Justus Drew Doenecke

Transcription

I want to begin by thanking Tom Schwartz, Matt Schaefer, the staff of the Hoover Library and the Hoover Library Association for the privilege of making this presentation. My research here goes back to 1970, when Tom Thalken and Bob Wood were the major archivists I've often been on pilgrimages here, both as scholar and as panelist. Let me begin my presentation this afternoon by a remark Herbert Hoover made to the Bar Association of Nassau Country, New York, in May 1940. Europe had been at war for just over seven months. German troops had just reached the English Channel. The bulk of British and French forces in Belgium and northwestern Europe were trapped. Hoover said, "We are passing through the most serious moment in the history of the world since the year 410 AD-- the year of the fall of the Roman Empire and the capture of Rome by the barbarian king Aleric." “The world,” he continued, was experiencing "the most gigantic drama of 1,000 years." Yet the very same Herbert Hoover who had voiced such alarm was a major opponent of Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist measures, so much so that just six months before Life magazine had called him the nation's most effective isolationist. Hoover was, said Life, more energetic than Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg, more realistic than Idaho senator William Borah, more discrete than aviator Charles Lindbergh. One should note that Hoover was neither indifferent nor apathetic towards developments overseas. He paid far closer attention to foreign policy than his close friend and political ally Senator Taft. Were one living in 1929, one could find few presidents entering the White House with so much international experience, and even had Hoover died a few years after leaving the presidency, say 1935 or 1936, he would have been seen as a cautious Wilsonian, a theme to which I will eventually return. Just look at his role in the Manchurian crisis, the London Naval Conference, the Geneva Disarmament conference, the international debt moratorium. Until 1937, it could be argued that Hoover was more of an isolationist than his successor, Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover's reputation as an isolationist, or as I prefer the term anti-interventionist, comes about primarily because of his opposition to US World War II policies and certain Cold War policies. It is easy to stress Hoover's opposition to FDR's interventionism during the years 1939-41, for he frequently and vociferously attacked one Roosevelt policy after another. Be the matter lend-lease, convoys to Britain, military aid to the Soviet Union once it faced attack, FDR's freezing of Japanese assets, Herbert Hoover was in opposition. Little wonder that R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., executive secretary of the America First Committee, wrote Hoover immediately after Pearl Harbor, saying, "I want you to know how much I personally appreciated your help during the fight to keep our country out of war.... If the country had heeded your words, it would not be facing these tragic days ahead." The very same day, Hoover in turn wrote General Robert E. Wood, national chairman of America First and board chairman of Sears, Roebuck, "I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your fine efforts and to let you know that I feel you made a grand fight. We were right-- and time will so demonstrate it." Hoover had begged off joining America First on the grounds that his own committee to feed the Nazi-occupied Europe had top priority, though he did aid America First's fundraising efforts. Hoover's food efforts are a vast and rich topic in themselves and I don't have time to develop the matter here. Let me just note the research of my friend Hal Elliott Wert, who has done excellent work on this topic. Hoover's anti-interventionism involved several tenets. First, he assumed that continued fighting would lead to stalemate, for neither Britain nor Germany had the means to invade the other country. Second, he denied that Germany was a military or economic threat to the US. Diminishing exports and the threat of foreign dumping could be met by creating more home industries. If necessary, the US could conduct its trade on a barter system. In an emergency, America could be 97% self-contained. As far as any military threat was concerned, a Germany unable to cross the English Channel could hardly cross the Atlantic with an invading army. Hoover told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in February 1941 that though the Soviet Union could be conquered with two army corps, an attack on the Western Hemisphere required far too many resources and weaponry to be successful. Conversely, US entry into war could only bankrupt the nation. The savings of the American people would be lost. America’s debt would equal 50 percent of her wealth. As far back as 1938, Hoover argued that the US could not remain a democracy under war conditions. A third point, under no circumstances should the US do anything to aid the Soviet Union. When Hitler invaded Russia, Hoover commented that to enter the war to bring about FDR's Four Freedoms to mankind would be "a gargantuan jest." Even in late November 1941, when Germany was besieging Moscow, he wrote Republican leader Alf Landon, "Aid to Russia may sound practical now but the world will pay dearly for this debauchery of our ideals of freedom." Fourth, it was folly to provoke the Japanese. Hoover did say in 1938 that Japan's war on China was "as horrible as that of Genghis Khan." But he opposed any direct pressure on Japan, be the move terminating the 1911 commercial treaty or embargoing aviation gasoline, high grade iron, and steel scrap, or in July 1941 freezing Japanese assets, which in reality blocked off all trade to Japan and triggered the Pearl Harbor attack. In August 1941 Hoover wrote his friend Cal O'Laughlin concerning the recent Japanese invasion of Indochina. Hoover said, "When Hitler wins in Russia-- as he will eventually-- and when the British make peace with him, or when we go to war and eventually make peace with him, the Japs [his term] will still be there. We will probably go to war with them and when we have made peace with them, they will still be in China and way stations." In addition, he saw war with Japan as "God's gift to Hitler," as it would force the American navy to convoy in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and thereby relieve pressure on Germany in the Atlantic. Yet Hoover's attitude was not simplistic. In 1938 he opposed the proposal of Indiana congressman Louis Ludlow for a popular war referendum, saying it would only be effective if all countries were democracies. Similarly, he opposed the neutrality acts of the 1930s, which forbade arms shipments to belligerents, arguing that they "place us in practical economic alliance with the aggressor." In September 1939, when war broke out in Europe, Hoover favored the repeal of the arms embargo and called for the enactment of cash-and-carry. Such arms sales, he wrote O'Laughlin, would "give an enormous emotional outlet to the American people" and thereby reduce pressures for intervention. He had one qualification--that a ban on shipments of all offensive weapons be retained. Admittedly, during this month he told Charles Lindbergh that it was inevitable that Germany either expand peacefully or, if necessary, by war. But in May 1940, he reversed his criticism of military appropriations. In fact, he went so far as to endorse Roosevelt's proposal of spending $1.8 billion on national defense. That December he commended FDR for establishing the Office of Production Management and for appointing auto executive William Knutson as its head. He also favored supplying Britain with needed bombers, tanks, food, munitions, fighter planes, and minor warships. In March 1941, Hoover called the pending lend-lease bill "a war bill" that surrendered Congress's war-making powers to the president, but he wrote his close friend William R. Castle that he would give Britain 2 to 3 billion dollars to buy defense goods. Once lend-lease was adopted, he urged his countrymen to "make a good job of it." During 1941, Hoover made guarded endorsements of Roosevelt's protests against the German sinking of American ships, first when the Robin Moor was sunk in May 1941 and second that September. This was when FDR protested against German firing on American warships and German sinking of American merchant ships without providing for the safety of the crew. Hoover did privately claim that in two sinkings the US was the offender. This is the case of Greer in September and the Kearny a month later. In June 1941, he called for direct aid to China, though he said privately in September the US should encourage Japan to seize Siberia. He thought in terms of trading Japan's withdrawal from territory south of the Great Wall for what he called "this vast unpopulated area into which to expand." Within a year, though, Hoover wrote a memorandum in which he called Chiang Kai-shek (and I quote directly) "the war lord leader of a military oligarchy based upon a secret society, the Kao Ming Ting” [meaning the Kuomintang] Hoover continued, "There never was an election in China; there never was a representative government in the Western concept. There was never the remotest 'freedom' of the Western variety." Hoover realized his anti-interventionism was exposing him to attack. He wrote O'Laughlin, "For what my life and conscience are worth, they become valueless to me or anyone else if I do not persist in what I so deeply believe. I would greatly welcome total eclipse from dealing with the contemporary world. But so long as my voice will be heard I shall do the best with it that I can." Once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hoover publicly said that war had been forced on the US. Privately, he wrote columnist and broadcaster Boake Carter, "This war will be put in the scales of judgment and when the time comes you and I will be found to have been right." He also wrote Castle, referring to the US sanctions on Japan and Hull's 10-point note of November 26, "This continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes has finally got this country bitten." During the war, Hoover spoke relatively little on strategy, though he did endorse a Pacific-first strategy for fighting the war. His greatest fears always centered on the growing power of Russia. In July 1942, he doubted wither Russia would hold out, privately writing O'Laughlin, "Peace will be easier with the Communists out. Peace will be more lasting with that center of revolution in other countries eliminated." At the same time, Germany would be weakened, for the task of garrisoning the Soviet Union would take one and a half million men. In 1943, he privately accused the Russians of deporting one and a half million Poles to concentration camps in Siberia, where half died of starvation. In December 1945, several months after the war ended, Hoover condemned America's role at the various Allied summit conferences. Indeed he found nothing at all to praise in any of Franklin Roosevelt’s diplomacy. “The United States,” he told O'Laughlin, “had appeased every time at the expense of the freedom and liberty of more and more human beings." He also was suspicious of British power, fearing the British would use the war to dominate most of Africa below the Sahara. When Truman became president in the middle of April 1945, Hoover urged him to use diplomatic and economic pressure to achieve free elections in Russia. Yet he warned, "A war with Russia meant the extinction of Western Civilization or what is left of it." Most of the time, however, Hoover focused on the coming peace. With retired diplomat Hugh Gibson, he published a book The Problems of Lasting Peace in 1942, a work supplemented by many speeches and articles. The causes of modern war, he said not surprisingly, were rooted in militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and ideology. But Hoover by no means excluded economic factors. Though denying he was a "complete" economic determinist, he claimed that market and population pressures played "a striking part on the world stage today." In fact, they were "among the primary causes of the collapse of the world into this second World War." Though in religion a Quaker, he sounded a bit like an old-time Calvinist in his claim that man was "a combative and egotistic animal" who "loves contest" and "hates easily." Though Hoover was no Cordell Hull, he stressed the need to lower tariff barriers. The end of hostilities must be followed immediately by the lifting of a food blockade, by instant relief to friend and foe alike. Fearing a repetition of the destructive protectionism resulting after Versailles, Hoover wanted to make the independence of small countries contingent on the lowering of economic barriers. When it came to the international state system, Hoover sought the general principle of effective parliamentary government. Noting that for a hundred years irredentism was a course of war, he said consideration should be given to what he called "the heroic remedy of transfer of populations." Surplus populations should be channeled to undeveloped areas, particularly Polynesia, South America, and Africa. I’m sorry he never elaborated on any of this. He opposed the dismemberment of Germany, claiming that otherwise efforts of "this virile race" [his term] to reunite its nation would result in war. By 1943, Hoover and Gibson envisioned two parts to international organization. The first involved a general world agency that would eventually include all nations. The second concerned separate councils for Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere and would act under the larger world institution. These regional councils would bear the primary responsibility for peace, for they would command the international armed forces and settle controversies. In 1943 Hoover met with Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the US. He told Halifax that while Americans opposed collective security, he personally favored informal cooperation with Britain after the war. Hoover called the San Francisco conference to draft the UN charter "the most fateful conference in all American history, one that might determine the future for the next hundred years." When the charter was drafted, Hoover called for its immediate ratification. Its major strength lay in its provisions for continual meetings in which major problems could be aired. Other positive points included the reestablishment of the World Court, a trusteeship system for independent people, "limited action" to prevent military aggression, and machinery to promote social and economic welfare. Yet Hoover opposed some aspects of the UN. It lacked a positive bill of rights and codification of principles. It needed a more elaborate regional machinery to prevent aggression. He opposed the veto within the Security Council as it put the great military powers out of reach of any enforcement mechanism. "World wars," he said, "are not started by small nations." The new UN lacked other things--methods of revising outmoded treaties, a definition of aggression, a commitment to reduce armies and navies. Hoover sought lenient peace terms for Italy and Japan. When he met with President Truman in May 1945, just a month after Truman had taken office, he said peace terms with Japan should be limited to unconditional surrender of Japan's military forces. In addition Japan must completely disarm for 30 to 40 years. Manchuria must be restored to China. There should be American trials of those Japanese who "violated the rules of civilized warfare." That the Japanese form of government should be retained, obviously meaning the emperor, and Japan should keep Korea and Taiwan. In October 1945 Hoover suggested that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan might have been necessary, but he expressed dismay over the killing of what he said were "tens of thousands of women and children." Within a year he privately told physicist Niels Bohr that he considered the dropping of the bomb a crime, and in his new book Freedom Betrayed, just published by the Hoover Institution and edited by George Nash, he called its use "immoral." By the end of World War II many deemed Hoover an isolationist. Hoover disavowed this label, and in Freedom Betrayed, he writes that he would always use the terms "intervention" and "anti-intervention." Hoover was correct in so doing, though most historians will still use the label "isolationist" to describe one seeking to avoid political and military commitments. One scholar of this phenomena, Ted Galen Carpenter, wrote on Hoover's views during the Cold War. In his doctoral thesis on Cold War dissenters that during the period 1945-54, Carpenter puts Hoover in the class of marginal isolationists, those supporting the prevailing interventionist foreign policy while adopting dissenting positions on some important issues. Carpenter places Hoover in the same camp with Ohio Senator John Bricker, upstate New York congressman John Taber, and Missouri Senator Forrest Donnell. And Carpenter distinguishes these individuals from what he calls doctrinaire isolationists who believed that the events of 1931-51 did not change America needs to avoid foreign involvement at all costs. In that camp would be Senators William Langer and Hiram Johnson, journalist John T. Flynn, Chicago publisher Robert McCormick, commentator Lawrence Dennis, and historian Harry Elmer Barnes. Certainly Hoover supported revisionist histories of World War II. He no longer referred to Charles Beard as "that left-winger." Rather Beard was one "right down our alley." We must show he wrote journalist John T. Flynn in 1946, that "the events of the last few years have been all wrong." During the immediate postwar years, Hoover kept stressing that only the recovery of Germany would enable Western Europe to survive. As early as 1945 – October ‘45, he opposed a vengeful peace. While not mentioning the Morgenthau Plan by name, he claimed that dividing Germany would simply imperil the world. He went on to attack the forced labor of German POWs, whom- he said - were being worked under conditions reminiscent of Roman slavery. He made a highly publicized trip to Germany in 1947, one authorized by Truman, in which he stressed that Germany was the linchpin of Europe. Incidentally, he said the same thing about Japan's role in Asia. Hoover was less enthusiastic concerning aid to the rest of Europe. Beginning in 1946, he warned against the US continuing its role of Santa Claus. In 1947 he opposed sending American military forces to Greece. A year later, he endorsed the claim of publicist Bruce Barton, who said America had "bitten off more than it could chew." "You are right," replied Hoover, "I think we are headed for a nosedive-- and not too far off." In 1948, Hoover opposed the Republican presidential nomination of Arthur Vandenberg, recently a convert to Truman's internationalist foreign policy. Were the Michigan senator chosen as the GOP standard-bearer, he wrote Barton, it "would be the greatest tragedy that could come to the Republican Party." Now Hoover did back the Marshall Plan, though he wanted it greatly modified. What Hoover sought was a commitment for less than four years, a 15-month appropriations was plenty. Three billion dollars was plenty. Gifts should be confined to American surpluses in food, coal, fertilizer, and cotton. Europe should repay by shipments in steel and other capital goods. The whole Marshall Plan should center on German production. He said he would be more amenable to such aid if the Europeans gave up demands for a 40-hour, 5-day week. In November 1947, after claiming that communism was becoming weaker in Europe, he called on the US to help other nations combat what he called "their conspiracies." By early 1948, he asked the Western European nations to form a region defense alliance. George Washington, he said, would amend his advice against "entangling alliances" in light of Europe's misery. Now, Hoover was slightly off here. It was Jefferson, not Washington, who used the phrase entangling alliances. Yet Hoover also warned that if the US went to war with Russia, it could not rely on a single ally. Britain and Western Europe might remain neutral, not because of any ingratitude, but because they feared a Red Army of two and a half million men. Hoover was not hopeless. He posited that a regional European alliance might eliminate the need for an American commitment. During the Berlin blockade of 1948, Hoover suggested a counter-blockade of the Baltic and Black seas. In addition, he told Chicago investor Sterling Morton that the US, Britain, and France should levy an embargo. By June 1950, however, Hoover was suspicious of massive military aid. Europe, he said, was spending only 10% of its budgets of military items. The US was spending 40%. Perhaps Europe was feeling helpless, he mused, "and cannot do otherwise than rely upon being neutral, in which case we are simply playing Stalin's game by the economic exhaustion of our society." Yet, in some ways, Hoover was optimistic. Communism, he wrote Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, contained its own seeds of disintegration. Russian satellites were chafing under the oppressive rulers. If war could be avoided, the Russian empire would "decay in strength and even disintegrate" [his language]. Conversely, even if the US won a major war, it would have to spend years occupying all of Russia, China, and dependent countries. Ideologies, he stressed, could not be destroyed by machine guns. If the US attempted such a feat, it would be engaged in "processes of repression and liquidation repugnant to the American people." Now the Korean War saw a more militant Hoover. Only the conflict began, he endorsed American military intervention. The time for recrimination is over, he said. ‘To win, we must have unity of action and purpose." In the middle of October, it looked as if the troops commanded by Douglas MacArthur could unite both North and South Korea. Hoover favored crossing the 38th parallel. Once the Chinese entered the conflict, threatening to overrun all of Korea, Hoover shifted ground rapidly. He called for withdrawing all ground forces from both Europe and Asia. In a well publicized speech delivered on December 20th 1950, often called the "Gibraltar speech," Hoover called the Western Hemisphere "this Gibraltar of civilization." The US should confine its commitments to holding such "islanded nations" [his term] "islanded nations" as Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Britain if it so desired. America should rely on sea and air defense, not ground troops. Halting communism by a land war would merely create a "graveyard" for "millions of American boys" [his language]. Hoover called for total withdrawal from Korea, arguing the world itself lacked the forces to repel the Chinese Communists. He questioned whether Europe had the will to fight. The continent was haggling over German rearmament. It had refused to permit Spain to join NATO. It had within it well-organized Communist parties. Before the US contributed another man or dollar to Europe, the Europeans should establish "organized and equipped divisions of such large numbers as would erect a sure dam against the Red flood." Defenders of the Truman Administration were not exactly enamored by this speech. Even liberal publications were biting. The Nation magazine declared Hoover's policies "should set the bells ringing in the Kremlin as nothing has since the triumph of Stalingrad." The New Republic saw Stalin sweeping onward "until the Stalinist caucus in the Chicago Tribune tower would bring out in triumph the first communist edition." Within two months, Hoover slightly modified his position. In February 1951 he favored defending the nations who signed the Atlantic pact, which created the NATO alliance. Air and sea power, he maintained, would deprive the Russians of "General Manpower, General Space, General Winter and General Scorched Earth." Just one month after Truman appointed Eisenhower to Paris, there to become the first supreme commander of the Allied force in Europe, Hoover opposed administration plans to send ground troops, though he did approve shipping arms. He still sought total withdrawal from Korea. He approved arming Nationalist China. He claimed he would permit Chiang "to do what he wishes in China." When, in April 1951, Truman fired MacArthur, Hoover praised MacArthur. Hoover called the general "a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great general who has come out of the East." In January 1952, Hoover accused the Truman administration of denying the nation victory. The president should have adopted MacArthur's strategy of destroying the Chinese air sanctuary in Manchuria and employing Chiang's armies. Hoover attacked the peace negotiations. “The US,” he said, had "retreated from the original purpose of unity and independence for Korea to an appeasement idea of a division of Korea about where it was before." Yet he feared that too many commitments would wreck American solvency, as massive debt would guarantee a Communist victory. To Hoover American military policy should center on air power. In a letter to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Hoover said that an air strategy could serve as an effective deterrent. It would preserve American solvency. It could ultimately save Europe if that continent were overrun by ground forces. And in opposing the sending of more infantry divisions to Europe, he found the strategy fallacious. Indeed he said, "The time has come for civilian control of the armed forces of the United States." Yet if Hoover remained cautious concerning American commitments, he still made proposals concerning international organization. In April 1950, he called for reorganizing the UN without Communist nations. The Kremlin had, he said, "reduced the United Nations to a propaganda forum for the smearing of free peoples," thereby eliminating its role "as a preservative of peace and good will." If this move was impractical, he vaguely suggested that freedom-loving nations should a New United Front. In 1962, he again accused the UN of failing to offer even a remote hope of lasting peace. In fact, it had "added to the dangers of war." Now, in 1952, Hoover supported his close friend Robert Taft for the Republican nomination. Both saw eye to eye on foreign and domestic policy. However, once the GOP nominated Eisenhower, Hoover supported him in the general race. Now, where does one place the role of Herbert Hoover? Where does one put the post-presidential Hoover in the diplomatic spectrum? One could well see him, I think, as a cautious Wilsonian. Historian Lloyd Ambrosius, in a book titled Wilsonianism, defines this concept as involving: national self-determination, Open Door economic globalization, collective security, and progressive history, that is: the belief that history is ever evolving in the direction of freedom. Hoover served Wilson as Food Administrator during World War I and as American Relief Administrator during the Paris Peace Conference. In his book The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, which is part memoir, Hoover praised Wilson for his superior mind, his clarity of thought, his ability to reduce problems to what he called their "bare bones" and Wilson's staunch morality. To Hoover, Wilson contributed greatly to the rights of peoples for political independence. He established a "systematic and powerful organization of nations to maintain peace." He supported the organization of the greatest battle against famine and pestilence in world history – led by guess who? Now when one looks at Wilsonianism, at one point of Open Door economic globalization, one notes that as secretary of commerce, Hoover pushed an Open Door economic policy. When one looks at another Wilsonian doctrine, that the historical process is ever going in the direction of freedom, one finds Hoover less optimistic than Wilson about a tide of human history inexorably running towards such a goal, the 1940s, 50s, and 60s being far more perilous than the 1910s and 1920s. But as I pointed out, he was not a total pessimist. As far as the Wilsonian tenet of self-determination went, Hoover was somewhat selective, being more vocal concerning those people under Communist rule than those in the former Japanese Empire. When it comes to Wilsonian adherence to collective security, Hoover's endorsement of the UN was far less enthusiastic than Wilson concerning the League of Nations. Yet when Hoover criticized FDR's policies, he often did so in Wilsonian language, updated by his frequent references to the Atlantic Charter, a document Hoover found betrayed by its creators. At Paris, he supported Wilson's peace program but de-emphasized Article X of the League Covenant, in which members of the League of Nations agreed to preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of signers. Though Wilson did have some regionalism of his own in his world view. He said in Salt Lake City in September 1919, "If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you do not send to Oklahoma for the fire engine. If you want to put out a fire in the Balkans, or stamp out a smoldering flame in some part of Central Europe, you do not send to the United States for troops." Not quite Hoover's idea of regionalism, though there are similarities. Let me just conclude with this observation. I would argue that to the degree that we are still wrestling with Hoover's policies, we are somewhat wrestling with Wilsonianism, and that Wilsonianism might a far more creative category with which to view Hoover than overworked categories of internationalism and isolationism. Thank you! [Applause]