A New Deal for the World

Elizabeth Borgwardt

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780674281929
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime.Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter—buttressed by FDR's "Four Freedoms" and the legacies of World War I—redefined human rights and America's vision for the world.Three sets of international negotiations brought the Atlantic Charter blueprint to life—Bretton Woods, the United Nations, and the Nuremberg trials. These new institutions set up mechanisms to stabilize the international economy, promote collective security, and implement new thinking about international justice. The design of these institutions served as a concrete articulation of U.S. national interests, even as they emphasized the importance of working with allies to achieve common goals. The American architects of these charters were attempting to redefine the idea of security in the international sphere. To varying degrees, these institutions and the debates surrounding them set the foundations for the world we know today.By analyzing the interaction of ideas, individuals, and institutions that transformed American foreign policy—and Americans' view of themselves—Borgwardt illuminates the broader history of modern human rights, trade and the global economy, collective security, and international law. This book captures a lost vision of the American role in the world.

PART I

SOMEWHERE IN THE ATLANTIC, AUGUST 1941

Somewhere in the Atlantic you did make some history, and like all truly historic events, it was not what was said or done that defined the scope of the achievement. It is the forces, the impalpable, the spiritual forces, the hopes, the expressions, and the dreams, and the endeavors that are released. That’s what matters . . . We live by symbols, and we cannot too often recall them.

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,
letter of August 18, 1941, congratulating President Roosevelt
on his meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill
at the Atlantic Conference

CHAPTER 1

THE GHOST OF WOODROW WILSON

For many of its interpreters in the early 1940s, the Atlantic Charter was a unique opportunity to set the terms of American participation in world politics without repeating mistakes from the aftermath of the First World War. American policymakers drew different lessons from World War I at different times, but consistently seemed to extract four major guidelines from the previous conflagration and its post-conflict settlement.

Lesson number one was to bring putative opponents, as well as likely friends, into the postwar planning process at as early a stage as possible. This principle was based on the signal failure of Woodrow Wilson to fold Republican perspectives into the development of the postwar settlement a generation before.¹

Lesson number two, from the perspective of Roosevelt administration planners, was to begin planning the peace while the war was still raging, counterintuitive as that allocation of resources seemed to some. While winning the war was of necessity the top priority—only victors are able to implement their peace plans, after all—the instructive failure of Wilsonian diplomacy taught that negotiating positions tended to harden quickly after an armistice, and nations soon turned inward once victory was assured, in a natural eagerness to focus on long-neglected domestic priorities. A corollary of these first two prescriptions was to work actively to bring public opinion along as well, ideally in ways that could be measured and heard by the Senate.

The third lesson drawn from the failed Versailles settlement was to seek a more integrated vision of collective security through combining political and military cooperation with economic security in the realm of trade, finance, and labor standards. This precept was based on the perceived successes of some of the League of Nations-affiliated agencies, such as the International Labor Organization, as well as the harsh experience of interwar economic diplomacy, where competitive currency depreciations and trade barriers had greatly magnified the global impact of the Great Depression. A punitive reparations scheme for Germany, together with the deep indebtedness of the European Allies, had laid some of the groundwork for the Depression, which led to desperation and domestic instability, followed by an increased vulnerability to political extremism.

The final important lesson from the previous generation’s mistakes was to avoid promising too much—to emphasize hardheaded realism, technical expertise, and practical progress for the “common man” rather than idealism or utopianism. As an anonymous editorial writer in Life magazine observed in 1942, “In the last war we used to talk of building ‘a world fit for heroes to live in.’ This time let us cut the talk and simply get on with building a world fit for everybody to live in.”²

The sum of these four widely perceived lessons of the post-World War I settlement was that the United States had more to gain by participating in a new world order than by turning its back on international collaboration. The political scientist John Ikenberry elaborates that a hegemonic victor in possession of a preponderance of power is faced with three choices: “It can dominate—use its commanding material capabilities to prevail in the endless conflicts over the distribution of gains. It can abandon—wash its hands of postwar disputes and return home”; this was the choice of the United States following World War I. Or a victorious state “can try to transform its favorable postwar power position into a durable order that commands the allegiance of other states within the order.”³ The United States’ choice during World War II to seek a postwar global transformation needs explaining, especially given its later decision to seek domination both during the Cold War era and in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The negative example of the World War I settlement suggests why American planners were intent on avoiding “abandonment” after the global conflict ended. By the time of the Atlantic Charter, even before formally entering the war, they may have already concluded that the United States had the most to gain by actively working to parlay the fruits of a likely victory into a durable and stable institutional order. This was not so much an order created in America’s own image—although, unsurprisingly, ideas about democracy, rights, and constitutionalism as promoted by US negotiators had a distinctly American flavor. Rather, it marked a new approach to using multilateral institutions to “lock in” wartime advantages.⁴

“No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt”

Isaiah Berlin once described Roosevelt as “a spontaneous, optimistic, pleasure-loving ruler who dismayed his assistants by the gay and apparently heedless abandon with which he seemed to delight in pursuing two or more totally incompatible policies.” By contrast, wrote Berlin, the British prime minister “stands at almost the opposite pole.” “Churchill’s dominant category,” Berlin explained, “the single, central, organising principle of his moral and intellectual universe, is a historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multicoloured past.”⁵

In a famously evocative contrast, Berlin wrote in a later essay that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This image captures two incompatible intellectual and artistic temperaments. Berlin emphasized “the great chasm” between “those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way” (foxes) and those “who relate everything to a single, central vision” (hedgehogs). Early in 1941, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins had expressed concern that “the President is very like Winston in some ways—very temperamental” and that “if they were put together, in a ship for instance,” the results might be more explosive than unifying.⁶ How would an encounter between Roosevelt, the paradigmatic embodiment of Berlin’s fox, and Churchill, the very avatar of his hedgehog, come off?

Hopkins had been sent ahead as FDR’s personal envoy to get to know Churchill over the course of a twice-extended visit of five weeks. The ailing, rumpled former social worker got along famously with the patrician prime minister. In an informal after-dinner speech early in 1941, for example, Hopkins summarized his mission with the kind of world-historical idiom the prime minister loved best. “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” began the presidential aide. “Well, I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which . . . my own Scottish mother [was] brought up: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God . . . Even to the end.’”⁷

Recording this scene, Churchill’s personal physician noted, “I was surprised to find the P.M. in tears. He knew what it meant . . . the words seemed like a rope thrown to a dying man.” But Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes noted dryly in his diary, “Probably a good deal of this is true and the attachment of Churchill to Harry Hopkins may be entirely genuine. However, I suspect that if, as his personal representative, the President should send to London a man with the bubonic plague, Churchill would, nevertheless, see a good deal of him.”⁸

Hopkins had cut short a trip to the Soviet Union to accompany Churchill on the long and perilous journey to the coast of Newfoundland—six full days of travel, five of them over waters infested with U-boats. The American New Dealer passed the time by beating Churchill at backgammon for a shilling a game and responding to the prime minister’s persistent queries about Roosevelt’s personality and attitudes.⁹

The Atlantic Conference was to be Churchill’s first meeting with Roosevelt, or, more precisely, his first encounter with FDR in the American politician’s capacity as head of state. The two charismatic career politicians had been introduced in 1918 at a large ceremonial dinner in London, where the 44-year-old British cabinet member had given the 36-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy the brush-off, “an encounter Roosevelt remembered with distaste and Churchill had completely forgotten.” Now, more than twenty years later, Churchill felt that the very survival of the British Empire might hinge on the American president’s attitude. Given the precariousness of Britain’s strategic situation in the summer of 1941, it seemed only fitting “that the Old World come, as it were, cap in hand to the New,” writes the diplomatic historian Theodore Wilson.¹⁰

Shortly before his departure, Churchill ruminated about Roosevelt to the American diplomat and financier Averell Harriman. “I wonder if he will like me.”¹¹ Churchill later remarked on this era in his relationship with FDR, “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”¹²

Churchill later recalled his modest expectation that “a conference between us would proclaim the ever closer association of Britain and the United States, would cause our enemies concern, make Japan ponder, and cheer our friends.” Shy of attaining a formal, public American commitment to a military alliance with Britain, Churchill’s overarching goal was to bring the United States to the threshold of such a step. Churchill’s most specific objective, however, according to his official biographer, was a severe joint warning to Japan, ideally framed as an ultimatum, in response to Japan’s recent occupation of French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and parts of the US-administered Philippines.¹³

Roosevelt’s staff had also deliberately tamped down their expectations for this long-anticipated encounter. An American military aide later wrote that the main purpose of the clandestine meeting in the North Atlantic had been to reassure Roosevelt that the British prime minister was not a hopeless drunk, as some rumors had apparently suggested. With everyone seemingly satisfied on that point, one of FDR’s speechwriters, striving mightily for an image of unity, finally observed that “the cigarette-in-holder and the long cigar were at last being lit from the same match.”¹⁴

Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles later wrote that Roosevelt had two serious purposes in conferring with Churchill. First, the president had become interested in a face-to-face meeting after receiving an alarming 4,000-word letter from the prime minister on December 8, 1940. Described by Churchill as “the most important letter I ever wrote,” it outlined Britain’s desperate plight in the second year of a war Britain had entered after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. During that autumn and through the following winter Germany abruptly ended its “phony war” with lightning strikes into Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. “Entrenched in their island citadel, the British alone stood between the Axis and complete domination of half the world,” explained a 1942 Library of Congress publication discussing the context of the Atlantic Charter, written for American audiences. “May, June and July of 1940 represented the nadir of anti-Axis fortunes, with every prospect that Germany would attempt, and probably successfully complete, an outright invasion of England itself.”¹⁵

The unexpectedly rapid capitulation of France in June 1940 left thousands of British troops and materiel stranded near the French port of Dunkirk. When over 300,000 soldiers (but not their equipment) were rescued and transported across the English Channel, Churchill famously intoned in the House of Commons: “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender . . . ” The conclusion of this iconic assertion is quoted much less often: “even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.” The historian Warren Kimball has argued that this famous exhortation, excerpted with its final sentence intact, was pleading as well as defiant, and was directed as much toward an American audience as toward the British home front.¹⁶

In the late summer of 1940, Germany initiated its air war over Britain, originally intended to soften up British defenses and civilian morale in preparation for a planned invasion. The Battle of Britain lasted from August 13 to October 31, 1940, and included fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing civilian targets in London. At the peak of Britain’s defensive effort, RAF fighter pilots were regularly flying two or three sorties per day, and six or seven daily scrambles were not unusual. Overstressed pilots sometimes instantly fell asleep upon landing, leaving ground crews to turn off the engines. In September 1940 Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely. Although bombing continued into the winter, it was clear that Britain had survived the very worst that the Luftwaffe could deliver.¹⁷

But by autumn of 1940 Britain was suffering from a severe dollar shortage and was further squeezed by the denial of credit in the United States. During just one week in early 1940, Britain’s dollar reserves dropped by close to four percent. Later that spring, the American journalists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner estimated that Britain would soon have no dollars or convertible assets left at all, and that Americans would have to choose between credits and donations or an outright German victory. But a myth of untapped British reserves being craftily withheld persisted through 1940, fueled by American assumptions about the British Empire’s vast resources.

Kimball explained that “the exchange of sterling for dollars was the problem, not over-all British wealth” and that on the British side “the unspoken accusation was that the United States was using the wartime situation—as in World War I—to challenge Britain’s overseas trade position.” “Britain’s broke, boys, it’s your money we want,” quipped a chipper Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador to the United Sta...