Seeing Clinton leaving after 2 terms made me think… if FDR had to leave after 2 terms, someone else would have been president during World War 2. Would this have changed the outcome of the War?
Absolutely. We might not have been in it to begin with. FDR desperately wanted us in that war. Certain things were done to insure the Japanese would attack. He needed that. It allowed him to nationalize the economy more than he already did, and use that to pull us out of the depresion.(let’s face it, the things he mandated for 10 years prior to the war didn’t do much. How he kept getting re-elected is beyond me.) A different president…Democrat or Republican…probably would have had the depresion solved by 1941,(one year after FDRs last term expired) thus, no need to get involved in the war. Just sit back and let them fight it out, and let all the American G.I.'s who died in the war live! There would be no baby boom, thus, possibly, no Bill Clinton.
Only 2 terms for FDR AND no Bill Clinton?
Beautiful is the dream that makes this true!
You think fighting the Nazis was a bad idea?
You would trade the possibility of Clinton’s nonelection for the possibility of a Europe ruled by National Socialism?
I’m not a Nazi, but I am an isolationist. Consider this: wasn’t much of Europe ruled for 50 years by the Communist because of the out come of the war? So what’s worse, living under National Socialism or living under Communist Socialism? It’s like asking if you want a kick in the throat or a kick in the nuts, isn’t it? Regardless, the outcome of that war was not good for Europe. Especially eastern Europe. So, if it was a lose/lose proposition (Commie V.S. Nazi Europe) I say, why participate at all?
Personally, I prefer the commies. They weren’t particularly nice, but they weren’t planning the kind of unimaginable genocides that the Nazis were doing. In addition, if the Nazis successfully conquered all of Europe, there’s no reason why they couldn’t conquer the North America in less than a generation. (If we could send a war over there with our resources, they certainly could have done the reverse with all the resources of Europe.)
Further, isolationism is dumb, IMO. It’s silly to think the US does not have interests worth protecting outside its borders. It’s also undeniable that, however morbid, war does good for the economy and leads to technological innovation.
And then there’s the simple matter of morality; I think it was FDR who said, “If I have to choose between peace and righteousness, I choose righteousness.”
Regarding the OP:
With FDR’s support, a reasonably good Democratic candidate probably would have been elected in 1940, with policies (domestic and international) similar to Roosevelt’s. The Japanese would have still attacked, and the war would come.
Even if a Republican had won in '40 (thus taking office in early '41), he would have had only the better part of a year to reverse the entire trend of U.S.-Japanese relations. In any event, we were already in a de facto shooting war with the Germans in the Atlantic, and extricating ourselves from that affair would have been extremely difficult.
Once in the war, the actual conduct of the war on our part would probably differ only slightly from our conduct under FDR. Most decisions made by the allies were ones of military necessity, and would have been made (in one way or another) regardless of political leadership.
So, “would this have changed the outcome of the war?” In some ways, of course. In any essential way? Probably not.
pkbites:
There is no reason to believe that FDR was actively courting a Japanese attack. All evidence I’ve seen suggests that he would have been perfectly happy with the cessation of Japanese aggression in the far east. He certainly wanted the U.S. to enter the war, but not so that he could nationalize the economy. At the time, there were those who thought it important to save Europe. Others (your isolationist brethern) believed maintaining our neutrality was more important. Simply put, FDR fell into the former category. As for pulling us out of the depression, the war did do that, no?
If you want to bitch about the military-industrial complex of Truman and Eisenhower (and beyond), you’ll hear no argument fom me, but Roosevelt did what he had to.
A baseless assertion. The only western leader who effectively pulled his nation out of the world-wide depression of the 30’s (that I’ve heard tell of, anyway) was Hitler. Given his, err, unorthodox methods, I’d just assume have the depression last a bit longer.
“A different president,” Hoover, had three years to solve the depression before FDR took over. His attempts showed that the then traditional methods of curing recessions made nary a dent in this particular panic. You’re correct in asserting that the New Deal was an economic failure, but I see no reason to believe that any other plan coming from Washington would have succeeded.
Just sit back and let them fight it out, and let all European Jews, Slavs, Poles, and other undesirables die. (!) Our involvement in the war almost certianly saved lives. Why do you assume that American lives are inherently more valuable than European and Asian lives?
Without American intervention, either the Nazis or the Soviets would have won the war (my money would be on the Russians) and controlled all of Europe, not just “much” of it. Given your obvious distaste for the Russians in this matter, I hardly think you’d cherish the thought of the Red Army beating us to Paris instead of just Berlin. (I wouldn’t either.)
As I pointed out, it wasn’t a lose/lose situation for Western Europe. As for Eastern Europe, it is inaccurate to say that it wouldn’t matter who controlled the region. Soviet-style communism need not be homocidal Stalinism. As it is, things were bad, but not catastrophic. Nazism, not just Hitler, called for the enslavement and eventual extermination of all Slavic peoples to make way for German settlement. Do you honestly believe that political oppression and an inefficient economic model are worse than large-scale genocide?
This is rather off topic, but all of our history (the 30’s and 40’s in particular) has shown that Americans simply do not have the option of stopping the world and geting off, despite their obvious preference to the contrary. (Paraphrased from Weinberg, “World at Arms.”) I’ve touched on the reasons why here (though it’s ultimately a seperate debate).
Supposing that FDR retired in 1940 and his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, were elected, I think America would still have gotten into the war. Willkie was no isolationist; he was fully in favor of Lend-Lease to Britain. Nor was any American president simply going to sign over the Pacific to Japan; America had been struggling for an open China for years. Willkie too would have imposed an oil and steel embargo, frozen Japanese assets, etc., so Japan would still attack the U.S.
Militarily, the outcome of the war would have been the same. FDR’s influence over the military course of the war was minimal. Wisely, he relied on Marshall and the other professionals to run the war for him - an example Churchill, and for that matter Hitler, should have followed. Willkie would have quickly learned to do the same, perhaps after getting his hand burned once or twice. The Allies would have won anyway.
Two major things might have changed under Willkie.
One, would the United States still have agreed to make unconditional surrender an Allied war aim at Casablanca and Potsdam? This would have made no difference in Germany, since Hitler would not have accepted a negotiated peace even if the Allies had offered one. But in the Pacific, if we had offered terms to Japan in May 1945, especially by promising to preserve the Emperor (which we ended up doing anyway), the Japanese would have tripped over themselves running to the peace table. From one perspective this would have been a good outcome, in that the atomic bombs would not have been dropped. But it likely also would have meant that Japan would continue under a repressive militarist regime. No children roasted alive at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but plenty of innocents abducted, tortured and murdered by the kempeitai.
Two, would Willkie have fared any better at Yalta than FDR? He could hardly have done worse; Roosevelt was a dying man, losing control of his faculties, alternately manipulated by Stalin and by the strongly pro-Soviet Harry Hopkins. Still, nothing could have changed the fact that the West was dealing with Stalin from a position of weakness. Without an agreement, Stalin likely would have achieved most of the same things he achieved with the agreement. But there was no need for Britain to turn its anti-Communist POWs over to Stalin for shipment to the gulags. Nor did the West have to recognize Bierut’s paid traitors as the legitimate government of Poland. And Willkie could perhaps have persuaded Churchill to stand fast. In postwar years, Churchill pretended that he had always seen the Soviet threat and warned against it, but in reality he was almost as compliant as FDR, browbeating the Polish government-in-exile into accepting the Curzon line as Poland’s new border.
Bearing in mind that Churchill had been part of an earlier British government that had relied on the profesionals to win the Great War, and saw the mindless butcher shop that they produced, I’m not surprised that he thought there was a greater role for civilian direction of the war effort.
Danimal wrote:
AHA!! THAT’S IT!!
That’s been bugging me for years!!!
On an old Bugs Bunny cartoon filmed during World War II, Bugs discovers a miniature man with wings sticking out of his head who’s gleefully going about sabotaging an American bomber plane. Bugs whispers, “Could that have been a … gremlin?”
The gremlin jumps back into frame, and shouts in Bugs Bunny’s ear, “IT AIN’T WENDELL WILLKIE!!”.
Until this moment, I had no idea whom he was talking about.
But seriously, folks …
Danimal wrote:
This, of course, assumes that Willkie would have been re-elected to a second term in 1944.