Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (103 page)

Yet Hitler wasn’t appeased. He had wanted war, and Chamberlain’s arrangement deprived him of a promising pretext. After muttering to himself for a few days, he declared that the Sudeten Germans must be protected by the troops of the German reich. Once again war clouds boiled above the mountains of Moravia.

At this point Roosevelt weighed in. The president circulated a memo to the governments of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France declaring the peace of Europe to be in “immediate danger.” An outbreak of war would be disastrous, he said. “The lives of millions of men, women and children in every country involved will most certainly be lost under circumstances of unspeakable horror. The economic system of every country involved is certain to be shattered.” Claiming to speak as an honest broker—“The United States has no political entanglements. It is caught in no mesh of hatred”—the president called on all parties to keep talking till they found a solution. “So long as negotiations continue, differences may be reconciled. Once they are broken off reason is banished and force asserts itself.”

It was an utterly vacuous statement, as Roosevelt realized. But it was the best he could do. Even without the pressure from the isolationists—even had Roosevelt been a free agent in the matter—he wouldn’t have done much more than he did. America’s strategic interest in Czechoslovakia’s borders was nil, and Roosevelt’s political interest was scarcely greater. It was easier to argue that the mapmakers had got things wrong in dissecting the Hapsburg empire than to say that the United States should become involved in a Central European fight. Perhaps Hitler would have to be dealt with at some point, but America could find a more compelling set of circumstances.

As much as anything, Roosevelt’s memo was written for the record. He wrote again for the record after Hitler answered his appeal with a wordy defense of Berlin’s position. The Czech government was the problem, Hitler said, not the German government or the long-suffering Sudeten Germans. And the Czech government must bear the blame if the negotiations failed, as appeared likely. “It does not rest with the German Government, but with the Czechoslovakian Government alone, to decide, whether it wants peace or war.”

Roosevelt replied to Hitler as one statesman to another. “The world asks of us who at this moment are heads of nations the supreme capacity to achieve the destinies of nations without forcing upon them, as a price, the mutilation and death of millions of citizens,” the president stated. “History, and the souls of every man, woman, and child whose lives will be lost in the threatened war, will hold all of us accountable.” Yet Roosevelt was even less forthcoming regarding a role for America than in his earlier message. “The Government of the United States has no political involvements in Europe, and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.”

Roosevelt’s diffidence left Chamberlain to rescue the peace—at Czechoslovakia’s cost. The British prime minister flew to Munich, where he met with Hitler and French premier Édouard Daladier, as well as Italy’s Mussolini, who joined the negotiations at Hitler’s behest. Chamberlain and Daladier gave Hitler the Sudetenland. He gave them his word that the Sudetenland was all he wanted.

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won the democracies time—during which Hitler turned his aggressiveness in another direction. The November murder of a minor German diplomat in Paris by a man identified as a Polish Jew provided the pretext for a rampage against everything Jewish in Germany. Nazi gangs looted and burned Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages and terrorized Jews, thousands of whom were arrested. Jews were expelled from Munich. Previous outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, though obviously sanctioned and orchestrated by the ruling party, had typically been attributed to Communists or criminal elements; in this case the regime didn’t bother to deny its imprimatur. “The justified and understandable anger of the German people over the cowardly Jewish murder of a German diplomat in Paris found extensive expression during last night,” the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, asserted. “In numerous cities and towns of the Reich, retaliatory action has been undertaken against Jewish buildings and businesses.” Goebbels, applauding the “healthy instincts” that had given rise to the violence, went on to say that additional chastisement was in store for the Jews. “A final answer to the Jewish assassination in Paris will be given to Jewry by way of legislation and ordinance.” A series of decrees soon followed proclaiming the purpose of effecting the “liquidation of the Jews” and the “elimination of Jews from German economic life.” A fine of one billion marks was levied on the Jewish people collectively; immediate repair of the damage to Jewish property was required, at the owners’ expense; insurance payments for the property damage were confiscated by the government; Jews were barred from operating most businesses or holding responsible positions in German corporations; Jews were forbidden to patronize theaters, dance halls, and other places of public recreation.

This latest pogrom elicited protests from governments and other groups across Europe and North America. Roosevelt declared that the news from Germany had “deeply shocked” American public opinion. “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” To underscore his concern, Roosevelt recalled the American ambassador from Berlin.

More quietly Roosevelt examined methods to alleviate the plight of German Jews. The immigration quotas from Germany had been filled, but some ten to fifteen thousand German Jews were in the United States on visitors’ visas. If they returned home, they would suffer the same treatment as Jews who had never left. “I don’t know, from the point of view of humanity, that we have a right to put them on a ship and send them back to Germany under the present conditions,” Roosevelt mused to reporters. He possessed the authority to extend the visitors’ visas for six months, and he chose to exercise it. Congress theoretically could override the president’s decision, but the legislature wasn’t in session. “They will be allowed to stay in this country under the six months’ extension,” Roosevelt said, “because I cannot, in any decent humanity, throw them out.”

A reporter asked if the president intended to extend the extension when the six months ended.

“Yes,” he said.

“And on and on?”

“I think so.”

Fifteen thousand was a very small number given the scope of the tragedy befalling the Jews, but it was the best Roosevelt could do at the moment. The isolationists in Congress were as leery of saving European Jewry as they were of challenging fascism; at the core of the isolationist philosophy was the belief that the problems of other countries and peoples were for those other countries and peoples to solve. Even for the fifteen thousand, Roosevelt had to reassure the skeptics that the refugees would not be eligible for citizenship. He explained that their numbers wouldn’t grow, since the German government had stopped issuing passports to Jews. And he said that he wouldn’t ask Congress to raise the immigration quota. Revealing perhaps more than he intended, Roosevelt concluded his remarks on the refugees with a sigh. “It is a very difficult problem,” he said.

F
OREIGN POLICY GOT
no easier during the following months. In January 1939 Roosevelt for the first time opened his State of the Union address with a discussion of international affairs. “A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted,” he said, referring to the Czech crisis. “But it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured. All about us rage undeclared wars, military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments, military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression, military and economic.” Never had Roosevelt spoken so forthrightly about the threat to America and its values.

Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith. Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors. Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows. International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will of civilized nations of men to respect the rights and liberties of other nations of men. In a modern civilization, all three—religion, democracy and international good faith—complement and support each other.

Roosevelt wasn’t ready to challenge the isolationists directly. He proposed no military action against the foes of religion, democracy, and international good faith. But as he had suggested in his quarantine speech fifteen months earlier, he said there were methods short of war for dealing with aggression. At a minimum, America should avoid actions that encouraged aggressors. The neutrality law embodied a noble sentiment, but it operated erratically and sometimes to the benefit of aggressors. This deficiency should be rectified.

The president pushed harder in the area of armaments. Citing the “old, old lesson that probability of attack is mightily decreased by the assurance of an ever ready defense,” he asked Congress for $525 million in new money for defense. The army would receive $450 million and the navy $65 million, with $10 million for the training of civilian air pilots. Two-thirds of the army’s share, or $300 million, would be used to purchase airplanes—there being, at this time, no separate air force. Roosevelt took pains to assert that preparation for war did not imply intention for war. His request for appropriations did not “remotely intimate” that he had “any thought” of engaging in another war on European soil, he said. Even so, prudence required preparing for the worst.

Roosevelt’s arms request was still pending when Hitler again bolstered the president’s argument for a stouter defense. In March 1939 the Nazi dictator decided that the Sudetenland wasn’t enough of Czechoslovakia for Germany and imposed a German protectorate over the Czech portions of the country. Some observers interpreted this step as more of the same bullying as before; others perceived a difference, in that for the first time Hitler was annexing
non
-German territories to the reich. Either way, the action belied Hitler’s Munich promise to aggress no more, and it put Europe and the world on notice that Germany’s appetite remained unsated.

Roosevelt and his advisers drew the same conclusion. “No one here has any illusions that the German Napoleonic machine will not extend itself almost indefinitely,” Adolf Berle remarked after meeting with the president and top officials of the State Department. Berle went on to describe the administration’s conundrum regarding Hitler.

1. Whatever we do, we shall have to go alone. Neither France nor Britain can be trusted; they are frightened and unfrank. This is particularly true of the British government.

2. Any move we make will be the first move in a constant irritating policy which will lead to a modified state of war.

3. In the event the European situation does explode, we are then in the war in any event.

4. There is no use merely irritating. Unless we are prepared to knock out the principal, I do not see that we gain much.

As he had before, Roosevelt let others in the administration take the lead in responding to Hitler’s latest outrage. The White House kept quiet while the State Department issued the administration’s formal protest. Yet even this came cloaked in generalities, mentioning neither Hitler nor Germany and touching but lightly on Czechoslovakia. “Acts of wanton lawlessness and of arbitrary force are threatening world peace and the very structure of modern civilization,” the State Department memo asserted.