'They would commit us to everlasting wars everywhere'

"Shall the United States of America become a merchant of death?" - Senator Rush D. Holt

" ... When elected in 1934, Rush Holt of Weston was the youngest person ever to win a seat in the United States Senate. Having waited since the general election to attain his thirtieth birthday, as required by the Constitution, he was sworn into office in June 1935. He had won fame and high office in West Virginia as a champion of the common man and a critic of privately owned utility corporations. He benefitted from the enthusiastic backing of the United Mine Workers of America, and the blessing of West Virginia's Senator Matthew M. Neely (D). Though he proclaimed himself an unequivocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, most knowledgeable observers (critics and sympathizers alike) viewed Holt as politically left of the president.

Soon after his accession to the Senate, Holt underwent a remarkable political metamorphosis. Believing himself denied a fair share of the patronage emanating from federal relief programs, he began in 1936 by attacking the Works Progress Administration for political corruption and inefficiency. Within months he emerged as one of the New Deal's most vocal conservative critics. Proudly independent, he sacrificed his alliance with Franklin Roosevelt, Matthew Neely, the United Mine Workers, and most rank and file Democrats in West Virginia. By maverick and impolitic behavior he condemned himself to a single Senate term. In the primary election of 1940 Holt placed only third in his bid for renomination. Though he remained politically active and later joined the Republican party, Holt failed to win another high office. 9

Holt's quixotic style could make him a questionable subject for logical analysis on an important public issue. But the "Boy Senator" always claimed philosophical consistency. Partly self-deceived and perhaps a little disingenuous, he viewed himself as faithful to pristine "liberal" and "progressive" values, while Roosevelt-style "big government" and John L. Lewis-inspired "big labor" trampled individual liberty. On at least one important matter Holt remained steadfast: throughout his Senate career and afterward, he opposed any American involvement in overseas warfare. After World War II began in Europe, Holt devoted himself to the noninterventionist cause at the expense of most other concerns. As Nebraska Senator Gerald P. Nye (R) later recalled, Holt was the only easterner in the Senate, with the exception of Massachusetts's David I. Walsh (D), who "stood by his guns" on the war issue.10 Holt took a stand without regard to political consequence and was motivated by isolationist and pacifistic feelings and principles. Though Holt did not fit the precise definition of a pacifist, his isolationism was determined chiefly by his abhorrence of war. A conditional but deeply felt pacifism was the chief wellspring for his unrelenting isolationism.

Holt viewed war as destructive of constitutional liberties, unnecessarily sacrificial of human life and material goods, and in most cases immoral. His pacifism was not dictated by religious scruples, for he held no firm theological convictions at the time. Nor did he condemn every war as unjustifiable; a war clearly in the defense of one's beleaguered and peace-loving homeland was legitimate. Like most of the noninterventionists prior to World War II, Holt discounted the likelihood of an unprovoked attack against the United States. Therefore, a European or an Asian war, regardless of the ultimate outcome, did not require American involvement. Holt's concept of homeland frontiers was limited to the forty-eight states. A strict anti-imperialist, Holt opposed North American military and economic intrusions into Latin America, and he was indifferent toward Canada, provided the United States had no presence or commitment there. At issue between Holt and most interventionists were their differing values. The latter believed in the efficacy of war to protect national interests, including those beyond the continent. The former viewed war as a greater evil than the threatened loss of peripheral or external interests, even those quite close to home.

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Though Holt sometimes prefaced his remarks on foreign policy with a perfunctory endorsement of "a strong national defense," his conduct reflected the anti-militarism inherent in his pacifism. As a member of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, he opposed every administration request for increased military spending.21 Holt believed that reckless militarization would actually enhance the risk of American involvement in a war, reasoning that a well-armed nation is more likely to resort to arms than a weak one. Therefore, the United States would be more secure with a small army and navy. The "big Navy" proposals of the late 1930s especially alarmed the senator. Franklin Roosevelt, he once noted, "likes to play with boats. The country would be safer if he had some other hobby."22 Holt opposed a five hundred million dollar request for the navy in 1937 on the grounds that "defense does not include the building of ships to transport airplanes and troops to foreign soil."23 He was a vocal leader of the opposition to the 1938 Naval Expansion Bill sponsored by Representative Carl Vinson (D) of Georgia. By threatening a filibuster against the measure, he helped extend debate for two and a half weeks before it eventually won Senate approval.24 In February 1939, Holt sought unsuccessfully to limit the construction of new warplanes, which he viewed as potentially offensive and bound for the European conflict.25

Clearly, the "Boy Senator" had manifested pacifist traits prior to the 1939 war declarations. It remains to be shown that Holt expressed his pacifism unflinchingly in isolationist terminology. Some bitter-end noninterventionists, such as senators Burton K. Wheeler (D) of Montana and Gerald P Nye, objected to the "isolationist" label pinned to them by interventionists. Some claimed that they always favored internationalism in peaceful ways, while opposing military entanglement or "collective security."26 In contrast, Holt was an unabashed isolationist, who did not mind keeping the nation aloof from the international community in peace as well as war. Sharing his father's distaste for President Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles, he never favored American membership in the League of Nations, and in 1935 would have voted against World Court membership (the vote came before he officially took his Senate seat). Throughout his Senate term he opposed the reciprocal trade agreements program and faithfully represented the pro-tariff glass industry of West Virginia.27 Holt's single concession to internationalism was his attendance at the 1939 conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Oslo, where he was chairman of the American delegation assigned to study the reduction of armaments. However, he afterward condemned participation in the Inter- Parliamentary Union by congressmen as useless junketing.28 Holt's ardor for insulating the nation from war heightened with the danger after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Isolation, rigid neutrality and anti-militarism remained his prescription for avoiding war. Chiefly a propagandist during his remaining months in the Senate, Holt engaged in lengthy, sometimes acrimonious Senate debates, traveled hundreds of miles for numerous speaking appearances, and delivered dozens of national and local radio broadcasts. Any rewards he realized from his proselytizing were intrinsic. It did not promote his already doubtful chance to win re-election to the Senate, he received little remuneration, and the travel undermined his health. His reputation was blackened by the "internationalist" press, and some of his associations during the crusade tainted him at considerable cost to his political future.29 Of course, in September 1939 most Americans, including the president, formally favored "neutrality." Roosevelt promptly applied the neutrality laws, then successfully called upon Congress to substitute a "cash and carry" policy for the arms embargo, and as part of the deal, to prohibit American ships from entering specified "danger zones." Roosevelt, and even some of the more determined noninterventionists, depicted the amendments as supportive of neutrality. But many isolationists and pacifists, including Rush Holt, opposed any tampering with the arms embargo. Holt viewed it as a first fateful step over the precipice to war.

On October 18, he expressed his view in a bitterly intoned day-long address to a handful of colleagues on the Senate floor. He underscored his theme with a rhetorical question: "Shall the United States of America become a merchant of death?" With the pacifist's indignation, he condemned the immorality of the munitions industry and the perfidious folly of changing rules in the course of a war in order to benefit one side at the expense of the other. The United States, he continued, was not threatened by attack from any nation. The nation's greatest peril was the deluding of Americans by British propaganda, which undermined true neutrality and prepared the public for eventual entry into the war.

Holt's fear of war blinded him to the distinctions others made between the "fascist aggressors" and the "peace-loving democracies." In Holt's words, "that great `democracy' [Britain] for which we are called upon to defend has an empire of nearly 600,000,000 people, which was gained by the sword. France has 4.6 million square miles of colonies." The senator systematically cited British "atrocities" against the Irish and the Boers, the British "betrayal" of Czechoslovakia at Munich, and the British "lies" to Arabs and Jews over the Palestine question. German aggression he conveniently attributed to the "unjust and punitive Versailles Treaty which caused untold suffering for the German people." Furthermore, he pointed out, it was Britain which had helped rearm Germany in recent years. Returning to the moral question of war, Holt concluded: "My vote will not be a vote for death; it will be a vote for peace, for I intend to vote to continue the embargo on arms, ammunition, and implements of war."30

Holt's remonstrances against the "cash and carry" amendment revealed his dislike for Great Britain and France. This opposition did not signify a sympathy for Nazi Germany. While he was invariably harsh in judgement of the Allies, Holt never expressed admiration for Hitler's Germany or any fascist state.31 Normally, he was cynical toward any belligerent's claim to moral righteousness. He often condemned what he called the "Sir Galahad" philosophy of international relations, which distinguishes between "good" and "bad" nations, "peace-loving" and "war-making" nations, "democracies" and "dictatorships."32 However, one international conflict in early 1940 curiously affected his conscience. That was the "Winter War," wherein the Soviet Union attacked neighboring Finland. While he could see "wrongs on both sides" in the German-Anglo-French conflict, Holt openly expressed sympathy for Finland, "that great little country." He nevertheless voted against a bill to extend a loan to Finland. "My sentiment was to vote for the bill," he explained. "My judgement told me to vote against it."33 In perhaps a more unusual departure from his isolationist position, Holt had earlier sympathized with the beleaguered republican government of Spain. Though several of his conservative supporters expressed disapproval, the senator signed a 1938 letter from about sixty congressmen extending "best wishes" to the Spanish Parliament as it convened at the height of the civil war.34

On May 14, 1940, young Senator Holt suffered defeat in the West Virginia primary. As a lame duck, he immersed himself unreservedly in the pacifist-isolationist cause. The debates on Capitol Hill escalated with the German spring offensive, and on June 3 Holt challenged Florida Senator Claude Pepper (D), when the latter demanded that Congress empower the president to sell arms to the Allies. Holt asked how far Pepper would go to support Britain and France in the event that limited aid failed to stop Germany. Pepper replied that it was a bridge he would cross when necessary.35

This exchange revealed the widening chasm separating the "internationalists" and the strict noninterventionists. The former could now entertain even the prospect of a war declaration, when during the previous autumn they had insisted that lifting the arms embargo would only insure America's nonbelligerency. The latter remained obdurate neutralists even while France collapsed before the Nazi war machine. When the Roosevelt administration revealed on June 6, 1940, the transfer of fifty American planes to the Allies, Holt remarked acidly that the plane deal was "just edging toward a declaration of war."36 Fearing that war could be presaged even by humanitarian gestures, Holt declined on June 18 to give the Senate's unanimous consent to a resolution empowering the president to send Red Cross mercy ships into war zones.37

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During autumn 1940, the general election campaign afforded Holt, no longer a candidate, little opportunity for waging the anti-war fight. Initiative in foreign policy lay entirely with the president, and his opponents were only able to raise vain protests to the seriatim steps taken to aid Great Britain. In September the "destroyers for bases" deal was announced as an executive fait accompli. Threatening a "full discussion" of the transaction, Holt was only able to complain that the deal "was not the American way of doing things."45

In December the "Boy Senator"retired from the Senate at age 35, brooding over the likelihood of war under Franklin Roosevelt's leadership. His pessimism was reflected in an article published by the New York Journal and American. "Get ready, America, we are going to be asked to repeal the Johnson Act which prohibits loans to defaulters and to amend the Neutrality Act which was passed to keep this country out of war. . . . I believe in being frank. The move was to get us in the war and they knew it had to be done gradually."46

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In his addresses Holt stressed that the Roosevelt administration was seeking to maneuver the United States into the European war. When, for example, the public was informed that American destroyers had been fired upon by German submarines, Holt blamed Franklin Roosevelt, not Adolf Hitler. ". . . I believe the crowd in Washington was hoping that there would be some American casualties that would create an incident to take us into the war."55

Since the first amending of the Neutrality Act in November 1939, Holt had been pessimistic about the likelihood of America's avoiding war. However, two years later the enthusiastic response of sometimes overflow audiences buoyed his spirit and gave rise to optimism. Having often predicted that the first steps in aid to the Allies would lead inevitably to war, Holt now sensed that, in spite of Roosevelt's machinations, the final barrier against a formal war declaration was increasingly formidable. Appearing in Denver on November 17, he asserted: "America can keep out of the war if American citizens keep fighting against `steps to war through the back door'." He noted that "enthusiasm for our cause is gaining ground. America First meetings have outdrawn intervention committee meetings by anywhere from five to one to ten to one."56 In Salt Lake City a day later, Holt predicted that opponents of the war would soon have a majority in Congress. He ascribed a rise in anti-war declaration sentiment (confirmed by public opinion polls) to a realization on the part of Americans that they had been taken to the precipice of war through "subterfuge, hypocrisy and dishonesty."57

The America First coalition and Holt's tour ended, of course, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even then, Holt was unwilling to concede that there would be no future return to the sanctuary of isolationism and pacifism. This he revealed in a January 1942 letter to R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., former director of the America First Committee. "Our fight is not over. We must stand guard to see that the internationalists who wanted war from the first day of September, 1939, are not allowed to determine the future of our great country. They would commit us to everlasting wars everywhere."58

Embittered, especially by the accusations of pro-Nazi sympathies, but undeterred, Holt early conceived of a strategy by which the internationalists might someday be exposed. He outlined a course of action in a letter of April 28, 1942, to George N. Peek, the agricultural theorist of Moline, Illinois:

"If this country is committed to the policy of forever policing the world, we have lost the war. To win this war does not require us to follow Roosevelt and Wilkie [sic] into internationalism. The international crowd is a motley group. It contains New Dealers, communists, anglophiles, international bankers, and all these individuals can control. They are coordinating their program to silence any opposition. . . .

"That brings me to a point I think very important. We should plan also. We should start building now to stop internationalism from taking over America. We should gather facts, figures and data to meet the challenge."59 ... "

From Isolationism and Pacifism: Senator Rush D. Holt and American Foreign Policy By William E. Coffey, West Virginia History, Volume 51, 1992