Lehigh University Lehigh Preserve Theses and Dissertations 2013 Expanded Horizons: Reconsidering American Responses to Adolf Hitler Andrew Wallin Lehigh University Follow this and additional works at:http://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd Part of theHistory Commons Recommended Citation Wallin, Andrew, "Expanded Horizons: Reconsidering American Responses to Adolf Hitler" (2013).Theses and Dissertations.Paper 1660. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please [email protected]. “Expanded Horizons”: Reconsidering American Responses to Adolf Hitler by Andrew Wallin A Thesis Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in The Department of History Lehigh University May, 2013 © 2013 Copyright Andrew Wallin ii Thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in the Department of History. “Expanded Horizons”: Reconsidering American Responses to Adolf Hitler Andrew Wallin Date Approved Roger Simon, Thesis Director Nitzan Lebovic, Co-Director Stephen Cutcliffe, Department Chair iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Part II 9 Part III 17 Part IV 27 Part V 64 Vita 74 iv ABSTRACT This essay seeks to take the broad historiographical issue of teleology and apply it to a specific historical event, namely, the rise of Hitler and the establishment of the Third Reich. The common narrative of this period typically follows a set structure: the Nazis come to power in Germany, begin agitating on the European continent, slowly expand their territory, oppress the Jews of Europe, and finally begin a military contest that precipitates the Second World War. This chronology reinforces the notion that not only was the Second World War an inevitable result of the Nazi policies that preceded it, but also that contemporary observers should have come to the same conclusions. In this study, the argument is advanced that while both the American government and general public were indeed aware of what we would now deem as warning signs of the trouble to come, at the time there was no reason to believe that Hitler’s ascension to the German Chancellorship presented any imminent threat to the world, much less the United States. By exploring contemporary media reports, this essay contextualizes the events of early 1933 and attempts to arrive at contemporaneous, rather than present-day, understandings of the perceived implications of a Nazified Germany. 1 “Expanded Horizons”: Reconsidering American Responses to Adolf Hitler1 Part I. Introduction Surveying the wide and multi-faceted landscape of the twentieth century, one period in particular seems to rise above the rest; a looming mountain, casting shadows and coloring the appearance of the people and events both before and since. Though its peak is located over central Europe, its arms stretch south through Mediterranean Africa, north toward the Arctic circle, with some spurs thrusting out as far as the tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. From 1939 to 1945, the Second World War raged across parts of four continents, leaving a legacy that stretches across both space and time. Not only did it precipitate the destruction and displacement of untold millions, but it has also occupied a place of prominence in collective consciousness ever since. In what is perhaps a natural consequence of this legacy, it has not been uncommon for historians to look at events and individuals that have followed, as well as preceded, this period through the smoky and blood-spattered lens of the war. In particular, the 1930s are more often than not viewed as a series of preludes—mere steps along the path that led systematically and with little divergence to all out warfare. But such a teleological approach – one that assumes a certain unavoidable end result – flirts with the common but problematic issue of historical anachronism. In other words, such methods project knowledge acquired after the fact to a time in the past when 1 For the title of this work, I have borrowed a concept from John Lewis Gaddis. See The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. 2 that information was unavailable. For example, just because it is now generally agreed that appeasement at Munich in 1938 encouraged the German invasion of Poland in 1939 does not mean that Neville Chamberlain should have been excoriated as a “guilty man,” since he could hardly have known that his actions would lead to war.2 As far as he knew, his policies were a blueprint for peace, not an invitation to conflict. In fact, his belief that his diplomacy had secured “peace for our time” offers a perfect illustration that although history is learned backward it is lived forward. The implications of this uniquely historical issue have been the subject of much methodological discourse. According to Karl Löwith (1897-1973), a German-Jewish philosopher, this problem is a constant and perhaps even unavoidable consequence of the historical process: “The historical consciousness cannot but start with itself, though its aim is to know the thought of other times and of other men. . . . We understand—and misunderstand” the past, “but always in the light of contemporary thought, reading the book of history backward from the last to the first page. This inversion of the customary way of historical presentation is actually practiced even by those who proceed from past ages to modern times, without being conscious of their contemporary motivations.”3 More recently, Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has also acknowledged the difficulties encountered by anyone trying to recapture a pure sense of the past. Unlike with other academic disciplines, where lab experiments or computer simulations can recreate specific conditions or circumstances, “we cannot relive, retrieve, or rerun” 2 Chamberlain, along with fourteen other British public figures, was the subject of a pseudonymously published tract in 1940 that placed the blame for the present conflict on those men and the so-called policy of appeasement. See Cato [pseud.], Guilty Men (London: V. Gollancz, 1940). 3 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 2-3. 3 history. The past “is something we can never have.”4 But lest this admission discourage anyone from attempting to explore the past, Gaddis has suggested that perhaps the very thing that prevents us from reliving, retrieving, or rerunning the past actually helps us to better understand it. Those who live through history necessarily have a narrow perspective—one that precludes them from seeing larger patterns as events are occurring, or how one specific action might influence another. An historian, on the other hand, enjoys the benefits of an “expanded horizon,” wherein he or she can connect the complex and seemingly random dots of everyday life into a clear and cogent picture.5 Yet therein lies the problem. It is easy for the modern observer to look backward through time and see in the sequence of events in the 1930s a clear line leading from the Nazi political victories in 1933 to the red tide at Normandy or the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz or Treblinka. But to impose that chronology upon the average American of 1933 is to promote a false temporality and ultimately an incorrect version of events. History assumes the ahistorical air of inevitability, and understandings of the present mar our perceptions of the past—symptoms of what Harvard’s Niall Ferguson has termed “the dubious benefit of hindsight.”6 But the challenge of history is to understand the past on its own terms—admittedly no small feat. The historiography of the pre-war years of the 1930s brings this particular issue into sharp focus. Take the following description from one account of the foreign policy of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Diplomatic historian Robert A. Divine 4 Gaddis, 3. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 80. 4 has portrayed FDR’s neutrality policies of the mid 1930s as naïve—a characterization that itself implies that at the very least, the Roosevelt administration should have been braced for an inevitable German war. He then goes on to provide a more explicitly anachronistic assessment: FDR specifically and Americans in general failed “to comprehend that they were confronted by a revolution which threatened the very existence of the nation.”7 Aside from the somewhat hyperbolic tone, such an assessment is also problematic in that it faults the American government as well as the general population for what can only be considered a failure to predict the future. But what seems obvious in hindsight is rarely as clear in the present. It seems unfair, to say the least, to judge the actions and opinions of Americans in the 1930s based on what happened later in the 1940s. But as Löwith and others have posited, such is often the nature of historical analysis. Characterizations of this type are not limited to only one historian. In fact, the general account of world affairs in the 1930s and 1940s only reinforces this sense of inevitability. One would be hard pressed to find a secondary account of those decades that veers too far from the following basic narrative: the Nazis come to power in Germany, begin agitating on the European continent, slowly expand their territory, oppress the Jews of Europe, and finally begin a military contest that precipitates the Second World War. The following passage from the University of Maryland’s Wayne S. Cole might therefore seem unremarkable: 7 Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), 48. 5