FDR - Jean Edward Smith [266]
Debate began January 10, 1938. The Rules Committee allotted twenty minutes. Speaker Bankhead, departing from custom, left the chair to lead the opposition. After Bankhead spoke, Majority Leader Sam Rayburn made one of his rare appearances in the well of the House. He was followed by Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, the ranking member of the Committee on Veterans’ Legislation. “This is the gravest question that has been submitted to the Congress of the United States since I became a Member of it more than twenty years ago,” said Bankhead.29 Speaking on behalf of the resolution were Ludlow; Hamilton Fish of New York, the ranking Republican on Foreign Affairs; and Democrat Caroline O’Day of New York, an old friend of Franklin and Eleanor. When the yeas and nays were called, Ludlow lost, 188–209. The vote, like the debate, crossed party lines. Democrats split 188–111 against the resolution; Republicans were 64–21 in favor. Support for the resolution was strongest among members from the Middle West and the Plains states. All thirteen Progressives and Farmer-Laborite members—who usually went down the line for FDR—voted with Ludlow. Southern Democrats, a majority of whom were now aligned against the New Deal, backed the president 74–14.30*
Shortly after the defeat of the Ludlow Amendment, the international picture darkened. On March 11, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, not only overturning a key element of the post–World War I treaty structure but unleashing a virulent strain of pan-Germanism not seen in Europe since well before the time of Bismarck.31† The Nazi slogan used to justify the Anschluss—“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—would provide the kindling that would bring the world to the brink of war. France, which was without a government when the German Army crossed the Austrian frontier, said nothing.32 Mussolini, who had rushed four divisions to the Brenner Pass in 1934 to prevent Austria’s incorporation into Germany, this time acquiesced.33 The Neville Chamberlain government in Great Britain continued to look upon Hitler as an important bulwark against communism and chose not to make an issue of the takeover.34 The League of Nations, which had treaty responsibility to protect Austria’s independence, did not even hold a meeting on the question, and the Catholic Church, represented by Theodor Cardinal Innitzer in Vienna, gave its blessing to the Anschluss.35 Since those closest to the annexation accepted it as a fait accompli, Roosevelt felt nothing could be gained by stirring up domestic opinion in a lost cause. At his press conference on March 11 he was noncommittal.36 Privately he deplored Chamberlain’s eagerness to appease Hitler. “If a Chief of Police makes a deal with the leading gangsters and the deal results in no more hold-ups, that Chief of Police will be called a great man—but if the gangsters do not live up to their word the Chief of Police will go to jail.”37
In April the president’s mood soured when Great Britain gave formal recognition to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. As Chamberlain explained it, by appeasing Mussolini, Italy might become sated, the Mediterranean pacified, and Britain’s Suez gateway to India secured. To Roosevelt, such recognition merely rewarded aggression and would have a ruinous effect on the situation in the Far East “and upon the nature of the peace terms Japan may demand of China.” To Winston Churchill, watching events in political exile at his Chartwell estate, Chamberlain and the British cabinet were “feeding the crocodiles.”38
Scarcely before Austria was digested, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia. Three million ethnic Germans lived adjacent to the Bavarian border in the Sudetenland, an old Bohemian enclave folded into Czechoslovakia after World War I. The führer demanded that they be added to the Reich. What Clemenceau had once called the anarchic principle of national self-determination had come home to roost. When Hitler threatened military action to effect the union, Czechoslovakia