The USA in the Time FDR - 1933-1939
AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
by Mike Donovan
Assistant Secretary of the Navy King
War Leader - The Brains Trust - Lawyer -Cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt – Harvard and Columbia – “President Rosenfeld” - Campobello – Democratic VP Nominee 1920 – ‘Bob Dole’, he put most of the country on it - Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woody Wilson - King Roosevelt – Hyde Park, New York – Married Teddy Roosevelt’s niece – –VP’s John Nance Garner 1933-1941; Henry Wallace 1941-1944; Harry S. Truman 1945
Regardless of how one feels about FDR's politics, personality, or record as president, he has to get a break for the difficulty of his task. Before he was finished in 45, Roosevelt had more problems on his plate to deal with than Coolidge, Harding, Ford, Arthur, Hayes, Tyler, Pierce, Fillmore, Taft and the two Harrison’s combined.
Name the four men who lost to Roosevelt – answer later.
“The only thing we have to fear is … a monstrous federal bureaucracy created by me!”
The first President to run for more than two terms, King Franklin in fact ran for four, and would have been president until about 1970 if his health had allowed it. It was Roosevelt who forced the enactment of the 22nd Amendment limiting the President to two terms.
Considered by many to be our finest President, Roosevelt is the showpiece of Democratic history. He is the Jackie Gleason of the Democratic Party. FDR is, “The Great One.”
Who were the four men who lost to Roosevelt? The four losers were Hoover, Landon, Wilkie, and Dewey – Herbert Hoover in 32, Alf Landon of Kansas in 36, Wendell Wilkie in 1940, and NY Governor Tom Dewey in 1944. –VP John Nance Garner 1933-1941; Henry Wallace 1941-1944; Harry S. Truman 1945 –
Election of 1932;
Electoral College---Roosevelt-Garner D) 472
Hoover-Curtis R) 59
Popular vote 1932-------Roosevelt D) 22,821,000
Hoover-Curtis R) 15,761,000
Thomas S) 881,000
Election of 1936;
Electoral College---Roosevelt-Garner D) 523
Alfred M. Landon R) 8
Popular vote-------Roosevelt-Garner D) 27,751,000
Landon R) 16,679,000
Mark W. Lemke U) 882,000
Election of 1940;
Electoral College-----Roosevelt D) 449
Wilkie R) 82
Popular vote----------Roosevelt D) 27,244,000
Wilkie R) 22,305
Election of 1944;
Electoral College-----Roosevelt D) 432
Dewey R) 99
Popular vote -------Roosevelt D) 25,602,000
Dewey R) 22,006
Was Roosevelt a socialist? Did Stalin bully him at Yalta? Was Eleanor rumored to be gay? Did he clearly make all the right decisions in handling the Great Depression?
Yes, yes, yes, no.
Roosevelt’s cabinet;
Secretary of State---------Cordell Hull----1933-1944
E. R. Stettinius-----1944-1945
Sec. of War-----------George H. Dern-----1933-1936
Harry H. Woodring-1936-1940
Henry L. Stimson---1940-1945
$$$$$$$$$--------------William H. Woodin-1933-1934
Henry Morganthau Jr.-1934-1945
Att. General-----------H. S. Cummings-----1933-1939
Frank Murphy-------1939-1940
Robert Jackson ------1940-1941
Francis Biddle--------1941-1945
Sec. of Navy--------Claude A. Swanson—1933-1940
Charles Edison--------1940
Frank Knox------------1940-1944
James “Frosty” Forrestal---------1944-1945
Sec of the Interior---Harold L. Ickes -----1933-1945
Franklin Roosevelt campaigned hard against Herbert Hoover. He called Hoover a spendthrift and scolded him plenty for creating huge federal deficits. Then when FDR was elected he spent like a drunken sailor. The US government under Franklin D spent 17 billion dollars by 1937. And remember this was back when 50 cents could buy a new car and a second home.
The USA from 1932 to 1939 under Roosevelt is the closest thing to complete power by one political party that has ever occurred in America (at least until 2009). The Democrats dominated both the Senate and the House. And what did the Dems give us? A lot of government spending, a lot of hope, a lot of moral support, and no genuine relief from the Depression. FDR treated the symptoms well enough, in the form of government handouts to stave off revolution from the disgruntled masses below. But he didn't cure the Great Depression any more than my uncle Tommy Cormier cured malaria.
Franklin Roosevelt favored a “planned economy.” This was a euphemism for an economy free of free enterprise and controlled by the government. Fortunately his dream was never realized and the Supreme Court and the Congress, not to mention the threat of the popular vote, kept him and some of his cronies from fully implementing their socialist program. But they got plenty of it in also, and its apparently permanent.
FDR admired “the Soviet experiment” and the first thing he did when he became President was to recognize the USSR. The US had refused to recognize the Soviet Union because of it’s professed goal of overthrowing western governments and because it had reneged on its international debts, claiming that as a new regime it did not have to pay Tsarist Russia’s old war and pre-war debts. Russia had changed its name to get away from its past and its creditors, like a credit card cheat. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover didn't accept it. FDR did.
Roosevelt did not live long enough to witness the ugly Cold War of 1946-90 with the USSR, and died in April of 1945 still believing that Stalin was his loyal friend, that the Russian experiment in communism was righteous and progressive, and that we had more to learn from them than vice-verse.
Accusations against Roosevelt as red make shocking and unhip reading today. But in the 1930’s you would not be an oddball if you said that Roosevelt was red. And you wouldn’t be considered a weirdo if you said that you were red.
Being a communist was no great crime in America in the 1930’s. The debate hadn’t been settled yet. People didn’t have to be ashamed to be either communist or to be anti-communist. Was Roosevelt a Communist? No, but a pink rose by any other name looks just as sympathetic to Communist red economic panning.
All of these political terms are general, of course. If you ask a hundred people, ‘what is a socialist?’ you would get 100 different answers. But government control over the economy, combined with confiscatory taxes which punish achievement would be my suggested starting point.
During World War II FDR tried to pass a law that no American could earn more than $25,000 a year. The government would take all other earnings. If that isn’t red, than Millard Fillmore had a black belt in karate.
FD wanted the 25,000 salary cap passed very much. Congress defeated it. Gee, I wonder why.
BIO;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882 at Hyde Park, New York. His mother Sara was the second wife of his affluent father James Roosevelt. Franklin was born two days after the proud parents were married.
His first uppity schooling came at Groton.
Then he went to Harvard University from 1900 to 1904, majoring in chemistry. Like most future presidents, he was a joiner became prominent on the writing staff of the Harvard Crimson. One of his first political moves was to write a piece clearly taking sides with the Boers in their war against England, which is ironic considering his later friendship with Churchill.
Franklin went on to Columbia Law but he did not graduate. He disliked the study of law ( he didn’t care for law when he was president either) but he had learned enough to pass the bar exam in 1907 (another source says 1910) and become yet another lawyer prez.
In any case he soon joined the New York law firm of Carter, Ledyard, McGillicutty and Milburn.
In 1910 the Democrats nominated Roosevelt for the New York state senate from Duchess County. Few expected him to win because no Democrat had won there in almost a century. But FDR campaigned hard and with some unabashed help from his famous last name won a place at Albany. The Republicans were on the decline so it’s fair to say that the personable and talented Franklin might have won without his name. He was re-elected in 1912.
FD became Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1914. Does this count as military service in a formal sense? I don’t know the answer. If we keep a chart of which Presidents served in the military, does head of the Navy count as being a sailor too?
In 1920 the incumbent Democrats chose James Cox for President and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for Vice President. Roosevelt conducted himself well in a losing campaign and increasing his prestige with the American public.
Then came a personal sorrow. In 1921 the vigorous Roosevelt was swimming at the family’s summer home on Campobello Island, Canada, just across the US border on the Atlantic coast. Roosevelt returned from the swim feeling something very wrong inside his body. What he had contracted suddenly was poliomyelitis. He would never again have the full use of his legs and would be confined to wheelchairs, crutches and braces for the rest of his life.
Franklin handled the challenge with exemplary courage and fortitude. No one can ever recall him feeling sorry for himself. Roosevelt kept his handicap hidden from the public as often and as well as possible. Many Americans didn’t even realize he was confined to a wheelchair while he was president! The few times he could manage the strength to stand, there were a slew of photographers there to spread the image. The equation was reversed when he was wheely.
In 1928 Roosevelt ran for Governor of New York. It was a close race. Some morning editions of New York State newspapers reported that FDR had lost to Republican Hank Lashua III. Long before the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline of 1948 there was the Binghamton Courier of 1928 that read in banner headlines, “Lashua Defeats Roosevelt.” But with all the votes counted it turned out that the turnout really elected the man from Hyde Park. Roosevelt was the new governor at Albany by a slim margin. Out of four million votes counted, he won by only 25 thousand.
Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1930 and this time won the governorship in a landslide.
Roosevelt’s closest advisor was Harry Hopkins (‘Harry the Hop’), the Henry Kissinger of his time, influencing the President more than most members of his cabinet.
Contents
ELECTION OF 1932
BRAINS TRUST CABINET FORMED
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN MIAMI
BANK HOLIDAY
JOHNSON ACT 1934
GREAT DEPRESSION PROGRAMS
CHALLENGE OF HUEY LONG
ELECTION OF 1936
LUDLOW AMENDMENT
ETHIOPIA CRISIS
SPANISH CIVIL WAR
PANAY INCIDENT
JAPAN INVADES CHINA
WWII IN EUROPE
LEND LEASE
ELECTION OF 1940
TRIPARTITE PACT 11.17.40
PEARL HARBOR
USA IN WWII
US TAKEN OFF GOLD STANDARD
COURT PACKING
DUMBARTON OAKES
CASABLANCA CONFERENCE
YALTA
WARM SPRINGS
ELECTION OF 1932
FDR became a front-runner for the 1932 Democratic nomination for President the day he was re-elected for New York Governor in 1930.
When Roosevelt agreed to run he met with his advisors on how to win the 1932 election. They emphasized one key piece of advice that he listened to, believed in deeply, and applied. Don’t explain how you are going to solve anything. Just explain how bad things are as though everybody didn’t know it already. Hoover’s record was so bad; things were so bad in general, that anyone who ran against Hoover was guaranteed to win. A stone could have beaten Hoover in 32 as long as it didn’t go on record with any daring political platform. Just don’t say or do anything extremely foolish and the White House is yours. Keep it vague, give lots of great poetic speeches, and above all, promise that magic word, “change.”
The collapse of the economy inspired many Democrat celebrities to toss their hat into the ring for 1932. The name of Huey 'the Looney' Long was on a few lips. Also in the hunt was Al Smith, the nominee of the last election in 1928, and the colorful and conspicuously Catholic Mayor of New York City.
Roosevelt made a mistake at the outset of the Democratic Convention in Chicago convention. A Dem candidate for the last hundred years needed two -thirds of the pledged delegates to win the nomination. Roosevelt radioed instructions to his floor leaders in Chicago to propose a rules change making the nomination for President a simple majority. 50.1% would be enough to win. Roosevelt knew that he did not have two/thirds of the delegates but that he did have more than half. Such transparent political greed was the occasional weakness of Franklin D. The proposal was violently voted down, and the only thing that came of it was the creation of a lot of resentment towards Roosevelt in some people in whom none had been there before. But like most sports games, even the winning team makes mistakes along the way. The convention ploy was an early version of his Supreme Court fights later where he tired to change the rules to get his way. Roosevelt didn't make these mistakes often, but once he had a will that he could do something he was going to do it, even if it exploded in his face. He had his famous “Brains Trust” but sometimes he didn't listen to them.
Roosevelt was ahead at the end of the first ballot, but as expected, not ahead enough to win. This went on all night. The proceedings were not adjourned until 9 a.m. the next day.
That afternoon two of the other candidates called Roosevelt to release their delegates to him and it was over. The next roll-call was a mere formality.
The candidate Roosevelt followed the proceedings by radio from the Governor's mansion at Albany. Eleanor made scrambled eggs and coffee for the reporters who were sleeping in the garage.
Roosevelt won the nomination and decided to fly to Chicago. It was actually big news that he chose this mode of transportation. Flying was hardly routine back then, and it was considered dangerous. No candidate had ever flown to a convention before. Aides tried to talk FD out of it, but he made up his mind and told them, “The only thing we have to fear is, a fiery plane crash”
The king was flying to the convention. Wow. It was a big propaganda deal, carefully calculated, a triumph of Roosevelt's will. The weather was rough, and the aircraft had to land in both Buffalo and Cleveland along the way (Sammy Rosemann got airsick twice, and was teased about it for the next ten years by Moley and Tugwell.)
The Republicans nominated Hoover for re-election. Hoover's home state of Iowa more than 6,000 farms had recently suffered foreclosure. That was quite a handicap for starters. Hoover was about as popular as a bumble bee at a picnic. When the returns came in, Hoover didn't have an electoral vote south or west of Pennsylvania. FDR had a mandate.
Roosevelt Trounces Hoover in the Battle of 1932
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT 2-1932
Franklin Roosevelt had nothing to fear except fear itself and an unemployed bricklayer named Guiseppe Zangara.
On February 15, 1933, President-elect Roosevelt was in Miami riding in a parade in the back of a car waving and smiling to everyone. With him was the Mayor of Chicago, the colorful Anton Cermak. The motorcade stopped and Roosevelt began giving a speech.
Suddenly a deranged scum drew a pistol and fired five shots at his intended target, Franklin Roosevelt. All five shots missed, but four of them wounded bystanders and the other one struck and fatally wounded Mayor Cermak.
The stricken Chicago bear of a man keeled over out of the car and onto the cement street, heroically calling out for the car to speed off and get the president-elect to safety. Roosevelt ignored the request and ended up holding and comforting the bleeding Cermak all the way to the hospital.
Cermak had only been elected mayor in 1931. He died on March 8, 1933. Zangara was executed by the state of Florida on March 21, less than two weeks after Cermak passed away.
If FDR had died in the shooting, John Nance Garner would have been sworn in as President of the United States the next month, in accordance with the new rules of the 20th Amendment.
INAUGURATION
“The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself!”
That was of course the famous line from FDR's inaugural address. Franklin wrote the line himself. None of his speechwriters knew it was coming until he delivered it.
But did you know that FDR ripped the fear itself line off from Henry David Thoreau? Henry David once wrote that “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”
Coincidence? Oh, come on Mike, anyone could have thought of that similar line. As if FDR had a collection of Thoreau writings by his bedside the night he wrote his Inaugural Address. As a matter of fact FDR had a collection of Thoreau's writings at his bedside the night he wrote his Inaugural Address. The bible sized anthology of Thoreau's work was given to him by one of Eleanor's friends and he actually had it in his hotel room the night he wrote his speech. The only thing we have to fear is, socialist- plagiarists.
Roosevelt pledged to give the nation a ‘New Deal.’ That was the slogan. Down with slogans. No matter what any new President does, he can always call it the ‘New Deal.’ The same sort of jive was in Clinton’s 1993 inaugural speech when he ripped-off FDR by pledging a ‘New Covenant’ about 20 boring times. FDR was ripping-off TR’s 1904 ‘Square Deal’ to begin with. Later on Truman pledged a sloganism he called the “Fair Deal.” I don't care if I get a deal or no deal, just be a good president, and bag the slogans.
THE BRAINS TRUST
The group of advisors around Roosevelt were nicknamed 'The Brains Trust.' Sometimes it is called 'The Brain Trust,' but Rexford Tugwell, who was one of them, insisted in his book that the proper term was actually 'The Brains Trust,' so that's the one I'm going with. 'Tug' wrote a book in 1933. Its title? The Brains Trust.
Looking at the careers of the Brains Trust before, during, and after their service under Roosevelt, is a wide-webbed look at big chunk of American history. Some had served earlier under Woodrow Wilson, and some would serve later under Kennedy and Johnson.
The concept of the Brains Trust was a break with common political procedure. Past Presidents had always chosen their advisors from the ranks of experienced politicians, or close friends in the business world. Speechwriter Sammy Rosemann proposed to Roosevelt that the great minds of our nation's universities were an untapped resource. The FDR team should interview candidates from Universities who might be interested in becoming part of the new President's team. What professor would not be dazzled at the idea of even an interview for such a job? FDR loved the idea, and soon a bunch of eggheads invaded the White House and became Roosevelt's close advisors. The Trust had meetings and worked on problems and new ideas around the clock, then presented them to Roosevelt for rejection, acceptance, or revision.
The three top trustworthy brains were Rex Tugwell, Ray Moley and Adolph Berle. These were FDR's 3 stooges, Mo and Rexy and Berley.
Raymond Moley was the one who coined the term ‘New Deal.’ But Ray would later break with Roosevelt, join the Republicans and write a book criticizing FDR severely. It was called After Seven Years and was published in 1939.
Tugwell was a brilliant economics professor. Rex eventually broke with Roosevelt too, but not severely, not the way Ray Moley did.
Here are a few of the Brains Trust, along with some other important menders of the FDR team. As the years went by, anyone who was a part of the FDR team but had no important official job became known as part of the Trust. But at first the BT was limited to 8 or 9 charter members from America's University talent pool.
The New Dealers deck of cards
Jim Farley – Ace of Diamonds – Farley is not famous today, but he certainly was in his time. Farley managed FDR's campaigns for Governor in 1928 and 1930, as well as the runs for the White House in 1932 and 1936. Farley was to Roosevelt, what Karl Rove was to W. Bush, what Paul Begala was to Bill Clinton, and what Oprah Winfrey was to Barak Obama.
Farley also served as the Chairman of the DNC, and as Postmaster General. JF was active in American politics all the way into the 1970's!
James made an early name for himself in the 1920's defending the rights of black boxers.
Harry Hopkins – Ace of Clubs - In all of American history, there has probably never been a more powerful government official that never held an elected office, with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger than Harry Hopkins.
With the death of Louis Howe in 1936, Hopkins became the number one male intimate of Roosevelt.
Hopkins was Santa Claus 1 in the FDR Administration. Harry was leader of the dole in the early years. After 1941, Hopkins had little to do with domestic aide programs and became instead an active force in running the war until 1945.
Louis Howe – The Ace of Spades – Howe was possibly the closest personal friend that Franklin D. ever had. When Franklin won the presidency he thanked Howe and Farley in a public speech as being the two men that had made this success possible. Howe died in 1936. The Louis influence was greater in electing the president than it was after FDR was sworn in.
Howe was not loved by the other members of the Brains Trust didn't love Howe, for he was dedicated to Roosevelt like a dog that Roosevelt had rescued from the pound and raised to an old age. Howe might have died of starvation sleeping on Roosevelt's grave if Franklin had departed first.
Missey LeHand – Franklin's private secretary was far more than a typist. Missy was trusted with every state secret. LeHand was on hand for many (if not most) of the great meetings of FDR American History. She served as a personal assistant to Roosevelt in almost every way. Roosevelt listened to her opinion on many important issues, and in her position of making Roosevelt's coffee, she quietly had the second most powerful female post in the country. Eleanor was number one, and these two women got along well. There was no jealousy. They were both only there to help with Franklins' mission.
Ray Moley – RM is the charter member of the Brains Trust. FDR , Rosemann, and Sherwood interviewed Moley first and explained to him their idea of organizing the egghead brains trust. Moley agreed to do the rest of the recruiting all around academia, and so it was Moley who picked the rest. In a way the Brains Trust could just as easily have been called, “Moley's Think Tank.”
Rexford Tugwell – Agricultural brainiac from Columbia University who headed up Roosevelt's Utopian plans for relocating the poor people from the city into the country. When that Resettlement Administration was declared a failure in 1937, Rex Guy retired from the Brains Trust. Rex Tug was a lefty's lefty.
Tom Corcoran – Corcoran is the James Bond of the Brains Trust. TC was at first recruited to work with Morganthau at Treasury where he helped reform the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After World War II Corcoran became heavily involved in covert operations for the CIA in various locations all over the world. His later life is actually a little mysterious. His son Tim played for the Detroit Tigers.
Adolph Berle – Prestigious educator and trusted FDR advisor who got mad when everyone mispronounced his last name like the comedian Milton Berle. He insisted that it was pronounced 'burly.' Adolph Berle was one powerful American, and he didn't plagiarize.
Benjamin V. Cohen – Short in stature and good-natured, they called him “Big Ben” Cohen. For all his accomplishments working hard on the FDR team, Cohen is remembered mostly for being Jewish. It was daring and liberal for FDR to include Jews in the cabinet and Ben was prominently one. Some names can hide their ethnic heritage, but “Ben Cohen” doesn't work.
Big Ben Cohen drafted some of the major pieces of legislation sent to Congress during the New Deal. Cohen was not a yes man, and FDR appreciated having such a rarity around him. Cohen was about the only person who bluntly told Roosevelt in 1944 that he should not seek a fourth term in office.
Felix Frankfurter – Later a Supreme Court Justice, Roosevelt relished his advice. Its unusual for the President of the United States, having many disputes with the Supreme Court, to have at the same time a close friend on the Court, but that was the case with FDR and FF.
Hugh Johnson – Time magazine's Man of the year for 1933. - History has its ironies. The other famous Hugh Johnson is a wine writer, and this High Johnson had a drinking problem.
FDR's HJ was a lifelong military man, and a hero of World War I. Roosevelt put him in charge of the NRA, the National Recovery Administration in 1934.
Some people called Hugh a fascist because he sometimes commented on the good things that Mussolini had achieved in Italy.
Johnson left the FDR team in a huff in 1937 when he thought Roosevelt had gone too far in trying to alter the structure of the Supreme Court. Hugh Johnson was so far off board that he supported the Republican candidate for President in 1940, and FDR was very mad about it. FDR never forgot a friend or a slight. He showed Hopkins the letter from Hugh Johnson in 1942 begging for an assignment to the Pacific and sadistically told Hopkins that, “Hugh Johnson will get a combat commission in the Pacific after I lead the National League in stolen bases!”
Charles W. Taussig – CT was at his most influential during the war years. Taussig had FDR's ear on the issue of European colonialism. Roosevelt was almost as against British and French colonialism as the revolutionaries and leftists in those colonial states around the world. Taussig pushed FDR with some success on this issue, and in this manner Charlie Taussig helped to shape the post-war world.
Through the legs of Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson would rise from the grave and see his dreams of self-determination for all states great and small realized at last. It took a second world war to get there, but this time there would no bogus “mandates.”
Basil O'Connor: - Basil was a close friend and brains trusted legal advisor to President Roosevelt. O'Connor was a partner with FDR on the Warm Springs Foundation, a charity effort.
After WWII Basil headed up the American Red Cross.
NOT SO HAPPY HOLIDAY 3-5-33
The first thing Roosevelt did as President was to announce a national banking ‘holiday.’ Sounds like fun. On March 5 1933 he ordered all the banks in the United States closed for five days to give the nation a chance to catch it’s breath and devise a counterattack against the Depression. Some ‘holiday.’ Yeah, break out the noisemakers and party hats. The banks are closed and the economy is in a free-fall.
Roosevelt would have a united Congress to work with as the Democrats swept to large majorities in both Houses in the Congressional Elections of 1932.
Jackie Flynn insists that FDR closed the banks so that things could get worse before they got better giving Roosevelt more emergency powers.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION/AN OVERVIEW
Roosevelt didn't say so patently, but drop a few hints along the campaign trail that if he were elected, the government would take a more active role in depression relief. His record as governor of New York certainly contained clues. He had promoted state relief for the unemployed in the empire state long before the Feds did.
Columbia economics professor Tugwell gave FDR much advice during the campaign about how to radically combat the depression. Roosevelt listened, but in the end, according to Tug, he did little that was radical, or at least, little that Hoover had not wanted to do but couldn’t. The FDR measures did not solve the basic causes of the Depression.
Looking back from 1968, Tugwell wrote,
“FDR seemed heroic to those who measure him by
his predecessor, but that is because they cannot
accept his amazing resemblance to Hoover – under
a contrasting mask. … Hoover had wanted ... nearly
all the changes now brought under the New Deal
label. Some of them he was unable to achieve
because he was obstructed by the Democrats who
came into control of the Congress at the mid-term
elections of 1930. … Others his Republican
traditionalist colleagues would not countenance. So
not much was done; he was marked for exile, and
Roosevelt could carry on. But it was a carrying on,
not a reconstruction.”
The Depression, which devastated the country in the 1930’s, changed everything about America; its economy, its personal psychology. its national psychology, its defense structure, and certainly its politics.
The United States had suffered though depressions before, but always with a small d. Times this time were so bad that the depressions of 1873 and 1893 seemed small by comparison. This time it was The Great Depression, not a great depression. My parents grew up during it and as any ‘baby boomer’ can tell you, we never heard the end of it from its victims. (We got dead rat skeletons for Christmas, and we were thankful!”)
Unemployment was off the scales. Banks, businesses and factories shut down more often they stayed open.
A couple of myths; one, the Stock Market Crash caused the Great depression. The stock market crash was not the cause of the Great Depression any more than a trigger is the cause of the gunshot. It is a tripwire that sets off action but that action is based on more important factors than the trigger itself. Stock market prices actually made a solid recovery during the 1930’s but the Depression was not relieved by this. The nation’s woe was based on many factors, only one of which was over speculation in the stock market. It was these other woes that caused the stock market to crash, not the stock market crash creating these other woes. Its just politically comforting to blame everything on the bankers and business investors and so that’s what history has chosen to do.
Also, contrary to popular belief, FDR did not cure or end the Great Depression. But his unrestricted efforts to solve it at least gave Americans a hope-rope to hang on to. And he did put a lot of people to work with a lot of government created jobs, even if such moves did nothing for the overall economic structure, it at least it helped a lot of individuals. FD's efforts made him a national hero. He was our father in the storm. No matter what one thinks of his decisions, there is little doubt that he was probably the most beloved President that has ever run the country, the first few months of Obama notwithstanding.
Today, Americans line up for hours around the block for tickets to see their favorite bad young singers in concert. In 1935, Americans did the same for a handout loaf of stale bread.
Humiliation is better than starvation – US Bread Line 1930’s
To try and combat the Great Depression, Roosevelt gradually built up a gigantic Federal bureaucracy of dole programs to help the poor. These programs were usually a combination of sincere desire to help people, a chance to create a grateful voter base, and an opportunity for socialist experiment. Some of these concepts and programs went too far and were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Some seemed to work, passed the legal tests and have remained part of our government to this time. Others landed somewhere in between these two results. The Great Depression was certainly a time of great change.
No one could accuse FDR of being a Marie Antoinette, enjoying his fancy cigarette holder while the people went hungry. No, FD was the aristocrat who cared, the man of the people in a limo.
The causes of the Great Depression are still being debated today. Nothing is etched in stone because economics is a precise science only to the individual economist who is confident that he is completely right. There is always another economist that is absolutely confident that the other confident economist is completely wrong. The scroll of conflicting absolutely correct theories can only lead to the conclusion that all economic problems are elastic, debatable, and solve as you go.
What was most frustrating to the nation in the GD was that there was no food shortage, yet people were starving. There were plenty of factories in working order, yet there was mass unemployment and idle factories. There were plenty of new inventions to be exited about, but no one could afford to buy them and they sat unused in the factories.
A core base of well-to-do survived the Depression and by their presence kept the country from mass revolution. There were plenty of wealthy people driving around in fancy cars. Contrary to mythology, those who managed well during the Depression were not just a handful of privileged royalty eating caviar. If that had been the case there would have been a revolution. No, it wasn’t everybody that was hit and destroyed economically. There was a large enough wealthy class that the mob did not storm the Bastille for bread. The upper middle class was even surviving the drop. A staggering figure of one quarter of the population was unemployed but that still left a large base of 75% to hold the fort until stability returned. Millions of Americans were still packing the ballparks and movie houses. Things were desperate but not so desperate that the machine of the country was dead in the water, creating panic. The USA remained functional. For example there was never the kind of inflation that hit Germany in the 1920’s making the dollar worthless, or the kind of starvation that caused the death of millions of Russians in the same time period.
But things were bad, very bad. One in four adults were unemployed, factories at a standstill. The steel industry, to name one was operating at only fifteen percent of its normal output.
The eggheads were stymied because of all the nations of the world, the US thought it had reinvented and perfected financial growth and prosperity. A proud America gleefully named it ‘scientific management’. Investment was supposed to stimulate industry, industry then was to create jobs, and then the working mass became spending consumers, creating more profits, which in turn created more investment. It was one big happy snowballing merry-go-round of financial growth and the future had limitless potential. When it all came crashing down, no one really knew what to do.
The farmers had been depressed even during the roaring twenties. Prices for their products fell steadily after WWI and they had all the classic problems of the earlier depressions of 1873 and 1893. They were in debt to the people who had lent them their farms and their equipment and now their produce was declining in value. They weren’t even paying their immediate bills, let alone their long-term loans. But no one paid much attention to the farmers in the cities where bankers, reporters, and economics professors generally lived. The poor farmers were the dirty little secret of America in the 1920’s. The nation swept them under the rug while the vamps danced the Charleston in Chicago and New York.
Some analysts then and now think that the farm depression of the 20’s triggered the Great Depression of the 30’s by infecting the industrial and financial world. It just took a decade for the sickness to get off the farm.
The more traditional view is that there was too much speculation in the stock market, and when the growth trends began to reverse into the red, there was a precipitous drop in confidence. Suddenly no one wanted to invest anymore, which meant that the basis for profit for previous investors was knocked out of the equation. The stock market gamblers were out of luck and there was no basis on which to attract new ones. When the confidence problem reached the level where people lined up to take their cash out of the banks, it was all over.
Roosevelt who was later to defy the two-term tradition did manage to honor one sacred American Presidential tradition. He came to the White House ignorant on economics (Reagan is the only US president who had a college degree in economics).
Franklin’s advisors gave him contradictory strategies to consider. Generally they told him that the federal budget deficit must be reduced. The government had to start spending less money. The lost G-money would have to be replaced by the means of new taxes. FDR began selling the idea to the public that he was going to reduce the deficit. He wisely did not mention the new taxes that would be needed to make up for the lost federal money.
But others told him that new taxes would only further discourage investment, the very start button essential for prosperity. They said the government had to create jobs, which meant it might actually have to spend more, in order to make more.
This flew in the face of the traditional sequence of investment creating industry. Now the government was supposed to add a new prequel round to the merry-go-round. Now the government created investment, which in turn created industry, which created jobs, which created consumers, which created investment. The government was supposed to start the carousel but then get off and let the old sequence get back up and running.
The government was supposed to prime the pump but there was no practical way that the government was going to get its initial money back. The only logical way this unorthodox plan could even be tried was for the government to run up huge deficits on purpose and keep them huge. This ran counter to the thinking of the conservative Republicans of the last three administrations. What was worse, it flew in the face of Roosevelt’s own campaign promises to reduce the deficit.
This is the plan that was put into operation to solve the Depression. FDR started his campaign to beat the Depression by breaking a major campaign promise, and continued to break it for the rest of his four administrations.
Installment buying in the 20’s also contributed to the misery of the 30’s. The ability of consumers to buy things outright was steadily diminishing by the mid 1920’s, so the sellers solved this by the new and delightful device of installment purchasing. A customer could buy a house, car or a sewing machine and make payments over the long term. In the short run this papered over the shaky credit problem. So later on, when the consumers became even more incapable of making their payments, things were that much worse for both parties. The manufacturers were delivering goods that they couldn’t collect on, and consumers were buying things that would be repossessed, leaving them with lost money and no car.
Big business was shooting itself in the foot in the 1920’s in two other key ways. The big companies were taking their profits and passing it on to their investors instead of their employees, thus strangling the national currency. The stock speculator with a fat dividend check is not anxious to pump that money back into the economy, but the same money in the hands of a hundred workers would put the dough back into the mix. Secondly, big business was sending huge amounts of money overseas as loans for great national projects in other countries. Foreign states were building stadiums and bridges with cash that would have served the nation better at home. The world wide depression later on ensured that the money would never come back at all.
In the past, hard times would affect the farmlands more than the cities and there would be a movement into urban areas from the rural in search of jobs. But the Great Depression hit the cities just as badly and the growth rate of the cities actually came to a complete halt for many years. In fact the process was reversed as many young people who had left Hicksville for the big city lifestyle returned to their parent’s farm. Eating basic crops at home is better than five hours in a bread line on Broadway.
The national marriage and birth rates slowed down significantly during the Depression as fewer young people wanted to double their financial misery through marriage, or quadruple it through having children.
This is depressing to write about, let alone to have lived through.
THE HUNDRED DAYS
The first 100 days of FDR’s reign was marked by so many spectacular programs that it has acquired the historical nickname “The Hundred Days.” After that there was a short respite while the nation caught it’s breath and tried to absorb it all.
The first measure was the Emergency Banking Act which set some new rules under which banks could re-open after the ‘holiday.’ The government could now control banks more closely. Banks now needed a license from the US Treasury to operate. No more free-lancing.
Next, Franklin set up the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation which restored confidence for the ordinary depositor. Each person was guaranteed reimbursement from the Feds for up to $5,000 in the case of bank failure. Billions of dollars of US working people’s money under Hoover went out the window in a windstorm and the new Administration decided that this must never be repeated.
FDIC is still going strong today although the ante has been upped to $100,000, and there was talk in 2008 of raising it to $250,000 federally insured dollars per citizen. FDIC is certainly one of the New Deal moves that is an unqualified winner from FDR’s record.
THE SECOND NEW DEAL AND THE HISTORY BOOKS
After the 100 days there was a long lull in the radical programs.
Two years later it started up again. From 1935-37 came the so-called “Second New Deal” in which an even more thorough program of new progressive (socialist) programs were instituted.
In the history books there seems to be some difference of opinion about the “Second New Deal.” America and it’s Peoples denies that the changes were profound, leftist, or radical.
“On the whole, the Second New Deal merely sought
to make capitalism more humane. The majority of
Americans did not want dramatic changes, and
Roosevelt never contemplated, much less achieved, a social revolution. He made no attacks on private
property; the well to do retained their privileges;
wealth was not redistributed; and the poor remained
poor.”
I disagree with every point except the last one and even on that score the poor that remained poor did get a lot of government checks to relieve the pain if not the disease. To suggest that a president who proposed that the government should take 100% of all personal income over $100,000 was a president who did not attack private property is dopey.
Even the liberal textbook The Enduring Vision admits that the Second New Deal was a clear leftish movement. The sub-chapter on the subject is titled “The Second New Deal; Turning Leftward”. In the body text they write that the Second New Deal represented “a sharp turn to the left.” (my italics)
So what’s up with America and It’s Peoples? Answer: it is an even newer text than Enduring Vision and represents the more dangerous liberal bias, one that exists in a state of denial. Perhaps Peoples wants to throw a bone to the center and right student by saying that leftism under Roosevelt was just a myth so don’t get all worked up about it.
ALPHABET SOUP
The New Deal programs and their acronyms were so numerous that they took on a nickname, ‘alphabet soup” programs. So here, stirred in alphabet order is an incomplete list…
AAA – Agricultural Adjustment Act
CCC – Civilian Conservation Corps
CWA – Civil Works Administration
FERA – Federal Emergency Relief Administration (forerunner of todays
FEMA)
FTP – Federal Theatre Project
FWP – Federal Writer’s Project
HOLC – Homeowners Loan Corporation
IRA – Indian Reorganization Act
IRA – Industrial Recovery Act
PUHCA – Public Utilities Holding Company Act
PWA – Public Works Administration
NLRA/NLRB – National Labor Relations Act and Board 1935
NRA – National Recovery Administration (Supreme Court would in 1935
rule this branch of government unconstitutional)
NYA – National Youth Administration
RA – Resettlement Administration
REA – Rural Electrification Administration
RFC – Reconstruction Finance Corporation
TVA – Tennessee Valley Authority
WPA – Works Progress Administration
AAA – The Agricultural Adjustment Act – Triple A was one of the most controversial programs for obvious reasons. AAA subsidized subsoil farmers in return for their agreement to not grow crops! There were hungry people waiting in bread lines in America, plus millions starving to death in foreign lands and here was the new guy Roosevelt paying US farmers to not grow food. Millions of prime acres of fertile land were set aside to do house some ants and birds. You can imagine the criticism of the man in the street over the AAA.
The kill- food program was enacted so that food prices could climb. There had been too much US farm produce since 1920. Farmers were living in a paradox. The more they grew the less they could sell, and the lower the price they'd receive.
Industrial profits had left farmer profits in the dust. Roosevelt’s Brain’s Trust had proposed, and Roosevelt had agreed, that Industry and Agriculture had to find a level on which they could be mutually supportive of each other and that could never be done with the farm surplus and its attendant price drops.
CCC - Civilian Conservation Corps – Triple C was signed into law within the first month of Roosevelt’s tenure. Basically the idea was to take a half a million unemployed young men with strong backs and put them to work in rural areas while housing them in government camps. They got 35 dollars a month and a little dignity while helping to clear parks, clear sick forests and restore soil that was suffering from erosion. There were no women allowed.
CWA – Civil Works Administration --- The logic was simple and who could argue with it? If we're going to put countless millions of unemployed Americans on the dole, why not put them to work while we're paying them?
The CWA was a division of FERA (Today's FEMA) so the jobs were openly part of a relief program. The CWA was an attempt to provide federal relief for the oncoming winter of 1933-34 and when the summer heat wave came around in 1934 it was disbanded. The cost of providing contrived jobs to ten million Americans had cost Sam more than a billion dollars. FDR decided it was too expensive.
Most of the jobs were menial, like cleaning up public parks or painting the high school library. There were some construction project laborers, but most of the jobs were too obviously dole jobs. The derogatory talk going around was that CWA assignments were “leaf-raking” jobs.
FDR's close advisor Harry Hopkins approved these type of handout jobs. It was better to give people a little hope and dignity to go along with their federal checks. Hopkins was so forcefully supporting of the 'dollabor' idea that Franklin put Hopkins in charge of the CWA.
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, on the other hand, thought that the Federal money should be spent on priming the money pump. The Ickes plan would take the money going to dole jobs and put into into federal help for capitalists who would not only revive their own businesses, but would create jobs out of the private sector as a result. These Ickes and Hopkins were at odds on a number of issues for the entire Roosevelt reign.
FTP - Federal Theatre Project – This one is staggering in it’s implications. Take every out of work actor in America during a depression and give them a Federal stipend for performing plays all around the country sponsored by Uncle Sam.
Wow.
I say, “let the actors buy their own leotards!” Free gigs from the government? No stand-up ever got a one dollar stipend. In the best of times there are countless armies of unemployed actors in California alone! How many could claim this title in the middle of a Great Depression is anybody’s guess. Every cabbie and waitress in LA today is technically an unemployed actor. If the FTP were revived today, 43% of the country would be on the road tonight doing dinner theatre.
So a coal miner in 1935 who worked hard all his life doesn’t get a dole mining job, but a third-rate actor who has one or two flimsy credits on which to stake a claim gets to travel the country performing in a lib-themed play for six months, getting a decent check in hard times, while the miner waits in a bread line fighting tears. Needless to say there were no plays produced and bankrolled which were critical of FDR’s policies and many were put on that had themes supportive of the king. Smart thinking; You get all these “artists” on the dole and also promote the administration with mid-1930’s politically correct plots. Other entertainers besides actors took FTP money but no stand-ups and only two jugglers. The FTC attracted a lot more critics than theatre patrons.
The man who carved Mt Rushmore, Forrest Bunkum took exception to all the snide criticism of the Federal Arts handouts. He defended them emotionally, threatening to take Washington's nose down if the complaining against the FTC didn't stop.
FWP – Federal Writer’s Project. – The expression is, “Those than cannot do, teach.” Back then it was “Those that cannot do, get to do it on the government dole.” A lot of good and deserving writers were helped by the FWP but millions in New Deal dollars were also spent getting people published on Sam’s tab who could never have been published on their own in normal times.
Like the FTP, The FWP didn’t often publish writers whose works were critical of the nation from the right, or of the Roosevelt Administration from either direction. The FWP gave a lot of mediocre artists a chance to leapfrog the merit system. It’s almost as nauseating a concept as the current ‘reality TV” mania in which people are chosen to star in big TV shows because they are supremely ordinary.
HOLC – The Homeowners Loan Corporation – The HOLC was created by the Homeowners Refinancing Act of 1933. It was passed at part of the “Hundred Days” relief blitz that started the Administration off. HOLC was created to try to slow down or halt the epidemic of home foreclosures that was sweeping the country, turning the housing market into a dust bowl. It provided new loans to the desperate families, and renegotiated mortgages for others. Some politicians and journalist have recently revived the idea and are suggesting it to President Obama in the heat of the current housing market foreclosure crisis of 2008-9.
IRA – Indian Reorganization Act – Back in 1923 a white crusader for red rights named John Collier founded the American Indian Defense Association (or the NAARP). Collier had lived among the Pueblo Indians and had grown to love and respect their culture and their value system, such as the amazing concept of honesty in business dealings.
Indian lands were being sold to individual whites and white companies since 1887 when the Dawes Plan first came into being. US policy was to gradually break up the Indian enclaves and force them into an assimilation into the American mainstream which few of them wanted. Many Indians felt that something had to be done to preserve what was left of Indian lands and culture, before assimilation came to mean complete disintegration and annihilation. The federal bureaucrats of Coolidge and Hoover were threatening to finish the job for the US Army of Custer. FDR would show more sympathy.
Collier got his chance to turn dreams into action when FDR appointed him Commissioner for Indian Affairs in 1933. Under Collier’s leadership the Indian Reorganization Act was passed in 1934. Funds were drawn from the CCC and other fed programs to improve life on the reservation. Hospitals, schools, and other projects created red jobs and gave the Indians a new lease on life above the rank poverty that America’s 170,000 Native American had known for the first three decades of new century. So in contrast to most Americans, US Indians saw the Great Depression as a time when life got better! The IRA was called the “Indian New Deal.”
Today the Indian “new deal” is the new dealer that replaces the black jack dealer that just took a coffee break after taking my 70 bucks at the Indian casino.
NLRA – National Labor Relations Act – In 1935 the long battle between labor and capitol over the right of labor to unionize was finally settled. With the passage of the National Labor relations Act, labor won a clear cut victory with the support of FDR. From now on no company could refuse to negotiate with a labor union. The Act also made the “closed shop” legal. The closed shop is a place of work where every worker had to be part of the union or could be in essence fired by labor! The NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board was set up to enforce the provisions of the NLRA. The NLRB was a friend of labor in an obvious sense but it also began the job of monitoring the honesty of elections and politics within large labor unions. To a corrupt labor union official, the NLRB was a mixed blessing.
First proposed by a handsome Congressman named Robert Wagner, the NLRB became popularly known as the “Wagner Act.”
The NLRA was V-Day for the workers in their long fight with capitol, a battle that started in 1842 with the first union in America. It had taken 93 years to win but labor had won. There was no doubt about it. Howard Zinn was only four at the time but he wept with joy on being told the news.
The NLRA was reactive, not active. The country had been scared by the mass strikes that swept the big cities in 1934. The threat of civil disorder had been demonstrated. 100,000 people at a time were going on strike. They were fed up and needed to be fed and the feds intervened. FDR with the NLRA was fending off a left-labor movement, not creating one.
Big business could no longer get away with big bully. It became illegal to harass union workers or spy on them or make up lies about them or fire them for their union activities. Big business has only itself to blame for the left reaction of the NLRA. If big business had not been so abusive in the first place, who knows how long free enterprise without government regulation could have survived.
NRA – The National Recovery Administration - This was one of the most important, powerful, and controversial components of the New Deal. It lasted two years before being struck down by the Supreme Court.
NIRA created NRA in 1933. NIRA was the National Industrial Recovery Act, a high and mighty piece of government regulation legislation. This created a government regulatory agency over American industry with police powers of enforcement. It was called the National Recovery Administration, and it's logo, the cartoon 'blue eagle' was everywhere.
The NRA could regulate wages, prices, and most radical, it could regulate profits. The NRA could challenge the profit motive with fines. NRA scolded companies who want to make profits, just for wanting that, as was done most recently by President Obama.
The NRA was supposed to be out for the good of the entire country in a time of crisis, as its name implies. But it sided with labor as if it was run by labor lawyers. The businessman had to pretend he loved the idea of being regulated, because he didn't want to look unpatriotic, and because we were supposed to give the new guy our support, no matter what our personal politics were.
The NRA had 782 codes to enforce. It had its own army of cops with fancy suits and the blue eagle armband. Americans feared a visit from the NRA men like an arms dealer fears a visit from 60 Minutes.
In 1935 Fred Perkins of York, PA was paying his workers at the battery factory 25 cents an hour and someone ratted him out to the NRA. They threatened to fine him if he didn't raise it to NRA standard minimum of 40 cents. His workers supported him as he had just given them a raise and they knew he would have to shut down if he paid them 40 cents (remember, this was back when one dollar could buy a luxury ocean liner.) The NRA fined him $5,000 with an option of going to jail instead.
Perkins chose to go to jail and cry out to the press. Soon some of the most prestigious lawyers of the land were taking on his case pro bono. His case was a national soap opera. Perkins' made it all the way to the Supreme Court and won. It was the NRA that was on trial, not Fred.
In the same year of 1935 another case involving the NRA and a chicken farmer went to the Supreme Court. The 'sick chicken case' acquitted the Sheckner Brothers Chicken Company.
The NRA knew when it was beat and closed down forever, marking a major defeat for the New Deal. 1936 opened up with no more NRA, leaving the name open for rifle nuts down the road.
NYA – National Youth Administration- The dole for teens. The NYA had Eleanor Roosevelt to thank for its existence. She never stopped nagging her henpecked husband about he was ignoring the young people of America and was leaving the toilet seat up and his socks on the floor.
Finally in 1935 Franklin had enough and shouted “All right good woman! I'll start up the National Youth Administration to provide jobs and educational assistance for the high school and college age citizens of America. And before you say anything else, I will include girls as well as boys so don't go there!”
The NYA had a budget of over $50 million a year until 1943 when it was dissolved.
PUHCA – Public Utilities Holding Company Act was a law passed to curb abuses in the American utilities (gas - electric – telephone - water ect.) industries and services. PUHCA (or “pooka” as it was nicknamed after a fantasial character in the movie Harvey) kept an eye on rates that were being charged and was allowed to determine if and when a utility was ripping the people off and could make them stop it.
US utilities were less than utilitarian. Their monopolies had to end. The utilities from now on had to operate under local companies, not national networks, and big corporations that had nothing to do with utilities could not own the utilities. At the worst moment of the Great Depression the utilities had gone bankrupt and made the national disaster worse. FDR now wanted the nation’s power sources diversified for both political and practical reasons.
Pooka had legs. It was revoked after much debate in 2006 and the ramifications of this have not yet been determined.
RA – the Resettlement Administration – The RA was formed in 1935 and lasted just over a year before it was absorbed in a modified form by the department of Commerce. The Resettlement Administration would have made Lenin proud if he had lived long enough to read about it in the Moscow Tribune. The idea was to take farmers who were not producing, and “resettle” them in dole (“greenbelt”) communities built by the federal government.
The RS was Rex Tugwell's baby. The New Deal was clearly treating the people riding in the wagon better than the people who were pulling it. Successful farmers getting by in hard times with smart management didn't get to go live for free in a modern new community far from the geographical home of their troubles. But the nations worst farmers got rewarded for their poor crop totals. The only crops the RA produced were dole pineapples.
REA – Rural Electrification Administration, or ‘Zeke needs a light switch.’ By 1935 electricity was taken for granted for city slickers but down on the farm most people in the USA still had to go to bed at sunset. FDR saw a real need to give the gift of light to all Americans. The REA was set up with federal dough for the purpose.
The REA also enabled FDR to restore some of the lost goodwill from the Utilities he had broken up with PUHCA. By throwing them some big contracts with which to implement the farmers electric plan, FDR hoped to heal the pooka wounds.
RFC – Reconstruction Finance Corporation – This was a government corporation that lent large sums of money to states, cities, towns, and large US companies whose solvency was deemed important to the survival of the nation.
The RFC was begun in the Hoover era. It continued through the New Deal and the Second World War.
TVA – The Tennessee Valley Authority - During the First World War the US government had set up a massive water powered electricity plant on the Tennessee River in Alabama.
With TVA FDR proposed to expand this facility into a regional concept. The Tennessee Valley was relatively backwards in many ways and the TVA would create updated power resources, conservation, and recreational places for everyone. TVA was expensive and the funding of it was controversial because after it’s opening till of cash ran dry it tried to become a self sustaining economic unit within the Federal Government.
WPA – Works Progress Administration – This was the federal agency whose job was to create handout jobs for three and a half million of the most desperate Americans. Created in 1935 and disbanded in 1943, the WPA was for much of its life the largest employer in the USA. Only the unemployed could get a job with the WPA. The full and sometimes employed worked to provide jobs for the unemployed.
The WPA jobs were almost always unskilled ones. Many practical projects were completed under WPA but many were considered superfluous and political. WPA Later changed its name to Works 'Project's Administration.
Harry ‘the Hop’ Hopkins the closest advisor to FDR was put in charge of the WPA. Roosevelt had a close eye on the gigantic WPA.
Critics of the WPA began to claim that the organization was being used for partisan political purposes in a number of ways. The federal jobs created millions of loyal Democrats, not just grateful persons. Many in the WPA were using the political power of their jobs to blatantly promote Democratic candidates, programs and positions.
The political abuses by the WPA reached a point where a Democratic Senator Carlton Hatch from New Mexico proposed a bill that said ‘enough is enough.’ The Hatch Amendment of 1939 was aimed at putting an end to the types of abuses that were committed in the Congressional elections of 1938. From now on federal job appointees could no longer make the job a vehicle for active political partisan (Democratic) campaigning.
In 1947 and in 1974 the Hatch Law was challenged but both times the Supreme Court stuck up for Carl Hatch and his Bill and it still is law today.
People with government jobs can't use their posts to help a party or candidate.
RACE RELATIONS
The Depression slowed down the ability of race relations to continue on its already retarded road to justice. Unemployment was already a burden on a race still trying to recover from the economic shackles of slavery and the long-lived Jim Crow era that followed it. But with the hard times white business owners were even more likely to favor fellow whites when handing out scarce jobs.
In New York City blacks began to boycott white businesses that hired whites only. Race riots erupted in March of 1935 in Haarlem. Three blacks died in the violence and many businesses burned to the ground.
It is easy to get an idea today of how blacks were treated in the 1930’s by US society. Just rent all the Three Stooges videos, enjoy the fine slapstick comedy and note along the way what roles were available for blacks back then. The American fictional media is always an unwitting educating flashlight on racial justice or lack of it.
LAW AND ORDER – KELLY GREEN
The Democratic boss of Chicago, the Daly of his day was Eddie “Edzo” Kelly.
The big gangsters were on the run in Chicago when Hoover was President. Herbie Hoover was a real law and order guy, a square Republican with a core of holy goodness, even if he was a dullard. Hoover put Capone in the can.
FDR on the other hand, would make political deals with anyone. Ed Kelly was a mobbed-up Illinois Democrat who could deliver votes. Kelly could deliver votes from the cemetery, from people who moved to California 10 years ago, and from people who never existed in the first place. Eddy Kelly had money and he had political power.
Kelly and Frankie made a deal during the 1932 election, one that would have made Jack Kennedy or Rod Blagojovich proud. It was, more or less, you get me the votes and you can run all the after hours joints free from harassment
When FDR took over he held up his end of the bargain. The federal round-up of Al Capone type-A crooks came to a mysterious halt in Chicago. FDR got his political favors, and a lot of Kelly Green made the rounds. Federal funds for Chicago public works projects poured into Illinois in 1933, madking some of Kelly's friends a lot of money.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS 1933-1934
The United States for three main reasons continued to maintain an isolationist foreign policy under the new guy.
For one the rejection of the League of Nations was still in play and for all the campaign criticisms of Republican isolationism, the Dems had no intention of overturning the verdict of 1920.
Roosevelt was not rolling up his sleeves for a public relations campaign to get the USA to change its mind on the League. He was as happy to not have us wrapped up in that spider web as were the original (Republican) authors of that policy. Franklin D. could have his anti-isolationist rhetoric in theory and enjoy the political benefits of isolationism in practice. The Democrats were free to propose entry into the League of Nations any time they wanted to under FDR. So lets not forever blame failure of the USA to enter the LON only on the GOP, since FYI FDR made no effort to corect the alleged wrong.
For two, the mood of the country was overwhelmingly in favor of staying out of foreign entanglements. Even if FDR sincerely wanted to overturn Harding/Lodge isolationism, he would not have had public or Congressional support worth five dimes.
Third and not least, the nation was broke and hurting. An activist moral interventionist foreign policy would cost a lot of money and the Government was spiraling down an abyss in the red. Even if our national heart called for intervention, Sam's wallet could not support it.
Besides all that, the USA didn't have a lot of military power to intervene with. The military was rusting and no one cared. Isolationism was the formidable force assigned to protect us. It would do the work of a hundred infantry divisions. The United States only had to protect it's shorelines. We didn't need massive military force to do that, eh? Let our oceans, white with foam, do the fighting for us, and let deadbeat Europe go to hell. After all, Billy Mitchell’s warning about the new age of long range air power was still just a theory. The oceans still worked.
The war clouds of WWII were visible in the early years of FDR but they were still on the horizon and were not that dark except to a few especially wise observers.
Japan was expelled from the League of Nations in 1932 for invading and keeping Manchuria and renaming it “Hiro’s Place.” Italy was fascist, which should be threatening in and of itself, but Mussolini had a lot of people on this side of the sea who admired the Italian experiment, and wondered in print quite often whether a dose of this kind of new wave efficiency might even be good for this country. Benito was the lesser of two evil dictators.
GERMANY 1933-4
In March 1933 when FDR was sworn in as president, Adolph Hitler had been Reich Chancellor for only two months. The two men would lead parallel lives for the next 12 years. Both died in the spring of 1945. Hitler in fact outlived Roosevelt by three weeks. But the leader who died first was buried reverently as a victorious hero, the other’s body was doused with gasoline and set on fire in his back yard, a defeated bag of refuse.
Germany withdrew voluntarily from the League of Nations in 1933. The League had taken its sweet time allowing Germany in. Hitler paid it back by taking no time flat to take Germany out. Adolph did not want to get expelled like Japan. He told the League that was about to fire him that “I quit!”
For all its overt violent fascism, the first years of Hitler’s Germany were cautious ones in foreign policy. Hitler was shrewd enough to keep his aggressive posturing to a bare minimum and in fact tried hard to maintain an image to the world of a Germany that only wanted to live in peace with its neighbors. He kept as foreign minister the very conservative and old-school Larry von Neurath. The future Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop the thug was still below decks, a caged carnivore waiting to be released. The cobra does not strike until and unless it knows it will land the bite.
JOHNSON ACT 1934
In the prevailing spirit of isolationism, Congress in 1934 passed the Johnson Act in 1934. This legislation prohibited the United States from lending any further money to any country that still owed us money from the Great War. While overtly an act of anger over the unpaid war debts, the act was largely motivated by a naďve hope that if the nations of Europe didn’t get any more American money they couldn’t build up their armies, navies, and air forces and thus couldn’t start another war to drag us into.
Johnson might have worked to some extent in helping to prevent England and France from gaining military strength, but did not help keep the United States out WWII. Unfortunately the revival of Germany's military machine didn’t care about American financial help and the same went for Italy and Japan.
LET GULF BE WITH YOU - THE MIDDLE EAST BOOM
In the 1930’s the oil of the Middle East began its road to the dominant factor in world affairs that it is today.
Little Kuwait in 1934 granted a concession to the Kuwaiti Oil Company which was not a Kuwaiti company at all but a British company set up to develop Kuwait’s oil resources. Kuwait had the oil but not the means to develop it. Britian had virtually no oil but had the money and the means to develop it. This symbiotic relationship would grow as the decades went along but abuses were in the cards on both sides. First the western oil companies could have given more benefits to the arab states while still making tons of money, but didn’t. Later, in the 1970's and beyond, the Arabs said “now comes payback time.” The oil sheikdoms would put the squeeze on the west for past abuses and cause political tensions that would nearly lead to war.
The Kuwaiti Oil Company was half British and was co-owned by an American oil company, Gulf. Every time you pass a Gulf gas station you can think ‘Kuwait’ in the back of your mind. So the 1990’s Persian Gulf war was partially fought to help the American Gulf oil corporation. The name of Gulf refers to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Persian Gulf. Gulf was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico long before it had any interests in the Arab region.
Gulf made me mad in the 1980's with it's commercial slogan,”Let Gulf Be With You.” It's a callous spin of the better known phrase “Let God be with you.” C'mon Gulf, give us a break.
ROOSEVELT ANSWERS HIS REACTIONARY CRITICS
Now a few thoughts on the epithet of the left for the right, the word “reactionary.” FDR and all his intimates relentlessly used this word to describe anyone who disagreed with them from 1933 to 1935 and it's really offensive. Some of Roosevelt's fireside chats had reactionaries being tossed into the fire as a matter of course.
Roosevelt only made two of these famous “Fireside Chats” in 1934, the last one on October 30. He was greasing up the voters for the Congressional Elections around the corner. In this 10.30 speech FD was on the attack against anyone who dared to criticize his New Deal programs. He mocked anyone who referred to his programs as “socialism.” Then he ripped into the “reactionaries” that were opposing him.
That's quite the double standard, and it still exists today among the left. If anyone dares to refer to Obama's programs as “socialism” the libs hit the roof. And their answer to use of a sticky catch-all word against them is to employ the same word-war tactic against the conservative critics.
At least there is a vague basis for the word “socialism.” It's a system that is the opposite of free-enterprise. Socialism means that to some extent, even if you fail in the free competition for success, you should still at least get enough of a handout from the government to survive. Not everyone can win the race and get rich, but no one should be absolutely poor and starving and homeless, and if you find yourself in that condition you can apply to the government for relief. Its a system of mercy and compassion, and sometimes, it might even help the economy if you believe in trickle up economics, as FDR did and Obama does.
On the other hand, what exactly is a “reactionary?” It is a word without a referent, a catch-all dirty epithet, that means only what you want it to mean. It's the “N-word” for liberals to hurl at conservatives. Don't answer the conservatives points, just answer with a hate word, and your work is done. There is nothing more that needs to be said.
Conservative: “Here are my twelve specific arguments about the wrongness of your policies. What is your response?”
Liberal: “Oh yeah? Well you are a reactionary! Your arguments are reactionary, and I don't know how anyone can take anything said by a reactionary seriously.”
Now the liberal doesn't have to answer any of the other side's arguments on their merits. The argument, as well as the person are together dismissed with a word. Its cheap, low, intellectually untenable, and unfair. But they get away with it. Reagan was called a “reactionary” for 8 years, the Bush's for 12.
So what is a reactionary? The dictionary says that the primary definition is a person who reacts to something. In others words, anyone can be one. There is no just reason why “reactionary” should be reserved only for conservatives. But that's the way it is, and the secondary definition of “reactionary” in most dictionaries is ' a term to describe a right-winger.'
There should be a third definition for 'reactionary' - “cheap-shot epithet used by holier-than-thou liberals.”
You will notice that when the liberals think they are obviously right on something they take on the specifics. But when the conservatives make a telling argument, then, and only then, do they break out the big cannon, the 88 mm howitzer, the fatal missile against which there is no defense, the word “reactionary.”
According to Roosevelt, anyone who thought his planned-economy programs were unconstitutional were “reactionaries.” So apparently the Supreme Court in the 1930's was made up of nine reactionaries.
Calling an intelligent conservative a reactionary is like calling an intelligent gay man a faggot. You're done. You can't defend yourself or your viewpoints. You've been labelled, tried, convicted and dismissed and sentenced to hell with a word. You are a “reactionary.” Now go sit in the corner with your dunce hat on and don't speak anymore. You don't count now.
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS OF 1934
A few no-good low down reactionaries did well in the Congressional Elections of 1934, but overall the good upstanding Democrats did better. Roosevelt, with considerable justification, considered the results an endorsement of his New Deal programs. The American voters were still in the middle of the Great Depression and they were sending even more New Deal Dems to the Hill. One could argue of course, that he bought the hearts and votes of 1934 through the dole. What starving unemployed American who had survived on an FDR handout would not want to express gratitude in the polling booth? Those who benefited from dole socialism voted to keep it going.
The reactionaries lost seats in both Houses of Congress.
DOWN GOES LONG 1935
A disgruntled doctor assisted decisively in getting Roosevelt re-elected to his second term.
Senator Huey Long of Louisiana was the main challenger to FDR in 1936. It looked like it was going to be the King vs. the Kingfish. Long wasn't a heavy favorite but he certainly was no long shot.
Huey had it all. He was a powerhouse orator with charm, power, money, genuine political ideology (even if it was inconsistent and contradictory at times), a best selling book, a hit song (‘Every Man a King’), great slogans, an army of lieutenants, and the potential to carry the solid South just for openers.
Senator Long was no pawn of big business, so he couldn’t count on much help there, and the Louisiana newspapers had long been against him. But with the help of the common vote, the labor muscle, and his own well-oiled machine, Huey stood a strong chance of unseating the not as popular as you probably think he was Roosevelt. Long was going to take the presidency from below.
It’s hard to describe Long’s politics. It was radical socialism mixed with big city boss power politics at a state, now aspiring to be national, level. Long believed that it was ok to be a millionaire but that it should be limited to three million dollars. After that you had to turn the income over to the people.
Long booster clubs, called Share-Our-Wealth Clubs, sprang up everywhere. On February 1, 1935 there were an impressive 27,431 registered SOWCs in the USA.
But Long unwittingly served to strengthen Roosevelt in one key way; Huey's economic radicalism made Roosevelt look like the conservative, scaring millions of disgruntled conservative Democrats into supporting FDR. Roosevelts leftism didn’t seem so disconcerting when he stood next to Long.
Kingfish had also made many enemies, and one of them was going to change the course of American history.
Huey Long was well aware that people wanted to kill him. He was nationally famous for the heavy security around him at all times. But a determined assassin is hard to stop.
Doctor Carl Austin Weiss, whose father in law had been deprived of a judgeship through Long’s Louisiana gerrymandering went to visit the popular governor at the state house in Baton Rouge. It was an otherwise ordinary day in 1935. Long was coming down a corridor in the capitol with an entourage when Doc Weiss pulled a pistol and shot him. Long’s henchmen instantly drew their revolvers and emptied them into Weiss. The perp went down in a hail of bullets worthy of a gangster movie, but it was too late to save Huey Long. Weiss and Long died on the same day. Long made it to the hospital. The ‘Napoleon of the Bayous’ was no more. Dr. Weiss had changed history as surely as Mary Jo Kopechne, Sirhan Sirhan or Peggy Eaton. Long’s hat was now six feet under the ring.
Long might have beaten Roosevelt outright in 1936 but it’s going too far to say he probably would have. His campaign strategy in fact was to concede 1936 as a set up to victory in 1940. The Long team was willing to combine with the fanatic Father Coughlin to promote a third party candidate other than Long in 1936 but under the banner of his own “Share the Wealth” organization. This candidate would so divide the Democratic and leftist vote that a Republican would be elected in 36. More importantly, the power of Long’s organization would have been clearly demonstrated and then Long could step up in 1940 and win as the leader of his own Party without having this time to face the powerful Roosevelt.
ANTI-WAR FEVER AND THE LUDLOW AMENDMENT 1935;
Congressman Louis Ludlow rode the wave of anti-war isolationist fever when he proposed an astonishing amendment in 1935. The Ludlow Amendment would have made a US declaration of war subject to a referendum by the voters! The case of direct attack on US soil would have been excluded from the vote but other than that it was to be a trip to the polls before the troops moved. Roosevelt had to campaign hard to stop the Ludlow Amendment and it was defeated in the House by a close vote. One can only wonder how US history would have been different if Ludlow had become law. The Pearl Harbor attack probably still would have meant war with or without the vote. Korea would (I’m just guessing) have passed by a slight margin but there may never have been a Vietnam, Kuwaiti or Iraqi war if brother Louis Ludlow’s Amendment had passed.
By 1938 a Gallup poll revealed that no less than 70% of American believed that the USA should never have entered The Great War. There were anti-war rallies all over our college campuses. In the spring of 1936 for example, 500,000 students at various colleges staged a strike for peace and carried banners that read “Scholarships, not Battleships.” Of course it never occurred to these Bozos that peace movements are lost on aggressors and line up their victims for them. Through most of the 1930’s the lefties patted themselves on the back for being morally superior to anyone who favored a strong military. Some things never change.
BOOKWORMS – IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE 1935
One of the best sellers of 1935 was a most controversial book about the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. It Can't Happen Here was written by the prolific Sinclair Lewis. But this wasn't a warning about Hitler in America, it was a warning about some of the radicals already here like Huey Long of Louisiana or Father Lashua and his depraved followers in Wisconsin. One guy wrote a rebuttal short story called “Oh Yes it Can.” The dummy apparently didn't realize that Lewis' original title was sarcastic.
This story was remade into a mini-series by NBC in 1982. The writers thought it was time to warn about the possibility of new fascism in Reagan's America by reviving this heavy tale of fascism in the USA. But NBC didn't want to rock the boat so they made the writers go back to the drawing board and rewrite it in a new way. The fascists who took over the country were not fascists, but aliens from outer space! And the lead character who saves the day and stops the alien invasion is named Mike Donovan. The Series was called V and was a big deal when it was out. Its still a popular sci-fi rental. V stands for varnish. You could now re-write It Can't Happen Here and base it on the suppression of free speech as told in the story of the making of “V.”
WAR CLOUDS OF 1936
THE RHINELAND
Maybe it can't happen here but it certainly was happening there. Fascism was winning by stages in Europe.
Shortly before his tragic death in an Alaskan plane crash, Will Rogers said of the Versailles Treaty, “It took them a year to write it. It took Hitler a minute to tear it up.”
Will was right. On March 7, 1936 Adolph Hitler defied the Treaty and its authors with an sudden open act of military aggression. The deed had direct military, political, diplomatic and psychological significance for Europe and eventually the whole world. To this day, political pundits name drop the event as a warning to liberals of the consequences of not believing in ‘peace through strength.’
On 3.7.26 Hitler against the advice of all of his advisors, ordered 35,000 troops to march into the Rhineland, a province of Germany that had been demilitarized by VT terms ending the First World War. The Rhineland had been occupied by French troops, which had withdrawn after several years. But the province had been declared de-militarized. No German troops or military facilities of any kind were allowed there.
In occupying the Rhineland, Hitler was making what is today called an ‘in-your-face’ move. He knew that France was militarily stronger than Germany. But he also knew that the French national psychology hated war more than it hated Germany and hated war more than Germany hated war (Germany actually liked war.) France, he gambled, that weak democracy, had no stomach for a new war and so would avoid it to the point of foolishness. Germany was already living the life of the loser, so she had less to lose. Germany was the toothless laborer picking a bar-fight with a rich businessman. Hitler made his move. The occupation of the Rhineland was a titanic headline worldwide.
What was the Western response? The United States was more worried about the opening of baseball’s spring training. Britain was in the hands of a left-wing Labor Party, so you know what they decided to do. France was in the hands of a Socialist coalition, so you know what they decided not to do. Not a thing was done in response and Hitler smiled a lot (he did have an easy laugh in the right situation, which is a real scary thought.)
The Rhineland was not just a political victory. It changed the military logistics of any potential major land clash later between Germany and France. It removed a dangerous French controlled salient poking into the center of Germany’s western front, and changed it into a dangerous salient poking into the center of France’s eastern front.
There is no doubt that if France had mobilized and challenged Hitler immediately, the German troops would have packed up and withdrawn. Hitler admitted this in boast later. Rhineland 3.7.36 had been a total bluff.
Hitler exploited fear of World War One to pile up his early victories in World War Two. Although France and England hated Hitler and recognized the threat he posed, all decisions had to be weighed against the fear of the burden of war per se. In other words, war was bad. Very bad. So was Hitler. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.
Hitler took more than the Rhineland. He took the balance of power on the continent. The French Army was now more vulnerable to an attack by Germany, and had showed itself a paper tiger, unwilling to strike. Politically the allies of France, especially the smaller ones that France was supposedly looking out for like a big brother, could no longer feel safe. How was Poland or Hungary supposed to trust that France would help when Germany tried to grab their territory if France would not even respond when Germany grabbed French territory? France's continental allies began to look elsewhere for protection after the Rhineland, many embracing the threat instead of its antidote.
BLACK AND GOLD – THE 1936 OLYMPICS
The Olympic Summer games of 1936 were scheduled to be held in Berlin. Hitler attended many of the games. He was an avid sports fan, especially soccer, and believed that the German was a superior athlete by nature.
But the Germans did not dominate the games they way they could dominate Jewish shopkeepers. Bullyhood had no clout in a fair contest. An African-American named Jesse Owen stole the show by winning three gold medals. When a black won the gold, Hitler turned blue. He refused to attend the awards ceremonies.
Nazi philosophy was just as racist against blacks as it was against Jews. It’s just that there were more Jews on hand in Germany to persecute. If there had been a million blacks in Germany, they would have joined the condemned on the road to Auschwitz. During the war, a black PW was more likely to be executed for no reason at all than a white.
While there were virtually no blacks in Germany, there were some in the Rhineland. When victorious France occupied the Rhineland after the First World War, many occupation troops came from French colonial territories in Africa. So from 1920 to 1936 Germans were being policed by blacks in the Rhineland and the racist Germans among the Germans resented this. Other decent Germans did not. Some German women married black men and had mulatto babies. When the Nazis took over the Rhineland these mulatto children were punished. Hitler had specifically discussed this problem of the “Rhineland Bastards” in his worst-seller Mein Kampf. He wrote that he would someday do something to correct this insult to German racial purity. And the Bavarian bastard kept his promise. The devil punished the angels. The mulatto children of the Rhineland were all forcibly sterilized.
SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGINS 1936-7
The Spanish Civil War is one of the ugliest parts of World War II. This one doesn't even have a clear good guy in the ring. Here was political terror where non-combatants were deliberately singled out for execution by the thousands as a warning for their armies to surrender. The left wing Spanish nuts are blowing up churches and murdering priests and nuns while being supported by the Stalinist Soviet Union; the right-wing Spanish nuts are overturning a fair and free election with fascist military force while being supported by Nazi Germany. Pick a team!
In February of 1936 a left wing government was elected in Spain. The right tried to swallow it's pride for a few months but after a while it just couldn't take it anymore. The Spanish Army in Morocco mutinied on July 16, 1936, taking over the civilian government there, putting some lefties in jail and shooting others. The rebellion spread quickly across the Straights of Gibraltar. Soon all of Spain was in a bloody Civil War. The Nationalists (the fascists) took over half the country very quickly and it looked like fascism would win a third state for Europe. But the Loyalists (left broad-base coalition) re-grouped and held the line. Spain was a checkerboard of Loyalist and Nationalist held territory for the next three years. In the end the blackshirts won over the redshirts.
They weren't all reds, of course. The Loyalists consisted of communists, liberals, anarchists and other socialist in a coalition government. Considering the wide range of factions in the Loyalist camp, Franco might have chosen to do nothing and watched it fall apart through internal bickering in a few years. Then he could have walked in without firing a shot.
But FF chose force. The Civil War in Spain that only slayed hundreds of thousands of sweet civilians but also assisted the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy
The Spanish Civil War also cemented the alliance between Germany and Italy. Previously there was a chance Italy might have joined an alliance against Germany. The SCW became a great advertisement for fascism when it emerged victorious in 1939.
The left in the United States completely supported the Loyalists. The US Communist Party considered this fight to be their fight. On the other hand, the Loyalists was so violently against the Catholic Church that many religious Americans could not in good conscience take either side in spite of the evils of fascism. For millions of Americans it was impossible to choose a side in this fight. For others it was easy. Ernest Hemmingway the famous novelist went to Spain and fought actively on the side of the Loyalists while writing a novel about it called For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ve seen the movie but never read the novel (Hemmingway may not be overrated, but Gary Cooper is.)
ADOLPH AND BENITO OCTOBER 1936
Fascist Hitler was anxious to gain the alliance of fascist Italy. It wasn’t so much that he needed Italy’s strength, it was a more a case of him not wanting to compete with Italy for prizes in central Europe.
Germany and Italy signed a treaty of alliance on October 24, 1936. It was called “The Pact of Steel.” But they misspelled it. It was really the “Pact of Steal.”
Chills ran up the spines of thinking decent people all over the world. The Rhineland had been scary enough, now Frank Nitti had a partner. The steal-pact was also called the Rome-Berlin Axis. It gradually became known the world over simply as ‘The Axis.” The term stuck for the length of the war. In the 2000’s George W. Bush used a callback when he referred to troublesome states of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, as the “Axis of Evil.”
The pact of 10.24.36 was a major setback for England and France. These two nations had been courting Mussolini for years, trying to get Italy to join in an alliance against Hitler. This was the only reason they had had let Italy get away with its invasion of Ethiopia. Now they had allowed the Italian Empire to grow and had lost it too.
The two fascist dictators were now a team, all set-up to unleash hell upon the earth. Happy Halloween!
ANTI-COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL PACT -- 11-36
The next month, on November 25, 1936 Japan, Germany and Italy signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact.”
The ACP was the “reactionary” solution to the Communist International operating out of Moscow. The “Comintern” had been pledging to start Communist revolutions in all the western capitalist countries since 1917. The price the world must pay for this kind of left-wing militant conceit is the rise of right-wing militarist conceit in reaction. These extremists start wars and drag the innocent reasonable mass of the people into it.
The fascists recognized that the purpose of the Moscow-based Communist International was to subvert and destroy all the civilized nations of the world. FDR, by comparison, admired the “Soviet experiment” in “planned economy” and didn't seem very concerned about the activities of the Comintern in the United States. Democracy under-reatced and fascism overreacted.
The Anti- Comintern signers pledged to consult with each other in case of any aggression coming from the Soviet direction. They pledged not to make any separate deals with Russia (a pledge Hitler would break in August 1939.) Japan and Germany signed first. Italy signed the Pact a year later marking the first time the three fascist states came under the same Axis.
It’s too bad the Anti-Comintern Pact had been created and signed by the only three nations on earth as criminally minded as the Soviet Union. If only FDR hadn’t been so liberal, a similarly worded pact might have been signed between the US the UK and several other decent nations. The Anti-Comintern Pact reads like something Ike or JFK would have signed in their time.
ELECTION OF 1936
One of the reasons that Roosevelt became more openly leftist in the Second New Deal in 1935 was to help win the election of 1936. This may seem like a paradox. Usually shrewd politics would dictate that the center must be courted and therefore a move to either extreme would be politically disastrous. Roosevelt had won in 1932 with votes from all ends of the political spectrum and his first new deal had been given wide popular support, criticisms from Hears who called it the ‘Raw Deal’ notwithstanding.
But by 1935 there was so much criticism of Roosevelt’s programs that there was a real danger of his being outflanked on the left by any organized coalition under the leadership of rogues like Coughlin, Long and Townsend. The center was beginning to drift away from Roosevelt and the right had never been much in his corner in the first place. Since his programs were taking heavy criticism from all sides and the left was saying they weren’t radical enough, why not embrace the criticism of the left and at least win that power base since it was the most winnable in light of the general direction his programs were heading? So Roosevelt went ‘sharply” to the left and insured that no leftist political movement would divide the Democratic Party and hand the House over to the Republicans.
It was generally understood that whomever the Republicans nominated at their Cleveland Convention in early June 1936 was doomed to lose. FDR was very popular. According to one recent textbook this popularity was due to “the administration’s achievements and FDR’s enormous political skills.” But could it not be easily argued that when you give federal handouts to 50 million voters, it’s a pretty sure bet they will vote for you at election time, with or without ‘political skills’? It was a form of bribery little elevated above the 1800’s when they gave our hard cider and turkeys for votes. No doubt FDR’s dole was for higher and sincere socialist motives and his heart did bleed for the poor. He was not deliberately buying re-election through federal handouts. But that was the inevitable result. How could anyone not vote for the first President that gave them a job and a stipend when they were starving and on the verge of eviction?
The Republican nominated Alf Landon from Kansas for President and Frank Knox from Boston for Vice President.
The Dems met in Philly a week later and nominated the King to remain on the throne.
The only chance that Roosevelt could lose had already been gunned down in 1935 in the Capitol hallway in Baton Rouge.
Roosevelt campaigned on the record of the New Deal. The critics charged that the New Deal had destroyed capitalism and free enterprise. FDR did not duck the charges but took them on. He countered that the New Deal had saved capitalism and free enterprise. In his speeches he stated that if the do-nothing approach of Hoover had continued, the nation would have collapsed, and free enterprise and capitalism would have collapsed with it.
He said that these same businessmen had begged him for help in 1933 and he had given it to them. Now they were condemning him. They were like the rich man in the silk had who was drowning. The New Deal had jumped into the icy water to pull him out. In the background of the rescue, the silk hat floated away. Now, four years later, these men were berating the New Deal for stealing the silk hat.
As always, FDR never referred to his opponent by name. In fact he didn't even speak of him indirectly. You never heard an Alf out of Roosevelt. Why give the Republican campaign free advertising. Roosevelt, the genius politician, understood that as president, anything that had anything to do with him was big news. So if the President criticized Landon on the campaign trail, the press would be crowded around Landon waiting for his response to the criticism. Why put the spotlight on your opponent when he was desperately looking for publicity? Even if the charges had merit, they helped Wilkie by giving him the stage for an eloquent response and counter-charge in front of 25 microphones.
This was no “Rose Garden Strategy” either. Roosevelt went out and campaigned hard, crisscrossing the country by rail, giving speeches at formal banquets and to everyday crowds from the back of the train. A crew of reporters had their own railroad car. Some of them gave advice to the FDR team. They analyzed his speeches and the response to them, and suggested changes to help FDR win.
FDR clearly believed that most of the newspapers were against him. It was probably a lot closer to even handed than that. Some of the reporters who offered advice were actually employed by newspapers that were anti-Roosevelt. But they whispered to FDR's closest aides that they were actually on the Democratic side.
Roosevelt liked to wonder what he would do to defeat him if he were managing the campaign for the other side. Although he threw out this subject at lighthearted moments for the gang to kick around, and seemed like self-effacing good-humor, it was really a telling tale of his political intelligence. What better way to map out a strategy than to get into the other camp's frame of thinking? Roosevelt thought that if were running against himself he would first repudiate the support of some of the right-wing newspapers. Then he would focus on the corruption that was discovered in some of the WPA programs.
Election of 1936 – The Dolees Show Their Appreciation
Maine voted for President a few days before the rest of the country and chose Republican Alfie Landon. But this was not an omen. On November 2, 1936 FDR carried every other state except Vermont. polling 61% of the vote. One politician wisecracked afterwards that “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
A young George Gallup had predicted the results based on a survey of 49,000 voters nationwide. The good work built his good name and the Gallup poll was born. It is now as much a part of American politics today as the voting booth, the cheap shot, and the fake smile, and the promise for 'change.'
During the last weekend prior to voting day, roosevelt campaigned exclusively in his home Duchess County. The locals bonded with him as he pressed the flesh with the same people who had sent him to the state senate a while back and started him on his march to Washington.
Try as he might, Roosevelt only once managed to carry his home town of Hyde Park, New York and it wasn't carried in 1936.
On Election Night 1936 Roosevelt stayed home at Hyde. By midnight the entire country knew that Landon was toast. In Duchess county, a parade gathered momentum and marched with songs and torch-lights to the home of FDR. By the time it reached Franklin's place, the crowd had grown to 5,000 people. The Secret Service was almost panicked. Any Bozo with a pistol could have mingled into this parade, and here it was camped on the President's front lawn at 12:30 in the morning, and here was FDR sitting before them giving a friendly speech as though there was not the remotest chance that anyone would want to kill him.
The front lawn victory party was an FDR tradition and the Secret Service could not convince him to abandon it (in 1944 the crowd gasped at how bad he looked when he first came out.)
INAUGURAL 1 – 37
In January of 1937 the 20th Amendment to the Constitution was applied to the Presidency for the first time. Until this time, the new American President was sworn in on the first Monday in march in the year following the November election. This law was initially written because of the transportation difficulties of 1787. The distant rural politicians might take three months to make it to New York or Philadelphia to begin duties in public service. Give them a full four months to get their house sold and take the horse carriage to the national capitol.
By 1932 it was clear that the four plus month delay between Election and Inauguration was a hindrance to the nation. There were planes and highways to get anyone to Washington in a day. New administrations had to sit around and stare at the clock for one third of a year and it no longer made sense.
Lincoln and FDR had taken over the government in times of crisis, and both might have done a better job getting started if they didn't have to wait 4.2 months before taking over.
Congress passed the 20th Amendment in 1932 which changed the date the new people took over from March to January 20 of the following year after the election. For the House, the new rule was for the new members to be sworn in on January 3.
It was ratified in January of 1933, just before FDR took over. But it did not apply until October 15, 1933. So the new rule wouldn't apply for the President and Vice President until 1936, and not until 1934 for Congresspersons.
Roosevelt was sworn in the next January on the wettest Inauguration Day in American history. Heavy winds and heavy rain all day marked the event.
LABOR FRONT 1934-39
Labor and capital were still slugging it out while war was looming in Europe and Asia, a dangerous situation. Fortunately things leveled off to a reasonable disputation just in time for Pearl Harbor. It would have been bad to have had a virtual civil war at home between capital and labor while we were trying to fight overt enemies abroad in full scale conflagration.
The poor agricultural workers of the west began a series of strikes in the early months of FDR’s term that got the nation’s attention. In 1933 pea pickers went on strike in Hayward California, cherry pickers abandoned their trees in Sunnyvale CA, grape pickers walked off the vines in Fresno, cotton pickers walked off in the San Joaquin Valley, and the pomegranate strike in Needles shocked the world. A labor organization was formed for these workers called CUCOM, which stood for the Confederation of Unions of Mexican Workers and Farm Laborers. CUCOM called for more strikes in the next few years. Some critics charged that many of the leaders were radical leftist outsiders who had a political agenda far beyond compassion for these individual laborers.
While California Mexican cotton pickers were striking, another problem was hitting New Mexico and Arizona. The westward migration of unemployed whites from the heartland displaced thousands of Mexican workers in the southwest. The new history books barely mention that they were illegal aliens if they mention it at all and then only at the very end in subtle slip-it-past-you fashion after first giving the reader three pages on how these poor Mexican workers were victimized and mistreated in every way by the evil white who were looking for jobs and using racial epithets, thus rendering them unworthy of compassion or an honest look at their factual situation. Their “traditional patterns of migratory labor were disrupted.” They were forced into the cities where they faced horrible discrimination and rude racist slurs openly printed on posters, as easily as spoken in private. Racial prejudice according to the new textbooks is exclusively a trait of the white race, and what can be more racist than to suggest that? Does the fault of racial prejudice trump all other cards? If a racist never steals from his boss and a person free of racial prejudice steals from his boss if the latter a more admirable person?
A major steel strike was settled in 1936-37 and the UMW was recognized. Then it was the turn of the auto industry for Zinnean combat.
In late 1936 a sit-down strike led by the United Auto Workers began in the General Motors factory at Flint Michigan. By sitting down inside the plant and carrying out the strike through occupation, the workers had removed the ‘scab’ option for capital. Scumbag scabs could not be imported to replace the legitimate workers since the factory was filled to the rim with angry workers. Labor was carefully instructed by their leaders not to destroy or damage any equipment. The message was that we don’t hate capital and we aren’t radical leftists, we just want better and more equitable rewards for our part in making the wonderful capitalist system work.
The strike went on for six long weeks. GM sent spies to Union meetings and threatened workers secretly. GM asked Roosevelt to sent in troops to force the workers out of the factory. Franklin said no. What a surprise. GM then asked Michigan Governor Frances Murphy to send in state troops to bounce them out. Murph held his turf and he too said no to force.
On February 11, 1937 GM surrendered. The workers (all men) had refused to shave until the strike was settled and so, on that happy day, thousands of Abe Lincoln’s bounced gleefully out of the GM plant. The UAW was recognized and by the end of the year had almost half a million members. Chrysler gave in to UAW recognition soon afterwards.
Henry Ford the anti-Semite admirer of Hitler was not as easy to win over to unionism as GM or Chrysler or Hyundai . The Ford Motor Company kept a private army of violence-friendly strikebreakers known as the “service department.” They serviced your skull with a billyclub. A brawl between workers and ‘servicemen’ at the River Rouge in 1937 resulted in so many injuries that even Walter Reuther the UAW leader was sent to the hospital. The River Rouge lived up to it’s name in this sanguinary battle. Ford didn’t throw in the bloody towel until 1941.
The big steel industry had recognized unionism as noted earlier. But the smaller steel factories, known as ‘little steel’ were still holding out. A riot near Chicago between labor and capital at the Calumet River plant of Republic Steel in on May 30 of 1937 resulted in ten dead on the side of the workers with no KIAs on the side of the steel police. Republic and the rest of ‘little steel’ recognized the right of labor to unionize at the 11th hour in 1941. The USA secured the home front just in time to take on the Axis.
HELL OVER NEW JERSEY MAY 6 1937
The German Zeppelin Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst New Jersey on May 6, 1937 killing everyone on board. Few of us have not seen the footage 1,000 times by the time we reach voting age. Its one of the most overplayed video-bytes of American history.
The fact that there is the video and also the audio report of the guy choking up and saying “oh the humanity!” helps keep it in the top ten spectacular moments of the 20th Century.
The Nazis swastika was prominent on the blimp as if caught fire and crashed. The official explanation for the disaster or many years was static electricity. But it's fairly certain that the explosion was an act of sabotage.
JAPAN INVADES CHINA 1937
John Hay’s Open Door was finally slammed officially shut in 1937 when Japan invaded China.
The USA entered the Pacific War in 41 primarily because of our objection to the Japanese conquest of China.
Manchukuo had been ruled by the Japanese since 1935. But by 1937 it was time for more. The Japanese Army was ready to make a big move into the heart of China.
The border between Manchukuo and China proper was ripe for friction. On July 7, 1937 a Japanese soldier was shot and killed at the Marco Polo Bridge a structure that was built in the 1200’s. The bridge was located in Liokachiao, on the outskirts of Beijing. The Japanese claimed that Chinese soldiers had murdered the soldier. No one knows to this day if the soldier had been murdered by the Chinese, or whether he had been shot in a fair fight, or whether he had been a dead Japanese that was offered as a prop but had not been killed by the Chinese at all. In any case it was hardly justification fro conquering the most populous nation on earth.
What is certain is that a corpse in a Japanese Army uniform was dragged before the gate of the town where the Chinese troops were hiding. When the Chinese troops resisted a forced entry into the city gates the war was on. But the entire incident at the Marco Polo Bridge was almost certainly a pretext for the overt invasion of China by the Kwangtung Army. By the middle of the day on the 8th of July 1937 the invasion was in full swing on a broad front across the length of China. Gee, it was almost as if the entire thing had been planned all along.
No more would there be limited goals with puppet governments nominally under Chinese rule. Now it was just the little giant attacking the big giant. The shark was trying to eat the whale.
For months the Japanese Army moved deep into China marking one conquest after another. But China had what was known as a “limitless rear.” The deeper the invading army penetrated into China, the more the Chinese under Chaing Kai fell back. The Japanese Army won victory after victory but the victory had its price. The administering of such a large land mass would bog down the Japanese. A million troops would be required just to hold on to what they had. And there was no end to how far inland the Chinese could retreat. The fall back positions became more mountainous and easier to defend, while the attack positions became more dangerous and difficult to support with logistics. The Japanese were winning every battle but could not win the war.
This Sino-Japanese War went on for more than two years before Hitler invaded Poland. 7-7-37 is arguably the true outbreak date of World War II. Far more soldiers and civilians died in the Sino-Japanese War than died in the invasion of Poland in 1939 (the concentrations camps would come later for the Poles.)
During this invasion, the Chinese people became heroes to Americans. Japan was the clear enemy and China the clear friend. Americans had little understanding of some of the anti-western resentment that infested the giant country and would show it self in the Maoist Revolution later. But for now on a basic level, we were totally on the side of China and went to war with Japan largely in defense of China.
During this invasion Japan committed atrocities that are hard to believe. What was worse they were done at all levels of the Army and with approval of commanders at all level. This was no isolated incident of undisciplined troops. These were disciplined actions of terror by disciplined troops.
These atrocities were committed in all of China, in Korea, in Hong Kong, in the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and anywhere else the Japanese invaded. The worst single instance of this terrorism has come down to history under the title of ‘The Rape of Nanking’.
The defense of the peninsula leading up to the City of Nanking was the finest hour of the Chinese Army. They fought hard and resisted well. Every mile was surrendered in blood. These were the best of Chiang’s divisions giving it their all. Nanking was the capitol city. Later in the war, the limitless rear strategy would be more frequently employed, but here in the last weeks of 1937, the Chinese were making a good showing.
But they were outclassed nevertheless in military prowess and armaments. They lost slow and hard but they lost. Nanking fell. Then all hell broke loose. Literally.
Tens of thousands of male civilians and surrendered soldiers were used for bayonet practice while deranged soldiers laughed and took pictures.
20,000 women or more were gang raped and then murdered. Their babies were murdered before their eyes. This went on routinely for two weeks. It was hell on earth. Soldiers send home pictures of the atrocities to their families with pride. A few Chinese civilians were sheltered in the foreign legations, but for everyone else death was around every corner.
I am not the world’s easiest cry. But when I first learned of this story in a chapter of a book I was reading in the Northeastern University Library I had to go into a stairwell and cry. For a long time I could not come out of the stairwell. The Rape of Nanking is an incomprehensible horror show that proves decisively that Japan was on the side of evil in World War II. Japan is not being honest with its people today about this sorry fact.
The Nanking massacres were an international outrage but nothing material was done in direct response by any other nation. The toothless League of Nations was very mad at Japan for invading Manchuria. The League decided to expel Japan from the organization. As the decision to expel was being read, the Japanese delegation walked out. You can’t fire me, I quit. Now they were free to bayonet innocent people without fear of moral reprimands from enemy political leaders in tuxedos.
China had a large Army to defend itself with under the leadership of Chiang Kai Shek. But Chiang had his forces deployed in positions to fight his civil war against the Communists, not to resist a potential Japanese invasion. Japan had this huge strategic advantage at the start along with its clear superiority in armaments, training and discipline. Japan’s Army was obedient and under unified purpose and command whereas 75% of Chiang's army was not dependably under his command. The first loyalty of a majority of his army was to local war lords and these troops could not be counted on in a war.
Throughout this Sino-Japanese War (‘Kang-Ri’) which lasted from 1937-1945 the Communist Chinese put up a more aggressive fight against the Japanese than did the forces under Chiang, although it should be recognized that the Nationalist forces engaged in many courageous full-scale struggles and suffered more than a million casualties. But the Communists used retreat less and aggressive counterattack more. This produced political results for the Communists in the Civil War which followed World War II. The people in 1949 had not forgotten which side had more tenaciously stood up to the Japs.
CLAUDE HOPPING
The Japanese air arm employed the first mono-plane fighter in the invasion of China. This was the Type-96 Mitsubishi, known in US parlance and code ID as “Claude.”
The Clause is largely forgotten by history because of the spectacular success of its successor, the Zero, but the Claude in its day was on the cutting edge of fighter plane technology.
The Claude ended the debate about bi-plane fighters versus monoplane fighters. There were still plenty of experts who believed the bi-plane to be the best format, because of its undeniable superiority in turning radius and general maneuverability. The proponents of the monoplane argued that speed, altitude, and firepower more than made up for losses in turning geometry. The Claude performed so well that it
settled that argument and the rest of the military powers took due notice of how Claude hopped up and down the Shanghai-Nanking theater.
The Claude 96 was originally intended as a land-based plane, but some of the old fashioned fighters launched from Japanese carriers took a beating from the Curtis American planes and Russian N-16's being used by the outgunned Chinese air force. The Japanese quickly tried the Claude from carriers and the take-offs and landings were deemed difficult but doable and soon the Claude was a carrier based fighter.
The later Zero was built from the blueprint on up as a strictly carrier-based fighter aircraft.
The Japanese “Betty” bombers were also advanced stuff. They went out on missions deep into China knowing that they were superior to any Chinese aircraft. That was true but it was also not true. Fighters and bombers were apples and oranges, as the Japanese found out the hard way.
Japanese technologically superior bombers were no match for even technologically backward fighters. The Betty missions went deep unescorted by Japanese fighters and came back decimated. Even old bi-planes like the Gloucester Gladiator, could take a toll on unprotected bomber formations. No matter how new and advanced the bomber it was still a bomber and was no match for fighters. Essentially, a Sopwith Camel can shoot a B-17 down in a one-on-one, to exaggerate the point a little. From now on the Claude was not just used exclusively for ground support, as initially planned. From now on it was also in charge of bomber mission escort. This concept is taken for granted today as common knowledge. But all the way up to the end of 1942 the jury was still out on whether bombers could go on missions without fighter escort. The question was a big deal because these fighters were also desperately needed on ground support. Every time a commander sent out 30 fighters on a bomber mission escort, there were men who would die in the trenches because the air help they needed wasn't there.
PANAY INCIDENT – 12. 37
On December 12, 1937, two days before Nanking fell, the USS Panay, a river gunboat operating on the Yangtze River, was attacked by Japanese planes launched from IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy) carriers off the coast in the East China Sea. The boat was clearly marked with US insignia. It was a clear afternoon, and the attack lasted twenty minutes at close range. It was one machine gun run after another. Three [chk] US sailors were killed on the Panay.
On that same 12/12 while planes from the IJN were strafing the Panay, the Japanese Army was using shore artillery to sink the British freighter Ladybird as it puttered up the Yangtze not far from the Panay.
Japan soon apologized for the incident, which it said had been an accident. Japan also agreed to pay an indemnity. Some private Japanese donations were offered to the families of the victims but this charity was rejected. The families told them to shove the money.
But a trial balloon had been floated. The Japanese were demonstrating that the western powers were paper tigers and no match for the real tigers of Asia. In the US there was a brief outcry against the Japanese for the attack but the rage died down fast.
In another time and setting an incident like that could have led to war but the world was stuck in a depression, the Nazis had everyone scared, and people were setting used to incidents from the Japanese. The Japanese apology stifled American anger more, perhaps more than it should have if we employ 20-20 hindsight.
COURT PACKING 1937
In the 1930’s the Supreme Court consisted of nine very old white guys, few of whom had a liberal leaning. Franklin decided that this would not stand. The number of nine was not written in the US Constitution, but like the two-term tradition for President, was a custom that had evolved into virtual law. Franklin challenged the letter and spirit of the law in early 1937 when he proposed to add a new Supreme Court Justice for every man on the court over the age of 70! The reaction against this proposal was pronounced and covered liberals conservatives, socialists and everyone else. Anarchists making bombs and winos in blackouts condemned the idea. What was he thinking?
Roosevelt tried to sell the idea that his only motive was to assist these elderly men with their heavy work loads by lightening up the division of labor on the Supreme Court. It was a low artifice and only added to the angry reaction to the idea. Roosevelt only wanted to increase his power over a court which had already ruled several of his programs unconstitutional.
Even Roosevelt’s adoring historian supporters (that would be about 96% of them) admit that the charge of court-packing is valid. The Supreme Court wasn’t giving Franklin his way and its members wouldn’t die. So FDR proposed a law to extend the number of Supreme Court members so he could pack the body with Rooseveltian robes. Every time a 69-year-old Justice had a happy birthday, Franklin was to have one too.
The Court had been unhappy with Roosevelt even before his packer plan. FDR had been taking shots at how the Court was comprised of old tottering men who were way behind the times in their thinking. Too bad, Frank. That's their job. They're supposed to be old people adding a reserved and cautious second look at new ideas. That''s part of their reason for being. But Franklin could not accept this.
The Court showed it's displeasure in its informal procedures. There had long been a Washington tradition, that whenever the Supreme Court was about to begin a long session, the secretary to the Chief Justice would call the President and tell him the Court was about to convene. The the President would send an invitation inviting the men to pay a social visit to the White House. The Justices would come into the Oval office on the eve of the first session, have a few drinks, and shoot the breeze with the President about informal matters, such as their relationships with past presidents.
In the fall of 1936, FDR knew that the Court was about to convene, but he never got the call from Chief Justice Kevin McReynold's secretary. He therefore could not respond with an invitation. The Justices were tired of being insulted by Roosevelt in the press, for being backwards old men who “coughed dust” and “were so hard of hearing they failed to hear the real desires of the American people.” They snubbed FDR socially in 1936 and he answered in spades with his packing plan in 1937
The reversal of his attempt to pack the Court hurt Roosevelt and helped the Republicans gain seats in the Congress in 1938. But the threat to the court was not without results. Several old Justices soon thereafter announced plans for retirement! He had eased them out after all and soon did pack the court with his personal favorite liberals Justices none of whom served with less than greatness.
FDR’s first Supreme Court nominee was Hugo Black in 1937. He served with until 1971. Black handed down the famous “Lansdowne Decision” in 1956 which prevented the elimination of the street behind the famous Left Field Wall.
Felix Frankfurter served for three decades and relished his job.
Sammy Rosemann has an interesting theory on why the Court Packing plan failed. he thinks it had nothing to do with the greater constitutionality issues, or the problems of checks and balances. Nor dod it have anything to do with the stubborn Congressional opponents of everything Franklin said and did.
Rosemann thinks that the reason the country was so outraged by the court packing plan, was because they Court had already turned in the direction of the New Deal, so there was no longer any real need to punish it by changing it.
The Supreme Court had been ruling against New Deal measures for years, but in the middle of 1936 it was ruling in favor of many important New Deal agencies and programs. So the original reason for the court packing, to get the Court to get modern and change with the trying new times, was no longer operative. The Court had shown that it was going to start going more and more Franklin's way, so there was no need to attack. The cops no longer need to break up that gambling den - those guys are all at a GA meeting. Call off the dogs.
But Roosevelt didn't call off the dogs. He had his mind made up in early 1937 that he was going after “those nine mummies” that were holding back his planned economy, and no one was going to talk him out of it. Rosemann describes FDR as disturbingly very cocky about how he was going to teach that Supreme Court a thing or two. Rosemann adores Roosevelt so he is the last person whose criticisms can be dismissed as the biased paintings of a reactionary. It never even crossed Roosevelt's mind that every element of the country would be outraged, especially members of his own party!
What Rosemann argues is that if the Court had not changed it's ways 'In the nick of time,' then Roosevelt's court-packing plan would have been accepted by the country as a whole and approved by Congress. He thinks that the entire populace was as caught up with New Deal zeal as he was, so he projects through Rosemann colored glasses a scenario where the Supreme Court won't catch the fever, and the President breaks it up and rewrites the whole branch, while the country applauds because they love the New Deal that much. It is an interesting historical argument by a good and brilliant person. But no way.
MEXICAN OIL ISSUE 1938
In March of 1938 Mexico under its assertive new President Cardenas expropriated that last remaining foreign oil concessions. The UK was so outraged that it severed diplomatic relations with Mexico. Some of Roosevelt’s cabinet (especially Cordy Hull) wanted to do the same but for a rich man, Roosevelt sure was always against big business. He had little sympathy for the oil corporations. He also had to worry about needing Mexican oil and political support in the event of a new war. The exit of the British enabled infiltration by Nazi agents into Mexico. Roosevelt was worried. A settlement was reached just in time for the war. The US companies settled for approximately 40 million in expro cash and the matter was over.
WAR CLOUDS OF 1938
The world situation in 1936-9 was unique in all of history. It is hard to try to recapture with words the feel of impending doom that existed everywhere.
There are dozens of top rate Hollywood movies from the years 1936-8 in which the feel of the movie is that war is coming, its very sad, and we have to prepare for it. The history books will describe a story of a war that was brewing and may or may not have come depending on the flow of events. But the movies may say more. In a lot of these movies the characters engage in their dialogue on the common knowledge assumption that a major world war is on the way. But it is more than that. There is a plethora of melancholic celluloid characters who feel a great evil force rising in the world that will soon cause this war. These aren’t the people doing the Charleston in 1926 or the Hustle in 1976 celebrating the end of their war eras. Movie characters are microcosms of ourselves and the movie folk in 1938 are in a unique and sad position. Many of the male actors in these movies will die in the war. The movie people show the true mood of the country better than books do. Nothing before or since can compare to the psychological state of the nation and the world in the
It wasn’t Hitler alone that cast a dark shadow on everyday life and thinking. It was an army of spiritual evils on the march, as opposed to the good old days when it was only the army. Fascism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, oppression of individual rights in the name of the state, racism, Communism, militarism, were bearing down on the characters in these movies. It was not merely the three nationalist factors of Japan, Germany and Italy.
Even if the fighting war did not break out, the political/ideological war was actively being fought and lost every day and week. Evil was on the rise all over the world. Some wise people had a fear that there wouldn’t be a war. If the empires of the Axis continued to grow and flourish with a cautious but forceful expansion, seeking and probing for opportunities and weak spots and nothing was done to stop it then peace might become a greater enemy of mankind than war. Many wars break out rather suddenly. Others are advertised in advance and both nations want victory and have angry issues with the other side. World War I was a conflict that many had been predicted for 20 years. It broke out gradually and erupted in terrifying scale. But except for Prussian militarism, political ideology and a simple line-up of evil vs. decency was never the bottom line behind the fighting nor of the beginning of the shooting.
But in WWII was unique in that it was completely political and ideological and everyone saw it coming a mile away and no one could stop it. Americans in 1938 did not so much wonder if war would come, but wondered when. They wondered if the USA could and would stay out of it. The American citizen felt a two-ton safe hanging over their head. Isolationism was less pronounced in the movies in 1938 than it was on the editorial pages. Which arena more accurately represents the general state of the average American? I urge the reader to rent every movie they can get their hands on from 1936-1938 and look for clues. These films and the attitudes they convey are extremely instructive. There was an emotional groundswell in America over the tragic impending war, and the screenwriters were not off-key. We may have been isolationist in policy but not in heart. We may have been looking the other way but we definitely did not have our head in the sand.
First came Austria. Since Hitler had supported Mussolini in the Abyssinia issue, his Italian partner was no longer so obstructionist in Austria. The Nazi Party in Austria intrigued with Hitler to welcome the Germans as liberators. The Germans were a minority in Austria but they claimed to represent the will of the people. This flimsy pretext was used to invade a foreign country.
On March 3, 1938 Hitler entered Vienna as the new ruler of Austria. The place where he was born was united with his equally beloved Germany. A substantial minority of Austrian welcomed the unification of their country with Germany, the ‘anschluss’ as it was called. [sp]
MUNICH
Once he had taken his beloved Austria, Hitler set his eyes next on Czechoslovakia. But it was more for defensive than offensive reasons that he coveted Czechoslovakia, particularly the Sudetenland. As General Keitel noted later for history from his Nuremberg cell, the Fuhrer told his staff that Czechoslovakia was a springboard for the Red Army to bust out into the Ruhr and spread out all over the plains of Germany.
Hitler took Czechoslovakia in two stages, the first in the Sudeten.
Then he divided it administratively into a Czech and a Slovak province of the new Germany.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is the appeasement poster boy for all of history. He appeased Hitler at a conference there and came home to wave a paper at the airport exclaiming peace in our time. He was wrong of course and to this day he is ridiculed and condemned for his Munich performance.
But was Chamberlain the instigator of an appeasement movement or a mere representative of a movement that pushed him to the front to represent it? Revisionism is the cancer of history. Once it finds a place in the historic body is grows and spreads until it consumes it. But the Munich compromise was only called appeasement later. At the time it was widely praised as wisdom and a sigh of relief and appreciation swept the civilized world.
President Roosevelt sent Chamberlain a telegram that read simply, “Good man.”
At Munich Germany bullied Czechoslovakia into surrendering the Sudetenland, the area in black on the map, in 1938. The ability of Czechoslovakia to defend itself against Germany depended on this mountainous outer border. It was no coincidence that this was exactly the same region Hitler was demanding.
What made things tough for those opposing Hitler was that there was some validity to the Fuhrer's claim that he was merely enforcing the Woodrow Wilson principle of self-determination as promised at Versailles in 1919. Most of the population in the black area on the map were in fact German speaking Germans with little loyalty to the checkered Czech flag.
As you can see, Hungary and Poland got their slice of the pie too. Poland would later play victim to Germany while Hungary would be a moderately supportive ally of Hitler through most of the coming war. In 1938 they were vultures enjoying the carcass that Hitler had killed.
Hitler assured the worried world that they could relax now. This was his last land demand. His exact words were “There is for Germany no territorial problem in Europe.” Read my lips, no new territories. His words were as good as gold; fools gold.
The democracies conceded the Sudetenland. Chamberlain has been vilified by history for the sell-out. Munich is now such a dirty word that it can be tossed as an accusation at anyone who for any reason favors peaceful diplomatic solutions in any situation.
But the democracies also told Hitler that this would be their last territorial kow-tow. Neither side held completely true to their promises.
HISTORY DEBATES MUNICH
College professors are still debating Munich. Every few years a new scholar offers a new book with a new look at Munich.
The lesson of Munich for me is what a deceitful two-faced slimy lying sack of bile public opinion is. I saw it in the aftermath of the first Gulf war of 1991 and I couldn't believe it when I saw happen. The people who praised Bush Sr. in the spring of 1991 as a hero for the way he conducted and the way he ended, the Gulf War were the exact same people who by the end of the 1990's were screaming holy hell that “He didn't finish the job!.” As if you thought that at the time, you sanctimonious bozo! We never heard a word of this strategy out of you in 1991. Everyone was celebrating the termination of the terrible war. No one was screaming “On to Baghdad!” at the time. Nine years later the war was seen by the whole country as a failure and if only Bush had listened to the cab driver and the housewife of 1999, the war would have been handled right in 1991. Of course these same people shut up real fast when the invasion of 2003 bogged us down in the Iraqi Civil War. This Gulf War experience makes the Munich thing seem only normal. The praise for Chamberlain's peace settlement was something close to %90 in England, and higher than that in the United States and in Germany. Crowds of German people gave Neville prolonged ovations everywhere he went on his trip to Munich and back. Even these loonies wanted peace! (I'm half-German, btw.)
The west bought time at Munich. Churchill was begging his country to rearm at a desperate pace, but did not get his way. The labor (read left) party was still in power in London. The opposition party made speeches but not decisions. England did not prepare for certain war in the interim between Munich and the outbreak of world war in September 1939.
However, half a loaf of re-armament was better than none. England did not re-arm at at pace to earn the smiles of post-war historians, nor at the pace
Churchill wanted, but it did begin to re-arm. When in the spring of 1939 Hitler swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia, England shifted into fourth gear and began to re-arm at a Churchillian rate.
The real problem for the Allies in the fall of 1938 was air power, particularly French air power. There wasn't any.
Britian had only one squadron of modern one-winged fighter planes when Neville went to Munich in 1938. When Germany attacked Poland on 9-1-39, England had 26 first-rate fighter squadrons ready to defend England.
The French air force was of second rate quality with no first rate planes about to be hopefully deployed soon, as was at least was the case in England and the United States. France was a great power, but it was mostly on land. Even the French Navy was a formidable and modern fleet when compared with the French Air Force.
The British French military chieftains knew they could not tell a Chamberlain or a Daladier that in case of war with Germany, the west would clearly win.
So what would have likely happened if Chamberlain had listened to the revisionist finger-waggers of later history and stood up to Hitler at Munich?
Would Hitler have backed off? That is the common presumption. And secondly, if they had stood up to Hitler and called his bluff, would Hitler have still taken the Sudetenland, calling the Allies bluff in turn? The allies then would presumably have declared war on Germany, per order of later generations.
Would France have then launched offensive operations against Germany? France didn't attack on the offense when Hitler had already conquered Poland in September 1939. It's not likely it would have attacked in late 1938 over the Sudetenland.
Would Britain then send several expeditionary divisions to France to help attack Germany? If not, what kind of war would Britian be able to fight at this time. The RAF simply was not ready to defend Britain's cities against Germany's bombers. St. Paul's might not have made it through a London Blitz that started in November of 1938
There wasn't a lot of support in Britain or France in late 1938 for going to war again for any reason except in the case of an actual invasion or attack by an enemy power. How could Chamberlain go to Munich playing tough guy when he didn't have the people to back him up? The mass of western people of 1968 and 2008 backed him up, but unfortunately they couldn't do anything to help him. He was stuck with the British people of 1938 and they did not want to go to full-scale war for the Sudetenland.
The British dominions would have had a bad time of it trying to support going to war in late 1938 to help it's Queen Mother if the cause was the Sudetenland, and if Britain was proposing to take offense actions to start the war. Australia protested that it didn't want to go to war over this, while recognizing that it would if so obliged in the case of a formal declaration of war. New Zealand aid the same. South Africa made it clear it would not help out in any way.
The Munich failure did have one or two other silver linings. By giving in to Hitler on the basis of Wilson’s 14 points, the democracies placed him in a position where he could advance no further under the umbrella of morality and proper international relations. The liberals in England, France, and the USA would condemn their own countries at that time if they had mobilized for war against Hitler at the time of Munich. They would have said that Hitler was bad but in this instance his arguments were legitimate. It would not have been a clear unified war effort with excellent morale if war had come over the Sudetenland in 1938. A year later after Hitler had proven himself a liar and a scum by taking over other territories, in violation of both his pledge and Wilsonian principles the democracies could then prepare openly for war and with the full backing of its human resources.
In the interim between Munich and war the Allies cracked the German secret codes for military and political intelligence. This was a great asset in the war that would not have been available in 1938. Nevertheless Munich has come down to history, not unfairly, as a word that means a base form of political appeasement.
A great American once said that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. How true. When Chamberlain came back from Munich with the peaceful settlement of Munich on a piece of paper Britain welcomed him as a hero, and the world cheered and raised a toast to his name. It was hard to find anyone to really condemn him at the time. But in hindsight it seems that everyone hated the settlement at the time and knew full well it was low appeasement and a knave’s mistake.
On the same day as the Munich sell-out, the worst hurricane in the American 20th century hit the New England and Long Island region and killed more than 700 people. The city of Providence Rhode Island was submerged in 14 feet of water. The town of Westerly Rhode Island was wiped off the earth.
As the storm was approaching Boston a baseball game was under way at Fenway Park. The winds were getting so strong that a pop fly in the infield was blown over the left field wall for a home run and the game was immediately cancelled.
STRIKE UP THE BUND
The German-American Bund was a pro-Nazi organization in the United States, led by Fritz Kuhn. Its members wore Nazi uniforms and imitated the Nazi organization in Germany. There were thousands of Nazi Bundsmen in the USA in the pre-war years. One day they actually filled Madison Square Garden in New York for a rally.
But Hitler understood that the American Bund was not doing his cause any favors. Hitler instructed his ambassador to the US, Mr. Hans Deikhoff to offer no support for the German-American Bund, and asked German citizens to give it no support either. The Nazis wanted to keep the United States out of a war they knew would come sooner rather than later. The goose-stepping imitators in America were bad publicity. The Bund was bad for US isolationism, which is what Hitler wanted out of America. The blatant pro-Nazi Bund was alarming the average American citizen and giving Roosevelt a fine propaganda tool for war preparedness.
What Hitler did want out of Nazis in America was secret financial support for isolationist newspaper advertisements, and secret financial help in transporting isolationist politicians to important political events. This did happen with the public and even the US government unaware.
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the Germans in America were under strict instructions to not engage in any overt acts of sabotage. It had been tried in World War I and it backfired. There were some successful acts of destruction over here, but Wilson and the US government exploited the incidents well. Hitler was scummy but no dummy. He knew that in the event of war, the plants destroyed would not compensate for the morale boost that would result. Every blown up fuel truck meant another thousand volunteers at US Army recruitment. Sabotage was not cost effective.
GO BACK TO GERMANY, DEIKHOFF
In November of 1938 a Polish Jew murdered a German diplomat and the Nazis used the incident as a pretext to launch a mass pogrom on the all the Jews in Germany. Nazis beat up and killed Jews all over the country. Thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and Synagogues were burned to the ground. Descriptions of the atrocities committed against Jews in Germany could fill ten thousand books, and this was before World War II even started.
President Roosevelt was outraged by Nazi anti-Semitism and its deeds, as were all decent people. In November 15 Franklin asked the American Ambassador in Berlin Hugh M. Wilson to come home for Thanksgiving dinner, “and bring your toothbrush.” Hitler responded by asking Ambassador Deikhoff to come back to Berlin on the next available zeppelin.
Formal withdrawal of an ambassador is tantamount to declaring a state of imminent belligerency, so FDR was careful to keep the recall of Wilson informal, a matter of a personal request, and not an official diplomatic act. But the meaning was plain enough, and it just so happened that neither ambassador ever went back to their assigned capitol. So in effect, the United States and Nazi Germany severed diplomatic relations on November 15 1938.
ASIAN FRONT - 38 CALIBER
In the Far East Japan and China were engaged in full scale war along a front as wide as China itself. The casualties ran over the one million figure on both sides before Pearl Harbor was attacked. This war is usually neglected by the historians as worth the slightest nod or none at all. But the Sino-Japanese War was massive, and our support of China in this war led directly to our enmity with Japan which led directly to war.
China had two strategic advantages against a superior military foe, which Japan overwhelmingly was in Army, Air and Navy. China had an anthill of people with which it could endlessly replenish its depleted divisions. Its army could be pushed around but it could hardly be eliminated as a fighting force even if it stood its ground and took more than 50% casualties. Japan had a much smaller population base and its army had to be maintained over long supply lines.
The other advantage the Chinese had was an endless mountainous interior to which it could forever retreat and still remain strong. The ‘limitless rear.’ Japan could win fight after fight, which it generally did, but the Chinese armies could give ground and live to fight another day. The Japanese army would then with each advance, require more troops of occupation, extend its lines of communication and encounter progressively difficult and disadvantageous terrain. With each defeat China came closer to victory. Japan was however in complete control of about half the country when the US entered the war.
Japanese atrocities in the Middle Kingdom were not state secrets. The news of their dastardly behavior was traveling the world just as was the mistreatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. In 1938 we would have to say that Japan was far ahead of Germany in physical crimes, maybe one or two light years ahead. The Rape of Nanking speaks for itself. But that 1937 horror show was no isolated incident condemned by Japanese authorities. Rape, torture, and murder of captured Chinese civilians was a matter of course in the Sino-Japanese War, and it was condoned at all levels. These were not the actions of rogue drunk privates defying disciplinary orders. It was all part of the racist militarist national illness in Japan. The proof is that Japanese soldiers regularly sent back photographs of their atrocities to their families back home.
It is often explained that to the Japanese way of thinking, no man should surrender in war, so these Chinese (and later American and British and Philippine) prisoners deserved to be spit on and kicked just for openers. So therefore prisoners of war were routinely tortured and beheaded.
Even if we concede the point, why the civilians? Civilians were given the same treatment! What’s the apologist revisionist rationalization for that policy? As if mothers and babies and elderly men should be ashamed of themselves for surrendering to 10,000 guys with guns and bayonets.
The Sino-Japanese War was unthinkable hell. Some kind of poison was sweeping through the Japanese Army during this China War, some evil force beyond our ken. It was the evil god of macho conceit, and it just happened to find its way here at this time, but it has lived since the beginning of cave man, and has already poisoned a trillion men and a thousand states. Who knows what it has in store for us in the future?
FLYING TORAS
The lines were clearly drawn between right and wrong as far as 99% of Americans were concerned, and a squadron of US fighter pilots enlisted in the service of China to fight the Japanese. These were the famous ‘Flying Tigers’ in their P-40 Warhawks, with the mean teeth painted on the nose of the fuselage. Tiger means ‘tora’ in Japanese.
For short money these guys fought and died in the Second World War before we were in it. The P-40’s under Claire Chennault had amazing success in kills versus losses in their two years of combat in the China/Burma area.
MID TERM ELECTIONS OF 1938 – THE FDR PURGE
The Great Depression made a sad and large comeback in late 1937 and continued into 1938. Although dole checks and dole jobs had been given to multi-millions of Americans, the essential GD infrastructure of mass unemployment, farm foreclosures and a handicapped industrial base was still standing as tall and strong in 1938 as it had stood in 1933. The New Deal had treated the symptoms but not the disease. It had been a mission of mercy, not solution. The Republicans were rubbing their hands in delight waiting for Election Day 1938.
Consequently 1938 the Republicans gained seats in both Houses in the Congressional Elections but not enough in either case to win control. The GOP also picked up 13 governorships across the states.
FDR decided to get very involved in the election campaign of 1938, but not in the way you might think. He didn't hit the trail fighting Republican candidates late in the game, on behalf of the broad spectrum of Democratic friends. Instead he campaigned early in the campaign against Democrats!
FDR was mad at the Democrats who came into office on the coattails of his popular New Deal programs and his New Deal reputation, yet became obstructionist to these very programs once they were seated on Congress. There were quite a few of these Democrats around, especially from the South. It's pretty easy to understand his anger towards those who exploited his name to power then showed a marked lack of support and cooperation for FDR's policies. FDR decided he would “purge” these bad Congressmen.
He felt that most of the American people were unaware of the voting records of these “two-faced phony backstabbers” and that if he went out and campaigned against them in the primaries, he would unseat most of them and send an effective warning to those few who survived.
So in the early fall of 1938 Roosevelt spent all of his political capitol on an effort to punish disloyal Democrats in the Democratic primary contests. He went to many states campaigning for Democratic challengers to Democratic incumbents.
To his surprise and chagrin, he was only able to show results in one case, and that person might well have lost anyway. All of the other Democratic candidates he campaigned against in 1938 won their primaries.
The Republicans fared fairly well in the general election. Thanks to the new recession, combined with a serious backlash against Roosevelt for his “court-packing” scheme of 1937 the Republicans gained seats in both Houses in the Congressional Elections in 1938, but not enough in either case to win control. The GOP also picked up 13 governorships across the states.
The signs were clear to Roosevelt that he had to slow down his grand left strategy. The political capital of novelty was wearing out.
The New Deal was in fact coming to close, or close to it (the War would finish it off.) In his State of the Union address in January of 1939 Roosevelt did not propose a single new federal program and kept his speech focused entirely on foreign policy issues. The War clouds in Asia and Europe were overshadowing even the crisis of the Great Depression and the attempted answers of the New Deal.
WAR CLOUDS OF 1939;
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR DECIDED;
In 1939 a victor was declared in the ugly Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939. This was a complex and highly political blood bath between the two extremes of left and right, their extremism making them both violent and dictatorial. Someone had to give. An incredible 700,000 people died in this merciless clash.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who was to rule Spain until 1975) headed the right wing group, with the support of the church and big business. He won. Hitler and Mussolini supplied Franco’s side with guns, planes and troops. There were called “volunteers”, 85,000 of these so-called ‘volunteers” fighting for fascism in Spain.
The Soviet Union strongly supported the anti-Catholic leftists.
It was hard for nations like the USA and the UK to decide on which side they were on. Ernest Hemmingway volunteered to fight on the side of the leftists. For most it was a tough choice. Hmmm … do I support the democratic left, a gang that is blowing up churches and hanging nuns and priests from the church belfry? Or do I support the fascist right with Hitler and Mussolini supporting it? The USSR firmly supported the anti-clerical anti-fascist side. The left in America was also largely anti-clerical so they fell in with the Soviets in spirit (or anti-spirit.)
The violence was unspeakable and deliberately targeted civilians. It was a blend of terrorism and military maneuvers on a canvass of revolution and counter-revolution, with all kinds of involvement from the outside. The mountainous terrain of Spain increased the turmoil and chaos. There were Spanish places where decisive military strategic campaigns could be conducted. It was nothing like the America Civil War with enormous armies clashing on reasonably flat terrain and settling matters once and for all. The pain in Spain was not mainly on the plain. The suffering was instead scattered in kaleidoscopic fashion in rugged little villages all over the nation.
The German Air Force used Spanish cities for training practice. The townspeople of Guernica were attacked in 1937 by planes from the air, and by machine guns on the ground. 1,600 died. One entire town was thrown down an abandoned mine shaft. Priests were murdered as special prized targets. Terror begot terror. Spain was a political Dante’s inferno for four years.
By the middle of 1939 the Fascist faction was the clear winner. When the World War began Hitler wanted fellow fascist Franco to join the scrap, but Franco dutifully kept Spain out of World War II to the frustration of the Fuhrer. Franco never joined or helped the Allies either. Spain was strictly neutral officially. But in action and deed Spain was moderately friendly to the Germans through the Second World War. Hitler settled wisely for this and maintained friendly relations with Franco.
POLISH QUESTION JAN-AUGUST 1939
The nominally independent city of Danzig had been de facto part of Hitler’s Nazi state for several years. Hitler continued to threaten Poland over this city. (map) It was only a matter of time before it had to be handed back over to Germany. Jews were being persecuted there, even though it was technically independent under international control.
By the spring of 1939 France and Britain had come to their senses and were ready to stand up to Hitler. They would not allow him to take any more territory in Europe.
As a result, these former enemies in the Hundred Years War gave a guarantee to Poland that if Hitler attacked it, they would come to the rescue militarily. Poland was a bit surprised by the offer. Relations between Warsaw and these two had been fair at best. It just so happened that Poland appeared to be next on Hitler’s plate, so this was where France and England had decided to take a stand.
Poland had not endeared herself to the west when she helped Hitler in dismembering Czechoslovakia. Poland greedily took its slice in the Teschen area.
Poland had reason to fear that joining an alliance with Britain and France would be a provocation to Hitler, who seemed to be just looking for an excuse to attack. Also Poland thought its military forces were strong enough to hold off the Germans if they invaded. They had foolish faith in their large horseback army, and felt a little lost pride in being protected by big brothers France and England. They saved face by providing in return that if Germany attacked to the west, Poland would come to the aid of France.
There was plenty of talk going around about France invading Germany from the west should Hitler attack to the east into Poland. There was talk about the British bombing German cities if Hitler attacked Poland. After a while Poland believed these pledges. But there was not a firm commitment.
There was no legal document or treaty and they were pledges that would not be honored.
The vague commitment to Poland also mislead Hitler. He honestly thought that England and France would not go to war over Poland, and that their rhetoric had no teeth.
Poland feared and distrusted Russia almost as much as Germany. London and Paris wanted Russia on board with Poland against Germany, but there was too much ill feeling between the Pilsudski’s and the Ivanov’s, so it had to be Poland alone. Russia never made it to the Allied camp against rising Nazi Germany for many reasons, one of which was Churchill.
SOVIET UNION ON THE FENCE – SUMMER OF 1939
By the summer of 1939 the entire world knew that Hitler was a man of war, and that a second world war was almost inevitable. But there was still some faint hope that it could be prevented with deterrence through united strength. London and Paris, as well as shrewd observers world-wide, knew that the only certain way to stop Hitler from invading Eastern Europe was to bring the Soviet Union on board in an alliance with the western democracies against Hitler. The USSR would decide whether there would be a World War II and if so, what it would be made of.
Stalin was on the fence. He knew that the Nazi regime of Hitler had its greedy eyes on Mother Russia, Holy Russia. JS was not deluded as to the real long-term intentions of Hitler, but he also did not care too much for the terms being offered by the west for an alliance against Hitler.
In this situation, the USSR found itself in the position of Italy a couple of years earlier except the stakes were much higher. The good guys and the bad guys were both trying to get the Soviets into their Entente, and the Russian dictator had to make a call. There was an angel and a devil on his shoulders each pleading their case in his ears. The problem was that the devil was offering better terms, and the angel was not even making a firm commitment to the second rate offer it was making.
The Nazis were offering specifics. Hitler offered Russia peace, time and a slice of Eastern Europe all on the same plate. If the USSR would ally itself with Germany in a non-aggression pact, Russia would buy a couple of years more time now to prepare for the war it knew would come later. In other words, Stalin could pretend to be friends with Hitler for now in order to hit the gym for two years or so and be better prepared to fight him later. Both men knew what was what and could at the same time pretend otherwise for publicity purposes.
Stalin needed time to rebuild the command structure of his military since had already had most of the top officers of the Red Army murdered in his sick purges.
The Nazi offer of much of Eastern Europe was quite the carrot in addition to withdrawal of the raised stick. If and when Hitler attacked in the east, Russia could have a slice of the conquered cake, even though she hadn't helped to bake it. She was the little Red Hen of 1939. The Eastern half of Hitler's eastern conquests was quite a temptation for a fascist dictator, and especially for a Godless knave like Stalin.
France and England were making a counter-offer. They wanted the Soviet Union to join them in a new and improved Triple-Alliance in order to stop Hitler. The idea was to guarantee the safety of the smaller states of Eastern Europe. If Germany attacked Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states, then the UK, France and Russia would come to the rescue with their combined military might.
This looked like a good offer on paper, but in practice there were many problems. First of all the geography of Europe made it impossible for England and France to even dream of rescuing Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states from a German invasion. The only thing England and France could really offer was a punitive invasion a year or tow or three down the road to restore these original governments and even that was highly unlikely in any event.
The only member of the trio that could do anything to stop a Hitler invasion of Poland was Russia and there were problems with that idea both in Russia and in Poland. In fact, they were more than problems. They were immovable obstacles. First and foremost the Poles did not want any Soviet troops moving into Poland at any time, even if they were actually being invaded. They feared the Russians at least as much as the Germans, and throughout the spring and summer of 1939 the Poles just said no to any plans to have Russia help them stop Germany. The British and the French were understandably frustrated.
Russia and Poland had been historic enemies for centuries. Russia had helped to partition (dismember) Poland three times. Poland had attacked and invaded Russia in 1920, occupying most of the Ukraine and Lithuania before a Red Army counterattack under Trotsky had beaten them back to the gates of Warsaw. Only Allied diplomatic intervention prevented the Russian conquest of Poland at this time. Poland was severely ant-communist and between historic enmity and political hatreds, one can understand the position of Poland. Historians call Polish diplomatic stubbornness in 1939 things like “unbelievably stupid.” But Poland was being asked to welcome one mugger to rescue them from the threats of another. I don't find fault with their stupidity. Romania felt about the same way. The livestock of Eastern Europe didn't want a contract with the leopard in order to gain protection from the cougar.
Another factor in Polish stinkin thinkin was (if you can believe this) an honest lack of faith in Russia's military ability to make much difference one way or another. Beck, the Polish leader, thought that if Hitler attacked, that Poland could defend itself, and if it failed, Russian intervention would not save the day and would only prolong the suffering and fighting.
Russia for its part did not want to be the only one of the three partners to have to actually send its boys to die to save Poland, Romanian or Latvian independence. England and France wanted the Soviet Union to “guarantee” the integrity of these countries, but at the moment of truth, only Soviet divisions would be deployable and Stalin found this deplorable. France and England would get around to intervention only after the matter was pretty much settled. They might contribute some fast air and naval power, but little else, and France, as events would prove in September, was not seriously interested in any offensive actions against Germany's undefended rear in the case of a German invasion of Poland. France was militarily dependent on its famous Maginot Line of super-pillboxes, trenches and tunnels. The Maginot Line was impressive but it was as immovable as it was impregnable. Stalin was probably aware of French literal military 'intransigence' on this point.
In fact, the Russians had dreams of swallowing up these countries themselves, not protecting them. What was more important, and much worse, none of these East Europe states trusted Russia as far as they could throw a glacier. The states of Eastern Europe flat out rejected even the theoretical offer of help from the Russians.
This refusal of Poland to accept Soviet help led many politicians in the west to reconsider their commitments to Poland. Why should we go to war to protect Poland when Poland won't take the necessary steps to protect itself, they asked. There was a movement to tell Poland that if it did not agree to accept Soviet help, then the Allies in the west would withdraw their pledge to go to war with Germany if and when those demons attacked ( I can say that – I'm 60% German.) As far back as April 3 Lloyd George had asked Parliament to make this a strict condition if Poland expected England to go to world war for her. It made sense and it might have worked, but it was never tried, and the west was in the end roped in to committing itself to defending a nation it could not defend, while the only country that could have defended it helped to conquer it instead.
In addition to these obstacles, the British (and to a lesser extent the French) considered their own governments by their very nature to be the natural enemies of the Communist government of Russia. Even the Labor party in Britian hated Stalin and the Communists. The Conservative Party couldn't sleep at night they hated them so much. Now the UK was being asked, for expedience, to embrace and ally itself with their sworn political enemies, the Communists, the ones who wanted to overthrow all the capitalists states of western Europe and and had been preaching and promoting that since 1920.
Is it any wonder then that Britian and France only went through the motions of courting a Soviet alliance but did not take the important steps to make it a reality? The western democracies continued to send low-level emissaries to Berlin and Moscow to meet with Soviet diplomats. The Russians correctly were insulted by the low level celebrities they were meeting.
When the British negotiated with Poland for military and political discussions, they sent their most famous generals and diplomats. When the British negotiated with the Soviet Unions they sent unknown warm-up acts. Stalin was got the message.
What the British and French were trying to do was stall the Nazi-Soviet Pact by dangling vague promises of a military and political alliance. They gambled that the Russians would break off these sinister talks with the Nazis in order to maintain the opening for an alliance with them. But the west was sending over-the-top signals of disrespect to the proud Russians, for example sending emissaries to key meetings on slow ships when they could have flown them in. Stalin was no fool, and was not a man who handled insults well.
The Soviets enjoyed their position as the double-courted lady. When the Germans began to make their offer more concrete, the Russians feigned hesitation. 'How can we take your friendship seriously,' they asked, 'when the Nazis had done so many things against us recently.
“Like what,?' asked the nazi rep.
“Like the anti-Comintern Pact, your support of Japan against us, and refusing to allow us participation in the important Munich Conference of 1938 when we specifically asked to be included,” they replied.
“So what is it you want,” asked the Germans, “Surely there are no territorial questions between the Baltic and the Black Sea that we cannot solve between us amicably.”
“Now you're talking,” replied the Russians.
The Soviet Union wanted a specific deal to divide Eastern Europe between the two fascist predators. In the end they got it and the pact was thus sealed.
On July 26, two Russians and two German diplomats had a fancy dinner at one of Berlin's finest restaurants and for the first time, they essentially agreed the the time had come to make a deal. The German waiter had no idea that he was serving a table that was plotting to serve up Eastern Europe to massive death and destruction. In the meantime, British diplomats were sailing the North Sea at a deliberately leisurely pace on their way to what was supposed to be the same dinner to save Europe from massive death and destruction. The difference between serving and saving was Communism. The west could not ally itself with a great power that was dedicated to destroying it, and the countries of Eastern Europe felt the same. The only country on earth that stank badly enough to treat with these Communist stinkers, was the vilest smelling nation in all of human history, the Third Reich. Stalin and Hitler weren't even strange bedfellows, they were two Satanic peas in a pod. It is no wonder that they signed their infamous pact of 1939 and it is almost silly that the world found it shocking. Stalin had already starved, imprisoned or murdered millions of his own people. What a surprise that he teamed up with Adolph Hitler.
HITLER'S OTHER ALLIES
Italy and Hungary, Hitler's other allies, wanted no part of a war. When it began to seem clear to anyone with eyes that Hitler was planning to invade Poland, Mussolini sent the Foreign Minister Count Ciano to meet with German foreign Secretary Ribbentrop (hanged at Nuremberg) for talks.
Ribbentrop took Ciano to one of the best restaurants in Germany and listened coldly while Ciano told Ribbentrop that Italy was hoping for a diplomatic solution of “the Polish Problem.” Italy was still allied to Germany by the Pact of Steel, the antiComintern Pact, and the Tripartite Pact, but Italy didn't want to have to go to Germany's aid in a war started by Germany. Hitler would gain territory in eastern Europe that wouldn't be shared with Italy in any case. Italy had no quarrel with Poland, and Italy was not prepared for war, and was in bad shape financially. Fascist gold reserves were almost empty.
Ciano warned Ribbentrop against invading Poland. He told Ribbentrop that if Germany invaded Poland, then Britain and France would declare war on Germany. Ribbentrop scoffed at this suggestion,
“That shows how much you know, Ciano. France and Britain cannot forget the mass casualties of World War One. They will run from war. They are soft. The men of Munich will never go to war with Germany to save Poland.”
Ribbentrop was speaking the mind of his Fuhrer, word for word.
Ciano replied, “You're wrong, Ribbentrop. My spies have been all over Europe, and my contacts in Paris and London are better than yours. Britain and France intend to go to war with you if you attack Poland.”
“I'll bet you six ounces of solid gold that they never will.”
“You're on.” said Ciano.
Ciano continued to plead that there must be some diplomatic way out of the brink of war. Finally Ribbentrop interrupted him by pounding the table one time with his fist. He leaned over to Ciano with eyes of a black heart and said, “You obviously don't get it. We want war.”
Ciano gulped and called for the check.
Three years later, when Ciano was still waiting to get paid on his best, he was executed by the Nazis, for alleged disloyalty to Hitler.
On August 19 the Germans finally got word that the Russians had agreed to the non-aggression pact between the two super-powers of evil.
NAZI-SOVIET NEGOTIATIONS
The Soviets tried to proceed with caution when the Germans first approached to rapproach. But the Nazis needed the deal sealed quickly or else the invasion of Poland would have to be postponed beyond the target date of August 26, 1939 with the last feasible date September 1. Any date beyond that and the autumn rains would arrive before the German Army could finish the job on the wide plains of Poland.
By the 19th of August Hitler basically had to beg Stalin to conclude a deal now, not later. He warned in a personal telegram to Stalin that, “the tension between Poland and Germany has become intolerable.”
A fool could read between the lines. Hitler was tipping his hand that the invasion of Poland was moments away, so deal now or never.
For two days Hitler, Keitel and Ribbentrop paced the floors of their Nazi mountaintop lairs, waiting to hear back from their pen-pal in Moscow. Hitler had never been in such a humiliating spot since he had taken power in 1933. It was all up to Stalin. If the Marshall said no, then the invasion of Poland might never happen, Germany would crash financially, and Hitler might die before winning the whole thing. Without this war, and a victory in it, Hitler knew he might not even remain in power indefinitely. Not only that, Hitler would suffer a personal humiliation at Stalin's hands, a rejected suitor to a hated Communist leader, and rival.
AUGUST 22 - LASHBRUKEN - HITLER HAPPY
Germany and held a meeting with his top brass on August 22 at Lashburken.
As usual the meeting consisted of an endless lecture by Hitler. Remember, this was a man who as a corporal in World War One used to launch into long political speeches that bored his comrades to tear gas. It is consistent that as dictator, this personality disorder would be that much worse.
According to all accounts of this crucial war council, Hitler talked non-stop for seven hours. No one dared to interrupt him. All the big Nazis, Generals, and Admirals were there. The reports from Ribbentrop assured him that the Russians had officially turned his way and now it was only a matter of formal ceremonies. Hitler was elated. He now knew he could take Poland with no interference from Russia and he did not far England or France. “Our enemies are little worms,” he told the gathering, “I saw them at Munich.”
According to all accounts of this crucial war council, Hitler talked non-stop for seven hours. No one dared to interrupt him. All the big Nazis, Generals, and Admirals were there.
He was going to go to war with Poland. England and France would not intervene. They might have if Russia had been part of their team, and that was only might have. With the new non-aggression pact between the USSR and the Third Reich, Britian and France would not dare attack. He had seen the men of Munich and had concluded that “they are little worms.”
The Third Reich launched the Second World War largely because it was out of money. It could not pay its debts so it had to conquer them. I took a class at Suffolk University where the prof based the entire six weeks on this thesis. That the real motive for war wasn't even racism or Hitler's insanity. The real reason was more practical. Germany was about to go completely bankrupt. It had dodged the Great Depression with radical borrowing and stealing and national restructuring, but it couldn't hold out forever.
Hitler confirmed this at the 8/22 conference as Lashbruken,
“It is easy to make this decision. We have nothing to lose; we
can only gain. Our economic situation is such that we cannot
hold out more than a few years.”
Then there was his personal power, his madness, his acute awareness of his historical mission. Germany had to attack now, because the Fuhrer could die,
“No one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people the way I have it. There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a key factor. But I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or lunatic.
No one knows how long I shall live. It would not be safe to put off the showdown for four or five years. It has to take place now!”
Hitler was right on many things but wrong on others. He was certainly wrong in thinking that only a lunatic or criminal would want to off him. Elderly pacifists wanted to kill Hitler by 1939, so he was correct in his assessment that his personal safety was precarious. And he knew that he had never been a particularly healthy guy. Hitler probably had venereal disease. Adolph knew that either way he didn't have long to live and he wanted to take the world down with the ship when he sank.
With considerable accuracy he said, “I have made the political preparations. The way is now open for the soldier.” Clauzevitz could not have said it much better. His only fear was that “some dirty dog will make a proposal for mediation.” The guy wanted World War II. He couldn't wait to get started.
“Close your hearts to pity!,” he cried with an exclamation mark. “Act brutally! Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion!” These orders would be obeyed for the next six years.
If only his father Alois hadn't beaten little Addie as a boy! This time the exclamation mark is mine. One loving father who laid off the booze and the strap might have saved 20 million lives.
The meeting adjourned with Hitler predicting absolute victory in a rousing speech to his intimates. Herman Goering was so pumped up that he jumped up on Hitler's table and danced.
The HG table dance story came from two persons who testified at Nuremberg in 1946. Goering was enraged at this allegation. He didn't mind being accused of mass murder and conspiring to conquer the world. But he did mind someone telling a false story making him look like a twit. He admitted that he was there and the he led the applause at the end of Hitler's even of war speech. But Goering made sense when he said the dancing story
was absurd. No German officer would behave like that at an official meeting, Goering was fat and could have severely hurt himself by dancing on a table, no sane person would dance on someone else's living room table, and not even a madman would dance on Adolph Hitler's table.
One of the interrogators told Herman, “Don't worry, you'll be dancing soon .... at the end of a rope.”
CHAMBRLAIN LETTER -OOH WE'RE SCARED NOW
By August 21 it was apparent in all diplomatic circles that the deal was about to go down between the Nazis and the Soviets. The British cabinet held an emergency meeting the next afternoon.
The cabinet and its leader the less than intrepid Neville Chamberlain correctly figured that Hitler expected Britian to back off from going to war over Poland. They were incorrect in thinking that if they warned Hitler that they would still go to war with Germany if he invaded Poland, the Fuhrer would back off on his war plans.
Chamberlain signed off an letter to Hitler composed by the entire cabinet that was delivered to Hitler on the afternoon of the 23rd, or, at about the same moment that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was being signed in Moscow. It said in essence,
Dear Adolph,
A lot of people in Germany, probably yourself included, are saying that if Germany and Russia sign a non-aggression pact, then Great Britain will not dare intervene in the event of a Nazi invasion of Poland. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Some people say that if England had made its pre-war position more clear in 1914 then the entire bloodbath of World War One could have been avoided. If that may be so, let's make things crystal clear this time round. We will go to war with you if you invade Poland. If you want one of our barnstorming pilots to skywrite it over Berlin we can do that too. But make no mistake. We will declare war on Germany if Germany invades Poland. If you cut a deal with Stalin it won't change anything on our end.
Once a war like that begins, it will probably go on for a very long time and it might make the First World War look like a skirmish.
Signed
Neville
David Henderson, the British Ambassador to Germany drove up the mountaintop to Berchtesgaden and delivered the note personally to the man on the top of the mountain. Weizaeker, the Nazi Ambassador to England was present and recorded the event in his memoirs.
For the umpteen thousandth time, Hitler was furious. This is the gist of the conversation acording to Weizacres notes,
Hitler: “You English have a lot of nerve. We were close to resolving our differences with Poland but England interfered and ruined everything. Now Poland is intransigent only because of English prodding and you dare to come to me with this warning? It was England that caused Czech intransigence last year, and now this. Poland is persecuting native Germans within their borders. Poland is conducting a race war against Germans.”
Henderson: “I contest all that you say, Mr. Hitler, Poland is not the troublemaker here. Poland does not want war but apparently Germany does and you are using false stories about Polish persecution of Germans to justify you aggressive intentions.”
Hitler: “Wrong again Mr Henderson. England, the most aggressive empire building nation in the history of the world is accusing my country of being a bully? That is a laugh. Life for Germans in Poland today is a living hell. More than six cases of forced castration of German men have been confirmed!”
How does Henderson come back from that argument? Hitler used the alleged castration story repeatedly in the year before he attacked Poland. I kid you not. I wouldn't joke about something like that.
When Henderson walked out the door, Hitler waited patiently until the Ambassador's fading footsteps could no longer be heard. Then he looked at Weizaecker and broke into a satisfied laugh, slapped his knee in delight and said, “Chamberlain won't survive that conversation; his cabinet will fall this evening.” - So Hitler hadn't been that furious after all. Hitler was crazy like a fox, a method to his madness. The scariest thing about the guy was how crazy he wasn't.
Ambassador Henderson returned to Hitlers den that same evening after spending the afternoon at the Salzburg Hilton. This time Hitler was calm in tone but not in words.
“Mr Henderson, you should know that I am now 50 years old. I do not intend to make war when I am 58 or 60. Now is the time for me to fight while I still have the physical energy.”
Henderson could not believe his ears. This was even worse than what Hitler had shouted angrily in the early afternoon.
“Make no mistake about who I am,” the maggot continued, “I was a front -line soldier in The Great War and I know what war is and how to conduct it. I think it should also be clear to you and everyone else by now that if I had been in command of Germany in 1914 the official language of France today would not be French.”
Then Hitler returned to the great lie of Polish persecution of Germans, warning Henderson that an “appalling wave of Polish terrorism has been unloosened against one and a half million Germans there. The Fatherland will not tolerate this mistreatment of it's children any longer.” Henderson cringed as he waited to hear the crastration story one more time. Hitler brought it up again. Henderson in this spot was like Marylyn on the Munsters, a normal person trying to make sense of lunatics, with no one else in the house he could turn to for consolation.
Henderson in the isolated rat's den also could not have known that the Nazi-Soviet pact was already being champagne toasted in Moscow.
THE OTHER DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY – AUGUST 23, 1939
Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and his entourage flew to Moscow for the formal ceremonies making the Nazi-Soviet Pact official.
The deal was finalized on August 23. Pictures of the signing ceremonies show Stalin with a happy smile.
There were two agreements. The larger one, the one that was made very public was the agreement to not make war on each other, and to not join in the war if a third party or coalition third party made war on the other. This gave both sides what they wanted. The Russians got time and security, the Germans got the green light to put the lights out on Poland.
The smaller agreement was just as powerful in the long run. Part two of the day of the devils, was a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into Russian and German spheres of influence. This was the price of the ticket for Hitler to keep Russia neutral. While he conquered Poland, Hitler would have to share the turkey with his new friends. Poland would get the eastern portion of Poland along the lines of the Gooblinki, Washivka and Winskii Rivers
There were two full meetings. The one in the later evening including all the signing ceremonies and quite a few toasts.
As a matter of fact everyone got pretty well hammered. Ribbentrop, Molotov, Stalin and their aides got sloshed on vodka and whiskey raising toasts to their new friendship. I kid you not.
Stalin at one point raised his glass and said, “We are well aware of the great love in your country for your Fuhrer. He is a great man. A toast! To Adolph Hitler!” Everyone downed another one.
Ribbentrop proposed a toast “To Holy Russia, our new and eternal friend!” More booze down the hatch, and anyone who didn't keep up would be called “a Chamberlain.”
POLAND AWAITS ITS FATE
Now Poland was alone. Russia would not lift a finger to defend her old Polish enemy. The allies France and England were pledged to help but… Well, what they never told Poland was that they knew they would have to come to its aid only after totally defeating Germany first. Meaning Poland was toast.
Hitler had been threatening to settle his feuds with Poland by invasion. Now with Stalin smiling on with folded arms, he could launch his war.
Next to Poland, the group that suffered the most from the Nazi Soviet pact
was probably the American Communist Party and all of it’s fellow-travelers. Prior to August 20, 1939 the American Communist Party had been openly pro-Soviet and openly supportive of the person of Joseph Stalin. But now after a decade of status and significance, Communism in America took a nosedive off the cliff with people deserting the Party faster than you can say ‘we wuz wrong.’
The American Communist Party had always taken their orders directly from Moscow and had been funded by the Kremlin as well. But now even nasty US leftist extremists were appalled at the behavior of Stalin the Great. No reasonable person could defend an alliance with Hitler over here in the states. The Communist Party fell off the planet in the USA for now. When Hitler invaded Russia in June of 1941 the Party waded slowly back into the water.
It is important to note that a large number of Americans who were simply disillusioned by Communism in the 1930’s and learned their lesson properly on 8.20.39 were later persecuted in the 1950’s for their actions two decades earlier. The fact that they had correctly admitted error the first day after the Nazi-Pact did not absolve them and it probably should have. The judgment of presentism in 1953 or 1956 was not fair to many men and women who had been Communists long before it became a dirty word.
But other extremists who had truly sought to overthrow the US under the USSR’s surreptitious direction deserved what they got in the 50’s. These pawns of the Comintern were not innocent in 1955 any more than they had been in 1935 or 1955. What was wrong was to lump them all together in the same red basket. And by the way, anyone who laughs off the threat of Communism in America in the 1930’s is an ignoramus.
The Communists of the Great Depression along with their fellow-travelers later became known as the “Old Left.” Many of the Hippie Rads of the 1960’s were children of these parents. The opposite of the kid who joins an anti-war rally partly to defy his parents, many of the Jerry Rubinesque Yuppies were actually trying to win their parent’s respect!
AUGUST 25 – HITLER SEEKS A STALIN DEAL WITH CHAMBRLAIN
Hitler was a genius with a dummy streak a mile wide. On the afternoon of August 25 he met with the British Ambassador in his Berlin office. Mr. Chamberlain listened as Hitler proposed to make a deal with England like the one he made with Stalin.
Hitler actually liked the English and had much admiration for the British Empire. This is a theme of Nazi history up until 1941. The Poles, Russians, and the French are the bad guys, in that order. But the English are way down the list, even though there was that World War One business. So he was probably in ernest when he said to Chamberlain,
“I am prepared to make a personal pledge to look out for the
safety and the continued existence of the British Empire. I am
prepared to formally commit the power of the German Reich
for this.”
Hitler told Henderson that the German armed forces would come to the aid of Britian if her empire was threatened anywhere on the planet. The price of course was for England to stay out the way in Poland,
“The German-British Mutual Assistance Pact will be drafted and signed only after I have first settled the Polish problem.”
Chamberlain sat there in amazement thinking, “yeah, rite, when a burning tugboat wins the America's Cup.”
Hitler would have looked smart here only if the whole thing was a gag and Goering and Goebbles were suppressing giggles from behind some two-way mirror. The foreign policy of the British Empire for centuries had been the absolute prevention of any single state dominating the continent of Europe. Hitler was messing with 1815 and Metternich, and you don't want to go there with the British, mien Fuhrer. If the UK would go to war against Russia in 1853 over the Crimea, it would certainly go to war with Germany over Poland in 1939.
Hitler added a nauseating personal note about his tender nature,
“Mr. Henderson, I am by nature not warmonger. I am an artist.
Once I settle this Polish question I will retire and return to my
true love, which is painting. But if England rejects my offer of
mutual assistance and eternal friendship, there will be a war. I am
a great man who makes great decisions for a living, and I am not
NEW ANGLO-POLISH TREATY
As soon at the Nazi-Soviet Pact was official, Hitler gave the order for the invasion of Poland. The latest possible date for the Nazi assault upon the Polish nation was to be August 26 at 4:30 in the morning. General Halder was in charge of the operation and his diary of August 24 records that after 4:40 am on the 26th “Everything is going to roll automatically.” (This bears a remarkable and chilling resemblance to the message sent to the Japanese envoys in Hawaii in early November of 1941 that after November 26, “Things are automatically going to happen.”
But as history knows, things did not roll on the 26th. The war began on September 1 1939, not November 26.
There were two reasons for the delay, the Anglo-Polish Treaty of August 25, and complications within the “Pact of Steel.”
In London on August 25 Poland and Great Britian upgraded their alliance. What was already in place was an one-way agreement whereby Britian guaranteed the independence of Poland. The new treaty was an old-fashioned mutual military assistance pact, its terms a clear warning to Hitler.
Hitler frowned when he read about this. he was hoping to pick up the Bavarian Times and read about the resignation of the Chamberlain government. Instead he read of new resolve.
ITALY ON THE FENCE AS USUAL
Meanwhile in Rome the Duce began to dodge. Mussolini was offended that Hitler had negotiated the pact with the arch emeny of fascism, the USSR, and that he had done it behind his back. No one in Nazi diplomatic circles had even hinted to the Romans what was going down. The imminent invasion of Poland was not to Mussolini's liking either. The pact of Steel wasn't supposed to be an excuse to drag Italy into war whenever Hitler felt like taking another country.
Count Ciano, the foreign ministr was anti Nazi and had Mussolini's ear. He kept trying to convince the Duce to renounce the alliance with Germany entirely, suggesting in rough terms that Hitler was, among other things, “ a backstabbing squid who could not be trusted.” German spies in Rome were on to Ciano but couldn't do much about it.
The terms of the Pact of Steel pretty much said that Italy was supposed to join up with Germany in the event of war with anybody, but there was a secret protocol that Germany wasn't going to start the fire until 1942. Mussolini felt that Italy needed that long to get its armed forces in shape.
Both Musso and Count C felt that a war in 1939 might leave Italy vulnerable to attack from France and England. Germany would settle its problems in the east while enjoying its proteced geographic location in the center of the continent while the British and French could exact their revenge on Italy.
It was a logical thought process considering the exposed position in the Meditteranean of the Italain peninsula. The British indeed considered the Medittranean of top strategic importance, especially with the British controlled Suez Canal at stake there. A British offensive against Italy before dealing with Germany was not an unrealistic fear. This was especially true of the naval aspect. Judging from Churchill's memoirs, the Brits were ready to pounce on the Italian Navy in the Meditteranean as soon as Italy entered the war. The Italian Navy was not exaclty a negligible force, but the British Navy alone was superior, and combined with the formidable French Navy, an Italian declaration of war on Poland in 1939 would have probably meant the annihilation of the Italian Navy. By waiting until France was on the verge of surrender and the Brits were trapped at Dunkirk before entering the war (June 1940) Mussolini probably made the wise call.
The Duce was definitely tempted though, when he learned of Hitler's imminent invasion. Benito enjoyed the thought of being on the winning side and he thought if he committed Italy to the impending war he could pick up some territorial compensation in Dalmatia and Croatia. Ciano kept telling him that the Nazis were no-good, and so Mussolini was torn.
US ARMED FORCES 1939
Even the conservatives in Congress who favored a strong national defense knew that the Great Depression meant that where there was a will did not mean there was a way. It would be a fine idea to beef up US armed forces in light of the growing war clouds of Europe and Asia, but the money was simply not there and there was no support for instituting the draft.
General George C. Marshall became Army Chief of Staff on July 1, 1939. The Army at that time consisted of less than 200,000 men, about enough to provide a decoy flank movement in one major battle in 1944, and far less than the total number of British troops evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.
By July 1, 1941 the United States Army would comprise 1,400,000 men. By the time Japan surrendered in 1945, the US Army had more than eight million men and 100,000 women in uniform.
The US Navy in 1939 was still using depth charges from World War I on its destroyers, and it would pay when the undeclared war in the Atlantic began and it found itself behind the Nazi 8-ball in the war of science.
The Air Force did not exist except as a sub-division of the Army and it had only 20,000 men in it at the beginning of 1939. Training facilities were so poor that civilian flight training schools were bought out to teach the Army air pilots until our Army training facilities could be developed and built. President Roosevelt asked for and got from Congress a large appropriation for more warplane production on January 12, 1939.
On August 31, 1939 the US Marine Corps had only 19,000 troops, just a few good men. At the end of World War II there were 484,000 proud Marines. In 1945 these guys with a helmet for their pillow could hardly call themselves the “few.”
THE WORLD OF TOMORROW 1939
In the summer of 39 a great world’s fair was held in New York City. It was called the World of Tomorrow and almost every major nation in the world provided exhibits. It was supposed to be a positive and exited look at a new and better world of tomorrow.
The grim news from the world of impending war was meticulously kept off the grounds. Newspapers and radio sets were absent and silent. In the waning days of the summer, Hitler launched World War II. World of Tomorrow packed up and closed for the winter. When it opened again in 1940 the Soviet Union pavilion had been replaced by a recreation of an old New England town. Latvia and Lithuania no longer had exhibits since they were no longer nations. The television set was displayed to the amazement of viewers. A major league baseball game was shown. TV for the average Joe was a long way off but the World of Tomorrow was a tease for toys in the next generation.
GREAT DEPRESSION – SOME MORE THOUGHTS
Franklin D was like a farmer who sold all his lumber and bought fireworks for Christmas with the dough. 'It all went up with a bang.'
This is a quote from Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and says it all for me.
THE NAZIS
Before September 1 1939, Hitler and the Nazis were one group, and after the war began they were another. They were yet another when the was began to go very badly in 1944. I'd like to take an in depth look at the end of the between war 20-year cease-fire at who these bozos were.
BOOGER JOHNSON
Anyone who thinks Hitler was insane is so far off the mark it's incredible. He was so ordinary, so human, so easily understandable, it is frightening. Hitler didn't have great social skills, but he had enough that you could have chatted with him about a thousand things in the right setting and if you didn't realize he was the Fuhrer you would have thought that he was actually an ordinary sort of guy. The world is full of quirky people who are nevertheless quite ordinary. That, again, to me, it the scariest thing about him. He fit that description.
Hitler's intimates were that much more in awe of him because they saw the natural man and that made them feel privileged. On stage he was this dynamic fireball of political frenzy, leading the masses to the coming victory of the forces that were oppressing the great fatherland, but then off-stage he'd be hanging out with a Speer or a Doenitz or his chauffeur Hoffman and having the most natural small talk conversation about the movies, or architecture, or the weather, or which restaurant made the best lasagna in Munich. Those who were on the inside end of the regular Joe Hitler were even more dazzled than those who only saw his awesomeness. Nothing makes a movie star today more powerful than a reputation of being just a regular sort in real life. Those few who act like prima donnas hurt their star power. President Obama hangs out with all sorts of people at one “after-six” function or another an impresses all by not acting like he's something special.
Of course, once Hitler got to work and politics was involved, the monster emerged, but even then, not all the time.
The sickness in Hitler grew as he became more powerful and especially grew when he launched a world war. After they tried to kill him in 1944 he really went off the deep end, but here we are looking at this little man in the 1930's with the intense eyes who was fond of hanging out with his lady secretaries and shared laughs and stories over tea. He'd take a nap after a long and lazy chat with his pals, resting off to dreamland while everyone kept talking, just as easily as he's bark an deadly order at a subordinate the next day. The Hitler before the war would even let most of his close friends disagree with his ideas and plans, something he would never do in 1944. But remember, if he was in the first place the sort of guy who wouldn't listen to any disagreement ever, he never could have risen to such power as no one would have wanted to get close to him and help him rise to power.
Hitler had quite a large number of political intimates in the pre-war years. He was part of a team. He was the boss, but he was the boss of a team. He wasn't the team. In the latter stages of the war he lost all but two or three of his teammates. In 1934 50 men and 5 women were allowed to speak frankly with him. Not so many in 1944. By the end he had bought his own publicity. In the early and mid stages he and his team knew that it was just a game.
Back in 1923 he was at the head of the November 9 Beer Hall Putsch that failed and he spent a few months in prison. Those who fought on the streets with him were part of the pioneer Nazi group. He was just an aspiring leader among many at the time.
When he came to power he held an annual meeting with the original Putsch gang, remembering the good old days with those who were there in the beginning.
What is telling is that with each passing year he hated going to this annual reunion more and more. By the end of the 1930's when he was all powerful he hated going to the Beer Hall Reunion with a passion. They knew him when he was nobody and he didn't want to remember, and he didn't want to be with people who could see through the publicity kit. It was a fun thing in 1928, but a painful November 9 1938. He was caught up in the “Booger Johnson syndrome.”
That needs explaining. A comedian I know had a funny routine about how you can't live down your childhood no matter how far you go. He knew a kid that had a booger on his collar in the school picture and everyone laughed about it so hard that he got the nickname “Booger Johnson.” 30 years later he's a brain surgeon and the kids see him walking down the hall of the hospital and start calling out, “Hey! It's Booger Johnson!” They grab the hospital p.a. microphone and tease him, “Booger Johnson to room 311. Booger Johnson, you're wanted in 311.”
The bit worked because it's dead on. Hitler hated the November 9 reunion because in essence these people saw him as Booger Johnson. “You're no Fuhrer, Addie, come on have another beer!” they could joke, and he'd have to pretend to laugh and go along with it. It really irritated him, and he was easily irritated to begin with. Pretending to like it made it even worse.
Every movie star in Hollywood today has a pack of old friends who don't take their stardom one one thousandth as seriously as public strangers do. You can reinvent yourself all you want, but you'll always be Booger Johnson to someone.
(One of the things I'm eternally grateful for is that the kids I grew up with in South Boston never come to my comedy shows. I think I know why. They spared me from Booger Johnson syndrome by not showing up.)
LESSONS OF NUREMBERG
One thing about Nazi propaganda is that it worked so well that it still works. The best was to sell a lame novel is to make a cover design with a swastika on it.
The Nuremberg rally is a case in point. Most of you have seen the film of the pictures of the Zeppelin Stadium filled with jaw dropping masses of German soldiers at attention. My wife recently saw a picture of the masses of soldiers and commented on how incredibly powerful the Nazi army was at that time and no wonder they conquered all of Europe. It certainly impressed me that way too until I studied up on it.
That stadium held 100,000 people. Altogether, 100,000 men isn't enough to conquer Belgium, let alone all of Europe and Russia, plus North Africa. But in one stadium it looks like its enough conquer the world. The Nuremberg rally was just a great big publicity stunt to make the German Army seem much bigger than it really was. At the time the German Army was small compared to France or Russia, but those two countries didn't pack their entire army into one soccer stadium, cover the area at night in searchlights and red flags and then get slick photographers to do their thing and maximize the effect.
Goering protested to Hitler that this was all the searchlights in Germany and it was bad for national defense to deplete them from the four corners of the country. Hitler told Hermie to smarten up. That was the whole idea. Make the west think that Germany must be swimming in searchlights if they could spare that many just for a party rally. The same with the troops. The image was supposed to mean that this is just a sample of the power of Germany, when in fact it was all of it. On tactical nuke could have won the Second World War in three seconds if one had been invented and available to a Brit terrorist at the Nuremberg rally.
The amazing thing is how the Nuremberg 1930's photos still fool people into thinking that it represented awesome power, when it really represented a desperate shortage of it. By the time Germany really did have two million troops to attack Russia with in 1941 the Nuremberg Rally had become superfluous and a waste of resources.
The Nuremberg propaganda game helped scare France and England from intervening at the time Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936. For a supposed madman, the guy had some serious Hollywood brains. He loved to brag later that at the time his army was so small it could not dare go to war against Poland, yet it had intimidated France and England.
The other point I'd like to make about Nuremberg and Hollywood propaganda is that Hollywood picked up Third Reich jive where Hitler left off and then even improved it. There is nothing so perfect as a Hollywood depiction of any Nazi organized gathering in the post war world. During the war the USA made Three Stooges shorts mocking the Nazis. After the war Hollywood glorified the Nazis for monetary reasons.
Look at any real footage of Hitlers Nazi party. Sure, you see some men perfect and strong and eyes focused with discipline, their body language at textbook attention. But scattered in all of this real footage there are always men who look over their shoulders to peek at the Fuhrer, other men coughing, some restless, some are short and chubby with glasses, some unstable and swaying from standing at attention too long. And that's after the Lena Wurtburger or whatever her name was editing. They are a human group. But post-war Hollywood makes them the superhuman race that Hitler tried to sell the world they were. Hollywood enables the Nazi legend. In any Hollywood depiction of the Nazis every man is a perfect specimen, rigid as a steel statue. If anyone dares to move, the director yells “cut!” and threatens to fire the extra and send him back to Burger King if he doesn't act like a real Nazi.
“We're trying to recreate the Nazi party, not a sloppy imitation! Let's try it again. Take it from the line, 'Bourgeois Jews wouldn't understand this.' ”
But the sloppy imitation would be the accurate one. The perfect version is a manifestation of Hitler's fantasy that he never saw in real life.
In the real footage, a Himmler or Hess makes a speech and every shot of the audience is loaded with bits of imperfection. Someone leans over and subtly whispers something to someone. Here and there a face that betrays a sense of, 'when is this boring ceremony going to get over with?' Yet in any Hollywood film version we see more rapt attention on every face than any famous public speaker ever saw on their best day.
If I'm the L.A. director I'd say, “OK, everyone whose first or last name includes the letter p or w, act like you wish there was somewhere else you'd rather be or that you have a sciatic nerve problem and are having trouble standing.” I'd throw in a scene where the p.a. feeds back and the Nazi speaker has to repeat some lines and maybe even make a joke about how the Third Reich perhaps has some work to so on building a master race sound system. I'd have Otto Strasser yell at someone in the front row to “keep your mouth shut while I'm talking.” A pile-driver might be going in the distance to everyone's annoyance. Then you'd see the real Nazi party. Don't make these bastards superhuman when they were anything but.
A couple of stories about Nuremberg illustrate the point. The N rally was a three day affair climaxing in speeches by the top figures like Goebbels and Hitler. The first day was warm-up time. It was much like the DNC or the RNC today in this sense.
The first night was a tribute to the Nazi civil service. The non-military Reichers got their day in the sun, their praise from the Party. They were to march into the Zeppelin field and take medals and cheer for the cameras at the end of rousing speeches in their honor.
But the planners of the rally became acutely aware that about half of these guys were patently fat old bald guys with glasses and canes. This was not the stuff of which great propaganda films are made.
Publicity Director Deitrich and Speer came up with a bright idea. Let's hold the Civil Service Party party at night so no one could see how out of shape these supermen were. The idea was approved. In fact that was why every searchlight in Germany was brought to Germany. They were there to cover up the NBA basketballs these guys were packing. In fact the original idea for the Nuremberg Rally was for most of it to take place in the day with one final ceremony at night. But the searchlights aimed at the black and red giant Nazi flags not only blotted out the excessive beer and knockwurst these guys had been eating for 30 years, they inspired the Nazi planners to change the entire event to primarily a night game. All three nights the top gun motivation speakers came on stage when it got dark, like a good outdoor summer rock concert. The opening acts did their 20 minutes of hack material as the sun set, then Goering or Hitler showed up amidst a great buzz.
The other story is about the Opera. On opening night, while the civil service fatties were getting their bellies kissed at the stadium, the top Nazis were supposed to attend the Nuremberg Opera. Hitler happened to love the opera as much as I hate it and every person I know hates it. The entire Nazi Party party was supposed to kick-off with these two events going on at once; The rally for the nobodies at the stadium and a moving performance at the Opera for the Party leaders with Hitler in the front row wiping tears from his eyes and glancing over his shoulder at the assemblage of important Fascists behind him.
But Hitler had forgot to make attendance at the Opera mandatory. He presumed that all these dregs in newfound power loved the opera too. Ten minutes into the show he got restless because so many of them seemed to be late. 25 minutes into the show he realized he had been burned by these uncouth barbarians he had taken to the top with him. They had stayed away in droves. The Nuremberg Opera House was only 20% full. Adolph hit the roof. He got up from his seat, went up to the back and gave out some serious orders to go round up these nebulous Nazis and get them to the theatre on time for the second half. He ordered the intermission period lengthened so the order could be carried out. All over Nuremberg, Nazi officials were dragged out of pubs, brothels, and hotels and forced to go to the opera. By the time the show ended the place was full. When Hitler went back out into the street everyone kept a terrified distance. He was totally steamed. He fancied himself quite the cultured one and had projected that onto his cronies when it wasn't there.
The guys never made that mistake again. For the rest of the 1930's the opening night at the Nuremberg Opera House was packed to the hilt with Nazis. Even then, many of them fell asleep during the show out of boredom and pre-drank beer.
The stories of how these men were dragged out of their brothels to make it to the opera on time became legendary food for funny over steins for years to come.
I think this story is instructive on Hitler and his contradictions and his naivete, and on the blatant imperfection of the Nazi rulers.
No Hollywood producer is going to depict anything like that in a retro look at Nazis. Hollywood has made them the supermen they never were, and more threatening as individuals than they ever were. That is part of why they rose to power. No one took these clowns seriously until it was too late. In the early 1920's the European hip mocked them for the harmless dolts they actually were, but these weeds grew out of control and ruined the garden.
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