Neutrality or Rust

DEEP SNOW PLANTATION IVANHOE, MISSISSIPPI
April 15, 1939
DEAR ELISAVETA ANDRIEVNA :—
My dear, I’m confused myself. I thought that my long association with rural Negro preachers who, like all fascists and some of our politicians, are masters of the non sequitur would enable me to follow the debates on neutrality in the Congress and the country. I was wrong. I fear I shall never catch up. ‘Debating neutrality,’ you say, ‘seems to be an old American custom. What is your foreign policy, anyhow?’
Debating neutrality is indeed an old custom of ours. We’ve been doing it since 1809, and, although it has never kept us out of a world war, we go on debating. At least every tenth boy baby born in the country (every third one in the South) is born with a silver tongue, and he makes it ring with oratory until he dies. Generally, however, we get so balled up in the debate that we end it by wading in and fighting. It seems easier, even for so garrulous a people as ourselves, than to go on talking forever. As for our foreign policy, I once put this question to an ex-Secretary of the Navy.
‘If the Navy is an instrument of foreign policy,’ I asked, ‘ and you don’t know what the policy is, how do you know what kind of Navy to build?’ His answer was short and sweet. ‘We don’t,’ he said.
But you’ve asked me to tell you what I think and I’ll tell you. If at the end you are more confused than ever, take the two aspirin tablets enclosed.
Let’s look at the parties to the neutrality debate. First, the people. It is they who will get the tax bills and the death notices in the event of war. What do they want? Three fourths of them want to stay out of war. (All the figures are from the Gallup polls.) But what they want and what they think they will get are altogether different things. Three fourths of the people believe that we shall inevitably be drawn into a world war. Therefore: while we want to stay out of war, our people believe they can’t stay out.
Then note this extraordinary confusion. The people, having decided they want to stay out of war, desire at the same time to take measures that will make it difficult or impossible to stay out. More than three fourths of them (82 per cent) want to give economic help to Britain and France in a war with Germany and Italy. Yet for years we have said that giving economic help was the cause that brought us into the last world war. Next, as if driven by some dark fate that will put a people into war who don’t want to go to war, more than half the population is in favor of selling arms to Britain and France during wartime. This again lessens our chance of keeping out of the conflict.
These are concrete measures that the people would take. Let’s look now at the all-important matter of the American mood as measured by the polls.

American hatred of Germany is increasing. To the question ‘Do you feel least friendly toward Germany?’ 17 per cent said yes in 1935; 31 per cent said yes in 1937. This hatred grows with the increase of Hitler’s conquests.
And now we come to an astounding fact of American opinion. To the question ‘Will we fight Germany again in your lifetime?’ nearly half the people (46 per cent) said yes.
The direction of the wind is shown by another opinion of our people. There may be many in Britain and France who feel that Germany’s lost colonies should be restored, but Americans take the opposite stand. Over three fourths of the people believe they should not be restored.

Now we come to a question that is of direct interest to you — a Russian. If there should be a war between Germany and Russia, 83 per cent of the American people would favor Russia to win.
There is no point in discussing whether the people are right or wrong; whether they think straight or crooked; whether they are wise or foolish. The hard fact is that they are thinking and feeling the things I have pointed out, and eventually they will act according to their thoughts and their moods. It was the great virtue of Lincoln that he could often understand when he did not necessarily comprehend. Perhaps that virtue is now the virtue of the whole people in this crisis. One thing is clear. They do not want Germany victorious in a world war. They do not want Britain and France to be crushed by Germany. And with these desires, while they humanly want to stay out of war, they know that they cannot translate them into action and yet stay out.
Now let’s look at the Congress, which is busy debating neutrality. It would take all night to delineate the various schools of neutrality and their exponents. So let’s skip most of them and examine two of the leaders.
First, there’s the Isolationist school led by Mr. Bernard Baruch. He believes that during a world war the whole United States should be made into a chain grocery store on a cash-and-carry basis. Let him who wants our prunes walk into our store, plank down the money, and haul his prunes away. Mr. Baruch’s theory is that in 1914-1917 we delivered groceries, sent our delivery boy among fighting people who slapped his face and snatched or destroyed the parcels he was carrying, and naturally we had to back him up by slapping the slappers. But if another war should come we’ll keep the boy at home, and the rowdies will have to walk into our store on our premises and behave themselves. So much for groceries. But what about hardware — things like rifles and ammunition? O. K., says Mr. Baruch. We’ll sell hardware, too, on the same basis as flour. He can’t see any difference between feeding a soldier and outfitting him. And flour is just as much contraband as rifles.
All customers look alike to Mr. Baruch. He looks at their cash, not their complexions; he hears the clinking of coin, not the tongues of men. Behind his wartime counter he could not distinguish a Japanese from Anthony Eden; a German from Eve Curie; an Italian from the King of Sweden. This is not because Mr. Baruch is color-blind or tone-deaf. It is because he believes that to pick customers during wartime is to pick a quarrel. And to the argument that, whatever the neutrality laws of the country, we shall be drawn into war, he answers in the words of Gershwin’s song, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So.’
On the other side is Mr. Henry L. Stimson, an Internationalist, who was Mr. Hoover’s Secretary of State. He believes that insularity, like familiarity, breeds contempt. What moves him is this. ’I believe,’ he said at a recent Neutrality hearing, ‘that our present Caucasian civilization is threatened by the gravest danger with which it has been confronted for centuries.’ What, then, would he do? Precisely what Mr. Baruch would forbid. That is, he would let the President pick our customers; let him refuse supplies to treatybreaking, aggressor nations and offer them to their victims—which is to say that we would sell goods to Britain, France, and their associates; we would not sell to Italy, Germany, Japan, and their associates. This means, in turn, two things. One, that naming the aggressors would be tantamount to fixing the responsibility for war and to that extent align us, morally at least, with Britain and France. Two, that in the event of a long war American supplies might decide the victory.
Why does Mr. Stimson want to pick customers? First, because he believes that the United States, the mightiest and richest single power on earth, ought not to conduct its foreign relations on the same basis as El Salvador. Second, that in the event of war Germany and Italy in all probability could not trade here because of the superiority of British and French sea power. But this probability does not necessarily extend to Japan. Consequently, if we do not shut her out of her markets, we should be helping Japan to defeat Britain and France, to hold down China, to take the Netherlands Indies, British Malaysia, and anything else she could grab while the British and French were struggling for life in Europe.
It was Mr. Stimson, you remember, who in 1931-1932 when Japan seized Manchukuo —the first of the great territorial grabs of these times — proposed to the British Government a joint British-American démarche against Japan ; who pronounced the doctrine of non-recognition of territory seized by force, a doctrine we are now applying in eastern Europe and Asia; and who, employing the words of M. Litvinoff, the Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, said peace is indivisible, and that wars beginning anywhere may spread and eventually endanger the peace and prosperity of the United States. Recent history has come along to prove that he was right.
And finally there is the attitude of President Roosevelt. It is an attitude — whatever its merits — of overwhelming importance because the President under our Constitution is charged, in collaboration with the Secretary of State, with the conduct of our foreign relations. He is, in addition, the commander in chief of our armed forces. He may dismiss any ambassador or minister accredited to Washington; negotiate treaties with foreign countries; order the armed forces to come and go at will. And he may do all this without consulting anybody. It is only when a treaty is to be ratified, war is to be declared, and appropriations for the carrying on of war are to be made, that Congress must act. The President — any President —may, therefore, set in motion a train of events that would put the country into such a position that it would be almost impossible for the country and Congress not to follow through with a declaration of war. That is why so many efforts — destined to futility because of his broad powers under the Constitution — are being made to tie the President’s hands.
What, specifically, does President Roosevelt believe? (a) That ‘we have an interest wider than that of the mere defense of our sea-ringed continent.’ (b) That war, whether we engage in it or not, would be a catastrophe for the United States. (c) That the constant threat of wars — the week-end bullyings and seizures — are almost as intolerable as war because they halt business, disturb public tranquillity, threaten personal happiness, make the whole world into an armed camp. (d) That the freedom of all peoples to trade anywhere in the world on a basis of equality is a freedom that is a condition precedent to American prosperity. Such freedom is now sharply curtailed. It will vanish in the face of war. (e) That the collapse of the British and French empires would endanger the peace of the United States and cause such convulsions that our own political and economic structure would be shaken down. (f) That fascist ambitions are not limited to Europe. They take the world, including South America certainly and North America possibly, for their province. (g) That we shall inevitably be drawn into war. (h) That, whatever the result of war, we shall undergo a revolutionary transformation in America. And (i) that common sense dictates, in the face of these premises, that the stupendous power of the United States should be used, not to punish the fascist states or rescue the so-called democracies, but to prevent a war. How? By making it perfectly clear that in the event of war the power of the United States will be thrown against the fascists and in all probability encompass their defeat. (This is on the assumption that Britain and France will not start a war without aggressions against them.) If this warning is heeded, the President suggests a definite ten-year period of peace during which the controversies among the nations may be adjusted by rational conference.
Note that the President is not talking the Wilsonian doctrine of ‘making the world safe for democracy.’ He is talking the language of 1776: ‘If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.’ And he knows that while the people believe that Washington made the speech about avoiding entangling alliances he would have been entangled with a rope in British hands if the French navy had not rescued him.
Now let’s see if we can make head or tail out of this remarkable situation. The people — that is to say, the victims of war — not only believe that they cannot stay out of war, but are willing to give Britain and France the kind of help that Mr. Baruch, the isolationist, is sure will get them into war. Here they are in agreement with the President. They don’t want the fascists to win a war; it is silly to suppose that a people who believe they will have to fight Germany will not do everything in their power to help those who are fighting Germany; and, consequently, will thereby clinch the assurance that they themselves wall fight. The people and the President, therefore, are practically of one mind. And in no respect is their oneness more marked than in that neither wants war.
But the Congress? What is its contribution to the United States and the world in this period of terrifying crisis? On the one hand it votes ever-mounting sums of money for a greater army and navy. It feels that war may come. It fears that we cannot stay out of war. How, then, does it go about assuring that we shall not engage in war? By emulating the policy of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Stores. It differs from this corporation in only one respect. The A & P will sell to anybody. One Congressional group would follow that policy. Another would pick its customers. It follows, then, that in an era of wars, revolutions, and terrors, with millions of men under arms, with the happiness and security of every individual on earth imperiled, with the peace and prosperity of the United States endangered, the utmost contribution that Congress can make is to debate whether or not we shall deliver dried apricots and to whom. This is not a foreign policy. It is a storekeeper’s policy.
This absurd situation is made the more absurd by the fact that if we really want neutrality, if we really want to stay out of war, we can have neutrality and stay out. One way is to sell nothing to anybody; keep our ships off the seas; forbid our citizens to travel; order those abroad to come home or remain at their own risk. Japan avoided war in this manner for centuries. We could do it now. Naturally it would cost something: economic collapse and perhaps a dictatorship. But an adult man or nation knows, or ought to know, that you can’t get something for nothing. Or we might try to have our cake and eat it too by selling groceries à la Baruch. Suppose, then, that war does come, that we sell and grow rich, and the war ends. What then?
It is not written in the stars that victory will go to Britain and France. Remember the World War. We have a right to assume that victory may just as likely go to the fascists. So now the war is over, and Hitler and his associates are the masters of Europe and Africa. He holds such power as no man ever hold in the modern world. (Mussolini is predestined to be a side-show clown in Hitler’s circus.) The British Empire in the East, China, the Netherlands Indies, fall to Japan. Australia and New Zealand become outlets for the teeming Japanese population. Russia, if not militarily conquered, is impotent and imprisoned in Asia. South America falls under the swastika shadow. We are isolated in the Pacific at Hawaii. If we have not lost Guam and the Philippines, it is because Japan is not ready to take them. Nobody pretends that they could be held against Japanese attack in their present state of defense. Nobody pretends that our navy successfully and alone could attack Japan in Japanese waters. How long we should continue to hold Hawaii thereafter against perhaps three fleets is another question, and a vital one, because it is our first line of defense for our Pacific shores. And our goods and citizens would thereafter move across the world at the sufferance of the dictators. Well, what of it? Is that any skin off our teeth? Shouldn’t we have stayed out of war?
These assumptions, which seem fantastic as I put them on paper here in the quietude of the plantation, may seem insane to many of my countrymen. But not to you. For you have suffered through wars and revolutions and witnessed empires crashing about your ears. Nor will they appear fantastic to diplomats and military authorities. It would seem indeed, in the light of the history of the past twenty years, that no prediction, however visionary, might not be realized or exceeded in our world. Who in 1933 would have said that by 1939 the little figure named Hitler would soon terrify the great French and British empires; that enormous areas of Europe would lie under his heels; that Spain would be the scene of a horrible civil-international war; that Japanese armies would spread the length and breadth of China; and, finally, that the world would wait with fear and trembling upon the spoken word of one man — Adolf Hitler? Act it. is so. Is it, then, too violent to assume that Hitler will win the next war and become master of the world?
But if we want neutrality, then this cannot matter to us, because the very essence of neutrality is indifference to what happens beyond our borders to other nations. If war is the greatest of all evils, then no price is too high a price to pay for avoiding it. If, however, there are things and conditions more intolerable than war, then a people must be prepared to pay a price for their avoidance.
Let’s take the next step. After the war, friendless and alone, we shall face the most powerful and ruthless dictator the world has ever known. Does anyone believe that fascist conquests will stop with Europe and Africa? If he does, let him read Mein Kampf, where the author says in plain German that the time to talk peace is when Germany has conquered the world.
Our answer to that is simple. The hell it can. Or, in the words of the distinguished Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania, addressing the Loyal Order of Moose in Boston: ’We will protect every inch of American soil, from the Arctic to Cape Horn, against industrial, economic, or political invasion.’
It doesn’t occur to the Senator that we are now having a hard time doing what he says we will do in the future, and he omits entirely the possibility of military invasion. But let’s waive the point. He who fools with the Monroe Doctrine, we say, fools with dynamite.
Very well, then. We triple our navy. We spread our ships, to match the Senator’s spread-eagle words, from ‘ the Arctic to Cape Horn.’ Then, strangely, the fascists do not want to land troops anywhere. They merely want to trade in South America. Well, we can’t fight about that. So Japanese, German, and Italian vessels sail peaceably by our battleships as they go to and from South America. We can’t trade right now in the areas conquered by Germany and Japan, — try to sell a pair of our shoes in Slovakia or Manchukuo, — but they insist on trading everywhere. Why can’t we trade, too, in South America? We can. But there’s this difficulty.
We’ve had the Monroe Doctrine a long time, but it has given us no monopoly, nor even a lion’s share, of South American trade. Nor has it ever been our great trade area. Thus, in 1936, 42.5 per cent of our total exports went to Europe and 16.2 per cent to Asia — principally Japan. Contrast this with the 8.3 per cent taken by South America. Ah, that golden continent! Our savior when all else is lost.
With our European trade lost, we should need our southern trade more than ever. So we double or triple it. This would be only half our present exports to Europe. But — and this is the point — even if our competitors stepped aside we should find it hard to increase that trade enormously. The reason is simple. The lowering of our standard of living as the result of war and the loss of great trade areas would sharply contract our demand for goods. And our southern trade is limited by this rigid factor. The products of that area compete with ours: wheat, meat, cotton, hides, vegetable oils, corn, and minerals, notably copper. Are we going to exchange automobiles for these things when we are already up to our necks in them? No. But Hitler and Company will, because they will need them.
The logic of the situation, then, is that if Hitler wins the world war he will win South America. He will not have to fire a shot. He will dominate it economically simply because that area, like the Danubian area at the moment, will have nowhere else to turn for a market. And economic domination in these times means political domination. If, then, we should attempt to keep the fascists out of South America by force, it would not be long before the South Americans would demand that we either take their surplus products or remove our ships. We couldn’t take the products, just as Britain and France cannot now take the products of Rumania. And we couldn’t keep our ships strung around South America against the will of the South Americans. What becomes, then, of the Monroe Doctrine? But — to repeat — if war is the greatest of all evils, and we can escape war through neutrality, then the loss of South America, body and soul, is not too high a price to pay for it.
Now all this is very curious, because it means that we who live in a war-torn revolutionary world are seeking to escape its risks and yet enjoy its privileges. And who are we? We are a people born of taking risks. The first settlers preferred the dangers of the unknown ocean and an unknown continent to the conditions under which they lived in Europe. Later they preferred the risks of war — the little colonies against mighty Britain — to the conditions of living imposed upon them by Britain. A few years pass and we are again at war with Britain following our futile efforts at neutrality during the Napoleonic wars. The very city of Washington where Congress debates neutrality was burned by the British in the War of 1812 that neutrality did not prevent. Then our people took the risks incurred in winning the West. Our clipper ships, manned by young New Englanders, made perilous voyages to China and made New England rich. Our navy put down pirates off the African coast. And shortly before and after the Civil War our industrialists — call them pirates or grabbers if you will — threw railroads and telegraph wires across the continent, dug the mines and canals, tamed the rivers, built roads, borrowed millions of dollars in Europe, and imported millions of Europeans and Asiatics to do the work. They took big risks — sometimes with their own money and sometimes with the money of others. Many grew rich; others went broke. But America was built.
Is it possible that this once hardy, adventurous, and risk-taking people will not stir now beyond the portals of their federal bonds, their life insurance, their old-age pensions? Is our passion for security so great that we shall lose it because we dare venture nothing in its protection? For security, paradoxically, is dynamic and not static; like liberty, it is something for which one must ever be on guard.
Our foreign policy? It has never been, to my knowledge, defined. It is the Monroe Doctrine. It is the defense of our shores and the shores of our territories overseas. Once it was the defense of our commerce and nationals all over the world.
Beyond this the United States does not, and perhaps cannot, have a fixed foreign policy. The world is on notice concerning the things I have mentioned. The great question mark in every chancellery of the earth, and in the mind of every American, is: What will the United States do in the event of a world war? The answer hangs upon a multiplicity of emotional, practical, hysterical, logical, religious, and economic considerations inextricably intertwined.
Perhaps we can guess the answer if I ask you a question. What do you think will happen when the world war begins? It will be reported vividly and photographically by radio. Into millions of homes will come voices describing bombs falling on London; the destruction of Oxford University in an attempt to destroy the big automobile works in the town of Oxford; fires in Liverpool and Leeds; the collapse of the Opera House in Paris and the burning of the Louvre; the recital of wounds suffered by women and children; and, for all we know, their cries and groans brought across the ocean. From the Pacific will come reports of attacks on the Netherlands Indies; of Japanese naval movements near the Philippines; or of ghostly Asiatic battleships off the California coast. Hour after hour, day after day, the people will glue their ears to the radios; hour after hour their anger will rise, and since we are a sentimental, generous people strongly moved by moral outrage, how long do you think it will be before they go to war? Do you think they will then be restrained by legalistic arguments? Or that neutrality will hold them back? On such occasions the voice of the people is indeed the voice of God.
A time comes in the affairs of men and nations when they are faced with the question that Samuel Butler put to himself. ‘Is life worth living?’ he asked. And he answered: ‘That is a question for an embryo; not for a man.’
As I write, American battleships responsive to the mind’s hard impulse slip past peaceful New York Harbor bound for the Pacific, where empires sway in the gusts of threatened conflict; we store raw materials against The Day; our President begs the dictators for a tenyear respite and Congress for greater military appropriations; Congress debates neutrality, and a bank clerk in Kansas registers his opinion that we ought to but cannot stay out of war, while our hearts whisper to God that war may not come.
But however much the wings of our hearts beat against the cage of the world into which we were born, and through whose bars we shall escape in death, we shall never escape in life. Only the high heart and the hard mind can save us now.
Affectionately,
DAVID