f reedom of a ction 181point where the destruction contributed to the reduction of the war-
fi ghting capacity of either enemy.
Prisoner of Events
Roosevelt initiated planning for peace almost as soon as the United
States entered the Second World War. With a peace-building agenda at
least as ambitious as Wilson’s had been, Roosevelt enjoyed important
advantages over his predecessor. By preference and circumstance,
Wilson had tried to build a postwar order largely by his own hand. He
insisted on tight control over diplomatic initiatives; he also had a very
modest government organization on which to draw. Roosevelt recog-
nized that the tasks of reconstructing the world after the most
destructive war humanity had ever suff ered would far exceed what he
alone could manage. Fortunately, the state apparatus at his disposal had
grown enormously during his time in the White House, first as an
outgrowth of the New Deal and then as a result of sustained wartime
mobilization. Th e military general staff organization, for example, had
matured into a complex, specialized structure capable of managing
extraordinary planning challenges.
But that enlarged government structure also introduced a political
complication. Planning for the postwar order provoked a fundamental
division, with the military and conservatives on one side and New
Dealers on the other. Looking to the end of the war, the former group
favored a military occupation of Germany and Japan for a relatively
short period, which implied a less thorough eff ort to remake social
institutions. The New Dealers, by contrast, called for more
far-reaching social engineering to uproot institutions and traditions
that seemed the underlying source of militarism. (Although the
respective positions paralleled domestic debates over the limits of gov-
ernment, some participants broke form—Cordell Hull, for example,
was a domestic conservative who wanted extensive remaking of
Germany and Japan.)
Interestingly, the arguments about how to treat the vanquished
enemies echoed those at the end of the Civil War. Th en, Radical Repub-
licans favored broad eff orts to uproot the old slaveholding order and
promote black political inclusion, while Republican moderates and war