AT THE CENTER OF a straining, throbbing nation in arms the White House in the winter of 1944 seemed more tranquil than a decade before. Under a mantle of new snow it showed the quiet of the storm center in its graceful aloofness from the hubbub around it. Visitors, remembering the bustle of grandchildren, ballet dancers, left-wing leaders, politicos, intellectuals, young friends of the Roosevelt children, noted Sistie’s and Buzzie’s Flexible Flyers standing unused in a litter of miscellany under the portico; the White House, with its pillars peeling a bit at the bottom, even seemed to need a coat of paint.
The people around the President changed but the structure of human relations around him had a kind of fixity. Hopkins was critically ill and out of commission all through the winter and spring, but Leahy partly took his place on military matters and Byrnes on domestic. Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling as much as ever—she was in Brazil on her thirty-ninth wedding anniversary—but Anna had come for a visit in the fall of 1943 and had decided to stay on to help her father. Marvin McIntyre was dead, but in February the President cheerily announced a “court-martial” for the gray, stooped, unflappable Hassett and presented him with a commission as full presidential secretary, clubbing him a “rare combination of Roget, Bartlett, & Buckle.” Grace Tully and the other secretaries helped preserve an atmosphere of unhurried efficiency. Fala was four and was given a cake, which he refused to eat for the benefit of the photographers.
Roosevelt still followed his old routine, reading and working in bed until late in the morning, whizzing off in his wheel chair to the oval office, dropping into the map room with Leahy to look over shifting military dispositions noted by flags and pins, seeing callers through the afternoon, dictating his pithy little letters for an hour or so, then returning to the mansion for cocktails and a late dinner. But the pace was a bit slower now, the anecdotes a bit longer, the visitors a bit fewer, the evenings a bit shorter.
On the morning of March 4, 1944 the President observed the start of his twelfth year in office with a reception for two hundred in the East Room. The old warriors of the New Deal were there and the new warriors of the Pentagon and the Navy. Old Dr. Peabody, now eighty-six, in a full and vibrant voice asked divine help for “thy servant, Franklin” and to “save us from all false choices.”
The chief of the warriors was sixty-two and in the winter of 1944 he was ailing and tired. Days after he had recovered from his post-Teheran flu of January he was complaining of headaches in the evening. Those in the White House who saw him the most—especially Anna Boettiger and Grace Tully—became more and more alarmed about his condition. He seemed strangely tired even in the morning hours; he occasionally nodded off during a conversation; once he blanked out halfway through signing his name to a letter, leaving a long scrawl. Finally Anna spoke to Dr. McIntire. The Admiral, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, seemed concerned, too, but curiously resistant to talking with the President. Anna pressed him to speak at least to Eleanor. The upshot was that the President was persuaded to go, on March 27, 1944, to the United States Medical Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, for a check-up. Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn, a consultant in cardiology who was in charge of the Electro-Cardiograph Department, was detailed to examine him.
The young Navy doctor was called in so hurriedly that he had no time to look over the President’s medical records before greeting his distinguished patient. He quickly felt at ease, though, when Roosevelt came rolling down the corridor in his wheel chair, wisecracking with an old friend and waving genially to the nurses and patients who clustered in the hallways and peeked at him around corners. As the President was lifted to the examining table, he seemed to Bruenn neither disturbed by having to undergo examination nor annoyed by it—indeed, not especially interested in it.
It was Bruenn who was first surprised, then disturbed, and finally shocked as he conducted the examination and then rushed to check the earlier records. Not only was Roosevelt tired and gray of face, slightly feverish, able to move only with difficulty and with breathlessness, and coughing frequently—clearly suffering from bronchitis—but his basic condition was far more serious. Roosevelt’s heart, Bruenn found, while regular in rhythm, was enlarged. At the apex, Bruenn found a blowing systolic murmur. The second aortic sound was loud and booming. Blood pressure was 186/108, compared with 136/78 in mid-1935, 162/98 two years later, and 188/105 in early 1941. Since 1941 there had been significant increase in the size of the cardiac shadow. The enlargement of the heart, which was mainly of the left ventricle, was evidently caused by a dilated and tortuous aorta; and the pulmonary vessels were engorged.
Bruenn’s findings were grim: hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure.
Emergency conferences were held among McIntire, Bruenn, and other Navy doctors, with Drs. James A. Paullin and Frank Lahey brought in as consultants. It was obvious that the patient must be put on a regimen, but how much could a President—especially this President—be expected to follow the ordinary heart patient’s routine? One or two weeks of nursing care was suggested, but rejected because of the demands on the President. Bruenn urged that at least Roosevelt be digitalized; there was some resistance, but Bruenn insisted that if that were not done he could take no further responsibility for the case. The doctors finally agreed on a program: digitalis, less daily activity, fewer cigarettes, a one-hour rest after meals, a quiet dinner in the White House quarters, at least ten hours’ sleep, no swimming in the pool, a diet of 2,600 calories moderately low in fat, and mild laxatives to avoid straining.
The digitalis seemed to bring good results within three days. When Bruenn examined his patient on April 3, 1944, Roosevelt had had a refreshing ten hours’ sleep, his color was good, his lungs entirely clear, and there was no dyspnea on lying flat. The systolic murmur persisted, however, and his blood pressure was still disturbing. He continued to improve during the following days, but Bruenn and his colleagues decided that he needed a real vacation. The President readily agreed to take a long rest in the sun at Bernard Baruch’s plantation, “Hobcaw,” in South Carolina.
The cardinal issue during these alarming days was who should tell the President about his condition, and in what manner? The doctors agreed that he should be given the full facts, if only to gain his co-operation. But who would tell him? It was soon clear that the President himself would not raise the question; not once did he ask why he had to have the examination or take drugs or get more rest. He simply followed the doctors’ recommendations to the extent he could and left the matter there. Bruenn did not feel it his duty to inform the President; he was only a lieutenant commander and was a newcomer to the White House. Everyone evidently assumed that McIntire had the responsibility and would exercise it, but there is no indication that he did. Perhaps he lacked sufficient confidence in his own capacity to pass on such portentous findings to the President, especially if he should be asked difficult questions. Perhaps he sensed that the President would neither accept the significance of the findings nor act on them. Perhaps he realized how fatalistic the President was, or perhaps he realized that no matter how well grounded the findings there was a heavy psychological and political element in the situation, and that a President—especially one with Roosevelt’s determination—could not be advised as easily or authoritatively as the ordinary patient. Or perhaps, after all his rosy prognoses of the past, he was simply too timid.
So Roosevelt went off to Hobcaw Barony not knowing that he was suffering from anything more than bronchitis, or the flu. He never asked what were the little green tablets—the digitalis—that he was taking. He wrote to Hopkins that he had had a really grand time there—“slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang. The interesting thing is that the world didn’t hang.” He had pleasant visitors—members of his family, and Lucy Rutherfurd. He claimed that he had cut down his drinks to one and a half cocktails per evening and nothing more, “not one complimentary highball or nightcap,” and that he had cut his cigarettes down from twenty or thirty a day to five or six. “Luckily they still taste rotten but it can be done.” The President did experience a painful gall bladder attack at Hobcaw, but medication relieved the pain and there were no cardiac symptoms.
So it was not really a matter of work. He was tired, Miss Perkins remembered later, and he could not bear to be tired. Grace Tully still worried about the more pronounced tremble of his hands as he lit a cigarette, the dark circles that no longer ever seemed to fade from around his eyes, the slump in his shoulders. Watching Roosevelt at a press conference in March, Allen Drury felt that “subdued” was the only word for the man. The well-known gestures—the quick laugh, the upflung head, the open smile, the intent, open-mouthed, expressionless look when he was listening—all were there, just as they had been in numberless newsreels and photographs. But underneath, Drury detected a certain lifelessness, a certain preoccupation, a tired impatience—whether from work or political opposition, or from age or ill-health, Drury could not tell.
On his Washington stopovers James Roosevelt noted that his father was doing little things—autographing books and digging mementos out of old trunks and boxes for his children and grandchildren—as though he had some feeling of time closing in. Still, the old buoyancy was there, even if it took longer to show. Washington would twitter with gossip that the President was dead or dying, and then he would return from the South or from Hyde Park, refreshed, appearing a bit thin but radiant and vigorous. Visitors kept remarking on how wasted the President’s face seemed, but the main reason for his changed appearance was his determination to lose weight—and his success in dropping from 188 pounds to about 165.
Nothing stimulated him more than memories of old times. When Eleanor was told in Curacao that “Lieutenant” Roosevelt had visited there on an American warship and had been given a goat as a mascot for his ship, she asked her husband, “What have you been holding out on me all these years?”
“I have an alibi,” the President wrote in a memo to her. “The only time I was ever in Curacao in my life was in 1904 when I went through the West Indies on a Hamburg-American Line ‘yacht.’ I was accompanied by and thoroughly chaperoned by my maternal parent.
“I was never given a goat—neither did anyone get my goat!
“This looks to me like a German plot!”
In his diary Stimson was still railing at the President’s “one-man government,” which helped produce “this madhouse of Washington.” In fact, his chief was running the White House much as he had in prewar days, while all around him were rising the huge bureaucratic structures of defense and welfare that would characterize the capital for decades to come.
The apex of the huge structures was the tiny west wing of the White House. Here the old hands, including Steve Early and Pa Watson, served and protected the President. Executive clerks Maurice Latta and William Hopkins sought to keep some control over the documents and messages that flooded into the White House—no easy job given Roosevelt’s distaste for set communications channels. The White House office had already begun to spill over into the old State Department Building across the way; administrative assistants—Jonathan Daniels, Lowell Mellett, Lauchlin Currie, David K. Niles, and others—occupied on the second floor a row of offices that they called “Death Row” because of the turnover. The President obtained Blair House, across the street, for putting up distinguished guests. Rosenman was still in charge of the speech-writing team, but he had no team, because Hopkins was in the Mayo Clinic and Sherwood was in London as head of the Overseas Branch of OWI.
Over in the east wing, which was in the final stages of building, Byrnes ran an even smaller shop than Roosevelt’s. In a clutter of tiny offices and partitioned cubbyholes—for a time the news ticker was in the men’s room—a small staff struggled with the tide of problems relentlessly streaming in from the civilian agencies struggling for funds, authority, manpower, and recognition. Ben Cohen, as incisive and unpretentious as ever, served as his legal adviser; “special adviser” Baruch offered wise, opinionated counsel; Samuel Lubell and a handful of others made up the rest of the full-time staff. Byrnes set up a War Mobilization Committee composed of Stimson, Nelson, and other top civilians. Roosevelt occasionally presided over its meetings—it was the nearest thing he ever had to a war cabinet—but like most of the White House committees it dwindled into innocuous desuetude.
Crowded also into the east wing was Admiral Leahy, with a staff that never numbered more than two or three civilian secretaries and a couple of aides. Unlike Byrnes, he spurned the notion of having a public-relations man, on the grounds that his chief should do all the talking and was better at it anyway. As Roosevelt’s personal Chief of Staff, Leahy presided over meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared its agenda, and signed its major decisions, but he did not exert strong leadership on the committee and recognized that important decisions were often made between Roosevelt and individual members of it, especially Marshall. Behind the JCS were banked its supporting agencies: the Joint Deputy Chiefs of Staff, Joint Secretariat, Joint Staff Planners, with its own Joint War Plans Committee, Joint Intelligence Committee, and a host of others.
The third leg supporting the administrative tripod of the White House was the Bureau of the Budget, also located in the old State Department Building. Under Harold Smith’s gifted leadership the bureau had moved far beyond its traditional budgetary responsibility and was making ambitious efforts to plan, co-ordinate, and review the whole war administration. With its special access to the west wing and with the talents of men like Wayne Coy, Donald Stone, and Stuart Rice, the Budget Bureau had become the President biggest single staff resource.
On paper, in form, on an organization chart it all looked so logical—the Chief Executive at the top of the administrative apex, his three “assistant presidents” or chiefs of staff just below him, and then the lines of control and responsibility radiating out to the great bureaucratic workshops along Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall. In fact, Roosevelt was carrying on the old Rooseveltian tradition of administrative juggling and disorganization. He was no more able in 1944 than in 1940 or 1934 to work through one chief of staff. He had not three, but at least a dozen, “assistant presidents,” including Marshall, the more influential Cabinet members, especially Hull and Stimson, war-agency czars Nelson, McNutt, Land, and others. Despite Leahy’s and Byrnes’s efforts, co-ordination among the “assistant presidents” was sometimes weak. Byrnes and Smith jousted with each other with icy politeness. It was not always clear whether Marshall or Stimson should report to the President on a military matter.
Roosevelt’s penchant for secrecy within the administration compounded the whole problem. Even such a primitive matter as communication was not always certain; occasionally messages to Roosevelt were delayed days and even weeks, and generals and admirals learned about a vital White House decision first from the British. Marshall sometimes was unsure which version of presidential statements at Cabinet meetings was correct. And he complained to Byrnes that the JCS had to wait a day or two before learning of important White House decisions.
Hopkins, the only man who had ever really served as assistant president or as an over-all chief of staff, was sorely missed. He was restless to come back but finally aware of his condition. When T. V. Soong asked him for aid on a matter, Hopkins balked. “Tell them I’m sick.” But the President seemed in no hurry to have Hopkins back. He ordered him to stay away from the White House until mid-June at the earliest. If he returned before that, Roosevelt warned, he would be extremely unpopular in Washington, “with the exception of Cissy Patterson who wants to kill you off as soon as possible—just as she does me….
“Tell Louise to use the old-fashioned hatpin if you don’t behave!”
As Roosevelt’s reference to Cissy Patterson suggested, the hostilities between the White House and part of the press continued through the war. Administration officials held confidential “backgrounders” with favored members of the press—columnist Raymond Clapper, Marquis Childs, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Turner Catledge, of the New York Times, and a few others. The anti-Roosevelt newspapers retaliated by publishing “secret” war information. The President could do little but complain at his press conferences about irresponsible columnists and commentators.
It did seem in early 1944, though, that he was at last bringing to book a group of radical rightists whom he considered guilty of seditious conduct. For weeks he had prodded Biddle at Cabinet meetings: “When are you going to indict the seditionists?” Finally, Biddle did so, but the preliminaries stretched out over months. He put a group of thirty on trial in Federal District Court in Washington. It seemed like a grand rally of all the fanatic Roosevelt haters: Joseph E. McWilliams, head of the Christian Mobilizes, who liked to refer to Roosevelt as the “Jew King”; Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, author of The Red Network; an erratic lady nicknamed “T.N.T.” who delighted photographers with her stiff-armed Nazi salutes; James True, said to have received Patent No. 2,026,077 for a “Kike Killer,” a short rounded club made also in a smaller size for ladies; Lawrence Dennis, philosopher of fascism; and others ranging from the dotty to the desperate. The defendants were charged with conspiring to overthrow the government in favor of a Nazi dictatorship and stating that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately invited by Roosevelt and his gang; that the American government was controlled by Communists, international Jews, and plutocrats; that the Axis cause was the cause of morality and justice. The trial got under way amid histrionics but dwindled into endless legalisms and obstructions; it lasted over seven months; the judge died before its conclusion; no retrial was held, and in the end the indictment was ingloriously dismissed. The trial did serve to muzzle “seditious” propaganda, but it also revealed Roosevelt as a better Jeffersonian in principle than in practice.
May 11, 1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
Perhaps the most bitter anti-Rooseveltian in the spring of 1944 was no seditionist, but Sewell Avery, head of the huge mail-order house Montgomery Ward. For many months Avery had been defying the War Labor Board by refusing to negotiate with the CIO union that had won representation rights. When the union called a strike the President ordered the men to return to work and the company to follow the Labor Board’s orders and recognize the union. Avery refused. Normally the War Department would have taken over the plant, but knowing that Stimson was keenly opposed to seizure of a nondefense industry and perhaps glad for a chance to put Jesse Jones on the spot, Roosevelt ordered the Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate the Chicago plant. Jones promptly turned the job over to his Undersecretary, Wayne Taylor, himself a wealthy Chicago businessman. Prodded by Byrnes to go to Chicago and expedite the seizure, Attorney General Biddle flew out, occupied Avery’s office, and asked for Avery’s co-operation. When Avery refused, saying “to hell with the government,” he ordered him taken out.
“You New Dealer!” Avery exploded, using the worst epithet in his vocabulary. A photograph of the portly executive leaning back in two soldiers’ arms, his hands folded benevolently over his stomach, hit the front page of hundreds of newspapers. A great hubbub followed. Government by bayonet, one editor termed it.
The President calmly reviewed with reporters “a little history that the country doesn’t know,” reciting the long story of Montgomery Ward recalcitrance. A lot of people were seeing things under their bed, he complained; having been at Hobcaw Barony he could view the whole thing with some detachment. He did not mention Avery by name. The President’s judicious mien had little effect. The company continued its defiance, and later in the year Roosevelt ordered Stimson to take it over. This time the President did not mince words. Montgomery Ward, he said, under Avery’s leadership “has waged a bitter fight against the bona fide unions of its employees throughout the war….We cannot allow Montgomery Ward to set aside the wartime policies of the United States Government just because Mr. Sewell Avery does not approve of the Government’s procedure for handling labor disputes.”
Roosevelt had backed Biddle all the way through. When the Attorney General had to face a special House investigating committee, his chief wrote to him: “Don’t let the boys get you down,” adding in his own hand, “bite ’em!”
One day during the height of the mobilization effort, Steve Early telephoned Rosenman to say that Mrs. Roosevelt wanted them to talk to a young man about something very important. When Early and Rosenman met with the rather wild-eyed man in Early’s office they were astonished when the visitor asked whether the walls were bugged, whether the secretaries ever eavesdropped—and suddenly flung open a door to see if anyone was listening. They were even more astonished when he told them that he worked on atomic energy and told them about the bomb; neither Early nor Rosenman had heard of it. The visitor said he had come because the big corporations in general and Du Pont in particular were taking control of the atomic project in order to monopolize postwar energy. Early and Rosenman could only report the problem—and the visitor—to the War Department.
It was a zany item in the whole complex of secrecy that surrounded the atomic project. It was so secret that Bush’s progress reports to Roosevelt were returned, with no copies made even for the White House files. The President withheld knowledge of the project from Hull and from other key decision-making officials. Grace Tully remembered the President saying, around June 1944, “I can’t tell you what this is, Grace, but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many American lives.”
The work on the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos was carried out in utmost secrecy and isolation. Exceptional security precautions were taken. Very few of the 150,000 people employed in the Manhattan Project knew the real purpose of their work. General Leslie R. Groves, head of the project, wanted no communication among scientists working in different sectors, so he enforced a policy of compartmentalization. This policy was virtually ignored, however, in the Los Alamos laboratories, where the free exchange of information was vital and unavoidable. Security officials thoroughly investigated the scientists, censored their mail, listened in on their telephone conservations, forbade them to tell their families the nature of their work, assigned them code names and bodyguards. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of Los Alamos and chief recruiter of the glittering assemblage of scientists there, was kept under continuous surveillance by the Army and the FBI.
Secrecy infected every level of government, including Congress. Until 1944 the Manhattan Project had been supported by funds available from various War Department sources, but expenditures were rising so steeply that appropriations had to come directly from Congress. Early in February Stimson, Marshall, and Bush met secretly with Rayburn, McCormack, and Martin and described the program to them in general terms; later they met with Senate leaders. Appropriations were then pushed through a blind Congress without debate. Several Congressmen grew suspicious and proposed to visit the Oak Ridge and Hanford installations; they were headed off by their colleagues and by Stimson and Marshall.
Atomic secrecy strained Anglo-American relations, too. Despite Roosevelt’s agreement with Churchill in 1942 on joint conduct of atomic work, a veil of secrecy closed in on the program after the Army took over the Manhattan Project, and by the end of 1942 Roosevelt seemed to support the Army’s wish to share no more information with the British than was necessary. At Casablanca, Churchill said that if the exchange of information was not continued Britain would develop tire bomb independently, and that would be a somber decision. After Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, told the President in May 1943 that Britain wanted the atomic bomb mainly for military purposes to counteract Soviet might, and was not interested in industrial use of atomic energy, Roosevelt decided in favor of “complete exchange of all information.” As a result of a communications mix-up, however, Bush, in England, did not get Roosevelt’s instructions and persuaded Churchill to accept a limited interchange of information directly relating to war plans. At Quebec in August the two leaders ratified this agreement in essence and set up an Anglo-American-Canadian policy committee to supervise the joint atomic work of the three nations.
Sharing atomic information with Britain was one thing; with Russia, quite another. In this momentous field the Soviets found themselves once again excluded by the Atlantic partners.
By early 1944 Bohr was arousing sharp concern among his fellow scientists and others about the prospect of a fateful nuclear competition after the war. The Danish physicist did not oppose developing the bomb or even using it in the war, but he was convinced that the enormous power of the atom then being released for destructive purposes offered supreme danger and opportunity after the war. He felt it imperative that before the bomb was ever used the Allies establish international control and inspection of atomic energy to build an open world of friendly international co-operation. Bohr wanted the United States and Britain to approach the Soviets about the matter while Russia was still an ally in order to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust. If the two democracies did not make an early agreement with Moscow, he contended, a suicidal nuclear-arms race was sure to break out after the war.
Bohr won the enthusiastic support of several British officials, including Ambassador Halifax, in Washington, and Sir John Anderson, who was in charge of the British atomic-energy project, as well as Mackenzie King. Introduced to Felix Frankfurter by the Danish Ambassador, Bohr sounded the Justice out cautiously to see if he knew of the project; when Frankfurter obliquely mentioned “X,” he saw that he did. Frankfurter knew little about science as such but a lot about the nature and nurture of ideas. He knew, Max Freedman says, that it was repugnant to the ethics and philosophy of scientific research to think of exclusive secrets and of building a barbed wire of security regulations to barricade atomic secrets from the rest of the world. He promised to pass Bohr’s views on to the President.
Frankfurter found Roosevelt “worried to death” about the whole postwar atomic problem. The President knew that he and Churchill would have to confront it; he knew about Churchill’s fear of sharing secrets with the Russians. Bohr was incredulous when Frankfurter told him that the President wanted him to fly to London and discuss the whole matter with Churchill. While waiting to see the Prime Minister in London, Bohr received word from an old Russian scientific friend, Peter Kapitza, inviting him to Moscow, where everything necessary for scientific work would be made available. Bohr inferred from this and other items that the Russians knew of the work in the West on the bomb and wanted him to work on fission.
Bohr’s meeting with Churchill was a disaster. Busy with the impending invasion of France, the Prime Minister quickly became impatient with Bohr’s quiet discursiveness, and the interview ended before Bohr could make his key point. Crushed, he returned to Washington in June and sought out Frankfurter, who promptly reported to the White House. The President was amused that anyone would tackle Churchill in one of his belligerent moods; he said that he would see Bohr. He had not been thrown off by Bohr’s long memos, in which the scientist, in contrast to the reporter who makes his key points first and embellishes them, built up a long theoretical background before coming to his conclusions.
Bohr found a different reception in the White House from that at 10 Downing Street. The President greeted him warmly, sat him down next to his gadget-littered desk, told some stories about Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, listened to his views, stated that he generally agreed with them, and sympathized with Bohr’s reception by Churchill, adding that the Prime Minister often behaved this way in the face of a new idea. He was confident, the President went on, that atomic power created vast possibilities for good as well as evil, that it would help build international co-operation and even open a new era in history. He seemed to feel that Stalin should be approached on the matter. The President’s clear-cut, enthusiastic words elated Bohr—and even more when the President said he would take all this up with Churchill at their forthcoming meeting.
There is no record of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s discussion of the bomb at their Hyde Park meeting on September 19, 1944, following their Quebec meeting, but the outcome suggests what happened. The Prime Minister, suspecting that Bohr might be leaking information to Moscow, evidently succeeded in shattering Roosevelt’s confidence in the physicist. It was a lugubrious example of what happened when Roosevelt’s idealistic impulses and amorphous policy collided with Churchill’s narrower, Atlantic-oriented outlook. The aide-mémoire issued by the two men spoke with shattering finality.
“1. The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding tube alloys, with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy, but when a ‘bomb’ is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.
“2. Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing tube alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement.
“3. Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information particularly to the Russians.”
Behind Roosevelt’s turnabout was not only his own ambivalence, but also a fundamental change in the Realpolitik of the atomic weapon. By the fall of 1944 it was becoming evident that Germany was not succeeding in making the bomb. The terrible fear of the scientists that the Führer would possess the ultimate weapon was dwindling; some scientists were beginning to wonder about their own leaders. The leaders—especially Churchill—were pondering the implications of the weapon being in the hands of the Russians, whom they suspected of conducting atomic espionage. Russia, not Germany, was now the issue. The anti-Hitler coalition was under a new strain.
For the moment the prophetic voice of international science desperately trying to forestall a disastrous nuclear-arms race was cut off from reaching the top levels of the American government. The awesome and deadly new atomic age was being born in secrecy and suspicion, not as a shared adventure in scientific co-operation and world unity, but as a military means of beating the Axis and perhaps containing the Russians. Moscow was reacting with suspicion and espionage. Some notes of Stimson’s for a meeting with Roosevelt late in August illustrated the strange combination of idealism and narrow realism that was being brought to bear on S1, Stimson’s code name for the atomic project:
“The necessity of bringing Russian orgn. into the fold of Christian civilization….
“The possible use of S1 to accomplish this….
“Steps toward disarmament
“Impossibility of disclosure—(S1)
“Science is making a common yardstick impossible.”
As the President was driven along the streets of Washington he could see the artifacts of a mobilized society. The Mall, with wings and annexes branching out from the drab “temps” of World War I, looked like a vast construction project. Sidewalks were crowded with GI’s, sailors, Marines, WAC’s, WAAF’s, WAVES, soldiers of Allied nations. Not far from the White House was the Stage Door Canteen, in the old Belasco Theatre. Gasoline rationing had cut civilian driving; some government workers rode to their offices on bicycles.
Thousands of girls in their teens and twenties had flocked to Washington; Arlington Farms, across the river, housed 8,000 of them, including 3,300 WAVES, and came to be known as Girl Town. WAC’s encamped in the sprawling South Post. Whole agencies had been packed up and moved to other cities—the Rural Electrification Administration to St. Louis, the Farm Credit Administration to Kansas City, the Wage and Hour and Public Contracts Division to New York—but the nation’s capital still labored under the housing pressure. Army officers pleaded for apartments, offering bonuses for leads, promising “no pets or parties.” Hotels set up cots in dining rooms after mealtime.
Less visible from a presidential limousine but all too clear in the data flowing to the White House from the agencies—from the Pentagon, Isador Lubin’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, McNutt’s Federal Security Agency, and other offices—were the phenomena of a nation pulsing with fecundity, change, and stress. Despite cutbacks in the output of raw materials, war production was soaring. Early in June 1944 the President reminded a news conference of business-newspaper editors of the “most awful howl all over the country” when he had once asked Congress for 50,000 planes a year. “Couldn’t be done—just couldn’t be done.” Well, he went on, “we are now up to a hundred thousand a year, and we are keeping on going—keeping on making records. American industry has done a lot better than the non-business press thought it could do.” The 200,000th United States-financed airplane since July 1, 1940 had just been accepted, Roosevelt added; the first 100,000 had taken 1,431 days to build, the second only 369.
The United States was spending over three hundred million dollars a day on the war. Income—real, disposable, per capita—was soaring to new heights, heading from under $1,000 in 1940 toward almost $1,300 four years later. The total labor force in 1944 was sixty-six million, twelve million over 1940, with women providing five million of the increase. Unemployment had dropped from the eight million of 1940 to 670,000 four years later; the huge lump of Great Depression joblessness had vanished at last. For the first time in history the participation rate (per cent of population over fourteen years employed) rose to over 60 per cent. In 1944 over two-thirds of teen-age boys (fourteen to nineteen) were gainfully employed. One of the biggest jumps in participation was among men sixty-five and over. War had dramatically solved the problem that Roosevelt had struggled with for a decade.
Behind the bounding economic figures was a social panorama etched in hope and anguish. Most evident was the war migration. Eleven million young men and women were uprooted from their communities and sent off to the four corners of the globe; a civilian migration to better jobs was changing the face of the South, the inner cores of major cities, and the industrialized metropolitan outskirts. The war sharply accelerated the decades-old flow of blacks and whites out of the South and into the coastal and inland industrial regions of the North and West. Within metropolitan areas whites were moving to the fringes of the cities, while Negroes settled in the urban cores, where they became more socially visible, economically significant, and politically potent than they had been in the old rural cultures of the South.
Over the frantic protests of the War Manpower Commission, the placement of plants lured workers from their homes, communities, parents, and families to lucrative new jobs. But the migration of able-bodied young men was not enough, for the armed services and industry had an insatiable demand for manpower, and one by one all groups were pulled in. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Stimson found that color was no barrier to war usefulness; next, women were urged to work; then the young and the old were summoned, along with the illiterate, the handicapped, the leisured, aliens, students, and finally Japanese-Americans from the concentration camps. The people responded, but the demand was infinite. Even as the participation rate for women climbed over 36 per cent, Roosevelt and Stimson pleaded for drafting women into the Army.
Since for war purposes all bodies were equally necessary, and the war priority was all-powerful, traditional distinctions and ties diminished. The kinship system, never very strong, was virtually dismantled. The demands for young men in the services and on the assembly line lessened their economic dependence on their elders and projected anew the cult of youth. The freedom and importance of young people—almost instant adulthood—sent the marriage rate skyrocketing. The demand for women as economic producers on assembly lines caused a new move toward sexual equality and a de-emphasis on the wife-mother role. Families, separated geographically and functionally, spent less time together. Long overtime hours, migration to job centers, the induction of husbands into the services, and the loss of control by parents over marriage, all weakened family stability.
The equality of bodies virtually destroyed the old yardstick of status, identity, and legitimacy. New income taxes, high wages, and rationing undercut the economic stratification system. Conspicuous consumption was difficult when, for example, yachts were donated to the Navy for shore patrol. The status of jobs in economic sectors changed drastically; the lowly military, political, and governmental jobs suddenly became highly prized. Draft-board regulations made manual labor in factories and on farms more important—and sometimes more rewarding—than the work of salesmen, small businessmen, and college professors. No one planned these changes; few foresaw them.
The hierarchy of age, income, sex—in fact, the whole stratification system—was eroding. From the disorder there gathered, among other forces, a new social energy of black Americans. As a consequence of moving north, blacks became better paid, more educated, better fed and clothed. They were also becoming more frustrated and socially disorganized. Negroes moved into city slum areas as whites departed for the suburbs—and into the hand-me-down housing left behind. Crowding intensified; 60,000 Negroes moved into Chicago areas previously occupied by 30,000 whites. As usual, black income lagged behind white, and many blacks felt more keenly than ever the gap between the egalitarian, antiracist ideals of the war and the pervasive discrimination around them. In May 1944 a clear majority of respondents across the nation told pollsters that whites should have a better chance at jobs than Negroes because whites were superior, or better trained, or more intelligent, or more dependable, or because this was a white man’s country.
Negroes by the thousands were now coming into contact with whites in war jobs. And though racial strikes constituted only .00054 of all work stoppages, the confrontation was usually troublesome. After a year of war, OWI reported that “Southern whites who came with the construction crews brought racial attitudes foreign to the community.…As a matter of fact, racial tensions actually developed to the acute stage under the influence of these new attitudes….”
In 1943 Ickes wrote to Roosevelt that discrimination, “although it can be nibbled at ineffectively locally, cannot be handled except on a comprehensive national scale. This is not a local question. It is a national one.” The Fair Employment Practices Committee and other fragile efforts, however, could not begin to grapple with social resistance and change of this magnitude. The FEPC admitted its impotence in the face of flagrant discrimination by the railroads and the railway unions. The first FEPC report, on defense training by the Office of Education, was suppressed by Roosevelt on the advice of the War Department and Marvin McIntyre. At the urging of the State Department, Roosevelt stopped FEPC hearings on discrimination against Mexican-Americans “for international reasons.” When the Office of Education in Washington called on white universities in the South to admit Negro scholars, the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News told it to “go straight to hell….Nobody but an ignorant, fat-headed ass would propose such an unthinkable and impossible action.” The South Carolina legislature declared, “We are fighting to preserve white supremacy” in the war, and J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt that “a good proportion of unrest as regards race relationships results from Communist activities.” Two months before Pearl Harbor, Selective Service Director Hershey wrote to Roosevelt, “It is obvious we must sooner or later come to the procedure of requisitioning and delivering men in the sequence of their order numbers without regard to color.” After three years of coping with white racism, however, Hershey changed his mind: “what we are doing, of course, is simply transferring discrimination from everyday life into the Army.”
Roosevelt was ambivalent. In midwinter 1944 members of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association met with him for a special press conference. Roosevelt had hardly finished his cheery greetings when John Sengstacke, of the Chicago Defender, read a statement. For long moments, while Roosevelt listened, Sengstacke recited grievance after grievance arising from discrimination in jobs, schools, voting, civil rights. Second-class citizenship, he said, violated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and hurt the war effort. An awfully good statement, the President commented. He liked to think, he said, that mere association helped things along. But he admitted that “we are up against it.” When Chairman Ross of the FEPC suggested facilities for black victims of infantile paralysis at Warm Springs, Roosevelt wrote to his wife, “you can tell Mr. Malcolm Ross that Tuskegee Institute has a whole unit devoted to the care of Negro children,” and worriedly asked an aide, “what should I do about this?”
The other race bearing the sting of discrimination in America at the height of the war—Japanese-Americans in concentration camps—also received lukewarm support from the President. In September 1943 Roosevelt had publicly promised, “We shall restore to the loyal evacuees the right to return to the evacuated areas as soon as the military situation will make such restoration feasible.” When Stimson admitted to the President in May 1944 that the Army saw no military reason for keeping loyal Japanese in the camps, Roosevelt suggested that he investigate attitudes in California. At a Cabinet meeting Stimson warned that if the Japanese were freed there might be riots and Tokyo would retaliate against American prisoners of war. The President decided that suddenly ending the order excluding Japanese from the West Coast would be a mistake; the whole problem should be handled with the greatest discretion by seeing how many families would be acceptable to public opinion in specific West Coast localities, and by the gradual shifting of one or two families to individual counties throughout the nation. He had found that some Japanese-Americans would be acceptable to Dutchess County. Then it turned out that Ickes, to whose jurisdiction the War Relocation Authority had been transferred early in 1944, favored immediate release; and Hull warned that Tokyo was more likely to react to incidents involving Japanese-Americans in custody than those at large. That put a different face on the problem. By September, Undersecretary of Interior Abe Fortas could report that out of 114,000 evacuees, over 30,000 had been relocated on indefinite leave, 60,000 were in relocation centers and were being released at the rate of 20,000 a month, and over 18,000 were still at Tule Lake and not eligible for relocation.
The old system was gone, replaced by government agencies, and the wartime bureaucracy had but a single standard: military usefulness. Like many institutions, education fragmented under this test. The public schools thrived; working mothers and the move to urban centers sent more six to fourteen-year-olds into the schools, though there was a drop in high-school attendance. War fervor helped the social-involvement and learning-by-doing emphases of progressivism, which took more control over the public schools. Roosevelt had said, “We ask that every school house become a service center for the home front,” and the schools responded with bond drives, courses in Asian geography, and paramilitary school organizations. The boom in public education was only half the story, for colleges and universities were out of a job. Male students and teachers were drafted, women left for factory work; so the colleges stood idle. In 1943-44, liberal-arts graduates were less than one-half and law-school graduates only one-fifth the prewar level. Vannevar Bush estimated to the President that science lost 150,000 college graduates and 17,000 advanced-degree graduates to the war.
Clearly war mobilization meant educational disruption. As protests poured in from college presidents, Roosevelt sought a short-term solution. “Federal participation in this field should be limited, at least for the present, to meeting defense needs,” the President said, and asked Stimson and Knox for an immediate study of the fullest use of American colleges for war purposes. By the end of 1943 the Army Specialized Training Program and the Navy V-12 program had used idle college buildings at about five hundred institutions to provide training for about 300,000 men. But as the result of a strong letter from Marshall pleading for young men for the forthcoming invasion of France, the Army cut its program to the bone in early February 1944, and, on Rosenman’s advice to the President, the Navy did the same. The war came first; everything else must wait.
Higher education would never return to the prewar system. The drafting of students, the military-training programs, and OSRD weapons research had changed it permanently. Students marched in the Army; the Army marched in the classrooms; science professors improved bombs and medicines in the laboratories. After consultations among Stimson, Smith, Hopkins, Rosenman, and Oscar Cox, Roosevelt, on November 17, 1944, wrote to Bush requesting a program for postwar government subsidy of research and “discovering and developing scientific talent”; from this request evolved the National Science Foundation and the incorporation of universities into a new defense-industry complex. Together with the GI Bill of Rights educational giants, the government subsidies transformed local liberal-arts institutions into centers for national research and vocational instruction. The temporary war-research organizations and the temporary termination of teaching produced a lasting reorganization of education.
The temporary became permanent, the means became ends, as emergency change lasted into the postwar world. Roosevelt himself was responsible for much of the confusion, for he tried artificially to separate war from postwar, temporary crisis from permanent tasks, means from ends. “I am not convinced,” he declared, “that we can be realists about the war and planners for the future at this critical time.” Yet the future would not wait for peacetime planning; it was growing from the narrowly conceived war organization. Roosevelt demanded the authority to mobilize for war, but he disclaimed responsiblity for planning against the social disruptions brought by mobilization.
With peacetime institutions dismantled, only government organizations could deal with social turmoil. Where government mechanisms persisted into the war period, disruption was transformed into progress. With the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the War Labor Board, and a host of New Deal agencies agreeing on union policy, union membership during the war jumped more than six million. In 1944 one-quarter of the work force belonged to unions, strikes were a third the prewar level, defense workers received one day of rest in seven, a thirty-minute meal period in the middle of each shift, a vacation period, overtime pay, and a host of other stabilizing and humanizing benefits. Clear policies, established organizations, and the obvious military benefits of good labor relations prevented the turmoil potential in the migrations, conversions of industries, and new entrants to the labor field.
For labor, Roosevelt had a policy and stuck to it; for other social problems there were limited goals and faulty means. In the absence of effective programs, Roosevelt was often confronted by social disruptions that were the product of day-to-day military-industrial decisions. The disruptions were inevitable in a quickly mobilized country, but in the absence of social goals, unrest provoked ad-hoc responses seeking vainly to restore prewar arrangements. In housing, the need to shelter millions of black and white war workers thrust the government into deciding for or against segregated housing. In the absence of any social goals, housing agencies decided to abide by prewar “local custom.” Migration to defense communities, however, was so massive as to make “local custom” irrelevant; local custom quickly became whatever the government decided. In these communities, the more numerous whites had more political power than the blacks, so cities such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which prewar segregation was virtually unknown, received segregated housing, starting a new “local custom” still in force many years later.
Government decisions often aroused even more social unrest when announced goals were sacrificed to political or war expediency. Vacillation and delay in constructing the black Sojourner Truth housing project were one cause of the 1942 race riots in Detroit. Roosevelt’s reluctance to restore the Japanese-Americans to their homes helped produce riots at the Tule Lake concentration camp. The President’s continual frustration of FEPC work touched off a furore among liberals and blacks. Without goals, without strong organizations to implement social policies, social transformations were uncontrolled.
Organizations have a way of enduring. By refusing to build strong organizations for social policy, Roosevelt insured that the government would not control domestic society. While large residuals of presidential government, the military-industrial complex, and other wartime controls persisted, the dominance of American society by the national government ended with the war. Standards and mechanisms to insure that the social antagonisms enhanced by the war did not tear society apart would have to be a peacetime creation. Some new sources of integration, compounded from the prewar yardstick and the mobilization experience, would have to link together the black cities and the white suburbs of metropolis, the vast military and social-welfare bureaucracies of presidential government, the skyrocketing marriage and divorce rates, the disenchanted students and weapons researchers on campuses. Urban riots, family dissolution, feckless bureaucracy, and campus strife would be the price of not finding such new links.
“…There are no two fronts for America in this war,” the President had said early in the year. “There is only one front….When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground—we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his Government.”
Noble words, and perhaps true in the way Roosevelt meant. But in fact there had developed by the third year of war an ambivalence in the American way of war—an ambivalence that would have more significance in the long run than the consensus that the President sought to invoke.
On the one hand Americans were giving massive support to the war. In June 1944 the President reported proudly in a fireside chat that while there were about sixty-seven million persons who had or earned some form of income, eighty-one million parents and children had bought more than six hundred million individual bonds totaling more than thirty-two billion dollars. Americans were growing almost twenty million victory gardens; housewives were canning three billion quarts of fruit and vegetables a year. Boy Scouts, with the motto “Junk the Axis,” were tracking down the last remaining worn-out bicycles, old license plates, and scrap metal. In remote towns civil-defense wardens were still manning key buildings with sand buckets and stirrup pumps and scrutinizing the heavens for enemy planes that would never come.
On the other hand there was little indication, as American soldiers came more and more to grips with the enemy, of any deepening or broadening of popular understanding of the meaning of the war. After closely studying American popular attitudes, Jerome Bruner concluded in 1944 that people said that they were fighting for freedom, liberty, and democracy, but that was not why we went to war. “We went to war because our security demanded it.” The popular attitude toward the great peace documents of the war, he concluded, was symptomatic. A few weeks after the Atlantic Charter conference some three-fourths of the American people knew that a meeting had taken place and that a charter of some sort had emerged from it. Five months later less than a quarter of the American public said that they had ever heard of the Atlantic Charter. The same was true of the Four Freedoms, he found; only a handful of people would take exception to any of the four points, but they had not become a symbolic rallying cry for the future.
The Nation was quick to put the blame on Roosevelt. The American people were asking why we were fighting, and what is our foreign policy. People were asking Roosevelt and Hull this and receiving no answer. There were long, earnest debates as to whether Johnny felt he was simply fighting for Mom and blueberry pie. The “other side” of the war—the black and gray markets, widespread theft of rationing stamps, profiteering—was cited by observers as proof of lack of purpose and faith among the people.
On this score Roosevelt had little patience with his critics. Had he not proclaimed eloquent war aims over and over again? Late in March he stated them once more, and more flatly and succinctly than ever. “The United Nations,” he said, “are fighting to make a world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.” He pointedly read the statement to reporters and added, “Some of you people who are wandering around asking the bellhop whether we have a foreign policy or not, I think that’s a pretty good paragraph.”
Others wondered. John Dos Passos, exploring wartime Washington, had heard of the quiet and serenity of the White House. He asked a friend who worked there: Did the very stateliness of the place help keep the President out of touch with the country? Was the whole place under a bell glass? His friend thought the President might have lost touch with what real people did and thought and felt. Another man “close to the White House” was more reassuring. Every time the President took a trip, he told Dos Passos, he came back refreshed; perhaps it was a little like the Greek mythical giant who lost strength as soon as he ceased touching the earth. But the President was still seeing old friends—giving them too much time, some felt. Did people hesitate to tell him bad news? The President had a genius for handling that kind of problem.
Later Dos Passos watched the President at a press conference. He noted the two Secret Service men behind the chair, the green lawn sloping down to the great enclosing trees, the President’s fine nose and forehead etched against the blue Pacific Ocean on the big globe behind him. Roosevelt was boyishly gay as he described the war, puffing out his cheeks while searching for a word, lifting his eyebrows, scratching the back of his head as he prepared to shoot out an answer. But when the talk turned to strikes and rationing and price control, Dos Passos noted, his manner changed. He became more abrupt, almost querulous. His face took on the sagging look of a man who had been up late at his desk, Dos Passos felt, and had known sleepless nights.
Had the people lost touch with Roosevelt? Dos Passos did not ask this question. The people had no clear way of showing their support or their understanding between elections except through answering questions someone else had framed. So tested, public confidence in Roosevelt as a person and as President was fairly high, but it seemed to turn much more on his experience and competence than on the ideals and war goals he represented. Thus when asked in June the strongest reason for voting for Roosevelt for re-election in 1944, the great majority of voters endorsed his “superior ability to handle present and future situations”; others approved his past record of handling internal affairs; only a handful stressed his personality and general ability. Dr. Win the War did indeed seem to overshadow men’s perspectives of their leaders; the long-run goals were still vague in the popular mind.
Ideologies are shaped and hardened in the crucibles of fear and stress. Unlike the British and Russians, Americans as a whole had never had the experience or prospect of fighting for their lives and lands against a foreign invader. Most Americans, even in the darkest days after Pearl Harbor, had never feared a major invasion and certainly not defeat. They had differed only over the question of how long it would take to win, with most expecting victory over Germany within a year or two. But the cause of American optimism and lack of ideology lay much deeper—perhaps in what D. W. Brogan in mid-1944 described as the permanent optimism of “a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America.”
A country has the kind of army its total ethos, institutions, habits, and resources make possible, Brogan wrote. The American Army was the army of a nation whose motto was “Root, hog, or die,” of a country that, just as it slowly piled up great economic power as a special kind of corner, piled up military power for a final decisive blow; of a mechanized country of colossal resources and enterprises. “Other countries, less fortunate in position and resources, more burdened with feudal and gentlemanly traditions, richer in national reverence and discipline, can and must wage war in a very different spirit.” But Americans were interested not in form but in manpower, resources, logistics; not in moral victories, but in victory.
“Manpower, resources, logistics…” The admirals and generals passed through the gates to the White House grounds in their limousines and command cars and strode into Leahy’s quarters or into the map room or into the oval office. The military police, walking their hundred-foot beats in their white leggings, belts, and gloves, marched to and from the military installation nearest to the White House, a barracks behind the State Department built in the shadow of the Peace Monument put up after World War I. WAVES, quartered on the Mall, hung up their underthings to dry a stone’s throw from the Washington Monument. Encampments stretched alongside the Navy Yard, the Pentagon, the airport. The military dead slept at Arlington.
Unending caravans passed through the city, following occult unit designations posted along the streets. Along the highways and railways north and south of the capital sprawled vast embarkation areas, airfields, dumps, hospitals, depots, encampments, war plants, ports, proving grounds. At the ports of embarkation armies of men and mountains of equipment, clothing, weapons, ammunition were gathered, divided, allocated, paired, and dispatched on aged merchantmen, on Liberty and Victory ships, on converted liners like the Queen Mary that could carry a whole division. Overseas, men and munitions were sluiced into more camps and dumps, redistributed, assigned, loaded, shipped to the fronts: artillerymen, engineers, medical corpsmen, storekeepers, cooks, torpedomen, tail gunners, clerks, aircraft spotters, chaplains.
Near the front the manpower and supply routes branched off into corps and division headquarters and dumps, forked off to regiments, twisted along stream beds and jeep roads and mule paths to companies and platoons and squads. At the end of the long road bulging with war supply from the overflowing war plants of America was a thin, irregular line of soldiers with stubby faces, in shapeless fatigues, hardly distinguishable from the earth in which they lived and to which they clung. This was the seemingly fragile shield that held and advanced with tensile force. That force lay not in these few expendables, but in the colossal technology that lay behind the front.
American soldiers were workmen. They did not advance as in a pageant or charge the enemy in splendid array. Occasionally men fought with bayonets and pistols in Hollywood fashion, but for the most part soldiers wormed ahead on their bellies, came up against strong points, manhandled their light weapons into place, poured in fire and explosives; moved on; or if the strong point held, they called up reinforcements, asked for bigger tools, waited, summoned artillery, heavy mortars, planes, directed the holocaust of fire, waited….This was the “cutting edge” of war, glorified by combat reporters, but the Army really moved on the ocean supply routes and the endless lines of trucks clogging the highways.
Behind the front there rose a whole new culture, symbolized more by the quartermaster than the combat soldier. The GI had his own myths and credo, his own humor, his own blasphemy and invective invariably and irrelevantly garnished by one fuckin’ expletive, his own press—Yank and Stars and Stripes and countless unit publications—his own food, clothing, laundries, postal system, schools, recreation, paperbacks, shops, doctors, libraries. Like the soldier himself, all these were Government Issue.
There was no deep gulf between soldiers and civilians, in part because they shared the same ideology or lack of it. The area of consensus among Americans both in and out of the armed forces, investigators found, lay simply in the belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor meant war. Now they had to win the war to get back to home and blueberry pie. Like the civilians, the soldiers remembered little about the Four Freedoms, had no doubt that their side would win, felt little sense of personal commitment even while, in the soldiers’ case, sacrificing years of their lives and sometimes life itself. There was considerable distrust of Russia and some distrust of Britain. The soldiers lacked a consistent rationale by which to justify the war; they lacked a context; the war had no connection with anything that had gone before, except Axis aggression, or would come after it. It had to be fought, to be gotten over quickly so that men could go home.
The Commander in Chief was neither loved nor hated by most soldiers, but simply taken for granted as the top man in charge. He was the only President the younger men had known since the dawn of their political consciousness. A little of the old cynicism remained. Occasionally a vexed soldier would burst out to no one in particular: “Ah hate wah. Eleanor hates wah. Sistie hates wah….” But this was exasperation, not isolationism. By and large there was not much interest in the upcoming national elections. The average GI did not feel that his Commander in Chief would be tested at the polls in November. Ernie Pyle reported from Italy that, sure, the average combat soldier wanted to vote, but if there was going to be any red tape he would say nuts to it.
Washington was aware of the problem. The Army searched for Tolstoy’s quantity X, “the spirit of the army, the greater or less desire to fight and to face dangers….” Colonel Frank Capra directed a series of films called “Why We Fight,” based mainly on Allied and captured enemy newsreels. The films were eloquent, professional, relatively factual; they were required to be shown to all personnel; they provided men with a better knowledge of the prelude to war; they were found to have influenced specific opinions. But they had virtually no effect on general opinions, on commitment and conviction, on ideology. The GI had not ideology, but faith—faith in the Tightness of his cause, the iniquity of the enemy, the certainty of victory. He was persuaded mainly by the fact of war, just as the people had been after Pearl Harbor—and just as Roosevelt helped them to be. The GI was a realist, a workman, a practical achiever, just as, in large measure, his Commander in Chief was.
Thus the GI lived and worked and fought and sometimes died in the culture of war. Cutting across it, both at home and abroad, was a curious subculture—scattered enclaves of black soldiers. The Army in 1944 was still segregated; the Navy was lily-white, except for messmen and a few others. Some Negro army outfits had white officers, some had black. Despite their resentment of segregation, Negroes had developed some pride in black combat air and ground units, only to become more indignant than ever in early 1944 when black combat-infantry troops—some of them from famous old Negro outfits—were used for labor service and black pilots were accused of poor combat performance. The Negro press protested; Representative Fish appealed to Stimson; William Hastie, who had resigned as civilian aide on Negro affairs because of despair over the continuing misuse of black troops, wrote to Stimson that the Secretary had been misled by his own subordinates as to the conversion of Negro combat units into service units.
The White House rarely intervened in the services’ handling of Negro matters, but Eleanor Roosevelt passed along complaints, and the known concern of both the President and the First Lady was a brooding presence in Pentagon decisions. Annoyed by both the racists and the Negro “extremists,” Stimson believed that “we are suffering from the persistent legacy of the original crime of slavery”; he wanted equal opportunity for both races but not social intermixture. “We have got to use the colored race to help us in this fight and we have got to officer it with white men,” he wrote in his diary. “…better to do that than to have them massacred under incompetent officers.” For Stimson the issue was how best to win the war; but he would not face the question of the potential effectiveness of integrated units. Nor would Roosevelt.
“This war is an ideological war fought in defense of democracy,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma, which appeared in 1944. “In fighting fascism and nazism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial toleration and cooperation and of racial equality.”
Roosevelt’s position was a mixture of concern, realism, and resignation. When the Negro publishers in their February meeting with him chided him on the treatment of black soldiers, the President answered:
“It is perfectly true, there is definite discrimination in the actual treatment of the colored engineer troops, and others. And you are up against it, as you know perfectly well. I have talked about it—I had the Secretary of War and the Assistant—everybody in on it. The trouble lies fundamentally in the attitude of certain white people—officers down the line who haven’t got much more education, many of them, than the colored troops and the Seabees and the engineers, for example. And well, you know the kind of person it is. We all do. We don’t have to do more than think of a great many people that we know. And it has become not a question of orders—they are repeated fairly often, I think, in all the camps of colored troops—it’s a question of the personality of the individual.
“And we are up against it, absolutely up against it….”