Embers of War (10 page)

One can imagine the assembled journalists nodding vigorously in affirmation. A general distaste for colonialism, after all, came with being an American: Other U.S. leaders could have spoken in identical language about all nationalities having the right to their own nationhood. But it is also true that Roosevelt’s views on colonialism had undergone a dramatic change, and that he now was more insistent on the matter than many in official Washington who were never as willing to sacrifice European interests on anticolonial grounds. In his early years of public life, he had been a proponent of imperial control. Echoing very much the French
mission civilisatrice
, FDR thought it justifiable and necessary for the United States to impose the blessings of her civilization on the more backward and less fortunate peoples, by force if necessary. Nor was his motive solely humanitarian: Like his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, he believed geopolitical imperatives demanded that the United States control whatever land or water was necessary to ensure the protection of the Panama Canal and the water approaches to the United States. Later, as assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, Roosevelt held a paternalistic attitude toward existing American colonies, and at least in the Caribbean he would have supported further territorial acquisitions.
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At the same time, and somewhat incongruously, Roosevelt came out early in favor of the Wilsonian program of collective security. As the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920, he campaigned vigorously for American entry into the League of Nations, and in the years thereafter he embraced the Wilsonian view that active U.S. involvement in international affairs was essential to securing the nation’s peace and prosperity.
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What is more, like Wilson he emerged from World War I convinced that the scramble for empire not only had set the European powers against one another and created the conditions that led to war, but also worked against securing a negotiated settlement during the fighting. French and British war aims regarding territory and influence, particularly in the Middle East, had made effective mediation impossible.

In the mid-1920s, Roosevelt began urging a more cooperative U.S. policy in Latin America, and he strongly opposed intervention when instability threatened in Nicaragua. He had not lost his missionary zeal to improve the lot of less fortunate peoples, but the methods U.S. officials used increasingly troubled him. American imperialism in Latin America had achieved important humanitarian achievements, he acknowledged, but at what cost? Might there be a better way? Gingerly at first, and then more strongly, Roosevelt began in the late 1920s to urge that Latin American countries be treated as independent sovereign states and that territories like the Philippines be pushed more rapidly toward full independence.
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In 1933, shortly after entering the White House, Roosevelt announced that the United States would thenceforth act as a “good neighbor” in her dealings with Latin America. The phrase promised more than it delivered—his administration continued to support and bolster dictators in the region, believing that they would promote stability and preserve U.S. economic interests—but the Good Neighbor Policy nevertheless marked a real departure in hemispheric relations, and it stood in sharp contrast to the colonialism of the Europeans. In his first term FDR also approved the granting of “commonwealth” status to the Philippines, with the expectation that full independence would come in 1946. These policies, journalist Walter Lippmann enthused during World War II, showed that great powers did not need to impose formal colonial controls on weaker countries within their “orbit.” As such, Roosevelt’s approach was “the only true substitute for empire.”
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To be sure, neither Lippmann nor Roosevelt advocated immediate self-rule for all parts of the colonial world. Neither doubted that immediate independence for many colonies would cause widespread disorder and conflict. Roosevelt fully shared prevailing views regarding white and Western superiority, and his anticolonialism came with all the burdens of paternalism and ignorance. The important point here, however, is that even before the start of World War II, he had reached the conclusion that, for good or ill, complete independence was foreordained for all or almost all the European colonies.
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III

BY THE START OF 1941, ROOSEVELT, PRESSURED BY JAPANESE ANTICOLONIAL
propaganda and smug about having set the proper example by promising independence for the Philippines, began pressing Britain on the issue. At his meeting with Churchill in August at Placentia Bay, he insisted that achieving a stable peace required a commitment to develop “backward countries.” “I can’t believe,” FDR reportedly said, “that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.” Churchill, so devoted to the British Empire, objected to this line of reasoning, but in muted tones, desperate as he was to gain U.S. assistance in the war in Europe. The meeting’s most publicized accomplishment, a statement of broad war aims that became known as the Atlantic Charter, included a clause respecting “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Going further than Wilson in 1919, Roosevelt would make clear he considered this declaration to have universal applications, applying not only to the German and Japanese empires but to all colonial holdings everywhere. Churchill, however, assured Parliament that it referred only to the sovereignty of previously self-governing European peoples conquered by Germany—“quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.” To Leo Amery, Britain’s secretary of state for India, Churchill said the pledge could be invoked “only … in such cases when the transference of territory or sovereignty arose.”
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FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND WINSTON CHURCHILL CONFER DURING THEIR MEETING AT PLACENTIA BAY NEAR NEWFOUNDLAND IN AUGUST 1941.
(photo credit 2.1)

But the prime minister had allowed FDR to outmaneuver him. A “Rooseveltian moment” was in the making: Nationalist leaders in colonies all over the globe, not least Indochina, interpreted the charter as an unambiguous commitment to independence, as the president intended. For many of them, Roosevelt became a hero. Moreover, the wide attention given to the Atlantic Charter in the American press meant that public opinion was now focused on the issue, and it would remain near the forefront of popular attitudes for the rest of the war. Editorial writers and columnists generally applauded the self-determination clause, while among nationalist leaders overseas the United States now occupied the moral high ground.
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In the short term, though, Churchill got his way. When the two leaders met again a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, this time in Washington, Roosevelt suggested that Britain commit herself publicly to granting independence to India. Churchill, taken aback, rejected the idea strongly—“so strongly and at such length,” he later wrote, “that [Roosevelt] never raised it verbally again.”
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Churchill said he would rather resign than “desert” the Indian people. Roosevelt got the message. He continued in 1942 to tell aides that London should promote self-government for India, and he had intermediaries make the same case to London, but he more or less ceased pressing the matter personally with Churchill. With Japan making rapid imperial and military gains in Asia—Hong Kong fell in December 1941, Singapore in February 1942, Rangoon in March, the Philippines in May—and with German forces in control of huge swaths of Europe, FDR worried that continued pressure on the intransigent British leader could endanger Allied unity at a critical time. South Asia, relatively unimportant in geopolitical terms, would have to wait.

Here as elsewhere during the war, Roosevelt showed a propensity to let short-term, pragmatic concerns drive his actions in foreign affairs. His fundamental anticolonialism had not dissipated, however—he remained steadfast in the belief that Indian independence was inevitable—and in 1943 he shifted his attack to a colonial power that did not have Britain’s geopolitical importance, namely France. Indochina, in particular, became for him a near obsession. Early in the war, U.S. officials had on several occasions expressly endorsed the return of Indochina to French control at the end of hostilities, but these statements lacked conviction. Roosevelt, still contemptuous of the French performance in the Battle of France three years earlier, grew more and more convinced that Indochina had been the springboard for the Japanese attack on the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, and he blamed Vichy authorities for repeatedly giving in to Tokyo’s demands in 1940–41 without first consulting Washington. This was a dubious reading of history—American officials, as we have seen, had been consulted at most points and had tacitly encouraged first Catroux’s and then Decoux’s concessions—but the president clung to it nonetheless. He also held up Indochina as an example of colonial mismanagement, a place where exploitation and indifference had left the indigenous people in a terrible condition—an argument that tracked closely with that proffered by Ho Chi Minh in various writings, notably
Le procès de la colonisation française
(translated into English as
French Colonialism on Trial
).

French officials, Vichyite as well as Gaullist, despaired at this presidential message, but it didn’t surprise them. “The American people, born of an anticolonial revolution, are hostile to colonies by tradition,” read one typical Foreign Ministry report, noting that the hostility cut across party lines and class lines. As such, it was that rare issue “on which American opinion is not divided.” Moreover, the study continued, Roosevelt’s policy played into the American public’s “penchant for crusades”—his Wilsonian rhetoric allowed Americans to endow the sacrifices on the battlefield with ennobling purpose, in this case bringing self-determination to oppressed peoples. Then too, less lofty principles were involved. The report charged that American businessmen favored decolonization mostly in order to gain access to raw materials and markets, so as to maximize profits and to maintain production after the war. The basic aim seemed to be “an open door for merchandise as well as capital,” the authors claimed, and there could be no doubt who would emerge on top: “The open door would favor powerful Americans over European competitors.”
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Not coincidentally, Roosevelt’s hostility to a French return to Indochina increased as Charles de Gaulle’s position strengthened. His animus against the general was deep and unrelenting—bizarrely so, in hindsight. When the Allies attacked North Africa in November 1942, they sought Free French involvement, in order to convince French commanders in Algeria and Morocco not to resist the invasion. But Roosevelt ruled out including de Gaulle in the operation. Instead, he and Churchill placed their bets on Henri Giraud, a stiff and formal French general whose most compelling calling card appeared to be that he had escaped from German prison camps in both world wars. Giraud, it soon became clear, had movie-star looks but not much else; he had neither the brainpower nor the charisma to be effective. The Allied landings resulted in Germany’s occupation of Vichy-governed territory in southern France and to Vichy’s diplomatic break with the United States. Even after Washington’s Vichy strategy had lost its usefulness, and Giraud’s attempt to wrest control of the Free French had collapsed, the administration remained stubbornly skeptical of de Gaulle and his movement. FDR and several of his top aides questioned the extent of de Gaulle’s support among the French people and ruled out making commitments that might be “harmful” to postliberation France.
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But if Indochina and potentially other colonies should not be returned to the colonial powers after the war, what should happen to them? Roosevelt proposed a trusteeship formula by which the colonies would be raised to independence through several stages. Those not ready for independence—which in FDR’s view included all of France’s possessions—would be placed under a nonexploitive international trusteeship formed by the United Nations. In laying out this plan to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March 1943, the president singled out Indochina as an area that should be controlled by this new system. Eden, destined to play a leading role in Britain’s Indochina policy for the next dozen years, questioned whether FDR was being too harsh on the French, but the president waved the query away. France, he said, should be prepared to place part of her overseas territory under the authority of the United Nations. But what about the American pledges to restore to France her possessions? Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles interjected. Those pledges applied only to North Africa, Roosevelt replied.
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