The Quarantine Speech

On 5 October 1937 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke in Chicago at the opening of a new bridge on the city’s lakeshore thoroughfare, built with money from the federal public works programme. Instead of the bridge and the fight against unemployment, he spoke about the world. He warned that an “epidemic of world lawlessness” was spreading, and reminded his audience that when an epidemic of physical disease breaks out, the community agrees to quarantine the sick in order to protect the health of all. He named no country, but everyone understood that he meant Japan, which had been waging war in China for three months, as well as Italy and Germany. The speech, called the Quarantine Speech after this metaphor, was Roosevelt’s first public stand against the policy of isolation enshrined in the Neutrality Acts. It caused a storm, but it did not change American policy.

It is sometimes said that in Chicago Roosevelt outlined a “departure from neutrality”. That is too strong a verdict. The President spoke of principles rather than a programme, announced no sanctions and the very next day was insisting that he had none in mind.

The world in 1937

By the autumn of 1937 war was being fought on two continents. In Spain the civil war was raging, with Italian soldiers and German airmen fighting on the side of General Franco, and in April German and Italian aircraft had bombed Guernica. A year earlier Italy had conquered Ethiopia. Above all, however, since the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937 Japan had been waging an undeclared war against China. In August it took Beijing, from mid-August it was fighting a heavy battle for Shanghai, and its aircraft were bombing Nanjing, Canton and other cities, killing thousands of civilians. At the end of September the League of Nations condemned the bombing of open cities.

The United States watched from a distance. In 1935, 1936 and 1937 Congress passed successive Neutrality Acts, and the last of them, of 1 May 1937, became permanent law. Disillusioned by the First World War and preoccupied with the Depression, Americans did not want to hear about becoming entangled in other people’s conflicts. Roosevelt did not apply the act to China and Japan, taking advantage of the fact that neither side had declared war, because an embargo would have hit China above all. Public sympathy lay with China, but there was no readiness to act.

What Roosevelt said

The President was returning from a tour of the western states. The speech had been prepared in the State Department, but Roosevelt himself added its sharpest passages, including the image of the quarantine, without consulting the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who preferred more general language. The President described a world in which, “without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind”, bombs dropped from aircraft were killing civilians, including women and children, in which ships were being sunk by submarines and nations were meddling in the internal affairs of others. Innocent peoples and innocent nations, he said, were being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy. The peace, freedom and security of ninety per cent of humanity were being threatened by the remaining ten per cent.

He quoted a passage from James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon foretelling a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage across the world and every precious thing would be in danger. And he warned Americans that if this came to pass in other parts of the world, “let no one imagine that America will escape”, that it could expect mercy, or that the Western Hemisphere would not be attacked. Withdrawal into isolation or neutrality, he said, offered no escape from international anarchy. Peace-loving nations had to make a concerted effort to oppose the violation of treaties. “War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared,” he stressed, and he closed by saying that America hated war and hoped for peace, and therefore actively engaged in the search for peace.

What mattered most was what Roosevelt did not say. He did not explain what the quarantine was to consist of – the breaking off of relations, a trade boycott, an embargo, a naval blockade. Nor did he say who was to impose it, or against whom.

“An attitude, not a programme”

The next day, 6 October, the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva adopted a report which found that Japan was violating the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed China’s integrity, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and proposed convening a conference of the treaty’s signatories. On the same day the State Department declared that Japan’s conduct was inconsistent with these treaties. For the first time since the Stimson Doctrine of 1932, Washington openly called Japan a lawbreaker.

At the same time, at a press conference on 6 October, Roosevelt was clearly cooling tempers. When journalists asked about sanctions, he replied, according to historians’ accounts, that “sanctions” was a terrible word and that they were out of the question. The speech, in his view, expressed an attitude rather than a programme, although the United States was looking for such a programme.

The reaction at home was mixed. Many newspapers praised the President, but isolationist papers, led by William Randolph Hearst’s press empire and the Chicago Tribune, accused him of pushing the country towards war. Pacifist organisations protested, and some members of Congress warned against repeating the path that had dragged America into war in 1917. Hull later recalled that the reaction against the quarantine idea had been “quick and violent” and had set back by at least six months his efforts to win Americans over to international cooperation. Roosevelt himself is said to have told an adviser that it was a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you were trying to lead and find no one there. In Tokyo, Ambassador Joseph Grew regarded the speech as a mistake that would only make his work harder. The German and Italian press responded with sharp attacks on the President.

Nothing came of Brussels

The test of the words spoken in Chicago was the conference of the parties to the Nine-Power Treaty, convened in Brussels by Belgium on the League of Nations’ recommendation. It sat from 3 to 24 November 1937. Japan refused to take part, regarding the war in China as a bilateral matter; Germany did likewise, and Italy, which in November joined the pact with Germany and Japan, defended Tokyo’s position in Brussels. The American delegation was instructed not to take the initiative and not to allow any talk of sanctions. Britain under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not want to act without the United States, and the United States did not want to act at all. The conference ended with a declaration calling for a peaceful settlement, without any means of pressure. China was left on its own.

On the road to war

Little came of the “quarantine” in 1937. When Japanese aircraft sank the American gunboat Panay on the Yangtze on 12 December, Washington contented itself with an apology and compensation. In January 1938 the House of Representatives narrowly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have made a declaration of war conditional on a referendum. The aggressors concluded that America threatened only with words.

The speech nevertheless set the direction in which Roosevelt led the country over the next four years, cautiously, step by step and with an eye on public opinion. In 1938 the administration announced a “moral embargo” on the sale of aircraft to states that bombed civilians; in 1939 it gave notice to terminate the commercial treaty with Japan and pushed through an amendment to the Neutrality Act; and in 1940–1941 it imposed successive embargoes on scrap metal, steel and finally oil for Japan. This economic quarantine, which Roosevelt had not dared to announce in Chicago, confronted Japan in July 1941 with a choice between withdrawing from China and war. Japan chose war and on 7 December 1941 attacked Pearl Harbor. Historians still argue over whether the speech of 5 October 1937 heralded a turning point in American policy or was merely a trial balloon that showed the President how far away such a turning point still was.