FIGHTING WORLD WAR II ★^865Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a
bitch,” FDR said of Somoza.
However, as the international crisis deepened in the 1930s, the Roosevelt
administration took steps to counter German influence in Latin America by
expanding hemispheric trade and promoting respect for American culture. Nel-
son Rockefeller, the head of an office that hoped to expand cultural relations in
the hemisphere, sent the artists of the American Ballet Caravan and the NBC
Symphony Orchestra on Latin American tours. This was a far different approach
to relations with Central and South America than the military interventions of
the first decades of the century.
The Road to War
Ominous developments in Asia and Europe quickly overshadowed events in
Latin America. By the mid-1930s, it seemed clear that the rule of law was disin-
tegrating in international relations and that war was on the horizon. In 1931,
seeking to expand its military and economic power in Asia, Japan invaded Man-
churia, a province of northern China. Six years later, its troops moved farther
into China. When the Japanese overran the city of Nanjing, they massacred an
estimated 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians.
An aggressive power threatened Europe as well. After brutally consolidating
his rule in Germany, Adolf Hitler embarked on a campaign to control the entire
continent. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, he feverishly pursued German
rearmament. In 1936, he sent troops to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized
zone between France and Germany established after World War I. The failure of
Britain, France, and the United States to oppose this action convinced Hitler that
the democracies could not muster the will to halt his aggressive plans. Italian
leader Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, a movement similar to Hitler’s
Nazism, invaded and conquered Ethiopia. When General Francisco Franco in
1936 led an uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain,
Hitler poured in arms, seeing the conflict as a testing ground for new weap-
onry. In 1939, Franco emerged victorious from a bitter civil war, establishing yet
another fascist government in Europe. As part of a campaign to unite all Europe-
ans of German origin in a single empire, Hitler in 1938 annexed Austria and the
Sudetenland, an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter,
he gobbled up all of that country.
As the 1930s progressed, Roosevelt became more and more alarmed at Hit-
ler’s aggression as well as his accelerating campaign against Germany’s Jews,
whom the Nazis stripped of citizenship and property and began to deport to
concentration camps. In a 1937 speech in Chicago, FDR called for international
action to “quarantine” aggressors. But no further steps followed. Roosevelt had
What steps led to American participation in World War II?