Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (97 page)

Yet Roosevelt’s effort wasn’t without avail. Perhaps Owen Roberts would have changed his mind about the constitutionality of certain New Deal legislation even without the sword of Roosevelt’s reform plan hanging over the court’s head. Evidence indicates that the conversion of the associate justice, who had voted against the New Deal previously, began before Roosevelt revealed his reform design. But the conversion certainly occurred after the 1936 electoral landslide, which got the attention of all the justices. In any event, the Supreme Court decided in
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish,
on March 29, 1937, that a Washington state minimum wage law was constitutional. The vote was 5 to 4, and the fifth vote was that of Roberts, who had voted the opposite way in a nearly identical case from New York just the previous session.

Roberts’s reversal, which brought the court and therefore the Constitution to the side of the New Deal, amounted to “the greatest constitutional somersault in history,” in the words of an amazed but approving Maury Maverick. “Owen Roberts, one single human being, had amended the Constitution of the United States by nodding his head instead of shaking it,” the Texas congressman continued. “The lives of millions were changed by this nod.” The identity of the punster who called Roberts’s conversion “the switch in time that saved nine” has been lost to memory, but the formula stuck, for it captured both the change on the court and the fact that the change deprived Roosevelt of his reason for reforming the court. A follow-on decision in April, by the same five-justice majority, upholding the Wagner Act, confirmed the change and further eroded Roosevelt’s argument for adding justices.

The president let the court plan die, to the immense relief of most of his party. But the whole affair cast him in an unfavorable light. In presenting the plan he tried to cloak his real motives and fooled no one. In failing to get the reform through Congress, he cost himself the invincibility that had seemed to surround him since March 1933 and that the 1936 election had only intensified.

The irony of the court scheme was that the very effort by which Roosevelt secured the New Deal judicially ruined his chances of expanding the New Deal politically. Conservatives had been waiting for the clever Roosevelt to outfox himself; merely months into his second term, he seemed to have done just that. No one was ready to write him off, but few expected anything truly original or consequential from the rest of his presidency.

P
ART
III

The Fate of the World

1937 
 1945

34.

A
ND THEN EVENTS RODE TO HIS RESCUE
. N
OT AT ONCE, AND NOT IN
the way Roosevelt or anyone else would have wished, but in such fashion as to allow a subtle and canny leader to make the most of them.

If Roosevelt’s first term was all about domestic policy, his second term centered increasingly on foreign affairs. This played to his strength, to a degree most Americans only gradually appreciated. Roosevelt’s first-term allergy to foreign policy was topical rather than systemic; he kept clear of the world not because he lacked strong views but because he realized his views weren’t generally shared. As a convinced democrat he could tell himself he had no business leading the American people where the people weren’t willing to go; as a career Democrat he remembered how Woodrow Wilson’s presidency had wrecked upon the shoals of Americans’ aversion to foreign entanglements. He determined not to repeat Wilson’s mistake.

In 1937 foreign affairs polarized American politics more strongly than ever. Unlike the fights over the New Deal, the struggle between the internationalists and the isolationists blurred party and ideological lines, pitting Democrats against Democrats, Republicans against Republicans, liberals against liberals, conservatives against conservatives. Valid arguments, historical and contemporary, were adduced on both sides of the debate. The internationalists contended that the lesson of the World War was that Europe’s troubles became America’s, sooner or later, and that the thugs of the world would never behave till the responsible nations, including the United States, compelled them. The isolationists countered that the lesson of the war was that Europe was a sinkhole for idealism and a graveyard for American youth; they asserted that the Europeans could handle their criminal elements themselves and would do so if made to know the Americans were
not
coming to their rescue. As for Asia, the isolationists saw little threat to the United States from Japanese expansion into China. Some thought the Japanese might actually improve the neighborhood by forcing China to modernize, much as Japan had modernized under pressure from the West two generations before. The internationalists countered that Japan was upsetting the balance of power in the Far East, besides brutalizing all who fell under its sway.

Roosevelt’s views tended strongly—albeit not uniformly—internationalist, but his governing coalition contained many isolationists, and he didn’t want to jeopardize the New Deal over the problems of other countries. His torpedoing of the London economic conference was isolationist in effect if not in explanation, and it won him favor with the America-firsters in his party and among the Republicans. His endorsement of the World Court lost him much of that favor, while his acquiescence in the neutrality law had a neutral effect.

He might have attempted to maintain his balance between the two sides if the fascists hadn’t forced the issue. Mussolini, after blustering against Ethiopia for months, ordered an assault on the East African kingdom. The mismatch between the opposing armies shocked even jaded war reporters; when Emperor Haile Selassie’s criers shouted “Up with your spears!” to his subjects, the criers weren’t speaking metaphorically. Against the defenders’ spears, the Italian invaders threw modern tanks and fighter airplanes. The Ethiopian state was crushed under the fascist jackboots.

About the time Addis Ababa fell, a second front opened in the fascists’ war on civilization. The Spanish republic had been struggling for years, challenged by reactionaries in the army and others dissatisfied with leftward trends in Spanish affairs. In July 1936 General Francisco Franco led the army in a revolt against the government. What was intended as a coup stalled and then metastasized as the government refused to give way. The Spanish civil war pitted the center and left of Spanish politics against the right, with the former, calling themselves Loyalists, comprising republicans, socialists, and communists, and the latter, the Nationalists, including monarchists, militarists, Catholic clergy, and fascists. The conflict grew more complicated as foreigners joined the fray. Some came as volunteers, mostly supporting the Loyalists; others came under orders from their home governments. Italy sent infantry and armored units to bolster the Nationalists; Germany contributed transport planes, bombers, and crews to the Nationalist cause. The Soviet Union countered these with contributions of planes, other weapons, and military advisers to the Loyalists. Most Americans sympathized with the Loyalists; as many as three thousand enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of foreign fighters. But few Americans wanted the United States government to get involved.

Neither did Roosevelt. Shortly after the Spanish war began, the president traveled to Chautauqua, New York, to address that community’s venerable gathering of summer self-improvers. “I have seen war,” he said, referring to his 1918 tour of France. “I have seen blood running from the wounded…. I have seen children starving…. I hate war.” Roosevelt said he couldn’t prevent war, but he could register America’s strong disapproval. “I can at least make clear that the conscience of America revolts against war and that any nation which provokes war forfeits the sympathy of the people of the United States.”

The Spanish war escalated during the spring of 1937. In April German warplanes in support of the Nationalists bombed the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain. The attack killed hundreds and leveled most of the town, and foreshadowed a new phase in the evolution of warfare: strategic bombing for the purpose of destroying the morale of civilian populations. German officials later acknowledged what seemed obvious at the time: that the Nazis were testing their air force for potential use against more challenging targets. Between that ominous prospect and the immediate revulsion against the fascist cause, Guernica became a symbol—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—of civilization under siege by the forces of organized violence. “At 2
A.M.
today, when the writer visited the town, the whole of it was a horrible sight, flaming from end to end,” a front-page article in the
New York Times
declared. “The reflection of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the mountains from ten miles away. Throughout the night houses were falling, until the streets were long heaps of red, impenetrable ruins.” The article continued:

In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war material that lay outside the town was untouched. Two barracks on the outskirts containing small forces were untouched. The town was not near the lines. The objective of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the civilian population and destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.

The reaction in America was immediate. Religious groups staged protests. The pastor of the Park Avenue Episcopal Church in New York called for a world-wide strike of mothers against the murder of the children of Guernica. A petition signed by scores of clerics, educators, lawmakers, corporate officers, and union officials condemned “the unspeakable crime of war on women and children, waged with a brutality and callousness unparalleled in modern times.” In Congress, William Borah, whose clarion voice seldom rang out across the Senate chamber anymore, summoned his old energy and indignation. “Here fascism presents to the world its masterpiece,” Borah said of Guernica. “It has hung upon the wall of civilization a painting that will never come down—never fade out of the memories of men.” The destruction of Guernica, the Idaho Republican asserted, was “the most revolting instance of mass massacre of modern times.”

Yet the anger offered little guidance for action. Some of the protesters advocated American aid to the beleaguered Loyalists. Others urged invoking the neutrality law against Germany and Italy. Still others held that the United States should withdraw more deeply into its isolationist shell.

Roosevelt did invoke the neutrality law against Spain, forbidding the shipment of American arms and ammunition to that country’s government. But he declined to include Germany or Italy in the embargo, contending that since Spain didn’t consider itself at war with those countries, neither should the United States. Moreover, to invoke the law against Germany and Italy, on grounds of their intervention in the Spanish struggle, would logically require invoking it against the Soviet Union and France, which were aiding the Loyalists. Besides entangling the United States in Europe’s affairs to a far greater degree than Roosevelt was willing to hazard, such a move might actually harm the Loyalists.