Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90 page)

Roosevelt still had to deal with the horses—the Soviets—themselves. Though he knew nothing in detail about the inner workings of the Kremlin, he had to assume, simply as a politician, that there must be forces in Russia that would oppose a rapprochement with the United States for political reasons of their own. He therefore chose to proceed with caution, lest an overture from Washington be rebuffed, to the detriment of American prestige and the embarrassment of his administration.

He orchestrated a meeting in Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s office between the State Department’s William Bullitt and Boris Skvirsky, Moscow’s unofficial envoy to Washington. Skvirsky appeared first. Morgenthau told him Bullitt would arrive shortly with a draft note. “His face lit up with a big smile,” Morgenthau remembered.

Bullitt made his entry on the stage as arranged by the president himself, sat down, and said to Skvirsky, “I have a piece of paper in my hand unsigned. This document can be made into an invitation for your country to send representatives over here to discuss the relationship between our two countries. We wish you to telegraph the contents of this piece of paper by your most confidential code, and learn if it is acceptable to your people.”

If it was acceptable, Bullitt explained, President Roosevelt would sign the note. If it was not, Skvirsky must never speak of the offer or even of the meeting. Still holding the note, Bullitt demanded that Skvirsky give his word of honor to do as required. The Russian promised he would.

“Does this mean recognition?” he asked.

“What more can you expect than to have your representative sit down with the president of the United States?” Bullitt answered.

The representative who sat down with Roosevelt was Maxim Litvinov, an old Bolshevik currently serving as Stalin’s foreign minister. Litvinov was among the more cosmopolitan of the Bolsheviks, having lived in London for ten years before the October Revolution and taken an English wife. But he could be stubborn in dealing with Western governments. “Litvinov and I continued to argue for two hours on the subject of debts and claims,” Bullitt informed Roosevelt after one session. Litvinov insisted that the American claims against the Soviet government were grossly exaggerated, and he refused to budge from what Bullitt characterized as an “absurd” figure of $50 million. As Litvinov headed for the White House, Bullitt urged the president: “I think you should endeavor forcibly to get him to fix at least $100 million as the lower limit.”

Roosevelt, having determined that recognition would serve American interests, decided not to quibble much over the price. He offered $75 million, which Litvinov accepted. After the State Department worked out various details, the deed was done. “I trust that the relations now established between our peoples may forever remain normal and friendly,” Roosevelt said to Litvinov with a handshake, “and that our nations henceforth may cooperate for their mutual benefit and for the preservation of the peace of the world.”

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recognizing Russia made Roosevelt think he could accomplish something similar with the World Court. American adherence to the international tribunal should have been uncontroversial. For years the national platforms of both the Democrats and the Republicans had endorsed membership. The American Bar Association recommended joining, as did the American Legion, American labor unions, teachers’ associations, most newspapers, many state legislatures, and hundreds of other organizations ranging the spectrum from the radically pacifist to the soberly pragmatic. The World Court was an arm of the League of Nations, but it didn’t share the principal drawback—in American eyes—of the League: the ability to order member nations to engage in collective security measures. If anything, membership in the World Court would enhance America’s freedom of action by protecting the interests of Americans from legal challenges by foreigners. Only the willfully obstinate, one would have thought, could oppose such a worthy goal.

This was certainly what Roosevelt thought. But having encountered plenty of willful obstinacy during his years in politics, he moved carefully. At a press conference early in the Hundred Days, a reporter inquired whether he would ask the Senate to take up membership in the World Court. The president declined to respond. “Not even off the record,” he said.

His caution persisted through the following year and past the 1934 elections, whose heartening results gave him courage to move forward. The Democrats now controlled five more votes than the sixty-four needed to ratify a treaty of adherence to the World Court, and the president assumed that this margin, combined with his prestige and the broad popular support for membership, as measured by numerous polls, would enable him to carry the day. In January 1935 he put the matter to the Senate. “The movement to make international justice practicable and serviceable is not subject to partisan considerations,” he declared. The growing turmoil in foreign affairs rendered American participation in a central institution promoting justice and stability essential. “At this period in international relationships, when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the United States has an opportunity once more to throw its weight into the scale in favor of peace.”

Roosevelt expected some reaction, but nothing like what he got. Charles Coughlin, then at the height of his broadcast influence, immediately mobilized his listeners against the World Court. “I appeal to every solid American who loves democracy, who loves the United States, who loves the truth, to stand four square back of those tried and true senators of long experience in their hopeless yet honest fight to keep America safe for Americans and not the hunting ground of international plutocrats,” the radio priest implored. “Today, whether you can afford it or not, send your senator a telegram telling him to vote ‘no’ on our entrance into the World Court.”

Coughlin’s listeners responded, flooding the Senate with more messages than the local offices of Western Union and Postal Telegraph had ever handled. Meanwhile the Hearst papers hammered on the World Court as unable to preserve peace and unwilling to protect Americans. The onslaught of naysaying reinforced the convictions of outright opponents of the court in the Senate and pushed several fence-sitters into opposition.

Recalling Wilson’s failure with the Senate over the League, Roosevelt tactically accepted a reservation offered by Republican Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan reaffirming America’s noninvolvement in the affairs of Europe. The measure had little to do with the World Court, but it satisfied a certain element of the isolationists. Roosevelt initially balked at another addendum, which would require him to return to the Senate for two-thirds approval before presenting a case to the court. “From the strictly constitutional standpoint,” he told reporters on background, “that is a definite limitation of the constitutional prerogatives of the executive which cannot be of any effect.” But he eventually swallowed his scruples and accepted this provision too.

Each concession simply encouraged the opponents. One by one they announced their undying hostility to the World Court, however hedged by reservations. Roosevelt countered by enlisting adherents to speak out in favor. The night before the climactic vote, Eleanor Roosevelt took to the air in an unusually direct effort to influence a political decision. “I am speaking to you tonight as a citizen and as a woman deeply interested in this question,” she explained. A great deal had been said on both sides of the issue, but much of it was irrelevant.

The only real question before us now is whether we want to throw the weight of the United States behind cooperative efforts of nations to develop international law and apply it to the settlement of disputes, or whether we despair of any substitute for war…. It seems to me that we, the strongest nation in the world, can not be afraid to take this step, to make this gesture…. Is it really the spirit of our country, men and women, young and old, that they are afraid to join the World Court? I cannot believe it.

Whatever the feelings of the men and women of America, thirty-six senators voted against the court, killing Roosevelt’s hopes of easing his country toward a share of responsibility for world order. The defeat was a major embarrassment for the administration. In public Roosevelt kept his temper. “Any comment to make on the World Court?” a reporter asked. “Only this,” Roosevelt answered: “That I am very grateful to Senator Robinson for the very able and honorable fight which he conducted, and to the others who supported the World Court.” In private he aired his anger. “As to the 36 gentlemen who voted against the principle of a World Court,” he wrote majority leader Robinson, “I am inclined to think that if they ever get to Heaven they will be doing a great deal of apologizing—that is if God is against war, and I think He is.”

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Congress over foreign policy were just beginning. In 1934 the Senate had appointed a special committee to investigate connections between the arms industry and American intervention in the World War. Gerald Nye of North Dakota headed the committee. Nye was a Republican but of the agrarian-radical, business-distrusting type; he had made a name for himself investigating the Teapot Dome scandal and showing how the oil industry had corrupted the Republican administration of Warren Harding. Now, in an expression of bipartisan fair-mindedness, he sought to reveal how the munitions industry had corrupted the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson—and led American foreign policy disastrously astray. That the current Democratic president had been a key figure in Wilson’s Navy Department, a major purchaser of munitions, lent interest to the investigation, as did the increasingly obvious parallels between world events of the 1910s and those of the 1930s.

The Nye committee held hearings and gathered evidence. The witnesses and the evidence revealed that American arms makers had profited enormously from the World War, as had American bankers, whom Nye added to the list of targets of his probing. Nye had no doubt, as he made clear in numerous statements, that the financial interests of the armsmongers and the money men had been decisive in propelling the United States to war. A whole “merchant of death” literature sprang up around the Nye investigations and extended the committee’s findings up to the present. The committee itself eventually published a report condemning the still-standard practices of the weapons industry as “highly unethical, a discredit to American business, and an unavoidable reflection upon those American governmental agencies which have unwittingly aided in the transactions so contaminated.”

The “unwitting” disclaimer was the price of unanimity in the bipartisan report; in fact Nye and many others were convinced that certain American officials were wholly witting in their pernicious activities. And the forward thrust of the report indicated quite plainly the desire of Nye and the committee to shape the foreign policy debate of the mid-1930s. The depression constituted the foreground of the debate; while millions of Americans suffered at home, most of their compatriots had difficulty summoning enthusiasm for crusades on behalf of sufferers elsewhere. The downward-spiraling condition of international affairs formed the background of the debate. Mussolini, after crushing democracy in Italy, was provoking a dispute with Ethiopia over that country’s border with Italian East Africa. Ethiopia sought calm, but the Italian dictator escalated the affair by sending troops to the frontier and ranting about Italian honor. Meanwhile Hitler revealed that Germany had built an air force, in violation of the Versailles treaty, and was reinstituting conscription, toward the goal of creating a half-million-man army. As if his actions didn’t speak loudly enough, the Nazi leader declared the Versailles system dead. The Japanese continued to consolidate their hold on Manchuria and to speak of an Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine, by which they meant that Japan ought to dominate East Asia the way the United States dominated the Americas and that other countries ought to keep out, as other countries generally kept out of the Western Hemisphere.