From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (80 page)

Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson at first contented himself with watchful waiting, viewing the incident as a police action against Chinese dissidents, hoping that Tokyo could control the army, and fearing that a
provocative U.S. response might rally the Japanese people to the army. Already at odds with Stimson over other issues, President Hoover adamantly opposed risk-taking. The United States did send a high-level diplomat to participate in Security Council discussions on Manchuria, a significant initiative in itself, but it would go no further. Encouraged by the U.S. response, the League passed a resolution reminding Japan
and
China of their responsibilities under the Kellogg-Briand Pact, calling for peaceful resolution of the dispute, and asking Japan to withdraw its troops. When this failed, it would do no more than accept Japan's proposal to send an investigatory commission to Manchuria.
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The crisis deepened in late 1931. The Kwantung Army expanded its operations well beyond Mukden, posing a threat to all Manchuria and even North China. The Tokyo government would not or could not stop the onslaught. Wilsonian concepts of collective security called for economic sanctions to stop aggression. Some Europeans and Americans, Stimson included, increasingly viewed Japanese actions as a threat to world order and were willing to go this far. Most Americans saw no vital interests in Manchuria, however, and few sympathized with China. Hoover privately ruminated that it might not be a "bad thing if Mr. Jap should go into Manchuria, for with two thorns in his side—China and the Bolsheviks—he would have enough to keep him busy for awhile." In any event, he adamantly opposed sanctions, which he dismissed as "sticking pins in tigers." He viewed going to war with Japan over Manchuria as "folly."
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Without U.S. backing, the League refused to contemplate sanctions.

Determined to do something but without weapons at his disposal, Stimson in January 1932 resorted to the expedient that became known as the Stimson Doctrine (the first such pronouncement since Tyler). Now certain that Japanese aggression posed a threat to world order, he hoped to use
moral
sanctions to rally world opinion against Japan. A lawyer by profession, he believed it useful to brand outlaw behavior as such "by putting the situation morally in its right place."
¹³
Taking up an idea first proposed by Hoover, he informed Japan and China that the United States would not recognize territorial changes brought about by force and in violation of the Open Door policy and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Stimson's doctrine remained a unilateral statement of U.S. policy. Fearing a Japanese threat to
their Asian colonies, France and Britain responded ambiguously—and it took London four months to do that. The League gave no more than belated and qualified endorsement.

The Stimson Doctrine had no impact on Japan. By November, the Kwantung Army had moved almost four hundred miles north of Mukden, making clear its determination to take all of Manchuria. The moderate Japanese cabinet fell on December 31, 1931, leaving the government in the hands of men Stimson labeled "virtually mad dogs."
¹⁴
Shortly after, just as the secretary of state issued his doctrine, fighting extended to Shanghai, a major Chinese port city seven hundred miles south of Manchuria. When a Chinese boycott and mob violence threatened Japanese lives and property, the local Japanese commander dispatched forces to the scene. Eventually, seventy thousand Japanese troops entered Shanghai. Planes and naval vessels bombarded parts of the city, causing extensive civilian casualties and foreshadowing the carnage that would be inflicted on civilians over the next decade. Again, China appealed to the world for help.

Again, Stimson resorted to expedients. Japanese actions were increasingly difficult to justify in terms of defending established interests. The ferocity of the fighting and civilian casualties in Shanghai, widely reported in the Western press, provoked worldwide outrage. But there was only scattered support for strong action. The Western powers remained mired in the depression. The League awaited the report of its investigatory commission. Absorbed in economic problems and facing an election, Hoover did nothing more than beef up U.S. forces to protect the 3,500 Americans in Shanghai. Still persuaded that he must do something but certain that Britain and France would provide no more than "yellow-bellied" support, Stimson fell back on the Nine-Power Pact. In an open letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Borah, he charged Japan with violating that agreement, thereby releasing other signatories from their obligations under the Washington Treaties, a thinly veiled—and largely empty—threat that the United States might begin naval rearmament.
¹⁵

By his own admission, Stimson was armed with nothing more than "spears of straw and swords of ice," and his statement did nothing to stop the Japanese conquest of Manchuria.
¹⁶
Japan did withdraw its troops from Shanghai—before Stimson released the Borah letter. In the meantime, it
solidified its control of Manchuria. Using as a figurehead the last Manchu emperor, the tragic "boy emperor," Henry Pu Yi, the Japanese created in March 1932 the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League commission's report placed some blame on China for provoking the Mukden incident but criticized Japan for using excessive force. It called for non-recognition of Manchukuo and proposed an autonomous Manchuria in which Japan's established rights would be respected. When the League adopted the report in early 1933, the Japanese walked out. Stopping in the United States en route home, delegate Yosuke Matsuoka complained that the West had taught Japan to play poker, gained most of the chips, and then declared the game immoral and changed to contract bridge.
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It has been conventional wisdom since the 1940s that a firm Western response in 1931 would have prevented World War II. The so-called Manchurian/Munich analogy, which preached the necessity of resistance to aggression at the outset, became a stock-in-trade of postwar U.S. foreign policy. To be sure, the paralyzing impact of the depression and the sharp divisions among the Western powers resulted in a weak response. Only the United States did anything, and as both the British and Chinese hastened to point out, Stimson's protests were "only words, words, words, and they amount to nothing if not backed by force."
¹⁸
But there is no certainty that a firmer response in Manchuria would have prevented subsequent Japanese and German aggression. Nor did the non-response necessarily ensure future war. Neither Japan nor Nazi Germany at this time had a master plan or explicit timetable for expansion. The plain hard truth is that the Western powers in 1931 lacked both the will and the means to stop Japan's conquest of Manchuria. However attractive economic sanctions may seem in retrospect, their track record through history does not inspire confidence. They generally succeed only when the major powers unite behind them, which was assuredly not the case in 1931–32. The Western democracies together could not have brought to bear enough military power to stop Japan. To have gone to war in 1931 might have been more disastrous than a decade later. The crisis was significant less for its destruction of an established order in East Asia than for the stark revelation that there had been no order in the first place. It highlighted the weakness of the League of Nations but did not bring its downfall. Above all, it demonstrated the limits of what diplomacy can do in some crisis situations.
¹⁹

Shortly after Japan left the League of Nations, ending the Manchurian crisis, and with the U.S. economy at a standstill, a despondent Hoover gave way to the ebullient Franklin Roosevelt. Raised to old money in the gentile surroundings of New York's Hudson Valley, FDR, as he came to be known, was a middling student at prestigious Groton Academy and Harvard. After a brief and undistinguished fling at the law, he followed his distant cousin Theodore by taking the post of assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration. Stricken with a crippling and life-changing case of polio in the early 1920s, he found his niche in electoral politics, winning the governorship of New York and then soundly defeating the discredited Hoover in 1932.

Roosevelt dominated the tumultuous decade that followed as few presidents have dominated their eras, and only Wilson stands above him in importance in twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. He was a man of dauntless optimism, a trait that served him and the nation well during years of economic crisis and war. Although he had few close personal friends, he was capable of great warmth and personal charm and possessed formidable political skills. Blessed with a resonant voice and a rare eloquence, he used the new medium of radio to singular advantage in informing, reassuring, and rallying a troubled nation. As a result of the noblesse oblige in which he was raised, religion, and perhaps his struggle with polio, he developed a deep sensitivity to the needs of the less fortunate. He had a rare ability in hard times to articulate the core values of freedom from want and fear. His influence, like that of Wilson, touched millions of people across the world.
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Roosevelt viewed himself as a practical idealist—"I dream dreams," he once said, "but I am an intensely practical man"—and his accomplishments were considerable, but his leadership was not without flaws. He could be frustratingly elusive and enigmatic, confounding contemporaries and historians alike. It remains extremely difficult at any given time to read his mind with any precision on any issue. A notoriously sloppy administrator who knowingly appointed conflicting personalities to competitive positions, he created a multiplicity of agencies with overlapping responsibilities, then watched with seeming glee as they engaged in bitter and at times enervating turf wars. Especially in the area of diplomacy, he
made some bizarre and disastrous appointments. He could be bold and brilliantly improvisational. Yet through much of the 1930s, on vital issues of national security he could seem maddeningly timid, perhaps underestimating his powers of persuasion, not acting until events imposed decisions upon him.

Through the 1930s, the making of U.S. foreign policy remained a relatively simple process. The State Department continued to be the key player, although on major issues Roosevelt usually took control and in some areas his close friend Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. played an important role. True to form under FDR, State itself was deeply divided. The secretary, Cordell Hull, remained in office a record twelve years, but his influence was limited. A native of the rugged Cumberland region of Tennessee, "the judge," as he was called, was a political appointee, a veteran congressman, confirmed Wilsonian, and fervent advocate of free trade, useful to FDR mainly in keeping southern congressmen in line. Frailness of body and a benign countenance masked an iron will, a fiercely competitive spirit, and a raging temper. Hull's seething hatreds could set loose a volcanic eruption of profanity, made all the more colorful by a slight speech impediment. The undersecretary after 1937, Sumner Welles, was in many ways Hull's polar opposite. Born to wealth (and then married to more), Welles shared FDR's prep school and Ivy League pedigree. Suave, sophisticated, and snobbish, he was dapper in dress with finely tailored suits and an ivory-handled walking stick. No one "could possibly look so much like a career diplomat," a colleague observed, "bearing, gestures, the way his chin is carried, everything." The fierce rivalry between the two misfits burned throughout much of the Roosevelt era.
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During the long interregnum between Hoover's defeat and Roosevelt's inauguration (new presidents were then inaugurated in March), the United States approached the brink of despair. One-fourth of the workforce was unemployed; relief funds from state and local governments had been exhausted. Farmers had suffered economically since the Great War, and as prices plummeted still further in the 1930s mortgage foreclosures became commonplace. Shanty towns for the homeless—so-called Hoovervilles—took shape in most major cities. In early 1933, a series of bank failures produced runs on the banks by panicky citizens that in turn led to the declaration of banking "holidays" in many states to prevent further failures. While
the economic situation deteriorated, Congress did nothing. Hoover stubbornly tried to secure from FDR a commitment to follow his discredited programs. The president-elect wisely refused but left little indication how he might deal with the nation's most serious crisis since the Civil War. The mood of the country was one of deep despondency. "We are in the doldrums," a journalist observed, "waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes."
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Conditions abroad were equally grim. Europe continued its economic plunge, and the leading nations could not agree how to stop it. A once "cosmopolitan world order had dissolved into various rivaling subunits," Paul Kennedy has written, "a sterling block, based upon British trade patterns . . .; a gold block, led by France; a yen block dependent upon Japan . . .; a U.S.-led dollar block (after Roosevelt also went off gold); and, completely detached from these convulsions, a USSR steadily building 'socialism in one country.' "
²³
As always, Germany was especially volatile. In January 1933, in a move whose full significance was not clear at the time, the aged president, Paul von Hindenburg, asked National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler to assume the chancellorship. Hitler would subsequently assume full powers. By the end of the year, he would pull Germany out of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations.

As a vice presidential candidate in 1920, Roosevelt had campaigned vigorously for the League of Nations, but like the nation he too turned sharply inward under the burden of the Great Depression. In 1932, he explicitly spurned his mentor Wilson's handiwork and scoffed at the Hoover moratorium. After assuming the presidency, he further reduced in size an already small army. Like Theodore a naval enthusiast, he built the fleet up only to the limits set by the Washington and London conferences. As his inaugural address suggested, he firmly believed that the depression had domestic roots. He sought nationalist solutions, mainly through inflation.