94 percent expressed disapproval of "Nazi treatment of Jews." In that same poll, 97 percent disapproved of "Nazi treatment of Catholics." Also, Charles Lindbergh, who admired much that was German, was perplexed by Germany's treatment of the Jews as expressed during Kristallnacht. He could not, he said, understand why the Germans were handling their "Jewish problem" unreasonably.

Although the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens were opposed to attacks on Jews such as occurred on Kristallnacht, in a Roper poll in the United States, only thirty-nine percent of the respondents agreed that Jews should be treated like everyone else. Fifty-three percent believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted." And ten percent believed that Jews should be deported.

Kristallnacht inspired many Jews to emigrate from Germany, and in the United States the issue of immigration had risen. In the winter of 1938-39 many people denounced helping what they called "refu-jews." Seventy-one to eighty-five percent of those American polled opposed increasing national immigration quotas. Sixty-seven percent of those polled opposed admitting any refugees to the United States, and sixty-seven opposed a one-time admission of ten thousand refugee children.

Roosevelt acquiesced to public opinion and did nothing to help change immigration quotas. A bill to admit 20,000 refugee children won no backing from Roosevelt and died in Congress. In private, however, Roosevelt was concerned about Jewish refugees and angered by Great Britain's appeasing Arab opposition to increased immigration to Palestine.

Preparing for War, Jewish Immigration, to August 1939

In late 1938, Roosevelt did extend help to the Chinese, granting 25 million dollars to Chiang Kai-shek's government to help continue its war against the Japanese. And responding to Hitler's speeches, Roosevelt decided to speed the development of the U.S. aircraft industry. He told the Herald Tribune that like other nations the United States would not accept disarmament "while neighbor nations are armed to the teeth."

Congress was also becoming more concerned about defense, and in 1938 it passed a bill for expanding the navy, declaring that it wanted a Navy second to none." Aircraft carriers were in the making. The United States was developing the B17 bomber. The Marine Corps was refining amphibious warfare tactics. And the army was struggling with the development of mobilized warfare, including tanks.

After 1938, funds for armored vehicles exceeded those for horses, mules and horse drawn wagons. But the United States was spending less on arms than either Britain or Japan, and less still than Germany and the Soviet Union. The United States had been using World War I equipment, some of which cost more to maintain than the purchase of new equipment. The Marine Corps was not about to receive the material necessary for its amphibious landings, such as Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs). And the United States was lagging behind in research, while nations abroad were making advances in the radar detection of aircraft, aerial mapping, anti-tank weaponry, and fire control. And Germany had begun work in rocketry for long range bombing.

Beginning in 1939, Britain was preparing for war and becoming accustomed to gas masks, while 1939 in the United States was a good year for movies. Gone with the Wind opened in theaters, and the film Gunga Din was released, starring Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Junior - a  popular film based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling about British troops in India in the late 19th Century. It was the year that the movie Wizard of Oz was released, and the year that Mr. Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, went to Washington and fought for democratic ideals. It was the year that John Wayne appeared in Stagecoach and fought Indians in the nation's southwest. It was also another big year for the New York Yankees, who, with Joltin' Joe Dimaggio, won their fourth straight World Series, in four straight games. And it was the year that the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Marion Anderson to sing in their Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from that organization and arranged for Ms. Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial before a large, racially mixed crowd, and the concert was broadcast to millions more who tuned in on their radios.

The year 1939 began with Roosevelt, in his annual message to Congress, trying to scare the nation into approving more money for rearmament. He spoke of the increase in range and speed of foreign aircraft making necessary advances in "defensive aviation." Not mentioning Germany by name, he spoke of the possibility of North America being invaded by those believing in force.

Hitler, meanwhile, continued to view the United States with scorn and as militarily insignificant. He believed that the landed aristocracy of the United States had been crushed in its civil war and that this had been followed by upstart capitalists in the United States importing "scum of the earth" immigrants from Eastern Europe, resulting in the kind of polyglot urbanization that Hitler had seen in his youth in Vienna. Only a small minority in the United States, Hitler believed, was racially valuable. Jews, he claimed, were too influential in the United States. The U.S. he believed, was the Jewish spirit distilled. He saw Roosevelt as a tool of the Jews. He favored America's  isolationists for their keeping the U.S. insignificant, and he believed that the Jews were pushing the United State into conflict with foreign powers. He recognized that the United States was a great economic power, but, he said, it would not be a world power until 1970 or 1980 at the earliest.

In the German press were depictions of the United States as a place of decadence: crime, gangsters, jazz and peroxided women having cigarettes dangling from their mouths - nothing like virtuous National Socialist Germany.

Roosevelt was aware that Hitler was dismissing the United States as of no concern. After Hitler seized the Czech provinces of Moravia and Bohemia and disappointment over the Munich agreement set in, Roosevelt concluded that if the United States had been involved with its former allies, Great Britain and France, there would have been no appeasement at Munich. Here was Roosevelt not wanting war but wishing to prevent it. He believed that war was coming, but he was not prepared to say so publicly. More than ever he wished to make the United States a part of a coalition against Germany, and he wished for the increased influence that the United States would have if it amended the Neutrality Act.

Former president Herbert Hoover had become the Republican Party's chief spokesman in foreign affairs, and when Germany seized Moravia and Bohemia, Hoover declared that no clear and present danger existed and that Britain, France, and others in Europe would be able to defend themselves should there be war. Hoover spoke of Roosevelt's "dangerous adventures" and argued that Roosevelt was trying to divert people's attention from his failure to end the depression. Sounding like a progressive dissenter and an echo of Norman Thomas, Hoover declared that involvement in a major war would cause the United States to become "mobilized into practically a fascist government." This, he suggested, would help Roosevelt in his "ambitions to become a kind of dictator." Hoover however, was accurate on one account: he predicted that another major war would bring Communist expansion.

In June came the well-publicized issue of the German ship, the S.S. St. Louis, and its nearly 900 Jewish refugees.  The refugees had paid for their passage and expected to stay in Cuba while they waited for their names to rise to the top of a long list of people waiting to be included among the 26,000 people the United States allowed to migrate from Germany each year.  The Cuban president, Frederic Bru dithered, forced the St. Louis to return to sea, and tried to bargain cash payment in return for allowing the refugees temporary stay in Cuba.  The President of the Dominican Republic did the same.  No help came from the U.S. State Department. Germany's Propaganda Minister, Dr. Goebbels, announced to the world that the plight of the refugees on the S.S. St. Louis was an example of the world not wanting Jews.  The S.S. St. Louis was ordered to return to Germany.  The German captain of the S.S. St. Louis was sympathetic towards his Jewish passengers and outraged. He was able to put some refugees off in Britain.  And some refugees went to France.  And some eventually would go to the death camps.

In July, Roosevelt asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Act - so that he could strengthen those opposed to  aggression. The new and more conservative Congress was now cutting budgets, and 775,000 WPA workers were forced into the ranks of the unemployed. The Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations voted 12 to 11 against making any changes to the Neutrality Act.

Roosevelt was also urging the Soviet Union to align itself with the West against the fascist powers - just before  the Hitler-Stalin pact in mid-August.

In August, Europe appeared to be on the brink of war, and the number of people favoring shipping arms to Britain and France increased only slightly - to 39 percent of those questioned. And only one in six of those polled believed that events would warrant the United States joining the war in Europe without the U.S. having been directly attacked first. 

War in Europe and Debate about Intervention

With Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 and the declaration of war by Britain and France, debate erupted in the United States. Roosevelt called Congress into special session, and on September 21 he spoke for remaining neutral but for amending the Neutrality Act in order to aid the "non-aggressive belligerents." The sale of newspapers soared. Isolationism and analogies with World War I were losing ground. Most Americans now saw Hitler as a great danger to the world. Crowds overflowed at the galleries of the Senate and House of Representatives. Congress was changing with the change in public opinion. On October 27, after much debate, the Senate voted 63 to 30 to amend provisions in the Neutrality Act, and the House of Representatives voted its approval a few days later.

Those still against sending arms to Europe became more strident. Senator Wheeler was aghast. He cried that sending aid to the Allies would lead to the plowing under of "every fourth American boy." He asked whether the last war, World War I, had proved worthwhile. Why, he asked, should we pay for war materials for Great Britain when they still owed us money from the previous war. He complained that Congress had given power to the president to send all of the nation's "fighting aircraft and warships" to Britain. He complained of "warmongers and interventionists" controlling money in the U.S. and of their controlling most of the avenues of propaganda, including the motion picture industry.

Joining those opposed to the amendment of the Neutrality Act was the U.S. Communist Party. Before the Hitler-Stalin pact in August, they had favored changing the Neutrality Act. Now they joined the pacifists and others railing against U.S. involvement in Europe's war - while many were leaving the Party, unable to stomach the sudden switch in attitude toward fascism. The Party sponsored newspaper, the Daily Worker, editorialized that the people of the world wanted peace, and the Daily Worker was suggesting that atrocities by Germany's National Socialists were no worse than British atrocities in India.

In the spring of 1940, while Hitler's armies took Norway and rumbled through Denmark, Holland and France, Churchill was complaining in private that the United States was giving Britain too little help, and isolationists in the U.S. were continuing their campaign against involvement abroad.

Americans were surprised by Hitler's move westward, especially against peaceful Norway. Americans became concerned that German forces would now move into Greenland - territory of Denmark and near the United States. In responding to Hitler's new invasions, Roosevelt spoke of America's anger. And, on the day that Holland quit fighting, he again denounced isolationism.

Charles Lindbergh was leading the movement to stay out of the war, and he countered Roosevelt, declaring that the United States must stop the "hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion." The United States, he said, cannot be invaded. He spoke of the danger of the U.S. becoming involved in the war in Europe because "powerful interests in America" wanted it. "They represent a small minority of the people," he said, "but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda."

By now, Congress was more concerned with military readiness. In June, Roosevelt signed bills that allowed construction for the Navy and an expanded air corps. Roosevelt chose to send some World War I weapons to Britain, to help Britain's Home Guard and to replace a fraction of the artillery Britain's army had lost on the continent - his first shipment leaving the United States on June 24.

In July, 1940, the Battle of Britain began. In the United States an aroused public rushed to buy flags. "God Bless America" began being sung at sporting events, school meetings and at gatherings for bingo. In September, Roosevelt delivered 50 destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases at eight points on the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland to British Guiana.

Concerned about the prospect for war, Congress passed the Selective Service and Training Act, and Roosevelt signed the bill into law, establishing the first peacetime military service draft in the United States. In  late October the U.S. began drafting men into the military. And from Congress the U.S. Navy won authorization to double the number of their combat ships, and the production of planes for the Army Air Corps was being readied.

Worried about steps toward war, isolationists had formed what was called the America First Committee. Members argued in favor of fortress America - that intervening abroad would weaken the nation's ability to defend itself at home. Democracy at home, it claimed, could only be preserved by keeping out of Europe's war. In it were senators Nye and Wheeler, Henry Ford, Chester Bowles, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eddie Rickenbaker the World War I flying ace, Kathleen Norris, Lillian Gish, the historian Charles Beard and Father Coughlin. General Rover E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears & Roebuck, served as the committee's national chairman. The America First Committee began organizing petitions, lobbying and letter writing to Congress. And the Committee dismissed Henry Ford from its membership in order to reduce charges against it of anti-Semitism.

Charles Lindbergh, continued his campaigning against intervention, using his popularity as a national hero and drawing on his expertise in aviation and as a world traveler. Speaking at Yale in October, Lindbergh claimed that the United States could fight a successful war against Japan but only if it stayed neutral concerning Europe. But if the United States became involved in another war, he said, "life as we know it today would be a thing of the past." If the United States defeated Germany, he said, it would result in "the downfall of all European civilization, and the establishment of conditions in our own country far worse even than those in Germany today."

In 1940 the Republican Party pushed the Liberty League and its isolationists aside and chose as their candidate Wendell Wilkie, a business man from Indiana and an internationalist. Roosevelt won 27.2 million votes, and Wilkie 22.3.

In January, a lend-lease bill was making its way through Congress - a bill that gave the president the power to transfer war material, including ships, to Britain or any other power. Isolationists fought the bill, but the bill passed into law in March.

On April 4, while the air war called Battle of Britain was coming to an end, Roosevelt agreed to the British Navy repairing and refueling its ships in the United States, and he notified Britain that the U.S. was extending its defense zone eastward in the Atlantic - as far as Iceland and the western coast of Africa.

In secrecy, the U.S. had notified the British that they were breaking Japanese coded messages, and in April the British reciprocated, notifying the Americans that they were breaking German code. Through the British, the Americans learned of orders to German submarine captains to avoid incidents with U.S. forces. Knowing this, Roosevelt, it is assumed, believed that an incident leading to war involving German submarines was not likely. Roosevelt, it is said, gave orders to shoot on sight any German submarine not to create an incident but merely to scare the submarines away.

Secrecy aside, in June, 1941, the world got another big surprise, a surprise especially for Stalin: Hitler set aside his pact with the Stalin and sent his armies into the Soviet Union. Perhaps joking, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri announced that the U.S. ought to help the Soviet Union when Hitler was winning and Germany when the Soviet Union was winning.

By now the U.S. government was spending without concern for deficits. National security was at stake, and the money, it was believed, could be paid back later. Spending was lifting the United States out of the depression, without bringing the economic disaster that some thought it would. Millions were going to work in what was called the defense industry. Many on the Left were moderating their views, and many on the Right were also. The number of strikes had declined. Americans were becoming more unified, and they found themselves enjoying unity.

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