Franklin D. Roosevelt

B

1

The Stimson Doctrine

Although in 1932, Roosevelt denied that he believed the United States should become a member of the League of Nations, he seems never to have given up the faith in collective security he had developed under Wilson. He was disappointed in the accomplishments of the league, but like many of the league’s supporters he blamed many of its troubles on the failure of the United States to join. After his election in 1932, but before his inauguration, he conferred with Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, and accepted the so-called Stimson Doctrine of refusing to recognize the recent conquest of Manchuria by Japan. Thus, before he had become president, one of the cardinal principles of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, opposition to Japanese efforts to dominate East Asia, had been established.

B

2

Good Neighbor Policy

Another basic Roosevelt foreign policy was the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. The phrase “good neighbor,” used by the president in his first inaugural address, meant in practice that the United States would no longer intervene in Latin America to protect private American property interests. American support for the savage Cuban dictatorship of Gerardo Machado was withdrawn, and a revolution soon turned him out. The removal of the last U.S. Marines from Haiti in 1934 ended direct financial control by the United States. Secretary of State Hull’s reciprocal trade program, which resulted in several agreements with Latin American republics, lowered trade barriers on some goods and was thus popular in many Central and South American nations.

Hull went to the Pan American Conference at Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1933 to give full support to the important principle that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.” The administration acted in accordance with this principle when Mexico seized foreign-owned oil properties. Unlike Great Britain, the United States did not break off diplomatic relations with Mexico. Eventually the American companies worked out their own settlement with the Mexican government. The ambassador to Mexico, Josephus Daniels, was Roosevelt’s old chief in the Navy Department. The actions of these two men did more than anything else to convince most of the Latin American governments that the United States could be a good neighbor.

B

3

Growth of U.S. Isolationism

Toward Europe, President Roosevelt’s policies seemed at first to be almost isolationist, in spite of his background. He did agree to go ahead with U.S. participation in the World Economic Conference, scheduled to take place in London in the summer of 1933. President Hoover had promised U.S. attendance. However, Roosevelt did not have much faith in the ability of the conference to agree on measures to stabilize the value of the dollar. Except for Hull, most of the U.S. delegates were of minor importance. Roosevelt eventually undercut the conference by saying that he had little interest in currency stabilization and by announcing that he would work for economic recovery in other ways. He was strongly influenced by advisers, who had no faith in European central bankers and felt that there was nothing to be gained by tying the U.S. economy to a hazardous international agreement.

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Unquestionably, Roosevelt’s action was made easy by the prevailing isolationism in the United States. Some said the distress of these years was because of disillusionment caused by U.S. participation in World War I. Encouraged by congressional investigations and the works of a number of writers and politicians, many Americans felt that the United States should have stayed out of that conflict. This feeling was so strong that Congress passed a number of neutrality acts, which among other things forbade private American loans to nations that weren’t paying their debts to the United States. Other acts required the president to place an embargo on the shipment of arms to nations at war, authorized him to keep U.S. citizens from sailing on the ships of those nations, and forbade the carrying by American ships of guns or ammunition to countries at war. Roosevelt sought but was denied the right to discriminate between aggressors and their victims. A majority in Congress believed that trading arms with countries that were at war was a dangerous activity. Some belligerent country, isolationists argued, would inevitably attack some of the shipments and draw the United States into another European war.

However, the balance of power in Europe was already shifting, and President Roosevelt was unable to pursue his domestic program without paying some attention to the international situation. During his first term, Italy, led by the dictator Benito Mussolini, conquered the eastern African empire of Ethiopia, in spite of mild economic punishment imposed on Italy as an aggressor by the League of Nations. Soon afterward, Germany, headed by the dictator Adolf Hitler, placed troops and weapons in the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been signed at the end of World War I. In the summer of 1936, Italy and Germany gave vital assistance to the military forces leading a revolution against the Spanish republic. Not only did Britain and France do nothing, but the United States put its own unofficial embargo on the shipment of weapons to Spain, a course legalized by Congress when it convened in 1937. The U.S. policy toward Spain was isolationism carried as far as it could be carried, since under international law the government of Spain had the right to carry on trade, and the rebels were without legal status.

B

4

Quarantine of Aggressors

One of the most significant evidences of Roosevelt’s growing concern with the precarious state of world peace came soon after his reelection in 1936. He journeyed by sea to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to attend a special Inter-American Conference for Peace, where he warned that non-American nations proposing “to commit acts of aggression against us will find a hemisphere wholly prepared to consult together for our mutual safety and our mutual good.” Less than a year later, following the renewal of Japanese attacks on China, Roosevelt in a dramatic speech in Chicago proposed that a quarantine be placed on aggressor nations. Chiefly because of the lack of enthusiasm of Secretary Hull and the British, nothing came directly out of this proposal. However, it was a significant speech because it displayed Roosevelt’s long-held belief in a system of collective security. Soon afterward, the president requested a billion-dollar appropriation for naval expansion, and then almost at once he asked for even more. Congress obliged, and the defense build-up was under way.

B

5

Start of World War II

The amount of money spent on defense grew enormously. The United States under Roosevelt was quickly preparing for a new war, which seemed close at hand. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria and in 1939, it took over the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Large parts of Czechoslovakia had already been lost when Britain and France agreed to allow Germany to absorb German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia under the Munich Pact in 1938. At the end of August 1939 the Germans concluded a nonaggression pact with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which ensured that, if Germany went to war with France and Britain on one front, the Germans would not have to face the USSR on a second front. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Poles appealed to France and Britain for help. There was little that the Western powers could do to prevent the rapid occupation of Poland by the Germans, and, in the east, by the Soviets, except to declare war on Germany, which they did on September 3, 1939.

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