FOR FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT THERE had been the shock of Pearl Harbor, then the sense of relief that the uncertainty was over at last, then the growing alarm and agony about the extent of the losses. All this had been followed by a calm acceptance of the fact of war. Congress voted for war thirty-three minutes after the President finished his address: only one Representative voted Nay. The Great Debate was adjourned, the isolationists suddenly stilled, the domestic strife seemingly over—as was the struggle within Roosevelt’s mind and soul. No need now for misgivings or recriminations. Only one fact mattered: the United States was at war. Yet it was only half a war. What would Germany do? The President would not take the initiative; here, too, he wanted the American people to be presented with the fact of war. But Berlin, aside from exultation in the press over the devastating Japanese blow, remained ominously quiet. Was it possible, after all Washington’s elaborate efforts to fight first in Europe, with only a holding action in the Pacific, that the United States would be left with only a war in the Far East?
The answer lay mainly with one man: Adolf Hitler. He had hoped that Japan would join his war against Russia; failing that, he was eager that Japan go to war against the Anglo-Americans in the Pacific—in which event he would join that war, too. The crucial strategic question now was whether Japan in turn would attack the Soviet Union; otherwise Germany’s mortal enemy, Russia, and Axis ally, Japan, would be left without a second front. For a quarter-century Hitler had warned against a two-front war; would he take on the most powerful democracy in the world and increase his own two-front gamble without pressuring Tokyo to help out against Russia? And if Tokyo resisted the idea, would Hitler honor his promise to intervene?
Britain’s stand was never in doubt. Churchill leapt at the chance to fulfill his promise that if the United States and Japan went to war the British declaration would follow within the hour. It took the members of Parliament longer than that to return to London and take their seats, but on the afternoon of December 8 Churchill redeemed his promise. He warned Parliament of a long and hard ordeal. But “we have at least four-fifths of the population of the globe upon our side. We are responsible for their safety and for their future.” Both houses of Parliament voted unanimously for war against Japan. Roosevelt had wanted Churchill to wait until Congress could act, but the Prime Minister moved so quickly that Roosevelt’s message did not arrive in time. Britain was formally at war with Japan several hours before the United States was. The relations between the Atlantic Allies had already changed. When someone at a British staff meeting the day after Pearl Harbor took the same cautious approach to America as when its intervention was in doubt, Churchill spoke up with a wicked leer in his eye.
“Oh, that is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!”
While waiting tensely on Hitler the President rallied his nation to the job ahead. Even under the pressure of crisis he would not abandon his regular press conference on the ninth—though the newspapermen would get “damn little” from him, he warned Early. The reporters filed in slowly because each one had to be checked by the Secret Service; during the lull Roosevelt joked with May Craig about her being “frisked” and announced he would hire a female agent to do the job.
He gave the hungry reporters a few tidbits. There had been an attack that morning on Clark Field in the Philippines, he told them, and he had met with SPAB and agreed on both a speeding up of existing production and an expansion of the whole program. The President saved his main remarks for a fireside chat that evening. He started by reviewing a decade of aggression, culminating in the Japanese attack. It was all of one pattern.
“We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.
“So far, the news has been all bad. We have suffered a serious set-back in Hawaii. Our forces in the Philippines, which include the brave people of that Commonwealth, are taking punishment, but are defending themselves vigorously. The reports from Guam and Wake and Midway Islands are still confused, but we must be prepared for the announcement that all these three outposts have been seized.
“The casualty lists of these first few days will undoubtedly be large.…It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war.” But the United States could accept no result but victory, final and complete.
Roosevelt still had to deal with the awkward fact that the Nazis had not yet declared war—and might not. He simply asserted that Germany and Italy “consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” For weeks, the President said, Germany had been telling Japan that if it came in, it would receive the “complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area” and that if it did not, it would gain nothing.
“That is their simple and obvious grand strategy. And that is why the American people must realize that it can be matched only with similar grand strategy. We must realize for example that Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya; that any German success against the Caucasus is inevitably an assistance to Japan in her operations against the Dutch East Indies; that a German attack against Algiers or Morocco opens the way to a German attack against South America, and the Canal….”
Roosevelt’s White House was now in battle uniform, but in its own casual way. The bright light under the portico no longer shone at night; Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, went shopping for blackout curtains; gas masks were handed out and put aside. Morgenthau, who controlled the Secret Service, ordered the White House guard doubled. He also wanted to ring the grounds with soldiers and to place light tanks at the entrances, but Roosevelt demurred. No tanks, no men in uniform inside the fence, and only one soldier about every hundred feet outside it. Work was hastily begun on a special air-raid shelter in the vault of the Treasury, but the President did not take this seriously either. He told Morgenthau he would go down there only if he could play poker with the Secretary’s hoard of gold.
Tuesday passed, and Wednesday—still no declaration from Berlin. But by now Hitler had made up his mind and was simply waiting to stage his announcement. After receiving the news of Pearl Harbor at his headquarters behind the bleeding Russian front, he had flown back to Berlin during the night of December 8-9. He would declare war on the United States; he would not demand that Japan intervene against Russia. His reasoning was, as usual, a combination of rational calculation and personal emotion. He could not bluff Tokyo, for Roosevelt had been so provocative that a German-American war was inevitable anyway. There was little that he could offer Japan in the Pacific struggle and hence little he could threaten to withhold. Japan could not wound the Soviet Union mortally from the east; Stalin had thousands of miles to trade off in Siberia. It was better that Japan focus its efforts in the Pacific, and since the war had become global anyway, the stronger the Japanese effort in that ocean, the better for Hitler in the Atlantic, where he hoped to cut off American war supply to Britain and Russia. Above and beyond all this, though, was Hitler’s xenophobia and racism. He did not need the racially inferior Japanese to help him beat Russia, and he had only hatred and contempt for Americans, half Judaized, half Negrified, and certainly not a warrior race.
For months the Führer had publicly kept his temper in the face of Roosevelt’s threats and name-calling. Now he could pour out his hatred. On December 11 he appeared before his puppet Reichstag, assembled in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House. He began by denouncing “that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war….
“I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was…. First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack—in the approved manner of an old Freemason….
“A world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” He dwelt on the contrast between them: in the Great War Roosevelt had a pleasant job, while the Führer had been an ordinary soldier; Roosevelt had remained in the Upper Ten Thousand, while Hitler had returned from the war as poor as before; after the war Roosevelt had tried his hand at financial speculation, while Hitler lay in the hospital. Roosevelt as President had not brought the slightest improvement to his country. Strengthened by the Jews all around him, he turned to war as a way of diverting attention from his failures at home.
The German nation wanted only its rights. “It will secure for itself this right even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it….
“I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American chargé d’affaires today, and the following—” The rest of Hitler’s words were drowned out in applause as the Deputies sprang to their feet. That afternoon Ribbentrop coldly handed the American Chargé d’Affaires Germany’s declaration of war and dismissed him. Later in the day the three Axis nations declared their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the Anglo-Americans were beaten and not to make a separate peace. The President sent written messages to Congress asking that a state of war be recognized between Germany and Italy and the United States. Not one member of Congress voted against the war resolutions.
The war news from the Pacific was almost all bad. The Japanese were following their Pearl Harbor strike with lightning thrusts in the Philippines, Guam, Midway, Wake Island, in Kota Bahru, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong. The small, almost defenseless garrison on Guam faced impossible odds. Marines on Wake beat off the first Japanese landing, but the Pacific fleet was too crippled to send help, and it was clear that the Japanese would return. After smashing Clark Field, near Manila, enemy planes were striking at Cavite naval base. The Japanese, with nearly absolute freedom of naval and air movement, were rushing troops and arms west, south, and east.
From the Japan Times & Advertiser, December 20, 1941, courtesy of the Japan Times
The most crushing news of all arrived in Washington on the tenth. Japanese bombers from Saigon, catching the Prince of Wales and the Repulse at sea without air cover, had bombed and torpedoed the great ships to the bottom. In London, Churchill twisted and writhed in bed as the import of the news sank in on him: the Japanese Navy was supreme from the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific.
For Roosevelt and his military chiefs the long-dreaded predicament was now fact: cut to the bone to help its allies, the nation’s Army and Navy suddenly had to guard dozens of vital sectors. Rumors spread that Japanese warships were headed back to Hawaii, to Panama, even to California. Frantic calls for protection came in from coastal cities. The Army and Navy dared not be caught napping a second time. For a while all was improvisation and inadequacy. Antiaircraft regiments had to be sent to the West Coast without most of their guns. Aviation schools were stripped to fill out combat groups. A convoy of five ships, halfway to the Philippines with infantry, artillery, munitions, and seventy dive bombers and pursuit planes, was ordered back to Hawaii. But Stimson and Marshall, anxious to buck up MacArthur in his travail, appealed to the President, who asked the Navy chiefs to reconsider their decision. The convoy was rerouted to Brisbane.
During these days Roosevelt was never seen to lose his air of grave imperturbability, punctuated by moments of relief and laughter. He not only kept cool; he watched himself keep cool. He took the time to write to Early a curious memo noting the many comments that “the President seems to be taking the situation of extreme emergency in his stride, that he is looking well and that he does not seem to have any nerves.” People tended to forget, the memo went on, that the President had been through this kind of thing in World War I, that he had personally visited practically all defense activities throughout the United States and many abroad, that he had gone to Europe in the spring of 1918 on a destroyer and “probably saw a greater part of the war area than any other American.” Roosevelt had long been defensive about his failure to don uniform in World War I; now he was in psychological uniform as Commander in Chief.
In this, the biggest crisis of his life, Roosevelt’s first instinct was to unify the nation, his next to unify the anti-Axis world. Churchill had asked if he could come over to Washington at once, for military conferences, and Roosevelt gladly agreed. While Churchill sailed westward on his new battleship the Duke of York, Roosevelt took steps to solidify the spirit of unity that had swept the country after Pearl Harbor.
Party harmony was no problem; the President accepted pledges from the Democratic and Republican National Chairmen of cooperation during the war and suggested that the two party organizations could help civil defense. Nor did the Great Debate have to be adjourned; former isolationists were tumbling over themselves with promises of support. The most worrisome continuing division was between management and labor. The National Defense Mediation Board had been devastated by the resignation of the CIO representatives. Clearly new machinery was necessary for industrial peace. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the President asked union chiefs and the Business Advisory Council of the Commerce Department to designate representatives for a conference to draft a basic wartime labor policy. The first and essential objective of the conference, the President made clear, would be to reach a unanimous agreement to prevent strikes during the war period.
The President invited the conferees to the White House for a preliminary talk. In they came: industrialists who had hated Roosevelt; Lewis, who had broken with him in the 1940 election; Green, friendly but wary. The President greeted each delegate and then spoke to the group for almost half an hour—about the need to do “perfectly unheard of things” in war, about the need for a complete agreement quickly, for a time limit on conference speeches, for a self-imposed discipline. He had just been thinking of an old Chinese proverb, he said: “Lord, reform Thy world, beginning with me.”
There was not much difference between labor and management, the President went on. “It’s like the old Kipling saying about ‘Judy O’Grady an’ the Colonel’s Lady.’ They are both the same under the skin. That is true in this country, especially this country, and we want to keep it so.” His manner, Frances Perkins noted, was both sober and buoyant, confident and serious, and even touched with humility. The shock of Pearl Harbor, she felt, the hazards ahead, had acted like a spiritual purge and left him simply stronger, more single-minded. The conferees went on to their labors moved by the President, if still unsure of finding common ground.
Christmas was nearing, but a strange Christmas for the nation and for the Roosevelts. Thousands of men were taking their last leaves before shipping out; other thousands had their Christmas furloughs canceled; whole outfits were pulled out of posts and bases overnight. The Roosevelts were not immune to the new anxieties of war. In New York a few days before Christmas Joseph Lash talked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the phone. He found her worried and despondent in her Sixty-fifth Street home; she mentioned having had a hard day and then burst into tears. Lash wondered if she was upset by some trouble in her work at the Office of Civilian Defense; but not so. She and the President, she told him, had said good-by to their son James, who was headed for Hawaii, and to Elliott. They had to go, of course, but it was hard; if only by the law of averages, not all her boys would return. She wept again, then steadied herself. No one saw the President weep. Probably he could not; on his desk awaiting his signature was a bill that could send seven million men, from twenty to forty-four years old, off to the battle fronts.
Only one sock—Fala’s—would hang from the White House mantle, it was reported. But on December 22 Winston Churchill arrived in Washington, and life at the White House was instantly transformed.
Roosevelt was waiting, propped against his car, at the Washington airport as Churchill flew in from Hampton Roads, where he and his party had disembarked. With the usual plump cigar clamped in his teeth, the Prime Minister marched over to the President and “clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill wrote later. After a semiformal dinner for seventeen the Prime Minister was installed in the big bedroom across from Hopkins’s, with his cherished traveling map room nearby.
Suddenly the second floor of the White House was an imperial command post, with British officials hurrying in and out with their old red leather dispatch cases. The White House servants were soon agape at Churchill’s drinking, eating, and sleeping habits. The President and the Prime Minister were together for several hours every day, with Hopkins often present. They worked together in the closest familiarity: sometimes after cocktails Churchill would wheel Roosevelt in his chair from the drawing room to the elevator, as a token of respect, but also with his image of Raleigh spreading his cloak before Elizabeth. Eleanor soon discovered with concern that her guest took a long nap in the afternoon while her husband worked—but that the President hated to miss any of Churchill’s and Hopkins’s talk in the evening, and stayed up much later than usual.
The two leaders and their staffs at once plunged into the business of war. Roosevelt’s first priority, however, was not military strategy, but a declaration of the “associated nations” to symbolize the unity and aspirations of the anti-Axis coalition. The President and the Prime Minister, using a State Department draft and working much as they had at Argentia, each wrote a separate statement and then blended them together. Since many governments had to be consulted, further drafting went on while the two leaders turned to immediate military problems.
Christmas Eve they stood side by side on the south portico for the traditional ceremony of lighting the tree. A great throng waited in the cold blackness below. Addressing his listeners as “fellow workers for freedom,” Roosevelt said: “Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies….” He presented Churchill, who matched him in eloquence: “I have the honor to add a pendant to the necklace of that Christmas good will and kindness with which our illustrious friend, the President, has encircled the homes and families of the United States.” Christmas Day was observed without a single son or grandchild in the house. Roosevelt and Churchill attended an interdenominational service, dined with a company of sixty, listened to Christmas carols by visiting carolers—and then worked on the war until long after midnight.
One paramount question had occupied Churchill and his colleagues as they plotted strategy in the ordered calm of the Duke of York. Would an aroused American people, venting its wrath over Pearl Harbor, force the President to turn the main weight of the nation against Japan, leaving Britain to cope alone with the Axis in Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East? Had the carefully fashioned Atlantic First strategy collapsed when the first bombs were dropped in the Pacific? This cardinal question embraced numerous secondary ones. If Roosevelt stuck to Atlantic First—and it was Churchill’s supreme aim to induce him to do so—what would be the plan of attack against Hitler? How could Japan be contained or at least slowed in the Pacific while the Allies concentrated on Germany? How would the Allied command be organized in the vast Pacific and Atlantic theaters? And how would new plans affect demand, supply, and transportation of munitions?
Atlantic First was not left long in doubt. Roosevelt and his military chiefs quickly made clear that—even under the frightful pressure of Pacific defeats—the Americans still saw Germany as the main enemy and victory in Europe as crucial to the whole global effort. Indeed, little time was spent during these tumultuous days on any fundamental reconsideration of the long-planned priority. The old Plan Dog was almost taken for granted. Reassured, Churchill, in the first evening’s discussion, plunged into the next question-strategy for Europe.
The Prime Minister had rarely been in better form. He had carefully worked out his plans for Europe and cleared them with his military men on the way across the ocean. Now, flanked by Beaverbrook and Halifax, he presented his case to Roosevelt, Hull, Hopkins, and Welles. If the Germans were held in Russia, he said, they would try something else—probably an attack through Spain and Portugal into North Africa. It was vital to forestall such a move. He than presented his plan—GYMNAST. He proposed that American forces invade Northwest Africa in the Casablanca area, and later hook up with British troops renewing their drive along the North African coast from the east into Tunisia.
The eager Prime Minister wanted to launch the attack quickly—in three weeks, he hoped. He had 55,000 troops ready to load onto ships at short notice. The actual plan of operation would depend largely on whether the French authorities in Northwest Africa cooperated or not. It seemed to Churchill—and so he reported confidently to his War Cabinet—that Roosevelt favored the plan “with or without invitation” from the French.
Perhaps Roosevelt was merely being the polite host this first evening; perhaps, as the absent Stimson and Marshall feared, he tended to be vulnerable to Churchill’s eloquence and zeal when his military staff was not with him. In any event, Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for a North African invasion had cooled markedly by next day, when the two leaders presided over a meeting of their staffs. The President now spoke on the basis of a War Department memorandum that stressed the safety of the British Isles as the central “fortress” and of Atlantic communications, but played down the value of American action anywhere in the Mediterranean. Stimson and Marshall had won the President’s endorsement of this approach at a war conference the day before the British arrived; but the Secretary was as surprised as he was delighted when his chief now used the memorandum to brief Churchill and his party.
While Churchill’s hopes for GYMNAST sank, the President posed other major possibilities. He was willing to take over the defense of Northern Ireland, thus freeing British troops for use elsewhere. He granted the importance of the islands in the eastern Atlantic, but inclined toward the Cape Verde Islands, rather than the Azores. He acclaimed the British successes in Libya but doubted the value of placing American troops there. He then moved across the globe to the Pacific. It was vital, he said, that Singapore be held; the United States would do its utmost to save the Philippines, or at least to help the defense of the Dutch East Indies.
By the time Churchill took over, the initiative had been gained by the President. The Prime Minister still clung to GYMNAST, emphasizing that British advances into Tunisia might arouse French support, or precipitate a showdown between Berlin and Vichy—and in either case Africa would be a fine opportunity. But Marshall remained cool to GYMNAST if it required a large American force.
The emergent difference between the Allies cast a long shadow on future strategy. In proposing GYMNAST Churchill had challenged the strategic assumptions and professional bias of Marshall and his fellow soldiers, and especially Stimson. The Americans were inclining toward a long build-up and then a massive, concentrated thrust toward the enemy center—Germany. Any other move was a dispersion of effort unless it directly supported this central thrust. The American mind in war planning, as well as in commerce and production, Churchill felt, ran to “broad, sweeping, logical conclusions on the largest scale,” while the British allowed more for the role of opportunism and improvisation, trying to adjust to unfolding events rather than to dominate them. To the American military such strategic assumptions led to expediency, dispersion of effort, to that “peripheralism” that had marked so much of Churchill’s thinking beginning with the Dardanelles in World War I. To the British, with their limited resources and perhaps more patient view of history, this kind of strategy was more supple, flexible, sophisticated. Churchill also feared that a long preparation for the final assault by the Americans would mean their hoarding the munitions and supplies that he had been planning on for the months directly ahead. GYMNAST was also being strangled by the rush of events. While the planners talked in Washington, the Japanese hurricane was sweeping south and west. Some in the White House feared that the Japanese might bombard the West Coast, lay mines in the ports, or even land troops from the sea or air. Roosevelt and his staff still did not flinch from their strategic commitment to Atlantic First, but the crisis in the Pacific could demand day-to-day commitments that might erode that strategy. Even to slow up the Japanese, Washington had to support and strengthen its outposts, and the shipping requirements were appalling. The Japanese were carving an enormous salient into the direct route between the West Coast and Tokyo, which ordinarily would run just south of Alaska. The turnaround time between the East Coast and Australia was three months. Shipping had been short all along; now it would clog Allied strategy in both oceans.
The Pacific crisis also precipitated the whole problem of unified command. On Christmas afternoon, at a meeting of the American and British military chiefs in the Federal Reserve Building, across Constitution Avenue from the War and Navy buildings, Marshall seized the initiative. The Japanese could not be stopped, he said, unless there was complete unity of command over naval, land, and air forces. “With differences between groups and between services, the situation is impossible unless we operate on a frank and direct basis.” He was no orator, but he was so earnest that his words became eloquent. “I am convinced that there must be one man in command of the entire theatre—air, ground, and ships.” Cooperation was not enough; human frailties were such that local commanders would not put their troops under another service. He was ready to go the limit.
Marshall had a special reason to speak feelingly; at this point he was still smarting from a brief skirmish with the President. That morning he had heard that on Christmas Eve his Commander in Chief had blithely discussed with Churchill the possibility that if American forces assigned to MacArthur were not able to get to the Pacific, they be turned over to the British. When Marshall and his colleagues took this report to Stimson, the Secretary became so heated over this threat to his precious reserves for MacArthur that he telephoned Hopkins that he would resign if the President persisted in this kind of thing. Hopkins raised this matter with Roosevelt and Churchill, who both denied that they had reached such an agreement—but Stimson cited the minutes that a British secretary had made of the evening meeting. The episode bolstered Marshall’s view that only a unified Pacific Theater command would permit orderly planning and decision making.
That way of running things was not much to Roosevelt’s taste. Typically he had not made basic changes in his own command arrangements. He had put the old Army-Navy Joint Board under the White House in 1939, but he preferred to deal informally and often separately with his military chiefs. His British guests were agog at the American command setup. “There are no regular meetings of their Chiefs of Staff,” Dill wrote home to Brooke, “and if they do meet there is no secretariat to record their proceedings. They have no joint planners and executive planning staff….” Simply informing the President was a problem. “He just sees the Chiefs of Staff at odd times, and again no record. There is no such thing as a Cabinet meeting….The whole organization belongs to the days of George Washington.…”
In the press of crisis, though, Roosevelt was willing to change his ways—at least for a theater 8,000 miles away. He supported Marshall’s specific proposal that the combined American, British, Dutch, and Australian—ABDA—sea, land, and air forces in the Southwest Pacific be placed at once under a single top commander with an inter-Allied staff. The huge theater would embrace not only the East Indies, Malaya, the Philippines, New Guinea, and Burma, but would also stretch limitlessly to New Britain, the Solomons, the Fijis, Samoa. Marshall won the grudging backing of Knox and some of the admirals. The main obstacle would be the British—and here Roosevelt tried some reverse English. “Don’t be in a hurry to turn down the proposal the President is going to make to you,” Hopkins said to Churchill, “before you know who is the man we have in mind.” It was Wavell. Churchill was dubious about unity of command over such a vast expanse; some of his staff wondered whether Wavell was slated to be a British scapegoat who would preside over a rapidly disappearing command. But in the face of Roosevelt’s and Marshall’s persuasiveness, backed by Beaverbrook at a timely moment, Churchill agreed to the new command and commander.
This step in turn forced a far bigger decision on the structure of the top command. To whom was the ABDA commander to report? The British proposed a divided chiefs of staff committee, operating in both Washington and London and clearing with the Dutch, Australians, and New Zealanders. After some hesitation Roosevelt rejected this cumbersome arrangement and substituted a simple meeting in Washington between the American and British staffs, in turn reporting to the President and the Prime Minister, with the other nations consulted “if advisable.” It was no embarrassment to Roosevelt that he had no joint chiefs in the British sense, and that he had no air chief as a counterpart to the head of Britain’s RAF. He simply created, as the American component of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a Joint Chiefs of Staff composed of Marshall, King, a hard-bitten old salt slated to replace Stark as Chief of Naval Operations, and General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, whose genial manner masked a flair for organization and management. In this rather backward fashion were the Allied and American command structures established.
“The Americans have got their way and the war will be run from Washington,” wrote Churchill’s observant personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), doubtless reflecting feeling among the British chiefs, “but they will not be wise to push us so unceremoniously in the future.” Churchill accepted the decision with good grace, largely because of his profound confidence in Roosevelt, Marshall, and Hopkins.
During these days of long conferences in Washington and deepening crisis in the Pacific, the President continued work on the declaration of Allied unity. He was discovering that gaining agreement from a score of allies on even a simple proclamation was full of snares. One arose over a “freedom of religion” clause. The President, much to his later remorse, had left religion out of the Atlantic Charter; now surprisingly he left it out of his and Churchill’s Christmas Day draft. Hopkins urged him to put it in—but this meant gaining the concurrence of the Russians. Litvinov had flown in; perhaps he could help.
The old Bolshevik had had his ups and downs since the cheerier days of 1933 when he was talking with Roosevelt about recognition. Dismissed by Stalin at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1939, the long-time proponent of collective security had faded into obscurity, only to be plucked out as Washington and Moscow were forced into partnership. From his war-stricken capital Litvinov had flown across the Pacific just in advance of the Japanese attack and had landed in a Washington still full of shiny cars, traffic jams, food, and parties.
The President found Litvinov notably less ebullient than in the old days. The envoy was clearly reluctant to urge Number One in Moscow to endorse a religious pledge, but Roosevelt was insistent. When Litvinov said that the Kremlin might agree to the phrase “freedom of conscience,” Roosevelt assured him that it was exactly the same thing. Indeed, Roosevelt added expediently, the old Jeffersonian principle of religious freedom was so democratic that it included the right to have no religion at all; a person had the right to worship God or choose no god. Armed with this interpretation, Litvinov won the concurrence of Moscow.
The President took great pride in his feat. He regaled the White House company so often with his account of how he had talked with the Russian envoy about his own soul and the dangers of hell-fire, Churchill remembered later, that the Prime Minister promised to recommend him for appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury if he lost the next election.
The declaration ran into other obstacles, large and small. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted it to include “authorities” as well as “governments” as signatories, so that the Free French could sign, but Hull at this point had become indignant with the Free French to the verge of resignation over de Gaulle’s unauthorized occupation of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, French islands south of Newfoundland, and Litvinov said that he could not agree to such a major change anyway. Churchill was annoyed at Hull’s making so much of one small episode amid gigantic events, and contemptuous of Litvinov for acting like a frightened automaton. Roosevelt mediated the differences, but “authorities” stayed out. The Americans wanted India included in the signatories, but here Churchill resisted. The British wanted “social security” kept in the declaration, but Roosevelt dropped it, partly out of deference to congressional sensitivities. Another problem was Russia’s relation with Japan; the declaration could call for victory only over Hitlerism, rather than over the Tripartite powers.
On New Year’s Day, after a week of cabling among twenty-six countries, Roosevelt was wheeled into Churchill’s room with the final version in hand. “I got out of my bath,” Churchill said later, “and agreed to the draft.” Roosevelt proposed at the last moment that the term “United Nations” replace “Associated Powers.” Churchill was delighted; he showed his host the lines from Byron’s Childe Harold:
“Here, where the sword united
nations drew,
Our countrymen were warring on
that day!”
And this is much—and all—which
will not pass away.
Roosevelt, Churchill, Litvinov, and T. V. Soong, the new Ambassador from China, gathered in the President’s study on the evening of New Year’s Day. The text lay before them.
DECLARATION BY UNITED NATIONS
A JOINT DECLARATION BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND, THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, CHINA, AUSTRALIA, BELGIUM, CANADA, COSTA RICA, CUBA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, EL SALVADOR, GREECE, GUATEMALA, HAITI, HONDURAS, INDIA, LUXEMBOURG, NETHERLANDS, NORWAY, PANAMA, POLAND, SOUTH AFRICA, YUGOSLAVIA.
The Governments signatory hereto,
Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter,
Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world, DECLARE:
(I) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such Government is at war.
(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.
The foregoing declaration may be adhered to by other Nations which are, or which may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.
Done at Washington
January First, 1942
The President signed first. Eleanor Roosevelt, Lash, and a few other onlookers watched from near the door, and Lash recorded the scene in his diary: Roosevelt observed that perhaps he should have signed as “Commander in Chief.” “ ‘President ought to do,’ Hopkins said dryly. Churchill then signed. The President looked and then called out, ‘Hey, ought you not to sign ‘Great Britain and Ireland?’ Churchill agreed, corrected his signature and then stalked around the study, a look of great satisfaction on his face. Litvinov signed next, and finally T. V. Soong for China. While Soong was signing, Churchill asked Litvinov whether he had not seen him once on a plane to Paris. Litvinov looked blank and then said, betraying the tension he was under, ‘It may have been my wife.’
“Four fifths of the human race,” Churchill remarked when Soong had finished signing. Four-fifths of the human race. But on this New Year’s Day at the White House, governments representing four-fifths of that four-fifths—hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, and Russians—were not given seats on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which was to frame global strategy, and these governments had worries and forebodings about the shape of United Nations command and strategy.
The Kuomintang’s elation at gaining two allies was soon offset by its growing fear that American aid, with many more mouths and guns to feed, might fall off rather than increase, at least for a time. Japan’s invasion of Burma threatened to cut the Burma Road, along which a trickle of supplies was coming in. The great connecting points with the West—Singapore, the Philippines, the East Indies—were already under attack. Chiang accepted supreme command of Allied land and air forces in the theater he already commanded. The only other step Roosevelt felt able to take was to arrange for a “political loan” to Chungking. “I am anxious to help Chiang Kai-shek and his currency,” he wrote to Morgenthau. “I hope you can invent some way of doing this.” Reluctantly—because he had little confidence in China’s capacity to fight—the Secretary obtained from Congress authorization for a half-billion-dollar loan to China, with repayment deferred until the end of the war. But Chiang still lacked what he wanted—massive aid in arms and a seat in the top strategic councils.
The Australians faced their own predicament. With three of its best divisions in North Africa and a fourth in Singapore, Canberra felt denuded in face of the Japanese thrust south. In ports along the northern coast, and even the eastern, Australians were preparing for attack. Within ten days of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had authorized Marshall to plan a major base in northern Australia—but would the Japanese get there first? The Dutch had a special grievance; in their haste Roosevelt and Churchill neglected to clear Wavell’s appointment with them ahead of time, and Roosevelt felt constrained to salve wounded feelings by asking Marshall to release some war munitions to them “even though they be very modest.” The Filipinos were beginning to doubt that the Americans would be able to save their country. And India, the second most populous nation in the world and also in the path of Japanese conquest, was hardly consulted at all.
But it was the place of Russia in the United Nations that raised the most fateful questions of all.
On New Year’s Day the President was sitting with Churchill and the rest of the dinner company when the talk turned to Russia. At this point the Germans and Russians were locked in a critical struggle west of Moscow. Churchill, having served as War Secretary under Lloyd George in World War I, was not to be outdone by his host in tales of combat. Dispatches from the Russian front reminded him of the days when he was directing British military intervention against the new Bolshevik regime. His forces had got as far as Tula, just south of Moscow. But now, he said, he forgave the Russians “in proportion to the number of Huns they kill.”
“Do they forgive you?” asked the brash Hopkins.
“In proportion to the number of tanks I send,” Churchill said.
Roosevelt disagreed. He thought they did not forgive, he said. And he was probably right. Even in the first flush of United Nations collaboration, with Britain and the United States ranged solidly with Russia against the Axis, the fissures in the coalition were all too obvious. As the German armies had moved on his main cities, Stalin had complained about delays in arms shipments. Eden had been on his way to Moscow for conferences with Stalin and Molotov at the time of Pearl Harbor, and Churchill had been much disturbed by his ensuing reports from Moscow. Stalin had proposed to Eden an immediate secret agreement returning to Russia the Baltic states, the frontiers of 1941 with Finland and Rumania, and a frontier with Poland based on the old Curzon Line. Eden had demurred on the ground that Roosevelt had asked the British not to enter into any secret postwar reorganization of Europe without consulting him. Such an agreement would also be contrary to the Atlantic Charter.
Stalin had been annoyed and mystified. How could there be a wartime alliance if war aims differed? In Washington, Churchill was annoyed, too. Even now, after six months of brave Soviet resistance, he could not forget how Russia had been indifferent and even hostile to Britain’s interests before June 1941, and had fought the Nazis only when attacked. But Churchill’s opposition to making postwar agreements stemmed more from strategic calculations than either pique or principle. “No one can foresee how the balance of power will lie or where the winning armies will stand at the end of the war,” Churchill counseled Eden. Britain and America would be economically and militarily strong; the Russians would need their aid. Churchill would defer postwar arrangements until he could move from a foundation of power.
The transcendental issue was the second front. In the critical days of late 1941 Stalin had pleaded for British action that could relieve the excrutiating pressure of the German war machine. Churchill had authorized Eden to discuss sending British troops into the Caucasus and into the Russian fighting line in the south. Nazi pressure in Africa, however, had led London to withdraw this offer, and a guarded proffer of RAF squadrons was dropped after Pearl Harbor. By late December the fortunes of war had changed. At just about the time the Japanese were smashing Pearl Harbor, the Russians were unleashing a tremendous counterattack on the Moscow front. For a few days the Red Army made spectacular progress.
Now it was Moscow’s turn to announce tens of thousands of enemy soldiers encircled and trapped, vast war booty captured, key cities, including Kalinin and Tula, relieved or recaptured. After a few weeks Russian progress was slowed by the snow and cold, lack of transport, severe arms shortages, German tenacity, and sheer fatigue. But during the days when Eden and Stalin were meeting in Moscow, and Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington, Stalin was no longer in a begging mood. He could afford to look far into the future. No longer need he ask for American troops for the Russian front. But on one issue he would not change—would never change. He was still demanding a second front that might soften the tremendous blows that he knew Hitler would launch against him during the new year.
On the Far East, Stalin was coldly realistic. He was not ready to attack Japan. He reminded Eden that he had had to switch many divisions from Siberia to the Western Front. Moreover, war against Japan would be “unpopular with our people if the Soviet Government were to take the first step,” he told Eden. “If, on the other hand, we were attacked, the feelings of the Soviet people would be strong.” He even thought a Japanese attack on his country likely in the spring. Eden warned him that Japan would try to destroy its opponents one by one, including Russia, but Stalin commented that Britain was hardly fighting Japan alone.
Roosevelt had tried a more indirect approach. In mid-December he cabled to Stalin that he was suggesting to Chiang that he at once convene in Chungking a conference of Chinese, Soviet, British, Dutch, and American representatives to prepare for joint planning in the Far East. Stalin quickly answered that the President had not made clear the aims of such a conference and he wanted “elucidation,” in effect putting the President off. But Stalin added: “I wish you success in the struggle against the aggression in the Pacific.”
So committed was Roosevelt to Atlantic First strategy that never during these feverish days did he seriously consider the only alternative that might have brought Russia into the Far Eastern war—a Pacific First strategy that would have thrust American power on a direct axis across the northern Pacific, there to link up with the Soviets in a second front against Japan. Such a strategy would have faced formidable difficulties and represented a distinctly minority view. Yet it was some such plan as this that MacArthur had in mind when he cabled to the War Department that, with the Japanese so overextended to the south, a “golden opportunity” had arisen for a “master stroke” if Russia could be induced to enter the war against Japan and attack from the north. MacArthur did not explain how Russia was to be brought into the Pacific war. The President invited Stalin to discuss “joint planning” with the American, British, and Chinese Ambassadors in Moscow, but Stalin responded to this vague suggestion as coolly as he had to the idea of a Chungking conference.
So the Soviet Union remained half an ally—a member of the United Nations, the main foe of Germany, but not at war with the enemy in the Far East, and not a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Roosevelt was satisfied with these arrangements, at least for the moment. He could understand Stalin’s caution in Siberia; he felt that events would bring their own compulsion toward unity. The Soviet leader, he told friends at dinner on New Year’s Day, had to rule a very backward people, which explained a good deal. Harry Hopkins, on his return from Moscow, had told him that Stalin had a sense of humor—which meant, the President said, that he also had a sense of proportion.
Clearly the President was bent less on setting grand strategy during these days than on establishing relationships, ordering priorities, soliciting views, laying immediate plans. The code name ARCADIA had been assigned to the Washington meetings, and a slightly idyllic atmosphere often seemed to surround the proceedings. The long-run decisions—aside from the reaffirmation of Atlantic First—were not to prove crucial. The importance of the conference lay in its certification of Anglo-American unity, establishment of joint machinery, and discussion of tactical plans. And ARCADIA left the two principals closer than ever in concord and comradeship.
The extent of Anglo-American co-operation, and indeed of the “industrial-military complex,” was vividly shown later when Marshall came to Harvey Bundy with a rumor that Churchill was about to replace Dill in Washington. Dill had worked so closely with the administration that the Pentagon was dismayed at the thought of his leaving. Marshall suggested that Bundy arrange for Harvard to give Dill an honorary degree at a special convocation and thus raise him in London’s estimation. Bundy tried with his friends in the Harvard establishment, but was told that Harvard never held special convocations. He then tried with his friends in the Yale establishment, only to be told the same thing. But then Yale thought of a way out: what about awarding Dill a prize for fostering Anglo-American co-operation? This was arranged, and the top Pentagon brass flew up to New Haven with Dill for the occasion. Dill’s speech was given front-page treatment in the New York Times. Marshall told Bundy later that Churchill had been duly impressed; in any event, Dill stayed.
On January 14 the President and Hopkins drove with Churchill to his special train. Roosevelt sent with the Prime Minister’s party some presents for Mrs. Churchill and a note:
“You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip.…I didn’t see him take anybody’s head off and he eats and drinks with his customary vigor, and still dislikes the same people….”
With his friend gone, the President could get more sleep. He could also devote more attention to the domestic state of the union.
“For the first time since the Japanese and the Fascists and the Nazis started along their blood-stained course of conquest they now face the fact that superior forces are assembling against them. Gone forever are the days when the aggressors could attack and destroy their victims one by one without unity of resistance….”
It was January 6, 1942. The President was delivering his address on the state of the union—delivering it to Congress in person, as usual. He was in a militant mood.
“The militarists of Berlin and Tokyo started this war. But the massed, angered forces of common humanity will finish it.”
The President proceeded to offer Congress a breath-taking set of production goals.
“First, to increase our production rate of airplanes so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes, 10,000 more than the goal that we set a year and a half ago. This includes 45,000 combat planes—bombers, dive bombers, pursuit planes. The rate of increase will be maintained and continued so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes.
“Second, to increase our production of tanks so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 25,000 tanks; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks.
“Third, to increase our production rate of anti-aircraft guns so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 20,000 of them; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 35,000 anti-aircraft guns.
“And fourth, to increase our production rate of merchant ships so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall build 6,000,000 deadweight tons as compared with a 1941 completed production of 1,100,000. And finally, we shall continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall build 10,000,000 tons of shipping.
“These figures and similar figures for a multitude of other implements of war will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.
“And I rather hope that all these figures which I have given will become common knowledge in Germany and Japan….”
The shipping goal was the most audacious of all. The President told reporters how he had called in Maritime Commission officials and put the problem to them.
“What are you making now?” he had said to them. “ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we can step it up to five million tons.’ I said, ‘Not enough. Go back and sharpen your pencils.’ …So they went back and sharpened their pencils, and they came back, and they said, ‘It will hurt terribly, but we believe that if we are told to we can turn out six million tons of shipping this year.’ I said, ‘Now you’re talking.’ And I said, ‘All right now, for ’43 what can you do? Can you turn out four million more tons, to a total of ten million tons of shipping?’ And they scratched their heads, and came back and said, ‘Aye, aye, sir, we will do it.’…”
It was not quite so easy as all this. The ARCADIA Conference was making clear during these days that transports and merchantmen were now the worst bottleneck in all the war planning. Not only were the Allies scrambling for tonnage, but the President’s services were competing fiercely over the building of warships versus army transports. Troop transports were so short, army planners concluded with dismay, that no other major troop movement could be undertaken in the Atlantic for at least three months if the North African operation was undertaken. Roosevelt had to raise his own sights. Within a few weeks of his January demands he was asking Chairman Emory S. Land, of the Maritime Commission, and Admiral Howard L. Vickery, of the Navy, to commission nine million tons in 1942 and fifteen million in 1943.
“I realize that this is a terrific directive,” Roosevelt said, “but I feel certain that in this very great emergency we can attain it.”
The nation must strain every existing arms-producing facility to the utmost, the President warned in his State of the Union message. In mid-January he established the War Production Board under the Office of Emergency Management in his Executive Office. The WPB was headed by the same eight officials who had manned SPAB, but with one major difference—the chairman would have unprecedented powers to “exercise general direction over the war procurement and production programs and determine plans and procedures for purchasing, contracting, building, requisitioning, plant expanding.” OPM was put under the new board; SPAB was abolished. At last the President had responded to congressional and popular clamor to set up a czar of czars in production.
“Production for war is based on men and women—the human hands and brains which collectively we call Labor,” the President told Congress in his message. “Our workers stand ready to work long hours; to turn out more in a day’s work; to keep the wheels turning and the fires burning twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week.…” A week later he established the National War Labor Board, with four public, four industry, and four labor members. In contrast to the old Defense Mediation Board, the new agency would have authority to take jurisdiction over a dispute on its own initiative; it would have major wage-stabilization responsibilities; and, above all, it could under its own rules impose arbitration rather than merely recommend it.
“War costs money,” the President said in his State of the Union address. “So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it. We have devoted only 15 per cent of our national income to national defense.” The war program for the coming year, he said, would cost fifty-six billion dollars—more than half of the estimated annual national income. “That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials….”
In his budget message early in January the President urged that seven billion in additional taxes be collected during the fiscal year 1943 and that Social Security trust funds be raised by two billion. “An integrated program, including direct price controls, a flexible tax policy, allocations, rationing, and credit controls, together with producers’ and consumers’ cooperation will enable us to finance the war effort without danger of inflation.” If inflation could be controlled during the war, a recession could be prevented after it.
“…We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God,” Roosevelt concluded his message on the state of the union. “Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image—a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.
“This is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives. No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.”
It was one thing for the President to issue clarion calls for production, discipline, sacrifice—but something else to set up the necessary agencies and give them adequate powers. The impact of the new war agencies would depend on the kind of men he chose, the leadership he supplied them from the top, the power resources he could help them mobilize to carry out their programs in hostile terrain. The bleak fact was that industrial mobilization had been faltering to the point of crisis during the weeks before Pearl Harbor. The priorities system—the heart of effective mobilization—was breaking down as manufacturers demanded and often received the highest ratings to obtain materials. Machinery and staff were inadequate for ordering priorities in terms of a comprehensive plan; there was, indeed, no real general plan. Disputes between civilian and war agencies, between New Dealers and conservative businessmen, between cautious expansionists and “all-outers” boiled beneath the surface and often erupted in the press—or at least in indignant memorandums to the Commander in Chief. SPAB and OPM could not program, allocate, order, deny, penalize; at best they could bargain, negotiate, mediate, persuade, and exhort.
Production figures were proof of the pudding. Aircraft production had soared; then the rate of increase fell off during 1941. Of 1,279 combat aircraft scheduled for production in October, Isador Lubin of OPM informed the President, war plants had turned out 923, most of which went to other countries. Fewer naval ships were produced in the third and fourth quarters of 1941 than in the second. Cargo-ship production declined during the last half of 1941; even more ominously, so did the production of copper, lead, and zinc. Steel production rose only a million tons between the first and last quarters.
The failures had a multitude of causes, but not least the President’s reluctance to make strategic commitments, his determination not to plan ahead too far, his fear of vesting too much authority in one man or office. Pearl Harbor jarred these old predilections of his. The declared war not only gave him a plenitude of authority to clear the decks, boost production goals, and grant power; it also gave him the popular backing for crisis action and the self-assurance that he was acting for a consensus. He was aware, too, that events had dramatized the failures of SPAB and OPM. The Truman Committee was digging up production delays and muddles, and its chairman was urging that a strong man with full authority be placed at the head of the production effort.
Roosevelt was under pressure from within his administration, too: Stimson urged him to concentrate executive power into a single head on the business side of munitions making; Felix Frankfurter, who was still sending the President notes of unabashed admiration and praise, wrote him a long memo favoring the appointment of a man who would serve as the President’s eyes and ears in overseeing the defense program and would be an instrument of the “centralized execution of the President’s will—an instrument of dispatch, concentration and responsibility.” The CIO was still pressing for faster conversion through the establishment of industry councils. Walter Reuther, of the Auto Workers, charged a week after Pearl Harbor that his year-old plan to convert auto plants to airplane manufacture had been sabotaged by Knudsen.
Even with all this, Roosevelt took a gingerly approach. It was clear that Knudsen had to go; but the old GM boss had been so utterly loyal and had become such a symbol of mobilization that the President did not know how to let him go, until Hopkins came up with the idea of making him a lieutenant general and production expediter. For a time Roosevelt dallied with the notion of setting up a committee of Willkie, Donald M. Nelson, of OPM, and Justice William O. Douglas to “explore” the problem of defense organization for him; Hopkins talked him out of that notion. For a time he thought of making Douglas the new czar of czars, but Stimson felt that this would be a “hideous” appointment. In the end the job went to Nelson, who had proved himself no superczar, but a skilled conciliator, and had won the backing of most—or, at least, antagonized the fewest—of Roosevelt’s defense chiefs.
“It took Lincoln three years to discover Grant, and you may not have hit on your production Grant first crack out of the box,” Frankfurter wrote to him. “But the vital thing is that you have created the function—the function of one exclusive ‘final’ delegate of your authority…indispensable for your conduct of the war.”
The labor situation before Pearl Harbor had been equally critical and far more visible. Four times as many workers struck during 1941 as in the year before. The defense boom and AFL-CIO rivalry were major causes, but the thorniest issue was union security. Labor chiefs contended that new workers flooding into the defense plants could not enjoy the benefits unions had fought for without joining; employers denounced any effort to use the defense crisis to boost union power. On this explosive issue the National Defense Mediation Board had followed a wavering course, always denying the union shop, once even granting a closed shop, and sometimes recommending maintenance of membership (under which all employees who were members of a union or who later became members must stay in the union for the life of the contract, or lose their jobs). The NDMB was under pressure to set a more definite policy, but, lacking clear direction from the President or credible authority of its own, the board continued to straddle the issue.
Roosevelt’s old adversary John L. Lewis happily fished in these troubled waters. Wrangling in turn with employers, rival unionists, and the White House, he demanded a union shop for the “captive” miners working in pits controlled by Big Steel. In mid-September 1941 he pulled the captive mine workers out on strike. Fearful of strengthening his already powerful union, the Mediation Board repeatedly denied him the union shop. In mid-November the two CIO members of the board denounced both the employer and the AFL members for opposing the union shop, and resigned. The miners kept striking, returning to work on the President’s request, and then striking again. At the White House Roosevelt bluntly warned Lewis and CIO President Philip Murray that “the Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop.”
May 2,1941, Hugh Hutton, by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer
Once again Roosevelt and Lewis were at loggerheads. When the President asked the union chief to let the question be arbitrated, Lewis replied loftily that the President was so prejudiced that no one he chose would be impartial.
The gauntlet had been thrown. By now—two weeks before Pearl Harbor—the Mediation Board was expiring. Its chairman, William H. Davis, was urging Roosevelt to request legislation authorizing the government to seize and operate the mines. Trouble flared on another labor front, as the five railway brotherhoods rejected the findings of an emergency presidential board. The White House asked both the miners and the railroad workers for further parleys, but clearly parleying was no longer enough. Both employers and union chiefs needed a command, and Roosevelt would not command them. Rather, he had become a one-man mediation appeals board. Pressure was applied on him directly from all sides. He had to devote hour after hour to negotiating, placating, maneuvering—and do so during the feverish days of rising military and diplomatic crisis of late November and early December.
But the President was still the master broker. While Lewis stalled on the question of arbitration, the President blandly went ahead and set up a tripartite board of arbitration, under John R. Steelman, head of the conciliation service of the Labor Department. The Mine Workers grumpily ordered its men back to work. The President’s man was not as susceptible to Big Business blandishments as Lewis had charged, for Steelman promptly sided with labor to decide in favor of the union shop for the captive coal mines. That decision was handed down on December 7, and hence buried in the press—another bit of lucky timing for the President, and for Lewis.
After Pearl Harbor, in the exuberant new mood of national unity, the President convened his labor-management conference to reach agreement on basic policy for maintaining labor peace. The conferees labored five days. They agreed to discountenance all strikes and lockouts for the duration and to submit disputes to a new war labor board for binding settlements. But on the emotional issue of union security, the conference soon became deadlocked. Industry representatives wanted to freeze union status for the duration; labor would not have it. The session became tense.
Like an old stage manager, the President pulled down the curtain before the peace conference turned into a battle royal. He ingenuously accepted the no-strike pledge and announced that he would set up a new board to handle disputes. Since he did not exclude the union shop as an issue that the new board could properly arbitrate, the President in effect passed the spiky issue on to the new agency. This was a victory for laborites and liberals who wanted government to accept the challenge and opportunity of the union-security issue. Then in appointing men like Davis, Wayne Morse, long friendly to labor, and Frank P. Graham, a liberal educator, as public members, Roosevelt made an indirect commitment to some form of union security. With this lead from the White House everything would now turn on the decisions of the board under the day-to-day pressure of new disputes.
The President had long recognized that workers would not sacrifice wages and status unless the cost of living and industry profits were held down, but it was on this economic front that his power was most limited. He had had a price-control bill introduced in the House Banking and Currency Committee in August, only to open a Pandora’s box of special interests. During three months of hearings, well-organized groups pressed for special exemptions; most vociferous and effective were the Farm Bureau Federation and other farm groups. Under their pressure Roosevelt and Henderson reluctantly went along with a provision for no per cent of parity. The bill that passed the House ten days before Pearl Harbor was already a tattered remnant of what Roosevelt had wanted. The Senate, even more vulnerable to farm pressures than the House, so riddled the bill with further concessions to cotton, wheat, oats, barley, and hog growers that Majority Leader Alben Barkley himself branded it a “farm relief” measure.
Thoroughly disappointed in the bill, the President took the unusual step of calling House members of the conference committee to his office to persuade them to moderate the farm provisions in the Senate version. Once again his persuasion seemed to work. After a long and bitter session, the conference committee agreed on a suffer measure. Roosevelt’s establishment of the new War Labor Board, with power to stabilize wages, mollified some Congressmen; even so, the price bill passed the House by a margin of only twenty-five votes over the opposition. Despite the negative recommendation of at least one OPA administrator, the President signed the bill. Perhaps he sensed even then that he would have to ask Congress for broader anti-inflation powers—a move that he did make within three months. Meanwhile, he would proceed one step at a time.
In a graceful statement on signing the compromise bill he concluded—perhaps a bit wryly after all the vexing delays—by quoting a remark of Woodrow Wilson: “The best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” But it was Wilson, too, who had extolled presidential leadership of a free people.