Roosevelt Has Never Been This Happy!

An ad from a Guatemalan Hooters:

I really don't know what I could possibly add to this.

Via Edge of the American West.

From Colony to Superpower, Part XIII

This is the thirteenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

That World War II is the most transformative and important event in the twentieth century seems without question. In the United States, the nation rapidly transitioned from a country committed to limited engagement with the world outside of trade to the world's most powerful nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the primary architect of this project. In the last chapter, Herring seemed rather critical of FDR, and to a certain extent he remains so here. But Roosevelt also did a tremendous job preparing the U.S. for the war against significant domestic opposition in the 18 months before the war, allowing a still unprepared U.S. to transition into the war fairly quickly. A lesser leader might not have done this and it could have been 1943 before the U.S. was ready to fight at all. Generally, the narrative of the war is fairly uninteresting to me. I basically don't care about wars as a subject of study, except for their domestic implications. So I'll move on to some specific issues of interest.

One problem with a lot of diplomatic histories is that wars dominate the narrative at the expense of other topics. To no small extent, Herring does this as well; it's understandable but his tentative interests in the cultural side of America's relations with the world almost totally disappear in this chapter. I do think he does a good job discussing Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. This is one of the strongest sections of the book. He shows both the benefits of the Good Neighbor policy in Latin America for short-term stability and its downside through allowing dictators like Somoza and Trujillo to consolidate their repressive regimes with tacit U.S. support. The sons of these two leaders even attended West Point. The minimal weapons provided by the U.S. allowed these governments to kill its own civilians. Whether the Good Neighbor policy was in the best long-term interests of the nation is a question Herring doesn't really explore.

In the Middle East, Herring does a great job getting into how the U.S. comes to see oil as the world's most important resource and how by 1943, the nation is becoming increasingly involved in Iran and other nations to ensure a steady supply both for the war and the postwar world. In Asia, Roosevelt wanted to slowly bring colonialism to an end, something fiercely resisted by Churchill and De Gaulle. But his own racism, and the racism of the entire nation, made taking the proper actions unlikely. Thinking the Vietnamese and other Asians were children who needed to be protected, the U.S. ultimately did little to end colonialism and moreover began to see itself dictating policy to the region. In China, Chiang's corruption became ever more obvious during World War II. Chiang had powerful friends but constantly frustrated the U.S. government who frankly saw Mao's communist movement as more effective and quite likely the winners of the Chinese civil war.

Herring also usefully discusses the fate of the Jews. While many criticize Roosevelt for not doing more to stop the Holocaust, Herring points out that he faced massive anti-Semitism both in the State Department and the U.S. population. Plus, nothing he could have done would likely have saved many Jewish lives. Roosevelt's classic ambivalence shows up very strongly in figuring out what to do with Jews after the war. He gave lip service to both Jews and Muslims on the issue and never had a strong plan, but he could also see the hornet's nest he was walking into. It's almost taboo to say this, but the establishment of Israel is one of the great foreign policy disasters of the 20th century. While one cannot question that Jews were not safe most anywhere in Europe, creating a state under constant siege that has to displace the people already living there and then oppressing them in occupied territories has not exactly been a huge success. The failure of the Jewish state to establish long-term stability in the face of low birthrates compared to the Islamic population suggests either it losing its Jewish identity or apartheid; either way, it's likely that we'll still be dealing with these same problems in another 60 years.

The person who comes off the worst in this chapter is Churchill. It's not surprising--Churchill was an excellent wartime leader but was a bastard of the first order who had no business leading the British during peacetime. His racism, outright colonialism, willingness to sell nations out, and unwillingness to consider changing Britain's traditional foreign policy prerogatives in the face of the obvious decline of the empire did little to make him a sympathetic leader today. Of course, he was facing massive challenges and perhaps changing who he was is way to unrealistic, but I have trouble arguing with the British people throwing him out of office the first chance they got.

Finally, no discussion of the war is complete without the atomic bomb. Herring is right in criticizing FDR for keeping Truman (and all his VPs) out of the loop. Although I'm sure he didn't want to dwell on his mortality, it was clear by early 1945 that FDR was running out of time. Truman was completely unprepared for the task of steering the nation through the end of the war. However, he did pretty well. His most controversial move was using the atomic bomb against Japan. It was unnecessary and immoral, but also almost inevitable. The nation spent such a huge amount of money on the thing that to not use it would have caused incredible outrage in Congress and among the general public, perhaps leading to the impeachment of Truman and the end of many politicians' and soldiers' careers. Without an outright surrender of the hated Japanese, there was no chance Truman would have made any other decision, and I think the same is true of Roosevelt, although of course we can't know.

There's more to say about US-Soviet relations, Yalta, and all of that, but I'll leave it to Rob and respond to his piece.

From Colony to Superpower, Part XII

This is the twelfth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries. You can see Rob's entry for the week here.

This week covers Franklin Roosevelt's administration up to Pearl Harbor. According to Herring, the Great Depression turned American inward in a way they did not in the 1920s. Usually, the 20s and 30s are seen as a general period of isolation. Herring argues against this, but I'm not entirely convinced the Depression represents as sharp a break as he claims. I don't have strong examples in my favor, but Herring just sort of says this without really showing it. It makes sense that the nation would turn inward as a response to massive economic crisis, but it also seems that there are a lot of continuities between the two decades.

Roosevelt's foreign policy was dominated by dealing with the Depression and then preparing for World War II. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, a positive step, although it certainly didn't lead to long-term good relations. He also instituted the Good Neighbor policy in Latin America, preferring stability to expensive American invasions. The Good Neighbor policy rightfully comes in for a lot of criticism. It allowed dictators like Fulgencio Batista to come to power in Cuba. Rather than push for democracy or some kind of more responsive government. Cuba was trying to work this under under Grau, but American interests in Cuba undermined his popular movement. The long-term implications of Batista and US policy set the stage for Castro.

On the other hand, a US government not blatantly riding roughshod over the rights of Latin America was a pretty welcome change after 35 years of invasion. Moreover, it would seem like a better time from the perspective of postwar Latin America, when the CIA and American military are active everywhere fighting "communism," broadly defined as "people demanding the rights that Americans enjoy everyday." This of course was unacceptable in the Cold War context and would lead to some of the most reprehensible US foreign policy actions.

Of course, the dominant issue of the period was the rising tide of German and Japanese militarism. Herring shows how ineffective the world was in dealing with both countries. When the Japanese invaded China, they rightfully believed the League of Nations would do nothing. That the United States was not part of the League didn't help, but there's certainly little reason to believe it would have made much difference. In Europe, FDR recognized some of the potential problems fairly early but faced a hostile domestic climate for any U.S. involvement. It really took the invasion of France to wake the nation up.

Herring is critical of much of Roosevelt's policy over these issues, but I think this is a little unfair. He was rightfully focused on domestic issues during his first two terms--after all, the fate of the nation was at stake here. I suppose he could have handled issues like the Italy-Ethiopia war better, but ultimately this was of pretty minor interest for the United States. Spain definitely went bad. Trying to stay out of it meant handing the nation over to Franco. But again, working with the Soviets would have been extremely difficult in 1937 and there was the same widespread domestic opposition to significant involvement. Certainly Lend-Lease furthered U.S. interests in important ways, as did the expansion of the American defense zone into the mid-Atlantic.

Finally, there is the issue of Pearl Harbor. Herring is also critical of American foreign policy toward Japan in this period, saying that we ended up with a 2 front war when we weren't prepared for 1 front. Perhaps, but what were the alternatives? To continue trading with a hostile power bent on taking over all of Asia? If you define all foreign policy questions as whether it is the U.S.' narrow interests to further policy, maybe you can criticize FDR. And certainly there were some clunky moves. But if you at all think the U.S. has some obligation to limit its trade with openly hostile nations, cutting off supplies to Japan makes a lot more sense. Yes, it did help convince the Japanese that it was in their interests to declare war on the United States. But the other side would have been aiding and abetting Japanese militarism.

Government Propaganda, 1940s Style

We rightfully complain that FOX is nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Bush wing of the Republican Party. The Bushies did a great job manipulating the news media for their aims, especially leading up to the Iraq war in 2002 and early 2003.

But that is nothing compared to the craziness of the past. World War I marked the beginning of modern American propaganda with Wilson establishing the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel. While the CPI died after the armistice, the basic idea remained alive.

I was reminded of this today while listening to some Duke Ellington. During World War II, Ellington did a bunch of benefit shows to raise money for war bonds. So lots of the songs have little speeches at the beginning to get the mostly African-American audience to buy bonds. Most of these intros are pretty standard stuff. But some of them are off the charts crazy. Take the song "Moon Mist." The exhortation for this number is about how much Franklin Roosevelt cares about black people. The, clearly white, narrator goes so far as to compare FDR to Lincoln in his concern, which is absurd. While the New Deal did help out African-Americans and started the migration of blacks to the Democratic Party, the idea that FDR cared specifically about blacks is just wrong. Laughable even. He did almost nothing for them that he didn't have to. He refused to support anti-lynching legislation. He saw blacks as potential political allies in northern cities but didn't want to alienate the South. While that might have been a smart political move, it was also an easy one for him because he didn't care about black people.

The real shocker though was hearing a government sponsored broadcast talking about the sitting president like he was a deity, making openly false historical analogies about him, and connecting fighting the war with loving the president. I respect FDR to no end, but one can see why many Americans found him threatening. Certainly the propaganda was a lot more blatant in 1943 than it is today.