Abstract
The United States and Japan pursued contradictory goals in the Far East during the 1930s. The Americans wanted naval superiority with Japan and the Open Door with an independent China. The Japanese wanted Washington to accept naval parity and Japanese hegemony over China. These conflicting goals eventually resulted in war.
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Notes
For a highly critical account of the Hoover administration policy toward the Manchuria crisis, see Justus D. Doenecke, When the Wicked Arise: American Opinion Makers and the Manchurian Crisis, 1931–33 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1984).
For an overview of the entire decade, see Gerald Haines, “American Myopia and the Japanese Monroe Doctrine, 1931–41,” Prologue, vol. 13 (Spring 1981) pp. 101–14.
For two very different views of C. Roosevelt’s foreign policy, see the laudatory vision of Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979);
and the derogatory opinion of Frederick W. Marks, Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988).
Arnold Offner, The Origins of the Second World War: American Foreign Policy and World Politics, 1917–1941 (New York: Praeger, 1975) p. 99.
Sadao Asada, “Japan’s ‘Special Interests’ and the Washington Conference, 1921–22,” American Historical Review, vol. 67 (October 1961) pp. 69–70.
Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Keanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) p. 80.
Quoted in Hugh de Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Marks, Wind Over Sand, p. 11; for a good account of Roosevelt’s political perspectives, see Thomas Greer, What Roosevelt Thought: The Social and Political Ideas of Franklin D. Roosevelt (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1958).
Warren Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend Lease, 1939–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969) p. 99.
For works on Roosevelt’s advisors, see John Blum, ed., From the Morgenthau Diaries, 3 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959, 1965, 1967);
John Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970);
Stanley H. Hornbeck, The United States and the Far East: Certain Fundamentals of Foreign Policy (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1942).
Waldo Heinrichs, American Ambassador: Joseph Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward (New York, NY: John Day, 1933);
Franklin D. Roosevelt, On Our Way (New York, NY: John Day, 1934).
Warren F. Kuehl, “Midwestern Newspapers and Isolationist Sentiment,” Diplomatic History, vol. 3 (Summer 1979) pp. 283–306.
See Frederick W. Marks, “Franklin Roosevelt’s Diplomatic Debut: The Myth of the Hundred Days,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 84 (Spring 1985) pp. 245–6.
For an excellent account of American policy toward Japan during this period, see Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933–38 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
For early Roosevelt views of Japan, see William L. Neumann, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Japan, 1913–33,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 22 (May 1953) pp. 143–53;
and Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Shall We Trust Japan?,” Asia, vol. 23 (July 1923) pp. 475–78, 536, 528.
For excellent accounts of Japan’s foreign policy during the 1930s, see James B. Crowley, “Japanese Army Factionalism in the Early 1930s,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 21 (May 1962) pp. 309–26;
James B. Crowley, “A Reconsideration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 22 (May 1963) pp. 277–91;
James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979) pp. 37–8.
Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Japanese Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Quoted in Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York, Vintage Books, 1985) p. 42.
See Ernest R. May, “U.S. Press Coverage of Japan, 1931–41,” in Dorothy Borg and Okimoto Shumpei, eds, Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–41 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 546–61.
Roosevelt’s speech and its aftermath have been thoroughly explored. See, Dorothy Borg, “Notes on Roosevelt’s Quarantine’ Speech,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 72 (September 1957) pp. 405–33;
John M. Haight, “Roosevelt and the Aftermath of the Quarantine Speech,” Review of Politics, vol. 24 (April 1962) pp. 233–59;
John M. Haight, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Naval Quarantine of Japan,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 40 (May 1971) pp. 203–6;
Travis Beal Jacobs, “Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech,” The Historian, vol. 24 (August 1962) pp. 483–502.
William Neumann, “Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Ideas of National Interest in Asia,” in Alexander DeConde, ed., Isolation and Security (Durham: Duke University Press, 1957) pp. 133–58.
John W. Masland, “Commercial Influence upon American Far Eastern Policy, 1937–1941,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 11 (September 1942) pp. 281–99.
Frederic R. Sanborn, Design for War: A Study of Secret Power Politics, 1937–1941 (New York: Devin-Adair, 1951) pp. 40, 43.
Quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948) pp. 290–1.
See William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–41 (New York: Harper, 1953) pp. 30–1.
Joseph C. Grew, The Turbulent Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952) vol. 2, p. 927.
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in War and Peace (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948) p. 173.
Ibid., p. 225; for good accounts of this diplomacy, see R. J. C. Butow, “The Hull-Nomura Conversations: A Fundamental Misconception,” American Historical Review, vol. 65 (July 1960) pp. 822–36.
R. J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961).
Lester H. Brune, “Considerations of Force in Cordell Hull’s Diplomacy, July 26 to November 26, 1941,” Diplomatic History, vol. 2 (Fall 1978) pp. 389–405.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969) p. 24.
Masland, “Commercial Influence,” p. 296; for other studies of the embargo, see: Irvine Anderson, “The 1941 De Facto Embargo on Oil to Japan: A Bureaucratic Reflex,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 44 (May 1975) pp. 201–31;
Jonathan Utley, “Upstairs, Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil, Exports, and Japan, 1940–41,” Prologue, vol. 8 (Spring 1976) pp. 17–28.
Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) pp. 305–11.
Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1948), vol. 2, pp. 1069–70.
James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1970) p. 157 .
For Japanese accounts that generally admit Japan’s imperial ambitions and the unwillingness to accept any diplomatic solution to the crisis short of total American acquiescence, see Shigenori Togo, The Cause of Japan, Fumihiko Togo, trans. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956);
Mamoru Shigemitsu, Japan and Her Destiny: My Struggle for Peace (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958);
Nobunaga Ike, trans. and ed., Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967).
Historians are sharply divided over whether Roosevelt engineered or drifted into America’s entry into World War II. Some argue that Roosevelt did not want or seek war. See William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940 (New York: Harper, 1952);
Donald F. Drummond, The Passing of American Neutrality, 1937–1941 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955);
C. Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom; Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–41 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985) pp. 177–82.
More recent historians believe that at some point Roosevelt favored America’s entry into the war, but differ over when. For a Roosevelt decision for war as early as 1940, see Sanborn, Design for War. For an August 1941 decision for war, see Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy; Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Whether or not he wanted war, Roosevelt periodically displayed a fatalism over its inevitability. Jablon, “Cordell Hull, His ‘Associates,’ and Relations with Japan, 1933–36.” For other balanced accounts of the reasons for war, see Borg and Okimoto, eds, Pearl Harbor as History; Offner, The Origins of the Second World War; Jonathan G. Utley, “Diplomacy in a Democracy: The United States and Japan, 1937–41,” World Affairs, vol. 139 (Fall 1976) pp. 130–40;
Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981);
Utley, Going to War with Japan; Gordon Prange, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986).
Sir George Sansom, “Liberalism in Japan,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 19 (April 1941) pp. 551–9.
Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin, “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications,” in Richard H. Ullman and Raymond Tanter, eds, Theory and Policy in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) pp. 66–7.
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© 1996 William R. Nester
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Nester, W.R. (1996). The Road to War, 1931–41. In: Power across the Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378759_4
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