Memorial Day was fittingly celebrated, both here and north of the border, with solemnity, reverence, good cheer and elegant settings wrapped in moving the world’s “universal tongue” — music. The occasions that many of us witnessed, rightly, and thankfully, emphasized a nation’s often awkward hand of aid to those who have served to defend the United States in ways and venues complex and baffling, most of them dangerous.
It is unavoidably clear that the toll of two long wars has been overwhelming. President Barack Obama has promised to “bring home the troops,” and he is doing that. But it would be naive to believe America’s enemies are going to cease their war. Whatever the future holds, it is doubtful that it will be untrammeled peace.
It is also true that 9.11.01 was a maniac’s doing. But more than a few United States citizens —and many others — believe that a misguided and hubristic foreign policy prompted that attack. That debate promises to go on for decades.
That is not healthy for a nation suffering from a deep political fragmentation, thus far unresponsive to the band-aids that various groups are clumsily, sometimes spuriously or half-heartedly, trying to apply.
Shortly before Memorial Day, a book appeared outlining a United States severely, angrily, possibly fatally, divided. The author, Lynne Olson, has written a fine history about the division which nearly doomed the United States to becoming a satellite of the world-dominating German empire. Many people wanted this. Joseph Kennedy, former ambassador to England, believed, as did many others, that “we can do business with Hitler.” Kennedy, weirdly, was not worried about democracy. His term as ambassador ended abruptly during the Battle of Britain in November 1940, when he said publicly that “Democracy is finished in England” … ”It may be here (in the U.S.).”Olson’s book, “Those Angry Days,“ gives us a close look at the bitter, wrong-headed American isolationist politics throughout the 1930s and up until several hours after December 7, 1941. A number of political groups made up this willfully mistaken view of the world, that created legal obstacles prohibiting the United States from offering the slightest bit of help to European democracies. That despite the fact that America’s entry into this massive, world-changing conflict was apparent with the Munich Pact of 1938. That was quite before troops of the National Socialist regime invaded Poland in 1939, and England and France declared war on the invading Germans, officially defining Adolf Hitler’s ambitions as a second World War. The war that Ernest Hemingway had warned of earlier.
Meanwhile in the United States a war of angry words and political maneuvers had been taking place between isolationists and interventionists even before the Johnson Act of 1934, which prohibited lending to countries which might go to war. The naive assumption: this would prevent them from doing so.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not want to get tangled in Europe’s perennial and vicious scraps. Yet, early on, FDR perceived that Hitler’s ambitions would not permit America the luxury of sustaining the role as neutral on-looker forever.
Yet he had to keep the United States – still wounded by the Great Depression – on the path of coherent recovery and slow, steady economic growth. What he and his advisors most wanted to avoid was an adversarial confrontation while the nation was so intensely politically divided. The primary opposition to even the slightest aid to Britain was the Republican Party, though many in his own party also did not understand that Hitler’s goal was world supremacy. Other opponents: the German-American Bund, the Liberty League, a Congress that created a series of Neutrality Acts, and a corps of enemy spies.
The most popular isolation voice was that of America’s great aviation hero, and rigid Republican, Charles Lindbergh. His 1927 feat of flying solo non-stop from New York to Paris in his “Spirit of St. Louis” aircraft astounded the world. He had moved to Europe, and had seen the Nazi advances in attack aircraft unparalleled by any other nation. He did not believe the United States could ever match Germany’s modernized war machine, at least not in time. Many American businessmen, lawmakers and their followers agreed with him.
Another factor that many for some time did not factor into any assessment of the U.S. isolationism was its widespread, and widely accepted, anti-semitism. A good many of the isolationists were emphatically anti-semitic, including Lindbergh, and lawmakers from the south and the mid-west. Some of the opposition to intervention to Hitlerian fascism and its conquest of increasingly larger portions of of Europe was sparked by opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal – the WPA, the CCC, new ways of farming to avoid the “dust bowl” effect, etc. This was accompanied by the strange impression on the part many rural folks who had little education and no memory of Theodore Roosevelt (who died in 1919) that Franklin Roosevelt was Jewish. For many of them that last name was a strange one. Also many thought Roosevelt talked “funny.” And he was from some peculiar east coast place called Hyde Park.
This overall prejudice was responsible for many lawmakers, military and other leaders having little interest in digging into Hitler’s treatment of European Jews, and his ultimate design of a “final solution.”
Even when Hitler invaded, and surprised the world by swiftly defeating France, leaving Britain as the only democratic enemy of Germany, there were lawmakers and other U.S. leaders who believed America was protected by its great moat: the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Fixed in the past, they were unable to comprehend the danger posed by long-range bombers and lethal submarines – even as U.S. shipping to England was soon being sunk by German U-boats.
Republican Senator Robert A. Taft distrusted European politicians but was an outspoken opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and did not support prohibition. Yet, he cooperated with conservative southern Democrats to frustrate FDR’s attempt to find a way to aid Britain without entering Europe’s war. Taft saw his mission as not only stopping New Deal growth, but eliminating “socialist” programs issuing from it. Yet, he supported Roosevelt’s Social Security program. Taft, who opposed a military draft, simultaneously backed a strong national defense (Navy and Air Force) and noninvolvement in European wars.
He believed that a strong U.S. military, combined with the natural geographic protection (the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans), would protect America even if the Nazis overran all of Europe.
September 2, 1940, President Roosevelt “agreed” to transfer 50 destroyers left over from WWI to Britain. In return, Britain agreed to hand over to the U.S. eight valuable defensive base sites. Shifting warships from a neutral United States to Britain was a violation of the neutrality obligations.
Heeding to the need of France and Britain for war materials, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1939. It allowed European democracies to buy U.S. war materials if they would transport the munitions on their own ships after paying for them in cash. America thus avoided loans, war debts, and the torpedoing of American arms-carriers. And overseas demand for war goods brought a healthy step out of the recession of 1937-1938, ultimately solving the unemployment crisis. FDR became increasingly adept in his efforts to ease the U.S. closer to preparing for an unimaginably harsh inevitability, one that would change the nation, and the world, forever.