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TOWARD WAR: U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND ISOLATIONISM

American Foreign Policy in the 1930s

In the opening years of what would be a decade of worldwide depression, President Herbert Hoover made a series of proposals to quiet rising international tensions. In 1930 his administration extended the naval-limitations agreements of the early 1920s. In 1931 he proposed a moratorium on international debt, while refusing to cancel those lingering World War I debts owed to the United States by the European powers. Further, Hoover pressed for an international agreement on arms limitation, but the World Disarmament Conference, held in Switzerland in 1932, failed to achieve its goals. International economic and military pressures intensified. Fueled by the global depression, Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, State Socialism in the Soviet Union, and militarism in Japan were ascendant.

Roosevelt and Foreign Policy in the 1930s

Roosevelt's initial foreign policy was mixed. His administration took an isolationist stance at the World Economic Conference in June 1933, when it refused to cooperate in the effort to stabilize world currencies. In 1934, however, he took an internationalist stance in the U.S.-negotiated Reciprocal Trade Agreements on tariff reductions. His vacillating policies reflected his political priorities: at the beginning of his administration domestic issues were more important than foreign policy.

The "Good Neighbor Policy."

In December 1933 Sec™ retary of State Cordell Hull committed the United States to a new policy toward Central and South America. Signing an international accord that declared, "No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another," Hull initiated an agenda that was to characterize Roosevelt's presidency. This "Good Neighbor Policy" put an end to the repeated U.S. military interventions in Latin America. Critics of the policy have argued, however, that it was a smokescreen for redoubled economic intervention and exploitation of the region by the United States.

Isolationism

Isolationists held the view that America ought not get involved in European wars and in other "entangling alliances." They believed that it was not the role of the United States to be policeman to the world or to make over other nations in its own image. Isolationism was not restricted to one end of the political spectrum, Conservatives, liberals, and radicals might be isolationist. Indeed, in the early and mid 1930s most Americans were isolationist.

Roosevelt and the Isolationists

In his first term Roosevelt worked closely with isolationist progressives such as Senators Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin, Hiram Johnson of California, George Norris of Nebraska, and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. Other influential isolationists in the Senate included William E. Borah of Idaho, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota, and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. During his second term Roosevelt gradually broke with the isolationists as international tensions rose. In October 1937 Roosevelt's famous quarantine speech—which called for international cooperation in bringing unspecified economic and diplomatic pressure to bear on aggressor nations—irritated the isolationists. Beginning in 1937 they increasingly, and sometimes angrily, turned against the president. After France fell to Germany in 1940, however, isolationists were forced to rethink their position.

The Nye Investigating Committee and Neutrality Acts

In 1934—1936 the discoveries of a Senate investigating committee headed by Senator Nye helped to fuel the nation's mood of isolationism. Exposing war profiteering by banks and corporations during World War I, the Nye committee investigation led many to conclude that the interests of American banks and corporations had driven the United States into a war the nation should have avoided. Many isolationists believed that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans afforded the United States sufficient protection from foreign aggression, The Senate's refusal to allow the United States to join the World Court in 1935 was another indication of the isolationist mood pervading the country. Fearful of being pulled into a war from which it would suffer but not benefit, Congress passed three acts that declared American neutrality. In the event that a

war broke out between other countries, the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 made it clear that the United States would not supply either side with weapons or ammunition. The Neutrality Act of 1937 moved the nation further in the direction of isolation and asserted a "cash-and-carry" policy by which warring countries could purchase weapons but not ammunition in cash only and that those supplies could be shipped from American ports only in the bottoms of the belligerents. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the United States remained on the sidelines. When tensions rose in Asia as a result of Japan's expansionist foreign policy, Roosevelt's quarantine speech, in which he called for expansionist nations to be contained, was ill received. When, on 12 December 1937, Japanese airplanes sank the Panay, a U.S. gunboat navigating the Yangtze River in China, Americans were ready to forgive the incident after a formal Japanese apology.

The Open Door in China, War with Japan

In 1899 and 1900 Secretary of State John Hay had unilaterally asserted the "Open Door policy" to Asia. It was, he declared, the right of all countries to equal trading opportunities in China. Two decades later, in 1922, the Open Door was made international law in the Nine Power Treaty. In 1931, after Japan occupied the region of China known as Manchuria in direct defiance of the Open Door Policy, tensions ran high between Washington and Tokyo. President Hoover's secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, viewed the Japanese invasion and takeover of Manchuria as a challenge to U.S. foreign policy in the East. The Stimson Doctrine of January 1932 called for the United States to refuse recognition of the Japanese puppet government in Manchuria. After Roosevelt became president his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, sent occasional notes of protest to Japan, but the severity of such criticism was mitigated by the fact that Japan was an important trading partner with the United States. In 1937, when war erupted between Japan and China, Roosevelt was inhibited by broad national sentiments of isolationism and acted cautiously, hoping that Japan would agree to withdraw its troops. By 1939 Roosevelt recognized the need for firmer action. He canceled the 1911 U.S. trade agreement with Japan, and when the Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, President Roosevelt initiated a partial embargo against Tokyo. Thus, it was that the Japanese challenge to the Open Door Policy became a major cause of the disagreement between the United States and Japan that exploded with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

Drifting toward War

As the 1930s drew to a close, the United States stood by as Hitler began his expansionist push eastward. Congress and the president reasserted American neutrality as Hitler moved troops into the Rhineland in 1936, marched on Austria in March 1938, and seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia the following September, Hitler violated the Munich Accord, invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin later that year. As German soldiers invaded Poland, the United States remained on the sidelines, As World War II began, Roosevelt declared, "This nation will remain a neutral nation," but he called for a revision of the Neutrality Acts to allow the United States to sell England and its Allies weapons and ammunition. Skeptically, Congress allowed them to purchase the arms on a cash-and-carry basis.

War Ends the Depression

Ironically, European orders for war goods sparked a phenomenal economic boom that brought the United States out of the Depression for good. So long as America stayed out of the war, it seemed, both peace and prosperity were possible. Members of the Roosevelt administration, however, leaned toward American intervention in the European conflict. Economists within the administration warned that German success in Europe and Japanese victory in Asia would irrevocably close huge markets for American goods. Unless the United States intervened in these conflicts, they argued, America's economic future would be worse than the Great Depression. Such arguments, in concert with war atrocities on the part of Germany and Japan, convinced Roosevelt and his administration that the United States must set isolationism aside and take an active hand in the European and Asian wars. Ever the political leader, Roosevelt devoted himself to convincing his countrymen to enter the greatest military conflagration in world history. While the 1930s ended with the disappearance of the Great Depression, peace, too, was fading away.