War and Myth V

When we talk about the 1920s, the Depression and World War II, we resolutely live in a land of almost total myth. We were on the make—our statesmen as much as any businessman. We had been quarreling over who would control the British Empire since the 1750s when Franklin wrote, “in one century, the center of English speaking power will be North America”.
Britain tried desperately to prevent this—at places like Bunker Hill and Saratoga. She lost. She tried to hang onto the Great Lakes after the Revolution; she lost again. She tried to keep us out of Oregon and Washington—she gave up and ceded them.
She tried to keep us out of Texas and Cuba; we told her we would take either or both whenever we were able (Monroe Doctrine). We did. She tied to limit our control over a Central American transcontinental canal. She failed. She finally conceded the Caribbean to us in 1903.
When France and Russia made an alliance—and Germany, Italy and Austria allied, all in the 1890s—England realized she could no longer govern the planet from a position of splendid isolation. She turned to allies. She began talking to France; she allied with Japan and, very much, she turned her eyes toward her feistiest commercial rival, the North American colossus.
(When Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US he predicted, “I have created a colossus on the North American continent that will one day bring England to her knees.” In World War II we carried out the prophecy.)
We waited until England (and France) were nearly on their knees (and Russia was destroyed) before coming in and rescuing England in 1917. England was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; we were fabulously rich.
We allowed Britain to go on spending money she did not have, keeping the Muslims quiescent, preventing the slave trade in Africa, and holding the line against our most formidable planetary rival, the new Soviet Union. We stayed home, needed to spend almost nothing for defense, and concentrated on making money.
At Versailles (1919) and after we helped force central Europe into bankruptcy and near starvation. Our markets went up and up and up. We paid no attention while the supposedly democratic (and even Christian) new government of revolutionary China became more and more corrupt, turning even to the Nazis for training and support.
With withering contempt we thwarted every aspiration of the newly prominent Asiatic power, Japan. We forced her to sink a large part of her navy to keep at only 60% of our fleet. We denied her access to funds and raw materials. We forced England to end her treaty with her.
We were a bit like an obliviously drunken man staggering through a room full of delicate china, crystal and bric-a-brac. We refused to acknowledge our own strength—or the responsibility that came with it. We kept up the myth that we were just a little fellow (like the United States of the early 19th Century) and there was nothing we could do or were obligated to do about anyone else.
This lay at the core of American economic, political and military isolationism. We firmly refused to accept that we had become the biggest kid on the block—that whatever we did affected everyone else. We hid behind the British Empire as we always had done—pretending it had not become an empty shell that a single blast would completely blow away.
Finally the whole rest of the planet went into economic heart failure. This brought us down too—although we refused again to acknowledge a correlation. We ignored Hitler. We ignored Stalin. One thing we could not ignore—and we owe FDR for this.
He came out of that small group of East Coast Imperialist who saw clearly we were an Empire—and must act like one. He recognized that our historic interest in controlling China (going back before Jamestown) was at risk because of the new Japanese power.
In 1934, he began a ten year navel building program—a fleet that could and would crush Japan. At long last the American giant was stirring—but still not seeing clearly through the fog of myth. But at least it was stirring a bit.