TWO OF FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S traits charmed and puzzled his friends. One was his fascination with European royalty and his willingness to put himself out for its members. The other was his ability to talk at the end of a wearing day and to animate himself through the process of talking. Both these traits were especially noted in the spring and summer months of 1942.
Dispossessed royalty paraded through Washington and Hyde Park almost every week, or so it seemed to the commoners around. The President talked with King Peter about Nazi atrocities in Yugoslavia, presented a submarine chaser to Norway’s Crown Princess Martha, and had tea with Queen Wilhelmina at her summer place in Lee, Massachusetts, and invited her over to Hyde Park and to the White House. He treated her as a kind of beloved but crotchety great-aunt; “I’m scared to death of the old girl,” he confided to Grace Tully, in a tone of admiration. Wilhelmina got a sub chaser, too, with her name on it.
Rosenman marveled that when Crown Princess Juliana, of Holland, and her husband came in to see the President during a busy speech-writing session, work stopped and Roosevelt talked with his guests as though he had nothing to do. Hassett, with his republican Vermont blood, frowned on the time his chief spent with royalty, but the President seemed to enjoy his role. He did admit to Hassett that the chain of visiting heads of state, especially from Latin America, tired him because of their imperfect knowledge of English. Sometimes they even bored him. But Wilhelmina—nothing was too good for “Minnie,” Hassett noted. On her departure for England the President wrote to her that he would do his best “to look after Juliana and the babies.”
When Roosevelt this summer spent many weekends at “Shangri-La,” a camp in the Catoctin Mountains about sixty miles north of Washington, reporters wondered if he was tired of the demands and semiformality of Hyde Park. Certainly Hyde Park had its shortcomings as a retreat. The President wanted to go back home mainly for a holiday, to have a chance to read, sort out his books, decide on new roads and tree plantings, but he was pursued there by visitors and telephone calls. When he made plans to build a small cottage on Dutchess Hill to “escape the mob,” reporters had labeled it his “Dream Cottage,” much to his annoyance.
Roosevelt’s main reason for favoring Shangri-La during this period was that it could be reached in a two-hour drive from the White House. Arrangements were simple to the point of crudeness there. His cottage had only two baths, one of them his; the other was shared by three bedrooms, and the President laughingly alerted his guests to the fact that the bathroom door did not close securely. Presidential aides roomed in rude pine cabins scattered about the area. The place was staffed by Filipinos borrowed from the Potomac, which was now on combat duty.
One rainy Saturday afternoon in the midsummer of 1942 the President left the White House with a small band of companions—the Samuel Rosenmans, Archibald MacLeishes, Grace Tully, his cousin Margaret Suckley, and Secret Service men. The party traveled in four cars whose low White House number plates had been changed to more anonymous digits. The cars moved slowly through the villages, stopping for traffic lights, and were unobserved except when the agents rode on the running board while passing through crowded streets. It was pouring at Shangri-La, too, but Roosevelt seemed not to mind. Wheeled through the cottage, he showed his guests to their rooms and complimented the messmen on their hanging of pictures sent from the White House, adding casually to his guests, “I may make a few changes tomorrow.”
“He then sat down in an easy chair in the living-dining room,” Dorothy Rosenman noted soon afterward, “and I gave him the box of cheeses, cocktail appetizers and candy we had brought. He had a boyish glee in opening each package within the box, and then told Isaac, the Filipino who is in charge, just when to use each item during the week end. We all sat around chatting—sometimes about matters of importance but mostly about trivialities. The President, Archie and Sam would slide from serious talk to comedy with each other, and the President was thoroughly relaxed. At six o’clock he asked when I would suggest we eat. It was made a question of great moment. I was hungry and suggested some speed. So with much seriousness we all discussed dinner timing, and he finally decided that cocktails would be had at 6:40 and dinner at 7:00, and that he would take a little nap before 6:40….”
Before sitting down to dinner the President asked for his portable radio and listened to the 7:00 P.M. news. He also took a call, with war news, on the direct wire from the White House. “I’ve just read my newspaper,” he said on putting down the receiver.
At dinner the stories began. The guests had heard them before, but relished the retelling—the way their host dwelt on details, his manner of pausing and drawing the story out, the inflection of his voice, above all his zest in being the storyteller. He told a true-life tale about a forger who went from city to city taking the checks of any convenient bank, writing them up, and passing them off. The President had remembered every detail and every city, Sam Rosenman told his wife later. Roosevelt also related an old French story about a barber who supplied delicious veal to the local butcher during the hungry days of the siege of Paris. It seemed that several of the barber’s customers were missing. While his lady listeners shivered, the President told in detail how the “veal” was butchered and delivered.
After dinner he worked on his stamps while others read or played cards. He warned people not to play with Grace Tully, because she always won; earlier he had hand-printed and hung a crude sign: VISITORS WILL BEWARE OF GAMBLERS (ESPECIALLY FEMALE) ON THIS SHIP. Tonight Miss Tully won, as usual. Later the President started a detective story. All went to bed about ten.
It had been a very peaceful evening, Dorothy Rosenman reflected. She was a little taken aback by the subjects of Roosevelt’s stories. But she thought she knew what had inspired them. That noon, August 8, 1942, two hours before Roosevelt left Washington, six young Nazi saboteurs had been electrocuted in Washington. Roosevelt had commuted the death sentences of two others. His only regret about the six who died was that they had not been hanged.
The vast pendulum of war came into a tremulous balance in the early summer of 1942. There was a momentary lull in global battle. The grim submarine war went on in the Atlantic, but was now showing omens of a change of fortune in favor of the Allies. The Japanese, bloated by their conquests and at the same time shaken by their losses at Midway, were moving more slowly, feeling for enemy weaknesses, especially toward the southeast. Here there was conflict. On August 7 Marines invaded Guadalcanal, in the southern Solomons. Later a Japanese task force of cruisers and destroyers raced down to strike the Allied naval forces guarding the Guadalcanal beaches and sank three American heavy cruisers and one Australian.
From Washington the President’s naval aide drove to Shangri-La with this jolting news. For a long time he and his chief pored over a large map, while the guests chatted away nearby. Later, at dinner, Roosevelt remarked calmly: “Things are not going so well in the Pacific. There are heavy losses on both sides.” He then dropped the subject; soon he was telling long stories again. He was not staking his hopes on any one battle; he would not know for some time whether Guadalcanal was a turning point or merely one more in a long series of delaying efforts.
The President’s most urgent front at this point was the battle against inflation at home. In the spring of 1942 he had bluntly told Congress that to “keep the cost of living from spiraling upward”—a phrase he repeated seven times—the nation must “tax heavily,” keeping personal and corporate profits at a reasonable rate; fix ceilings on prices paid by consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers; stabilize wages and salaries; stabilize farm prices; encourage people to buy war bonds instead of luxuries; ration all scarce, essential supplies; discourage credit and installment buying. “Our standard of living will have to come down,” he said. But he rejected the concept “equality of sacrifice,” because he believed that a free people, bred to the concepts of democracy, deemed it a privilege to fight to perpetuate freedom. He called, rather, for “equality of privilege.”
As summer wore on, however, it was clear that Congress did not quite see its privileges this way. The seven proposals made an impressive package, but the legislative branch was not adapted institutionally for making unified economic policy, the executive branch was not well organized to administer it, and the President was not temperamentally inclined to press for it when the political risk seemed high. Evidently the voters did not welcome a co-ordinated effort except in principle; the clearest popular reaction to the seven-point program was a complaint by each major group that it was sacrificing more than some rival interest.
As usual, tax policy was the hardest to integrate with the rest of the anti-inflation program. In March a committee chaired by Vice President Wallace had recommended 11.6 billion dollars of new taxes, plus a two-billion-dollar increase in Social Security taxes—a total sum that would have soaked up much purchasing power and thus helped stabilize prices, and would have enabled over 40 per cent of war costs to be paid out of current revenue. But Roosevelt and Morgenthau wanted more than fiscal “soundness.” They felt deeply that a tax policy could prevent “war millionaires,” that a war economy could tolerate and even encourage economic egalitarianism. “Profits must be taxed to the utmost limit consistent with continued production,” the President told Congress in presenting his seven-point package. “This means all business profits—not only in making munitions, but in making or selling anything else.” If “clever people” found loopholes in the tax laws, he hoped Congress would pass a special tax to thwart them. And he stated flatly that no American ought to have an income after taxes of more than $25,000 a year. This last proposal was dubbed by the New York Herald Tribune “a blatant piece of demagoguery,” but Frankfurter wrote that Theodore Roosevelt would have said, “Bully.”
The administration presented a bold and united front on tax policy, but in fact it was sorely divided. The Wallace committee favored a retail sales tax to raise 2.5 billions; Roosevelt and Morgenthau had long opposed such a tax. Henderson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Eccles wanted a compulsory savings policy; Morgenthau much preferred a voluntary savings program. Both sides appealed to the President; Morgenthau demanded that he tell Budget Director Harold Smith to stop undermining Treasury policy.
The President placated both sides. “Well,” said Morgenthau philosophically after hearing of the enemy’s latest foray at the White House, “I always say when you are doing a tax bill you have got to sleep on the floor so a fellow can’t put a knife in your back.” Yet administration differences were dwarfed by congressional hostility to major tax increases and tax reform. Morgenthau in March had proposed a heavier and more graduated income-tax schedule but one that would still raise only two-thirds of the revenue recommended by the Wallace committee. This was a concession to congressional feeling, but it did little good.
Roosevelt simply seemed unable to evoke from Congress a sense of urgency about taxes. Morgenthau, partly in order to head off a move on the Hill toward a sales tax, suggested early in May the lowering of personal exemptions from $750 to $600 for single persons and from $1,500 to $1,200 for married couples. Rebuffed by the Ways and Means Committee on his major proposals, the Secretary pinned his hopes on getting any decent kind of bill out of the House and into the Senate, where it would have a better chance.
Roosevelt concurred: “Keep on settin’ and no sweatin’ and no talkin’,” he told Morgenthau. “…Just stay put.”
Inflationary pressures and threatening shortages made it impossible for the administration to stay put. By midsummer the OPA was staggering along under the double burden of its internal administrative problems and its general unpopularity in the nation. Henderson’s people had to keep a host of technicians—lawyers, accountants, and so on—on tap without letting them get on top; they had to staff and run thousands of local rationing boards; they had to issue and enforce a multitude of regulations. One task alone was to apply OPA’s General Maximum Price Regulation—“General Max”—to 1,700,000 retailers. By the summer of 1942 the national office was swamped. As in the old New Deal days, the White House was the visible target for complaints about federal interference. “At present we are expected to fill out seventeen forms, reports and questionnaires, a month, to government agencies,” a Knoxville foundry operator wrote to “Your Excellency.” He went on with a long bill of grievances. “So around and around we go. Rules change faster than replies come from Washington.…Is there any hope for relief?”
The main threat to effective price control came from Congress, which felt even more exposed than the President to grass-roots protest. Early in the summer Henderson appealed to the President for help in heading off a move in the Senate to slice OPA’s appropriation, require every employee getting more than $4,500 to be confirmed by the Senate, and, in effect, cripple its control of farm-commodity prices. Roosevelt in turn appealed to Wallace, Barkley, and Carter Glass, with some success, but a 100-per-cent-of-parity measure passed the Senate. Henderson warned his chief that the parity provision would mean price increases for bread, packaged cereals, milk, meat—in short, for the staples of millions of families. But there was little Roosevelt could do at the moment in the face of the power structure on Capitol Hill.
For the administration the most trying program was rationing, and of all the rationing tasks the most trying was rubber. Rubber was not only in short supply, but its restriction was a means of limiting the use of automobiles and hence of conserving gasoline, which had been so short on the East Coast as to compel the OPA to start gas rationing there in 1942. Nelson had found on becoming WPB chief early in 1942 that the nation would be practically out of rubber in fifteen months. Although frantic efforts had been made to start a synthetic-rubber program, only one plant was making it—at the rate of 2,500 tons a year. By early summer defense officials were fearing a shortage of several hundred thousand tons.
Pressed by Nelson and Henderson at a meeting early in June to ration gasoline to save rubber, the President seemed to fear the popular reaction and cast about for easier solutions, notably a scrap-rubber-collection campaign. He seemed to lack his usual sure grasp of a policy question.
“Now I suppose I have had as much information on what that scrap rubber is as anybody in the world—anybody, in Congress or out, in a column or out,” he told reporters. “And I don’t know. I don’t know who is right. Now here—” pointing to himself, amid laughter—“is the greatest expert on it in the United States, and he doesn’t know!” But what Roosevelt did know was how to appeal to the people, and soon he was on the radio describing the rubber shortage in simple, graphic terms and asking people to turn in to the nearest filling station any kind of rubber—old tires, rubber raincoats, garden hose, rubber shoes, bathing caps, gloves. About 450,000 tons were collected in less than a month, but not enough to provide more than a stopgap.
Congress forced the President’s hand. Impatient for action, fearful of nationwide gasoline rationing, impressed by the popular demand for czars who could break through the obstacles, the legislature passed a bill establishing a Rubber Supply Agency under a director with wide powers. Roosevelt vetoed the measure, arguing that it would frustrate centralized control under the WPB. But recognizing by now, early August, the need for more drastic action, he announced in his veto message the appointment of a committee of Conant, Compton, and Baruch, chairman, to investigate the problem, after Chief Justice Stone had turned down a similar assignment. “Because you’re ‘an ever present help in time of trouble’ will you ‘do it again’?” he wrote to Baruch in longhand—and by enlisting the old promoter of tough remedies, Roosevelt knew that he would get a recommendation for drastic action. So he did: rubber and gas rationing, stepped-up synthetic-rubber programs, and a powerful rubber administrator under the WPB.
At summer’s end of 1942 Roosevelt seemed to be losing the battle against inflation. Since April the cost of food exempt from controls had risen at a rate of over 3 per cent a month for wage earners. Surging wage rates were putting heavy pressure on anti-inflation controls. The voluntary bond drive was raising a great deal of money but not enough. And Congress had failed to act on the two measures the President considered central to a stabilization program: taxes and food-price controls.
Roosevelt had wielded his executive power effectively on some anti-inflation fronts, but he had shown little leadership in the politically most sensitive sector of all, especially in an election year-wage control. Lacking clear guidance on wage policy from the White House, the War Labor Board had proceeded on a case-by-case basis. As food prices rose, labor members of the board pressed for bigger wage increases; the employer members resisted, with support from business and farm groups. A long-pending dispute in Little Steel almost broke up the board early in the summer, but the members hammered out a decision that would raise hourly wage rates 15 per cent to compensate for the 15-per-cent rise in the cost of living between January 1941 and May 1942.
Despite howls from both sides, “Little Steel” became the basic formula for disposing of wage disputes. But wage policy was still soft. The War Labor Board could decide only wage rates that came before it in dispute cases; it was always vulnerable to labor or management threats to desert or defy it; and it had little guidance from the White House in handling wage inequities between industries or areas. Lack of set policy in turn put a heavy burden on the President. Again and again in 1942, as in the year before, he had to take time to keep Green and Murray friendly to the administration and at least on speaking terms with each other; to handle barbed issues like double time on Sundays, about which there was strong public feeling; and always to keep a wary eye on the ever-rambunctious John L. Lewis.
Whatever his public posture, the President was not one to deceive himself for long about the economic situation. Aside from all his other sources of information on inflationary troubles, he could always resort to “look-see.” He told reporters that on a visit to Hyde Park he drove twelve miles down the Post Road at a steady thirty-five miles per hour; prevented by police (as standard policy) from passing the President, twenty-two cars piled up behind him in that distance. It all showed, Roosevelt went on, that people were driving too fast, using up gasoline, not living up to the request of their President and government. “And we have got to enforce the thing some way.”
How could the thing be enforced without laws? Some in the White House, including Rosenman and Sherwood, urged Roosevelt to bypass Congress and carry out his stabilization program through his war powers. The President was sorely tempted. In his electrifying Inaugural Address in 1933, amid numbing economic crisis, he had warned that if Congress did not face up with him to the emergency, he would ask it for broad executive power “as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Now he had that kind of power under his war authority. He remarked to reporters that “in the old days, in 1933, when the country was economically on its back, and people’s pocket-books were being hit” he had been able to get measures from Congress at the rate of two or three a week or even one a day, but now that the nation’s very existence was threatened he could not get action. Still, the President would not, even in wartime, rely on his war powers. Rather, he relied on an ingenious—and ingenuous-power ploy.
First he lectured and scolded Congress, in a message on September 7, for stalling on taxes and stabilization of the prices of farm products. Its delay “has now reached the point of danger to our whole economy.” Then he dramatized that danger in short paragraphs studded with concrete examples of inflation. He talked about the price of pork chops, butter, oranges, sweet potatoes, corn, oats, rye. He warned that wages could not be stabilized unless farm products were. What was needed was an “over-all stabilization of prices, salaries, wages, and profits.” Then he sprang his surprise:
“We cannot hold the actual cost of food and clothing down to approximately the present level beyond October first. But no one can give any assurances that the cost of living can be held down after that date.
“Therefore, I ask the Congress to pass legislation under which the President would be specifically authorized to stabilize the cost of living, including the prices of all farm commodities….
“I ask the Congress to take this action by the first of October. Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable responsibility to the people of this country to see to it that the war effort is no longer imperiled by threat of economic chaos.
“In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.
“At the same time that farm prices are stabilized, wages can and will be stabilized also. This I will do….”
As usual the President saved his main dramatics for his fireside chat in the evening. He began with the story of an American dive bomber pilot who had promised to lay a bomb on a Japanese flight deck for the “folks back home” and who had died in the Coral Sea doing it. He “hereby and now” awarded him the Medal of Honor.
“You and I are the ‘folks back home’ for whose protection” the brave pilot had fought and repeatedly risked his life. “How are we playing our part ‘back home’ in winning this war?
“The answer is that we are not doing enough….”
If Congress did not act, he warned again, he would assume responsibility, to prevent “economic chaos.”
“This is the toughest war of all time. We need not leave it to historians of the future to answer the question whether we are tough enough to meet this unprecedented challenge. We can give that answer now. The answer is ‘Yes.’ ”
A few days later a reporter asked the President a question many in Washington were asking: “If by October 1 it appears that your anti-inflation bill is on the way in Congress but has not yet passed, in that case will you wait and give them a chance?”
“What was the first word of that question?” he asked. The reporter mentioned the fatal word “if.” Roosevelt would not tip his hand; the only game he would play was his own. He summoned Rayburn back from Texas and asked him to have his flock on hand within a week.
Smarting under the Chief Executive’s reprimand and ultimatum, Congress glumly went back to work on an anti-inflation program. Within one week bills were introduced, hearings were held, and measures were reported to both chambers. Once again the farm groups stood like tollkeepers over the legislative roadways; they demanded a recomputation of parity that would mean higher farm prices. Roosevelt publicly denounced the proposal; a presidential veto and assumption of extraordinary economic power seemed in the offing. But Senate moderates concocted a compromise on parity and delegated extensive power to the President to take production costs into consideration. The final measure provided other protection to farmers. Congress passed the bill on October 2, and the President, though not wholly satisfied, signed it the same day.
He had to wait another three weeks for a tax bill, and a disappointing one to boot. The measure would raise only seven billion dollars in new revenues by Treasury estimate. It reduced personal exemptions; lifted the top surtax on individual incomes a little, the top tax on corporate income moderately, and the top excess-profits rate sizably; and it boosted a number of excises on luxuries and scarce goods. Roosevelt had no choice but to sign it; he joked to Morgenthau that he had hardly read it because he could not understand it. The Secretary despaired of ever getting “total war on taxes.”
The President had already chosen his man to direct the new stabilization program—Justice James Byrnes, a hardheaded negotiator and operator, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the high court the year before. Liberals were worried by his Southern background and essential conservatism, but Roosevelt was aware of Frankfurter’s high opinion of him and impressed by Hopkins’s advice that “Jimmy has loyalty and knowledge, judgment and political sense.” Byrnes moved into the new east wing of the White House as Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. Shortly he was telling Hopkins, with a smile, “There’s just one suggestion I want to make to you, Harry, and that is to keep the hell out of my business.”
Four groups had been especially vulnerable during periods of turbulent economic and social change in America—industrial labor, Negroes, ethnic groups, and women. All these groups went through critical transitions during 1942; all established new dependencies on the federal government; all directly or indirectly turned to the President for help.
Women, to be sure, did not seem to be a deprived minority in the war boom of 1942. Besides donning sober uniforms for the women’s branches of the military services, they were wearing trousers for war work, and by the middle of the year were pouring into factories, taking over men’s jobs, such as driving trucks and running heavy machinery, and bringing home pay checks to swell the family income and civilian spending. Women workers increased by almost two million in the year after Pearl Harbor. The President was impressed by the visual evidence, especially by the large number of women workers he saw on inspection trips. Time and again he recalled seeing women doing a variety of work in the plants he visited.
Booming war employment was boosting income for millions of workers, male and female. National War Labor Board wage decisions were far less important than the enormous war contracts and the heightened competition for labor. Workers and their unions were also winning a bigger voice in production decisions. In April the President shifted all labor-supply functions from the WPB’s Labor Division to the new War Manpower Commission, and set up in the WPB a new Labor Production Division as a channel to Nelson for labor information and ideas. Sidney Hillman, now ailing and under criticism from his old union comrades, was eased out of the labor unit; Roosevelt tried to placate him with an offer to serve as special assistant to the President on labor matters, but the union chief, hurt and mystified by the President’s seeming loss of confidence in him, preferred to return to his beloved Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The Labor Production Division, under a new chief who had to conciliate both the AFL and the CIO, did not itself have a major role, and indeed encountered considerable criticism from labor, but it helped arouse further union demands for participation in war-production decisions. By the end of 1942 joint labor-management committees were operating in many industries and at many levels.
It was clear that rising wages and a greater union voice in running plants might not outlast the war. The crucial long-run question was whether labor could exploit the war to bolster its organized economic and political power. Left-wing union leaders had claimed in speeches that war would bring a vast union-busting drive and a shift toward the open shop; businessmen had warned of the compulsory unionism of the closed shop. There was a deeper, more philosophical issue: during a time of crisis should the status of unions be frozen for the duration, or did a war of democracies against fascism mean vesting labor with more rights and duties? Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had bluntly warned Lewis and Murray that the “Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop”—but on December 7 federal arbitrators had granted a union shop to Lewis’s captive mine workers. The whole disruptive issue had been passed on to the War Labor Board.
During the early months of 1942 the chairman and the three public members of the WLB conducted a search for a formula that would resolve for wartime labor one of the oldest and toughest problems in the Western world: the reconciliation of liberty and order in groups undergoing change and stress. This remarkable quartet—Davis, Morse, Graham, and Professor George W. Taylor—shared Roosevelt’s mixture of practicality and lofty idealism. They knew that in the dynamic, expanding productive period of a war economy, as Graham said, union status could not be frozen. But what kind of union status would produce the right balance of flexibility and stability? After much discussion and delay, with the union and employer members contributing both threats and constructive suggestions, the board reshaped an old formula, maintenance of membership, into a new one, maintenance of voluntarily established membership. Under the first, all employees who were members of a union or later became members must stay in the union for the life of the contract, or lose their jobs. Under the second, the same rule prevailed, except that an escape clause would give employees ten or fifteen days to quit the union without penalty before maintenance might take effect. Seemingly a slight change, the new formula provided a compromise to which management and labor reluctantly agreed, provided a practical reconciliation of liberty and security for employees, and was so widely adopted that by war’s end it covered almost a third of all workers under union agreement. In the long run it both strengthened and stabilized union power. It was the most brilliant application—some would say the only successful application—of Roosevelt’s notion of a moving consensus overcoming a sharply divisive problem.
The President’s efforts at a rolling consensus were meeting far less success in another critical sector in 1942. The Fair Employment Practices Committee encountered frustrations and setbacks from its first days. Roosevelt had started it off with a broadly representative six-member board headed by Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, an old friend and an unusually strong civil-rights advocate for a man born in Mississippi. Murray, Green, David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America, Milton Webster, of the Sleeping Car Porters, and Earl B. Dickerson, a Chicago alderman, made up the rest of the board. The committee was slow to get organized and starved for funds; by the time it was transferred from OPM to WPB, its staff included fewer than seven field investigators. Murray and Green proved unable to attend meetings; the President had to appoint alternates. Ethridge aroused a storm among blacks when in Birmingham he defended segregation, at least for Southerners. But the main obstacle was the sheer intractability of the problem: a corporal’s guard was trying to breach the citadels of Jim Crow. Training and jobs, for example, were linked in a vicious circle—employers turned away Negroes because they had inadequate training; training classes were closed to Negroes because of an alleged lack of jobs. The United States Employment Service was supposed to refer workers without discrimination, if possible, but not if employers insisted on discriminatory orders; in Southern states the service still maintained segregated employment facilities. AFL craftsmen were hostile. And almost every move of the commission provoked outcries from one side or even both.
In its frustration the FEPC often turned to the President for support, communicating through Marvin McIntyre. On these matters Roosevelt was somewhat unpredictable. He was personally concerned and was quick to respond to specific injustice—for example, when the nonpolitical Negro tenor Roland Hayes and his wife were victims of brutality in a Southern store, and when black troops landing overseas were identified by the War Department as “service troops.” But he seemed reluctant to spend any of his own personal political capital to mobilize support for the committee, even within the government, or to give much time to the problem. When Welles opposed public FEPC hearings on discrimination against Mexicans because of their effect south of the border, Roosevelt asked the committee to cut the hearings off. And suddenly in midsummer 1942, without advance warning to the FEPC and against its wishes, he transferred the little agency to Paul V. McNutt’s War Manpower Commission and thus cut the presidential apron strings that had been one of the few sources of the FEPC’s strength.
All the President’s action—and his inaction—on discrimination aroused sharp responses. Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, then and for years afterward head of public safety in Birmingham, wrote in to charge that the Employment Service and the FEPC were causing disunity, that venereal disease was the number-one Negro problem, and that the Ku Klux Klan would be revived in opposition. “Don’t you think one war in the South, however, is enough?” An equally withering fire descended on the administration from black militants.
It was not surprising, given Roosevelt’s fear of any divisive act, that he would shun a frontal attack on discrimination in private enterprises or even in state and local government. His support of Stimson’s policies reflected better his personal views. The War Department was proud of the fact that by the spring of 1942 about 10 per cent of registrants under Selective Service were black, several hundred black aviation cadets would soon be in training, and over three hundred Negro officers—including three colonels—shared in the command of five black combat units. But the Army was still segregated except for black troops under white officers—and Stimson believed in this. “The Negro still lacks the particular initiative which a commanding officer of men needs in war,” he wrote to a friend. “…Also the social intermixture of the two races is basically impossible….”
If a “little group of agitators, led by a man named White,” would only keep their hands off, Stimson felt, things would be better. He was pained to discover that MacLeish was planning to speak to Negroes in New York on the discrimination against them in the Army, and that McGeorge Bundy, the son of his close friend and assistant, Harvey Bundy, was helping MacLeish with his speech. After inviting the poet to see him, Stimson told him that he had been brought up in an abolitionist family, and his father had fought in the Civil War, but that the crime of slavery had produced a problem impossible of solution in wartime, that the only thing to do was to be patient and care for individual cases, that the foolish Negro leaders were actually seeking social equality, which was impossible. MacLeish appeared unmoved. Stimson felt secretly that Mrs. Roosevelt was behind MacLeish’s activity—the latest example of her “intrusive and impulsive folly,” he complained to his diary. But he did not blame Mr. Roosevelt, except for letting his Navy shut its doors “absolutely to the Negro race” while making the War Department carry the extra load. The President was more sympathetic to black aspirations than either his War or his Navy Secretary, but his tendency in wartime to look on race relations more as a problem of efficient industrial mobilization than as a fundamental moral problem left policy largely in their hands.
If Stimson seemed weak on Negro rights, within the military circle he was virtually a reformer. Early in 1942 Eisenhower rounded up reports on the “colored troop problem.” Not only did army generals in the South and even in multiracial Hawaii oppose the assignment of “colored troops” to their domains, but so also did the Australian government, the President of the Republic of Panama, Governor Ernest Gruening, of Alaska, the government of Bermuda, the British authorities in Trinidad, the South American governments and—absurdity to the point of hilarity—an army colonel advising as to Liberia. Stimson’s responses to most of these pleas ranged from “Don’t yield” to “Nonsense”; he reminded the Panamanians that the Panama Canal itself was built with black labor; and he asserted that the Southerners would have to get used to Negro troops; but neither he nor anyone else in high command reflected on the implications of the fact that it was segregated black units that were being objected to.
For all their troubles, Negroes for once were better off than some other group. This other group was also racial—the Japanese-Americans in the process of being “relocated” from their West Coast homes to inland areas. By the end of spring, Milton Eisenhower, first head of the War Relocation Authority, could report to Roosevelt that about 81,000 Japanese-Americans were in temporary assembly centers, about 20,000 in permanent relocation centers, another 15,000 had been “frozen” in eastern California, and from 5,000 to 8,000 voluntary evacuees were living precariously in Rocky Mountain states. He also reported that inland governors and attorney generals had fought bitterly the earlier plan of voluntary evacuation on a large scale. Mass meetings had been held, violence threatened, Japanese-Americans arrested. So eleven huge camps had had to be set up to hold 130,000 evacuees, schools and hospitals planned, farms and public works started.
But Milton Eisenhower did not report—and Roosevelt, with all his insight and compassion, could not have grasped—the dismal experience of thousands of evacuees: the sad departure from hard-won homes and farms, the hurry-up-and-wait journey through detention centers to relocation camps, the shock of arrival at Poston or Tule Lake or Gila or some other camp, with its burning heat and numbing cold and clouds of dust, endless barracks with one room to a family, lack of privacy, red tape, boredom—and always the military police and the barbed wire. Not that the President was kept in the dark about the episode. All major decisions were cleared with him; his office received all the information, good and bad. Roosevelt himself termed the centers “concentration camps,” as indeed they were. But the psychic cost of the experience was probably beyond his ken, or was simply written off as a sad but necessary casualty of war.
The President might have been more sensitive to the situation if the evacuees had protested vigorously, had demonstrated, gone on strike, fought their guards. But they did not, at this time. The authorities were impressed by their almost cheerful determination to make the best of their lot; their resourcefulness in knocking together tables and benches for their ill-equipped rooms, their quick reconstruction of a semblance of community life through dances, sports, handicrafts, schools. But as the hot months of summer 1942 passed, the mood in some camps changed. The WRA did not live up to its earlier promises or expectations about wages, clothing, garden plots, jobs, and ordinary comforts. Tension rose among the inmates and between them and their Caucasian superiors. There were demonstrations, picket lines, strikes, and beatings of suspected informers.
By fall the very policy that Roosevelt had approved out of military necessity was creating its own military threat. The Office of War Information’s chief, Elmer Davis, urged him to speak publicly against anti-Nisei bills in Congress and to authorize loyal American citizens of Japanese descent to enlist in the Army and Navy. “Japanese propaganda to the Philippines, Burma, and elsewhere insists that this is a racial war,” Davis reminded the President. “We can combat this effectively with counter-propaganda only if our deeds permit us to tell the truth.” At least 85 per cent of the Nisei were loyal Americans, he added. The Navy agreed with this estimate—but still did not want Nisei enlistments.
The contrast between Washington’s treatment of Italian and German-Americans and of Japanese-Americans was revealing. Roosevelt had assured Herbert Lehman, then Governor of New York, that he was “keenly aware of the anxiety that German and Italian aliens living in the United States must feel as the result of the Japanese evacuation of the West Coast.” Would Lehman assure them “that no collective evacuation of German or Italian aliens is contemplated at this time”? This was little solace to “Japanese” baking on the flatlands of Colorado—but of keen satisfaction to the Japanese propagandists broadcasting from Manila, Singapore, and Rangoon.
By late summer 1942 the President was giving in to an urge to “go to the country”—an urge as powerful in some politicians as the migratory instinct in the wild goose. He had told Mike Reilly, his bodyguard, that he wanted to travel during the second half of September and he wished to see everything he possibly could from coast to coast. But one thing would be different. He wanted the trip completely off the record until he returned to Washington. He would take along representatives of the three wire services, but that was all. No publicity, no parades, no speeches, he hoped, and if governors and other politicians were to ride with the President they had to be Republicans as well as Democrats.
On September 17 the presidential train pulled out of Washington with the Chief Executive and the First Lady (who went only as far as Milwaukee), a dozen members of the White House staff, the three privileged newsmen—and eight photographers.
The President packed his days as full as if he were running for office. On the first day, overhead cranes came to a sudden stop as the presidential phaeton, its top down, its bulletproof windows up, rolled into the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Detroit and moved between two huge assembly lines making General Lees, the new all-welded medium tank. Sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt and production officials, the President watched tanks grind through mud and dust on the testing ground; Secret Service agents shuddered as one tank drove straight at the presidential car and lurched to a halt ten feet away. The President shouted, “Good drive!” to the grinning operator. Later in the day he rode with Henry and Edsel Ford down the half-mile assembly line of the enormous Willow Run bomber plant. Next day he inspected the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, the nation’s largest; watched steam turbines and propeller shafts being made at Allis-Chalmers, scene of bitter strikes the year before. In the evening he was in the Twin Cities area for the night shift of a cartridge plant making thirty and fifty-caliber ammunition, but which had not yet achieved full production. He always arrived unannounced, and sat on the right-hand side of the car, sometimes in back, sometimes in front, smiling, radiant, observant. Plant officials bustled about; ripples of excitement spread as workers stared, then hollered at one another; women peeked while trying to keep their eyes on their machines. As they drove through the plant, Reilly remembered later, the Secret Service men heard such sweet sounds as “Geeze, Mamie, look. It’s Roosevelt!”—indicating that the security men had achieved tactical surprise.
No one would later describe the trip with more gusto than the President, who reported first to the press and then in a fireside chat. After leaving the Twin Cities, he said, the party had gone right on to a place called Pend Oreille, in Idaho.
“It’s a great lake out there. That and the Coeur d’Alene are the two largest lakes in northern Idaho; and because we have tried, as you know, to disseminate the congestion which has always existed on the east coast and the west coast for Navy facilities, we put this naval training station inland. They had gone into commission five days before I was there, and they already had about a thousand trainees who were coming in at the rate of two or three hundred a day….Then we went on to a place just outside of Tacoma—Fort Lewis—which is one of our principal Army posts on the west coast. We saw a post, which I had known before as a relatively small post, multiplied four or five times in its capacity for troops….Then from there we motored to the Bremerton Navy Yard, and saw wounded ships and wounded men….”
The President and his party took the ferry to Seattle, where he inspected the big Boeing plant and had supper with his daughter, Anna, and her husband, John Boettiger, and their children, Buzzie and Sistie. At Henry Kaiser’s Portland shipyards he watched the launching of a ship whose keel had been laid only ten days before. Cries of “Speech” rose from the thousands of workers watching. When a portable microphone was pressed into the President’s hand, the old campaigner could not resist it.
“You know,” he said in a resonant conspiratorial whisper, “you know I am not supposed to be here today.” The crowd laughed and cheered. “So you are possessors of a secret—a secret that even the newspapers of the United States don’t know. I hope you will keep it a secret….” Merriman Smith, one of the three reporters, who had not yet filed any stories on the trip, was damned if he saw anything to laugh about.
“From there we went down to the Mare Island Navy Yard and saw again a Navy Yard just about three times as big as it ever had been before,” the President reported later. “We saw the Jap two-man submarine which had been captured at Pearl Harbor, and we saw one of our own submarines with nine Japanese flags painted on the conning tower.
“From there we went down to the Army embarkation port at Oakland, which is an enormous organization from which a large portion of our supplies of men and materials go out to many parts of the Pacific….Then from there down to Los Angeles, and we saw the Douglas plant at Long Beach, California….Then, from there down to San Diego, we saw the naval hospital, and a lot more wounded men from actions in the Pacific….Then to the naval training center. Then to the old Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, and from there to the Consolidated plant, where they are stepping up production all the time….”
Turning east, the President spent most of a day at the ranch of his daughter-in-law Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, and played with three grandchildren there. He stopped in Uvalde to see his onetime Vice President, John Garner, who had left Washington for good the year before. Pulling up in his little car in front of the Casey Jones Café, Garner strode to the presidential train, swung up the steps, and shouted to the President: “Well, God bless you, sir. I’m glad to see you.” The President held Garner at arm’s length to survey him. “Gosh, you look well.” They talked about local affairs and asked after each other’s wife, like old country gentlemen. “How are things going around here?” the President wanted to know. Garner slapped his Texas hat against his leg and roared, “They’re one hundred per cent for you.” Garner spied Dr. McIntire as he left. “Keep that man in good health,” he told him, “and all the rest will take care of itself.”
On to the big Southern installations—to Kelly Field, Randolph Field, Fort Sam Houston, to the Higgins Yard in New Orleans, where small boats were building, to Camp Shelby, Fort Jackson, where the Commander in Chief reviewed infantry divisions.
Back in Washington after two weeks and 8,754 miles, the President was in a benign mood about the state of the nation. The people as a whole, he told reporters, had “the finest kind of morale. They are very alive to the war spirit.” But he was not happy about the state of the nation’s capital. He complained about reporters who discussed military matters without knowing anything about military matters, about inaccurate news reports, especially by columnists and radio commentators, about subordinates in the administration itself who sought publicity by rushing into print about their particular “ism” without having a rounded picture of what the government was doing.
The President waited over a week, until Columbus Day, to report to the nation on its home front. It was a long chatty speech. The main thing he had observed on his trip, he said, was not exactly new—“the plain fact that the American people are united as never before in their determination to do a job and to do it well.” He described some of the things he had seen, skillfully interweaving praise for accomplishments and criticism for employers who refused to hire Negroes or women or older people. He announced almost in passing that it would be necessary to lower the existing minimum-age limit for Selective Service from twenty to eighteen. He scorned “typewriter strategists” who were full of bright ideas but little information. He would “continue to leave the plans for this war to the military leaders.”
He mentioned the millions of Americans in army camps, naval stations, factories, shipyards. “Who are these millions upon whom the life of our country depends? What are they thinking? What are their doubts? What are their hopes? And how is the work progressing?” He could not really answer these questions on the basis of a two weeks’ tour, nor did he try. But perhaps he sensed that the American people were a strange compound of determination to win the war and to avoid its exactions and harshness, of an emotional involvement in the war without wholly understanding it, of constant exposure to war excitement and problems and an effort to elude them.
On the surface the war dominated everything. People were singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “The Fuehrer’s Face,” “He’s A-1 in My Heart,” “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” “You’re a Sap Mr. Jap.” Theater marquees featured Wake Island, Atlantic Convoy, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Torpedo Boat, Remember Pearl Harbor, Flying Tigers. Practically all big institutional advertising played on the war theme. Even Munsingwear’s foundation garments pictured a WAAC saying, “Don’t tell me bulges are patriotic!” and Sergeant’s Flea Powder showed “Old Sarge” exclaiming, “Sighted flea—killed same.” The stage was not yet inundated by war plays, but John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down told of heroism in a Nazi-occupied town and Maxwell Anderson’s The Eve of St. Mark had a remarkable reception on Broadway for a war play.
Some of the promotion and huckstering had a latent radicalism. Pan American Airways ran full-page advertisements presenting answers by John Dewey, Hu Shih, the Archbishop of Canterbury to the question: “What kind of a world are we fighting to create?”; Canterbury’s answer was a radical version of the Four Freedoms. Movie documentaries were appearing: Native Land, a dramatization of American labor’s fight for civil rights; Henry Browne, Farmer, a government film on the importance of the Negro to the war effort. The communications media could not always keep up with fast-moving military and ideological developments. Twentieth Century-Fox put out a movie glorifying the Yugoslav Chetniks at a time when General Draja Mikhailovich was losing favor with progressives and the Partisans were winning it. Books were slower to mobilize for war. In the fall of 1942 people were reading Matthew Josephson’s Victor Hugo, James Thurber’s My World—and Welcome to It, and Hesketh Pearson’s G.B.S.; but they were also reading John Scott’s Duel for Europe, Ethel Vance’s Reprisal, Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness.
In sum—if one could summarize a vast array of opinions marked by strange combinations of volatility and opaqueness—Americans toward the end of their first year of war seemed emotionally intent on fighting the war but not fully mobilized physically or intellectually to win either the war or the peace to follow. Trying to look at the scene with the detachment she had applied to Samoans and Balinese, anthropologist Margaret Mead feared that Americans were too passive, or at least that the government was treating them as if they were passive. One of the nation’s greatest strengths, she wrote this same fall, was in the American character. If her definition of this character was hazy, her conclusions went to the heart of the problem of an ill-mobilized nation. As a nation we had to honor our leaders, she granted, as something like ourselves—as part of ourselves. “But if the war should ever come to seem a battle in which Roosevelt and MacArthur and Kaiser are supermen—father figures who do our fighting or our thinking for us while we simply watch the show—then there would be danger, for such an attitude would bring out not the strengths of the American character—but its weaknesses.
“To win this war, we need the impassioned effort of every individual in the country,” she continued. “…The government must mobilize people not just to carry out orders but to participate in a great action and to assume responsibility. Above all government must tell the truth….It’s not that we need victories; but we gotta feel we have victories in us.”
She went back to the Puritans for the mixture of practicality and faith in the power of God, for a sense of moral purpose, back to Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan emerging from the Anglo-Saxon tradition—“Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!”
By coincidence the provocative, forty-year-old anthropologist was saying the same thing as the conventional, aging Secretary of War Stimson: the battle against Nazism must be fought with a sense of moral purpose. A moral purpose was exactly what Roosevelt felt he was supplying in his sermonizing speeches. Certainly his personal popularity remained high; the question was whether he was helping people see connections between the lofty, compelling symbols such as Freedom and Democracy and the practical political and economic choices which people could make and which in turn would influence the great decisions of the war.
The most important of these practical choices would come with the congressional elections of fall 1942.
At a press conference some weeks after Pearl Harbor the President had been extolling a new book by Marquis Childs, This Is Your War. He quoted approvingly from the jacket blurb: “A pampered nation in the past, America is inexperienced in war.” What the country needed was the practical energy of every citizen. “This is your war.” Right, said the President.
Could there be a greater concentration of effort on the main problem among various political groups and newspapers, he was asked.
“Yes. Very distinctly. I would say it was about time for a large number of people—several of whom are in this room—to forget politics. It’s about time. We read altogether too much politics in our papers altogether….They haven’t waked up to the fact that this is a war. Politics is out. Same thing is true in Congress.”
Did that include Cabinet members?
It was pretty rare in the Cabinet, said Roosevelt. “Whenever I see any implications of that kind I step on it with both feet.”
It was Roosevelt in one of his favorite roles—the high-minded chief of state acting for the whole nation, rising above sordid group and party interests. It was not the first time he had tried to adjourn politics since Pearl Harbor, and it would not be the last. When Democrats gathered at hotel banquet halls across the nation to pay off the party’s debt, which survived war and peace, they heard the President discuss the war and denounce “selfish politics” with nary a mention of either the Democratic party or party saints Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
The Commander in Chief’s nonpolitical posture faced several difficulties from the start. It was not clear just what he meant. Was he against politics in general, or just party politics, or just “selfish” politics? When he publicly called for Congressmen who would “back up the Government,” did he mean that they would be tested—even purged—on the basis of support of current war policies of the government only, or even on the basis of their pre-Pearl Harbor support of the administration’s foreign policy? Certainly the President could not oppose politics in general in a nation that was proudly flaunting its democratic institutions and processes—including free, regular elections—in a war against totalitarianism. As for selfish politics, everyone was against that—but what was it? Defining what was selfish and unselfish politics was at the heart of the democratic struggle.
Presumably the President was hoping to minimize traditional party politics, for he carefully avoided Wilson’s call for a Democratic Congress, and he dismissed as “perfectly silly” a New Republic claim that the fall elections would be the most important since the Civil War. Obviously, in wartime the President needed the backing of the two liberal, internationalist parties, the presidential Democrats and the presidential Republicans, for his coalition strategy and war policies. Did he, then, favor a party realignment with all liberals and internationalists in one party, all conservatives and isolationists in the other? Some liberals so concluded and looked eagerly toward an ideological party split. Others were not so sure. Anti-Roosevelt newspapers took advantage of the confusion to hint darkly that the President would cancel the fall congressional elections.
Adjournment of party politics would require the co-operation of the other party. And the Republicans in election year 1942 had no intention of surrendering their monopoly of the opposition. Nor did their leader, Wendell Willkie, whose party position now was even more anomalous than Roosevelt’s.
In the weeks after Pearl Harbor the two men had conducted a political minuet. The President offered Willkie a war job as arbitrator under the War Labor Board, and considered him for director of manpower; he did not offer the one job that Willkie doubtless would have accepted—production chief. Willkie suspected that the President had finally appointed a production boss mainly because of his own proddings. The White House announced the offer of the arbitration job before Willkie had had a chance to answer. As for Willkie’s demand that MacArthur be brought back to unify the defense effort, Roosevelt told his aides that that was downright silly. Even Winston Churchill stumbled into the strained situation when during his stay in Palm Beach he telephoned Willkie to arrange to see him—only to discover after some conversation that he was talking to Roosevelt. Still, despite all the troubles, Roosevelt and Willkie had a sneaking affection for each other. They met at the White House occasionally and kept in touch through intermediaries.
Whatever the climate at the White House, however, Willkie stuck to his main job as he saw it—constructive criticism. Again and again he demanded that America face up to its postwar obligations, especially the keeping of the peace through international organization. He attacked isolationism, colonialism, race hatred; he joined with Eleanor Roosevelt, La Guardia, Dorothy Thompson, and other notables in founding Freedom House; he denounced the persecution of minorities, though stopping just short of opposing the Japanese relocation program; he took advanced positions on civil rights, civil liberties, colonial peoples, a second front in Europe in 1942. In the four-party battle that survived Pearl Harbor he was lambasting congressional Republicans for their isolationism and conservatism and congressional Democrats for their racism and conservatism.
The absence of a strong, institutionalized opposition party shortened Willkie’s reach; it also gave him far greater leeway. Indeed, in the endless Virginia reel of political couplings and cleavings, Roosevelt and Willkie were brought into slightly embarrassing embraces. They met in April to talk, among other things about getting Ham Fish out of Congress. “I did enjoy that little party the other night a lot,” Roosevelt wrote to Willkie later, but he admitted that they had not got far on the Fish matter. Willkie later openly opposed the conservative Congressman’s renomination. That effort failed, but he also battled and overcame Taft and other congressional Republicans in persuading the Republican National Committee to take a moderately internationalist position at its spring meeting in Chicago, under the very nose of Colonel McCormick. He tried to conduct a “shadow purge” by intervening in Republican primaries against extreme isolationists and reactionaries. He tolerated for a while a short boom for himself as Republican candidate for governor of New York, then firmly stepped on it. Thomas E. Dewey, far more restrained than Willkie, more cautious, was out front for the choice as Republican standard-bearer for the seat Herbert Lehman was vacating.
By summertime hope was rising among some Republican and Democratic liberals that Roosevelt and Willkie might join hands to found a new party, or at least a party coalition, to win the war and organize the peace. The two men seemed agreed on policy; Willkie simply enjoyed a freedom to speak out that was denied the President. Then, on the heels of the 1942 New York Republican convention, Willkie suddenly announced that he was planning to leave the country—and the campaign—to travel around the world. His purposes, he said, were to demonstrate American unity, to “accomplish certain things for the President,” and to find out “about the war and how it can be won.”
The trip had been Willkie’s idea, but the President had seized on it eagerly and fully co-operated. Since Willkie would not be back until shortly before the election, any hope of real collaboration between the presidential parties was gone for 1942 at least. It was easy to see why Willkie wanted to make the trip, but what were Roosevelt’s motives? Earlier in the year Eleanor Roosevelt had remarked to her husband that the Democratic party was beginning to creak from disuse. The Republicans creaked more, Roosevelt had said, and would creak even more when he took Willkie into the government. Now the titular Republican leader would be away during the height of the campaign. He was deserting a host of political comrades—men who had fought by his side in 1940 and were running for office two years later—in their hour of need. For weeks he would be the President’s personal representative. Did the President want a loyal opposition? Did he hope that the Grand Old Party would creak and creak—and then crumble into the dust?
Certainly the Democracy was creaking. National Chairman Edward J. Flynn, accustomed to good, simple party fights back home in the Bronx, had never fought an election like this one. When he merely tuned up for the fray by suggesting gently that a Republican House would be a disaster, the President repudiated him. The National Chairman was supposed to define issues for the campaign—but what were the issues? Flynn did not even hold the party reins in an off-year election, for oversight of the congressional campaigns was vested in Democratic campaign committees in the Senate and the House. These committees were tied in with the congressional party leadership, however, and had limited funds, few issues on which congressional Democrats agreed, and virtually no control over Democratic candidates for Congress. The only force that might influence such elections from outside was the White House, the only party leader, Roosevelt—but he had adjourned politics for the duration and stressed that winning the war was the only issue. And how could a campaign be fought on that?
Republicans raged at this adjournment by the party enjoying power, and quite understandably. They knew that Roosevelt was too political an animal to rise above partisanship. The White House, indeed, was no place to escape politics. Judges, postmasters, federal attorneys had to be appointed, and around each of these prizes, however small, a fierce little battle was waged, usually under cover but sometimes erupting in charges, countercharges, and headlines. Two of Roosevelt’s appointments aroused special wrath—one was Robert E. Hannegan, a St. Louis Democratic organization leader, to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue; the other was a “henchman” of Boss Frank Hague, of Jersey City, to be a federal judge in New Jersey. Even George Norris, Senator from Nebraska, deserted his friend in the White House on the judgeship nomination, crying out in the Senate that the question was whether “one of the most disreputable and demagogic organizations that ever existed will go beyond New Jersey and take in the whole Federal Government.” Roosevelt seemed unmoved by this flare-up of old, peacetime politics. When Congresswoman Mary Norton called New Jersey’s Governor Charles Edison an arrant hypocrite for opposing Hague on the judgeship matter after seeking Hague’s aid earlier—so she claimed—in his own election campaign, Roosevelt sent her a note that was abbreviated even for him: “Dear Mary: You are a grand girl!”
Nor could Roosevelt stay out of politics in his own state and district. The Empire State Democracy prospered under the leadership of Alfred E. Smith, Roosevelt, and Lehman; now it boiled with discord. Jim Farley, still strong with the county leaders, was backing a Democratic party stalwart, Attorney General John J. Bennett, for the gubernatorial nomination. It was clear to the New Dealers in Washington that a Bennett victory in 1942 could mean Farley’s dominance over the New York delegation to the national Democratic convention in 1944. A Farley pilgrimage to the White House won from Roosevelt only a grudging promise to announce that he would vote for Bennett, if nominated over Dewey—but “not one word more.” Later Roosevelt gave encouragement to New York’s junior Senator, Democrat James M. Mead, on the grounds that Bennett would lose and only Mead could get the support of the fusionist American Labor party in New York City as well as a strong vote from upstate. A few days before the convention, however, the President switched again, now telling party leaders that the Mead and Bennett camps had got into such a mess that both had been irrevocably hurt; he now suggested a third candidate, to whom he would be willing to give wholehearted support. This maneuver failed, too, and finally, at the last moment, Roosevelt sent the state convention a letter, via Lehman, stating his first preference for Mead, his second preference for a compromise candidate, and implying his willingness to accept Bennett if he had to.
As usual, Farley had things well in hand and Bennett’s nomination went through. The American Labor party, itself sorely divided between garment-union leaders and a militant left wing, repudiated Bennett and nominated its own candidate. Dewey won the Republican nomination easily and faced the happy prospect of a fragmented opposition.
Roosevelt seemed less concerned with these setbacks than with charges that he was spending too much time on politics. When the New York Herald Tribune ran a cartoon so implying, he wrote an indignant letter to Mrs. Ogden Reid, a personal friend and wife of the president of the paper. He had acquired over the years the hide of a rhinoceros, he wrote, but there were times when he had to speak to real friends. Actually, the amount of time he had taken from war-work hours to devote to New York politics was exactly zero, he said. He listed the two appointments, one telephone call, and one letter that constituted the totality of his political effort back home. “The total amount of it was not much longer than the very nice visit I had with you the other day—which, by the way, was in ‘war’ time!”
But time—presidential time—was precisely the resource that had to be invested in politics if the President was to have influence on the election. His old adversary Hamilton Fish was the main case in point. Fish was still one of the few American public men Roosevelt cordially and thoroughly hated. But both the friends and the foes of the Congressman agreed on one thing: Ham put time into his district, which sprawled from the Connecticut line across Dutchess County and the Hudson River into Orange County and over to the New Jersey border. He took time to cover the straw-hat and clambake circuits, to keep in touch with veterans’ organizations and Gold Star mothers, to deliver on the gut staples of politics—jobs, favors, recognition. Now in his eleventh term in Congress, he had risen by the seniority ladder to become senior Republican on both the House Rules and the Foreign Affairs Committees—and would become chairman of one or both if the Republicans carried the lower house in November.
June 10, 1942, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
So Fish was a shining target, but Roosevelt hardly took direct aim. He talked with Willkie and with a few Dutchess County Democratic leaders and showed his library to a Poughkeepsie publisher who had promised that all three of his papers in that city would come out against Fish’s renomination. The President had little confidence in the Democratic organization; he felt, indeed, that when the Democrats lacked good men of their own they should combine with enlightened Republicans to choose a Republican. But he took no steps in his own congressional district to carry out this idea. Fish’s Republican foes failed to dislodge him in the primary; the Democrats nominated a lackluster candidate, and by fall Roosevelt had lost hope of beating Fish.
In only one state besides New York did Roosevelt openly intervene in 1942, a sharp contrast with his “purge” efforts of four years before. This was the “magnificently justified exception” of Nebraska, where old George Norris, a very special Senator, friend, and progressive, was in the battle of his life against a conservative Republican. Norris’s long support of Roosevelt in peace and war—except on patronage—was bringing him abuse as well as support. The President told reporters that he would not change one word of the ringing endorsement he had given Norris six years before, in the Aksarben Coliseum in Omaha: “…his candidacy transcends State and party lines …one of the major prophets of America…a man who has had no boss but his conscience.” Roosevelt sent Norris a copy of his re-endorsement, adding, “If this be treason, let every citizen of Nebraska hear about it.”
But such eloquence and conviction were in short supply in the congressional elections of 1942. It was a strange contest. During September, at the height of a nationwide election, the heads of the two major parties were cut off from battle—Roosevelt because he was on his blacked-out inspection tour, Willkie because he was still girdling the world. Separation did not make their hearts grow fonder. Willkie talked with Allied and neutral leaders with his usual enthusiasm and expansiveness; he privately advised the President to send wheat to Turkey and publicly urged a second front to help Russia. Willkie was annoyed when he heard in Chungking that Roosevelt had belittled his call for a second front, and annoyed again when the President talked scornfully of “typewriter strategists.” Roosevelt tried to make clear that he supported Willkie’s mission, was referring only to speculation about the second front, and was simply attacking columnists, but still there was a sharper edge of mutual distrust in their relationship when Willkie returned in mid-October—a feeling that was not wholly dissipated by an amiable meeting at the White House.
All through summer and early fall Hadley Cantril, in Princeton, continued to sample political attitudes for the President. He did not like much of what he found. During the forging of a grand coalition against the Axis, Americans had become a bit less interventionist than before Pearl Harbor. In the midst of a war against Nazism, anti-Semitism seemed more widespread than before the war. Under an administration sympathetic to the Negro, blacks were shifting toward the Republican party in the coming election. Margaret Mead was right—the people wanted their President to be tougher, more demanding of them; they wanted to be told; they wanted it laid on the line.
All this spelled trouble in the fall elections, Cantril warned the President. But he could not be sure he was getting through to Roosevelt, who was still maintaining his nonpolitical posture.
So the campaign, lacking in either dramatic national antagonists or clear-cut issues, meandered on toward the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Virtually every candidate in every party backed an all-out war effort, planning for the postwar period, and often even Franklin Roosevelt, at least in his role as war leader. Behind the big consensual symbols politicians stressed little issues, catered to local biases, played up personalities. Political lethargy, reporters found, was rampant. Some Willkie supporters of 1940 crossed party lines to back liberal Democrats, and some New Dealers preferred interventionist Republicans to mediocre Democrats, but the once-heralded party realignment was stalled to the point of nonexistence. There was little suspense about the election outcome. Pundits generally agreed that the Republicans would make gains but not take control of either Senate or House.
“Hope you have a nice election!” a schoolgirl called out to the President after he had voted at Hyde Park Town Hall. It was not to be. In his eve-of-election statement Roosevelt had said nothing about Democrats or Republicans or even about the importance of supporting win-the-war candidates. He merely expressed the hope that people would vote. People would not even do that. The turnout was far below expectations, so the Republican vote was relatively much higher. The GOP picked up forty-four congressional seats and came within a handful of seats, 209 to the Democrats’ 222, of winning control of the House. Republicans won nine Senate seats and, more important for the future, several governorships in the biggest states. A sizable band of loyal New Dealers lost their seats without a word of support from the President, for whom they felt they had gone down the line. Ham Fish and most of the other conservative isolationists won easily. The two congressional parties strengthened their hold on Capitol Hill; the presidential Republicans won a couple of potential national leaders in the victories of Earl Warren in California, who beat the once-formidable Culbert Olson, and Dewey in New York, who outpolled the Democrats and the American Labor party combined. Of the four parties, only the presidential Democrats—Roosevelt’s party—lost.
The usual off-year explanations were trotted out and combined with the effect of war conditions: the low vote; the young people, predominantly Democratic, who were off in the war or in war industry; administration toleration of labor excesses; inflation; local problems; gripes. The President was criticized for his hands-off policy. One commentator noted acidly that Wilson had called for a Democratic Congress in 1918 and lost seats in the House and Senate; Roosevelt had not called for anything and lost twice as many.
Cantril’s data summed up the hard meaning of the election. Low turnout was the main cause of the Republican gains. The great Democratic potential of low-income voters and younger people had not been mobilized. It was a typical off-year congressional election, hardly influenced by the great issues of war and peace. By staying above the political battle the President had protected his personal standing; but he had not helped the people find a sense of moral purpose or even a sense of direction. He now faced a potent coalition in Congress between congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans.
Roosevelt publicly was mum and privately seemed happy the whole business was over. He was sad about Norris’s defeat in Nebraska. So was the lonely old crusader, who was also bewildered. “I can’t understand it,” he said to friends who came to console him in his Senate office. “I went down to defeat for reasons that even my enemies cannot explain.” His remarks were a political dirge for the New Deal in wartime.