Roosevelt's Policies Toward Japan example essay topic

... e Supreme Court declared the agency unconstitutional in May 1935, the NRA had failed in its aims of sponsoring government-business cooperation and promoting recovery. The was a little more successful. Agricultural income increased by 50% in Roosevelt's first term. Some of this increase, however, was attributable to terrible droughts. These, ruining thousands of farmers in the Great Plains, caused cuts in supply and contributed to higher prices for crops produced elsewhere. acreage quotas also led some landlords to evict tenants from their lands. Moreover, as the improved farm prices, it forced consumers, millions of whom lacked adequate food and decent clothing, to pay more for the necessities of life.

Roosevelt, it seemed, was fighting scarcity with more scarcity. These early measures displayed Roosevelt's strengths and weaknesses as an economic thinker. On the one hand, he showed that he was flexible, that he would act, and that he would use all his executive powers to secure congressional cooperation. Frequent press conferences, speeches, and fireside chats -- and the extraordinary charisma that he displayed on all occasions -- instilled a measure of confidence in the people and halted the terrifying slide of 1932 and 1933.

These were important achievements that brought him and his party the gratitude of millions of Americans. FDR also refrained from large-scale deficit spending or from tax policies that would have redistributed income. Purchasing power, essential to rapid recovery, therefore failed to increase substantially. Roosevelt, a practical political leader and a moderate in economics, helped preserve capitalism without significantly correcting its abuses or ending the Depression.

In 1935, Roosevelt turned slightly to the left. He sponsored bills aimed at abolishing public-utility holding companies, at raising taxes on the wealthy, and at shifting control of monetary policy from Wall Street bankers to Washington. When Congress balked, Roosevelt compromised. The bills revealed Roosevelt's loss of faith in government-business cooperation.

They helped undercut demagogues like Sen. Huey Long (D-La. ), who was agitating for tougher laws against the rich. But they did not signify a commitment to radical, anti business policies. While these struggles were taking place, Roosevelt worked successfully for three significant acts passed in 1935. One, a relief appropriation, led to creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA disbursed some $11 billion in work relief to as many as 3.2 million Americans a month between 1935 and 1942. The second measure, the Wagner Act, set up the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which effectively guaranteed labor the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management.

In part because of the Wagner Act, in part because of overdue militance by spokesmen for industrial unionism, the labor movement swelled in the 1930's and 1940's. The third reform was social security. The law provided for federal payment of old-age pensions and for federal-state cooperation in support of unemployment compensation and relief of the needy blind, of the disabled, and of dependent children. The act, though faulty in many ways, became the foundation of a partial welfare state with which later administrations dared not tamper.

Controversy disrupted the president's second term. His troubles began in February 1937, when he called for a 'court reform' plan that would have permitted him to add up to six judges to the probusiness U.S. Supreme Court. The court's conservative majority had angered FDR by declaring some New Deal legislation, including the NRA and, unconstitutional. Congress, reflecting widespread reverence for the court, refused to do his bidding.

At the time, militant workers staged 'sit-down's trikes in factories. Though Roosevelt opposed the sit-downs, conservatives were quick to blame him for the growing activism of organized labor. In the fall of 1937 a sharp recession, caused in large part by cuts in federal spending earlier in the year, staggered the country. Taken aback, Roosevelt waited until the spring of 1938 before calling for increased federal spending to recharge purchasing power. His procrastination revealed again his reluctance to resort to deficit spending. These developments in 1937 and 1938 severely damaged his standing in Congress, which had grown restive under his strong leadership as early as 1935.

In FDR's second term, therefore, the lawmakers proved cooperative only long enough to approve measures calling for public housing, fair labor standards, and aid to tenant farmers. None of these acts, however, was generously funded or far-reaching. Meanwhile, Congress cut back presidential requests for relief spending and public works. After Republican gains in the 1938 elections, a predominantly rural conservative coalition in Congress proved still more hostile. Henceforth it rejected most of the urban and welfare measures of Roosevelt's administrations. Cordell Hull of Tennessee served as secretary of state from 1933 to 1944, but Roosevelt's desire to engage in personal diplomacy left Hull in a reduced role.

In 1933 the president's 'bombshell message' to the London Economic Conference, saying that the United States would not participate in international currency stabilization, ended any immediate hope of achieving that objective. In the same year he extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR, still a relative outcast in world diplomacy. Roosevelt and Hull worked smoothly in behalf of reciprocal trade agreements and in making the United States the 'good neighbor' of the Latin American. By the mid-1930's dictatorial regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy were casting their shadows across the blank pages of the future.

In 1936, in his speech accepting renomination as president, Roosevelt had said, 'This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. ' By 1938, Roosevelt was spending increasing amounts of time on international affairs. Until then he had acquiesced in congressional 'neutrality' acts designed to keep the United States out of another world war. Roosevelt did not share the isolationist sentiments that lay behind such legislation. But he hoped very much to avoid war, and he dared not risk his domestic program by challenging Congress over foreign policy. For these reasons he was slow to warn the people about the dangers of German fascism.

Germany's aggressiveness in 1939 forced Roosevelt to take a tougher stance. Early in the year he tried unsuccessfully to secure revision of a neutrality act calling for an embargo on armaments to all belligerents, whether attacked or attacker. When Hitler overran Poland in September and triggered the formal beginning of World War II, Roosevelt tried again for repeal of the embargo, and succeeded. In 1940 he negotiated an un neutral deal with Britain whereby the British leased their bases in the Western Hemisphere to the United States in return for 50 over aged American destroyers.

Roosevelt also secured vastly increased defense expenditures, which brought about domestic economic recovery at last. But he still hoped to keep out of the war and to appease the anti-interventionists in Congress. Thus he remained cautious. To protect the supplies against German submarines, U.S. destroyers began escorting convoys of Allied ships part way across the Atlantic. In the process the destroyers helped pinpoint the location of submarines, which Allied warships duly attacked. Roosevelt did not tell the people about America's un neutral actions on the high seas.

When a German submarine fired a torpedo at the American destroyer Greer in September 1941, he feigned surprise and outrage and ordered U.S. warships to shoot on sight at hostile German ships. By December the United States and Germany were engaged in an undeclared war on the Atlantic. Most historians agree that Hitler was a menace to Western civilization, that American intervention was necessary to stop him, and that domestic isolationism hampered the president's freedom of response. But they regret that Roosevelt, in seeking his ends, chose to deceive the people and to abuse his powers. Historians also debate Roosevelt's policies toward Japan, whose leaders were bent on expansion in the 1930's.

Hoping to contain this expansion, the president gradually tightened an embargo of vital goods to Japan. He also demanded that Japan halt its aggressive activities in China and Indochina. Instead of backing down, the militarists who controlled Japan decided to fight, by attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, and by assaulting the East Indies. These moves left no doubt about Japan's aggressive intentions. In asking for a declaration of war, the president called December 7 'a date which will live in infamy. ' He brought a united America into World War II.

By December 11, the United States was at war with Germany and Italy. Some historians argue, however, that Roosevelt should not have been so unbudging regarding the integrity of China and Indochina, which lay outside America's national interest -- or power to protect. If Roosevelt had adopted a more flexible policy toward Japan, he might have postponed a conflict in Asia at a time when war with Hitler was about to erupt. Roosevelt's military policies also provoked controversy. In 1941 critics blamed him for leaving Pearl Harbor unprepared. Extremists even claimed that he invited the Japanese attack in order to have a pretext for war.

In 1942 liberals complained when he cooperated with Jean Darlan, the Vichy French admiral who until then had been collaborating with the Axis, in planning the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1943, FDR's opponents grumbled that his policy of unconditional surrender for the enemy discouraged the anti-Hitler resistance within Germany. Other critics complained that he relied too heavily on strategic bombing. His own generals were angry because he postponed the 'second front' against Hitler until June 1944. Such delay, critics added later, infuriated the Soviet Union, which had to carry the brunt of the fighting against Hitler between 1941 and 1944, and sowed the seeds of the Cold War. Some of these criticisms were partly justified.

Poor communications between Washington and Hawaii helped the Japanese achieve surprise at Pearl Harbor. Dealing with Darlan was probably not necessary to ensure success in North Africa. Strategic bombing killed millions of civilians and was not nearly so effective as its advocates claimed. The delay in the second front greatly intensified Soviet suspicions of the West. But it is easy to second-guess and to exaggerate Roosevelt's failings as a military leader. The president neither invited nor welcomed the Pearl Harbor attack, which was a brilliantly planned maneuver by Japan.

He worked with Darlan in the hope of preventing unnecessary loss of Allied lives. Unconditional surrender, given American anger at the enemy, was a politically logical policy. It also proved reassuring to the Soviet Union, which had feared a separate German-American peace. Establishing the second front required control of the air and large supplies of landing craft, and these were not assured until 1944.

In many of these decisions Roosevelt acted in characteristically pragmatic fashion -- to win the war as effectively as possible and to keep the wartime alliance together. In these aims he was successful. By 1945, Roosevelt was 63 years old. The events early in that year added to the strains on his heart, and on April 12, 1945, he died suddenly at Warm Springs, Ga. Three days later he was buried at Hyde Park. Despite his limitations, he had been a strong, decent, and highly popular president for more than 12 years.