Transcript
If You Want Peace
August 27, 1928
Paris Monday, August 27, 1928
Fifteen nations have sent delegates to the French foreign ministry. Today, in the Clock Room, they will outlaw war.
Article One: they condemn war and renounce it “as an instrument of national policy.” Article Two: every dispute will be settled peacefully. No article says what happens if they aren't.
All fifteen will sign with one gold pen, a gift to Kellogg from Le Havre. Its Latin motto: if you want peace, prepare for peace. The old Roman proverb says: prepare for war.
In time, more than sixty nations signed. Thirteen years later, the United States was at war with Germany, Italy and Japan. All three had signed in this room.
Americans wanted a peaceful world. Could they have one without joining it?
The Way to Disarm
1920–1929
In 1920 the Senate refused to join the League of Nations. Americans wanted peace without promising to fight for anyone.
The next day, nine nations met in Washington.
Charles Evans Hughes The world looks to this conference to relieve humanity of the crushing burden created by competition in armament.
Then he read out the battleships each navy should scrap. By name.
The final treaty fixed battleship strength: five for America, five for Britain, three for Japan.
Japan wanted more than three. American codebreakers read its cables and knew it would settle.
The treaty let navies turn some doomed hulls into aircraft carriers. Japan chose Akagi and Kaga. Remember those names.
Keep score on three dials. Alone or with others. Hands off or on. Promises or none.
The Allies owed America over ten billion dollars. Germany owed the Allies reparations it couldn't pay.
In 1924 the banker Charles Dawes drew a circle. American banks lent to Germany. Germany paid Britain and France. They paid America. The same dollars went round and round.
It worked until 1929, when the loans stopped. Only Finland ever paid its war debt in full.
Next Door
1915–1938
Close to home, Americans didn’t stay out of anything. Marines occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Marines landed in Haiti in 1915 and stayed nineteen years. They ran its customs and its treasury.
They forced Haitian men to build roads without pay, under an old law called the corvée.
Thousands fought back. In 1919 Marines killed their leader, Charlemagne Péralte, and spread a photograph of his body. It made him a martyr.
In 1920 the NAACP sent James Weldon Johnson to investigate.
James Weldon Johnson …some three thousand Haitian men, women, and children have been shot down by American rifles and machine guns…
His explanation began with a New York bank that held Haiti’s treasury.
That summer, reporters quoted the Democrats’ candidate for vice president bragging he’d written Haiti’s constitution himself. He later denied it. His name was Franklin Roosevelt.
Then the policy turned. Hoover began bringing the Marines home. Roosevelt promised a good-neighbor policy, and his diplomats signed a pledge against intervention.
In July 1934 Roosevelt sailed to Haiti to say the Marines were leaving. They were gone that August.
Hands off. Mostly.
In Nicaragua the Marines left behind a National Guard. Its chief, Anastasio Somoza, had the rebel Augusto Sandino killed and took power. His family ruled until 1979.
Worth a Postage Stamp
1929–1936
Senator Carter Glass had a price in mind.
Back to the pen. The Senate ratified the Pact, eighty-five to one.
Sen. Carter Glass I am not willing that anybody in Virginia shall think that I am simple enough to suppose that it is worth a postage stamp…
He voted yes. The next bill authorized fifteen new cruisers.
The first test came in 1931. Japanese officers blew up their own railway in Manchuria, blamed China, and seized the region.
Secretary of State Henry Stimson sent a note: America would not recognize the conquest. The League condemned Japan. That was the penalty. Japan walked out.
Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. In 1935 Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia.
At home, Senator Gerald Nye's committee asked why America had fought in 1917. Its answer: bankers and arms makers. A best-seller called them merchants of death.
At Princeton, students founded the Veterans of Future Wars and demanded their war bonus in advance. Sixty thousand students joined.
Congress wrote the lesson into law. The Neutrality Acts banned arms sales and loans to nations at war. They treated invader and invaded alike. They were built to stop 1917 from happening again.
In Spain, about 2,800 Americans volunteered to fight Franco and his fascist allies. Their government stayed neutral.
Quarantine
1937–1939
October 1937. With Japan at war in China, Roosevelt tried an idea in Chicago.
Franklin D. Roosevelt When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients…
Isolationist papers and congressmen attacked it. Roosevelt backed away.
In December, Japanese planes sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in China. Japan apologized. Washington accepted.
The next day, Japan took Nanjing and killed tens of thousands of prisoners and civilians. Chinese estimates run to 300,000.
At Munich in 1938, Britain and France let Hitler take part of Czechoslovakia to avoid war.
Austria in March 1938. The Sudetenland in September.
In November, Nazis burned synagogues and wrecked Jewish homes and shops across Germany.
Ninety-four percent of Americans told Gallup they disapproved of Germany's treatment of Jews. Seventy-two percent said no to admitting more Jewish exiles.
In June 1939 the liner St. Louis carried 937 passengers, mostly Jewish refugees, within sight of Miami. Cuba turned them away. So did the United States. Of the 620 sent back to Europe, 254 were later murdered in the Holocaust.
Hitler had taken the rest of Czechoslovakia in March. On September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland.
Britain and France declared war. That night, Roosevelt went on the radio.
Franklin D. Roosevelt This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.
In November, Congress allowed arms sales again: cash and carry.
Pay up front and haul it home yourself. Only Britain and France had the cash and the ships.
Main Street
1940
In the spring of 1940, Germany took Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. France fell in six weeks. Britain stood alone.
By September, German bombers were over London every night. Americans heard it live.
Edward R. Murrow This is London.
Roosevelt traded Britain fifty old destroyers for bases in the Americas, without asking Congress.
Congress passed the first peacetime draft in American history. On October 16, more than sixteen million men registered.
America First said: arm, defend this hemisphere and stay out. A Kansas editor's committee said: help Britain now, or face Hitler alone later.
Roosevelt ran for a third term. His Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie of Indiana, also backed aid to Britain.
George Gallup's interviewers were asking Americans what they wanted. Roosevelt read the answers.
Most Americans wanted Britain to win. Most would vote to stay out. That was the country Roosevelt had to lead.
Franklin D. Roosevelt I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
November 5, 1940 Election Day
Six days later he became the first president to win a third term.
The Garden Hose
December 1940–October 1941
By December, Britain was running out of cash.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away.
Franklin D. Roosevelt I don't want $15 — I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
December 29, 1940. At 9:30 p.m., Roosevelt went on the radio. In London it was 2:30 in the morning, and the City was still burning.
Franklin D. Roosevelt There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.
Franklin D. Roosevelt We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
In January he named what it was for: four freedoms.
The bill to lend Britain whatever it needed was numbered H.R. 1776.
Sen. Robert A. Taft Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back.
In August, Roosevelt met Churchill off Newfoundland. Their Atlantic Charter promised self-determination, free trade and no conquests. Nobody ever signed it.
A U-boat fired at the destroyer Greer and missed. She had been trailing it for hours. Roosevelt left that out, and told the Navy to shoot on sight.
America First's case was serious: this was Europe's war, and aid would drag America in again. That night in Des Moines, Charles Lindbergh said this.
Charles A. Lindbergh The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.
Leaders of both parties condemned it.
On October 31, a U-boat sank the destroyer Reuben James. About a hundred American sailors died.
The United States was already fighting an undeclared war at sea.
Sunday
July–December 7, 1941
Japan had joined Germany and Italy as an Axis power. In July 1941, it moved into southern Indochina. Roosevelt froze Japan's money and cut off its oil. The United States had supplied most of Japan's oil.
Japan's leaders kept negotiating and preparing for war. On November 26, Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded that Japan leave China. Six Japanese carriers had already sailed for Hawaii. Two were the Akagi and the Kaga.
At 7:02 on Sunday morning, two soldiers at Oahu's Opana radar station saw the biggest blip they had ever seen. The officer on duty told them not to worry.
At 7:33, General Marshall's last warning reached Honolulu. It had come by commercial telegram. A messenger took it on his usual rounds.
On the Nevada, the band formed up to play the anthem at eight.
The Nevada's band finished the anthem while planes strafed the deck. In under two hours, the attack sank or damaged every battleship in the harbor and killed 2,403 Americans.
1,177 of them died on the Arizona.
In 1941 the Navy signed up Black sailors only as messmen. That morning he carried wounded men to safety, then fired an anti-aircraft machine gun he had never been trained to use.
Signed
December 7–11, 1941 · coda
Franklin D. Roosevelt Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Within the hour, Congress voted for war: 82 to 0 in the Senate, 388 to 1 in the House. The one no was Jeannette Rankin of Montana. She had voted against war in 1917 too.
At 4:10 that afternoon, Roosevelt signed. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America First voted to dissolve the same day.
So was America isolationist between the wars? It lent billions abroad, sent Marines next door and signed treaties that promised talk, never troops. What it refused was a promise to fight for anyone else.
The pact Senator Glass mocked is still in force. It never stopped a war. In 1946, judges at Nuremberg cited it to convict Nazi leaders of starting one.