Twelve

THE BRUTALITY OF MODERNITY

The day after the United States bombed Hiroshima, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran, as an editorial, a crayon drawing titled A New Era in Man’s Understanding of Nature’s Forces.

THE 1939 WORLD’S FAIR WAS HELD ON TWELVE HUNDRED acres in Queens, New York, a wasteland that had once been an ash heap. Years of planning and building had gone into the work of turning it into a fairground, a shimmering display of advances in politics, business, science, and technology, right down to the scaled reproduction of the Empire State Building. Its centerpiece was the Perisphere, a globe two hundred feet in diameter and eighteen stories high that housed the Democracity exhibit, a celebration of “the saga of democracy,” which took visitors to a world one hundred years in the future, to 2039, where highways carried people from suburbs like Pleasantville to the downtown of Centerton.¹ The fair celebrated the defeat of the past; its theme was the World of Tomorrow. General Motors mounted an exhibit called Futurama. Westinghouse staged a “battle of the centuries” between Mrs. Drudge, who scrubbed, and Mrs. Modern, who used a dishwasher. Elektro the Moto-Man, a seven-foot-tall robot, suavely smoked a cigarette.²

On opening day, on April 30, 1939, in a ceremony held in the fair’s Court of Peace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his hair gone gray at the temples, declared the World’s Fair “open to all mankind.” RCA, introducing the brand-new technology of television, sent out the address on NBC, which began broadcasting that day. A chorus line of women dressed in white performed a “Pageant of Peace.” A lot of visitors to the World of Tomorrow were unimpressed. E. B. White had a cold the day he went. “When you can’t breathe through your nose,” he wrote, “Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.” Harper’s offered a more mixed view: “It was the paradox of all paradoxes. It was good, it was bad; it was the acme of all crazy vulgarity; it was the pinnacle of all inspiration.”³

It was also obsolete, even before it began. On opening day, the pavilions featuring Austria and Czechoslovakia were already anachronisms: those countries no longer existed. The allure of the future faded fast. After Hitler invaded Poland, in September, the Polish pavilion was draped in black. Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon followed. By the time the fair closed, eighteen months after it opened, and bankrupt, half of the European countries represented at the World’s Fair had fallen to Germany.⁴

The Second World War would bring the United States out of depression, end American isolationism, and forge a renewed spirit of civic nationalism. It would also call attention to the nation’s unfinished reckoning with race, reshape liberalism, and form the foundation for a conservative movement animated by opposition to state power. By 1945, the future imagined six years before at the site of an old ash heap in Queens would look antique.

Still, the fair left its mark. Westinghouse had collected hundreds of items for a time capsule, to be opened five thousand years in the future, in the year 6939: everything from an alarm clock to an electric razor, along with seeds of grain provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, thousands of photographs, magazines, a dictionary, much of the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edition, 1937), an RKO newsreel and a motion-picture projector, and one hundred books, in the form of microfilm. (“A microscope is included to enable historians of the future to read the microfilm; also included are instructions for making larger reading machines such as those used with microfilm in modern libraries.”) Not everything was hokum. Among the “special messages from noted men of our time,” Albert Einstein had contributed a letter, written to tomorrow from today.⁵

“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals,” Einstein reported of the world in 1939. And “anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”⁶ As Orson Welles had warned, introducing The War of the Worlds the year before, “In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. . . .”

I.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, a ceremony was taking place in Geneva. Officials from the League of Nations dedicated a sculpture, a giant bronze globe, “To the Memory of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, Founder of the League of Nations.” Two days later, Britain and France, having fatefully appeased Hitler at Munich the year before, declared war on Germany. Had the United States not failed to join the League of Nations in 1919, some people thought, the world-shatteringly brutal war that followed might have been avoided. “The United States now has her second opportunity to make the world safe for democracy,” said Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture. That fall, internationalists like Wallace who regretted the failure of the League of Nations began meeting, usually in secret, to plan the peace—to imagine a new league. The Council on Foreign Relations began preparing a report for the State Department.⁷ Meanwhile, Roosevelt was trying to plan for war.

In the 1930s, both Congress and public opinion favored isolationism. In 1935, Congress passed the first of five Neutrality Acts, pledging that the United States would keep clear of war in Europe. In 1936, when civil war broke out in Spain, nearly three thousand private American citizens volunteered, and fought for democracy against a right-wing insurgency aided by Hitler and Mussolini; more than a quarter of them lost their lives. But the United States stayed out. A Gallup poll taken in 1937 reported that most Americans had no opinion about events going on in Spain.⁸

American indifference emboldened Germany. “America is not dangerous to us,” Hitler said. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified,” he said. “How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar?” Americans’ gullibility about Orson Welles’s radio production of The War of the Worlds revealed Americans to be fools, Hitler thought, and Americans were too selfish to concern themselves with Europe: if he had a grudging respect for stolid Soviets, he saw Americans as fools distracted by baubles. “Transport a German to Kiev, and he remains a perfect German,” Hitler said. “But transport him to Miami, and you make a degenerate out of him.”⁹

Late in 1938, FDR had proposed a plan by which the United States would manufacture airplanes for Britain and France and build a 10,000-plane American air force. In 1939 he presented this plan, with a budget of $300 million, to Congress. “This program is but the minimum of requirements,” the president said. While the Nazi war machine pummeled Europe, the president wanted Congress to repeal the Neutrality Acts, support American allies, and prepare American forces, a position that became known as his “short-of-war” strategy. Secretly, he had another worry, too. German chemists had discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had fled Germany, had come to New York with the news. Germany took over Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In August, Roosevelt received a letter written by Szilard and signed by Einstein, warning him about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” fueled by uranium. “The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantity,” the physicist informed the president. But “I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.” Roosevelt gathered together a secret advisory committee to investigate. It soon reported to him that uranium “would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known.”¹⁰

Before Germany invaded Poland, nearly half of Americans had been unwilling or unable even to commit themselves to favoring one side over the other in the conflict in Europe, not least because William Randolph Hearst, who’d opposed U.S. involvement in the war in Europe in 1917 (calling for “America first!”), took the same position in 1938. Over NBC Radio he warned that the nations of Europe were “all ready to go to war, and all eager to get us to go to war,” but that “Americans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation—great largely because it is independent.”¹¹ A fringe fervently supported Hitler. Father Coughlin, who’d left broadcasting after failing to win the presidency, returned to radio in 1937, when he began to preach anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party. To the extent that Hitler reciprocated, it was to express his admiration not for the United States but for the Confederacy, whose defeat in the Civil War he much regretted: “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war,” he wrote. Nazi propagandists, sowing discord, tried to make common cause with white southerners by urging the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.¹² Coughlin played into their hands. In 1939, his audience, while diminished, heeded his call to form a new political party, the Christian Front.¹³ Dorothy Thompson ridiculed him. “I am 44 years old and if I have been menaced by Jews I haven’t noticed it yet.” (Her strategy was always to refuse to take Coughlin seriously. He once referred to her on the radio as “Dotty”; after that, she never failed, in her column, to call him “Chuck.”) Twenty thousand Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in a Madison Square Garden bedecked with swastikas and American flags, where they denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal,” at a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism.” Thompson snuck into the rally, started laughing, and, even as she was dragged out by men dressed as storm troopers, kept calling out, “Bunk, bunk, bunk!”¹⁴

But if radio had first gained Coughlin his audience, it also helped bring him down, especially after an Episcopal priest from New Jersey named Father W. C. Kiernan launched a radio program whose purpose was to refute each of Coughlin’s arguments. A callback to the protests of abolitionists and anti-lynching crusaders from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells, Kiernan called his program Free Speech Forum.¹⁵

After Britain and France declared war on Germany in September, Fortune magazine raced to add to its next issue a supplement called “The War of 1939,” which included a map of Europe and a survey of public opinion.¹⁶ “In the trouble now going on in Europe, which side would you like to see win?” Fortune’s survey asked. Eighty-three percent of Americans now chose “England, France, Poland and their friends.” Only 1 percent chose “Germany and her friends.”¹⁷

The forces of isolation, however, remained strong. Fortune’s map made Europe seem near. But in a speech on October 1, 1939, American aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had been the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic alone, said, “One need only glance at a map to see where our true frontiers lie. What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific on the west?” Europe might be engaged in an air war, and Americans might build an air force but, said Lindbergh, “An ocean is a formidable barrier, even for modern aircraft.”¹⁸

Isolationists developed a vision of “Fortress America.” Most isolationists were Republicans, while opposition to isolationism was strongest among southern Democrats, who were committed to global trade for their tobacco and cotton crops. But even committed isolationists understood that the world was shrinking. In February 1940, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: “It is probably impossible that there should be such a thing as old fashioned isolation in this present foreshortened world when one can cross the Atlantic Ocean in 36 hours. . . . probably the best we can hope for from now on is ‘insulation’ rather than isolation.”¹⁹

Opponents of Roosevelt’s short-of-war strategy worried that it might backfire. If Americans were to sell tanks and ships to Britain and then, under attack from Germany, Britain were to surrender, American munitions would be seized by Germans. But Roosevelt’s ability to rally Americans to England’s aid was strengthened overnight when, on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister.

Churchill and Roosevelt had first met in London in 1918, when Roosevelt was a thirty-six-year-old assistant secretary of the navy and Churchill a forty-three-year-old former lord of the Admiralty. Twenty years later, after Churchill returned to the Admiralty, Roosevelt opened a channel of communication with him, eager to hear frank reports on events in Europe. Their relationship grew, Churchill the courter, Roosevelt the courted. “No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” Churchill later said. The prime minister desperately needed to win over Roosevelt and secure U.S. supplies—and, ultimately, U.S. entry into the war—because Britain could not defeat Germany without the Americans. The course of the war and even the terms of the peace would depend, in no small part, on the course of their friendship. Between 1941 and 1945, they would spend 113 days together, including a holiday at Marrakech. Churchill, a poet and a painter, painted the sunset for the American president.²⁰

If Churchill courted Roosevelt, he also courted American voters. On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered a rousing speech to the House of Commons, broadcast on radio stations across the United States, pledging that Britain would fight as long as it took:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . . until in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.²¹

Roosevelt pounded this same message at home. Six days later, in a commencement address at the University of Virginia, at his son Franklin Jr.’s graduation, Roosevelt described the dream that the United States is “a lone island” as a nightmare, the “nightmare of a people without freedom,” he said, “the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”²²

Roosevelt had decided to run for an unprecedented third term, against the Republican challenger, Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie, who hoped to win over Democrats disenchanted with Roosevelt’s reign. Whitaker and Baxter produced materials for Willkie’s campaign, including a speaker’s manual that offered advice about how to handle Democrats in the audience: “rather than refer to the opponent as the ‘Democratic Party’ or ‘New Deal Administration’ refer to the Candidate by name only.” But Willkie was unwilling to run a divisive campaign. The president’s short-of-war strategy had led him to propose the first ever peacetime draft; Willkie refused to oppose it. “If you want to win the election you will come out against the proposed draft,” a reporter told Willkie. Willkie answered, “I would rather not win the election than do that.”²³

Americans had so far been spared the misery of war. But, notwithstanding Hearst and Lindbergh and Coughlin, Willkie’s refusal to undermine Roosevelt had spared Americans the burden of division. “Here we are, and our basic institutions are still intact, our people relatively prosperous, and most important of all, our society relatively affectionate,” Dorothy Thompson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune the month before the election. “No country in the world is so well off.”²⁴

In September of 1940, Churchill refused to surrender to Germany, even after the German blitz took the lives of forty thousand Londoners. Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers, signed a pact, acknowledging one another’s geographical spheres in the work of “their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things,” as if the world were theirs to divide.²⁵ In November, moved by Churchill’s fortitude and fearful of the Axis menace, voters returned FDR to the White House. This unprecedented third term, along with the powers he’d assumed during the New Deal, the memory of the court-packing crisis, and the draft itself, added to the ongoing debate over whether the American system of government could endure the brutality of modernity. “Can our government meet the challenge of totalitarianism and remain democratic?” political scientist Pendleton Herring asked. “Is the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches compatible with the need for authority? In seeking firm leadership do we open ourselves to the danger of dictatorship?”²⁶ But for the most part, these questions were set aside until after the war.

On December 29, 1940, FDR again took to the radio, this time to talk about the distance of both time and space. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” he said. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had been made obsolete, he said, by the speed of travel, even across the vast seas. “The width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships. At one point between Africa and Brazil the distance is less than from Washington to Denver, Colorado, five hours for the latest type of bomber. And at the North end of the Pacific Ocean America and Asia almost touch each other.” And what of the Axis’s “new order”? “They may talk of a ‘new order’ in the world, but what they have in mind is only a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny.” Americans would not do Europe’s fighting for them but were duty-bound to provide arms to save the world from that tyranny. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he said. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” Descending from the lofty to the practical, he said, “I appeal to the owners of plants—to the managers—to the workers—to our own Government employees—to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint,” he said. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”²⁷

Britain, overwhelmingly outgunned by Germany and with its own armaments fast dwindling, had run out of cash to buy tanks and ships and planes from the United States. FDR had a plan for that, the Lend-Lease Act: the United States would lend these things to Britain, to be returned after the war, in exchange of long-term leases of territory for American military bases. To reach Americans still wavering, Roosevelt aligned fighting the Axis with the United States’ founding purpose, its self-evident truths. On January 6, 1941, in his annual address to Congress, he argued that the United States must exert its might in securing for the world “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. (Answered one African American, “White folks talking about the Four Freedoms and we ain’t got none.”)²⁸

As he readied for his third inauguration, Roosevelt took time to write a note to Churchill, which he trusted to his defeated opponent, Wendell Willkie, to deliver in person. “He is truly helping to keep politics out over here,” Roosevelt said of Willkie. On a green sheet of White House stationary, Roosevelt wrote out, from memory, lines from the last stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” the poem Longfellow had drafted in 1849 and revised after his friend Charles Sumner had convinced him to end with hope. “I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill:

        Sail on, Oh Ship of State!

        Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.

        Humanity with all its fears

        With all the hope of future years

        Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

Churchill read Roosevelt’s letter on the radio. “What is the answer that I shall give in your name to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty million?” he asked his listeners. “Put your confidence in us, give us your faith and our blessing,” he answered. “Give us the tools and we shall finish the job.”²⁹

Willkie, after meeting with Churchill, flew back to Washington in time to appear before the House Committee on Foreign Relations to offer his support for the Lend-Lease Act. When isolationists on the committee presented him with remarks he had made during the campaign, about Roosevelt rushing the United States into war, Willkie waved those remarks aside as campaign bluster. “He was elected President,” Willkie said. “He is my President now.”³⁰

While Congress deliberated, Henry Luce took to the pages of Life to make the case for Lend-Lease. In 1919, Luce said, the United States had passed up “a golden opportunity . . . to assume leadership of the world.” He urged Americans not to make that same mistake again. America must not only enter the war—he argued against “the moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism”—but adopt a new role in the world. “The twentieth century is the American century,” he insisted.³¹

Against the internationalism of Roosevelt, Willkie, and Luce stood the increasingly besieged and embittered ranks of “America Firsters.” In testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Charles Lindbergh refused to make a distinction between the Axis and the Allies. “I want neither side to win,” he answered.³² Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and their followers adopted Hearst’s America First motto in founding the America First Committee, which launched a publicity campaign against the Lend-Lease program by buying fifteen-minute ads on a forty-station radio network. So helpful were their efforts to the Germans that Nazi shortwave radio broadcast its approval from the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin: “The America First Committee is true Americanism and true patriotism.”³³

Congress nevertheless passed the Lend-Lease Act, which Roosevelt, relieved beyond measure, signed on March 11. A grateful Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” The New York Times marked its passage as the long-delayed reversal of America’s retreat from the world at the end of the last war.³⁴ Yet that spring and summer, Lindbergh drew crowds ten thousand strong, even as much of the world lay in the hands of the Axis. Hitler, having abandoned his pact with Stalin, had invaded the Soviet Union. Germany had seized virtually all of Europe; only Britain remained. Japan, feared for its pitilessness as a result of its invasion of Manchuria and Nanking, controlled nearly half of China. Lindberg fiercely opposed communism. “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exists in the Soviet Union,” he insisted. His fevered anticommunism left him blind to other kinds of ruthlessness. He offered excuses for Nazi propaganda: “In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question of whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances.” (Much of the American Left suffered from a different blindness—to the ruthlessness of Stalinism.) But he was also animated by other passions, confiding to his diary his belief that the press, in the United States, was controlled by Jews—“Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio, and most of our motion pictures.” Lindbergh, while defending Nazi propaganda, spoke out against what he considered to be American propaganda. At an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in September, he named three forces as responsible for spreading it: “The British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” Wendell Willkie, who had heroically cast down the campaign cudgel to lend his support to FDR and the war effort, called Lindbergh’s speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.”³⁵

More moderate isolationists set their objections within the long tradition of opposition to American expansion and American imperialism, elaborating on arguments that had been made during the War with Mexico and the Spanish-American War. In May of 1941, Robert Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio, warned prophetically that American entry into the war would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft said, “Frankly, the American people don’t want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom. It is not our manifest destiny or our national destiny.”³⁶

Roosevelt knew how to counter an argument about national destiny. That summer, in an elaborate ruse designed to fool the press, he appeared to leave Washington for a fishing trip in Maine. Even Eleanor didn’t know the truth.³⁷ Instead, he headed out across the ocean to meet Winston Churchill. Each man came on a gray battleship of steel and glass; the American president arrived on board the Augusta, the British prime minister on the Prince of Wales. The portly Churchill, wearing the dark blue uniform of a navy man, crossed over to the Augusta to meet with Roosevelt, who was determined to stand to receive him, leaning heavily on his son Elliott. “The Boss insisted upon returning to the painful prison of his braces,” an aide said, an arrangement all the more worrying on board a lurching ship. “Even the slight pitch of the Augusta meant pain and the possibility of a humiliating fall.” But the president stayed on his feet.

“At last—we’ve gotten together,” Roosevelt said, as the two men shook hands.

“We have,” said Churchill.

They opened negotiations. Churchill hoped to convince Roosevelt to ask Congress to declare war. They resumed talks on board the Prince of Wales, Roosevelt again insisting on not using his wheelchair, holding onto Elliott with one hand and a rail with the other. Churchill didn’t get what he wanted, but the two men forged a historic agreement. By telegram, they released a joint statement on August 14, containing, in eight points, their commitment, “after the final destruction of Nazi tyranny,” to a postwar world of free trade, self-determination, international security, arms control, social welfare, economic justice, and human rights. Their agreement, dubbed the Atlantic Charter, established a set of principles that would later be restated at Bretton Woods and in the charter of the United Nations. They agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” And they pledged themselves to what had been the tenets of Roosevelt’s New Deal, “improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security.” And, bringing together Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms with Churchill’s knack for poetry, they pledged themselves to a peace in which “all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”³⁸

It was meant as a new deal for the world. But first, they would have to win the war.

II.

EARLY IN THE SUN-STREAKED morning of December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched more than 350 planes from aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean. They flew to Hawaii and began a surprise attack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbor, a torrent of bombs raining down from the sky like bolts of thunder thrown by an angry god. Japanese bombers sank four battleships, destroyed nearly 200 American planes, killed more than 2,400 Americans, and wounded another 1,100. Sixty-four Japanese military men were killed and one Japanese sailor was captured. Without issuing a declaration of war, and while the United States and Japan were still engaged in diplomacy, the Japanese had essentially wiped out the United States Pacific Fleet. Churchill called Roosevelt to ask if the news he’d heard could possibly be right.

“It’s quite true,” the president said. “We are all in the same boat now.”

“This certainly simplifies things,” Churchill said. “God be with you.”³⁹

Immediately, Roosevelt set about dictating the address he would deliver to Congress, marking the attack on a chronicle of time. “Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history dash the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan period paragraph.”⁴⁰ He thought better of it and rewrote his words with care, and with an ear for force. The next day, Americans turned to their radios to listen as the president, his voice unshaken, spoke to Congress, calling December 7, 1941, not “a date which will live in world history” but “a date which will live in infamy.”

His hands bracing a podium crowded with microphones, he called upon the “righteous might” of the American people. Less than a half hour after the president finished his seven-minute speech, Congress declared war on Japan. As the nation set about the grim task of wartime mobilization, Roosevelt began the work of laying the groundwork for an argument that the United States ought to declare war on Germany, too. “We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map,” he told radio listeners on December 9, in a fireside chat in which he strategically tied Japan to Germany. “We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.”⁴¹

A 1943 Office of War Information poster celebrated the combined strength of the Allied forces.

Roosevelt would not need to press that argument. On December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States. This was Hitler’s worst miscalculation, since it’s by no means clear that Roosevelt would have been able to convince Congress to declare war on Germany if Hitler hadn’t acted rashly. He’d underestimated Churchill, and he’d underestimated Roosevelt. Above all, he’d underestimated the United States.

However sudden, the decisive entry of the United States into the war in both Asia and Europe rested on years of preparation. American planning for the war had begun in the 1930s, with dedicated munitions manufacturing and the building of planes, tanks, and battleships, much of this taking place in the South. Under the terms of the draft for men between eighteen and forty-five, put in place in 1940, 31 million men registered, 17 million were examined, and 10 million served. Adding volunteers and women to that number, the total reached more than 15 million: 10.4 million in the army, 3.9 million in the navy, some 600,000 in the marines, and another 250,000 in the coast guard. Three million women entered the labor force. Three-quarters of those women were married. The female labor force doubled. Beginning in 1942, women joined the Women’s Army Corps and the navy’s WAVES. By the time the war ended, in 1945, 12 million Americans were active-duty members of the military, compared with 300,000 in 1939.⁴²

Wartime mobilization called on women to join the military, as in this U.S. Navy recruiting poster from 1942.

American manufacturing and farming were conscripted, too. Between 1940 and 1945, Americans produced 300,000 military planes, 86,000 tanks, 3 million machine guns, and 71,000 naval ships. Farm production increased by 25 percent. Farmers produced 477 million more bushels of corn in 1944 than they had in 1939. These supplies weren’t just for American forces; the United States supplied Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies. Fifteen percent of American output was shipped abroad.⁴³

The federal budget grew at an astounding rate, from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945. Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941. In 1939, less than 2 percent of American national output went to war; by 1944, 40 percent did. The GDP doubled. And the GNP rose from $91 billion to $166 billion, crushing doubts that the economy had reached its limit. Mobilization for war acted as a public works program, the largest ever. In Europe, even food was rationed during the war; in the United States, civilians enjoyed a wealth of consumer goods and increased buying power. The leanness of the Depression was over. “The pawnbroking business has fallen upon dark days,” the Wall Street Journal observed in 1942.⁴⁴

Even before the United States entered the war, FDR had claimed new powers for the office of the president. During the Civil War, Lincoln had invoked “presidential war power,” but Roosevelt claimed a range of emergency powers never heard of before. In July 1939, he’d placed the secretaries of war and the navy under his own authority as commander in chief, removing them from the military chain of authority. After Germany invaded Poland, he’d issued an executive order declaring a “limited national emergency,” a concept without precedent. Senator Robert Taft described the president as “a complete one-man dictatorship.”

Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress passed the War Powers Act, granting to the executive branch special powers to prosecute the war, including the power to surveil letters, telegraph messages, and radio broadcasts. Some of the new agencies created by the administration ultimately wielded little power. The War Production Board, created in January 1942, consisted chiefly of corporate executives doubtful about state planning. “The arsenal of democracy,” I. F. Stone wrote, “is still being operated with one eye on the war and the other on the convenience of big business.” Other wartime agencies had more authority. A Second War Powers Act, passed in March of 1942, granted the president authority over “special investigations and reports of census or statistical matters” and established the National War Labor Board and the Office of Price Administration, ceding considerable control over the economy to the federal government and, in particular, to the executive branch.⁴⁵

Just as the administrative state had grown in both size and power during the First World War, it grew during the Second. The Pentagon opened in March 1943, having been built in sixteen months. The number of civil servants in the federal government grew from 950,000 in 1939 to 3.8 million in 1945. As federal spending skyrocketed, so did the national debt, which reached $258 billion in 1945 and called not only for war bonds but for an unprecedented rise in taxes. New Dealers sold tax hikes to the public as emergency measures, “taxes to beat the Axis,” while the Revenue Act of 1942, which included a steeply progressive income tax, vastly broadened the tax base: 85 percent of American families filed a return.⁴⁶

Business grew, and so did labor. Membership in trade unions rose from 6.6 million in 1939 to 12.6 million in 1945. Science grew, too. The Manhattan Project, a secret federal project to develop an atomic bomb, begun in 1939, had, by the end of the war, employed 130,000 staff, and cost $2 billion. The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), established by FDR in 1940, was headed by Vannevar Bush, the so-called czar of research, who by 1941 was also head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Before the end of the war, the NDRC employed some two thousand scientists, including three out of four of the nation’s physicists.⁴⁷

Roosevelt liked to say that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced with “Dr. Win-the-War” but the war itself, by extending the powers of the federal government, extended the New Deal.⁴⁸ The war also reshaped the role of the press. In the First World War, George Creel’s government-run propaganda program had stirred up so much hysteria and hatred against Germany that Americans had taken to calling hamburgers “Salisbury steaks.”⁴⁹ FDR, sharing Americans’ bitter memories of earlier American wartime propaganda, had been reluctant to wield the power of government to tell the American people what to think about the war.⁵⁰ But the establishment of a government information agency had assumed a new urgency in 1940, after the publication of a book by Edmond Taylor, Paris bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. In The Strategy of Terror—Europe’s Inner Front, Taylor reported firsthand on the campaign of propaganda waged by the Nazis in France to break the will of the French people and divide the population. “Words exercise a strange tyranny over human affairs,” Taylor wrote. He called propaganda “the invisible front.”⁵¹

Two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing a new government information agency: the Office of Facts and Figures. To head it, he appointed Archibald MacLeish, a poet and writer whom he’d earlier named Librarian of Congress. The agency’s mandate was not terribly clear. MacLeish said the executive order establishing it “read like a pass to a ball game.” MacLeish’s ideas about how to write about war could hardly have been more different than Creel’s. MacLeish had fought in World War I, after which he lived in Paris, where he wrote poems about places where lay “upon the darkening plain / The dead against the dead and on the silent ground / The silent slain.”⁵²

After MacLeish returned to the United States from Paris, he’d been an editor for Fortune from 1929 to 1938 before serving as the Librarian of Congress. “Democracy is never a thing done,” he said in 1939. “Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.” He believed that artists and writers have an obligation to fight “a revolution created out of disorder by a terror of disorder,” and that the real battle was the battle for public opinion. “The principal battleground of this war is not the South Pacific,” he said. “It is not the Middle East. It is not England, or Norway, or the Russian Steppes. It is American opinion.”⁵³

In directing the Office of Facts and Figures, MacLeish hoped not to produce propaganda but instead to educate the public about the danger of it. One of his office’s earliest pamphlets, Divide and Conquer, relied heavily on Taylor’s book to explain to Americans how the Nazi strategy of terror had worked in France. To illustrate, it quoted Mein Kampf. “At the bottom of their hearts the great masses of the people are more likely to be poisoned than to be consciously and deliberately bad,” Hitler had written. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.” MacLeish’s pamphlet aimed to defeat Nazi propaganda: “The United States is now subject to a total barrage of the Nazi strategy of terror. Hitler thinks Americans are suckers. By the very vastness of his program of lies, he hopes to frighten us into believing that the Nazis are invincible.”⁵⁴

Dorothy Thompson, who once described Mein Kampf as “eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction,” had long been making the same argument. “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a fine art, and propaganda as a form of government.” The challenge to Western journalists, she said, was “to represent a theory of journalism, a theory of what journalism stands for, a thesis of journalism, a philosophy of journalism, in countries where this philosophy is fundamentally repudiated.”⁵⁵

In this same spirit, MacLeish insisted that his office wouldn’t take positions but instead would give people the figures and facts: “The duty of government is to provide a basis for judgment; and when it goes beyond that, it goes beyond the prime scope of its duty.” Journalists were doubtful. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized: “OFF is just going to superimpose its own ‘well organized facts’ upon the splendid confusion, interpret the interpreters, redigest those who now digest the digesters, explain what those who explain what the explainers of the explanations mean, and co-ordinate the coordinators of those appointed to co-ordinate the co-ordinations of the co-ordinated.”⁵⁶

MacLeish clung to his idealism, which he grounded in the nation’s founding truths and in its founding commitment to truth. In an April 1942 speech at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, against the Nazi “strategy of terror,” he proposed a new, American strategy:

It is the strategy which is appropriate to our cause and to our purpose—the strategy of truth—the strategy which opposes to the frauds and the deceits by which our enemies have confused and conquered other peoples, the simple and clarifying truths by which a nation such as ours must guide itself.

To deploy the strategy of truth, he called upon American journalists: “No country has ever had at its disposal greater resources with which to fight the warfare of opinion than the practice of the profession of journalism in this country has produced.”⁵⁷ Critics, not unreasonably, called MacLeish naïve: war requires deceit. And FDR himself had little interest in what MacLeish proposed. Early on, Roosevelt ordered MacLeish to announce that gasoline would be rationed, when it was perfectly clear to Americans that there was no shortage of gasoline. Instead, there was a very concerning shortage of rubber, but the president, knowing that revealing the rubber shortage would undermine the war cause, refused to allow MacLeish to reveal the truth.⁵⁸

MacLeish soldiered on, especially keen to use the Office of Facts and Figures to mark the occasion, in 1941, of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. His surest vehicle was the radio. The Radio Division of the Office of Facts and Figures, headed by former CBS executive William Lewis, commissioned writer Norman Corwin to compose a radio play about the Bill of Rights. We Hold These Truths, broadcast eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was the first radio drama broadcast on all four networks. Its stars included Jimmy Stewart, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles, with music provided by the New York Philharmonic. We Hold These Truths was as much a call to arms as a celebration of the nation’s founding creed, the original strategy of truth: “The Congress of the thirteen states, instructed by the people of the thirteen states, threw up a bulwark, wrote a hope, and made a sign for posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race-haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists, the men who give up fights that have just begun.”

MacLeish and Lewis then signed Corwin up to write a thirteen-week series called This Is War! Parts were hard-hitting, but, as FDR’s critics pointed out, much of it aimed to shore up support for the president: it compared him to Washington and Lincoln.⁵⁹ Yet in courting public opinion, Roosevelt found MacLeish’s Office of Facts and Figures too restrained, and in June of 1942 he replaced it with the Office of War Information, headed by former CBS reporter Elmer Davis, who was far more willing to use the methods of mass advertising than MacLeish had been. A frustrated MacLeish resigned and returned to the Library of Congress. Without MacLeish as a force of resistance, the agency drifted, much of the staff at one point resigning in protest over the hiring of a former advertising manager for Coca-Cola. Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Henry Pringle made a mock Office of War Information poster. “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms,” it read. “It’s a refreshing war.”⁶⁰

EVEN AS THE WAR raged on unremittingly, Roosevelt looked ahead to the peace, concerned not to repeat the travesty of Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations. To that end, he invited Churchill to spend Christmas 1941 at the White House. During the visit, Roosevelt came up with the name for their planned new international organization, “United Nations.” He hastened to the prime minister’s room to get his agreement to it. Churchill had just emerged from a bath. Roosevelt entered his room and found him naked. “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide from you,” Churchill said calmly.⁶¹

Weeks later, on January 1, 1942, the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union—the “Big Four”—adopted a “Declaration by United Nations.” The document was signed on January 2 by twenty-six nations. All subscribed to the “common program of purposes and principles” of the Atlantic Charter and forswore the making of a separate peace. The Big Four also agreed to a military strategy: to concentrate on defeating Germany, first by bombing Germany and then by landing in France. The Allied victory against a far more loosely confederate Axis would depend on this unity of purpose.

The State Department, meanwhile, formed a secret fifteen-person Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy, headed by Undersecretary Sumner Welles. This study group devised much of the framework for the founding of the United Nations as an international organization. More publicly, Wendell Willkie dedicated himself to the work of convincing the Republican Party to abandon isolationism once and for all. “He who wins the war must maintain the peace,” he said in February 1942, warning Republicans that to cede internationalism to the Democrats would destroy the GOP. That spring, he convinced the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution declaring that “our nation has an obligation to assist in bringing about comity, cooperation, and understanding among nations.” Roosevelt asked Willkie to undertake a world tour to publicize the idea of a United Nations. He left in August, flying on a bomber named the Gulliver. Forty-nine days of travel included stops in Russia, the Middle East, and China. In a radio address that he gave when he got back, he called for an end to Western imperialism and the beginning of a new arrangement among nations. One World, the book he wrote about his trip and his vision, headed every best-seller list in the country, becoming only the third book published in the United States to sell more than a million copies. Roosevelt called for a United Nations, but it was Willkie who raised public support for it.⁶²

Roosevelt’s Office of War Information asked Americans to understand the war as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and fascism. For most soldiers, this meant something less lofty. When reporters asked GIs what they were fighting for, they generally said that they were fighting for home. Ernie Pyle, a reporter from Indiana, hauled his Underwood typewriter along as he followed American infantrymen fighting in Europe and Africa. “I love the infantry,” Pyle said, “because they are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. . . . And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.” He wrote of the ordinary soldiers, the “dogfaces,” and their bravery, and their misery, and the terribleness of their deaths. “Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules,” he wrote from Italy, describing a soldier who stopped to sit by the body of a captain, holding the dead man’s hand. “Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”⁶³

Soldiers communicated from the trenches by way of radio, here in the Philippine island of Leyte in 1944.

They fought in the mountains and on the seas. In 1942, much of the American fighting took place in the Pacific, where the Allies hoped to halt the Japanese advance. In the spring, U.S. intelligence broke Japan’s ciphers and, in the spring of 1942, defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Hawaiian island of Midway. Allied troops then challenged and eventually defeated the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, at the Battle of Guadalcanal. In Guadalcanal, marines told reporter John Hersey that they were fighting for blueberry pie. “Home is where the good things are,” Hersey wrote. “The generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie.”⁶⁴

Meanwhile, on the home front, the federal government had instituted a policy of imprisoning people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. As early as 1934, the State Department had reported to FDR on the possibility of sabotage by Japanese Americans. In 1939, the president had asked the FBI to compile a list of possible subversives, a list known as the ABC list because of its ratings system: people on the list were labeled: A, immediately dangerous; B, potentially dangerous; or C, a possible Japanese sympathizer. In the hours after receiving word of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI began rounding up suspects; by nightfall, the bureau had detained nearly eight hundred Japanese on the A list.⁶⁵

On February 19, 1942, another day that would live in infamy, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to establish military zones. The U.S. Army issued Public Proclamation 1 in March, directing aliens to demarcated zones. Restrictions began with curfews and proceeded to relocation orders. Eventually, some 112,000 Japanese, a number that included 79,000 U.S. citizens, were ordered from their homes and imprisoned in camps in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington.⁶⁶ They packed what they could in duffel bags and stiff suitcases, their distress captured in pictures taken by photographers including Dorothea Lange.

Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she’d taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. “Cripples know about each other,” she said of her ability to capture suffering on film. Lange disagreed with Roosevelt’s executive order. “She thought that we were entering a period of fascism,” her assistant said, “and that she was viewing the end of democracy as we know it.” Her photographs, commissioned by the War Relocation Authority for purposes of documentation, serve as testament to that objection. Lange’s FSA photographs became iconic; her WRA photographs were, for decades, locked in archives, hidden from view, many of them stamped IMPOUNDED.⁶⁷

Dorothea Lange photographed the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in California in 1942.

Appeals to the courts proved unavailing. Gordon Hirabayashi, an American citizen and a Quaker who was a senior at the University of Washington, refused to abide by the curfew. “I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives,” Hirabayashi said. He turned himself in to the FBI but sought a legal remedy, arguing that the executive order was “unconstitutional because it discriminates against citizens of Japanese ancestry.” In Hirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1943 upheld the constitutionality of a curfew, if narrowly. “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” Chief Justice Harlan Stone said, in the majority opinion, but in time of war, such discriminations “which are relevant to measures for our national defense and for the successful prosecution of the war” were perfectly constitutional. Justice Frank Murphy, while concurring, nevertheless regretted the ruling, which, he said, “goes to the very brink of constitutional power” and which he considered, whether constitutional or not, an American tragedy. “To say that any group cannot be assimilated is to admit that the great American experiment has failed.” The curfew and internment orders had deprived American citizens of their liberty “because of their particular racial inheritance,” and “in this sense it bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Germany and in other parts of Europe.”⁶⁸

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, born in Oakland, California, in 1919, had tried to enlist in 1940. A welder at a defense plant, he refused to obey the relocation order, choosing to stay with his girlfriend, an Italian American. He had undergone plastic surgery to disguise his appearance; he pretended to be Mexican and eventually went into hiding. The ACLU took up his case, arguing that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the order in a 6–3 decision, relying on the opinion in Hirabayashi and emphasizing the danger posed to the United States by possible Japanese saboteurs who might aid a Japanese attack on the West Coast. Hoover appointee Justice Owen Roberts, in a strongly worded dissent, made a distinction between the two cases. “This is not a case of keeping people off the streets at night,” he said. “It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp . . . solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty.”⁶⁹

And yet the war cultivated new forms of resistance to the racial order—unprecedented and sustained militant action. In the First World War, W. E. B. Du Bois, at the behest of George Creel, had urged African Americans to set aside the fight against Jim Crow for the duration. Eminent black leaders did not make this same case during the Second World War but instead put pressure on local and state institutions, and especially on the federal government, to dismantle segregation—as did men recruited to serve. “Every time I pick up the paper Some poor African American soldiers are getting shot lynch or hung, and framed up,” a man from the Bronx wrote to Roosevelt. “I will be darned if you get me in your forces.”⁷⁰

The wartime economic boom that lifted so many Americans out of Depression-era poverty left African Americans out. In factories, their work was segregated and poorly paid. So too in the armed services. In the army, African Americans served in segregated, noncombat units, where they reported to white officers and did menial work; in the navy, they worked as cooks and stewards. They were forbidden from enlisting in the air force or marine corps. “The Negro soldier is separated from the white soldier as completely as possible,” reported Henry Stimson, secretary of war. The Crisis editorialized: “A jim crow army cannot fight for a free world.” James Baldwin worked in a defense plant in New Jersey in 1943, when he was nineteen. “The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America,” he later wrote. “A certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.”⁷¹

Scattered sit-ins had started in 1939. A leading legal architect of the movement was Pauli Murray. Murray, born in Baltimore in 1910, had graduated from Hunter College in 1928 and then worked for the National Urban League and for the WPA. One of her white forebears had been a trustee of the University of North Carolina, which rejected her application for admission in 1938 on the basis of her race. At the time, Murray was in search of a doctor to prescribe testosterone; she saw herself as male. Her struggle with her doctors met with no success. To challenge UNC, she approached Thurgood Marshall, a young lawyer leading the NAACP’s campaign against segregation; Marshall discouraged her (Murray had moved to New York, and Marshall thought that a nonresident test case would be weaker than a claim made by a resident). In 1940, Murray was arrested in Virginia for refusing to give up a seat on a bus. Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, and having recently read a book called War without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments, Murray had decided to try to apply Mahatma Gandhi’s practice of Satyagraha, nonviolent direct action. The idea was to protest injustice without violence by waiting for one’s political opponents to perform injustice, by their own violent suppression of a peaceful protest. Murray’s own inclination was clench-fisted defiance of Jim Crow, but she forced herself to act, instead, with utmost courtesy. Murray next went to Howard University to study law, she said, “with the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.” Instead of fighting for equal facilities, Murray argued for dismantling the forty-five-year-old Plessy altogether by fighting against separate facilities. During her years at Howard, a time when most male students were away fighting the war, Murray planned sit-ins in Washington, DC, drugstores and cafeterias; participants carried signs that read “We Die Together, Why Can’t We Eat Together?”⁷²

In May 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a Negro March on Washington to be held that July. “I suggest that ten thousand Negroes march on Washington, D.C., the capital of the Nation, with the slogan, ‘We loyal Negro American citizens demand our right to work and fight for our country,’” Randolph wrote. By June, more than a hundred thousand protesters were expected to march. Eleanor Roosevelt, hoping to convince Randolph to call off the march, met with him in New York, along with Bayard Rustin, a young civil rights activist who’d been helping to organize the event—and who would later go on to organize the 1963 March on Washington. “Mrs. Roosevelt led off by saying that Mr. Randolph knew of her affection, of her efforts on behalf of Negroes,” Rustin recalled, “and that the President would be greatly embarrassed vis-a-vis our allies if, in the midst of our preparation for defense of freedom, this were to happen.” Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Randolph to meet with the president at the White House. The president, too, tried to dissuade him.

“You know, Mr. Randolph, that if you bring a hundred thousand blacks into Washington, there’s absolutely no place for them to eat,” he said. “Furthermore, there’s no place for them to sleep, and even more serious there’s no place in Washington where they can use toilet facilities.”

“That is not my fault nor my problem,” Randolph replied. “But you can issue an Executive Order before we get here opening up the toilets, opening up the restaurants, and making it possible for us to sleep in hotels.”⁷³

In the end, FDR signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to call off the march. Protests continued. Two black army sergeants in Norfolk, Virginia, refused to give up their seats on a bus; they were beaten and thrown in jail. A black U.S. Army nurse did the same in Montgomery, Alabama; the police who beat her broke her nose.⁷⁴ Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee blamed communists, charging that “throughout the South today subversive elements are attempting to convince the Negro that he should be placed on social equality with white people, that now is the time for him to assert his rights.”⁷⁵ In 1942, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, keen “to determine why particular Negroes or groups of Negroes or Negro organizations have evidenced sentiments for other ‘dark races’ (mainly Japanese) or by what forces they were influenced to adopt in certain instances un-American ideologies,” conducted a nationwide investigation, including surveillance of hundreds of black lawyers, organizers, artists, and writers. It would result in a classified 730-page report called the Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States, code-named RACON. Far from proposing remedies in the form of civil rights, RACON warned of dangerous political subversives, by which Hoover and the Bureau meant African Americans working to dismantle Jim Crow. Hoover did not believe that the African American struggle for civil rights had come out of black communities; instead, he blamed the Communist Party, and he blamed the Axis. “It is believed the Axis Powers have endeavored to create racial agitation among American negroes which would cause disunity and would serve as a powerful weapon for adverse propaganda,” the director wrote, in a memo to FBI field agents. “It is believed that the agitation has been incited among the American negroes by telling them that the present war is a ‘race war’ and that they should not fight against the Japanese, who are also of the colored race.”⁷⁶

By no means was the struggle against segregation confined to the South. In Detroit, white people barricaded the streets when the first black families moved in to a public housing project, the Sojourner Truth Homes, in February 1942. “WE WANT WHITE TENANTS IN OUR WHITE COMMUNITY,” read one billboard. Tensions grew over the next year; in June of 1943 more than six thousand federal troops marched into Detroit to suppress the unrest. In New York that August, rumors that a white policeman had killed a black soldier led to riots that lasted two days, involved more than three thousand people, led to six hundred arrests, and left six people dead. “Don’t you see, Mr. President,” A. Philip Randolph wrote to Roosevelt, “this is not a repetition of anything that has happened before in the history of Negro-white relations?”⁷⁷ Roosevelt offered very little by way of reply.

Pauli Murray offered, that summer, a poem.

A billboard in Detroit in 1942 called for the continuation of segregated housing.

        What’d you get, black boy

        When they knocked you down in the gutter,

        And they kicked your teeth out,

        And they broke your skull with clubs

        . . .

        What’d the Top Man say, Black Boy?

        “Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . .”⁷⁸

After graduating first in her class at Howard, Murray was rejected from a graduate program at Harvard Law School, which did not admit women. She went instead to the University of California, where she wrote a dissertation on “The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.” Beyond leading the effort to adapt the teachings of Gandhi to the civil rights movement, Murray would pioneer an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that insisted that it could be used to fight not only Jim Crow, discrimination by race, but also “Jane Crow,” discrimination by sex.⁷⁹

FDR, confronted with a sustained and organized wartime campaign of sit-ins, protests, rallies, and boycotts, pledged to remedy one of the most galling forms of discrimination: black soldiers living in Jim Crow states generally could not vote. “Surely the signers of the Constitution did not intend a document which, even in wartime, would be construed to take away the franchise of any of those who are fighting to preserve the Constitution itself,” the president said during a fireside chat in January 1944. But when proposed legislation guaranteeing soldiers the right to vote went to Congress, southern Democrats balked. Much amended, the measure that became law left enforcement to the states. As the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, explained, the new law “answers the demand for a soldier vote law while guaranteeing that the Negro vote be ‘taken care of’ by election in precincts, counties, and other state units, and therefore is satisfactory to all except Negroes.”⁸⁰

The American debate about the incompatibility of democracy and racism reached a new audience in 1944 with the publication of An American Dilemma, by a Swedish sociologist named Gunnar Myrdal, who’d been commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to study race. The American dilemma, according to Myrdal, was the tension between, on the one hand, the American creed of human rights and personal liberty and, on the other, racial injustice. “The three great wars of this country have been fought for the ideals of liberty and equality, to which the nation was pledged,” Myrdal wrote. “Now America is again in a life-and-death struggle for liberty and equality, and the American Negro is again watching for signs of what war and victory will mean in terms of opportunity and rights for him in his native land. To the white American, too, the Negro problem has taken on a significance greater than it has ever had since the Civil War.”⁸¹

As a national consensus emerged about the need for Americans to find common cause and put their ethnic differences behind them, Hollywood filmmakers developed a convention later known as the “ethnic platoon,” about a motley group of American soldiers who form a band of brothers. Eric Johnston, who had been an adviser to FDR, became head of the Motion Picture Association of America. “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath,” he announced. “We’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.” A government pamphlet titled “A Manual for the Motion Picture Industry” explained that wartime films ought to be sure to include all manner of ethnic Americans as “the people,” and that part of the fight in this war must be against “any form of racial discrimination or religious intolerance.” Lifeboat, based on a story by John Steinbeck, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and released in 1944, is the epitome of the genre. The military and civilian survivors of an attack by a German U-boat find themselves on a single lifeboat, with the U-boat captain. Only by conquering their own differences can they rescue themselves from his machinations. The rich socialite falls in love with the working-class Irishman; the black steward saves everyone.⁸²

Whatever the influence of Gunnar Myrdal or Hollywood filmmakers on the wartime struggle for civil rights, that struggle was led by black Americans, intellectuals, reporters, artists, and activists. “To win a cheap military victory over the Axis and then continue the exploitation of subject peoples within the British Empire and the subordination of Negroes in the United States is to set the stage for the next world war—probably a war of color,” the African American sociologist Horace Cayton wrote in The Nation in 1943. “Somehow, through some mechanism, there must be achieved in America and in the world a moral order which will include the American Negro and all other oppressed peoples. The present war must be considered as one phase of a larger struggle to achieve this new moral order.”⁸³ Building that new order would be the work of the postwar world.

It was possible to begin to imagine that world in 1943, because the tide of the war had turned. U.S. and Canadian forces pushed back Japanese advances in the Pacific. Hitler’s planned assault on Soviet forces at Kursk ended in a German retreat. Britain bombed Hamburg. Allies invaded Italy. In July 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—the “Big Three”—met in Tehran, chiefly to plan the campaign against Germany. They also touched on the question of postwar international cooperation. Roosevelt and Stalin twice met together privately. (“Roosevelt believed that he would get along better with Stalin in Churchill’s absence,” the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union later said.) Roosevelt told Stalin about the plan, drafted by Sumner Welles, for a United Nations organization comprising three parts: an assembly, with delegates from all nations; an executive committee, of the Big Four, with six other regional delegates; and a security council of the “four policemen,” who would have power to act with force to prevent aggression and secure the peace. (The idea of a “world’s policeman” dates to the First World War, but in 1943, during a birthday dinner for Winston Churchill, FDR called upon the Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—to serve as the world’s “four policemen.”)

The meetings in Tehran, lavish dinners hosted by each leader in turn, were plagued by mistrust and, on Stalin’s part, duplicity. Churchill felt that Roosevelt had betrayed him by meeting with and repeatedly siding with Stalin. “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched,” Churchill wrote, “and on the other side sat the great American buffalo.” Stalin reveled in his ability to divide the two men. The Big Three agreed on a plan for attacking Germany. But the statement issued at the end of the Tehran conference made no reference to the United Nations.⁸⁴

At home, Roosevelt’s rhetoric took a turn toward what would become the UN’s language of human rights. A fight for freedom became a fight for rights. In January 1944, in a message to Congress, Roosevelt announced his plan for a Second Bill of Rights. The first Bill of Rights had guaranteed certain political rights, but “as our nation has grown in size and stature,” Roosevelt explained, “these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Declaring certain “economic truths” to be “self-evident,” his list of rights included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “the right of every family to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care,” and “the right to a good education.”⁸⁵

Time declared, “Dr. Win-the-War has apparently called into consultation one Dr. Win-New-Rights.” Wartime prosperity strengthened Roosevelt’s hand in expanding the government’s role in securing rights, and civil rights activists had demanded it. At the same time, liberals were losing political power, not gaining it, at least as measured by congressional elections. In 1942, Democrats lost 42 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate. They still held a majority of seats in both houses, but a far diminished one. In 1936, there were 242 more Democrats than Republicans in the House; in 1942, that majority had shrunk to 10. In 1938, Democrats held 60 more seats than Republicans in the Senate, a majority that, by 1942, had shrunk to 21. By 1943, Congress had eliminated a great many New Deal relief programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Other New Deal agencies were either dismantled or had their heads replaced with conservatives. I. F. Stone said that the New Deal was “beginning to commit hara kiri.” In 1944, Archibald MacLeish gave voice to liberals’ anticipation of a reactionary peace: “Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they can endure to meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal proposals, the collapse of all liberal leadership, and the inevitable defeat of all liberal aims. It is no longer feared, it is assumed, that the country is headed back to normalcy, that Harding is just around the corner.”⁸⁶

MacLeish was not far wrong. In 1945, Martin Dies reconvened his Un-American Activities Committee to investigate liberals suspected of being communists. Anticipating Joseph McCarthy, Dies warned of “hundreds of left-wingers and radicals who do not believe in our system of free enterprise” and claimed that “not less than two thousand outright Communists and Party-liners” were “still holding jobs in the government in Washington.” The objects of Dies’s ire included Frances Perkins and even Eleanor Roosevelt herself. “The First Lady of the Land,” Dies said, “has been one of the most valuable assets which the Trojan Horse organization of the Communist Party have possessed.”⁸⁷

Liberalism survived—it remained the principal governing philosophy of the United States for decades—but it had been weakened. Socialism had been discredited. And conservatism, while still a hushed chorus of voices in a wilderness, gained strength in the form of a critique of statism. In 1941, James Burnham, a former liberal, published The Managerial Revolution, in which he argued that the nations that had descended into totalitarianism were those in which the greatest managerial power was held by the state. Practically, this kind of argument had the effect of galvanizing opposition to the income tax. The American Taxpayers’ Association (formerly the American Bankers’ League) argued for the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment and, failing that, for a constitutional amendment calling for a 25 percent tax cap, a proposal initially made by Robert B. Dresser. Dresser served on the boards of both the American Taxpayers’ Association and the Committee for Constitutional Government, a businessmen’s group organized in 1937 to oppose Roosevelt’s court-packing plan.⁸⁸ The cap, introduced in Congress in 1938, died in committee, after which the two organizations began calling for a second constitutional convention. “Our present tax system is doing much to destroy the free enterprise system,” a New York Times business reporter wrote in 1943, arguing that American taxpayers “should be given reasonable assurance now that their incomes and inheritances will not be confiscated in a process of converting our private enterprise system into some form of State socialism.”⁸⁹ By 1944, after the Committee for Constitutional Government had distributed 82 million pieces of literature, half of the states required to call for a constitutional convention had voted in favor of Dresser’s amendment, even though an investigation directed by the Treasury secretary reported that the measure would shift the burden of taxation from the wealthiest taxpayers to the poorest (only the top 1 percent of taxpayers would have seen their taxes cut, which is why its critics called it the Millionaires’ Amendment).⁹⁰ By the end of the decade, only one lobbying group in the country was spending more than the Committee for Constitutional Government. Wright Patman, a congressional Democrat from Texas, called it “the most sinister lobby in America.”⁹¹

THE ALLIES AT LAST invaded France on June 6, 1944, D-Day, determined to liberate a devastated and terrorized Europe. “You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a message broadcast to the Allied Expeditionary Forces. “The eyes of the world are upon you.” One million men eventually participated in the invasion along a fifty-mile stretch of the Normandy coast, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began at fifteen minutes past midnight, when paratroopers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions fell from the sky, trying to drop behind enemy lines under cover of darkness. Infantrymen carrying heavy packs weighted with ammunition stormed five land-mined beaches, wading through neck-high water under fierce gunfire. A fleet of bombers and fighter jets attacked from the sky. “I’ve never seen so many ships in my life,” said paratrooper Jim Martin, a twenty-two-year-old machinist from Dayton, Ohio, about flying over and looking down at more than five thousand Allied naval vessels. “You could have walked across the English Channel, not that you’d have had to walk on water, you could just step from ship to ship.”⁹²

Aided by the French Resistance, the Allies defeated German forces and proceeded to push them from the west while Soviet troops continued to assault them from the east, the plan agreed upon at Tehran the year before. In the Pacific, U.S. forces defeated the Japanese in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and began bombing the Japanese islands. As victory in Europe neared, delegates from what were now forty-four Allied nations met in July 1944 in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, at Bretton Woods, to plan a postwar order that could avoid the fatal mistakes of the last peace. Columbia political science professor James T. Shotwell had been at Versailles in 1919 and, like many delegates, understood that the objective of the meeting at Bretton Woods was to learn the lesson of the decisions made there. “The magnitude of the Great Depression of 1930 was due to two things,” Shotwell wrote, “the economic cost of the first World War and the acceptance of disastrous economic policies after it.”⁹³ Disavowing the economic nationalism that had followed the end of the First World War, the Bretton Woods Conference committed itself to open markets and free trade, and to Keynesianism, founding the International Monetary Fund, which would establish a fixed rate of currency exchange. Keynes chaired the commission that established the international bank, which eventually became known as the World Bank.⁹⁴

Even as this order was being built, a conservative assault on it began. Two months after Bretton Woods, Austrian-born political scientist Friedrich A. Hayek published an American edition of The Road to Serfdom, a work that established the fundamental framework of modern economic conservatism. Much of the argument Hayek made in The Road to Serfdom had been made, much earlier, by Herbert Hoover, in The Challenge to Liberty (1934). The New Deal, Hoover wrote, amounted to “the daily dictation by Government, in every town and village every day in the week, of how men are to conduct their daily lives.” Under that and like schemes, “peoples and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying, those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and the inspiration of Progress since the Middle Ages.”⁹⁵ To Hoover, and to Hayek, it was as if time were running backwards, from freedom to serfdom.

Hayek, who taught at the London School of Economics, had been a critic of Keynesian economics since the 1930s. “I wish I could make my ‘progressive’ friends . . . understand that democracy is possible only under capitalism and that collectivist experiments lead inevitably to fascism of one sort or another,” he’d written to Walter Lippmann in 1937. When governments assume control over economic affairs, Hayek warned, the people become slaves: “What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.”⁹⁶

Less important for what it said than for how many people read it, The Road to Serfdom, released in England in March of 1944, was published in the United States the following September, though it appeared first as an article in the Saturday Evening Post, was subsequently abridged in Reader’s Digest, and was adopted as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Hayek’s influence would begin to drive policy as early as 1947, when he and other economists met in Switzerland to talk about how to prevent Western democracies from falling into a “new kind of serfdom.” They drafted a “Statement of Aims” declaring that “Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. . . . Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.”⁹⁷

Liberals, of course, feared totalitarianism, too. As the Allies marched across Europe, reports of the devastation they found, the ruined cities, the slaughtered peoples, haunted Americans. What had man wrought? Over the course of the war, many liberals, especially those who’d flirted with communism, had changed their minds about the kinds of reforms they’d urged in the 1930s. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, “The rise of totalitarianism has prompted the democratic world to view all collectivist answers to our social problems with increased apprehension.” Instead of arguing against monopolies and for the restraint of capitalism, many, especially after the war, abandoned their interest in economic reform and followed the lead of African Americans in a fight for rights, and especially for racial justice.⁹⁸

Another fissure divided prewar from postwar liberals. Instead of arguing for and running public arts programs, public schools, public libraries, and public-minded radio and television programs, liberal intellectuals grew suspicious of mass culture, and, after the war, openly contemptuous of it. In the 1930s, it had been conservative intellectuals who were revolted by the masses; in the 1950s, it would be liberals—a trend that would only escalate over the following decades, and reach a crisis by the end of the century.⁹⁹ That crisis began with the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

III.

ROOSEVELT HAD GROWN haggard. At his inauguration in January 1945, he was wan and weak and could hardly stand; during his brief speech, his whole body shook, as if he had been seized by a fever. There would be no rest. He had agreed to undertake a harrowing journey, halfway around the world, in wartime, to a summit with Churchill and Stalin. Two days after the inauguration, he boarded a train for an undisclosed location, his car outfitted with bulletproof windows and armor-plated siding. Disembarking from the train at Newport News, Virginia, he boarded the USS Quincy, a battleship specially equipped with ramps for his wheelchair, for an eleven-day, 5,000-mile voyage to Malta. As the ship entered the harbor of the Mediterranean island, Roosevelt sat on deck wearing a tweed cap and a brown coat, smiling when a band on the Orion, the British ship carrying Winston Churchill, played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Returning the favor, the band on board the Quincy played “God Save the King.” From Malta, Roosevelt and Churchill were flown separately, each escorted by six fighter jets, on a seven-hour flight to Crimea, on the Black Sea, to meet with Joseph Stalin at a lavish villa, Livadia Palace, the summer retreat of the last czar, in the seaside resort town of Yalta.¹⁰⁰

Roosevelt and Churchill had gone to Stalin, and not he to them. It had been a terribly dangerous and long journey for the two friends, neither of whom was well, but especially for Roosevelt, who was dying. At the time the conference opened, Stalin enjoyed more support in the American press than he ever had before or ever would after. He appeared on the cover of Time in a story celebrating the American ally’s recent victories, “as Joseph Stalin’s armies thundered into the eastern Reich.” A month later, Time’s cover story, “Ghosts on the Roof,” commentary in the form of a strange fable written by senior writer Whittaker Chambers, fiercely denounced Stalin for devising an entirely new politics—international social revolution—by which he could “blow up countries from within.”¹⁰¹ It would later be suggested that Roosevelt, his powers diminished, had appeased Stalin at Yalta, with fateful consequences. As Stalin’s ruthlessness later became altogether plain, it became clear, too, that the agreement reached at Yalta hadn’t stopped Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe and it may have made possible the communist takeover of China. Later, too, there would follow intimations of intrigue and even of treason, after it was revealed that Alger Hiss, an American delegate to the conference, was a Soviet spy. But Soviet archives, opened after the end of the Cold War, would reveal that he reported to the military, not to the political branch, and that his reports from Yalta had little or no effect on the proceedings. And by many measures, Roosevelt got from Stalin the most that it may have been possible for an American president to get.¹⁰²

FDR and Winston Churchill conferred on a warship at the outset of the Yalta Conference in 1945.

Churchill had brought with him his traveling map room, the British embassy having sent particular instructions: “Mr. Churchill hopes that his map room may be adjacent to his private quarters at Yalta, and it should be so placed as to be accessible to President Roosevelt when wheeled in his chair.” Roosevelt, following the principles of the Atlantic Charter, arrived at Yalta determined not to slice and dice Europe and hand whole peoples over to imperial rule, as had been done at the end of the last war. He hoped to agree on a plan for how to win the war and to divide up Germany in a way that was agreeable to both Stalin and Churchill, in exchange for Stalin’s agreement to enter the war with Japan.

The conference opened in the palace’s ballroom on February 4. Churchill, who distrusted Stalin even more than Roosevelt did, repeatedly sought alliances with Roosevelt, to no avail, since Roosevelt was chiefly occupied trying to convince Stalin to join the fight against Japan. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill enjoyed a particularly strong bargaining position. Both needed help from the Red Army, Churchill in Europe and Roosevelt in the Pacific. To secure Stalin’s support, Roosevelt betrayed the principles of the Atlantic Charter in granting to Stalin, even before the war was over, territories in China, at the time an American ally. In the end, the three men agreed to a division of Germany into zones of occupation and to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. In three months, Germany would surrender; in six months, Japan. But before either of those nations surrendered, Stalin had already begun to betray the pledges he’d made at Yalta.

On March 1, Roosevelt reported to Congress on the Yalta Conference, describing the United Nations as “a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.” He’d grown even thinner and paler. He spoke from a chair, unable to stand and bear the weight of his metal braces.¹⁰³ His hands trembled; he slurred his words. On April 12, while sitting for a portrait at his retreat, the Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia, he collapsed. He died at 3:35 p.m. of a cerebral hemorrhage.

His death was broadcast at 5:47 p.m.: “We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News. . . .” Stations across the country canceled their regular programming for days and played only news reports, the president’s favorite music, and tributes. A stricken Harry S. Truman, who’d taken the oath of office four hours after Roosevelt’s death, said the next day, “There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping.”¹⁰⁴

Archibald MacLeish, three minutes into an address to the country on CBS, fell apart, weeping, as he said the words “our great president who is now so tragically dead at the moment of greatest need.” Radio correspondents reported on the funeral train that carried the flag-draped coffin to Hyde Park as solemn crowds gathered at every train station along the way. CBS announcer Arthur Godfrey reported from Washington when Roosevelt’s coffin was carried through the streets on a wagon led by six white horses, flanked by motorcycles, while a crowd, twenty people deep, watched from the sidewalk. “God give me the strength to do this,” Godfrey said, as he lost control of himself when the coffin passed.¹⁰⁵

ON APRIL 15, the day FDR was buried at his home in Hyde Park, CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow delivered, on American radio, the first eyewitness description of a Nazi concentration camp to reach the American public. At Buchenwald, he met the camp doctor. “We inspected his records,” Murrow said, his deep voice deepening. “There were only names in the little black book, nothing more. Nothing about who these men were, what they had done, or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242—242 out of 1,200, in one month.” Month after month they had died, unnamed, slaughtered, no prayers at their graves.¹⁰⁶

Murrow, born in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, had been hired by CBS in 1935 to run its London office and coordinate its European coverage; he’d never trained as a reporter. But by 1938 and the Anschluss, he’d been conscripted into the work of reporting on fast-breaking news from the field. His first words on the radio, in what CBS decided to call a “special report,” were: “This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 3:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.” In 1940, during the Blitz, he’d reported from the rooftops of London, transmitting a sense of such immediacy and intensity that he’d helped turn the tide of American opinion in favor of entering the war. “You laid the dead of London at our doors,” Archibald MacLeish told him, “and we knew that the dead were our dead.”¹⁰⁷

By the spring of 1945, Murrow was both a veteran of the new art and science of foreign radio correspondence and a voice known, heard, and trusted across the United States. On April 11, soldiers from the U.S. Ninth Armored Infantry Battalion had reached Buchenwald, near Weimar; soldiers from the Eightieth Infantry Division had arrived the next day, along with a group of reporters, including Murrow. In 1943, in a meeting at the Polish embassy in Washington, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter had met Jan Karski, a Polish socialist who had escaped Belzec. Karski described the death camp. Frankfurter was unable to speak. A full ten minutes elapsed. “I am unable to believe you,” he said finally. “Felix, you cannot tell this man to his face that he is lying,” said the Polish ambassador. “I said that I am unable to believe him,” Frankfurter replied. “There is a difference.”¹⁰⁸

At Buchenwald, on April 15, 1945, Murrow reported that he’d asked to see one of the barracks. “It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks,” he said. “When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed.” Murrow’s voice tightened. “As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead.”¹⁰⁹

Murrow did not use the word “Jew” at any point in his report. Nor did most reporters. Life described the people confined at Dachau as “the men of all nations that Hitler’s agents had picked out as prime opponents of Nazism.”¹¹⁰ Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf, a smaller camp outside Buchenwald, reporting to George C. Marshall on the same day that Murrow reported on live radio from Buchenwald: “In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”¹¹¹

Despite these reports, the scale of Nazi atrocities remained all but unknown in the West. Only about a fifth of the prisoners at Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Dachau were, in fact, Jews; the rest were political prisoners and prisoners of war. The death camps, like Auschwitz, where nearly all the prisoners were Jews, had been closed before the Allies arrived, or else liberated by the Soviets. American reporters did not generally see them.¹¹² The extent of the genocide—the murder of six million Jews—would not reach the American public for years to come.

In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other U.S. generals stopped at a newly liberated concentration camp at Ohrdruf, where the remains of burned bodies were found on railroad tracks.

Three days after Eisenhower stopped at Ohrdruf, the 305th Infantry invaded the island of Iejima, near Okinawa. Reporter Ernie Pyle was in a jeep that was driven into a ditch by machine-gun fire. When Pyle raised his head to look around, he was shot in the temple, a hairsbreadth under his helmet. He was forty-four. He died on April 18, 1945, with the dogfaces he loved and whose war he’d chronicled better than any other writer. At the time he was shot, he’d been writing a column. A draft was found in his rucksack. It began, “And so it is over. . . .”¹¹³

It wasn’t quite over, but very nearly. On April 24, Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent a memo to the fledging President Truman, stamped SECRET. “I think it very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible.” Truman had been told about the existence of the atomic bomb within hours of his swearing-in, but Stimson wanted to tell him, now, that the weapon was almost ready.¹¹⁴

In Europe, the Allied forces closed in on the Axis. On April 25, American forces fighting Germany from the west and Soviet forces driving from the east met on the Elbe River. Italian partisans caught up with Mussolini on April 28, shot him down, and dumped his body on the street, where a mob urinated on it, and hung him by his heels. Two days later, in a bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Germany signed a total and unconditional surrender on May 7.

Stalin had already begun pressing his claims to influence over the territory Hitler had so brutally conquered. At Yalta, he’d promised to allow “free and unfettered elections” in Poland; by spring, he’d abandoned that pledge. On April 28, Churchill, astutely perceiving what this foretold, wrote to Stalin: “There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their Associates or Dominions are on the other.”¹¹⁵ There was little comfort in such a future, but it would come all the same.

The World of Tomorrow imagined by the smooth-talking planners of the 1939 World’s Fair, a world of Elektro the Moto-Man and automatic dishwashing machines, would come, too. Its chorus line of women dressed in white, performing a “Pageant of Peace,” had been followed by six years of horrifying warfare and genocide, the shocking brutality of modernity. “People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals,” Albert Einstein had written in 1939, and “anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”¹¹⁶ And yet the fevered dream for world peace remained and seemed to many less a fantasy and closer to a reality when, on June 25, Truman attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco.

Delegates from fifty nations signed a charter that Truman called “a victory against war itself.” The American experiment, begun at the height of the Enlightenment, was to see a new day. “Let us not fail to grasp this supreme chance to establish a world-wide rule of reason,” Truman said, “to create an enduring peace under the guidance of God.” As the conference closed, acting secretary general Alger Hiss boarded an army transport plane along with this cherished treasure, the United Nations Charter, locked in a seventy-five-pound safe, attached to a parachute that read “Finder! Do Not Open. Send to the Department of State, Washington.”¹¹⁷

The United States, a nation founded in an act of severing, had tied its fate to the fate of the world. A nation that had refused to join the League of Nations had taken the lead in establishing its replacement.

It remained to be seen whether the moment would be fleeting or lasting, but it had been long in coming. The Depression, the New Deal, and Roosevelt’s political rhetoric had taught Americans about the danger of an island. “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away,” Roosevelt had said in 1933, in his first inaugural address. “We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’” And the millions of American sailors and soldiers and nurses and airmen who fought on all four corners of the globe gained a cosmopolitanism unknown to any previous generation of Americans. One GI, a “corporal with a rural background,” told Yank magazine that, before the war, “I never got much more than fifteen miles from home,” but “The Army’s taken me through fifteen countries from Brazil to Iceland and from Trinidad to Czechoslovakia.” In July 1945, the Office of War Information drafted “America in the World,” a statement unimaginable in any other era in American history: “In this interdependent world, there is no region in which the United States can renounce its moral and ideological interest.”¹¹⁸

Truman, meanwhile, faced a dire decision about how to end the war in Japan. In June 1945, Leo Szilard wrote to Truman, urging him against deploying the atomic bomb: “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” Szilard was a great admirer of H. G. Wells, who’d predicted atomic warfare in a novel published in the dark days of 1914. Wells had imagined an atomic World of Tomorrow. “Power after power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their bombs first,” Wells wrote in his novel. “By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs; the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized, and every city, every thickly populated area, was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation.”¹¹⁹

Szilard, fearing that Wells’s long-ago predicted dystopia was at hand, began gathering signatures to send to Truman. When the military threatened to charge Szilard with espionage, J. Robert Oppenheimer decided to delay sending the petition. But Szilard pressed on, and by July 17, seventy scientists working on the Manhattan Project, having witnessed the first test of the atomic bomb, had signed his petition of protest.¹²⁰

Outside of those scientists, the president, and a handful of military men with clearance, Americans did not know about the existence of the atomic bomb, but they who knew, knew fear. Weapons capable of destroying cities or even humanity itself had been the stuff of science fiction for decades. And the scale of destruction, between the First World War and the Second, augured nothing so much as yet more staggering destructive force.

Archibald MacLeish tapped into this fear in a campaign he waged to raise popular support for the United Nations. He arranged for so many pro–United Nations radio broadcasts that journalist and former America Firster John T. Flynn complained, “You cannot turn on the radio at any hour of the day—morning, noon, or night—whether you listen to the Metropolitan Opera or to a horse opera, a hill-billy ballad, a commentator or a newscaster, that you do not hear a plug for this great instrument of peace.”¹²¹ MacLeish’s most powerful project was Watchtower Over Tomorrow, a fifteen-minute film screened at movie theaters across the country, queued up with the newsreels that appeared before feature films. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Watchtower Over Tomorrow opened with footage that Hitchcock took from a 1936 science fiction film, Things to Come, an adaptation of yet another dystopian novel written by Wells, which imagined a decades-long war and a new machine age in which a race of super-scientists have built a “space gun.” In the footage used by Hitchcock, a giant crane lowers a bomb into the barrel of a giant missile that, launched in a giant cloud of dust, reaches the stars before falling to earth and exploding. “Death from the sky, from a bomb fired by an enemy, thousands of miles away, the bomb which could be the opening of World War Three,” a narrator says. “It is to prevent the firing of such a bomb that we of the United Nations have struggled on the Italian Front, the Western Front, the Eastern Front, throughout the Balkans, halfway around the world, in China, in Burma, in the Atlantic, up and down the Pacific, wherever the enemy can be brought to bay, to make possible a peace more permanent than a breathing spell between devastating wars.”¹²²

Watchtower Over Tomorrow began appearing in theaters in the spring of 1945. The future that it imagined the United Nations would stop came all the same. That summer, on August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered. “This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman said.¹²³ The Second World War had ended. And, watchtower or no, an altogether new tomorrow had begun.