Why was FDR and the American Congress so dumb in the 1920s and 1930s?

Question

Why did they criticize France for invading Germany in order to collect reparations? Why did they disarm? Why didn't they take the side of France prior to May 1940? Why did they think they could stay out of WWII? Why did Hitler have so much support in America in the 30s?

Would there have been WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq I (vs. Iran) Iraq II (Gulf War) Iraq III( current war), Afghanistan I (vs. Soviets) and II (current war) if America wasn't so dumb in the 1930s? Or is France solely to blame?

Why were they silent on Britain's naval pact with Hitler?

Weren't Prussia's terms on France in 1871 as harsh as France's in 1919? Didn't they take away two of France's provinces?

Why did the U.S. Senate betray France by denying them from occupying the Rhineland in 1919 and by denying the Treaty of Guarantee that was ratified by both houses of the British Parliament on the condition that the U.S. also ratify it?

Answer 1

well congress is more idiotic today than ever

Answer 2

Um, it wasn't FDR being stupid in the 1920s. If I were to blame someone, it would be Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Just a thought. FDR didn't get to be stupid until 1933 and even then I think he was SLIGHTLY more concerned with the 25% unemployment rate and the lack of trade in his country. The Republicans of the 1920s? They were just stupid. If you'll recall, after France was invaded in 1940, England DID take their side and finally declare war. The US didn't because (pretty much) it was an election year and isolationism was REALLY popular with the Americans. They did come up with the Lend-Lease program which helped a bit I guess. They, the people, thought they could stay out of WW2 because they were across an ocean from EVERYONE and the isolationism ideal was still present. Hitler had a lot of support in the 1930s in American because things were not going well for people at all. They wanted to point fingers and Hitler WAS pointing fingers. It looked good to people then.

If anyone is to blame for the WW2, etc. it's the countries that in 1918 ratified the treaty of versailles which totally screwed Germany over. The Cold War was TOTALLY unrelated to WW1 and had EVERYTHING to do with a new government in Russia and Americans not liking the idea of communism. Furthermore, it's hard to say that Iraq has any tie to WW2 at all. And you can't blame France for everything because France wasn't alone in appeasement of Germany.

Answer 3

Because being able to predict the future based on current events is a talent know only to a few. Hindsight is 20 20.

Actually FRD saw World War II coming, but the American people were very isolationist. We didn't want to get involved in another war. There are some who say that FDR knew that the attact on Pearl Harbor was immiment and decided not to act. He knew we had to get involved in the war in order to stop the evil that was enveloping the world.

Add the infection of anti-semitism that people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh spread, and you have a receipe for disaster.

You can also argue it was the aggressive and punitive reparations due France from Germany after the First World War that gave Hitler a disaffected German population ready to accept his hate along with his dream of making Germany strong again.

Answer 4

Well, you seem to be interested in this question, and the first two posters have made some good points. Please consider reading a little history of that period so that you understand better the actual events and personalities involved, and the actual sequence of events. But this is not a criticism - you are not alone in lumping stuff together once it is more than perhaps a decade or two in the past.

Let's see if we can sort of put this in a framework:

FRANCE AND GERMANY

By 1914, when World War I began, France and Germany had a history, and it was not pretty. Going back to the mid-1700's, the leading German principality, Prussia, had frustrated French designs for greater authority over Continental Europe. Prussia's forces arrived in the nick of time at the battle of Waterloo and did Napoleon dirt as a result. Eventually, in 1870 France and Prussia fought another war and the French were thoroughly pasted. (Krupp's famous steel cannon blew the living Hades out of the French cavalry at the Battle of Sedan and that was largely the whole story.) After the humiliation of France at the end of the war in 1871, Prussia went on to unify Germany - the FIRST time "Germany" as a state existed. The French went on to grind their molars and dream of revenge. They also hated paying Germany taxes for the wonderful wine of the Alsace-Lorraine, which had been taken away from them by Germany after the war. (Little matter that Alsace-Lorraine and related teritories had not really been French all that long; as far back as 1686, French King Louis XIV ingited a world war by trying to take that property over.)

The Dryfus Affair did not help matter much, either. Dreyfus, a Jewish General Staff officer in France, was framed on a charge of spying for the Germans. The French high command actually knew that one of their own, a Catholic junior officer from an aristocratic family, was the culprit. Eventually journalist Emile Zola took up the matter and after a LOT of very serious social conflict proved the Army had lied and covered up. This not only humiliated the Army, but led to an expansion of the anti-government Anarchist movement, terrible political conflict, and a miserable few final years for the victim of it all, Dreyfus. And, of course, those evil, nasty Germans were at the center of EVERYTHING. Oh, France HATED those Huns!

WORLD WAR I AND EVERYTHING ELSE:

The various machinations, posturings and pushings of England, France, Germany, Russia, the Austo-Hungarians, and the Ottoman Empire mostly made Americans glad to be well out of the entire European mess before and in the early years of the war. A huge percentage of Americans had run away from those places and found the United States largely safer, better, and more desirable than the Old Countires. A huge percentage of the immigrant Americans who felt that way, it should be noted, were at least one generation beyond the Old Countries - recent immigrants often lived in squalor and misery, were brutally exploited, and still had lots of friends and relatives overseas.

Early in WWI, the US was relatively content to be the armaments factory for the belligerents. The biggest problem were the pesky German U-Boats that kept killing civilians, including some prominent Americans, and the arrogance of certain German dipomats. The US did not want to be in the European war at all - Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of the war!" But then this German fellow Zimmermann sent a telegram explaining how the Mexicans could be brought into the war against the US and Germany would help them lots, oh, yeah, you betcha. Oops. The British were reading German diplomatic codes and made sure the US read the telegram. That and a few other matters ultimately forced the US to enter the war on the side of France and Britain - but with a very noble and high-handed war aim: "Make the World Safe for Democracy." Americans, unlike the British and French, did not have an old grievance to settle with Germany.

HOW THE PEACE MADE THE NEXT WAR INEVITABLE:

President Wilson went to Paris fully intending to impose his principles of justice and humanity on all those tough old Europeans and make the world a better place. President Wilson, however, was a freshly-roasted side of mutton at a gathering of wolves when he arrived. The British and French ran circles around him and in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles simply ate Wilson for breakfst, lunch and din-din.

The French had been waiting for well over a century to get sweet revenge on Germany. They claimed the Rhineland for two reasons - first it should have been theirs all along (remember the ambitions of Louis XIV) and second, it was a really rich industrial region served by great river transportation and France could make some GOOD stuff there. But that wasn't enough. France wanted to grind those uppity newcomers from Germany into the dust and show who was the big dog on the Continent.

Virtually EVERY achievement Germany had recorded since 1870 was smashed flat, especially its military forces and arms technologies. And then France required some of the most crushing "war reparations" anyone in history had ever demanded. Today Americans are unfamiliar with "war reparations," but throughout the history of civilization, wars usually ended with the loser paying off the winner in some pretty astonishing amounts of loot.

Britain for her part felt much the same way. The blood, the cost, the embarrassing destruction of her "battle cruisers" at Jutland, the submarine menace, merchant raiders, and worst of all the cousins of the British royal family making such a nasty war - the British by 1918 despised the Germans. The Royal Family changed its name to "Windsor" to get rid of the ugly German connection with Hannover.

Wilson's ideas of peace and justice did not have a prayer. He did manage to sell the concept of a worldwide organization to attempt to protect the peace and moderate the behavior of rogue states, but the Republicans in 1920 won the national elections and quite gleefully voted down ratification of the League of Nations.

Crushing reparations, a bitter and resentful Germany, a sustained hatered between old enemies, and arrogance at work within all the victors of World War I laid the groundwork for the next war.

NASTY OLD IDEAS MAKE NEW FRIENDS:

World War II might not have happened, even then, except that a variety of extremely nasty ideas, sown in England and the United States, and laer fostered by French and Gemran philsophers, mated with newfound "military nationalism" in the recent major states of italy, Germany, and Japan. Japan, like Italy and Germany, had been birthed as a modern nation in the middle 1800's. Self-conscious and anxious to take positions of respect and influence in the world, these countries had a very touchy sense of themselves. This is partly why the Versailles Treaty was such a wound in the German ego. Japan, too, had left the peace table with a bruised sense of self, for she had been rudely rebuffed in her desire to receive a share of the war spoils. These countries had learned, soon after their modern incarnations, that a strong military was a statement of national pride and strength.

A strong military, too, was necessary under the doctrine of "social Darwinism." This doctrine basically was a nationalistic edition of "survival of the fittest" - a term Darwin himself never used - tinged with horrendous racism. As a cultural tool, the ideas worked perfectly to encourage national arrogance, and the kind of pride that always ends up with some bully on his face in the schoolyard. "Social Darwinism," mixed with racism and nationalism, was a pure-heck formula for war on the horizon.

SO NOW TO ANSWER YOUR MIXED-UP POINTS:

France marched into the Rhineland days after the Armistice. She stayed until Germany, re-arming and militant, kicked the French out in 1936. That WAS the time to go to war with Hitler.

France occupied the Rhineland partly to secure her reparations claims - the French dismantled German factories, siezed natural resources, and generally plundered the place. They also used the Rhineland as a way to put themselves between France and Germany in case of war, have a jumping-off point for invasion, and thought it well to deny Germany the industrial and resources potential of the place. There was another, more cynical value to the French - as long as they held the Rhineland, Germany was completely beggared and could not afford the reparations. The entire country suffered.

During the 1920's, which was completely dominated in the U.S. and Britain by "conservative " political influences, there was no worry about Germany. Inflation ravaged Germany, made people starve. The Weimar Republic was a weak and ineffectual government and the country was largely in a state of armed anarchy. Both in France and in Germany, there was a very desperate kind of post-war fatalism, marked by disillusionment with all the standards of the past, and all the decadence a demoralized people could cook up. England, too, was afflicted by this but not quite so openly - those Brits are masters of understatement.

During the inter-war era, France never disarmed. Nor, entirely, did England. In fact, at the outset of WWII France had the largest army in the world, some of the best military equipment, and an immense defensive line along its eastern border. The French were out-thought, out-maneauvered, and under-generaled when the war came.

If you refer to two of the most stunning developments of the iner-war period, however, there are some intriguing points. Those two developments were the Washington Naval Conference, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Both were decades or centuries ahead of their time, in a way, but also very effective.

The 1922 Washington Conference was in fact a disarmament meeting. It was intended to set a "formula" for navies. The idea was to recognize the relative importance of navies to different countries and give them targets for shipbuilding so that the ruinous naval race from before WWI wouldn't be repeated. A lot of people blamed that race for helping cause the war. What the Conference DID accomplish was a limitation of an arms race, and stimulation of brilliant new approaches to naval ship design to get around the Conference's limitations. This ultimately benefitted the Germans and Japanese the most, but also led to construction of new aircraft carriers on the hulls of ships first designed as battleships. That was a plus for both the US and Britain in WWII.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a treaty signed by all the major powers (except the USSR) in 1928 and 1929. It was a policy statement, saying that the ratifying countries renounced war as a means of carrying out national policy. This was a great idea but of course it never worked. The Japanese completely shredded the pact with their invasion of Manchuria and mainland China. After WWII, the violations of this pact were used as principal counts in war crimes trials.

AMERICA IN WORLD WAR II:

The United States was offically neutral when the war broke out in September, 1939. All of the belligerent nations bought munitions in the US, just as they had in WWI. Most of the early action of the war took place on the wrong side of the Continent, and the Soviet Union, which the US did not officially recognize as a legitimate government at the time, looked to be up in its elbows with Polish blood. When Germany turned Westward and in a matter of weeks took France, it was a shock to the entire world. Why didn't the US help France? Heck, with the professional British Army in France and that massive military machine the French had on their own, no one expected Hitler to have a chance of succeeding. It was a terrible shock.

By mid-1940, US policy remained neutral but actively against German interests. Even Americans who volunteered to go help England during the Battle of Britain had to go by way of Canada, secretly, or risk being arrested.

As has been written by others, the isolationist movement in the US was very, very strong. It especially enrolled Catholics, Lutherans, German-Americans, and other groups that felt we had done enough in WWI and that Europe just wasn't worth it. And, of course, some people still felt a strong desire to support the homeland of their families - including Germany. One of the HUGE leaders of isolationism was the Catholic radio preacher, Father Charles Coughlin. He filled Madison Square Garen to ovrflowing with his speeches. And another one was Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero who before Pearl Harbor strongly favored Nazi Germany.

Hitler espoused many principles that Americans admired. He was strong, and direct. He raised his country from poverty and desperation while the US was still suffering from the Depression. He was a racist - and so was most of the United States, then. The Nazi party's public positions in the 1930's were pretty similar to those embraced in most middle-class white American homes - Church, Children, Kitchen. His scientists built neat stuff. And his party originated in the home of the Oktoberfest, Munich - good beer, bread, and bratwurst. This guy looked like the real thing to lots of people.

So there's war in Europe, but Americans don't really want to take on this guy many of them rather like. They really don't want to get into another gigantic European battlefield meatgrinder, they remembered WWI. Besides, France and Brtain have him pretty well covered.

Oops. But France wasn't entierly to blame for the war, and she surely paid for her mistakes after WWI. But - since you bring up the entire rest of the century and the past 6 years, let's see what France still needed to learn, and whether "the Frogs did it" or not.

WHAT DID FDR AND CONGRESS HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF OUR MODERN CONFLICTS?

The short answer is, nothing whatsoever.

The basic mistakes of policy and attitude that helped blunder the US into two world wars, and contributed to the conditions causing those wars, were fully paid off by September, 1945.

If your position is that Congress and Roosevelt laid the foundation for the conflicts with or caused by the Soviet Union after WWII, you are equally mis-informed.

The United States DID attempt with arms and support to overthrow the Bolshevik Revolution after WWI. Both the US and the British failed in that attempt. During the 1920's and the 1930's, although international socialism under the Communist International attempted to expand, and to establish subversive groups and capabilities in many countries, frankly it was a paper tiger. The USSR was wracked with the problems, prices and perditions of "reform." The country was re-making itself after almost 1500 years of an entirely different sysem of government, cultural, and economic organization. Under Stalin, particularly, the USSR was very weak. She lost more than 30 million people in his ruthless re-engineering of the country and its satellites. There was no "there," there - to mis-apply a literary slam about the City of Oakland.

To the extent that Stalin could steal any knowledge to use at home, gain any advantage militarily or diplomatically from spying, and undermine other governments, that was the entire nature of the "communist threat." And while it did work, a little - especially in acquisition of atomic secrets from the US - espionage was not ultimately anywhere near a powerful enough weapon to truly threaten the US or many other nations.

The United States created a monster under the bed named "communism" and then proceeded to shoot up everything in sight trying to get at it. The French made a terrible mistake, compounded by US treachery, in Vietnam in 1946. The US agreed to support French attempts to re-claim its Indochinese colonial empire and sold out Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh. This after Ho had been promised, by US operatives in 1944, that after the war those who resisted the Japanese would have US backing.

Ultimately that act of cold calculation to dump the nationalists led to the Vietnam War - despite the fact that the US had seen the French torn down by defeat attempting to produce a similar result. France learned its lesson at Dien Ben Phu in 1954 - the US ignored it.

The Afghan Wars do indeed result from some very stupid decisions made in Moscow - because Moscow destabilizd the nation of Afghanistan and left it to the Muslim revolutionaries. the US had several chances to change that and chose not to act until too late. Now the US had made the same mistakes in Iraq. the boogeyman of communism led the US astray many different times and the cumulative effects are haunting us - and bleeding us now.

But the Congress of the inter-war era, and Roosevelt, are not shades in that closet. Your position is incorrect.