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3 Roosevelt’s Mental Map March of Time’s newsreel of President Roosevelt’s “Quarantine” address from the isolationist heartland of Chicago on 5 October 1937 captured his characteristic head waggles and expressionless eyebrows, the wind-blown notepaper, and his liturgical monotone delivery. In the newsreel’s introduction, Edward Herlihy called it a “bombshell declaration against the policy of isolation and neutrality”; the declaration had brought the “nations of this earth” to attention. But might it lead to war, Herlihy wondered.1 It was an alarming speech. Secretary of State Hull and roving ambassador Norman H. Davis, who wrote the first draft of the speech, intended to scare Americans into backing international sanctions against expansionist nations, principally Japan. Roosevelt explained how the world had fallen into a “state of international anarchy.” Without justification of any kind, “civilians, including vast numbers of women and children,” were “being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air,” a reference to the bombing of Guernica by Spanish Nationalists and of Shanghai by the Japanese. Submarines were sinking ships without warning. Nations were taking sides in other nations’ civil wars. Were such things “to come to pass in other parts of the world,” he intoned, “let no one imagine that America will escape .” Americans must not think they could “continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization” immune from the spreading contagion. Peace-loving nations—headed implicitly by America—“must make a concerted effort” to quarantine the epidemic of lawlessness. “We are determined to keep out of war,” he assured listeners, “yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement.” “America hates war,” he nodded reassuringly as the crowd applauded. “America hopes for peace. Therefore America actively engages in the search for peace.”2 Roosevelt probably thought the speech would have educational value, function as a trial balloon, and placate calls for action from internationalists like Hull and Davis. When he wrote the concluding phrases, which he delivered with emphatic 61 62 arguing americanism wags of his head, he no doubt sought to reinforce the notion that U.S. foreign policy only ever had peaceful intentions. But isolationists read it as a dangerous blueprint for intervention writ large, while internationalists felt cheated once they realized that Roosevelt’s active search for peace still lacked a concrete agenda. Instead of gaining support for coordinated sanctions against aggressor nations, the address solidified public opinion around isolationism. Historian Dorothy Borg’s influential interpretation sees the speech as part of a “groping and intermittent” effort by Roosevelt to avert war, part of an ongoing “nebulous” plan “for warding off catastrophe.” Yet while Roosevelt’s thinking on Spain was nebulous, his Asian policy built aggressively on decades of U.S. military as well as missionary involvement in China, from gunboats patrolling the Yangtze, to expanding troop levels in Shanghai’s international settlement, to shipping boatloads of war matériel to Chinese Nationalists.3 During 1938—a pivotal year for geopolitics, the Neutrality Act, and Spain’s civil war in particular—Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy making was as eclectic as the theories advanced by historians to explain it. Most agree that he shifted focus from domestic to foreign affairs, moved from isolationism to internationalism, and acted decisively in spite of congressional and public constraints. Still, overarching explanations tend to be unsatisfying, because Roosevelt might say one thing but do something else, just as his policies were inconsistent from one region to another. He told friends he wanted to arm Spain’s Loyalists but avoided doing so; he appeased Germany while antagonizing Japan, America’s enemy and ally, respectively, in 1917. Given the specter of Axis expansionism in the spring of 1938, along with the growing intensity of the Great Debate over arms to Spain and Gallup polls running three to one in favor of the Loyalists, realpolitik suggests that a decisive, internationalist Roosevelt should have moved Congress for the act’s repeal, abrogated it by executive fiat, or, at least, actively encouraged its circumvention. Official support for Loyalist Spain would have enabled reticent Nazi generals—Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Ludwig Beck, and, later, the cautious Walter von Brauchitsch—to challenge the Führer’s insistence that there was nothing to fear from isolationist America in the event of general war over an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although there were at least two initiatives by individuals within or close to Roosevelt’s administration to circumvent the Neutrality Act, and...

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