The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War
Reviews / Comptes Rendus
Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War (Toronto: James Lorimer 2002)
JACQUES PAUWELS set out to synthesize the disparate monographs and scholarly articles that strip away the layers of the American mystique surrounding that country's participation in World War II. The US remained neutral during the first two and a half years of war, and only entered the fray after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Its armed forces then spent most of the next two years focusing on maintaining America's Pacific empire and beating back Japan's challenge for domination of Asia. Yet its government and tame scholars would quickly construct a mythology in which America was at war to defend democracy and civil liberties in Europe and defeat the fascist regimes that were the enemies of such values. After the war, American involvement in the prosecution of war criminals at Nuremburg and in the reconstruction of Germany were also presented as proof of the country's commitment to the destruction of fascism and the re-establishment of democracy in Europe. 1
Pauwels is mostly successful in his effort to construct a counter-narrative. His is a lively book, originally written in Flemish, and later translated into German, Spanish, and French. Lorimer published an English version, translated by Pauwels himself (his PhD and university teaching experience are Canadian), in 2002. Pauwels marshals the considerable evidence of the moral and financial support of leading American corporate officials in the 1930s for the Hitler regime, and their involvement in strengthening the German war machine once war broke out, an involvement that did not abate when the US itself joined the Allies as an enemy of Nazi Germany. As Pauwels notes, American corporations with subsidiaries in Germany benefited from Hitler's economic policies. "Their German subsidiaries and/or partner firms, such as Coca-Cola's bottling plant in Essen, General Motors' Opel automobile factory in Rüsselsheim near Mainz, Ford's Fordwerke in Cologne, IBM's facility in Berlin, or Standard Oil's infamous German partner, IG Farben, flourished under a Hitler regime that had swept away the unions, whose rearmament program caused a flood of orders, and with whom all sorts of highly profitable deals could be concluded thanks to the services of corrupt Nazi bigwigs such as Herman Göring, unscrupulous bankers such as the notorious Hjalmar Schacht, and financial institutions in Germany itself or in Switzerland." (30) 2
American capitalists, like their British counterparts, hoped that Hitler would aim his guns at the Soviet Union, destroy Bolshevism, and open up the Communist giant to foreign capital, while destroying workers' illusions everywhere that they would ever get away with trying to end capital's reign. When Britain, finally fearful that Hitler in fact intended to dominate western Europe and threaten their empire, went to war with Hitler, the US remained on the sidelines. Its capitalists were happy to arm both sides, and continued to hope that the two belligerents would unite in a war against the hated Soviets. 3
But, according to Pauwels, American capitalists, while supportive of Hitler's pro-capital and anti-labour policies, soured on him because of his promotion of autarchy. Britain offered more lucrative economic prospects, particularly after Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to the Lend-Lease program that provided American government guarantees for American manufacturers selling war materials to Britain. Nonetheless, American industrialists who were active in fuelling the German war machine, were happy to celebrate Nazi successes across Europe. Among guests at functions in New York in June and July in 1940, celebrating the Wehrmacht's victories were the leading officials of General Motors, Ford, and Texaco. 4
Of course, corporate America, which did not want to let markets in the Pacific disappear, supported Franklin Roosevelt's declaration of war on Japan after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. When Hitler then joined his Japanese allies in declaring war on the US, there was no way to extract the country officially from the war in Europe. But for several years the government's focus was on the war in the Pacific, and the Roosevelt administration, while it may not have approved of US corporations continuing to help the Nazis, pretended that there was no ongoing relationship between American subsidiaries in Germany and American headquarters. 5
Once the war was over, the American occupation zone and eventually the zones occupied by Britain and France, whose debts to the Americans left them with little option but to defer to the emerging Cold War leader of the West, became havens for former Nazi officials and corporate leaders who had collaborated with the Nazis. The Americans proved as determined to weaken labour organizations as they were to strengthen the hand of the Nazi collaborators who assumed control of "democratic" Germany's government and corporations in the postwar period. After formal liberation from Nazi rule, German workers recreated their unions and established democratically elected works councils in factories. They expected managers to receive input from these councils and to regard them as co-managers of the firm. When the owners of the firms were Nazis or Nazi collaborators, as they generally were, the workers also called for the state to assume ownership. The Americans suppressed the works councils and defended the right of Nazi owners and managers to remain in place. Confounding democracy with the rights of capital, the Americans insured that Germans only enjoyed democracy at the ballot box, a limited right that they nonetheless denied to citizens in many other countries who proved less willing than the Germans to give parliamentary majorities to pro-American, pro-capitalist politicians. 6
There are lacunae in this narrative. Pauwels weaves back and forth between the state and the corporations, only at times being clear about the relationship between the two. The result is a book with rather little nuance. This is particularly true with regards to the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration more broadly. The Left, both in Roosevelt's time and ever since, have had some difficulties determining where to fit this scion of a ruling-class family within a class-based account of American history. Though he was never anti-capitalist, his convictions about how to fix the capitalist system made him seem a class traitor to a large section of the capitalist class. By most accounts, Roosevelt and at least a section of his administration were neither pro-Nazi nor "isolationist." They behaved gingerly with regards to Hitler because the so-called "isolationists" in Congress, who were, in fact, despite that neutral-sounding term, mainly pro-Nazi, were believed to have public opinion on their side. Indeed most accounts of American political opinion in this period stress the weakness of anti-fascist organizations in the country before and during the war, with both the Socialists and Communists opposing the country's entry into war when Britain and France finally declared war on Hitler. Roosevelt, though more focused on the Japanese threat than the Nazis, had made overtures to Britain in late 1937 about using naval blockades to "quarantine" aggressor nations. They were swiftly rejected by Neville Chamberlain, whose Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, then resigned because he had not been consulted by Chamberlain and because he recognized that his modest efforts to end Chamberlain's appeasement policies could not bear fruit. Without internal or external allies for a bellicose policy regarding the dictators, and obviously unwilling to make common cause with Stalin, the major world leader opposed to Hitler, Roosevelt retreated. But his enthusiasm for Lend-Lease and his eventual willingness to open a Western front in Europe resulted at least in part from anti-fascist sympathies, though certainly, as Pauwels suggests, the Soviet victories in Europe against Germany probably played a bigger role. The Americans were not prepared to entertain the idea of a socialist Europe, whether of the dictatorial Soviet-controlled variety, or workers' republics run by workers' councils along the models of the original soviets at the time of the Russian Revolution. 7
It is clear that the American state was unwilling at any time, whether before the war, during the war, or in the aftermath of the war, to penalize in any way American corporate leaders who actively supported Nazi rearmament. Government leaders were happy to maintain Nazis in position of authority throughout both industry and government if only as an alternative to the popular demands among urban workers for democratic socialism. 8
American politicians of the post-war period, particularly both George Bushes, love to dredge up the Munich Agreement of 1938 to rationalize their invasions of various sovereign nations. They imply that Munich represented the craven surrender of jaded leaders of European democracies to Hitler's tyranny, and illustrated the need for America's leaders never to allow a similar surrender to tyranny. Pauwels' work complements the growing body of literature that demonstrates the shallowness of interpretations of relations between Hitler and the leaders of Britain and France in terms of "appeasement" as opposed to the common interests of pro-capitalist politicians. It also complements the extensive literature on American imperialism which underlines the profoundly anti-democratic outlook of the people who run American corporations and governments, even as they fool their own population with slogans that suggest American politics is guided by a commitment to democracy and Christian values. Indeed Pauwels ties together these two sets of scholarly literature to explain, in popular language, the real goals of the American ruling class from the time of the Nazis' rise to power to the beginnings of the Cold War. 9
Alvin Finkel
Athabasca University
