As Americans and their allies began to turn the tide of war, liberals and leftists spoke all the more determinedly of what defeating the Axis would mean. Most turned to the Four Freedoms either directly or indirectly to do so. At the invitation of the 1943 President’s Birthday Ball Committee, the playwright Norman Corwin produced A Moment of the Nation’s Time, a short but sharp play broadcast on January 30 over all four national radio networks. In the spirit of “they shall not have died in vain,” Corwin projected victory as not only witnessing “storm troopers, race-haters, lynchers, ground into the dust,” but also securing “The right to food, clothing, shelter, medical care . . .” And that spring the ten-thousand-member-strong Artists for Victory announced a “Four Freedoms Campaign” and graphic-design competition to coincide with the upcoming “Four Freedoms Days” on September 12–19 and culminate in late October with an exhibition of one hundred prints that would run concurrently in twenty-six museums around the country. Addressing “America in the War,” entrants were to submit works that portrayed the barbarities of fascism and imperialism, the heroic determination of Americans, and the promise of the Four Freedoms.1
Even FDR’s former Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, promoted the Four Freedoms. At the President’s invitation, he had flown around the world in 1942 in a converted American bomber, meeting with both U.S. military and diplomatic officials and Allied leaders and citizens. Enthused by what he saw and heard, Willkie wrote One World, recounting his journey and advancing his own argument about what Americans needed to do to ensure a better and more just postwar world. While embracing the Four Freedoms, he stepped out ahead of Roosevelt by calling for the United States to seek an end to all imperialisms, including its own “race imperialism.”
Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our inequities self-evident. When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored. If we want to talk about freedom, we must mean freedom for others as well as ourselves, and we must mean freedom inside our frontiers as well as outside.
Willkie urged action now, not later, for, he insisted: “nothing of importance can be won in peace, which has not already been won in the war itself.” And to their credit, Americans made One World a huge bestseller.2
Equally telling of the Four Freedoms’ massive popular appeal, the conservative Saturday Evening Post—whose corporate president, Walter D. Fuller, was also chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers—ran Norman Rockwell’s FDR-inspired paintings in four consecutive issues that February and March, each accompanied by an article on the freedom represented. Rockwell depicted Freedom of Speech as a garage mechanic, Lincolnesque in appearance, addressing an attentive New England town meeting; Freedom of Worship as a multicultural group of people praying together; Freedom from Want as a family gathered for a Thanksgiving feast; and Freedom from Fear as a couple tucking their children safely to bed. To accompany these democratic images, the Post editor Ben Hibbs commissioned the liberal poet and playwright Stephen Vincent Benét to contribute the essay on “Freedom from Fear” and the progressive Filipino immigrant writer Carlos Bulosan to compose the one on “Freedom from Want.” Warning against “forces which have been trying to falsify American history,” Bulosan recalled American workers’ perennial struggles for democratic rights, cited the continuing oppression of workers and minorities, and answered “What do we want?” with “We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promises and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger.” And he did not end there. “If you want to know what we are,” he declared, “—We are Marching!”3
The magazine’s offices were flooded with requests for copies of Rockwell’s paintings. Roosevelt himself praised the pictures and proposed that the essays be translated for international distribution along with the former. The Treasury Department not only made the Four Freedoms the theme of its “Second War Loan Drive.” It also cooperated with the Post in launching a yearlong “Four Freedoms War Bond Show” that took Rockwell’s paintings to big-city department stores around the country. Starting out in Washington, D.C., in April 1943, the show traveled to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, and Denver, with celebrity-filled gala events staged at each location. Plus, the NBC Symphony Orchestra premiered Robert Russell Bennett’s new symphony, The Four Freedoms, in a nationwide September broadcast. By tour’s end more than 1.2 million people had seen the show—and $133 million in war bonds had been sold.4
Additionally, the Post decided to run a related series, “What I Am Fighting For,” in July 1943. Composed of four GI-authored articles, selected from submissions to an essay contest sponsored by the Service Men’s Christian League, the series spoke of family, friends, and “the girl back home,” the “American dream,” and, naturally, the Four Freedoms. The references to the Freedoms were more than perfunctory. Private Albert Gerber, a Jewish soldier from St. Louis, eloquently wrote that he was fighting not only for freedom of speech and religion, but also “economic freedom for all.” Indeed, he said: “I am fighting for a progressive humane American way of life—not [that of ] nostalgic reactionaries who want to go back to the status quo ante of 1929. I am fighting so that our river of democracy may roll on and wash away . . . more intolerances, more discriminations, and more inequities and iniquities.”5
• • •
Yet, arguably, the greatest testament to the Four Freedoms’ popular appeal was the concerted effort by conservatives, reactionaries, and corporate capitalists to contain and co-opt them. Following the enthusiastic response to the Post’s Rockwell issues, Hibbs published an editorial, “The Four Freedoms Are an Ideal,” which cautioned Americans against reading too much into them. They did not, he insisted, promise to “reward the lazy and incompetent as richly as the able and conscientious,” or, as if these were equivalents, “set up a ‘welfare state.’ ”6
Self-evidently eager to turn the Freedoms’ popularity to its advantage, one reactionary organization, Four Freedoms on the Home Front, Inc., demanded “Freedom from racketeering labor leaders—Freedom from bureaucracy—Freedom of enterprise and individual opportunity—Freedom of State and local rights from Federal Domination” (the last, essentially a call to defend racial segregation).7
Most conservatives, however, were more thoughtful in their reactions. Speaking to a convention of several hundred bankers, the NAM board chairman, Walter Fuller, warned in May 1942: “One thing is certain, the people of this country are fighting this war for a better world in which to live. They would like to get it through democracy, liberty, and free enterprise. But they are determined to have this better world of greater security one way or another, and if they don’t get it through present principles they will look elsewhere.” And, he counseled, “We must either cut the cloth to fit that pattern or the reformers and demagogues will.”8
Intent upon tailoring Americans’ hopes and aspirations to their liking, corporate bosses sought to refashion the Four Freedoms to serve their purposes. Central to their ambitions were the labors of the War Advertising Council, whose “admen” members were going “All Out!” to promote not only the war effort, but also business’s role in it. In fact, working closely with the OWI, they would come to dominate the agency and eventually drive out their more liberal colleagues. Leaving the OWI in the spring of 1943, not long after a “dollar-a-year” Coca-Cola executive took charge of the Bureau of Graphics and Printing, the designer Francis Brennan and the artist Ben Shahn captured the transparent effort by corporate America to co-opt the bureau. They created a mock poster that had the Statue of Liberty holding aloft not her torch but four Coca-Cola bottles, with a caption satirizing Coke’s own slogan: “The War That Refreshes: The Four Delicious Freedoms!”9
Capitalists and their publicists produced many a magazine ad, wall poster, public speech, and radio program equating “the American way” with “free enterprise” and promoting the imperative of securing both home and family and “private enterprise and initiative.” In 1943, Republic Steel—making no mention, of course, of the infamous 1937 Memorial Day massacre—ran an ad in which an American soldier says, “I like the way we’ve always run things back home—you know—the American way of life,” which this fictional GI defined as “free enterprise, private enterprise, our commercial competitive system, the American brand of freedom . . . they all help explain the American way of life.”10
Eager to both restore capital’s lost standing and prestige and subdue or temper Americans’ democratic impulses and imagination, corporate executives underwrote public relations campaigns that not only advertised the patriotic productivity of their respective companies, but also projected the image of the Arsenal of Democracy directly onto big business by adding a Fifth Freedom to FDR’s four. In fact, it became a major talking point. Meeting in Chicago in August 1943, the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution proclaiming a “Fifth Freedom—the Opportunity of Enterprise.” In a speech, “The Meaning of Freedom,” that September in New York, the Columbia University president, Nicholas Murray Butler, insisted that “Freedom of Individual Enterprise” must be added to the Four Freedoms to make the modern idea of “Freedom” complete. And asserting that the freedoms pronounced by FDR were “meaningless” without it, the Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts presented a resolution in Congress to officially add “Freedom of Private Enterprise” to them and asked The Saturday Evening Post that it do a cover story on that “freedom.”11
• • •
The more avidly conservatives, reactionaries, and corporate capitalists tried to deny, appropriate, or alter the Four Freedoms, the more passionately did union, consumer, and civil rights activists promote them. In her 1942 book, The Consumer Goes to War, Caroline Ware told Americans, “We shall win for democracy in the world only if we win for democracy at home.” Insisting that “Tomorrow, we cannot go back,” she stated: “We must go on to an economy geared to a high and rising standard for all people and, for all people, a society based on democratic freedoms—freedom from want and fear, freedom for expression and worship.” And in a 1943 Labor Day radio broadcast, John Shelley, the head of the AFL’s San Francisco Labor Council, decried antiunion conservatives as “filthy creatures . . . who wrap themselves in the flag, scream of patriotism, sneer at every phase of the war effort, and . . . openly declare their advocacy of a world after the war in which there will be no guarantee of the Four Freedoms.”12
African Americans were as insistent. In How About It, Dixie, the poet Langston Hughes voiced black aspirations:
The President’s Four Freedoms
Appeal to me.
I would like to see those Freedoms
Come to be.
If you believe
In the Four Freedoms, too,
Then share ’em with me—
Don’t keep ’em all for you . . .
To be won Over There.
It means Freedom at home too—
Now—right here!
And the middle-class sisters of the national black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, declared in November 1942: “Listen, America! American Negroes want to win this war . . . Listen, America! We want the four freedoms right here in America . . .”13
More than rhetorical pressure was building for public action in favor of the Four Freedoms. Labor continued to honor its “No Strike Pledge” and union rolls expanded; but rising prices, escalating profits, and intensifying management demands (not to mention injurious and deadly workplace accidents) were exasperating workers. The Toledo UAW leader Richard Gosser expressed labor’s anger at his union’s August 1942 national convention: “I am for doing everything we possibly can in this nation to win the war and to lick Fascism once and for all, but by God, I am not in favor of letting our employer kick the hell out of us all around the place behind the American flag.” And soon the country would not only hear the AFL and CIO condemn the OPA for failing to control inflation, but also see multiplying numbers of wildcat walkouts and a UMW strike for higher wages that forced Roosevelt to order a temporary federal takeover of the coal mines.14
Walkouts were usually short-lived and workers quickly made up the losses, but they inevitably incited angry editorials, public ill will, and reactionary legislation to limit labor’s industrial and political capacities. Aligned with labor, Max Lerner would charge that the real strikers were “Congress” and “the big corporations.” However, opposed to wartime strikes himself, he called on others on the left to smarten up. “The American reactionaries don’t give two hoots about the war,” he explained, “but they are willing to use it—and are using it—for their own purposes. Under any circumstances we could fight them and beat them, but we cannot fight and beat the war which they are using as their protector.” Nevertheless, fed up with rising profits, prices, and demands, workers would walk out all the more in the months ahead.15
African Americans, too, did more than talk—and not for nothing did white supremacists anxiously decry “Negro uppitiness” (which they variously blamed on Jews, Communists, and Eleanor Roosevelt). The black journalist Roi Ottley wrote in New World A-Coming: “Listen to the way Negroes are talking these days! Gone are the Negroes of the old banjo and singin’ roun’ the cabin doors. Old man Mose is dead! Instead, black men have become noisy, aggressive, and sometimes defiant.” And, he could have said, women as well. Championing the role of black women in both her own profession and the broader struggle for equal rights, the nurse Mabel K. Staupers wrote, “Negro women continue to meet the challenge of helping America develop full democracy for all citizens. It is impossible for women to permit their men to return from battlefields and find lack of privilege and opportunity.” Indeed, the NAACP and other black organizations were spiritedly assembling and petitioning not just for better jobs and housing but, increasingly, for an end to segregation. Offering a model for a later generation of black student activists, Howard University students staged a sit-in for service in April 1943 at the Washington, D.C., whites-only Little Palace Cafeteria.16
At the same time, African-American men and women were eagerly joining unions all across the country, including down south, where “representation elections” afforded many their first real opportunities to vote. Moreover, not only were southern blacks risking life and limb by challenging segregation on public transportation systems, but when whites in Los Angeles, Mobile, Detroit, and other cities rioted against people of color that summer, African Americans fought back—and when they themselves angrily took to the streets of Harlem in August, Mary McLeod Bethune, the foremost black New Dealer, would not apologize for their actions, but observe that they were simply answering FDR’s call to fight for “the Four Freedoms.”17
Blacks did not stand alone. Prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and the leaders of the CIO, as well as many other white liberals and progressives, were advocating racial equality and integration. And despite the ugliness of the 1943 race riots, there was even reason to imagine that white Americans—at least young white Americans—were coming to see what needed doing. A September 1943 NAACP survey of nearly 13,000 college students nationwide found that 74 percent of them believed that to successfully pursue the “Four Freedoms” globally, the United States had to “take steps to end discrimination against blacks.”18
Americans were fighting for the Four Freedoms at the military front and on the home front—and many of them were determined to realize those freedoms sooner rather than later. They believed FDR when he said that those freedoms were “no vision of a distant millennium,” but “attainable in our own time and generation.” And like Wendell Willkie, many of them recognized that “nothing of importance can be won in peace, which has not already been won in the war itself.”
• • •
Stirred by popular pressure and stunned by the 1942 midterm election results that increased the size and power of the conservative congressional coalition, Roosevelt knew well before the racially explosive summer of 1943 that he had to reassure his fellow citizens of his commitments, while challenging the new Congress. And urged on by the AFL president, William Green, he acted quickly to do both. In mid-November 1942, FDR directed the National Resources Planning Board to publicly release its long-in-the-making proposal for “A New Bill of Rights,” a proposal that the President and many a New Dealer such as Robert H. Jackson and Charles Merriam had been hinting at for several years—and the president himself pointed the way forward in his January 1943 State of the Union address.
Reiterating that the Four Freedoms remained the nation’s war aims, Roosevelt told Congress and the nation: “When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that [along] with the opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards—assurance that will extend from the cradle to the grave. And this great Government can and must provide this assurance . . . I say this now to this Seventy-Eighth Congress, because it is wholly possible that freedom from want—the right of employment, the right of assurance against life’s hazards—will loom very large as a task of America during the coming two years.” And that March, he formally sent to Congress the NRPB’s Security, Work, and Relief Policies (1942) and National Resources Development—Report for 1943.19
With the latter document prominently citing the Four Freedoms and the “New Bill of Rights,” the two reports together called for more than a postwar revival of the New Deal. Proposing that the government guarantee both a full-employment economy and “cradle to grave security,” they projected nothing less than the making of a social-democratic United States.20
Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times lambasted the proposals. The National Association of Manufacturers not only denounced them as “Socialism.” It also issued JOBS—FREEDOM—OPPORTUNITY, a report that portrayed New Deal government and organized labor as the most serious threats to postwar freedom and prosperity. The only way to freedom from want and fear, the editors insisted, was the private enterprise way.21
However, others warmly applauded the reports. Declaring “We Know What We Want” and seeing the “New Bill of Rights” as the clearest statement of it, the liberal Twentieth Century Fund issued Wartime Facts and Postwar Problems: A Study and Discussion Manual, hoping to “fire the popular imagination with the challenge which the peace will bring.”22
Progressives, too, spoke of the challenges ahead; but they wanted more deliberate action, not more deliberation. Writing in The Nation, I. F. Stone perceptively suggested that Roosevelt was sending up “trial balloons” for a possible 1944 reelection campaign. However, Stone further contended that FDR had put into play far more than the possibility of a fourth term. “The President,” Stone said, “has launched out on the greatest battle of our time,” and the question was not simply whether he would win or lose that battle, but whether the outcome would be a truly democratic one. The answer, Stone insisted, depended not so much on the president as on the men and women of “this generation.”23
What Roosevelt knew was that Americans stood ready to join in his initiatives. Polls conducted for the White House by Princeton University’s Office of Public Opinion Research immediately after he sent the NRPB reports to Congress showed that the vast majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, heartily endorsed the prospect of pursuing progressive policies and programs to secure freedom from want and fear at war’s end. For starters, the polls registered strong and widespread support for expanding the social security system to assist not just returning veterans, but all Americans. Indeed, noting that 94 percent endorsed old-age pensions; 84 percent, job insurance; 83 percent, health insurance; 79 percent, aid for students; and 73 percent, work relief, the OPOR associate director Jerome Bruner would observe: “If a ‘plebiscite’ on social security were to be conducted tomorrow, America would make the plans of our social-security prophets look niggardly. We want the whole works.”24
Such polls indicated as well that while most Americans remained suspicious of state “control” of business, nearly 90 percent of them favored joint planning by “government, business, and labor . . . to do away with unemployment after the war”; 73 percent supported launching New Deal–style public-works projects to provide jobs after the war; and the same 73 percent favored a policy in which the federal government would actually “guarantee” a job to those needing one. Plus, 79 percent thought that in order to contain inflation, “price ceilings . . . should be kept on for a while after the war.”25
Furthermore, despite the disdain Americans said they felt toward the leaders of organized labor (especially the Mineworkers’ John L. Lewis), 86 percent actually favored joint “Labor-Management Planning to Prevent Unemployment.” And working people definitely wanted to enhance industrial democracy. A February 1943 Fortune magazine survey asking a cross-section of factory workers, “Do you think it would be a good idea or a bad idea for workers to have someone they elect represent them on the board of directors or some management council?” found that 75 percent thought it a “Good Idea”—and regarding what questions such representatives should have a “say” in determining, 97 percent checked “Working Conditions”; 95 percent, “Wages”; 81.5 percent, “Promotions”; and 62 percent, “Production plans.”26
Nevertheless, as much as Roosevelt wanted to act, he hesitated, convinced that the makeup of Congress made it futile to do so at that time—a conviction Congress itself seemed to confirm when it proceeded to defund and kill the NRPB itself. But he did not retreat from the NRPB proposals and the idea of “A New Bill of Rights.” Rather, he pushed them indirectly.
The President continued to talk of expanding government’s role in assuring economic and social security; however, when he did, he spoke most clearly of the imperative to plan for the needs of the veterans. In a late-July 1943 Fireside Chat, he stated: “While concentrating on military victory, we are not neglecting the planning of things to come, the freedoms which we know will make for decency and greater justice throughout the world. Among many other things we are, today, laying plans for the return to civilian life of our gallant men and women . . .” And he insisted that “The least to which [they] are entitled is . . . mustering-out pay . . . unemployment insurance . . . further education or trade training at the cost of their Government . . . liberalized provision for hospitalization, rehabilitation, medical care for disabled . . . sufficient pensions for disabled.” But he also spoke of the need to address the “problem of demobilizing the rest of the millions who have been working and living in a wartime economy,” indicating that for this, too, the administration “is drawing up plans.” In fact, his “chief of staff ” Samuel Rosenman would later write that as much as FDR believed that the “returning soldier and sailor and marine” warranted special attention, he also hoped that granting educational and other assistance to them would serve as an “entering wedge” to more universal postwar initiatives.27
• • •
While the President hesitated—or feinted—others did not. Mrs. Roosevelt renewed her call to secure the Four Equalities for all Americans. The NRPB member Beardsley Ruml declared that together the Four Freedoms, Atlantic Charter, and new “Nine Rights” provided a “Fighting Creed for America.” And some did more than talk.28
Aided by the CIO and the AFL, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York drafted a bill intended to radically expand America’s social-insurance system by creating, among other things, a “compulsory national health insurance program.” And joined by Senator James Murray of Montana and Representative John Dingell of Michigan, he introduced it to Congress in June 1943. Of course, he knew that “Wagner-Murray-Dingell” would not pass, but he looked forward to the day it might.29
And that July the CIO itself mobilized anew. Seeking to push the progressive agenda all the more forcefully, as well as avoid a repeat of the midterm elections, circumvent the clause in the Smith-Connally Act outlawing direct union contributions to political campaigns, and quash the talk in labor circles of forming a third party, the CIO’s president, Philip Murray, commissioned Sidney Hillman to organize and build a “political action committee” (CIO-PAC).30
Roosevelt did assert himself progressively where he felt he could. Responding to working people’s anger about inflation, he and his administration renewed their efforts to address it and once again rallied consumers to join them in doing so. In February 1943, the OWI, not long before Congress defunded its domestic activities, released Battle Stations for All: The Story of the Fight to Control Living Costs, a booklet that celebrated labor’s organizing advances, called for citizens to fight inflation by “Taking the Profit Out of War,” and praised the work of the local “War Price and Rationing Boards [“little OPAs”].” Soon thereafter, the President named Chester Bowles as the new director of the OPA and issued a “Hold the Line Order” on prices. And that fall, with the OPA itself facing a congressional cutback, Bowles not only initiated a “Home Front Pledge” campaign in which 20 million consumers promised to “pay no more than top legal prices” and help “stamp out the activities of all chiselers, profiteers, and black-marketeers.” He also recruited Caroline Ware to gather an advisory committee of “labor, consumer, and women’s groups” that would soon set itself to mobilizing shoppers to “police” prices at local businesses on behalf of the five thousand “little OPAs” operating around the country.31
Roosevelt addressed black concerns anew as well. Responding to MOWM’s protests, he made the FEPC an independent agency with enhanced authority and dollars. Plus, irritated by the Navy’s slowness in enlisting blacks, he commanded it to speed up its recruitment efforts, which it immediately did.32
In the same vein, the War Department not only followed FDR’s directive to start sending black units into combat. Acknowledging the problem of “Negro Morale,” it also arranged for Frank Capra to produce The Negro Soldier. Scripted by the black writer Carlton Moss, the film recounted the long, heroic history of African-American military service, highlighted black GIs’ participation in the current war, and stressed interracial unity. Test-shown to separate groups of black and white troops, the film was well received by both and on their popular recommendations it was made “mandatory viewing” for all GIs, shown publicly in three hundred theaters around the country, and soon followed by a second production, The Negro Sailor.33
Moreover, Roosevelt also actively backed a new Soldier Vote bill introduced in Congress in 1943 by the Democratic senators Theodore Green of Rhode Island and Scott Lucas of Illinois. Projected to benefit men and women of every region and color, Green-Lucas was clearly designed to circumvent the southern elites’ cherished “states’ rights” and poll taxes. But this time not only Dixiecrats opposed the legislation. So, too, did ardent anti-FDR Republicans. The bill went down in defeat, and that December, Congress once again handed over to the states the responsibility of enabling absentee soldiers, sailors, and marines to vote—instigating Max Lerner to write: “This is . . . the most barefaced betrayal of America by Americans that it has been my duty to comment on . . . I wish the Senators [who defeated the bill] had had the guts to say directly and frankly to our soldiers, ‘We don’t trust you: you have a right to die for your country, but we fear to let you choose who shall rule your country.’ ”34
• • •
None of it escaped the GIs themselves. One white army sergeant serving near the front in Italy spoke for most of his comrades when he told the photographer Margaret Bourke-White: “There shouldn’t have to be any legislation made, and argued, so that we can vote—it should be understood and automatic. When men leave their country, give up their jobs, leave their homes, and sometimes even sacrifice their lives to preserve the democratic way of life, why anyone can question this right to vote is beyond me.”35
Of course, the handling of the soldier-vote question was just one of many things going on back home that aggravated the GIs. Not only Congress angered them. Private Herrett Wilson of Everett, Washington, wrote home to his mother from the Pacific: “I fought and killed so that the enemy might not invade our land and I ask is it all for naught when red, white, and blue fascists drive Nisei about like coyotes and plague the fathers, mothers, and relatives of our colored comrades that fight by our side.” But refusing to give up hope, he urged his mom to “raise [her] voice.”36
The corporate bosses outraged GIs as well. Charles Bolte, who had returned home in 1943 after losing a leg in combat in North Africa, exclaimed that he was “shocked” by how high business profits were and that the magazine ads made him “retch.” The infantry rifleman and Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who created the famous GI characters “Willie and Joe,” would recall how “We all used to get sore at some of the ads in the magazines from America. The admen should have been required by law to submit all copy to an overseas veteran before they sent it to the printers.” And at least one outraged AFL brother from Arkansas wrote home from overseas that “We service men are out here fighting and dying so we will be free American Citizens . . . and now since so many of us are away from home the big business men have worked their little labor laws . . .”37
But it went even beyond all that.
Reporting from London in July 1943, John Steinbeck wrote, “The soldiers fight and work under a load of worry . . . [and] almost universally you find . . . not a fear of the enemy but a fear of what is going to happen after the war.” He explained: “They fight under a banner of four unimplemented freedoms—four words, and when anyone in authority tries to give these freedoms implements and methods the soldiers hear that man assaulted and dragged down.” More to the point: “They would like freedom from want. That means the little farm in Connecticut is safe from foreclosure. That means the job left . . . is there waiting, and not only waiting but it will continue while the children grow up. That means there will be schools, and either savings to take care of illness in the family or medicine available without savings.” But, he continued: “Talking to many soldiers, it is the worry that . . . is most impressive. Is the country to be taken over by special interests . . . ? Is inflation to be permitted because a few people will grow rich through it? Are fortunes being made while these men get $50 a month? Will they go home to a country destroyed by greed?”38
“The Four Freedoms define what [the GI] wants,” Steinbeck summed up, “but unless some machinery, some foundation, some clear method is shown, he is likely to believe only in that freedom which Anatole France defined—the equal freedom of rich and poor to sleep under bridges.” And no doubt with Roosevelt in mind, Steinbeck advised, “Anyone who can reassure these soldiers . . . will put a weapon in their hands of incredible strength.”39
Liberals in and out of the administration were urging the President to act along those very lines. And FDR himself had every intention of doing so. In fact, after telling journalists in late December 1943 that Dr. Win-the-War was in charge for the duration, he not only detailed “Doctor New Deal’s” accomplishments, but stated that “when victory comes, the program of the past, of course has got to be carried on.” And just a fortnight later, he would call for far more than simply resurrecting the New Deal.40