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By Root 1824 0

’s guarantors capitulated. The Russians refused to act without the French, the French refused to act without the British, and the British were feckless and indifferent. It was a replay of August 1914 with the film running in reverse. Determined to avoid the thoughtless mistakes that had led to World War I, the powers of the old Triple Entente erred on the side of caution. As Neville Chamberlain phrased it, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”39 At Munich on September 29, 1938, Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini signed the Four Power Agreement, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler avowed no further territorial ambition; Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time”; Mussolini boasted that “democracies exist to swallow toads.” Churchill, from the Tory backbench, said simply, “The Government had to choose between shame and war. They chose shame and will get war.”40

As a result of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia lost one third of its population, 29 percent of its territory, its most important industrial area, and the most formidable defense line in Europe. Roosevelt viewed Munich with mixed feelings. He appreciated that war had been avoided but lamented the price that had been paid. England and France, he told Ickes, “will wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands.”41 As the Czech crisis played itself out, Roosevelt had urged Hitler and Chamberlain to find a peaceful solution. He tried to bolster British resolve but had little to offer in the way of tangible support. With an army of 185,000 men—ranked eighteenth in the world—the United States was essentially unarmed.42 It was diplomatically isolated, still in the throes of the Roosevelt recession, and divided over its role in the world. As more than one historian has noted, America’s lack of involvement was the handmaiden of European appeasement.43

Roosevelt and, to a lesser degree, Hull and Stimson worked to reshape American opinion. Speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, on August 18, 1938, FDR pledged American support if Canada were attacked. “We are no longer a far away continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no harm. The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.”44

After Munich, Roosevelt ratcheted the rhetoric higher. “No one who lived through the grave hours of last month,” he told a national audience, “could doubt the need for an enduring peace.”

But peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword.

We in the United States do not seek to impose on any other people either our way of life or our internal form of government. But we are determined to maintain and protect that way of life and form of government for ourselves.45

American public opinion was moving, and perhaps faster than Roosevelt anticipated. A Gallup Poll in October 1938 indicated that 92 percent of Americans doubted Hitler’s assurances that he had no further territorial ambitions. Seventy-seven percent believed his demand for the Sudetenland unjustified; 60 percent thought the Munich Agreement was more likely to lead to war than peace.46

Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) in Germany, November 10, 1938, helped solidify American opinion against Hitler. On November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish refugee, shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan was protesting the summary expulsion from Germany of ten thousand long-resident Polish Jews, without notice and without legal recourse. He had intended to assassinate the German ambassador to France and shot Rath by mistake. In response to Rath’s death, the Nazi leadership ordered a night of vengeance. Storm troopers burned synagogues, smashed Jewish businesses,