One of Roosevelt’s first acts was to appeal to the belligerents to refrain from bombing civilian populations. Revulsion against the bombing of cities had grown in the United States since at least the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1937.1198 When Spanish Fascists bombed Barcelona in March 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had condemned the atrocity publicly: “No theory of war can justify such conduct,” he told reporters. “ . . . I feel that I am speaking for the whole American people.”1199 In June the Senate passed a resolution condemning the “inhuman bombing of civilian populations.”
