Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn

      The economic base for America’s postwar “world responsibility”—that is, for the American Empire—was laid during the war. The nation’s objective was simply to move into the vacuum that would be left by the collapse of British imperial power, and to become the undisputed economic leader of the nonsocialist world. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared early in the war:

      Through international investment, capital must be made available for the sound development of latent natural resources and productive capacity in relatively undeveloped areas. … Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.

      “No other problem, without exception, received as much space in the Department of State Bulletins during 1944 and 1945 as postwar foreign economic policy,” Kolko notes. Vice President Henry Wallace, who became secretary of commerce in 1945, said after a world tour in July, 1944—one month after the Allies had invaded western Europe and victory did not appear too far off: “The new frontier extends from Minneapolis … all the way to Central Asia.” (Was Kennedy, in making “The New Frontier” the slogan for his administration in the sixties, aware of this earlier use of the phrase? His administration was also conscious of the international reach of American business.)

      The war did in fact prove to be an opportunity for the United States to take control of the huge Middle East oil resources from England. Great unexploited oil reserves existed, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt met with its king, Ibn-Saud, after the Yalta Conference, and later recalled telling him, as a State Department summary put it, “that essentially he, the President, was a businessman. … and that as a businessman he would be very much interested in Arabia.” Forrestal, then secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary that he had told Byrnes about the importance of spending money in Saudi Arabia to promote American over British interests. “I told him that, roughly speaking, Saudi Arabia, according to oil people in whom I had confidence, is one of the three great puddles left in the world. …” A Department of State Bulletin put the issue succinctly:

      The desirability of control by American nationals over petroleum properties abroad is based on two considerations: (a) that the talent of the American oil industry for discovery and development is historically demonstrated so that results are likely to be better according to the extent to which American private interests participate, and (b) that other things being equal, oil controlled by United States nationals is likely to be a little more accessible to the United States for commercial uses in times of peace and for strategic purposes in times of war.

      The postwar outlook for foreign trade and foreign investment of American private capital was extremely important to leaders of the government. Lloyd Gardner in his detailed study of economic foreign policy in these years, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, says of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s chief adviser: “No conservative outdid Hopkins in championing foreign investment, and its protection.” Gardner quotes Hopkins as saying in 1944:

      Whoever borrows must see to it that expropriation will be impossible. The people of this country have a right to expect that kind of protection from their Government. It must be further agreed that money lent by the Government to other nations must be spent for purchases in this country. … And it is highly important that business and government have an early meeting of minds as to general policy governing private investments abroad.

      In that same year, however, poet Archibald MacLeish, then assistant secretary of state, spoke critically of what he saw shaping up in the aftermath of a war filled with grand pronouncements about the common man:

      As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief, of factual situations, a peace without moral purpose or human interest, a peace of dicker and trade, about the facts of commerce, the facts of banking, the facts of transportation, which will lead us where the treaties made by dicker and trade have always led.

      Throughout the war, England and the United States dickered and bickered about the shape of international trade in the postwar world, with the United States anxious to acquire equal access to the raw materials in the British-dominated nations. The rapidly expanding manufacturing apparatus of the United States would desperately require more raw materials than were to be found within its continental limits. America’s “open door” policy was similar to that under William McKinley at the turn of the century, a policy of pretending to want nothing but fairness for all while being intensely concerned with American economic access to regions formerly controlled by older empires. At the Bretton Woods Conference of July, 1944, England and the United States set up the International Monetary Fund to regulate international exchanges of currency; voting in the fund, however, was to be roughly proportional to capital contributed, thereby assuring American dominance. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was presumably established to help reconstruct war-destroyed areas; but in its own words one of its first objectives was to “promote private foreign investment” all over the world. Herbert Feis, a State Department analyst, wrote: “The United States could not passively sanction the employment of capital raised within the United States for ends contrary to our major policies or interests. … Capital is a form of power.”

      Kolko’s judgment of the Roosevelt-Hull doctrine of concern for private profit seems caustic. Yet it is supported by events:

      Nothing in this doctrine suggested a serious preoccupation with the problems of post-war reconstruction outside the context of a renovated world capitalist economy, and Washington’s planning focused on its trade goals rather than emergency aid to a starving Europe that was fighting the war with far greater sacrifices than those of American businessmen, farmers, and exporters anxious over their future profit margins.

      One fact supporting Kolko’s view is that the United States tried to keep down the reparations taken by the Allies from the Axis powers in order that the vanquished would be more dependent on American aid and trade. In November, 1944, the State Department told the Kremlin that “reparations payments should be scheduled in such a way as to interfere as little as possible with normal trading relations.”

      In the public mind, the foreign-aid program that started during and continued after the war was a humanitarian venture. In the minds of the public’s leaders, there were other objectives: the welfare of the business community and the political influence of the American government in postwar Europe. As Averell Harriman, then United States ambassador to Russia, said in early 1944: “Economic assistance is one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to influence European political events in the direction we desire and to avoid the development of a sphere of influence of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.”

      Similar concern with power lay behind the founding of the United Nations—in spite of the sentimental hopes of those who believed, as its charter declared, that it might save the world “from the scourge of war.” At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt had proposed a postwar organization at the top of which would be the “Four Policemen”—England, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. The policemen were to enforce law and order in the world, by military intervention if necessary. Ultimately, something approximating this plan was adopted, with France as the fifth policeman dominating the Security Council, and with each able to veto any important action by the council. It was the United States that first proposed the veto power; the Soviet Union, watching the UN take shape as an American-dominated group, later embraced the idea eagerly. Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, and former isolationist, who had much to do with creating Republican-Democratic unity on major issues of foreign policy, wrote about the United Nations Charter in his diary:

      The striking thing about it is that it is so conservative from a nationalist standpoint. It is based virtually on a four-power alliance. … This is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world State. … I am deeply impressed (and surprised) to find Hull so carefully guarding our American veto in his scheme of things.