Canadian International Council

Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain: Two Appeasers

Author(s): Donald Watt
Source: International Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, United States Foreign Policy (Spring, 1973), pp.
185-204
Published by: Canadian International Council
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40201112 .
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DONALD WATT

Roosevelt and
Neville Chamberlain:
two appeasers

Controversy still rages around Franklin Roosevelt's role in the

approach of the Second World War as it does around all other
aspects of the only president to hold office in the United States
for more than two terms. It used to be that Roosevelt was accused
of so manoeuvring the United States that it was committed to
war in Europe without the American people being aware of what
was going on. His defenders retorted by depicting him as a man
who saw what was happening in Europe and tried to lead the
American people to see and understand what was happening,
while using all the powers available to his office to prepare the
United States for the ordeal which lay ahead of it. His detractors
saw him as a super Machiavelli, always intriguing, evil. His de-
fenders saw him as an all-wise and all-seeing father figure.
Seen from Europe Roosevelt looked rather different. To the
French he was for a long time their ace in the hole. When every-
thing went wrong, he would intervene to save them. Just how
exaggerated their hopes were can be seen in the appeals for inter-
vention French Premier Paul Reynaud directed to him in the
dark days of the fall of France. The British saw him differently.
To some he was basically on their side against European fascism -
more so than their own government. To others, like Churchill, he
was the United States' leader and Britain's friend. To the British
government, especially to Premier Neville Chamberlain, he seems
to have appeared as an unreliable windbag in charge of a country
whose friendship and support Britain simply had to have. Cham-
berlain wanted American help and understanding. But he accepted
the facts of American isolationism. It is never safe to count on the

Professor of International History, University of London, F.R.Hist.S; author

of a number of books including Personalities and Politics (1965).
l86 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

Americans for anything except words, that was his view.1 It was
his mission, as he saw it, to do all he could to prevent Europe
stumbling into another world war. If there was such a war then
American help would be indispensable. Until then he did what
he thought was right. He did his best to explain what he was
doing to the various American ambassadorsand envoys in London.
But he was not prepared to change what he was doing to win
American support. It would, he thought, be only verbal, not even
diplomatic.
In coping with the problems of an approaching war Roosevelt
was no more prescient than anyone else. It was a long time before
he realized how threatening internationally, as opposed to how
unpleasant in their domestic politics, were the aggressor states,
Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. He was at first more wor-
ried by the arms race as a burden on world recovery from the
depression than by the prospect of another Armageddon. He was
neither well informed nor very well equipped to understand what
was happening in Europe; and he suffered from several grave
handicaps. He did not agree with, or have much confidence in,
his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. He preferred rather to work
with Hull's deputy, Sumner Welles. He did not really trust his
ambassadors abroad, and he made no effort to cultivate foreign
ambassadors in Washington as Theodore Roosevelt had. He had
the fashionable liberal prejudices against professional diplomatists
as such.2 He had no first-hand knowledge of Europe to call on
later other than the visits he had paid to Europe as under-secretary
of the navy under Wilson and his childhood experiences in Ger-
many.8 He knew none of Europe's leaders, neither dictators nor
democrats. And he was so constituted that, unless he had inter-
mediaries he could trust and rely on, unless he could form his
own idea of how the minds of those with whom he had to deal in
Europe worked, he was hesitant and out of touch with reality.
i Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London 1046). p ftsg.
2 See his remarks to Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes
(3 vols; London 1955), n, entry of 22 March 1939.
3 See his letter to Lord Murray of Elibank of 4 March 1940, Murray of Elibank
Papers, Scottish National Library, folio 8809, pp 229-30.
 ROOSEVELT AND NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN 187

This caution was reinforced by the suspicions Cordell Hull felt

towards Europe, the antagonism felt by idealist liberals in the
State Department towards British conservatism and traditionalism,
and the timidity all displayed, faced with an isolationist Congress
which wanted to reshape United States neutrality legislation so
as to keep the United States not so much neutral as neutralist.
Much of Roosevelt's policy towards Europe represents the
groping of someone trying to establish his own private envoys and
channels of communication with British and French leaders. In
fact he thought very much as they did. And although the policy
with which he approached Europe in 1936 was singularly out of
touch with the realities of the European situation, he came to
adopt the same approach as they did, and by the time of the great
Czechoslovakia crisis which led on 30 September 1938, at the
Munich conference, to the purchase of peace by the sacrifice of
much of Czech independence to Hitler's demand, he was fol-
lowing and supporting the same line - 'appeasement'- as the
leaders of Britain and France.
With the approach of his second term in the spring and sum-
mer of 1936, Roosevelt had become uneasily conscious that events
in Europe were threatening to make nonsense of his hopes that
the United States might be able to solve its economic problems on
its own. Stimulated by pressures from various elements in the
American peace movement,4 he had been toying, since 1936, with
the idea of calling a conference of the great powers to do some-
thing - what was never quite clear - to avoid what he then be-
lieved to be the steady drift of the world towards war, a war which,
with Cordell Hull, he believed would spring not so much from
the deliberate aggression of one power but from economic com-
petition. In the beginning, in August 1936, he had been taken by
the view, then fashionable among liberal revisionists, that re-
armament itself was the crippling burden to be avoided and that
it could lead to an arms race which would in turn lead to war.
He had therefore instructed Professor William Dodd, the liberal

4 Sec EdgarH. Nixon, FranklinD. Rooseveltand Foreign Affairs(Cambridge,

Mass, 1969), in, 373, 375-6, and footnote 1 thereto.
l88 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

historian of the American south whom he had made ambassador

in Berlin, to sound the Germans on the prospects of such a con-
ference.5 Dodd's attempts to open the question in Berlin had been
more than a little discouraging,6and the British foreign secretary,
Anthony Eden, learning of the matter from his ambassador in
Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, overrode his principal adviser, Sir Robert
Vansittart, who felt that Roosevelt should be encouraged, and did
his best to pour cold water on the idea as premature.7
At this stage, Roosevelt's mind had moved away from the sim-
ple idea of a meeting of the great powers to discuss disarmament,
and was turning instead to the idea of a conference to discuss basic
economic issues. He outlined his ideas at length to the British
novelist, John Buchan, who as Lord Tweedsmuir, governor gen-
eral of Canada, accompanied Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime
minister, to Washington in March 1937;8 and he listened with
equal interest to Mackenzie King's own ideas on the same subject,
soliciting from his long-time Canadian friend a memorandum
summarizing them.9 And he instructed Norman Davis, his per-
sonal expert on disarmament, on the eve of a visit to Europe in
the spring of 1937, to try discreetly to ascertain the reactions in
Europe to the idea of divesting the League of Nations of its polit-
ical function and reorganizing it as a kind of economic council in
'which case the United States ought to be able to go along/ He
also told Davis to see what he could do to find a means of bringing
the European governments together 'in a co-operative attempt to

5 Roosevelt to Dodd, 5 August 1936, The Roosevelt Letters, in: 1928-1945

(London 1952), p 183.
6 Dodd to Roosevelt, 9 August, 7 December 1936, in Nixon, Roosevelt, hi, 390-2,
526-8. See also the German records of Dodd's discussions with Dieckhoff of
the German Foreign Ministry and Baron von Neurath, the foreign minister, on
17 September and 16 October 1936, Documents on German Foreign Policy,
1918-194$, series c, vol. v, nos 544 and 611.
7 Lord Avon, Facing the Dictators (London 1962), pp 525-6; Ian Colvin,
Vansittart in Office (London 1965), p 119.
8 Buchan to Chamberlain, 25 October 1937, copy in Viscount Simon Papers,
Institute of Historical Research, London.
9 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (London 1965), pp 444-5. James Eayrs, In
Defence of Canada, 11:Appeasement and Rearmament (Toronto 1965), esp 41-3
and Appendix, doc 2.
 ROOSEVELTAND NEVILLECHAMBERLAIN l8g

arrest the rapid deterioration in the international situation.'10 In

the light of later events, it is interesting that the main opposition
to Davis' proposals came from Anthony Eden who thought that 'it
was not yet the time' for action.11An excellent reason for this op-
position was provided by Sir Eric Phipps, now British ambassador
in Paris, who told William Bullitt, American ambassador in Paris,
at the end of April 1937, that negotiations with Germany were
doomed to failure unless Trance and England should be prepared
to accord Germany absolute domination/ a view which Andri
Fianfois-Poncet, the French ambassador in Berlin, confirmed the
following month.13
Roosevelt's hopes of a general conference were given a dif-
ferent turn in the summer of 1937 by the outbreak of hostilities
between Japan and China. Although United States stakes in
China were immense, American resistance to Japan had long been
dominated by suspicions that Britain wanted the United States to
stand up to Japan so as to protect Britain's even greater share of
Chinese wealth.18 Once again, Hull's suspicions were able to
thwart Britain's suggestions of joint Anglo-American action.14
Chamberlain was confirmed in his view that 'it is always best and
safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words,'16and
negotiations which Norman Davis had been conducting with the
premier for him to visit Washington were broken off at the end
of September, on the pretext that the time was not yet ripe, de-
spite a friendly exchange of letters between Roosevelt and Cham-
berlain.19The incident must have gone some way to discrediting

10 Davis memorandum,19 March 1937,cited in Dorothy Borg, The United

States and the Far Eastern Crisis,1933-1938(Cambridge,Mats, 1964),p 374
and fn is.
11 Davis to State Department,10 April 1937,ForeignRelations of the United
States 1937, 1, 73-4. (HereafterFRUS.)
it Bullitt to State Department,30 April and 12 May 1937,ibid, 1, 84-5,and 9a.
13 Nicholas Clifford,Retreat from China:British Policy in the Far East, 1937-41
(Seattle 1967), p 19; Borg, Far Eastern Crisis, passim.
14 For the British proposalof so July 1937and the Americanreply, see FRUS
1937,m, SS6-7,S35-6.
15 Felling, Chamberlain,p 3S5.
16 Chamberlainto Davis, 8 July 1937,Norman H. Davis Papers,Libraryof
Congress,box 8.
190 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

Norman Davis in Roosevelt's eyes as the kind of confidential go-

between for whom he was searching.
During the summer, Roosevelt's mind began turning towards
positive measures which might be used to restrain what he was
now coming, in private conversation, to call the 'bandit nations/
His mind moved gradually towards the idea of universal eco-
nomic sanctions (although even in his most private conversations
he fought shy of using this term), involving the denial of trade,
indeed the complete isolation from all international contacts, of
the aggressor. An essential preliminary to this, and one that was
being urged on him independently by Sumner Welles, still con-
vinced of the need for an international conference, was universal
agreement on the accepted rules of international behaviour. Put
together, these proposals began to settle in Roosevelt's mind into
a sketch for a programme - a speech outlining his proposals to
isolate the aggressors, another appealing for a conference, and
then perhaps a conference at the initiative of the United States.

Seen from the vantage point of 1939, let alone 1973, there is a
delicious naivete about these ideas. They rested on such a range
of assumptions about the world outside the United States that
one is left to speculate on the state of a man who, in the autumn of
1937, could seriously entertain the prospect of their realization.
They were not to be realized: indeed they were so far from even
being seriously proposed, that controversy still rages over what
precisely was in Roosevelt's mind.
The first stage came at Chicago on 5 October 1937 with
Roosevelt's public proposal for a 'quarantine' of the aggressor
nations.17The speech provoked a storm of protest from the isola-
tionist press, and was followed by a press conference at which
Roosevelt was clearly badly rattled.18The majority of American
opinion on the other hand regarded the proposal rather favour-

17 For the text see FRUS, Japan, 1931-1941, 1, 379-83.

18 Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1937, Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park.
 ROOSEVELT AND NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN igi

ably.19It aroused 'mixed feelings' in Chamberlain.20Eden ignored

it completely, apart from an anodyne reference in a speech to his
constituents in Leamington, leading Roosevelt to complain that
he had hoped for 'a little more unselfish spirit' from Britain.21
As Sumner Welles had told the British charg£ in Washington
on 12 October that Roosevelt was not proposing 'the immediate or
imminent application of quarantine measures/22 Eden's reaction
was hardly surprising.
Roosevelt's own behaviour, or rather that he permitted his
administration to show during the following month, made this
comment rather ironic. Norman Davis went as his emissary to
Brussels to a conference called to attempt to put an end to the
Sino-Japanese conflict by agreement.28Davis himself travelled to
Brussels with the belief that once the conference had registered
its inevitable failure to get such an agreement, he was authorized
to discuss various means of pressure on Japan. The vital conversa-
tion with Roosevelt at which he seems to have gained this impres-
sion was never discussed with Hull; as a result Davis suddenly
found himself directly repudiated by both Hull and Sumner
Welles despite all the evidence he had reported of British willing-
ness to co-operate in any measures up to and including a joint
naval demonstration.24 Davis retired, hurt and bewildered, to
direct the American Red Cross, and Roosevelt, unwilling to move
as fast as circumstances demanded, yielded to Hull and Welles
with their renewed concern for American isolationist opinion.
Hull was to involve the United States in a still greater display

19 This is the conclusion of Dorothy Borg, 'Notes on Roosevelt's "Quarantine

'
Speech/' Political Science Quarterly, lxxii (1957), 424-33. See also John
McVickar Haight Jr, 'Roosevelt and the Aftermath of the Quarantine Speech/
Review of Politics, xxrv (April 1962), 233-59.
20 Feiline, Chamberlain, p «2S.
21 Roosevelt to Murray, 7 October 1937, Murray Papers, folio 8809, p 45; Murray
Memorandum, 10 September 1940, folio 8809.
22 FRUS iQtf, in, 601.
23 Report adopted by the League of Nations Assembly, 6 October 1937, FRUS,
Japan, 19311941, 1, 394.
24 FRUS 1937, rv, 145-7, 158*4J Borg» Fa* Eastern Crisis, pp 405-30.
192 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

of pusillanimity early in December when reports arrived in Wash-

ington of Japanese air attacks on hms Mosquito and the uss Panay,
the British and American gunboats on the Yangtse river. Aware of
the imminence of a British proposal for a joint Anglo-American
naval demonstration, he moved with unaccustomed speed to se-
cure and accept a Japanese apology, not only before the British
proposal could be made, but even before he had received any
reports from the Panay's survivors.26
Hull was, however, unable to forestall or inhibit action by
other departmental advisers to Roosevelt. The two who took the
most direct hand were Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt's senior naval
adviser, and Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury. Leahy
wanted the fleet made ready to put to sea but found Roosevelt
unwilling to go this far.26Morgenthau and his advisers conceived
the idea of joint Anglo-American action to freeze all Japanese
governmental assets in the United States and Britain. Roosevelt
enthusiastically welcomed this new form of bloodless retaliation
as an example of the 'quarantine' idea, and Morgenthau plunged
to the transatlantic telephone to call Sir John Simon, his opposite
number in London. He could not have chosen a more unfortu-
nate person or hour. Simon was at this time the arch-enemy of
precipitate action. The British service chiefs found him the big-
gest obstacle to British rearmament. And he had burnt his fingers
badly in 1932 as foreign secretary when he relied on the trans-
atlantic telephone to co-ordinate British and American policy over
Manchuria and Shanghai with the then secretary of state, Henry
L. Stimson. In 1937, called from his soup (he was playing host at
a dinner party at No 11 Downing Street), he referred frostily to the
usual channels and the need to have proposals in writing. He then
made sure that a vague and circumlocutory negative was returned
to Morgenthau's following cable.27

25 For this incident see FRUS 1937, rv, 490-1, 494-5, 497, 499-500; Borg, Far
Eastern Crisis, chapter xvi, passim.
26 Admiral William Leahy Diary, Library of Congress, entry of 14 December 1957.
27 See John Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, 1: Years of Crisis 1928-1938
(Boston 1959), pp 489-91.
 ROOSEVELTAND NEVILLECHAMBERLAIN 193

In the meantime, however, Leahy and Morgenthau together

had stirred the President into action. On the evening of 16 Decem-
ber he had sent for the British ambassador,Sir Ronald Lindsay.28
He began by proposing naval staff conversations in London. Their
object would be to arrange for a blockade or 'quarantine' of Japan
to be implemented whenever the Japanese committed their next
'grave outrage/ A line should be drawn from the Aleutians
through Hawaii and the Philippines to Hong Kong, the United
States looking after everything east of the Philippines, and all
Japanese trade and shipping across the line stopped by a cruiser
blockade, the aim being to cut Japan off from raw materials. It
would take about eighteen months, he said, to bring Japan to its
knees. It would not mean war and it was within his presidential
rights. He did not feel that the eight or nine battleships the British
were prepared to send to the Far East for a naval demonstration
would be needed - one or two would be enough.
The effect of this on Lindsay and those in Britain to whom
he was reporting can be imagined. Here was a president who, with
all the evidence of Japanese ruthlessness in front of him, did not
feel strong enough to accept a joint Anglo-American naval demon-
stration, talking of a major measure of war. Still worse, he seemed
to imagine that the Japanese would tamely submit to slow eco-
nomic strangulation without making any effort to destroy those
whose fingers were on their windpipes. In fact he denied that his
proposals would mean war. Even more extraordinary in this con-
text were his expressions of satisfaction with American opinion
and his admonitions to Lindsay that the British should stop talk-
ing of 'joint action/ Lindsay was caught between the professional's
inclination to gobble at these 'utterances of a harebrained states-
man/ a man 'in his worst inspirational mood/ and his sense of
history. His report to London, from which these comments are
quoted, admitted his own 'horrified criticisms/ but swung heavily
in favour of taking Roosevelt seriously as a man 'who had done

28 Lindsay to Foreign Office,17 December 1937,Public Record Office,fo 371/20961

(1937)-
194 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

his best in the Great War to bring America in speedily on the side
of the Allies and who was equally anxious to bring America in on
the same side before it might be too late/
Roosevelt's cabinet wanted even more immediate action.29
The British cabinet were more confused. To Chamberlain, Roose-
velt's rather 'naive ideas' about the possibility of blockade without
war made education of the Americans in the realities of life essen-
tial. The cabinet agreed that staff talks were a useful means for
such education.30 They still preferred, like Roosevelt's cabinet,
more immediate action; but an invitation duly went off to Wash-
ington.
Roosevelt's chosen emissary was Captain Royal E. Ingersoll,
then chief of the war plans division of the American navy. He
arrived in London on New Year's Eve and immediately disabused
Anthony Eden of any hopes he had continued to nurse of imme-
diate joint action. Eden left it to the Admiralty and to his sub-
ordinates to deal with Ingersoll and departed for the south of
France for a brief holiday, leaving Chamberlain in charge of
foreign affairs in his place. Talking with the Admiralty, Ingersoll
only confirmed their worst fears about American unpreparedness
and the curbs imposed upon United States freedom of action by
American public opinion. Nevertheless agreement was reached
on how the two navies would implement a distant blockade if
their governments agreed on one, and on the fleet movements that
each would undertake in support of such a blockade. Arrange-
ments were made for the exchange of codes and ciphers.81
The British Foreign Office now nerved itself, despite Lindsay's
objections, to a final appeal to Roosevelt for immediate action in
the form of a joint naval demonstration. Roosevelt in fact agreed
to announce that the Pacific fleet was to be made ready to go to

29 Ickes, Secret Diaries, 11,274-6; Blum, Morgenthau Diaries, 486-7.

30 Cabinet meeting of 22 December 1937, conclusions,pro, Cab. 23/90.
31 For the Ingersoll conversationssee LawrenceW. Pratt, 'The Anglo-American
Naval Conversationsof January 1938 and the Far East,' International Affairs
xlvii (October 1971), 745-63;John McVickarHaight Jr, 'Franklin D. Roosevelt
and a Naval Quarantine of Japan,' Pacific Historical Review, XL(May 1971),
203-26,does not have the full story on the British side.
 ROOSEVELT AND NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN 195

sea, providing that British announced similar preparations. He

also agreed to announce the advancing of naval manoeuvresin the
Pacific to early February. But at this point the Admiralty in Lon-
don refused to denude the Mediterranean of British ships for
the Far East. Italian submarine activities against British ships
trading with Spain, checked the previous year by joint Anglo-
French pressure, were again becoming troublesome, and so the
matter lapsed for the time being.32
Ingersoll's visit to London and the agreements reached be-
tween the two navies marked the highwater mark of Roosevelt's
determination against the aggressors. This determination was, it
must be emphasized, a lot more talk than action. And it was
accompanied by his acceptance of Sumner Welles's earlier pro-
posals for an American initiative to call a world conference. Hull
wanted more than this. His immediate reaction to the Panay out-
rage had been to forestall any British proposal for joint action.
But in the later deliberations of Roosevelt's cabinet he changed
his position completely. Italy's adherence to the anti-Comintern
pact in November 1937 had convinced him that the three Axis
powers were acting together. His Tennessean outrage, once he
learnt the full story of the Japanese attacks on the Panay, led him
to call for parallel British and American naval measures in the
Pacific; in Europe he was prepared to allow Germany and Italy
one last chance to participate in Anglo-American conversations on
economic co-operation and disarmament. But their refusal would,
in his view, be a signal for a combined British and American re-
armament drive. This went too far for Welles and Roosevelt.
Welles knew of Chamberlain's efforts to reach an understanding
with Germany and Italy. His scheme, a conference of the United
States and the neutral powers to draft an agreement on 'practical
recommendations which would insure world peace and which
would safeguard modern civilization,' was intended to reinforce
Chamberlain's efforts. If it failed, 'the worst of possible contin-
gencies' as Welles described it, at least the 'rallying of public
opinion on a world scale' would have an effect on the German and
32 Pratt, 'Anglo-American Naval Conversations.'
196 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

Italian peoples. What the United States would then do, Welles
preferred not to speculate upon.88
Roosevelt now made this scheme his own. On 11 January,
Welles saw Lindsay and gave him the text of the message it was
proposed Roosevelt should issue, calling the conference. To assure
his brain child a respectful hearing, he took it upon himself,
apparently on his own initiative, to warn Lindsay that if no action
were taken on the proposal, Britain might well forfeit America's
confidence.84Chamberlain remained unmoved. So far from shar-
ing Welles's belief that such a proposal would aid his efforts to
nail the dictators down to an agreement, he thought it 'fantastic
and likely to excite the derision of Germany and Italy* and likely
to give them a perfect out.85 He replied, asking Roosevelt to stay
his hand. Unfortunately, he also revealed it to be his intention to
'recognize' the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Hull's delight at
seeing Welles thwarted changed at once to outrage at this defiling
of his sacred cow, the doctrine of non-recognition of gains by con-
quest. The unfortunate Lindsay had to suffer a harangue reminis-
cent of a Baptist preacher'srebuke to sin.86
At this point Roosevelt's initiative was overtaken by history.
Despite Chamberlain's later acceptance of Roosevelt's proposal
once Eden had returned from leave and insisted that a more posi-
tive answer be given the President, Hitler's annexation of Austria
on 12 March 1938 killed the idea. All that was left was Hull's re-
newed distrust of Britain, and a denial by Welles that he had
approved the recognition either of Italy's conquest in particular
or of Britain's appeasement policy in general, couched in terms
certainly to destroy Lindsay's credibility in Washington87 and
possibly to damage Chamberlain's and Halifax's confidence in the
seriousness of American intentions.

33 FRUS 19^8, 1, 115-17,memorandumby Sumner Welles.

34 Avon, Facing the Dictators,pp 548-50;Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering
Storm (London 1948),p 251.
35 Chamberlaindiary cited in Iain Macleod,Neville Chamberlain(London 1961),
pp 212-13.
36 Hull memorandumof 19 January 1938, FRUS 1958, 1, 133-4.
37 ChamberlainDiary, Macleod, Chamberlain,p 213; FRUS 1938, 1, 126-30;
William L. Langerand S. EverettGleason,The Challengeto Isolation 1937-1940
(London 1952),pp 28-31.
 ROOSEVELTAND NEVILLECHAMBERLAIN 197

The gap between Chamberlain and Roosevelt had now, if any-

thing, opened wider. Hull had destroyed Davis as a reliable go-
between. Welles had now damaged Lindsay. The minions of the
New Deal on the one hand and their acceptance of the picture
painted by the famous private newsletter, The Week, published
by the crypto-communist British journalist, Claud Cockburn, on
the other, were now to destroy Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt's new
ambassador in London, whose initial success with London polit-
ical society was such that its fame reached even the American
embassy in Rome. Roosevelt feared and distrusted Kennedy's
ambition and sent him to London largely to get him away from
Washington - or so he told Morgenthau. He was, therefore,
already disposed to mistrust his chosen emissary to Britain before
he arrived in London. In April 1938 already stories of Kennedy's
connections with the Cliveden set were common gossip, and The
Week denounced him that month for obtaining Roosevelt's public
approval for the Anglo-Italian agreements.88This was far from
true. The approval came from Welles in response to a direct
appeal from Halifax;39and there were other influences at work of
which neither Kennedy nor Welles, nor for that matter Claud
Cockburn, were aware.
The main one was that of a friend from the days of 1917,
Colonel the Honourable Sir Arthur Murray, chairman of the
Eastern Railway Company. Murray was a displaced Liberal. Be-
fore 1914 his brother had been Liberal chief whip while he served
as Edward Grey's private secretary. During the war he had served
as assistant British military attach^ in Washington, and had be-
come great friends with Roosevelt in the latter's unregenerate
pan-Anglo-Saxon imperialist days.40 With the Liberal electoral
d^Mcle in 1918 and the Democratic d^bScle two years later, both
men had retired into private life, Murray permanently, and the
friendship lapsed. It was to be renewed in 1933 on Murray's ini-

38 Cited in Ickes, SecretDiaries, n, 377, entry of 23 April 1938,without identifying

The Weekas such.
39 Kennedy to State Department, 15 April 1938, enclosing personal and
confidentialletter from Lord Halifax, FRUS 1038, 1, 143-5.
40 Lord Murray of Elibank, 'Franklin Roosevelt: Friend of Britain/ Contem-
poraryReview, June 1955.
198 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

tiative; and in May 1936, Murray and his wife were the President's
guests in the White House. This was in Roosevelt's 'trade and
conference days/ and Murray was a close friend of Walter Runci-
man, then president of the British Board of Trade. With much
cloak and daggery and code words (and at the expense of £22.13.2
in cables) Murray arranged for Runciman to visit Washington
privately as Roosevelt's guest in January 1937.41 Shortly there-
after, as Chamberlain became premier, Runciman refused the
office of Lord Privy Seal and resigned from the Commons, going
to the House of Lords.42Roosevelt, however, remained in contact
with both men, who wrote to him at some length on various
occasions, keeping him au fait with the ins and outs of British
politics. Murray had warned Roosevelt six months in advance of
the imminent clash between Eden and Chamberlain and had
backed Chamberlain.48Runciman for his part wrote in mid-Feb-
ruary 1938 on Chamberlain's desire for a closer understanding
with Roosevelt, a letter which Murray supported in similar
terms.44Whatever Roosevelt's advertised distaste for the Anglo-
Italian agreement and the careful legalism with which Welles
strove to dissociate the United States from positive support there
can be little doubt Roosevelt approved of the agreement, as he
was, by and large, to support British policy on Czechoslovakia.
The American role during the crisis of the spring and summer
of 1938 over Czechoslovakia was no happier than that of any of
the more active participants in the crisis.45Indeed the course of

41 MurrayPapers,folio 8808,pp 8, 309-14.

42 Murrayto Roosevelt, 25 May 1937, ibid, folio 8809, pp 25-30; Runciman to
Roosevelt, 18 February 1938, copy in ibid, folio 8809, pp 61-62; Runciman
Papers, University of Newcastle Library.
43 Murrayto Runciman,21 February1938,MurrayPapers,folio 8809,p 63. The
original of Murray'sletter to Rooseveltis not in the MurrayPapers.
44 Runciman to Roosevelt, 18 February1938.
45 On this general theme see John McVickarHaight Jr, 'France,the United States
and the Munich Crisis/ Journal of ModernHistory, Decemberi960; Edward
L. Henson Jr, 'Britain, America and the Month of Munich,' International
Relations, n (April 1962);William V. Wallace, 'Roosevelt and British
Appeasement 1938/ Bulletin of the British Association of American Studies,
new series,no 5 (December1962).Arnold C. Ofner, The United Statesand the
Appeasementof Germany1933-38(New York 1969).
 ROOSEVELT AND NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN 199

American policy exhibited all the worst faults of Roosevelt's pref-

erence for division of counsel and control in the conduct of
American foreign policy. Hull reverted to his deep-rooted convic-
tion that Britain's leaders were trying to involve the United
States as a scapegoat to take the blows for their own inactivity.
Welles turned down all requests from London with the sancti-
monious aplomb of a bank manager denying overdrafts to the
needy. And the State Department liberals followed Roosevelt's
example in denouncing the immorality of appeasement. Only
towards the end did Roosevelt abandon the role of shocked spec-
tator, acting with sufficient force to earn the position of accessory
before and after the fact to the Munich settlement.
It was, therefore, vain work for the British to attempt to get
from the United States public statements of approval for the
Runciman mission or for Sir John Simon's warning speech of 24
August.46 The effect was simply to confirm Hull and Welles in
their belief that the British were seeking to shift to United States
shoulders the responsibility for their decision not to support
Czechoslovakia. It is, however, interesting to note Roosevelt's
knowledge of his friend Runciman's mission in Czechoslovakia.47
The absence of American support in no way worried Chamber-
lain. He expected none, and indeed advised Joe Kennedy at the
end of August of the opinion of his ambassadorin Berlin that any
statement by Roosevelt might do more harm than good.48The real
impact of America's abstention from action, the policy of 'the
eternal question mark ... to create a doubt in the minds of Ger-
many and Company that we would in all circumstances stay out
and at the same time to create a doubt in the mind of England
and Company that they could count on us for direct action no
matter what transpired' in the words of Jay Pierrepont Moffat,
the head of the State Department's European department,49was
on French determination. It was in France, fed by the contacts of

46 FRUS, 1938, 1, 537-9, 549-51.

47 Runciman to Roosevelt, 26 July 1938, copy in Murray Papers.
48 Kennedy to State Department, 31 August 1938, FRUS, 1938, 1, 560-1.
49 Nancy Harvison Hooker, ed, The Moffat Papers (Cambridge, Mass, 1956).
8OO INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

French opinion with the liberals of New York, that hopes of the
United States were highest. It was the French press that spoke of
the United States being 'alongside Britain and France when the
great decision must be made/ of Roosevelt and Hull ignoring the
neutrality legislation and 'leading America towards intervention/
of isolationism being discredited and of the 'union and firmness
of the democracies/50It was Georges Bonnet, who had abandoned
the French embassy in Washington in April 1938 to become
foreign minister, who seriously expected American reactions to his
appeals for American leadership; and it was Bonnet who reacted
with despair and capitulation when on 9 September Roosevelt
angrily denied to the press the existence of any moral commitment
to the democracies of Europe.61
Under these circumstances the talk in the State Department,
in the Senate, in the American press, and from Roosevelt himself
of a 'sell-out' over Czechoslovakia at the time Chamberlain met
Hitler at Berchtesgaden, did those who uttered such sentiments a
great deal less than honour. As Bullitt himself cabled angrily on
19 September to Washington, 'I know nothing more dishonorable
than to urge another nation to go to war if one is determined not
to go to war on the side of that nation/52 It is a measure of Roose-
velt's calibre that, unlike the bulk of his advisers, unlike the agi-
tated American foreign correspondents in Europe whose devotion
to the ideals of the Popular Front had so misled French opinion
as to American sympathies, he was beginning to abandon the idea
that crisis in Europe was for the United States simply a kind of
spectator sport. Already before Berchtesgaden he had told a
French visitor that France could count on the United States 'for
everything except troops and loans/58 And as opinion in Britain
swung towards resistance to Hitler, especially after the second
meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler at Godesberg, he swung

50 Haight, Trance.'
51 Ibid, citing GeorgesBonnet, Defense de la Paix, de Washingtona Quai d'Orsay
(Geneva1966),p 211.
52 Bullitt to State Department,19 September1938,FRUS, 1938,1,615-18.
53 Lindsayto ForeignOffice,12 September1938,Documentson British Foreign
Policy, series ra, n, no 841.
 ROOSEVELTAND NEVILLECHAMBERLAIN 201

his advisers into agreeing to some kind of action. Unfortunately,

he could not swing them far enough. Hull and Norman Davis,
temporarily recalled to action, ruled out any offer of 'good offices'
or of an 'international conference/ His first intervention there-
fore took the rather wishy-washy form of an appeal for continued
negotiation. Under the circumstances such an appeal only blurred
the clear moral issue by equating aggressorand victim, Hitler and
Benes; moreover it may possibly have tipped the balance in Lon-
don in aiding Chamberlain to overcome Daladier's resistance to
the despatch of Sir Horace Wilson to Berlin.54
Roosevelt had been driven to this intervention, as he was to
be driven to his second intervention two days later, by a com-
bination of baseless anxiety and misleading information. The
misleading information came in part from his minute intelligence
service (this was before the monstrous growth of the oss) which
produced 'information of unquestioned authenticity'55 to the
effect that Hitler had fixed the moment for German attack on
Czechoslovakiaat 2 pm on 28 September, and in part from Colonel
Lindbergh, the sad figure whose one-man flight across the Atlantic
(and subsequent tragedy in the kidnapping and murder of his
child) had raised him to the stature of oracle on the world balance
of power in the air. Early in September he had ended a European
tour in Paris where his judgments of German superiority in the
air over the French and Soviet air forces had played a potent part
in destroying France's determination.56 His judgment was un-
questionable: but the statistics of German aircraft production with
which he backed this judgment, accepted unquestioningly by
Roosevelt, were grotesquely exaggerated to something like the
power of ten.57
Roosevelt's baseless anxieties arose from his deep-rooted sus-

54 This was the view of the Czechpresident,EdwardBenes,MnichovskydDny

(London 1955),pp 105-10,cited in Wallace,'Rooseveltand Appeasement/
55 SumnerWelles, speechof 3 October1958,cited in John McVickarHaight Jr,
American Aid to France, 1938-1940 (New York 1970), pp 20-1.
56 Haight, AmericanAid to France,pp 15-16and sourcesthere cited.
57 RooseveltestimatedGermanaircraftproductionin 1938at 30,000planes per
annum. The actual figurewas 2847as of August 1938.
2O2 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

picion of German and Italian penetration of Latin America. Seen

from Berlin, Germany's position in Latin America had suffered
so disastrously from the Foreign Ministry's inability to control
the small groups of extremist Nazi hotheads among the various
groups of German settlers scattered through the continent that
the Foreign Ministry's Latin American experts were forced to
spend most of the twelve months from June 1938 onwards ham-
mering out some system of control and responsibility by which
political discipline could be maintained. Seen from Washington
on the other hand, Latin America was aflame with Nazi and Fas-
cist conspiracy. A German victory over France and Britain, which
Roosevelt in his gloomier moments thought inevitable, would be
followed, so his advisers believed, by a direct Axis challenge to
the United States in the western hemisphere, the first challenge
from Europe since the threat of the Holy Alliance to suppress the
revolutions in Spain's American colonies had led President Mon-
roe to formulate his famous doctrine.58It was thus Roosevelt came
to send his second message to Europe appealing for an inter-
national conference. It was this fear of war which led him to
welcome Chamberlain's decision to go to Munich, despite Czecho-
slovakia's exclusion from the conference, with the words 'good
man.'59 And it was for this reason he shared in the general
euphoria which attended the outcome of the Munich conference
and was to claim, in writing to his ambassador in Rome, in mid-
October, that his second message had played a large part in induc-
ing Mussolini to secure the meeting at Munich.00
Roosevelt was to turn against Munich very quickly. By the
end of October he was not only confessing his 'shame' at his sup-
port of the agreement to members of his cabinet,61but was actively
planning with British and French intermediaries to find ways of
putting the United States industrial potential to work for their
respective rearmament programmes despite the terms of the 1937

58 Iekes,SecretDiaries,11,entries of 24 September,9 October1938.

59 FRUS, 1938,1, 688.
60 Roosevelt to William Phillips, 17 October 1938,RooseveltLetters,in, 244.
61 Blum, From the MorgenthauDiaries, u: Yearsof Urgency(Boston 1965),48-9.
 ROOSEVELT AND NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN 2OJ

neutrality legislation.62 In this he was only matching the move-

ment of opinion within the British cabinet and government.
Suggestions that he was ahead of it rest basically on the old
popular-front fellow-travelling writings which used Roosevelt's
'democratic*stance as a backdrop against which they could depict
the Villainies' of the British appeasers in even blacker hues.
In actuality there were considerable parallels between Roose-
velt's position and that of Neville Chamberlain. Both were liberal
reformers with the liberal's distrust of the official machinery and
outlook. In foreign affairs this liberalism lead them into very simi-
lar positions. They shared the liberal antipathy to the 1919 peace
settlement and to the traditional diplomacy which had preceded
it. They preferred personal intervention, unofficial intermediaries,
co-operation only with those who shared their prejudices and
predilections. They shared the liberal belief in the economic
origins of war and the healing qualities of international trade.
They believed in the establishment of good will, Roosevelt being
as much deceived and misled by Stalin as ever Neville Chamber-
lain was by Hitler. Both were authoritarian personalities who
preferred manipulative to open politics in domestic affairs while
equally inclined in foreign affairs to prefer diplomacy by rhetoric
and appeal to lengthy negotiations. Where they differed the dif-
ferences arose from the very national contexts in which they
worked and from which they came. These differences were mainly
ones of style, national as much as personal. Chamberlain was
anxiously pragmatic, Roosevelt rather nebulously idealist. Roose-
velt in American terms was a hereditary oligarch in a land
nominally egalitarian and democratic, Chamberlain scion of a
successful British bourgeois family in a land previously dominated
by an aristocracymixed from birth and talent.
Of the two, however, Roosevelt was the more inclined to
favour large gestures designed to keep the peace, conscious of his
nation's vast reserves of strength. Chamberlain, always conscious
of Britain's economic and military weakness, was driven to be
more pedestrian and piecemeal in his approach. Yet his dramatic
62 See Haight, American Aid to France, chapter 1; Murray of Elibank, 'Roosevelt/
204 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL

flights to Germany showed that he could command the large ges-

ture too and won Roosevelt's admiration and praise. Had the two
men changed places there would obviously have been many dif-
ferences in the course of action they would have taken. What a
historian who looks at Roosevelt's record through eyes unfettered
by American party dogma must doubt is whether, in the end,
there would have been any difference, whether Roosevelt would
have trod the path of Churchill. The record is against any such
assumption.