The Diplomacy to the New Era

• It was clear when the Harding administration took office in 1921 that American membership in the League of Nations was no longer a realistic possibility

• The most important such effort was the Washington Conference of 1921—an attempt to prevent what was threatening to become a costly and destabilizing naval armaments race between the United States, Britain, and Japan

• The Washington Conference began the New Era effort to protect the peace (and the international economic interests of the United States) without accepting active international duties.

• The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 concluded it.

• When the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, asked the United States in 1927 to join an alliance against Germany, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg (who had replaced Hughes in 1925) instead proposed a multilateral treaty outlawing war as an instrument of national policy.

• Fourteen nations signed the agreement in Paris on August 27, 1928, amid great solemnity and wide international acclaim.

• Forty-eight other nations later joined the pact. It contained no instruments of enforcement but rested, as Kellogg put it, on the “moral force” of world opinion.

Debt and Diplomacy

• The first responsibility of diplomacy, Hughes, Kellogg, and others agreed, was to ensure that American overseas trade faced no obstacles to expansion and would remain free of interference

• The United States was most concerned about Europe, on whose economic health American prosperity in large part depended.

• Not only were the major European industrial powers suffering from the devastation World War I had produced; they were also staggering under a heavy burden of debt.

• The Allied forces were struggling to repay $11 billion in loans they had contracted with the United States during and shortly after the war, loans that the Republican administrations were unwilling to reduce or forgive

• In 1924 Charles G. Dawes, an American banker, and diplomat, negotiated an agreement under which American banks would provide enormous loans to the Germans, enabling them to meet their reparations payments; in return, Britain and France would agree to reduce the amount of those payments.

• Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, but in fact the Dawes Plan did little to solve the problems it addressed.

• It led to a troubling circular pattern in international finance.

• America would lend money to Germany, which would use that money to pay reparations to France and England, which would, in turn, use those funds (as well as large loans they themselves were receiving from American banks) to repay war debts to the United States.

• The flow was able to continue only by virtue of the enormous debts Germany and the other European nations were accumulating to American banks and corporations.

• Those banks and corporations were doing more than providing loans.

• They were becoming a daily presence in the economic life of Europe

• The high tariff barriers that the Republican Congress had erected (through the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922) were creating additional problems, such skeptics warned. European nations, unable to export their goods to the United States, were finding it difficult to earn the money necessary to repay their loans.

• Such warnings fell for the most part on deaf ears.

• The U.S. government felt even fewer reservations about assisting American economic expansion in Latin America.

• During the 1920s, American military forces maintained a presence in numerous countries in the region

• United States banks were offering large loans to Latin American governments, just as they were in Europe; and just as in Europe, the Latin Americans were having great difficulty earning the money to repay them in the face of the formidable U.S. tariff barrier.

• By the end of the 1920s, resentment of “Yankee imperialism” was growing rapidly. The economic troubles after 1929 would only accentuate such problems.

Hoover and the World Crisis

• After the relatively placid international climate of the 1920s, the diplomatic challenges facing the Hoover administration must have seemed ominous and bewildering.

• The world financial crisis that began in 1929 and greatly intensified after 1931 was not only creating economic distress; it was also producing a dangerous nationalism that threatened the weak international agreements established during the previous decade.

• In Latin America, Hoover worked studiously to repair some of the damage created by earlier American policies.

• He made a ten-week goodwill tour through the region before his inauguration

• When economic distress led to the collapse of one Latin American regime after another, Hoover announced a new policy

• He even repudiated the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine by refusing to permit U.S. intervention when several Latin American countries defaulted on debt obligations to the United States in October 1931.

• In Europe, the administration enjoyed few successes in its efforts to promote economic stability

• The Japanese, reeling from an economic depression of their own, were concerned about the increasing strength of the Soviet Union and of Premier Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist China

• By the time Hoover left office early in 1933, it was clear that the international system the United States had attempted to create in the 1920s—a system based on voluntary cooperation among nations and on an American refusal to commit to the interests of other countries—had collapsed.

25.1: Isolationism and Internationalism

Depression Diplomacy

• Perhaps Roosevelt’s sharpest break with the policies of his predecessor was on the question of American economic relations with Europe.

• Hoover had argued that only by resolving the question of war debts and reinforcing the gold standard could the American economy hope to recover

• The conference quickly dissolved without reaching an agreement, and not until 1936 did the administration finally agree to new negotiations to stabilize Western currencies.

• At the same time, Roosevelt abandoned the commitments of the Hoover administration to settle the issue of war debts through international agreement.

• In effect, he simply let the issue die.

• In April 1934, he signed a bill to forbid American banks to make loans to any nation in default on its debts.

• The result was to stop the old, circular system; within months, war-debt payments from every nation except Finland stopped for good.

• Although the new administration had no interest in international currency stabilization or settlement of war debts, it did have an active interest in improving America’s position in world trade.

• Roosevelt approved the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act of 1934, authorizing the administration to negotiate treaties lowering tariffs by as much as 50 percent in return for reciprocal reductions by other nations

America and the Soviet Union

• America’s hopes of expanding its foreign trade helped produce efforts by the Roosevelt administration to improve relations with the Soviet Union.

• The United States and Russia had viewed each other with mistrust and even hostility since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the American government still had not officially recognized the Soviet regime by 1933.

• But powerful voices within the United States were urging a change in policy because the Soviet Union appeared to be a possible source of trade.

• The Russians, too, were eager for a new relationship.

• They were hoping in particular for American cooperation in containing the power of Japan, which Soviet leaders feared as a threat to Russia from the southeast.

• Despite this promising beginning, however, relations with the Soviet Union soon soured once again.

• American trade failed to establish much of a foothold in Russia, and the Soviets received no reassurance from the United States that it was interested in stopping Japanese expansion in Asia.

• By the end of 1934, as a result of these disappointing hopes on both sides, the Soviet Union and the United States were once again viewing each other with considerable mistrust.

The Good Neighbor Policy

• Somewhat more successful were American efforts to enhance both diplomatic and economic relations with Latin America through what became known as the “Good Neighbor Policy.”

• Latin America was one of the most important targets of the new policy of trade reciprocity.

• During the 1930s, the United States succeeded in increasing both exports to and imports from the other nations of the Western Hemisphere by over 100 percent.

• The Good Neighbor Policy did not mean, however, that the United States had abandoned its influence in Latin America

The Rise of Isolationism

• The first years of the Roosevelt administration marked not only the death of Hoover’s hopes for international economic agreements but the end of any hopes for world peace through treaties and disarmament as well.

• Roosevelt himself shared some of the suspicions voiced by the isolationists and claimed to be impressed by the findings of the Nye investigation.

• Nevertheless, he continued to hope for at least a modest American role in maintaining world peace.

• In 1935, he asked the Senate to ratify a treaty to make the United States a member of the World Court—a treaty that would have expanded America’s symbolic commitment to internationalism without increasing its actual responsibilities in any important way

• That tide seemed to grow stronger in the following months.

• Through the summer of 1935, it became clear that Mussolini’s Italy was preparing to invade Ethiopia in an effort to expand its colonial holdings in Africa.

• Fearing that a general European war would result, American legislators began to design legal safeguards to prevent the United States from being dragged into the conflict.

• The result was the Neutrality Act of 1935.

• The 1935 act, and the Neutrality Acts of 1936 and 1937 that followed, was designed to prevent a recurrence of the events that many Americans now believed had pressured the United States into World War I.

• The 1935 law established a mandatory arms embargo against both victim and aggressor in any military conflict and empowered the president to warn American citizens that they might travel on the ships of warring nations only at their own risk.

• Thus, isolationists believed, the “protection of neutral rights” could not again become an excuse for American intervention in the war.

• The 1936 Neutrality Act renewed these provisions.

• On December 12, 1937, Japanese aviators bombed and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay as it sailed the Yangtze River in China.

• The attack was almost undoubtedly deliberate.

• It occurred in broad daylight, with clear visibility

• Even so, isolationists seized eagerly on Japanese protestations that the bombing had been an accident and pressured the administration to accept Japan’s apologies.

The Failure of Munich

• Hitler’s determination to expand German power became fully visible in 1936, when he moved the revived German army into the Rhineland, violating the Versailles treaty and rearming an area that France had, in effect, controlled since World War I.

• In March 1938, German forces marched into Austria, and Hitler proclaimed a union (or Anschluss) between Austria, his native land, and Germany, his adopted one—thus fulfilling his longtime dream of uniting the German-speaking peoples in one great nation

• Most Western nations were appalled at the prospect of another war and were willing to pay almost any price to settle the crisis peacefully

• On September 29, Hitler met with the leaders of France and Great Britain at Munich in an effort to resolve the crisis.

• The French and British agreed to accept the German demands for Czechoslovakia in return for Hitler’s promise to expand no farther

25.2: From Neutrality to Intervention

Neutrality Tested

• There was never any question that both the president and the majority of the American people favored Britain, France, and the other Allied nations in the conflict.

• The question was how much the United States was prepared to do to assist them

• After the German armies had quickly subdued Poland, the war in Europe settled into a long, quiet lull that lasted through the winter and spring—a “phony war,” many people called it.

• The only real fighting during this period occurred not between the Allies and the Axis, but between Russia and its neighbors.

• Roosevelt had already begun to increase American aid to the Allies.

• He also began preparations to resist a possible Nazi invasion of the United States

• Roosevelt was able to take such steps in part because of a major shift in American public opinion.

• Before the invasion of France, most Americans had believed that a German victory in the war would not be a threat to the United States.

• But while the forces of isolation may have weakened, they were far from dead.

• A spirited and at times vicious debate began in the spring of 1940 between those activists who advocated expanded American involvement in the war (who were termed, often inaccurately, “interventionists”) and those who continued to insist on neutrality

• Opposing them was a powerful new lobby called the America First Committee, which attracted some of America’s most prominent leaders.

• Its chairman was General Robert E. Wood, until recently the president of Sears Roebuck; and its membership included Charles Lindbergh, General Hugh Johnson, Senator Gerald Nye, and Senator Burton Wheeler.

• It won the editorial support of the Hearst chain and other influential newspapers, and it had at least the indirect support of a large proportion of the Republican Party.

The Third Term Campaign

• For many months, the politics of 1940 revolved around the question of Franklin Roosevelt’s intentions

• With Roosevelt effectively straddling the center of the defense debate, favoring neither the extreme isolationists nor the extreme interventionists

• Willkie took positions little different from Roosevelt’s: he would keep the country out of the war but would extend generous assistance to the Allies.

• An appealing figure and a vigorous campaigner, he managed to evoke more public enthusiasm than any Republican candidate in decades.

Neutrality Abandoned

• In the last weeks of 1940, with the election behind him, Roosevelt began to make subtle but profound changes in the American role in the war.

• More than aiding Britain, he was moving the United States closer to entering the war. In December 1940, Great Britain was virtually bankrupt.

• No longer could the British meet the cash-and-carry requirements imposed by the Neutrality Acts; yet England’s needs, Churchill insisted, were greater than ever.

• The president, therefore, suggested a method that would “eliminate the dollar sign” from all arms transactions.

• The new system was labeled “lend-lease.”

• It would allow the government not only to sell but also to lend or lease armaments to any nation deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.”

• In other words, America could funnel weapons to England on the basis of no more than Britain’s promise to return or pay for them when the war was over.

• Isolationists attacked the measure bitterly, arguing (correctly) that it was simply a device to tie the United States more closely to the Allies; but Congress enacted the bill by wide margins.

• With lend-lease established, Roosevelt soon faced another serious problem: ensuring that the American supplies would actually reach Great Britain.

• At first, Germany did little to challenge these obviously hostile American actions.

• By the fall of 1941, however, events in Europe changed their position

• At the same time, a series of meetings, some private and one public, were tying the United States and Great Britain more closely together.

• In April 1941, senior military officers of the two nations met in secret and agreed on the joint strategy they would follow if the United States entered the war.

The Road to Pearl Harbor

• Japan took advantage of the crisis that had preoccupied the Soviet Union and the two most powerful colonial powers

• Roosevelt had already displayed his animosity toward Japanese policies by harshly denouncing their assault on China and by terminating a long-standing American commercial treaty with the Tokyo government.

• Still, the Japanese drive continued. In July 1941, imperial troops moved into Indochina and seized the capital of Vietnam, a colony of France.

• American intelligence took note of a Japanese naval task force that began sailing east from the Kuril Islands in the general direction of Hawaii on November 25 and radioed a routine warning to the U.S. naval facility at Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu.

• But officials were paying more attention to a large Japanese convoy moving southward through the China Sea.

• A combination of confusion and miscalculation led the government to overlook indications that Japan intended a direct attack on American forces—partly because Hawaii was so far from Japan that few officials believed such an attack possible.

• At 7:55 A.M. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a wave of Japanese bombers—taking off from aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away—attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor.

• A second wave came an hour later

• American forces were now greatly diminished in the Pacific (although by a fortunate accident, none of the American aircraft carriers—the heart of the Pacific fl eet—had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7).

• Nevertheless, the raid on Pearl Harbor did virtually overnight what more than two years of effort by Roosevelt and others had been unable to do: it unified the American people in a fervent commitment to war.

• On December 8, the president traveled to Capitol Hill, where he grimly addressed a joint session of Congress: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

• Within four hours, the Senate unanimously and the House 388 to 1 (the lone dissenter being Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had voted against the war in 1917 as well) approved a declaration of war against Japan