The Big Change by Frederick Lewis Allen

Author:Frederick Lewis Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504037501
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11—The Reluctant World Power

I

During the early and middle nineteen-thirties there were occasional grim reminders from overseas that the world contained warlike nations bent on conquest. But at first these seemed hardly more than offstage noises during the drama of the Great Depression. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, when Mussolini’s Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, when Hitler entered the Rhineland in 1936 and gave manifest signs of an inclination to push farther, American disapproval was intense but the great majority of us felt that it wasn’t up to us to do anything about such foreign depredations. For the country was in an overwhelmingly isolationist mood, convinced that it could live in safety and satisfaction behind a wall of neutrality, regardless of what was going on in the rest of the world.

This was a belief at which individual men and women had arrived by a great variety of routes. There were, to begin with, the natural-born distrusters of all things foreign. Their logic appealed to many people of Irish descent (who bore England no love) and of German descent (who dreaded another conflict with Germany) and likewise to numerous Midwesterners and Great Plainsmen who suspected Easterners generally of an undue susceptibility to the blandishments of European diplomats in striped pants. There were also men and women who had suffered deeply from the Depression and who, attributing their troubles to the greed of financiers and big businessmen, proceeded naturally to the belief that it was the sly maneuvers of “international bankers” and “merchants of death” that sucked nations into war. There were also the Communists and their dupes, whom the party line of the moment directed to join in the hue and cry against Wall Street and the munitions makers. There were men and women who so deeply distrusted Franklin D. Roosevelt that they suspected him of trying to drag the country into war in order to fasten his hold upon it the more securely. Still others conscientiously believed that, with a Depression on its hands, the United States had enough to cope with at home without venturing into foreign expeditions, and that the best contribution that America could make to democracy and freedom was to demonstrate that these ideals could be realized within its own borders.

Finally there were those men and women who, as members of the disenchanted younger generation after World War I, had become (to borrow Lloyd Morris’s phrase) “truculently cynical” about that war. These youngsters of the previous decade were now coming into their middle years, and many of them, now solid and influential citizens, had settled into the conviction that America’s entry into World War I had been the great tragic blunder of their parents’ generation. When in the mid-thirties a Senate Committee headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota exposed the huge profits made by some American corporations during that war, and succeeded in conveying the impression that the Morgans and du Ponts and their like had got us involved in it, many members of these various groups felt that their worst suspicions had been confirmed.

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