Old Europe: America's First Annoyance

June of 1930. Memories of the Great War, Suspicion of the Old World

The big news of June 1930 was that Congress was nearing completion of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that would wreck global trade, which President Herbert Hoover would sign but not before forwarding to the Senate the objections of foreign powers. And the other news was that Congress overrode the president’s veto of what he believed was an over generous enlargement of the pension plan for Spanish American War veterans. With this, President Herbert Hoover suffered his first major political defeat when Congress overwhelmingly overrode his veto of a bill expanding pensions for Spanish-American War veterans. It was decisive, the Senate voted 61–18 and the House 298–14 to enact the bill into law, far exceeding the required two-thirds majority in both chambers. Notably, 28 Republican senators joined Democrats in opposing the president. He spoke the next day to the press and had only one thing on his mind:

THE PRESIDENT. I have had a number of questions about the veto yesterday, or overriding the veto.

I favored a liberalizing of the Spanish War veterans' pensions, because they have not been on a parity with the other services. But even yet I have not changed my opinion that it should have been worked out in a way that rich and well-to-do people with substantial incomes should not draw pensions from this Government. I made no suggestion at any time of a pauper provision against veterans, or anything akin to it.

I do not believe yet that we should alter the principles which have been held for Civil War veterans all of these 70 years, providing for the 90-day requirement of service.

And further than that, I do not believe yet that it is right to change our national policy and to call on the nation to pay disability allowances to men who have or who may tomorrow destroy their health through vicious habits. And I have received a very large number of communications from veterans throughout the country supporting those views.

That is the only subject on which I have any questions.

—Presidential press conference June 3 1930.

Hoover objected to three aspects of the bill: first, it granted pensions regardless of financial need. Second, it reduced the required service to qualify from 90 to 70 days, and finally, the new law extended benefits to those whose disabilities stemmed from "vicious habits." Despite assurances he would approve a revised bill, veterans’ groups refused to compromise and successfully lobbied Congress to act immediately. Hoover was a true progressive, a term that is misused, abused, and confused today. Hoover believed, as was the norm for the old progressives, that there was a public duty to help the people, but the people had a reciprocal duty to be moral and deserving of aid. Likewise means testing was a progressive value because the idea of taking from the public treasury to give to men who already had means was antithetical to their post-Gilded Age sense of obligation.

The law added an estimated $11 million annual cost, expanded eligibility, and increased monthly payments based on level of disability. Critics of Hoover’s veto, accused the administration of favoring corporate subsidies over fair treatment of veterans. Not a fair charge, but, the swift veto override demonstrated widespread Congressional and public support for veterans, even at the cost of GOP members embarrassing a Republican president. Things would be very different when Great War veterans marched for early payment of their war bonuses in 1932.

As summer neared in 1930, their were signs America was in some sort of economic trouble. The legacy of the next three years would make Americans turn more inward. The Great Depression was an addition or enhancement to the feeling and need to draw inward, not the cause. Anger with Europe was the cause. The American Great War of 1917–1918, and the following peace negotiations and occupation of Germany which went on from 1919–1924, left a bitter memory in the minds of the Americans. They did not like the suppression of civil liberties by President Thomas Woodrow Wilson. They did not much care for their allies the British, which was not new, but they also resented French behavior during the occupation of the Rhine. And Americans were infuriated by the British and French using the war to make their empires larger. Not since the French and Indian War (1754–1763) had Americans fought to enlarge the British Empire.

In the federal elections from 1920–1933, they punished the Democratic Party, Wilson’s party. The progressive Republican Party reasserted their domination of the federal government, which the GOP had held since the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln had saved the Union. Before the Great Depression, the Republican Party was what the UK Conservative was: “the natural party of government.” We rate Hoover low today, but he won the biggest Electoral College landslide of the 20th century before FDR.

American neutrality in 1930 has been called isolationism, but might better be understood as the diplomatic consequences of pairing the Great Depression with long-standing disaffection for Europe. Outside of Latin America, the world was European. Over 90% of Africa and 70% of Asia were ruled by Europeans. So to say America was turning its back on the world means Europe; Americans were intentionally turning their backs on Europe. “De-Europeanizing” the question misses what was really happening. Americans, for good reasons, saw Europe as the anti-America. Marxism and communism came from Europe. Fascism and Nazism were rising in Europe. But also, a renewed colonial drive for domination directed against the Arab Middle East was a Franco-British —European— project. Making promises to Jewish Zionists and Arab Nationalists, and then betraying both Jews and Arabs, that was the work of the British and their French allies. All of this game-playing and ideological monstrosity was European. When America restricted immigration in the 1920s, they were mostly targeting Europe.

American disinterest in others beyond trade and keeping an eye on clear and defined military threats was seen in the less than enthusiastic approach the US took in active espionage against foes. Although an American created the secret "buttonhole camera," it was not the sort of thing the US government invested in during the 19th century. You think of Europeans when you imagine early spy cameras. From the late 19th to mid-20th century, the United States traditionally emphasized intelligence gathering against conventional forces: navy versus navy, army versus army, and not spycraft per se. This focus gave rise to two dedicated agencies in the two armed service departments: the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), founded in 1882, and the Military Information Division (MID), established in 1885 and folded into the general staff in 1903.

Their primary missions were to monitor and assess the conventional capabilities of foreign powers, particularly the nearby European empires like Spain leading up to 1898, and later the rising power of Japan. The intelligence apparatus gathered data and developed maps and practical information for combat operations. The other concern of the United States was subversion, and the US was much more focused on preventing subversion within than it was concerned about the status of regimes abroad or subverting them in return. America was a tend-your-own-garden sort of country and was not particularly interested in daring operations of espionage. The FBI and to a lesser extent a new MID, the Military Intelligence Division created during the Great War, were active in anti-subversion operations, with the major threats being European ideologies such as anarchism, which was responsible for the first major wave of international terrorism and the assassination of President William McKinley. In response, domestic intelligence took priority.

These natural American tendencies only grew with the Depression. The rise of fascism in Europe was not a concern, but its influence in America was. If the idea of the Soviet Union was “socialism in one country,” America’s response was “fine, so long as it stays there, bub.” During the late 20th century, when Americans looked back on the 1930s, it seemed odd that so much happened during the interwar years and the American people were largely unconcerned with the events leading to the Second World War. But, the more surprising thing is that Americans a half-century later were surprised; it was they who were behaving outside the norm. In the 1930s the USA was largely as it had been —focused inward— and our modern expectation that people who were losing their jobs and quickly becoming desperately poor would be concerned about the fate of foreigners an ocean away is usually a losing bet.

Which gets back to American suspicion of Europeans attempting to manipulate America and export their problems. 1920s American xenophobia was much more anti-European than it was anti-Latin American. The paranoia was civilizational and ideological, not a simple reflection of racial prejudice. Looking back from 1930, was that not what the Europeans did in 1917 - exporting their problems. Was that not what the League of Nations would have been, was it not newcomers from Europe who were driving terrorism, socialism, anarchism, gangsterism, all the isms? Was not anti-liberalism an import from Europe? Perhaps not, after all racism was a longstanding American ideological problem and completely domestic, but that is how it appeared to perhaps the majority of White Protestant Americans, and many Catholic Irish Americans too, and it is why when the time came, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have a tough job convincing the American people to get involved in the Second World War, and it took Pearl Harbor to settle the issue. Before December 7th 1941, the war was another fool thing the Europeans had done to themselves, and problems in Asia were not the concern of Americans anxious about the continuation of the Great Depression.

But all that was in the months and years to come. In June 1930, Hoover was still in denial about the economy, Congress was helping veterans of the 1898 war, and believing their new package of tariffs was a big, beautiful bill that would protect American jobs and preserve the economy.

They provoked a trade war and wrecked America’s fortunes instead, giving the Democrats control of the federal government for the next 20 years.