FDR - Jean Edward Smith [263]
Roosevelt distrusted the career diplomats in the State Department. The seven hundred members of the foreign service, primarily prep school progeny with Ivy League pedigrees, were predisposed to political conservatism. Prone to the prejudices of their wealthy WASP backgrounds, they were anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, antiblack, and anti–New Deal. For the most part FDR ignored them. When he recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the State Department was fenced out of the negotiations. By the same token, Roosevelt’s principal ambassadorial appointments reflected measured contempt for the striped-pants set. To Mexico he sent his old mentor Josephus Daniels—whom he still addressed as “Chief.” To Russia he dispatched William Bullitt and then Joseph E. Davies, both sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Joseph P. Kennedy, an unapologetic Irish Catholic, went to the Court of St. James; Jesse Isidor Straus, a Jew (shades of the Dreyfus Affair), was sent to Paris; and Professor William E. Dodd, an outspoken anti-Nazi, to Berlin. Each of these ambassadors enjoyed direct access to FDR. That minimized State Department input and ensured that the president’s views would be accurately represented. When war came, the State Department was shunted to a siding. Roosevelt’s cable communications with foreign leaders were handled by the Navy; Hopkins and other special emissaries undertook delicate diplomatic missions; and the department was absent from major wartime conferences.
During the 1930s Americans concentrated on domestic recovery. The problems of Europe and Asia appeared remote: of little more than passing interest when a third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Much as they may have sympathized with victims of aggression, Americans had no desire to repeat their entry into World War I. Influenced by an isolationist press, revisionist historians, and the much-ballyhooed revelations of the Nye Committee, which had investigated the role of munitions makers in fomenting war, they eschewed involvement in foreign affairs. Mussolini’s 1935 subjugation of Ethiopia caused scarcely a ripple. “The policy of the United States is to remain untangled and free,” Walter Lippmann wrote in January 1936. “Let us follow that policy. Let us make no alliances. Let us make no commitments.”4*
Roosevelt swam with the isolationist tide. He acquiesced in the passage of a series of neutrality acts that denied American arms to aggressors and their victims alike, kept the Army on a starvation budget, and, like Britain and France, refused assistance to the duly elected republican government in Spain.5 In his speeches and letters during the mid-1930s he repeated his belief that the United States should avoid being drawn into another war. At Chautauqua in August 1936 he revealed the depth of his feeling. “I have seen war,” he said. “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed.… I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”6
Japan’s incursion into China in the summer of 1937 caused FDR to hesitate. Like most Americans he favored China (the historic ties of the Delano family ensured FDR’s sympathy),7 and he refused to invoke the Neutrality Act on the somewhat specious grounds