Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (102 page)

Roosevelt finally came around to Hopkins. The president noted the fact of Hopkins’s divorce, which would upset Catholics and some others. But his second marriage had turned out well—before his wife’s recent death—and other candidates had survived worse scandals. Grover Cleveland had fathered a son out of wedlock, had owned up, and had been elected twice. A larger question was Hopkins’s health. Campaigning for president was a trying job, being president more trying still. Hopkins seemed to be healthy enough now, but voters would wonder whether he could stand the strain. Yet Roosevelt remarked that he himself had neutralized the presidential health question as it applied to him; on balance it needn’t disqualify Hopkins.

Roosevelt and Hopkins were the only persons present at this meeting. The sole record was Hopkins’s notes, jotted down afterward, which ended with the phrase “assurances and hopes.” Roosevelt never spoke so unguardedly to Hopkins again on the subject of a possible successor. Perhaps he was as sincere as Hopkins apparently thought he was; perhaps he was thinking out loud. Perhaps Hopkins, like so many others who fell under Roosevelt’s spell, heard more than Roosevelt actually said.

In any case, Hopkins gave the impression, even without saying anything explicitly, of having the inside track to the nomination, which didn’t endear him to others around the president. Hopkins encouraged—goaded, some said—Roosevelt to attempt the purge of the Democratic conservatives; when the effort backfired, Hopkins’s critics were happy to hand him the blame. Hopkins’s colleagues from the early days of the administration remembered how he told them to ignore politics. “We’re here to implement a policy,” he had said. But as the presidency loomed in his mind’s eye, politics rose alongside it. He grew impatient at the “goddam New Dealers” for their excessive spending, conveniently ignoring that he had taught them most of what they knew on the subject.

Meanwhile he left Eleanor behind. “Here was Harry who was Mother’s protégé to start with,” Anna Roosevelt remembered, “and suddenly Harry became Father’s protégé.” Eleanor tried to mask her hurt at what she interpreted as Hopkins’s betrayal, as she always tried to mask her hurt. But the mask occasionally slipped. She feigned illness as an excuse to hole up in a small apartment she kept on East Eleventh Street in New York. To one friend, however, she related the cause of her distress. “I haven’t been ill at all,” she told Esther Lape. “Something happened to me. I haven’t gotten used to people who say they care for me but are only interested in getting to Franklin. But there was one person of whom I thought this was not true, that his affection was for me. I found this was not true, and I couldn’t take it.”

P
RESIDENTS OFTEN TURN
to foreign affairs when their domestic agendas stall. Roosevelt might have felt relief at reverting to diplomacy in the autumn of 1938 had the diplomacy of that season not been so uniformly disheartening. The civil war in Spain ground forward to an increasingly inevitable victory for the fascists. Ethiopia struggled for breath beneath the treads of the Italian tanks. Japan continued its brutalization of China. Hitler flaunted his scorn for international opinion more flagrantly than ever.

Congress meanwhile tightened the strictures on Roosevelt’s conduct of foreign policy. The Neutrality Act of 1935 had been modified in 1936, extending the president’s discretion as to whether a state of war existed but requiring him, in the event of war, to caution Americans against travel on belligerent vessels, and forbidding American loans to belligerents. A subsequent revision, in 1937, directly banned travel on belligerent ships and required that belligerent purchases of American goods—other than weapons, which continued to be embargoed—be carried away in non-American ships. In each case the experience of the World War motivated the legislators. The travel ban was intended to avert another
Lusitania;
the cash-and-carry provision was to prevent the emergence of an American financial stake in the victory of one side or the other and to keep belligerent warships from attacking American merchant vessels.

Roosevelt would have preferred complete freedom in formulating American policy toward foreign wars, but so long as he maintained the right to determine when a war existed, he saw little reason to expend political capital against the isolationists. They were fighting the last war, which had been duly declared by all participants. He prepared to fight the next war, which, by recent and continuing evidence, might well not be. From Roosevelt’s perspective, the critical question wasn’t what American law would allow but what American public opinion would tolerate. With the public on his side, Roosevelt could outflank the isolationists; without the public, any victory over the isolationists would be empty.

Briefly it appeared that the isolationists might mobilize public opinion against the president. Louis Ludlow was a moderate Democrat but a radical democrat, besides being an Indiana isolationist. He hatched a plan to put war to a popular vote and succeeded so far with his scheme as to get Congress to consider a constitutional amendment writing it into the supreme law of the land. In the angry aftermath of the
Panay
sinking, the Ludlow bill was reported out of committee, where the administration’s allies had contained it for months, and was put on the schedule for a floor vote. Roosevelt watched the water rise beneath the measure, hoping it would ebb on its own. When it didn’t, but threatened to swamp the administration, he issued a stern warning. The proposed amendment, he said, would “cripple any President in his conduct of our foreign relations” and would “encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.” Roosevelt credited the sincerity of the sponsors in their desire to keep the United States out of war. But they were misguided. “It would have the opposite effect.”

Roosevelt’s harsh words frightened dozens of Democrats into deciding against the amendment, and it failed. But by asserting his primacy in foreign policy, Roosevelt increased the political stakes for himself of whatever followed.

As it happened, those stakes were increasing for reasons independent of the contest between the legislature and the executive in America. For many years Hitler had agitated for the absorption of his Austrian homeland into the German empire; after taking control in Berlin he directed a campaign of sabotage against the Austrian government. The 1934 assassination of the Austrian chancellor was followed by terrorist attacks on other Austrian officials and institutions. In March 1938 Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless the government agreed to
Anschluss,
or union, with Germany. After the cowed government agreed, he invaded anyway, on grounds that the two countries were now one and therefore that the invasion wasn’t really an invasion.

Roosevelt viewed the developments in Central Europe with impotent alarm. Privately he described the Nazis and their ilk as “international gangsters,” and his first thought after the takeover of Austria was to issue a condemnation from the White House. But given the strength of isolationist sentiment in Congress, he realized that there was nothing he could do to reverse Hitler’s coup and that American condemnation followed by American inaction would simply discredit the United States as a nation and himself as president. He let Cordell Hull issue a statement expressing America’s “serious concern” and left it at that.

Roosevelt might have done more had other countries come to Austria’s aid. But the French and British had been even more traumatized by the World War than the Americans had, and though an American-style isolationism wasn’t an option for them—Germany and Italy were simply too close at hand—appeasement was. Before long appeasement would become the most vile label anyone could hang around a diplomat’s neck, but in 1938 it was a politically defensible policy. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister and the foremost apostle of appeasement, was willing to go to almost any length to avert a repetition of the carnage of the war. If the Austrians wouldn’t defend themselves against Hitler, Chamberlain saw little reason for the British to do so. Psychology and politics aside, Chamberlain appreciated that Britain wasn’t militarily ready for a war with Germany. In a year or two it might be. Whatever bought time, therefore, improved Britain’s chances of dealing successfully with the German tyrant.

Roosevelt found it convenient to follow Britain’s lead. The isolationists wouldn’t let him get out in front of London; his own concern at Germany’s growing power wouldn’t let him fall far behind. Roosevelt’s imitative policy persisted through the summer of 1938 as Hitler put pressure on the government of Czechoslovakia. A postwar godchild of Wilson’s, carved out of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, Czechoslovakia exemplified both the lofty principle of self-determination and the complex practice of creating new states from the wreckage of old ones. The portion of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany contained three million Germans; like Austria, this region—called the Sudetenland—included some honest advocates of a “greater Germany,” some opportunistic Nazi sympathizers, and many people simply hoping to survive the near future without another war. Hitler initially called for autonomy within Czechoslovakia for the Sudeten Germans, but he escalated by September to demand annexation of the region to the German reich.

His ultimatum put the French and British in a bind. France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia nominally guaranteeing Czechoslovakia’s security, but most French citizens had no desire to fight Germany over the borders of a country that hadn’t existed twenty years earlier. Britain was even less enthusiastic, lacking both the formal commitment of a treaty and the geographic adjacency that always made Germany loom larger to the French than to the British. Yet even Chamberlain had to worry that Hitler’s appetite for conquest would grow with the eating.

Roosevelt shared the worry. The president hadn’t figured out what to make of Hitler. He couldn’t tell how much of Hitler’s bombast was sincere and how much was cynical. He didn’t know, at any given point, whether Hitler was bluffing or serious. He couldn’t say whether Hitler wanted the fruits of war or war itself. He hoped the German people possessed the sense to turn from Hitler to someone more reasonable, but he had no idea if they would. In other words, he knew as much, and as little, about Hitler’s motives and plans as anyone outside Hitler’s inner circle—or perhaps Hitler’s head—knew.

The president admitted he was operating in the dark. “You cannot get news,” he told reporters, off the record, as the Czech crisis intensified. “The fellows covering that situation—there is no way in which they can get the dope, the plain facts…. While our State Department dispatches are not as wild as the newspaper stories, they are darned near, and that is saying a lot.” Roosevelt wanted the French and the British to stand up to Hitler, but not if that would lead to war—and definitely not if it required any commitment from the United States.

The president at first let Cordell Hull speak for the administration. The secretary of state called in the German ambassador to warn confidentially but pointedly where Berlin’s actions were leading. The path of “force, militarism, and territorial aggression,” Hull said, could easily provoke a general conflict that would make the last war look tame. “There will scarcely be left a trace of the people who brought it on or those against whom it was waged.” In public, though, Hull confined himself to generalities. He observed the tenth anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty by remarking on the “great tragedy of today,” namely that the spirit of that antiwar covenant was being lost. “In certain parts of the world strife and conflict are bringing untold misery to millions, and in other parts the idea of warfare is being actually glorified.”

The British and French had hoped for more from the United States and may even have expected it. The French ambassador asked Hull whether the president was communicating secretly with the Germans or the Czechs.

He wasn’t. As controversial as public diplomacy could be while the isolationists held the balance of effective power in Congress, its explosive potential was nothing next to that of secret diplomacy. Roosevelt had to assume that any secret initiative of his would leak and that when it did the isolationists would grow stronger than ever.

Accordingly, when the crisis reached the point where he had to take action of some sort, he did so in full view of the public. By mid-September Hitler had worked himself and the German people into a war frenzy; Nazi tanks and infantry massed along the border separating German territory from Czech Sudetenland. The Czech government, in contrast to the Austrian government, refused to yield to Hitler’s demands. War in the heart of Europe loomed.

Britain’s Chamberlain, determined not to give up on peace, flew to the rescue, or tried to. The prime minister was in his seventieth year and had never been on a plane. But he stowed his misgivings in his briefcase, armed himself with an umbrella against the German rain, and flew off to meet the Nazi dictator. An interview at Berchtesgaden yielded a formula for Sudeten self-determination that appalled the Czech government and left Hitler only slightly more satisfied. But the plan saved sufficient face that Britain and France forced it on the Czechs, who were made to understand that they could expect no help from either country if they resisted.