Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns

Author:James MacGregor Burns [MacGregor Burns, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453245163
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2012-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

THE KING’S FIRST MINISTER

Nowhere in the world of 1943 did the gap between fact and expectation open so wide and ominously as in China. Nowhere were military reality and Roosevelt’s hopes in greater disjunction.

Chiang’s problem was almost a caricature of Stalin’s. The Chinese, too, awaited a long-promised front—a second or third or fourth front. They, too, felt isolated from the Anglo-Americans, starved for supplies, robbed by Atlantic and Mediterranean needs, put off by promises and excuses, exploited for their vast manpower. Otherwise the Chinese scene was far more somber than the Soviet. Chiang’s three hundred divisions still held a sagging front against the Japanese. Prices were still soaring as printing presses turned out billions of fapi; the American loan seemed to have sunk without trace. The Communists, steadily consolidating their northern sectors, offered the peasants just what the Kuomintang could not: stern and demanding but honest village authority; campaigns against landlords, usurers, and other bourgeois devils; participation in local government, collectives, and militias; an ideology of equality, democracy, and freedom. By mid-1943 the Communists controlled 150,000 square miles and about fifty million people.

Roosevelt clung to his high hopes for China’s wartime success and postwar greatness even as he stood by his priorities of Europe first, Russia second, and China third. He also knew that aiding China was popular at home. He felt, too, that “China really likes us” and he wanted to sustain the reservoir of good will. He expected China to be a great power after the war and he wanted its friendship. He was proud of his country’s record in China and of his own old-time family connections, though he himself had never been there or in any part of Asia. Hopkins said later: “The United States, through the espousal of the ‘Open Door Policy,’ has an absolutely clean record in China over the years. We must keep it so.”

Early in 1943 the President struck a blow for Chinese friendship—a blow that did not cost a single gun or bomber. On February 1 he asked the Senate to ratify a treaty surrendering extraterritorial rights in China. For decades foreigners had resided or done business in China under their own laws and courts, backed by their own gunboats and garrisons, all exempt from Chinese law and taxation. Within eleven days the Senate ratified the treaty and ended an arrangement that was humiliating to the Chinese and embarrassing to wartime America. The British government took similar steps. By their action, declared Chiang, “our Allies have declared their Pacific war aim to sustain the rule of human decency and human right….” Later in the year Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the Chinese exclusion laws, which had harshly discriminated against Chinese immigration. “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes,” the President told Congress. “We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and to correct them.” Again the legislators acted quickly and favorably.

Roosevelt’s hopes for China were matched by fears. As the Nationalist armies fell back, rumors drifted out of Chungking of a possible separate peace with Japan.

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