to “promote private foreign investment” all over the world. Herbert Feis, a State Department analyst, wrote: “The United States could not passively sanction the employment of capital raised within the United States for ends contrary to our major policies or interests. … Capital is a form of power.”
Kolko’s judgment of the Roosevelt-Hull doctrine of concern for private profit seems caustic. Yet it is supported by events:
Nothing in this doctrine suggested a serious preoccupation with the problems of post-war reconstruction outside the context of a renovated world capitalist economy, and Washington’s planning focused on its trade goals rather than emergency aid to a starving Europe that was fighting the war with far greater sacrifices than those of American businessmen, farmers, and exporters anxious over their future profit margins.
One fact supporting Kolko’s view is that the United States tried to keep down the reparations taken by the Allies from the Axis powers in order that the vanquished would be more dependent on American aid and trade. In November, 1944, the State Department told the Kremlin that “reparations payments should be scheduled in such a way as to interfere as little as possible with normal trading relations.”
In the public mind, the foreign-aid program that started during and continued after the war was a humanitarian venture. In the minds of the public’s leaders, there were other objectives: the welfare of the business community and the political influence of the American government in postwar Europe. As Averell Harriman, then United States ambassador to Russia, said in early 1944: “Economic assistance is one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to influence European political events in the direction we desire and to avoid the development of a sphere of influence of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.”
Similar concern with power lay behind the founding of the United Nations—in spite of the sentimental hopes of those who believed, as its charter declared, that it might save the world “from the scourge of war.” At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt had proposed a postwar organization at the top of which would be the “Four Policemen”—England, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. The policemen were to enforce law and order in the world, by military intervention if necessary. Ultimately, something approximating this plan was adopted, with France as the fifth policeman dominating the Security Council, and with each able to veto any important action by the council. It was the United States that first proposed the veto power; the Soviet Union, watching the UN take shape as an American-dominated group, later embraced the idea eagerly. Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, and former isolationist, who had much to do with creating Republican-Democratic unity on major issues of foreign policy, wrote about the United Nations Charter in his diary:
The striking thing about it is that it is so conservative from a nationalist standpoint. It is based virtually on a four-power alliance. … This is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world State. … I am deeply impressed (and surprised) to find Hull so carefully guarding our American veto in his scheme of things.
In other ways, too, the UN organization reflected the nationalist interests of the big powers rather than the dreams of freedom that many thought the war would make real. The trusteeship system—by which former Japanese and German territories were to be supervised by the big policemen—was a way of delaying independence for those territories. As for the colonies held by the West European Allies, they were to move only gradually, if at all, toward independence. Hull wrote in his Memoirs: “At no time did we press Britain, France, or the Netherlands for an immediate grant of self-government to their colonies. Our thought was that it would come after an adequate period of years, short or long. …” From the American point of view, as Kolko points out, the “concept of trusteeship blended well with United States desires to acquire bases in the Japanese Pacific islands and elsewhere. …”
World War II fell upon a world dominated by a few imperial nations. In liberating people from the special brutality of the Axis, they were concerned with their own influence over these people, and with the perpetuation of the traditional prerogatives of empire. So it was with the English in India, Burma, Malaysia, Egypt, Palestine, East Africa; the French in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa; the United States in the Philippines and Latin America; the Dutch in Indonesia; the Belgians in the Congo. As for the Russians, they created a new “socialist” empire of their own, embracing Finland, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. The Western powers and the Soviet Union cooperated in maintaining hegemony in their respective spheres.
Furthermore, the so-called advanced liberal nations not only extended their control over other peoples, they maintained economic systems at home that labor strife and years of economic crisis after 1929 had proved both inefficient and unjust. They carried “democracy” only to the point of elections and parliamentary governments, but without the real day-to-day participation of popular bodies in decisions. If the war were to justify the deaths of tens of millions of people, it would seem reasonable to expect that its end would bring the liberation of subordinate peoples everywhere as well as critical changes in the societies of those nations that had waged the war. Instead, the victors continued to be much more concerned with maintaining the status quo.
For the United States, this meant that its national political leaders, during the war, never evinced any great interest in moving away from prewar conceptions. American society as a whole stuck to its traditional values. What were some of these traditional values? The idea of Manifest Destiny—the rightness of America’s growing power over other countries; white superiority in a population that was 10 per cent black; the inviolability of capitalism, the profit system, and corporate power and privilege.
Racism, ostensibly, was one reason the war was fought—to wipe out the race doctrines of Hitler. But in the United States, the idea of white supremacy in the North and South proved greater than the libertarian enthusiasm generated by the war. The most striking and bitter irony was that black soldiers fought in the war in segregated units, in separate and unequal situations. When soldiers were jammed onto the Queen Mary for transport to the European combat zone, the black soldiers not only ate and slept apart, they were consigned to the lower depths of the ship, near the engine room. On the home front, similar ironies occurred. Donations of blood to the armed forces were separated by race in the Red Cross blood banks, with government approval. (A black physician, Charles Drew, had been largely responsible for the blood-bank system; he died years later for want of blood after being denied admittance to a “white” hospital.) Blacks seeking employment in defense industries encountered the hostility of trade unions, the prejudice of fellow workers accustomed to seeing blacks as domestics and laborers, the discriminatory policies of business firms, and the complacency of the government. One West Coast aviation factory spokesman said: “The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities. … Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them.” Roosevelt did not issue Executive Order 8802 setting up a Fair Employment Practices Committee until black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in 1941 threatened a mass demonstration in Washington. The FEPC, as it turned out, was not powerful enough to enforce its own orders.
The war created the conditions—blacks moving into northern cities and into new jobs—for exposing the magnitude of racism in America; it did not stimulate eagerness in either the government or the public for dealing with the causes of racism. Poverty and over-crowdedness in the cities, bigotry in the minds of the people continued to exist. Two race riots occurred during the war. One was in Detroit in June, 1943, where white-black conflicts led to looting and property damage by blacks, police action, and the deaths of twenty-five blacks and nine whites. In Harlem that same year, blacks rioted when a white policeman tried to arrest a black woman. During the looting and burning that followed, six people died and five hundred were injured.
The war against fascism not only did little to curtail the power of customary racism in the United States, it did little to change the traditionally subordinate status of American women. One of the distinguishing
