Brief Bibliography and Literature

Review

Understudied Statesman

Despite the recent increase in interest in World War II, Hull’s role has escaped close scrutiny. There have been few studies of Hull and his role in forming United States economic and foreign policy. The entirety of Hull’s career as a public figure has received little attention from historians over the past fifty years. Currently there are only two major biographies of Hull, Harold Hinton’s Cordell Hull: A Biography and Julius Pratt’s Cordell Hull, 1933 – 1944. Historians greeted Hinton’s work, published in 1942, with mixed feelings. One reviewer noted that it was a “journalist’s biography” and lacked both the source base and critical analysis to provide a truly useful text for historians to fully understand Hull. Julius Pratt’s biography, published in 1964, only focuses on Hull’s years as Secretary of State. These shortcomings, coupled with the amount of time that has passed since its publication and the opening of additional records have rendered Hinton’s biography irrelevant. It is notable, however, that Pratt was the first historian to use Hull’s paper collections, albeit ineffectively. Historians lauded Pratt for his extensive use of the personal diaries of Hull’s associates, including Henry Stimson, J. Pierrepont Moffat and Adolf Berle. Pratt presented an already familiar picture of Hull as a cautious man placed into the State Department for political reasons, not his expertise in foreign affairs. This became the standard interpretation for historians who stressed the length of Hull’s tenure instead of the quality of his service. While Pratt was congratulated for the amount of research he had done for this work, it was noted that the biography actually added little to our understanding of Hull.

The early works on Hull (including his own Memoirs) left gaps in our historical knowledge of his contributions. Most significant was the absence of much discussion of his Congressional career. Currently there is no monograph that examines Hull’s career in Congress. A 1965 masters thesis by Joseph Leland Johnson at the University of Tennessee, entitled The Congressional Career of Cordell Hull, has been the only work produced on this period of Hull’s life. Senator William H. Frist and J. Lee Annis, Jr., produced a short work, Tennessee Senators 1911 – 2001: Portraits of Leadership in a Century of Change, on senators from Tennessee in which a brief sketch of Hull’s Congressional career was given. In addition to ignoring his important service in Congress, especially in formulating fiscal policy, no real scholarship has been done on his service in the state legislature or his work as state judge.

The primary focus of historians has been on Hull’s career as a statesman. Generally works on this topic have fallen into three distinct categories: general assessments of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration, examinations of the development of the Good Neighbor policy and studies of American diplomacy with Japan immediately prior to World War II. The most comprehensive treatment of Roosevelt’s foreign policy and Hull’s place in creating that policy has been Robert Dallek’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (1979, revision 1995), Irwin Gellman’s Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (1995), Warren Kimball’s The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (1991), Lloyd Gardner’s Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (1964) and Gaddis Smith’s American Diplomacy During the Second World War (1965) . Dallek’s work presents a picture of American foreign policy in which FDR reigned supreme, at least after 1939. Prior to that time, Dallek argues that domestic issues garnered all of Roosevelt’s attention and so he left foreign policy in the hands of men like Hull. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy is representative of the standard line of inquiry in to the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration. Warren Kimball follows Dallek’s lead in The Juggler by casting the spotlight onto Roosevelt. Kimball seeks to explain, unlike Dallek, the ideological motivations that drove FDR’s development of American foreign policy during World War II but still sees him as the primary actor in the story. Hull is granted more of a role by Kimball who points out that Hull’s own ideas on internationalism meshed well with Roosevelt’s and that both men often arrived at the same conclusion to foreign policy problems, though both often sought to remedy these problems by very different means. Similarly, Gaddis Smith’s brief synthesis on American diplomacy during World War II concentrates solely on the issue of American relations with Great Britain and the Soviet Union as represented through the relations and visions of the Big Three. Lloyd Gardner’s Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy grants Hull the greatest role in helping to formulate American foreign policy. In the style of William Appleman Williams, Gardner stresses the important role that economics played in American foreign policy under Roosevelt. Gardner’s economic focus is very telling in that it represents the only time that Hull is given equal attention to Roosevelt in the formation of policy. When economics are not a primary focus, Hull slips into the background of the major historical works on American diplomacy under Roosevelt.

The second major category of inquiry concerning Hull and American foreign policy has been on the development of the Good Neighbor policy during the 1930s. This aspect of Hull’s time as Secretary of State has received the most attention of historians. Numerous works exist which cover the development and implementation of the Good Neighbor policy and the primary role that Hull played in its creation. Some examples of these monographs include Irwin F. Gellman's Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933 – 1945 (1979), Frederick B. Pike's FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (1995), Bryce Wood's The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (1961), Randall Bennett Woods The Roosevelt Foreign Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor”: The United States and Argentina, 1941 – 1945 (1979) and Edward Guerrant's Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy (1950). Even in this area, however, there is a historiographic split over focusing simply on FDR or granting Hull a central part in the tale. Gellman maintains that FDR was the primary architect of the Good Neighbor policy and its decline can be linked to his death in 1945. Hull is nowhere to be found in Gellman’s story. Woods’ case study details how FDR, along with Sumner Welles and other “Latin Americanists” in the State Department handled the issue of Argentine neutrality during World War II. Hull again is a minor character, often only discussed when his views of policy ideas clashed with the President’s or Welles.’ Opposed to this approach is Frederick Pike’s work that argues that the development of the Good Neighbor policy was a collaborative effort between FDR and Hull’s State Department. Edward Guerrant’s work adopts a more institutional, rather than personal, approach in looking at the Good Neighbor policy. His emphasis on the series of meetings between Hull and his opposites that took place throughout the late 1930s places Hull in a central role but does not focus on the singular contributions that he made to the Good Neighbor policy. In general works on America’s Good Neighbor Policy have ignored Hull when the record demonstrates that he was fully active in its creation.

In the historical work on America’s relationship with Japan before World War II, Hull finally emerges as a central active figure in Roosevelt’s administration. This approach is best seen in Waldo Heinrichs’ Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry Into World War II (1988) and Jonathan Utley’s Going to War With Japan, 1937 – 1941 (1985). In Heinrichs’ work, Hull and Roosevelt are shown to be almost in lockstep on important issues of policy. Heinrichs does point out that Roosevelt often took the lead on certain policy issues but left Hull to handle large issues, such as the developing relationship with the Soviets and the ongoing negotiations with Japan. Utley seconds many of Heinrichs’ points, presenting a picture of Hull as the primary decision maker concerning the American stance towards Japan. Utley bases much of his discussion of Hull on the idea that it was the Secretary of State’s commitment to an ideology of free trade and respect for international law that led him to adopt such a hard line stance against Japan. However, Utley also shows a more complex Hull than other historians by stressing the lengths Hull went to in order to avoid an open break with the Japanese any earlier than December 1941.

After Hull stepped down as Secretary of State in 1944 for health reasons, he committed himself to working towards the creation of a new international body that he hoped would prevent any future wars on the same scale as World War II. Out of this commitment to an international body emerged the United Nations. Currently there is only one monograph that examines this aspect of Hull’s career. Douglas Brinkley and Townsend Hoopes’ FDR and the Creation of the United Nations (1997) is a traditional narrative account of the creation of the U.N. which details the role Hull played in creating it. Much like his early career, this final stage of Hull’s life has received insufficient scholarly attention.