FDR - Jean Edward Smith [265]
At a meeting of the cabinet immediately afterward, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson, supported by Vice President Garner and Harold Ickes, clamored for war. “Certainly war with Japan is inevitable sooner or later,” Ickes noted. “If we have to fight her, isn’t this the best possible time?”17 Roosevelt steadied the ship. The Navy was not ready for war, and the country was not prepared. “The gunboat Panay is not the battleship Maine,” chided The Christian Science Monitor.18 Arizona senator Henry Ashurst told FDR that a declaration of war would not win one vote on Capitol Hill.19 Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota spoke for many when he asked that all American forces in China be withdrawn. “How long are we going to sit there and let these fellows kill American soldiers and sailors and sink our battleships?”20
Roosevelt directed Hull to demand an apology from the Japanese government, secure full compensation, and obtain a guarantee against a repetition of the attack.21 He instructed Morgenthau to prepare to seize Japanese assets in the United States if Tokyo did not pay and mused about the possibility of an Anglo-American economic blockade. The day after FDR’s demand, Japan’s foreign minister, Kiki Hirota, patently embarrassed by the military’s action, tendered the official apologies of his government and promised full restitution for the losses sustained. Ten days later Hirota informed Washington that orders had been issued to ensure the future safety of American vessels in Chinese waters and that the commander of the force that had launched the attack had been relieved. On April 22, 1938, the Japanese government provided a check for $2,214,007.36, paying in full the claim submitted by the United States.22
The Panay incident ended agreeably. But it energized isolationist efforts to keep America out of war. In 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Representative Louis Ludlow, a five-term Democrat from Indianapolis, introduced a constitutional amendment in the House that would require a national referendum before the United States could go to war.23* It was referred to the Judiciary Committee, where the chairman, Hatton Sumners of Texas—who had “cashed in his chips” over FDR’s Court-packing scheme—loyally kept it off the committee’s agenda. By 1937 a discharge petition to bring the amendment to the House floor had obtained 205 of the necessary 218 signatures. Twenty-four hours after the attack on the Panay, an additional thirteen members signed on. A Gallup Poll recorded that 73 percent of Americans approved of the amendment.24 “You can cast your ballot for a constable or a dogcatcher,” Ludlow told a national radio audience, “but you have absolutely nothing to say about a declaration of war.”25
With the discharge petition in place, Ludlow’s resolution to bring the amendment to the floor became the first order of business when the House reconvened in January 1938. The administration pulled out all the stops. Farley called every Democrat in the chamber, party whips visited each member in his or her office, and FDR wrote a personal letter to Speaker Bankhead.26 “The proposed amendment would be impracticable in its application and incompatible with our representative form of government,” said Roosevelt. It “would cripple any President in his conduct of any foreign relations, and it would encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.”27 Alf Landon and his 1936 running mate, Frank Knox, weighed in against the amendment, and former secretary of state Henry L. Stimson, speaking for the East Coast Republican establishment,