The long-tenured secretary of state (1933-1944) firmly believed that "we cannot have a peaceful world . until we rebuild the international economic structure" Although Roosevelt often ignored him, Hull played a central role in Latin American issues, negotiations with Japan, and trade questions. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Old Wilsonian
Roosevelt chose Tennessean Cordell Hull as his secretary of state. A powerful senator devoted to free trade, the chronically ill sexagenarian (he secretly suffered from diabetes, claustrophobia, and tuberculosis) reluctantly accepted. FDR picked Hull not for his views on foreign affairs but because the appointment would please old Democratic party members, southern conservatives, and unreconstructed Wilsonians.
London Economic Conference
Roosevelt often undercut him, although Hull and the State Department remained dominant in formulating Asian and Latin American policy. Rexford Tugwell, a presidential aide, noted as early as 1933 that "Hull doesn't know half of what goes on. " Indeed, Roosevelt sent Hull to the World Economic Conference in London that June without consulting him on the makeup of the delegation, and then embarrassed him by rejecting a currency stabilization plan and effectively ending the conference.
"Miss Cordelia Dull"
Once dubbed "Miss Cordelia Dull" for his "congenital procrastination," the secretary had contemplated resigning earlier that spring when the president delayed sending to Congress Hull's pet project, the reciprocal trade bill. Hull's deliberate methods wearied the president, who preferred quickness and repartee. The secretary resented the president's practice of dispatching personal envoys overseas, of conspicuously excluding Hull from conferences, and of relying on friends such as Sumner Welles (after 1937 under secretary of state), Morgenthau, and Ambassador William C. Bullitt, instead of Hull himself "They all come at me with knives and hatchets," Hull once complained. But he stayed on until 1944, the longest tenure of any secretary of state, forever disliking the pomp of official dinners, always charming his listeners with his hill-country drawl and lisp, and impressing all with his personal dignity, hard work, and deep commitment to the premise that wars grew out of international economic competition.
Foreign Service reforms and specialists
The Foreign Service over which Hull presided improved during the interwar period. It certainly needed reform. Frequenting the dark corridors and Victorian furnishings of the old State, War, and Navy Building on Pennsylvania Avenue were U.S. diplomats noted for their elite backgrounds (urban, wealthy, eastern, and Ivy League-educated). Some derided them as "cookie pushers" and "striped pants," as purveyors of "pink peppermint and protocol." Foreign Service Officers nonetheless believed that "they belonged to a pretty good club. That feeling has fostered a healthy esprit de corps."" Many diplomatic appointees could not speak the language of the country to which they were assigned. Under the spoils system, faithful politicians received top diplomatic posts. The heavy work load imposed on Foreign Service personnel during World War I had exposed the shortcomings. The immigration laws of 1921 and 1924, establishing quotas, demanded a more efficient consular staff; the revolution in China required observers who could intelligently interpret that convulsion; and economic expansion depended on sound reporting about market conditions abroad. The Rogers Act of 1924 merged the previously unequal consular and diplomatic corps into the Foreign Service of the United States and provided for examinations, increased salaries, promotion by merit, and overseas living allowances. At about the same time, the State Department began training specialists in Soviet affairs, with George F. Kennan and Charles E. Bohlen (both later ambassadors to the Soviet Union) as initiates who mastered the language and culture of Russia. These trainees came to share hard-line attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Despite persistent cliques, political favoritism, snobbery, sexism, anti-Semitism; and lower salaries and staff cutbacks during the depression, the Foreign Service became more efficient and professional.
Depression trade declined
The depression raised havoc with the international economy. Only two countries might have led the world out of depression, but the "British couldn't and the Americans wouldn't." Economic nationalism guided most countries as they tried to protect themselves from the cataclysm with higher tariffs and import quotas. World trade declined 40 percent in value and 25 percent in volume from 1929 to mid-1933. In 1933 the United States exported goods worth $2.1 billion, down from the 1929 figure of $5.4 billion. American capital stayed at home, and foreign holders of American loans defaulted. American private investments abroad slumped to $13.5 billion, down from the $17.2 billion figure of 1930. President Hoover flatly-and wrongly-called it a "patently European crisis." His successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting 13 million unemployed Americans when he took office in 1933, also succumbed to economic nationalism as he created his New Deal recovery program. He abruptly sabotaged the London Economic Conference, indicating that the United States would henceforth "pursue domestic recovery by means of a policy of unilateralism." But Hull gradually persuaded him that lowered tariffs would spur U.S. foreign trade and spark an economic upturn at home.
Bolshevism
Hull also preached that healthy world trade would contribute to stable politics and peace at a time when Japan, Germany, and Italy were turning to political extremes and threatening aggression. It would also deter Bolshevism from exploiting Europe's economic and social turmoil. "International commerce," Hull avowed, "is not only calculated to aid materially in the restoration of prosperity everywhere, but it is the greatest civilizer and peacemaker in the experience of the human race."
Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act
In 1934 Hull piloted through Congress the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which empowered the president to reduce tariffs by as much as 50 percent after agreements with other nations under the doctrine of the most-favored nation. This principle, which had traditionally guided American trade, meant that the United States was entitled to the lowest tariffs imposed by a country (in short, the best favor that country granted any other nation) with which the United States had a reciprocal agreement, and vice versa. The reciprocal trade program did retard the deterioration of world trade, but, as President Roosevelt confessed, "those trade treaties are just too goddamned slow. The world is moving too fast.
Export-Import Bank
Hull also created in 1934 the Export-Import Bank, a governmental agency designed to provide loans to expand foreign trade. Washington could give or withhold credits to facilitate foreign-policy goals as well. Yet in 1937 FDR waxed skeptical in thinking that "an economic approach to peace is a weak reed. The reciprocal trade program and the bank came too late to help solve one of the major troubling legacies of World War I and Versailles - the debts-reparations tangle. Whereas before the war U.S. citizens owed some $3 billion to Europeans, after the war European citizens owed private Americans $3 billion and their governments owed another $10 billion, largely because of wartime loans. America had gone dramatically from a debtor to a creditor nation. But how would Europeans earn dollars to pay such a huge sum? American investments, sale of goods to the United States, U.S. tourist spending, and income from German reparations payments ranked as the most promising sources. But the Germans proved incapable of meeting the indemnity of $33 billion, so in the early 1920s the British began asking for a cancellation of the debts, arguing that Americans should write them off as a contribution to the Allied victory. Europeans, then, looked on the war loans as essentially political in character, rather than as business transactions.
Soviet Union recognition
Roosevelt administration formally recognized the Soviet Union in November 1933. American trade with Russia improved little, despite the signing of a trade treaty in 1935 and the establishment of the Export-Import Bank. When American communists spoke critically of the United States at Moscow's Seventh International Communist (Comintern) Congress in 1935, Secretary Hull charged a violation of Russia's no-propaganda pledge. The Kremlin expected governments to "fall like ripe fruit from their capitalist treetops," noted another U.S. diplomat."
Neutrality Act and Ethiopia
President Roosevelt, sensitive to American sentiment against U.S. entanglement in Europe and sharing much of the pacifist loathing of war, responded haltingly to the events of the 1930s. His foreign policy fed appeasement. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, Roosevelt stated that the United States sought above all to avoid war. America would set a peaceful example for other nations to follow. He and Hull invoked the Neutrality Act, warned Americans not to travel on belligerent ships, and suggested a moral embargo against trade with the warring parties. Actually, American businesses ignored the moral embargo and increased commerce with Italy, especially in oil. Aggression in Africa sparked "the first great manifestation of Afro-American interest in foreign affairs." In addition to anti-Italian boycotts and petitions by black churches to the pope, the African-American poet Langston Hughes composed a "Ballad of Ethiopia" in support of black solidarity. In August 1936, the president gave a stirring speech at Chautauqua, New York, recalling World War I: "I have seen war . . . . I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs .... I hate war."
Neutrality Act and Spain
In January 1937, Roosevelt asked Congress for an arms embargo against Spain. Congress obliged, but the decision sparked considerable debate. it produced "malevolent neutrality" that worked against the "Loyalist" Republican government and in favor of Franco, who received arms from Germany and Italy. In this case, many isolationists protested neutrality - the sacrifice of Spanish democracy. They agonized: How can one be commited to both peace and liberty? Roosevelt and Hull chose strict neutrality, in essence backing feeble British-French efforts to contain the civil war and aligning themselves with the pro-Franco views of the Catholic hierarchy at home. yet Roosevelt privately pondered ways to curb the aggressors.