By Edwin Cooney
I guess you are pretty old if you recall announcer Fred
Foy’s weekly invitation at the beginning of “The Lone Ranger” episodes on the
radio to “....return with us now, to those thrilling days of yesteryear.” If so, welcome to the club! If not, lucky you! However, that’s exactly what I’m inviting you
to do this week.
“Yesteryear,” this week’s focus, is the year 1938 which
began on a Saturday. President Franklin Roosevelt
was in his second term. America’s
population was about 129,000,000. The average income in 1938 was $1,730,
average rent was $27 a month, a new car cost $763, hamburger was 13 cents a
pound, and a new house cost $3,930.
Nineteen thirty-eight, like every other year, had its share
of memorable events. Future baseball
Hall of Famer Willie McCovey was born on Monday, January 10th and
the great “attorney for the damned” Clarence Darrow died on Sunday, March 13th.
The year 1938 was filled with challenges and crises. On Wednesday, June 22nd heavyweight
champion Joe Louis (a black man) knocked out the only man who had ever beaten
him, Adolf Hitler’s favorite Aryan boxer, Max Schmeling, in the first round at
Yankee Stadium.
On Thursday, July 14th, Howard Hughes set a new record
flying around the world in 91 hours.
Flier Douglas Corrigan, who was denied the proper license to fly to
Europe by the government, nevertheless landed in Dublin, Ireland on Monday,
July 18th. He explained himself by
insisting that he had meant to fly from New York to California but mistakenly flew
eastward instead. Hence, for the rest of
his life he would be remembered derisively as “Wrong Way Corrigan.”
The same day Louis defeated Schmeling, Congress passed the Chandler
Act which established procedures making it possible under Chapter Eleven for
citizens and corporations facing bankruptcy to settle their debts rather than
face liquidation of their businesses.
It was on Saturday, June 25th, that FDR signed
the Wagner Act also known as the Fair Labor Standards Act. It permanently
legitimatized the rights of workers to unionize and seek fair wages and safe
working conditions.
Wednesday, September 21st saw an unusually severe
hurricane make landfall in New England causing some 700 deaths and millions of dollars
in property damage. The storm hit
without warning from the National Weather Service and some 63,000 people were
left homeless.
On Sunday night, October 30th, NBC scared
millions of Americans by broadcasting Orson Welles’ play “War of the Worlds,”
as though it were a news story. After
all, the next day was Halloween, wasn’t it?
On Thursday night, November 10th, (the eve of the
twentieth anniversary of Armistice Day), Kate Smith sang Irving Berlin’s “God
Bless America” on her NBC radio show for the first time. However, the crisis that made all other
events seem small by comparison, due to its long lasting effect on the give and
take of future international diplomacy, occurred 75 years ago today, September
30th, 1938, in Munich, Germany.
To avoid the threat of immediate war, in the “wee hours” of
that Friday, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, French Premier Edouard
Daladier, Italian Duce Benito Mussolini and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler
agreed to cede the northern section of the twenty-year-old Czech Republic to
Germany. (Czech President Edvard Beneš wasn’t
even invited to the Munich conference.) The location for this four-power
conference was the Führerbau (or Führer’s headquarters). In return, Hitler agreed to make no
additional territorial demands in Europe.
Prime Minister Chamberlain’s proclamation upon his return to London that
he’d achieved “...peace in our time” proved a pathetic failure in less than six
months. The immediate reaction outside of Czechoslovakia was very popular although
there were misgivings in some very significant quarters.
The most long lasting effect of the Munich agreement, way
beyond even the devastation of World War II, was its anti-appeasement
lesson. Most people are convinced that
the two reasons Neville Chamberlain conceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler were his
fear of war and his naiveté. Even worse,
tradition insists Chamberlain was outfoxed by Hitler. I, too, had accepted that scenario until I
read former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s biography entitled “A Journey: My
Political Life.”
Blair insists that Chamberlain wasn’t fooled by Hitler’s
charm nor did he fail to recognize Hitler’s “badness.” According to Mr. Blair, Chamberlain
fully understood Hitler’s evil madness.
However, what Chamberlain had no way of knowing, insists
Blair who has carefully read Chamberlain’s diary covering that time, was how
extensive Hitler’s badness and madness might be. Thus, Chamberlain sought to
contain Hitler thereby allowing him to simply remain in place. As times changed so would Germany, Mr. Chamberlain
clearly believed. It has since been
revealed that there was a scheme at that very time in the German military to
oust Hitler if he gave the go ahead to move militarily into
Czechoslovakia. The scheme was led by
General Ludwig Beck, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, who had written a memo to Hitler
back in May warning him that Czech forces along the German Czech frontier were
exceedingly powerful and could be injurious to the security of the German Reich. Although forced to resign his post, Beck,
ironically, lost the essential momentum for his scheme when the Munich
agreement was made and Hitler could walk into Czechoslovakia unmolested. (Note
that Ludwig Beck’s opposition to Hitler was more practical than moral. Still,
the courageous Beck led the famous July 20th 1944 bomb plot that
nearly killed the Führer. Obviously, Beck had to pay for that
plot with his life.)
Tony Blair believes Chamberlain’s mistake was to ask himself
the wrong question: “Can Hitler be contained?”
The question Chamberlain should have asked according to Blair was
whether Fascism was sufficiently strong and dangerous enough that it should be immediately
uprooted. Nor does Blair take
Chamberlain off the hook. After all, leaders, Blair writes, must always ask the
fundamental question. Chamberlain’s
question wasn’t naive, it was simply too narrow.
Whether you and I buy the traditional interpretation of what
took place in Munich 75 years ago is less important, I think, than the truth of
a much larger reality. No tactic,
whether it be called containment, appeasement or aggression, is always either
wise or foolish. No American president,
not even Ronald Reagan, sought to overthrow Communism. Although some political conservatives called
it appeasement, American foreign policy was about containment. Not even aggression always has its “price.” After
all, Presidents Reagan and George.H.W.Bush invaded Granada and Panama with
minimum cost just as the Soviets invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia with minimum
consequences. Between 1947 and 1991, America
and its allies contained Communism which is exactly what Chamberlain sought to
do with Nazism and Fascism. As I see
it, Munich taught us no lesson nor established no guide for handling
international crises. For me, however,
Munich represents a larger truth than any lesson can possibly teach. The successful overcoming of every crisis
requires the application of principles that respond best to the fundamental
question that the crisis is asking.
With the political climate of 1938 Europe teetering on the
edge of war, the drama of the Munich conference of Yesteryear 1938 was
certainly thrilling. If only the “masked
man and his Indian companion Tonto” had been available to prevail, what a
different world today would surely be!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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