Abstract
There was Something Approaching Unanimity in the American public’s attitude about the “colonial question” during World War II. One would have to look very hard to find anything favorable to “empires” in newspapers or magazines, whatever their point of view on Roosevelt and the New Deal. Restoring colonialism was not considered a worthy war aim. The only place where that might not have been true was inside the State Department, and even there the only real dissent came from the heads of the Western European “desks.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull acknowledged in his memoirs the difficulty of trying to work with the Europeans in the war against Hitler, while opposing their imperial policies in Asia. Hull had spent his career in Congress and at State preaching the gospel of “free trade” against the sins of high tariffs and colonial restrictions and looked upon the war as the best chance in a lifetime to knock down the walls of autarchy and imperial trade preferences. He had even told the Japanese ambassador in the last days before Pearl Harbor that after the war many of their supposed grievances against the West would disappear as the world returned to economic sanity behind American leadership. It was a most remarkable thing to say to a presumed enemy. But it does capture the depth of feeling American leaders had about the connection between “selfish” colonial trade policies and the causes of war.
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Notes
Roosevelt to Ickes, August 12, 1942, The Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, PPF 3650, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
Diary Entry, October 27, 1942, in Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973), 421–2.
See Mark Lytle, The Origins of the Iranian—American Alliance, 1941–1953 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 55–57.
Quoted in Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 176.
See Editorial Note, “Roosevelt’s Conversations with Various Callers,” November 24, 1943, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran (Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1961), 345, and Editorial Note, “Memorandum of Conversation,” January 3, 1944, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran (Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1961), 864. (Hereafter: FRUS.).
FRUS, 1945, VIII, 9.
Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 578. I have transposed sentences here.
Diary Entry, November 27, 1942, in Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 187. Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York: Morrow, 1997), concludes: “Roosevelt was convinced that the pressure of nationalism in the European empires was the most serious threat to postwar peace.” 301.
Ward, Closest Companion, 187.
Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), 116. From the time it was published, Elliott Roosevelt’s account of his father’s deep dislike of European imperialism, and especially FDR’s supposed suspicion about British machinations to hold onto every part of every empire lest their own be threatened, has been denounced as inaccurate in detail and exaggerated in conclusions. Subsequent documentary evidence from various archives and memoirs has, however, strengthened confidence in Elliott’s reportage of his father’s attitudes.
Kimball, Forged in War, 300. See also, Albert E. Kersten, “Wilhelmina and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Wartime Relationship,” in FDR and His Contemporaries: Foreign Perceptions of an American President, ed. Cornelius A. van Minnen and John F. Sears (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 85–96.
See Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects ofNew Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 275–80, for a brief discussion of the debates at the Atlantic Charter Conference in 1941 and the debates over Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement that committed London to wartime negotiations over postwar trade and the removal of empire preferences. For a recent account that deals with the British predicament, see John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 89–101.
Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 115.
Anthony D. Biddle to Roosevelt, March 27, 1942, and Roosevelt to Queen Wilhelmina, April 6, 1942, both in, The Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, PSF, The Netherlands, 1942. The Dutch prime minister, Dr. Gerbrandy, who conveyed this delicate request, was at the same time expressing his hope to British officials that the center of gravity in the Pacific War not shift to Washington from London, out of concern for the future of the East Indies. See Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 219.
Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 218.
See Warren F. Kimball, “A Victorian Tory: Churchill, the Americans, and Self-Determination,” in More Adventures with Britannia, ed. William Roger Louis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 377–8.
Cordell Hull, Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1948), vol. 2, 1595.
Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 217.
Notes of Roosevelt—Molotov Meeting, June 1, 1942, in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1950), 573. This remarkable book, published so soon after the war, would provide the most complete history of American policy for years to come, and still bears rereading, no longer for documents once unavailable elsewhere, but for a feel of the atmosphere.
Ibid., 573–4.
See Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II through Dienbienphu (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 35.
Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 192.
Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 218.
FRUS, Cairo and Tehran, 323–5. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It, has his father suggesting to Chiang, however, that the French might be allowed to serve as the trustee for Indochina responsible to a United Nations organization. 165. This interesting piece of evidence certainly predicts where FDR came out in the final months of his life, and suggests that his mind was never at rest on how to manage the transition.
FRUS, Cairo and Tehran, 484–5.
Ibid.
Diary Entry, June 28, 1944, Ward, Closest Companion, 314. Sumner Welles, who issued many of the official statements on colonial questions during the war, wrote in 1951 that by the end of 1943 Roosevelt had become convinced that the United States had to work with China in years to come to prevent a cleavage between the Eastern and Western worlds, for our “own safety’s sake.” Welles, “Roosevelt and the Far East,” vol. 2, Harper’s Magazine 202 (March, 1951): 70–80.
Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 45.
M.R. Wright to P.M. Broadmead, November 14, 1944, PREM 4/27/7 (Churchill Papers), Public Record Office, London, England.
Neville Butler, Minute, January 13, 1946, FO US/46/13, Public Record Office, London, England.
Quoted in, Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu, 1941–1954 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), 69.
FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945, 770–1.
Ibid.
Quoted in Gardner, Approaching Vetnam, 46. Warren Kimball argues that FDR’s conditions for French reinvolvement in Indochina “were a trap designed to get them to dissolve their entire empire, not just in Southeast Asia.” A sole trusteeship under the United Nations would force the French to accept international accountability. “Sole trusteeship and international trusteeship would achieve the same result, independence.” The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 153.
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings: Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, 156–7. See also Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) for another account by a former OSS officer stationed in Vietnam.
Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 70.
Quoted in the Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, 4 vols. (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 1, 31.
Williams, et al., America in Vietnam, 97–8.
Ibid., 91.
Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference on October 15, 1950, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950: Korea (Washington: G.P.O., 1976), 957–8.
Draft Memorandum, July 9,1954, reprinted in William Appleman Williams, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, and Walter LaFeber, eds., America in Vietnam: A Documentary History (New York: Anchor Press,1985), 166–8.
Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), vol. 5, 83rd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: G.P.O., 1977), 142.
Gardner, Approaching Vetnam, 135. Emphasis added.
See Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to Vietnam (Berkely: University of California Press, 2005), 80–87.
Bundy to Donald Graham, editor of the Harvard Crimson, April 20, 1965, The Papers of Lyndon B. Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas, Files of McGeorge Bundy, Boxes 18–19.
David Anderson, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and Wholehearted Support of Ngo Dinh Diem,” in Anderson, ed., Shadow on the White House, 49.
Gardner, Pay Any Price, 47.
Unsigned Memorandum, February, 1965, Johnson Papers, National Security Files, International Travel, Boxes 28–29. The memo has notes in McGeorge Bundy’s handwriting, but the basic themes were common enough in Bundy’s day and in the days of his successors, Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger.
Quoted in William Appleman Williams, et al., eds., America in Vietnam (New York, 1985), 247.
U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings: Causes, Origins and Lessons of the Vietnam War, 92nd cong., 2nd sess. (Washington: G.P.O., 1973), v.
Testimony of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ibid., 116.
Steven Hugh Lee, Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vetnam, and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995). This outstanding monograph provides a well-argued case for an activist American policy, and a consistent one.
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© 2008 David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball, and David Reynolds
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Gardner, L. (2008). Fdr and the “Colonial Question”. In: Woolner, D.B., Kimball, W.F., Reynolds, D. (eds) FDR’s World. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616257_6
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