Free Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands Page A

kept his internationalist views to himself. He spent his first term as president dodging foreign affairs, pointedly refusing to accept responsibility for any multilateral approach to ending the depression.
    But isolation had serious drawbacks.Japan had exited the world war and the postwar peace conference miffed at not having been accorded the respect received by the other members of the victorious alliance; the Japanese government spent the next two decades devising means for compelling respect. It severedManchuria fromChina in 1931 and applied increasing pressure against the rest of the country. In 1937 it launched an open war against China, seizing the capital city of Nanking in especially brutal fashion.
    The affairs of Europe were even more alarming. Italian democracy succumbed to the blows ofBenito Mussolini and his fascist thugs; in 1935 the thuggery spread to Africa when Italian forces invadedAbyssinia, as Ethiopia was then called. Spain’s civil war produced horrific bloodshed and an evil premonition that if fascism triumphed there, as it seemed likely to do, it might conquer much of Europe.
    The greatest danger developed inGermany.Adolf Hitler took office as chancellor just weeks before Franklin Roosevelt became America’s president. Hitler’s hatred of Jews was no secret, but only gradually did the world discover how fully that hatred informed the policy of Germany. The National Socialist, or Nazi, Party and its allies in the German parliament imposed increasing debilities on the Jews living in what Hitler called the Third Reich (the empires of Charlemagne and then the Wilhelms having been the first two). Hitler denounced the postwar settlement and rebuilt the German military; he demanded territorial adjustments to restore Germany’s prewar borders.
    The reaction in America to all this took two forms. On one side wereinternationalists who believed Hitler and the other fascists represented an existential threat that the remaining democracies, including America, could ignore only at grave peril. On the other side were isolationists who declared the danger overblown and likely to produce the same sucker’s sentiments that had drawn the United States into the world war in 1917. Franklin Roosevelt agreed with the internationalists yet couldn’t afford to provoke the isolationists. In October 1937 he tested the waters of internationalism with a speech in which he called for a “quarantine” of foreign aggressors. The timid response by his fellow internationalists, however,and the denunciations by the isolationists, coming amid the grief he was getting over his court-packing plan and the recession, deterred him from doing more.
    Hollywood had no responsibility for American foreign policy, but it reflected the same divisions that paralyzed Roosevelt. The Warners, Louis Mayer, and most other leaders of the industry in the 1930s wereJews, and they naturally looked on Hitler’s ascendance with apprehension. But precisely because they were Jews, they often felt marginally positioned in American society. To pay special notice to the Jews of Europe would underline their difference from other Americans, a difference many had taken pains to diminish.
    So they waffled. Louis Mayer asked news baronWilliam Randolph Hearst to inquire of Hitler about Germany’s aims and plans, and heaccepted Hitler’s assurances, relayed through Hearst, that Berlin had no aggressive designs.Irving Thalberg, who worked with Mayer at MGM, was less hopeful but not more willing to challenge the Nazi regime. “A lot of Jews will lose their lives,” Thalberg said upon returning from a visit to Germany in 1934. Yet as a people, he predicted, the Jews would survive. “Hitler and Hitlerism will pass; the Jews will still be there.”
    The Warners took a stronger stand, in part because Hitlerism hit them sooner than it did some of their colleagues. During an early outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Germany, Nazi goons murdered theWarner Brothers