Franklin D. Roosevelt by Robert Dallek

Author:Robert Dallek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Faux Neutral

That Europe was again at war left people across the continent bewildered and horrified. Whether in France or Britain or Italy or in any of Europe’s smaller countries, the shared feeling was one of incomprehension that governments could be so reckless as to repeat the bloodletting of the Great War, which had led to such mayhem only twenty years before. In Spain, where a million people had already perished in the three-year-long civil conflict, Francisco Franco, the country’s newly anointed Fascist leader, understood that despite German and Italian contributions to his victory, participation in the war would be overwhelmingly unpopular.

Even in Germany, where sentiment strongly favored reversing the penalties imposed by the Versailles Treaty, people were sullen and depressed at the prospect of a major conflict with Britain and France. William Shirer, a U.S. correspondent in Berlin, saw “anxiety, fears [and] worries” on the faces of the populace. “Everybody against the war,” he wrote. “How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?” But the public had little or no say in Hitler’s decisions. He had consolidated his power, and dissent or opposition of any kind invited personal disaster, if not death. Still, his successfully having reoccupied the Rhineland and seized Austria and Czechoslovakia without bloodshed made him a hero to millions of Germans. Even Germany’s most ardent antiwar opponents could not ignore the possibility that with a Polish victory Hitler would recoup the losses of Versailles. If he could reach a quick settlement with Britain and France, which he said he wanted, his popularity in Germany would reach unprecedented heights.

In the United States, the antiwar feeling remained as strong as ever. However hateful Hitler’s behavior and regime were to almost all Americans, they did not see him or Nazi Germany as a genuine threat to the homeland. Although most people hoped that Germany would be defeated in the emerging conflict with Britain and France, they shared the belief of Charles Lindbergh, whose expertise as an aviator helped shape public opinion, that German air power was simply not capable of reaching the United States. Moreover, if America did become involved, it would mean the rise of a national security state like those in Europe, with government agencies limiting customary freedoms. Millions of Americans feared belligerency as threatening traditions of individualism that had set the nation apart from the Old World with its militarism and restrictions on free expression.

However eager Roosevelt was to help the British and the French with war supplies, he understood the limits of what he could do. But even becoming a nonbelligerent supplier was a challenge that required the most delicate political handling. On the eve of the war, only 50 percent of Americans favored changing the neutrality law. Once the war began, however, sentiment quickly shifted in favor of a cash-and-carry policy, and the likelihood that exports of war supplies would spur a sluggish U.S. economy was not lost on businesses and ordinary citizens.

A week after the

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