Colossus (16 page)

FIGURE
1
U.S. GNP in Constant Prices, 1900–22 and 1930–52

Source: B. R. Mitchell,
International Historical Statistics: The Americas
, pp. 761–74.

Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism was to be especially influential,
not least because of his leading role among the architects of the postwar international order. “The colonial system means war,” he had told his son in 1943. “Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.” When Roosevelt briefly visited Gambia en route to the Casablanca Conference, it struck him as a “hell-hole”——the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life.” Colonialism seemed to him synonymous with “Dirt. Disease. [And a] very high mortality rate.”
²²
It was largely on the basis of such assumptions that the president envisaged the postwar world as also a postimperial world. “When we’ve won the war,” he declared, “I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”
²³
In Roosevelt’s eyes, article III of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which asserted “the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” applied as much to the peoples living under British rule as to those whose territory had been invaded by the Germans and Japanese. “You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood,” he told his ally Churchill, “and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere else if they can get it.” “The British would take land anywhere in the world,” he complained, “even if it were only rock or a sand bar.”
²⁴

Churchill habitually saw Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism as the legacy of America’s origins in the War of Independence. As he put it in
The Hinge of Fate
, “The President’s mind was back in the American War of Independence, and he thought of the Indian problem in terms of the thirteen colonies fighting George lll….”
²⁵
But this was no idiosyncrasy; most Americans shared Roosevelt’s views. An opinion poll conducted in 1942 revealed that six out of ten regarded the British as colonial oppressors.
²⁶
Life magazine declared bluntly in October of the same year: “
One
thing we are sure we are
not
fighting for is to hold the British Empire together.”
²⁷

Yet even as Americans pledged themselves to make war against the empires of their allies and enemies alike, all unacknowledged, their own empire grew apace. By November 1943 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had drawn
up an extensive shopping list of postwar bases to be leased or held under international authority. In the Atlantic the new lines of defense would run through Iceland, the Azores, Madeira, the west coast of Africa and Ascension Island; in the Pacific, from Alaska through Attu, Paramushir, the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, the Philippines, New Britain, the Solomons, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, and not forgetting Clipperton and the Galápagos. Roosevelt personally asked the Joint Chiefs to include the Marquesas and the Tuamotu Archipelago in the U.S. sphere of influence.
²⁸
In places like Micronesia, postwar “trusteeship” turned out to mean American control.
²⁹
The secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, told Congress that, as far as he was concerned, all the islands occupied by the Japanese during the war “had become Japanese territory and as we capture them they are ours.”
³⁰
To British observers, the imperial character of American postwar planning was quite unmistakable. Alan Watt, of the Australian Legation in Washington, detected as early as January 1944 “signs in this country of the development of a somewhat ruthless Imperialist attitude.”
³¹
The historian Arnold Toynbee, tutor and mentor to a generation of British imperial administrators, recognized “the first phase of a coming American world empire.”
³²
In the words of Harold Laski, America would soon “bestride the world like a colossus; neither Rome at the height of its power nor Great Britain in the period of its economic supremacy enjoyed an influence so direct, so profound, or so pervasive.”
³³
Meanwhile Roosevelt piously pressed Churchill to relinquish not just Gambia, one of the few British possessions the president ever visited, but even India and Hong Kong.

Unlike so many later critics of U.S. foreign policy, Toynbee had little difficulty reconciling himself to American imperialism. As he observed, “Her hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia’s, Germany’s or Japan’s, and I suppose these are the alternatives. If we do get an American empire instead, we shall be lucky.”
³⁴
Given the seeming inevitability of their own bankrupt empire’s decline, the British regarded a transfer of global power to the United States as the best available outcome of the war. In two countries the Americans lived up to such British expectations: Japan and the western zone of occupied Germany. Indeed, these stand out as the two most successful cases of American imperial rule at any time. It is not surprising that these were the precedents President Bush most frequently cited in arguing for a policy of nation building in Iraq last year. “America
has done this kind of work before,” he told the American people in a television address on September 7, 2003. “Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace.”
³⁵
Yet the occupations of West Germany and Japan were not quite as Americans today like to recall them. Indeed, until as late as 1947 it was very far from certain that the United States would commit so much time and money to these former “rogue states.” Under different circumstances, the usual incoherent and halfhearted pattern of American intervention, seen before in the Philippines, the Caribbean and Central America, might very well have repeated itself.

When General Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Airfield, near Yokohama, on August 30, 1945, there was indeed an element of
déjà vu
about the scene. MacArthur’s father, Arthur, had been the American commander in the Philippines at the height of the fighting from early 1900 until mid-1901. In 1914 Douglas MacArthur had been among the junior officers sent to occupy Veracruz. MacArthur had been in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked the islands in 1941 (narrowly escaping capture). Small wonder MacArthur’s approach to the occupation of Japan bore the stamp of an earlier generation of American empire builders.

As supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP), MacArthur was omnipotent. “I had,” he later recalled, “not only the normal executive authorities such as our own President has in this country, but I had legislative authority. I could by fiat issue directives.”
³⁶
From his general headquarters in the Dai-ichi Building in downtown Tokyo, MacArthur and his staff, which initially numbered fifteen hundred, but which more than tripled in size in the space of three years, set out to achieve a “revolution” from above, to impose American “civilization” on a people most of them regarded as racially inferior.
³⁷

The trouble was that the aims of American policy were from the outset contradictory. On the one hand, by a combination of war crimes trials and purges, the Japanese elites were supposed to be cured of their militaristic,
undemocratic ways. On the other, MacArthur could not govern Japan without the assistance of the existing Japanese bureaucracy. On the one hand, the Japanese were to be “reeducated” and their political system democratized. On the other, this was to be achieved by an absolute monarch in the person of MacArthur. On the one hand, Japan’s economy was to be deprived of its war-making potential. On the other, living standards had to be improved in order to avoid an excessively costly occupation.

The compromises that emerged undeniably worked, in the sense that Japan emerged from MacArthur’s rule as a democracy, albeit one dominated by a single party, and a dynamic market economy, albeit one based on a great deal more state intervention and a great deal more cartellike business collusion than existed in the United States. Yet this success was in many ways a triumph for the law of unintended consequences. The Americans set out to “get at the individual Japanese and remold his ways of thinking and feeling.”
³⁸
They achieved nothing of the sort; attempts at Christianization, with which MacArthur certainly sympathized, came to naught.
³⁹
Nor were Japan’s institutions more than partially transformed. The principal achievement of the occupation was to persuade the Japanese simply (in John Dower’s phrase) to “embrace defeat”; to renounce the pursuit of military power in what had proved an unwinnable competition against the United States in favor of the pursuit of economic riches as the Americans’ junior partners.

Superficially, the changes were impressive. The war crimes trials led to the conviction of all Japan’s war leaders, barring the emperor Hirohito himself, as well as around four thousand smaller fry, of whom more than nine hundred were executed. In addition, more than two hundred thousand senior figures were forced out of their positions in the country’s armed services, political parties and major corporations. The education system was overhauled, liberalized and decentralized; so was the police force. Civil, political and religious liberties were enshrined: women enfranchised, trade unions legalized, the press gradually freed.
⁴⁰
Though (on MacArthur’s recommendation)
⁴¹
the emperor remained under the new constitution of May 1947, he was henceforth no more than a figurehead; power was vested in a government responsible to a bicameral legislature. Japan was constitutionally bound to resort to armed force only in self-defense.
⁴²

Yet barely 1 percent of senior Japanese civil servants lost their jobs, and
it was through the civil service that the Americans governed.
⁴³
How, otherwise, could the American occupation have functioned? Japan’s postwar masters were almost completely ignorant of the language and culture of their new subjects. Colonel Charles Kades, who played a pivotal role in the drafting of the constitution of 1947, later admitted: “I had no knowledge whatsoever about Japan’s history or culture or myths…. I was blank on Japan….”
⁴⁴
Moreover, the Americans generally confined themselves to their own “Little America” in Tokyo. As one of MacArthur’s senior staff put it, “For more than five years, with the rarest of exceptions, the only thing MacArthur saw of Japan physically was on the automobile route between the Dai-ichi Building and his quarters at the American Embassy, a distance of about a mile.”
⁴⁵
According to another insider, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him [MacArthur] more than twice.”
⁴⁶
The wife of an American colonel later recalled being able to “walk from one end to the other [of Little America] … without ever being out of sight of an American face….”
⁴⁷

The achievement of the American occupations of Japan and West Germany most often emphasized today was the extraordinary economic recovery both countries enjoyed. In neither case was this an outcome the occupiers originally intended. On the contrary, the initial plan was to
weaken
their economies and impoverish their peoples. The mood among many Americans as the war drew to a close was retributive, not regenerative. One adviser to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) proposed “almost [the] annihilation of the Japanese as a race.”
⁴⁸
The more restrained report of the Pauley Commission of late 1945 recommended the reduction of Japanese shipbuilding, chemicals and steel production, as well as the payment of reparations through the transfer of industrial plants to countries the Japanese had occupied during the war. In January 1946 the statistician and management expert W. Edwards Deming proposed the dismantling of monopoly companies; this was adopted by the SWNCC, which passed it on to the SCAP; as late as May 1947 it was still the centerpiece of economic policy when it was adopted by the Far Eastern Commission as directive FEC-230. The same concept underlay the Anti-Monopoly Law (April 1947) and the Deconcentration Law (December 1947), which designated over three hundred companies for dissolution.
⁴⁹
The targets of these measures were the notorious
zaibatsu
, in
whose hands the ownership of Japanese industry had indeed been quite closely concentrated before 1945.
⁵⁰
Yet there was a problem—one that has been a characteristic of nearly all American occupations.