Eighty Years Ago This Week

The British White Paper on defence spending provided a pretext for the US Navy to weigh into the debate on US rearmament. Affecting to treat mention of building up the Royal Navy as being aimed at the US, Admiral Leahy publicly asked whether the moment had arrived to match the British building programme. It was still an episode of the cart of armaments was put before the horse of diplomacy. Leahy’s remark only made sense if an Anglo-Japanese alliance against the US in the Pacific was a meaningful risk. It sounded pleasant, though, to US traditionalists. An Anglo-US agreement aimed at Japan was equally improbable; no such thing was even talked about, but in the calculus of diplomacy Japan’s aggressive expansionism threatened the English speaking powers with a force and immediacy, which entirely eclipsed their historic mutual rivalry. The President wisely ducked this aspect of naval rearmament, and instead focused on steering it through the minefields of his own social legislation. T...

The US had entered a phase of industrial agitation, almost on a par with the near war conditions twenty years before, when the overtly socialist IWW conducted an almost revolutionary campaign. In 1937 the motivation was far more obviously economic, but the personal ambition of John L. Lewis to establish his Congress of Industrial Organizations into the dominant force in national industrial negotiations also played a major part. Together with its affiliated union the UAW, the CIO was maintaining the pressure against General Motors. The flashpoint was the town of Anderson in Indiana, home to two GM plants, employing more than a quarter of the town’s population. Violence between unionised and non-unionised labour reached a scale, where martial law was declared by the State Governor and 1,000 National Guardsmen were deployed. Lewis publicly stated that next on his list were the Chrysler and, so far resolutely anti-union, Ford Corporation. The new British White Paper on defence spe...

Newly re-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to put some flesh on the bones of his scheme to expand executive power at the expense of the judiciary in the form of a proposal to change the membership of the Supreme Court, which had acted as a major brake on his early reforms. Once a Justice had reached the age of 70, this would create space for anew Justice to be nominated. In theory this could have expanded the Supreme Court to 15 Justices. In practice it was intended to dilute the opposition to Roosevelt of the mainly elderly Justices then sitting. Scenting a major Constitutional conflict in the offing, Wall Street fell sharply. The British government published a White Paper on a scheme to promote a national scheme of physical education. It was the brainchild of Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was almost certain to succeed Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in a few months. It was but a pale shadow of Nazi Germany’s Kraft durch Freude movem...

Soviet justice showed its usual promptitude and resolution in passing death sentences – rapidly carried out – on 13 of the 17 defendants in the latest trial of Trotskyists and wreckers and foreign agents in Moscow. Karl Radek was one of the defendants spared, in part because his testimony established the existence of a sinister “third Organization” training Trotskyite cadres to perform its pernicious work. He denounced   "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a  Fronde   against the Party, gave us this help" . In Nazi Germany the bar for culpable Jewishness was set at one quarter, Trotskyism was clearly one degree more insidious. Even the US ambassador believed that the trial had been conducted fairly. Against the background of the sad attempts by France and Britain, to restrain the flood of German and Italian “volunte...

The League of Nations was entering its death throes as was painfully obvious from the latest deliberations over the Free State of Danzig, an island of ethnic German territory surrounded by Poland, theoretically controlled by the League. The League’s Committee of Three which had been given oversight of the issue – Britain, France and Sweden – all but admitted that the situation was desperate, when faced with the question of settling grievances between the Poles and the Danzigers. It was simply accepted that the process would be a bilateral one, although the elephant in the room – Nazi Germany – was ignored. Danzig’s autonomy was largely fictional and, in practice, Berlin would make the decisions. Two and a half years later, Berlin took the decisions that caused the Second World War. The British government was once again taken to task In Parliament for the slow pace of air rearmament with Sir Thomas Inskip, displaying once again his weaknesses as Minister for Coordination of Def...

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for his second term as US President, having been elected with a landslide victory. He hoped to translate this win into a concrete increase in his own powers within the US constitution. He hoped to weaken the power of Congress and the Supreme Court to dilute his instinct to in favour of radical policies at home and more active diplomacy abroad. It would be a long struggle. The weakness of his underlying position can be read in the argument his side advanced for any change. To claim that the floods then devastating Ohio proved that the executive needed stronger powers, was hardly convincing. The British War Minister, Duff Cooper, upped the debate on rebuilding military strength by a piece of pre-emptive concession. He publicly ruled out introducing conscription in time of peace. This was not a great sacrifice given the overwhelming opposition that any such measure would face. Even in 1939 when Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia made war practically ...

The pattern of foreign involvement in the Spanish Civil War continued to repeat itself as steps were taken to try to control the participation of foreigners in the war. Britain and France were keen to curb the arrival of “volunteers” from the Fascist powers, but wholly lacking in any leverage to achieve this or resolution in trying to do so. Germany fobbed them off with a supportively phrased, but quite empty reply. In a pitiable attempt to set a good example, Britain and France paraded their own efforts. Britain promised to apply the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 vigorously to Spain and France more vaguely promised legislation. In Italy respect for Fascist forms was reinforced when Achille Starace, Secretary of the Fascist Party and the nearest thing Mussolini had to an ideologue, renewed his call that the official ban on traditional hand-shakes should be respected. Such a conservative, bourgeois gesture betrayed “scanty fascist spirit”. The official Fascist salute approximat...