Activation of new aaa units - Air Defense Artillery

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BOOK REVIEWS
The Road 10 War J94J
THE MEMOIRS OF CORDELL HULL.
Two Volumes. The Macmillan Company.
1804 Pages; Index.
Cordell Hull's massive memoirs cover
the period from his birth in a rented log
cabin in Overton County, Tennessee, in
1871 to his resignation from the cabinet
on November 30, 1944. After a distinguished
career as a Democratic Party
leader, judge, congressman, and senator,
Hull was chosen as Secretary of State in
the first cabinet of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He held that office for nearly twelve years,
almost twice as long as any other man in
American history.
Hull carne from a.stalwart and forthright
family. During the Civil War his
father was shot through the head and left
for dead by a "Yankee guerrilla" named
Stepp. After a recovery which seems miraculous,
his father tracked down Stepp
after the war and shot him down without
a Word. Cordell Hull was something of a
fighter himself; he led an infantry company
in the 4th Tennessee Volunteers during
the Spanish American \-Var.
Although the Constitution provides that
the foreign policy of the United States is
formulated by the President and the Senate,
Hull made his views on the function
of the Secretary. of State clear to Mr.
~OOsevelt before accepting office. He said:
If I accept the Secretaryship of State, I
do not have in mind merely carrying on
COrrespondence with foreign governments.
What I have in mind was that it would be
~y duty to aid the President in every pos-
SIble way in the conduct of foreign policy.
... I would foresee and appraise to the
~nest possible extent questions and prob-
"'II1S arising ... and would formulate my
OWn ideas of policy .... I would then
recommend such policy to the President
for his approval or disapproval and suggest
necessarv action. The President himlf
would, .of course, suggest a policy
on a given situation :l~ any time ... and
I would develop all facts in relation to it
and then, if he approved, carry it out
through the State Department." These suggestions
were accepted by the President,
and in twelve years there was no serious
misunderstanding between the two men.
Like Stimson, Hull thought that Roosevelt
was a great commander in chief and
war President. Like Stimson, he also had
difficulty in adjusting himself to the President's
domestic and economic policies. He
probably agreed with Stimson that Roosevelt
was not a good administrator. His experience
with Raymond Moley at the
London Economic Conference in 1933
made this clear. Hull did not favor the
President's practice of sending a number
of distinguished Americans abroad as his
personal representatives because it undermined
the prestige of our ambassadors. Not
only that, Hull thought it was a waste of
time and energy. Once in a while the
President listened to outsiders like Morgenthau
on foreign policy matters, but Hull
observed that these diversions wen~ rare
and generally carne to nothing. Hull's place
in history will be the more secure because
Roosevelt did not seek out or act upon his
advice on foreign policy matters con-
nected with the Teheran and Yalta Conferences.
The President considered these
conferences as being primarily "military"
in character.
There was a tide ~f aggression running
in the world when Hull took office in
1933. The Nazis won an election that
consolidated their hold on Germany and
the Japanese occupied the capital of Jehol
on the day he was sworn in. Hull admits
that when he took office he had a
strong conviction that Germany and Italy
would plunge Europe into war and that
"Japan had no intentions whatever of
abiding by treaties." Since the European
dictators were not ready, Hull was first
concerned with the Japanese conquest of
Northern China. He saw through the ab-
surd plea that the United States should
appease Japan and thus strengthen the
liberals in order to prevent the military
group from gaining complete control of
the Japanese government. This plea was
raised at each new Japanese aggression
and it has recently been revived by a
school of writers who are trying to convince
the American people that the war
was unnecessary and brought about solely
by our own action!
Hull never favored neutrality as between
right and wrong. He believed that a breach
of the peace by an aggressor anywhere in
the world affected American security.
We should therefore impede the aggressors
to safeguard our own peace. Under existing
neutrality laws and the arms embargo,
American neutrality was a boon to the aggressors.
He tried hard in 1939 to convince
certain isolationists that war was corning in
Europe, but one of them, the venerable
Senator Borah, declared that he had information
superior to that of the State Department.
\Vhen Hull invited Borah to
visit the State Department and read the
documents bearing on the European situation,
the Senator declined. To Hull's
way of thinking the world was not faced
with a threat of regional war or an isolated
conflict but "with an organized, ruthless,
and implacable movement of steadily coxpanding
conquest." \Ve could have peace
and isolation for a time but only at the
cost of total surrender.
\Ve find some interesting footnotes to
history in these volumes. Apparently Hull
was the real author of the 50,000-planesa-year
program announced by Presiden:
Roosevelt on May 16, 1940, for in May
1940 he urged the President to announce
such a program. Like Hull's associates with
whom he had previously discussed this
program, Roosevelt was "speechless" at the
size of the effort but immediately made the
project his own. Hull said that throughout
the period of crisis and war he was more
confident about our productive capacity