Bret Stephens wonders, in the Wall Street Journal, what possible benefit might have incurred if Columbia University had invited Adolf Hilter to speak in 1939, just prior to his invasion of Poland. It’s tempting to give such discussion the back of my hand, as it seems intended to create some kind of false equivalency between the undisputed dictator of Nazi Germany and the president of Iran, who has no control over his country’s armed forces. A better thought experiment would involve not Hitler, but his Minister of Interior Wilhelm Frick.
Stephens concludes:
Let’s assume, however, that Hitler had used the occasion of his speech not just to dissimulate but to really air his mind, to give vent not just to Germany’s historical grievances but to his own apocalyptic ambitions….So there is Adolf Hitler on our imagined stage, ranting about the soon-to-be-fulfilled destiny of the Aryan race. And his audience of outstanding Columbia men are mostly appalled, as they should be. But they are also engrossed, and curious, and if it occurs to some of them that the man should be arrested on the spot they don’t say it. Nor do they ask, “How will we come to terms with his world?” Instead, they wonder how to make him see “reason,” as reasonable people do.
In just a few years, some of these men will be rushing a beach at Normandy or caught in a firefight in the Ardennes. And the fact that their ideas were finer and better than Hitler’s will have done nothing to keep them and millions of their countrymen from harm, and nothing to get them out of its way.
If, as Stephens postulates, Adolf Hitler had come to New York City in the summer of 1939 and explained exactly what he intended to do, it would have changed history. As Jack Goldsmith details in his new book, The Terror Presidency, Franklin Roosevelt was compelled to resort to illegality in order to overcome Congress’ isolatationism and provide Great Britain with fifty outdated destroyers they needed at a desperate time.
Congress in 1935 enacted the first of several neutrality laws that barred the United States from sending arms, munitions, credits, and most other forms of support to any of the belligerents in the growing wars in Europe and Asia…as Germany gobbled ip countries in central Europe and Japan invaded Chine, Roosevelt believed (as he said in his 1937 “Quarantine” speech) that there was no escape from the growing global wars “through mere isolation or neutrality,” and that only “positive endeavors” could preserve peace.
But American isolationism remained steadfast, and Roosevelt’s weak attempts to loosen neutrality restrictions to aid countries that opposed Germany and Japan failed.
