Weeks 4‒5: To the Holocaust

I’m not talking about the Shoah here – or at least not just about that. I’m talking about the world’s slide toward a global conflagration that killed tens of millions, of which the six million were a part. Last week (Week 4) our topic was the interwar period – the years of the 1920s and much of the 1930s, when the United States was at peace. I didn’t have a chance to do a blog post about that, because of other commitments. So this is a combined post dealing with last week’s class as well as this week’s, whose topic was the Second World War as seen from America.

In Week 4, my students and I discussed the question of “isolationism” and US isolation during the 1920s and 1930s. There really is a kind of legend of isolationism during this time, one that numerous historians have challenged, but it won’t die. This is because – as I explained to my students – whenever, since World War II, Americans have debated whether or not to go to war, those in favor have accused those against of isolationism. It became a kind of swear word, not so different from appeasement – a word that actually did not have such obviously negative connotations as it has today until 1938 or so.

Was America an isolationist country between the world wars? Akira Iriye, a very eminent historian of international affairs and the author of a book my class continued to read for the past two weeks, makes a strong case that it wasn’t. Only to state the obvious, going to war or forming defense alliances is not the only way to be involved internationally. Iriye views the 1920s in particular as, in fact, a decade when the US came into its own as a global influence, financially, culturally, and even diplomatically. Even though the US declined to join the League of Nations, it took the lead in this era in negotiating limits to a naval arms race and in restructuring German war debt.

But putting this aside, I asked students if they were even familiar with the term isolationism. Yes. Had they heard it applied to countries other than the United States? Yes. Which other countries?

One hand went up: “North Korea.” Well…maybe we’re talking about two different things here. Another: “China.” That’s a bit more interesting as a comparison to the US. I doubt you could call China isolationist today, but there was a time, say in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when China tried to keep Westerners out of the country physically.

This was only getting us so far. I changed tack, and asked students to consider how the world viewed the United States during the interwar period. Think about the rising financial presence of the US in this period – having replaced Britain during the World War as the leading lending nation in the world, for one thing – and also the quickly growing cultural footprint of America in this era, most obvious in the field of cinema, a communication and entertainment medium that took the world by storm and in which the US was dominant by a long way. Think about the phenomenon of the “new woman,” as embodied in the flappers of the 1920s, and the image of liberated youth that America conveyed at that time. Think about the “Fordist” system of mass production and mass consumption, admired across the board by people ranging from Communists to fascists. But also think about the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrants and anarchists executed in 1927 on murder charges in Massachusetts after a trial that was widely viewed as very unfair. There were mass demonstrations in protest around the world. This was the image of American “justice.” Moshik Temkin’s great book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial, makes clear how many people around the world viewed the American state through the prism of this case. America was viewed with fascination, and with a mixture of admiration and deep criticism. Not totally unlike the way China is an object of worldwide fascination today, despite all the profound differences between the two countries.

But, for all the deep involvement of the US with the outside world in the interwar period, the idea of isolationism still meant something. For it was true that a strong majority of the American public, in the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, felt badly burned by its experience in the Great War. Woodrow Wilson had sold the American public on entry into the war as a mission for lofty goals – ending war, spreading democracy. It had ended with European powers grabbing a lot of land from vulnerable or losing combatants. The feeling of Don’t be fooled again was extremely powerful. Americans were determined not to get dragged into European conflicts again.

That is where we started Week 5, and this is where these fellows come in:

The guy on top is Smedley Butler – his name sounds like it belongs to a cartoon character, but he was as real as you or I. Beneath him is Lucky Lindy, one of the great names of the interwar era, the famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

I explained to my students that the main passenger terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is called the Lindbergh Terminal (Lindbergh was from Minnesota, his dad was a Farmer-Labor congressman representing part of the state in the Congress for a time), but that lately I have noticed the airport starting to refer to it as Terminal 1 instead. I think it’s still called Lindbergh, but it’s as if they no longer want to advertise that fact so widely as before. I don’t know what’s changed.

But go back to Butler for a moment. Old Gimlet Eye, he was apparently called. He rose to become Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, the service branch that most often was given the task of invading and occupying countries to the south of the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Butler saw a lot of action in a lot of countries in the Caribbean Basin. He retired in 1931 and started giving speeches – really just one speech, over and over again with small variations. He eventually published it in extended form as a pamphlet with the title War Is a Racket. It was widely circulated in the mid-1930s. It then got forgotten for a long time, only to be rediscovered during the US-Vietnam War, when the first large protest movement, among Americans, against any US war since the late 1930s arose. There was, in the 1930s, quite a vigorous protest movement against a potential US war in Europe – this was a kind of proactive antiwar movement – which partook of both the political left and the right, as well as people harder to label.

Some of Butler’s speech remains quite well known. Here are some pieces of it, which I read to my class:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket....

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

In the 1935 and 1936, a US Senate committee, led by Gerald Nye, Republican of North Dakota, investigated the role of the munitions and banking industries in allegedly scheming to get the United States into World War I. These hearings, and Nye’s findings, were considered rather sensational in their time. Now, why would events of 1917 seem a fit subject for investigation in 1935? Clearly this reflected a desire by many Americans, including some in Washington, to remind their fellow Americans of what had really happened, the last time, underneath the idealistic rhetoric, in getting the country into the World War. Don’t be fooled again.

But the political left in the US started to shift its views about foreign affairs, and specifically about Europe, around 1936. The really important event at this time was the rebellion by Spanish militarists, led by Francisco Franco, against the legal (and progressive) government of Spain. Fascist Germany and Italy jumped in on the rebels’ side, the USSR did so on the government side. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep out of the Spanish Civil War, as did most Americans.

FDR followed the same trajectory, even though he didn’t want any part of Spain. By 1937 and 1938 he clearly was preparing the ground for US involvement, even if only indirect involvement, in the brewing wars in both East Asia and Europe, by moving step by step to provide military assistance to Great Britain, France, and China. He kept saying this was a way of keeping America out of war – help others to keep the fascists at bay and we won’t have to do it ourselves.

Here is some of what Roosevelt said on 29 December 1940, in his great (and rather lengthy) radio broadcast calling on America to be “the arsenal of democracy,” i.e., to convert industrial plant to munitions production, in order to supply Great Britain in its desperate war against Germany. By this time France was defeated, out of the war. So was Norway, and so were Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium. I also read this to my students:

"...the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and you grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours....

"The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world....

"...the Axis not merely admits but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.

"In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically, that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world....

"Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us. But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere....

"If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas - and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun - a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military....

"Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your Government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out....

 

"Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on....

"There is no demand for sending an American Expeditionary Force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail - nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth."

Finally I read the class some excerpts from Lindbergh’s famous speech – many would call it infamous – in Des Moines, Iowa, on behalf of the antiwar America First Committee, on 11 September 1941, only three months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which ended all debate about the wisdom of America joining the war. Here is some of what Lindy said:

"...Why are we on the verge of war? Was it necessary for us to become so deeply involved? Who is responsible for changing our national policy from one of neutrality and independence to one of entanglement in European affairs?...

"The subterfuge and propaganda that exists in our country is obvious on every side. Tonight, I shall try to pierce through a portion of it, to the naked facts which lie beneath.

"When this war started in Europe, it was clear that the American people were solidly opposed to entering it. Why shouldn't we be? We had the best defensive position in the world; we had a tradition of independence from Europe; and the one time we did take part in a European war left European problems unsolved, and debts to America unpaid....

"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration....

"It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

"No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

"Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority do not.

"Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

"I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

"We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also much look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other people to lead our country to destruction...."

He was quite bitter about Roosevelt’s maneuvering, which Lindbergh seemed to liken to Wilson’s engineering of US entry into the previous European war. Now, put aside for the moment the fact that Lindbergh had visited Nazi Germany several times and been awarded honors by the German government. (I know, I know. But just as a thought experiment.) What is wrong with what he says? Well, a lot of it was wrong. But his reputation didn’t suffer the damage it did (and despite the airport naming thing, which has always surprised me a little, it did) because a lot of people thought he was wrong. It was because a lot of people thought his speech was anti-Semitic. Was it? I tried asking my Norwegian students what they thought of Lindbergh’s speech. But I have to say, they weren’t biting. Seemed like kind of an edgy subject to raise, I suppose.

Despite what some say, I don’t think it was anti-Semitic of Lindbergh to say that there was an organized Jewish effort to lobby Americans on behalf of involvement in the European war. I’m not sure there was much of an organized effort along those lines. But sometimes people are too touchy about the very idea of ethnic lobbies in the United States, and particularly about the idea of American Jews trying to influence public opinion or government action. It happens.

What was anti-Semitic about Lindbergh’s speech was something else. Take a look at his language. He contrasts “Jews” with “Americans.” Jews are the formal equivalent of the British government in his speech. They are the agents of a foreign nation. Neither Jews nor Britons have “American reasons” for wishing to see the United States enter the war against fascism. How can they? They’re not Americans.

Anyway, it was on to the war itself after this. But this may be enough for now. The tight US-British relationship that developed during the war - Winston Churchill basically moved into the White House for long stretches - portended the US “assuming” British “responsibilities” around the world after the war.

That comes next week.

I wondered if students would compare the debate over the wisdom of the US entering the European war in the 1930s to the debate right now over whether the US should bomb Syria. No takers – except for one student during the break between Hour One and Hour Two. That was better than nothing.