Pan-Americanism and the approach of war

Developments in Asia and Europe were another reason for the American reluc­tance to intervene directly in the Western Hemisphere in the 1930s. The Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931 and the full-blown Sino-Japanese War that com­menced in 1937 prompted increasing criticism of Japanese imperialism and interventionism throughout the 1930s.

As part of the ‘Good Neighbor’ Policy the Roosevelt administration thus sought to strengthen the pan-American movement. As early as 1889, an American initiative had led to the creation of the International Bureau of American Republics in Washington, which in 1910 was renamed the Pan-American Union, with its headquarters located near the State Department. While ostensibly designed to promote inter-American unity, in reality the Pan-American Union, chaired as it was by the American secretary of state, was a vehicle for promoting hemispheric trade. At the same time, however, Latin American representatives used its regular meetings as a forum within which to voice their discontent at the assumed right of the United States to intervene in their internal affairs. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, successive American administrations — including the Roosevelt administration at the 1933 Pan-American Conference in Uruguay — held on to this ‘right’ with a thinly veiled addendum to the various anti­interventionist resolutions.

As Germans, Italians and even the Japanese increased their economic involve­ment in Latin America during the late 1930s, pan-Americanism became the latest vehicle for upholding the Monroe Doctrine. With Nazi activists working throughout Latin America (especially in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay), the US government once again used the threat of an alien (non-democratic) political system to justify the need for hemispheric co-operation. In 1938 the Declaration of Lima endorsed a co-operative spirit of ‘the American republics’ to resist the influx of external influences. In 1939 the Declaration of Panama went even further by effectively creating a security perimeter around the Western Hemisphere and establishing an economic co-ordination committee. Although the conferees proclaimed their neutrality, the security perimeter was clearly designed to keep the Axis powers out of the American backyard, while the economic committee made it easier for the United States to block Latin American countries from trading with the future enemies.

Between the start of the Second World War in Europe in September 1939 and the American entry into the war in December 1941, the Roosevelt administration gradually inched closer to a partnership with Germany’s main adversaries, Britain and (from June 1941) the Soviet Union. In 1940 the United States, in the so- called ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal, began supplying Britain with military equip­ment. Because of strong isolationist sentiment, however, Roosevelt had to be careful about pushing the United States towards war lest he risk losing the 1940 presidential election. Thus, during the campaign, Roosevelt proclaimed that he would never send Americans to fight in a foreign war. However, after his re-election was secured, Roosevelt called upon the United States to become the ‘arsenal of democracy’, and in 1941 American aid shipments to Britain increased under the so-called Lend-Lease scheme; once Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, this country — which the United States had only recognized less than a decade earlier — was added as another major recipient of American material support.

Axis

A term coined originally by Mussolini in November 1936 to describe the relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The German-Italian Axis was reinforced by the so-called Pact of Steel signed by Rome and Berlin in May 1939. More broadly speaking, the term is often used (as in Chapter 8 of this book) to refer to the relationship between Germany, Italy and Japan. These three Powers were formally linked by the German-Japanese Anti­Comintern Pact of November 1936, which Italy signed one year later, and the Tripartite Pact of September 1940.

Lend-Lease

With the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, the US Congress empowered the president to lease or lend arms and supplies to any foreign government whose defence the administration considered essential to US national security. The programme, originally intended to rescue Britain, was eventually extended to more than thirty­eight states fighting the Tripartite Pact Powers.