The Munich Conference of September 1938 has long symbolized the fruitless “appeasement” policy by which the western democracies sought to halt German aggression in the 1930s through negotiations and concessions. At Munich, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier agreed that Germany might take part of Czechoslovakia if the German fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, agreed to make no further territorial demands. President Franklin D. Roosevelt interposed no objection. In March 1939, Germany seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began when Britain and France declared war on Germany.
The immediate context for the Munich Conference was Hitler’s demand for the cession of the Sudentenland, a region of Czechoslovakia bordering on Germany that contained some 3 million ethnic Germans—and his clear intention to take the area by force if necessary. In late September 1938, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proposed that a four-power conference involving himself, Hitler, Daladier, and Chamberlain convene in Munich, Germany, on September 29 and 30 to find a solution. On September 30, the four leaders released the Munich Agreement, which called for the Sudetenland to be handed over to Germany and for Hitler to forego additional territorial demands in Europe. Chamberlain came home to cheering crowds in London after the conference, claiming he achieved “peace in our time.” More realistically, Winston Churchill, who would succeed Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940, called the Munich Agreement a “total and unmitigated defeat.”
The United States, reflecting the influence of isolationists who had helped produce the Neutrality Acts of the mid - and late 1930s, played no significant role in the Czech crisis or the Munich Conference. Although he had privately counseled British resistance to Germany, Roosevelt on hearing about plans for the Munich Conference sent Chamberlain a cable, saying, “Good man.” The president also assured Hitler that “the United States has no political involvements in Europe, and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.” public opinion polls showed that the American public overwhelmingly approved this hands-off policy; and in any case, the United States had neither the military power nor the diplomatic leverage to influence events in Europe. The nation could only remind the European powers of the toothless Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the “international kiss” that had supposedly outlawed war, and urge a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
Privately, however, Roosevelt was appalled by the Munich Conference and deeply disturbed by the course of events as Germany, Japan, and Italy, soon to be joined in the Axis alliance, pursued their paths of aggression. By 1939, the president began to increase American defense spending, to work to provide support for Britain and France should war come, and to forge a more interventionist American foreign policy, including revision of the Neutrality Acts. A symbol of the weakness of the western democracies in the 1930s, the Munich Conference also marked a turning point of sorts, not only feeding Hitler’s appetite for aggression but clarifying his intentions and leading to a more active and anti-Axis American defense and foreign policy.
Further reading: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Robert Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965); Arnold A. Offner, American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).
—Michael J. Leonard
Murray, Philip (1886-1952) labor leader Philip Murray, a major labor leader of the 1930s and 1940s, became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1940 and led the CIO until his death in 1952. He also headed the Steelworkers Organizing Committee from 1936 to 1942 and then served as the first president of the United Steelworkers of America from 1942 to 1952.
The son of Irish Catholic parents, Murray was born in Scotland on May 25, 1886. Murray’s father, a coal miner
Who became president of a local union, imbued in his son an appreciation for social and political LIBERALISM, later reflected in his efforts to advance the lot of the working class. In 1902, Murray and his father left Scotland and came to America, where they settled in the coal-rich Pittsburgh area. Murray began working in the mines at age 16. He lost his job after a dispute with a weighmaster two years later, and 600 men followed Murray out of the mines on a strike that lasted four weeks. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the strike led Murray to become involved with organized labor. He was named to the international executive board of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) in 1912, served on the War Labor Board during World War I, and by 1920, at age 34, was a vice president of the UMW.
The Great Depression and the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought Murray to national prominence, and he joined the ranks of other notable Irish Americans involved in the rise of industrial unionism. When John L. Lewis of the UMW and other leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed the Committee for Industrial Organization in 1935, Lewis asked Murray to head the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to organize the steel industry, and the UMW provided money and manpower for the effort. The SWOC won recognition from the powerful U. S. Steel Corporation in March 1937 following the sit-down strikes in the automobile industry that led General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers.
But Murray and the SWOC encountered difficulties with the so-called Little Steel firms (including Republic, Bethlehem, and others) that resisted unionization. Perhaps the worst conflict came in the “Memorial Day Massacre” in 1937 at a plant of the Republic Steel Company when police opened fire on union sympathizers, killing 10 men (seven of whom were shot in the back) and wounding 30 others, including one woman and three children. In all, 18 steelworkers died in organizing efforts during the summer of 1937, but Little Steel avoided unionization until the early 1940s.
Murray gradually surpassed Lewis’s influence in the labor movement, and, by 1940, a rift had developed between the old friends. Lewis supported Wendell L. Willkie, the Republican nominee for president in the election of 1940, while Murray and most other CIO leaders continued to support Roosevelt. Keeping his promise to resign the CIO presidency if Roosevelt won, Lewis stepped down after the election, paving the way for Murray to succeed him.
During World War II, Murray (now president of both the United Steelworkers of America and the CIO, called for increases in production and controls on the nation’s economy, although he did not support wage controls and continued to push throughout the war for increased wages for workers. He did agree to a no-strike pledge in order to avoid strikes that would harm production levels. Lewis rejected upholding the no-strike pledge, proving less cooperative with industry during wartime economic mobilization than Murray.
After the war, Murray successfully negotiated substantial wage increases for labor, forged even stronger links between the labor movement and the Democratic Party, played an active role in shaping legislative priorities in Washington, and led the United Steelworkers in three national strikes in which workers successfully sought pensions and union security. Murray also worked in the postwar years to purge the CIO of Communists, who dominated several unions. Philip Murray died of a heart attack in San Francisco, November 9, 1952, at the age of 66.
Further reading: Ronald Schatz, “Philip Murray and the Subordination of the Labor Unions to the United States Government” in Labor Leaders in America, edited by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
—Joseph C. Gutberlet
World History
