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The 1930's In 1932, the book reviews were collected into a hardback volume a custom that continued for three more decades and finally culminated in a massive Foreign Affairs 50-Year Bibliography (1972) picking the still-significant books published over this period and reevaluating them at length. This was a project to which Ham Armstrong was particularly dedicated, and is another of his monuments. But of course, by 1933 the world itself was in terrible trouble, with the Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the consolidation of Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. It was natural that the idealism of the first decade of Foreign Affairs with no less than 30 articles dealing with the work of the League of Nations, and 32 on disarmament problems should give way to steadily growing concern and resolve over the threat especially from Nazi Germany. Armstrong himself was in the forefront of this transformation. Always following European politics closely, he managed to be in Germany in the spring of 1933 and interviewed a large number of people, including a long monologue from Adolf Hitler himself. On his return, he wrote a short book about his impressions, which were dire. Summing these up in his memoir, he wrote: I questioned most pessimistically both the hope that Hitler, armed, would draw back from the ultimate test of wills and the thesis of many that his reign would prove to be only a flash in the pan. A people had in sober and awful truth disappeared. These impressions grew rapidly to the conviction that Germany, once rearmed, would be a tremendous threat to the peace of Europe and to the US itself. By this time, Armstrong had renewed a friendship from Princeton days with Leading Character No. 4, Allen W. Dulles, who had tried the Foreign Service and wound up a lawyer in New York. Later much criticized for decisions in his last years as head of the CIA and as a member of the Warren Commission, the Allen Dulles of the 1930s and 1940s, and also of the 1950s when I had the honor to work under him on the national estimates side of the Agency, was in key respects like Armstrong, gregarious, wide-ranging, open to new ideas and people, and nonpartisan. That he was of his time in believing that in the face of a Stalinist Soviet Union (and before that Hitler's Germany), it was moral and necessary to use clandestine methods will not, I hope, preclude a fair judgment of his life and service. At any rate, Allen Dulles was an extremely active leader in the affairs of the Council from the late 1920s into the 1930s and again in the early postwar period before he went into CIA at the time of the Korean War. Between 1927 and 1947 he wrote eleven articles for Foreign Affairs. His papers are also at Princeton and a priceless source for the Council and Foreign Affairs as well as myriad official subjects. In the late 1930s, Armstrong and Allen Dulles wrote together a book called Can America Stay Neutral?. It was a short argument centered on the issue of neutrality and, as the title suggests, contending in effect that this was rapidly becoming an untenable position for the United States in the face of Hitler's policies. Over the next three years, the magazine came as close as it ever did to becoming a confirmed advocate for a particular school of thought, interventionism in the developing European war that broke out formally in September 1939. Few isolationist articles appeared in Foreign Affairs, and there was a drumfire of strong articles about the dangers of Hitler, notably by the famous columnist Dorothy Thompson. Concurrently, as the research of the German scholar Michael Wala has shown, a great many individuals who were Council members were also leading figures in interventionist organizations, first the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and then, beginning in early 1941, the Fight for Freedom committee, urging that the United States become directly and militarily involved in the war against Germany and be prepared to fight militaristic Japan. Armstrong himself never joined either of these organizations, but his recent collaborator Allen Dulles was a conspicuous member of the Fight for Freedom committee, and those who knew Armstrong had little doubt where his sympathies lay. As we shall see in a moment, however, his main activity once the war began in Europe in September 1939 was in another direction. In the period of the 1930s, the Council itself substantially expanded both its range of publications and its outreach beyond New York City. Beginning in the late 1920s, and regularly through the thirties, the Council published a Political Handbook of the world, compiled primarily by the executive director of this period, Walter Mallory. This gave full current details of governments and key figures throughout the world, and was for many years a leading reference source for journalists and others.
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