Don’t Know Much About History

The Great War was over. Disillusioned and shocked by its frightful toll, Americans wanted to retreat to the safe shell of prewar isolationism. The country wanted to get back to business. That meant putting Republicans back in the White House. Starting in 1921, a Republican held the presidency for the next twelve years. First was Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), who campaigned on the promise of a “return to normalcy.” (Although now commonly used, “normalcy” was not grammatically correct when Harding said it; the correct word is “normality.”) After he was elected in 1920, the highlights of his weak administration were the loud whispers of presidential philandering and the infamous Teapot Dome scandal of 1922.

In the midst of that scandal, Harding died and was replaced by Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), best remembered for his pronouncement that “the business of America is business.” Known as Silent Cal, he also said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. And the man who works there worships there.”

Under Coolidge, America seemed to prosper during the Roaring Twenties, a period in which the booming stock market was the centerpiece of a roaring economy. This was the exuberant era in which convention and old-fashioned morality were tossed aside—in spite of Prohibition—in favor of the freewheeling spirit of the Jazz Age, the days of wild new dances like the Charleston, of hip flasks and of women shucking Victorian undergarments and donning short skirts. It was the period that provided the inspiration for the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, including the great representative character of the era, Jay Gatsby. The disillusionment with war and society also brought forth angry new literary voices like those of John Dos Passos (1896–1970), author of the World War I novel Three Soldiers (1921), and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), whose first novel was The Sun Also Rises (1926). Also bucking the conventions of the day were the acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), whose writings skewered what he called the “booboisie,” the complacent middle-class puritanical Americans who were also the target of Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) in such books as Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and his great novel of religious hypocrisy, Elmer Gantry (1927), a body of work that brought Lewis the 1930 Nobel Prize, a first for an American author.

But the self-satisfied America targeted by these writers was very happy with the ways things were, thank you. A new industry in a far-off patch of California called Hollywood was producing a diversion that took America’s mind off its troubles, which seemed to be few in the twenties. By 1927, a Jewish singer in blackface named Al Jolson told the country, “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” in the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, and Hollywood was soon mounting multimillion-dollar productions to meet an insatiable demand for movies.

Seemingly contented with its wealth and diversions, America stayed the course in 1928 by electing Calvin Coolidge’s commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), an international hero as the World War I food administrator praised for keeping Europe from starving. But Hoover’s reputation as a brilliant manager faded fast. He was cursed with overseeing the greatest economic collapse in history.

In the midst of the worldwide economic collapse, Hoover was dropped in 1932 in favor of the governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), already crippled by polio but elected overwhelmingly by a nation that desperately wanted a new direction. The economic crisis was met in America by Roosevelt’s progressivism and the “New Deal.” Overseas, there were different responses. As the answer to their woes, Germany turned to Hitler and Italy to Mussolini. By the middle of the depressed thirties, the war that was not supposed to be was on the horizon.

AMERICAN VOICES

“Returning Soldiers” by W. E. B. DUBOIS (May 1919):

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

What happened in Tulsa and Rosewood?

If hundreds of Americans were taken out and shot, burned alive, or tied to cars and dragged to death by a foreign army or bands of terrorists, it would certainly make front-page news and probably would have wound up in your history books. If six Americans were chased from their homes and murdered, and the homes of hundreds of others torched by an invading army, that also would have been worth a mention in the history books. But when Americans did these things to other Americans, it didn’t merit much attention because the victims were black Americans in what was then a very different America.

These two massacres of large groups of innocent American citizens—or “race riots,” as they were characterized—took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. But they were lost to the history books for most of the last century.

In the early 1920s, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a boisterous postwar boom town, getting rich quick on oil that had recently been discovered there. It was a place where the postwar Ku Klux Klan recruiters found fertile grounds. The isolationist mood, or the America First movement also called nativism, was also flourishing. In the popular mood of the country, America was white and Christian, and it was going to stay that way. In 1921, when a black shoe shiner was arrested for assaulting a white girl in an elevator, the publisher of the local paper—eager to win a local circulation war—published a front-page headline screaming, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”

It was a familiar story in the Deep South of that era—a black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. Soon after the paper hit the streets on June 21, 1921, whites began to gather outside the courthouse where the accused shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, was being held. (Rowland was eventually released when the woman did not press charges.) Blacks from the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, some of them recently discharged war veterans, also began to descend on the courthouse to protect Rowland from being lynched. Shots were fired and soon the wholesale destruction of an entire community began in hellish force. A mob of more than 10,000 whites, fully backed by the white police force, went wild. It was called a riot but in modern parlance there is a better term—“ethnic cleansing.” The white folks of Tulsa seemed determined to wipe the town clean of blacks.

As historian Tim Madigan put it in his book on Tulsa, The Burning, “It soon became evident that whites would settle for nothing less than scorched earth. They would not be satisfied to kill negroes, or to arrest them. They would also try to destroy every vestige of black prosperity.”

Soon white women were looting black homes, filling shopping bags. White men carrying gasoline set fire to the Greenwood neighborhood. When it was over, there were many dead blacks, some of them dumped into mass graves, and their neighborhood was in cinders, with more than 1,200 homes burned. Insurance companies later refused to pay fire claims, invoking a riot exemption. To add to the crime, the story disappeared from local history. Even local newspaper files were eventually cleaned out to remove evidence of the incident.

For decades, the riot and killings were hushed up, kept alive only by oral traditions of a few survivors. Only after nearly eighty years of silence did Tulsa and the Oklahoma legislature come to grips with the past. Historians looking into the city’s deadly riot believe that close to 300 people died during the violence. In 2000, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, a panel investigating the incident, recommended reparations be paid to the survivors of what is still considered the nation’s bloodiest race riot.

Tulsa was the worst but it was far from unique. Starting in 1919, there were violent attacks on blacks in a number of cities, not limited to the Deep South, such as East St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These mass incidents, coupled with the wave of lynchings that spread throughout the South, continued for years. And usually, as with the Tulsa incident, they escaped the notice of most historians. That was the case with another notorious attack on blacks, in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. A small mill town on the Gulf Coast, Rosewood had approximately 120 residents, mostly black. They attended church and worked at the local mills. For the most part, there was a sense of peaceful coexistence with whites in the neighboring town of Sumner. But another trumped-up charge of a black man assaulting a white woman again set off the tinderbox.

On January 2, 1923, after word of the supposed incident got out, white men from Sumner went on a rampage. During a week of shootings and house burnings, black families fled into the woods or to the protection of a few white families who offered shelter. During the Rosewood massacre, at least six blacks were killed; several of them had been lynched and mutilated. Two whites also died in the fighting. The entire small community of Rosewood was practically wiped out. And as in Tulsa, the history was soon erased from local memory in a conspiracy of silence, shame, and fear.

In 1982, a report in the St. Petersburg Times related the details of the incident, and the Florida state legislature was pressed to compensate the victims. In 1994, nine living victims received $150,000 in reparations. (The story was told in the 1997 film Rosewood.)

Must Read: At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America by Phillip Dray; The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan.

Why were Sacco and Vanzetti executed?

People might have loved Ruth—although maybe not in Boston—and they called him the Bambino. But apart from that nickname, things Italian were not held in high regard in America of the 1920s. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had three strikes against them. They were Italian. They were immigrants. And they were anarchists. In 1920, those traits won no popularity contests in America.

When a payroll holdup at a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, left two men dead, an eyewitness said that two of the robbers “looked Italian.” On the strength of that, Sacco and Vanzetti, known anarchists, were arrested. They were carrying guns at the time of their arrest. A few weeks earlier, another Italian anarchist had died when he “jumped” from the fourteenth floor of a building where he was in police custody. Sacco and Vanzetti were quickly tried by a judge whose mind was already made up about what he called “those anarchist bastards.” The two men became darlings of the intellectual and leftist world. They eventually became martyrs. (Years later, FBI files and ballistics reports showed that Sacco was probably guilty and Vanzetti probably innocent.)

Guilty or not, the pair died because the country was in a frenzied, lynch mob mood created by President Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (1872–1936). After a bomb exploded outside his home in 1919, Palmer unleashed a hysterical Red Scare that was the equal of the more infamous McCarthy era some thirty years later. A month earlier, bombs had been mailed to some of America’s most prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Although none of the intended targets was injured, the maid of one U.S. senator had her hands blown off by a letter bomb. Palmer was riding the nation’s case of postwar jitters, a ride that he thought might take him all the way to the White House. To most Americans in 1919, the world had been turned upside down. The country went through a bout of economic dislocation of the sort that typically follows a high-powered wartime economy. Inflation was high and unemployment rose, bringing a new era of labor unrest. But it wasn’t a good time for unions. During the war, the Wobblies (see p. 301) had been broken by the government. Wobbly leader Bill Haywood skipped bail and fled to revolutionary Russia, where he later died.

Progressivism and reform were one thing. Communism was another. The Communists had taken over in Russia. Anything faintly tainted by socialism was presumed dangerous. To many Americans, anything faintly foreign was dangerous. Anarchism had nothing to do with Communism, but both were lumped together in the press and in the popular mind. Most immigrants were neither Communists nor anarchists, but they were so different. Under Palmer, mass arrests and deportations followed. Although a small federal investigation agency, the Bureau of Investigation, had existed since early in the century, Congress had been leery of creating a national police force. The first special agents of the Bureau of Investigation had no arrest power and were not authorized to carry weapons. But in August 1919, Palmer created the Radical Division—later renamed the General Intelligence Division—and appointed a supercharged anti-Communist named J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) to lead it.

Born in Washington, D.C., Hoover was the youngest of four children. He attended law school, earning a law degree and master’s degree in four years. During the time he worked as a clerk in the Library of Congress, he mastered the Dewey Decimal System—later applying the numbering system to the future FBI’s files. During the war, his father suffered a breakdown, and Hoover was unable to enlist. Instead he joined the Justice Department and was placed in charge of the Enemy Alien Registration Unit. After the war and the bombings, Hoover was appointed to head the new division charged with rounding up and deporting radicals. With a propensity for orderliness and an early disregard for constitutional rights, Hoover began amassing files on so-called radicals on more than 45,000 index cards. As Ronald Kessler writes in The Bureau, “Hoover made no distinction between criminal conduct and beliefs. . . . Hoover recommended that a German who had ‘engaged in a conversation with a Negro in which he indulged in pro-German utterances and in derogatory remarks regarding the United States government’ be jailed. The man, who had been in the United States for thirty years, was imprisoned.”

In 1920, based on Hoover’s index cards, the bureau and local police conducted a dragnet, arresting thousands of alien residents. Known as the Palmer Raids, these arrests became notorious. Most of the mass arrests led to no charges or trials. But 556 people were deported, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were sent to the Soviet Union.

Congress questioned the Palmer Raids, but J. Edgar Hoover established a pattern. Lawyers who testified against him or condemned the raids became the subjects of investigations. Files were opened on anyone Hoover viewed as a threat or enemy. It was a way of obtaining confidential information and using it to intimidate and exact revenge that Hoover followed throughout his long career as one of the most powerful men in America. As Kessler concludes, “After Hoover became director, he began to maintain a special Official and Confidential file in his office. The ‘secret files,’ as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remand director as long as he wished.”

With official America on the warpath against “foreign influences,” private America joined the hunt. The Ku Klux Klan revived once more, with a vengeance. The economic dislocation following the war gave the Klan its opening. New leadership gave it a respectability it had lacked before. But its violence was as deadly as ever. While blacks remained the chief targets of Klan venom, the new message of hate spread to include Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. By 1924, the “new” Klan claimed between 4 million and 5 million members, not limited to the South. In 1923, Oklahoma’s governor, J. C. Walton, declared martial law because he feared that the Klan was creating a state of insurrection. The largest Klan rally in American history was held in Chicago in 1919. The pace of lynchings, which had slackened during the war years, was revived with vicious frenzy.

Reflecting the great fear of people and things foreign, and the retreat from Europe’s affairs, Congress put the brakes on immigration. In 1921, a tight quota system began to limit immigration sharply. In 1924, the quotas were further reduced, and by 1929, the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States was lowered to 150,000. Most of these were white Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain.

The “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” would have to hold their breath and huddle a little longer.

Must Read: J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets by Curt Gentry.

Why was Prohibition one of the greatest social and political disasters in American history?

Nowadays, the night belongs to Michelob. Football stadiums ring with the chant “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” Budweiser comes wrapped in images of the workingman and the American flag. And attempts to limit beer sales at ball games are shot down as un-American. From the late-twentieth-century perspective, it is hard to imagine that this is the same country that once outlawed alcohol.

America has always had a love affair with simple solutions to complex problems. Indians on good land? Move ’em out. You want Texas? Start a war with Mexico. Crime problem? Bring back the death penalty. Prayer in schools will solve the moral lapse of the nation. Busing schoolchildren will end racial segregation. The solutions always seem so simple when politicians proclaim them, masses take up the cry and laws are passed with an outpouring of irresistible popular support. The problem is that these broad solutions rarely work the way they are supposed to.

America’s grandest attempt at a simple solution was also its biggest failure. The constitutional amendment halting drinking in America was supposed to be an answer to social instability and moral decline at the beginning of the twentieth century. It should stand forever as a massive memorial to the fact that complex problems demand complex responses, and that Americans balk whenever somebody tries to legislate their private morality and personal habits.

Proposed by Congress during World War I, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” within the United States. It also cut off the import and export of beer, wine, and hard liquor. In January 1919, the amendment became part of the Constitution when Nebraska voted in favor of ratification—only Rhode Island and Connecticut failed to ratify the amendment—and a year later it became the law of the land, when Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce the law.

To President Herbert Hoover, it was “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” To Mark Twain, Prohibition drove “drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and [did] not cure it or even diminish it.”

Prohibition didn’t just spring up as some wartime cure-all for the nation’s social ills. The Prohibition spirit had been alive in America since colonial times, but was greatly revived in the nineteenth century, especially in the West, where drunkenness and immorality became inseparably linked. It was there that primarily women waged war on “demon rum” and, though they lacked the vote, first demonstrated the political clout they carried. The temperance movement was strongest in Midwestern and western states in the years after the Civil War. As the primary victims of social and economic ills spawned by alcoholism, women held prayer vigils in the streets outside the many saloons that had sprung up in the cattle era, then moved to grassroots organizing. In 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) came together to fight alcohol, becoming the first broad-based national women’s organization in America.

By the turn of the century, the temperance gang lost its temper, led by the militancy of Carrie Nation (1846–1911). Striding into the saloons of Kansas with an ax and shouting, “Smash, women, smash!” Nation and her followers reduced bars, bottles, glasses, mirrors, tables, and everything else in their path to splinters and shards of glass.

The sense of dislocation left after the war, the desire for “normalcy,” the fear that emerged in Red Scares and Ku Klux Klan revivals, all helped pave the way for the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition was a notable example of the American predilection for living by one set of standards and publicly proclaiming another. In public, politicians wanted to be seen as upholding the Calvinist-Protestant ethic. Privately, most Americans consumed some alcohol before Prohibition and continued to do so afterward.

Once in place, Prohibition proved virtually unenforceable. “Bootlegger,” “rum runner,” and “moonshine” became part of the language. For the rich, there were “speakeasies,” the ostensibly private clubs, requiring a codeword entry, that often operated under the watchful eye of the corner cop. For the poor, there was bathtub gin. Pharmacists wrote prescriptions for “medicinal” doses of alcohol, and more Catholics must have gone to Mass, because production of legal sacramental wine increased by hundreds of thousands of gallons.

Some social historians claim that Prohibition had some beneficial effects: the rate of alcoholism decreased and, with it, alcohol-related deaths. Others argue that wages weren’t being spent on alcohol. This view overlooks the increased fatalities from the deadly use of rubbing alcohol in “bathtub gin.” It also ignores the death toll and cost of the rise of organized crime, which may have existed before Prohibition but gained its stranglehold by controlling most of the smuggling and distribution of illicit liquor—this was the heyday of Al Capone (1898–1947) in Chicago.

Few who wanted to drink were prevented. As an attempt to restore morality, Prohibition probably produced the opposite effect. The willingness to break the law contributed to a wider decline in moral standards. Official corruption, its prevalence reduced since the earlier days of reformers and muckrakers, skyrocketed as organized crime spent millions in payoffs to government officials, from cops on the beat paid to keep a benevolent eye on the local speakeasy, to senators, judges, mayors, and governors on the criminal payroll.

While the “dry” West may have stayed sober and decent, the cities entered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age under Prohibition. It was the Roaring Twenties, the era of the hip flask filled with smuggled gin, of the rumble seat and of the flapper—the “new woman” of the twenties. With her bobbed hair, short dresses, and exotic dances, the modern woman had two other things her mother lacked. The first was birth control, in the form of diaphragms introduced through the efforts of Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), who was arrested for “distributing obscene materials” from her New York clinic. Far from being widely available, the new method of contraception nonetheless brought the subject into the open for the first time in America.

The second was the vote.

AMERICAN VOICES

MARGARET SANGER in The Woman Rebel, a monthly newspaper she published to promote contraception (October 1914):

My work in the nursing field for the past fourteen years has convinced me that the workers desire the knowledge of prevention of conception. My work among women of the working class proved to me sufficiently that it is they who are suffering because of the law which forbids the imparting of information. To wait for this law to be repealed would be years and years hence. Thousands of unwanted children may be brought into the world in the meantime, thousands of women made miserable and unhappy.

Why should we wait?

Margaret Sanger, the greatest pioneer and proponent of the American birth control movement, was born in Corning, New York. She became a public health nurse and was convinced by the poverty she saw that contraception was a necessary step in social equality. In 1915, she was indicted for sending birth control information through the mail and then for operating a birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. After her first arrest, Sanger fled the country and returned when the case was dismissed. She was arrested a second time in 1916 and jailed for thirty days. She later became a founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Who were the suffragists?

Women in America always endured plenty of suffering. What they lacked was “suffrage” (from the Latin suffragium for “vote”).

American women as far back as Abigail Adams—who admonished her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when he went off to declare independence—had consistently pressed for voting rights, but just as consistently had been shut out. It was not for lack of trying. But women were fighting against the enormous odds of church, Constitution, an all-male power structure that held fast to its reins, and many of their own who believed in a woman’s divinely ordained, second-place role.

But in the nineteenth century, more women were pressed to work, and they showed the first signs of strength. In the 1860 Lynn, Massachusetts, shoe worker strike, many of the 10,000 workers who marched in protest were women. (At the time in Lynn, women made $1 per week against the $3 per week paid to men.) Women were also a strong force in the abolitionist movement, with Harriet Beecher Stowe attracting the most prominence. But even in a so-called freedom movement, women were accorded second-rate status.

To many male abolitionists, the “moral” imperative to free black men and give them the vote carried much greater weight than the somewhat blasphemous notion of equality of the sexes. In fact, it was the exclusion of women from an abolitionist gathering that sparked the first formal organization for women’s rights. The birth of the women’s movement in America dates to July 19, 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) called for a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, after they had been told to sit in the balcony at a London antislavery meeting. Of the major abolitionist figures, only William Lloyd Garrison supported equality for women. Even Frederick Douglass, while sympathetic to women’s rights, clearly thought it secondary in importance to the end of slavery. The abolitionist movement did produce two of the most remarkable women of the era in Harriet Tubman (see p. 200), the escaped slave who became an Underground Railroad “conductor” and later a Union spy during the Civil War, and Sojourner Truth, a charismatic black spiritual leader and prominent spokeswoman for the rights of women.

With the Civil War’s end, abolition lost its steam as a moral issue and women pressed to be included under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to black males. But again women had to wait as politicians told them that the freed slaves took priority, a stand with which some women of the day agreed, creating a split in the feminist movement over goals and tactics. Hardliners followed Elizabeth Cady Stanton into the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA); moderates willing to wait for black male suffrage started the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), leaving a rift that lasted twenty years. (The two wings of the women’s movement reunited in 1890 in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, with Stanton as its first president.)

Much of the political energy absorbed by abolition was shifted to the temperance movement after the war. Groups like the WCTU, whose greatest strength lay in the West, proved to women that they had organizational strength. Amelia Bloomer (1818–94) didn’t invent the pantaloons that bore her name, but she popularized them in her newspaper, The Lily, a journal preaching temperance as well as equality.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), called “the Napoleon of women’s rights,” came from the same Quaker-abolitionist-temperance background as Stanton, and the two women became friends and powerful allies, founding the NWSA together. A forceful and tireless organizer and lobbyist, she pushed for local reforms in her home state of New York while continuing to urge the vote for women at the national level. But by the turn of the century, Anthony’s position fell from favor. Women shifted tactics, concentrating on winning the vote state by state, a strategy that succeeded in Idaho and Colorado, where grassroots organizations won the vote for women. After 1910, a few more western states relented, and the movement gained new momentum.

At about the same time, the suffragists took a new direction, borrowed from their British counterparts. The British “suffragettes” (as opposed to the commonly used American term “suffragist”) had been using far more radical means to win the vote. Led by Emmeline Pank hurst, British suffragettes chained themselves to buildings, invaded Parliament, blew up mailboxes, and burned buildings. Imprisoned for these actions, the women called themselves “political prisoners” and went on hunger strikes that were met with force-feedings. The cruelty of this official response was significant in attracting public sympathy for the suffragette cause.

These militant tactics were brought back to America by women who had marched with the British. Alice Paul (1885–1977) was another Quaker-raised woman who studied in England and had joined the Pankhurst-led demonstrations in London. At the 1913 inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, who opposed the vote for women, Paul organized a demonstration of 10,000. Her strategy was to hold the party in power—the Democrats in this case—responsible for denying women the vote. By this time, several million women could vote in various states, and Republicans saw, as they had in winning the black vote in Grant’s time, that there might be a political advantage in accepting universal suffrage.

President Wilson’s views were also dictated by politics. He needed to hold on to the support of the Democratic South. That meant opposing women’s voting. Southern Democrats were successfully keeping black men from voting; they certainly didn’t want to worry about black women as well. Ironically, Wilson’s wife, Edith Galt, proved how capable women could be at running things. During the period when Wilson was immobilized by a stroke in 1919, she literally took over the powers of the presidency, making presidential-level decisions for her invalid husband.

After Wilson’s 1916 reelection, in which women in some states had voted against him two to one, the protest was taken to Wilson’s doorstep as women began to picket around the clock outside the White House. Eventually imprisoned, Paul and others imitated the British tactic of hunger strikes. Again, sympathies turned in favor of the women. After their convictions were overturned, the militant suffragists returned to their White House protests.

In 1918, Paul’s political tactics paid off as a Republican Congress was elected. Among them was Montana’s Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), the first woman elected to Congress. Rankin’s first act was to introduce a constitutional suffrage amendment on the House floor. The amendment was approved by a one-vote margin. It took the Senate another eighteen months to pass it, and in June 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. Now fearful of the women’s vote in the approaching presidential election, Wilson shifted to support of the measure. One year later, on August 26, 1920, Tennessee delivered the last needed vote, and the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution. It stated simply that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It took more than 130 years, but “We, the People” finally included the half of the country that had been kept out the longest.

AMERICAN VOICES

H. L. MENCKEN, famed writer for the Baltimore Sun, describing the scene in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes Monkey Trial (July 14, 1925):

It was nearly eleven o’clock—an immensely late hour for those latitudes—but the whole town was still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that [defense attorney] Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads described in Revelation XIII, and that the end of the world was at hand. There was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus. The real religion was not present.

Mencken had been dispatched to cover what was then the “trial of the century.” Schoolteacher John T. Scopes had been charged with illegally teaching the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, the most prominent defense attorney of the day. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, the Populist leader. Scopes was found guilty and paid a $100 fine. (The trial is the source of the play and later film Inherit the Wind.)

What was the scandal over Teapot Dome?

As one century ended and another began under a cloud of corporate scandals and questions about government regulation of business, one thing is for certain. Enron is as American as apple pie. There is nothing new under the sun, and cases of corporate corruption, with government officials receiving handsome payoffs, crop up like weeds in America’s history. In the nineteenth century, there had been fixing of gold prices, scandals in the Grant administration, topped by the Crédit Mobilier scandal (see p. 267). In the 1920s, the corruption would flower again, threatening a genial Republican president who liked to leave his hands off business.

Tired of the war and eight years of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a weary nation welcomed the noncontroversial Warren G. Harding, a small-town, self-made businessman with matinee-idol good looks. Opposed by James M. Cox—who ran with Wilson’s young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt—Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, the governor of Massachusetts, easily won in a low-turnout election. (Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered 3.5 percent of the vote.) Harding was popular, but by many accounts, may have been the laziest man ever elected president.

Harding’s was a classic Republican administration. Tax cuts. Help for big business. An America-first foreign policy that rejected Wilson’s League of Nations and set up stiff tariffs to protect American industry.

But his administration would also soon be dogged by what came to be called the Harding scandals. The first of these involved the siphoning of millions of dollars allocated for Veterans Administration hospitals. In another seamy episode, Harding’s attorney general Harry Daugherty was implicated in fraud related to the return of German assets seized during the war, and avoided conviction only by invoking the Fifth Amendment.

But the most famous of the Harding scandals involved a place called Teapot Dome. Two federal oil reserves—one in Elk Hills, California, and the other in Teapot Dome, Wyoming—were marked for the future use of the U.S. Navy. But the interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, contrived to have these lands turned over to his department. He then sold off drilling leases to private developers in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks in the form of cash, stock, and cattle. In August 1923, as this scandal was being uncovered by a Senate investigation, Harding suffered a fatal heart attack—misdiagnosed by an incompetent surgeon general as food poisoning—while in San Francisco on his way home from a trip to Alaska. Interior Secretary Fall was later convicted for accepting a bribe, thereby achieving the distinction of becoming the first cabinet officer in American history to go to jail.

Calvin Coolidge, untainted by the scandals, took Harding’s place and handily won reelection in 1924.

Did Henry Ford invent the automobile?

Autos and airplanes. The prosperity of the twenties was due in large part to a shift from the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution, symbolized by the railroads, to a twentieth-century revolution in technology. The invention and widespread commercial development of both the automobile and the airplane defined that shift. And during this period, both industries were defined by two American icons, Henry Ford and Charles A. Lindbergh. In their day, both men were revered. History has not been so kind.

Henry Ford (1864–1947) did not invent the automobile or the assembly line. But his perfected versions of them made him one of the richest and most powerful men in America. The son of an Irish immigrant farmer, Ford had a mechanical inclination. In 1890, he went to work for the Edison company in Detroit and built his first gasoline-driven car there. Europeans had taken the lead in the development of the automobile, and the Duryea brothers of Massachusetts were the American pioneers. Ford borrowed from their ideas, envisioning the auto as a cheap box on wheels with a simple engine, and brought out his first Model T in 1909. In a year he sold almost 11,000 of them.

But Ford envisioned a car for the masses. When Ford and his engineers introduced the moving assembly line, an idea proposed in a 1911 book by Frederick W. Taylor, the mass-produced Model T revolutionized the auto industry. The efficiency of the assembly line cut the price tag on the Model T from $950 in 1908 to under $300. By 1914, Ford Motors turned out 248,000 Model Ts, almost half of all autos produced, at the rate of one every 24 seconds. Realizing enormous profits, Ford made headlines by paying his workers $5 per day, almost double the going rate. Ford himself was clearing up to $25,000 per day. Paying his workers more money was Ford’s only way to keep them from quitting the monotonous, dehumanizing assembly line. He also realized that it was one way to enable his workers to buy Fords.

For Americans, it was love at first sight with the automobile. It is fair to say the Model T revolutionized American life. When Congress enacted highway fund legislation in 1916 and the country embarked on a massive road-building era, the American dream of freedom on the open road became a new reality. In a short time the auto industry became the keystone of the American economy, in good times and bad. New industries in roadside services—such as service stations, diners, and motels—sprang to life all over the country. The country cottage was no longer the exclusive preserve of the Vanderbilts and Morgans. The auto gave the working and middle classes a sense of accomplishment. The new, auto-induced sense of freedom, and the economic prosperity created by the automobile and related industries, helped to open up American society in the 1920s.

Henry Ford cared little for social improvements or the broad sweep of history. “History is more or less bunk,” he said. Autocratic and conservative, he tyrannized his workers. He fired anyone caught driving a competitor’s model. Gangster tactics were used to maintain discipline in plants, and unionizing efforts were met with strike-breaking goon squads. Unions were kept out of Ford plants until 1941. Ford’s attitude was that workers were unreliable and shiftless. In the midst of the Depression, he blamed the workingman’s laziness for the nation’s economic problems. “The average worker,” said Ford, “won’t do a day’s work unless he is caught and can’t get out of it.”

His conservatism spilled over into his political beliefs. An isolationist in foreign policy—although his plants won big defense jobs during both world wars—Ford was also an outspoken anti-Semite. Ford bought a newspaper, the Independent, that became an anti-Jewish mouthpiece. The paper was involved in the American publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic propaganda tract that had first appeared in Russia in 1905 to castigate Jews. But Ford’s conservative, stubborn streak cost him in the long run. Unwilling to adapt to changing styles, Ford Motors later slipped behind more aggressive competitors like General Motors. Yet at his death in 1947, Henry Ford remained an American folk hero for personifying the rags-to-riches American myth.

What was so lucky about Lucky Lindy?

Lucky Lindy was the other great hero of the era. Like Ford, Charles Lindbergh (1902–75) invented nothing. The Wright brothers had begun their famous experiments at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, and the Lockheed brothers built their early commercial planes in 1913. Strictly speaking, Lindbergh wasn’t even the first to fly across the Atlantic. A pair of Englishmen had flown from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919 (a route considerably shorter than Lindbergh’s).

But the war in Europe had given a real boost to the commercial potential of the airplane. While the air industry was not as economically crucial to the twenties as Ford’s automobile, it was symbolic of the venturesome spirit of the times. Lindbergh’s design of his aircraft, which he called The Spirit of St. Louis, allowed him to become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. It was an act of enormous daring, skill, and flying ability. The 3,600-mile flight began on Long Island on May 20, 1927. Attempting to win a $25,000 purse promised to the first pilot to go from New York to Paris, Lindbergh carried only a few sandwiches, a quart of water, and letters of introduction. He wouldn’t need those. When he landed in Paris thirty-three hours later, Lindbergh was smothered in the adulation of France and the rest of Europe. His hero’s welcome would be repeated around the world as he became, like Ford, the symbol of do-anything American inventiveness and daring. A reclusive personality, Lindbergh became best known by his newspaper nickname, Lucky Lindy, and he was the world’s most familiar celebrity.

That celebrity led to the great tragedy in his life. After his marriage to Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of a U.S. senator and later a renowned writer, he lived in the glare of international publicity. In May 1932, their son, nineteen-month-old Charles Jr., was kidnapped, and a $50,000 ransom demand was met. But the child was found murdered. Like the Sacco and Vanzetti affair, the case of Bruno Hauptmann, the man electrocuted for the crime in 1936, has never quite gone away. More than sixty years after Hauptmann’s execution, there were many who claimed that he was innocent, the victim of a frame-up. There is little question that the country’s antiforeign frenzy at the time helped convict him, but the evidence in the case was always strong against him. The infamous kidnapping, which dominated newspapers in the midst of the Depression’s worst year, prompted congressional passage of the so-called Lindbergh Law which made kidnapping a federal offense if the victim is taken across state lines or if the mail service is used for ransom demands, a measure making kidnapping across state lines a capital crime.

Ford and Lindbergh shared something besides their fame and success. By the late 1930s, both men were notorious for their conservative, isolationist, and anti-Semitic political views. Lindbergh made several trips to Germany to inspect the German air force (Luftwaffe) and, in 1938, was presented with a medal by Hermann Goering, first leader of Hitler’s storm troopers, founder of the Gestapo, and Hitler’s air minister. Ford also received a medal from Hitler himself in 1938. After pronouncing Germany’s military superiority, Lindbergh returned to America to become an outspoken leader of the isolationist America First movement, funded with Ford money, that tried to keep the United States out of World War II. In one speech, Lindbergh nearly killed the movement when he warned Jews in America to “shut up” and borrowed the well-worn Nazi tactic of accusing “Jewish-owned media” of pushing America into the war. Although he was in the air corps reserve, Lindbergh’s criticism of Roosevelt forced him to resign his commission. During the war, he served as a consultant to Ford and later flew combat missions in the Pacific. After the war, he was a consultant to the Defense Department. His heroics kept his reputation intact.

Must Read: Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg.

AMERICAN VOICES

From HERBERT HOOVER’S “Rugged Individualism” campaign speech (October 22, 1928):

When the war closed, the most vital of all issues both in our own country and throughout the world was whether Governments should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many instrumentalities of production and distribution. We are challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.

. . . Our American experiment in human welfare has yielded a degree of well-being unparalleled in all the world. It has come nearer to the abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear of want than humanity has ever reached before.

Why did investors panic in 1929, leading to the Great Crash?

When Herbert Hoover made that speech, America did seem to be a place of unlimited opportunity. Apart from a huge underclass of the unemployed and poor farmers that Hoover overlooked and prosperity bypassed, the bulk of the country probably agreed with Hoover’s sentiment. The year 1927 was one more in the prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties. Lindbergh’s 1927 flight to Paris came in the midst of the country’s “Coolidge boom.” An avatar of unlimited potential, Lindbergh added another boost to American feelings of confidence, invincibility, and Hoover’s “rugged individualism.”

With such good feelings in the air, Hoover was elected by a huge margin in 1928. But another factor in his election was the religion of his Democratic opponent, New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic. “A vote for Smith is a vote for the Pope,” proclaimed campaign banners in 1928. Smith also favored repeal of Prohibition, and another slogan said Smith would bring “Rum, Romanism, and Ruin” to America. But more than anything else, the Hoover victory was made possible by “general prosperity.”

And nowhere was the prosperity more conspicuous than on Wall Street, home of the New York Stock Exchange. During the 1920s, new companies like General Motors had issued stock that was making many an investor, large and small, seemingly wealthy. An ambitious young man like Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969), unfettered by the restraints of any regulatory authority (the Securities and Exchange Commission was a later creation), could make a large fortune for himself with not always scrupulous means. In fact, a great number of the most successful men in those days were operating in shady territory. Working in “pools,” crooked manipulators bought cheap shares of stock, drove up the prices among themselves, then lured outside investors into the pool. The pool operators then dumped their stocks at artificially inflated prices, leaving the “sucker” holding a bag of overpriced stock.

The most notorious of the wealthy crooks of the day was the “Swedish match king,” Ivar Krueger. Claiming to be an intimate of the crowned heads of Europe, Krueger built a huge financial empire on credit granted by some of the era’s leading financial institutions. Featured on the cover of Time as a giant of business, Krueger was a con man of the first order, whose empire was based on deception. He issued worthless securities and later counterfeited Italian government bonds. Equally notorious was Samuel Insull, a “self-made” millionaire who used millions put up by working-class investors—many of them public employees caught in the spell of Insull’s magnificent wealth—to build a public utilities empire, all the while manipulating stock prices to his benefit. Before the crash, Insull controlled an empire of holding companies, and he personally held eighty-five directorships, sixty-five board chairmanships, and eleven company presidencies.

The paper wealth being acquired masked a rot in the American economy. American farmers continued to struggle following the postwar collapse of agricultural prices. Before the Great Depression, unemployment was already high as factories became mechanized and the worker at the bottom was let go. Housing starts fell in 1927, always an ominous sign in the American economy. The problems were not only America’s. International production intensified, but demand slackened and warehouses filled up. The wealth of the world was concentrated in the hands of a small class at the top. The wealth trickling down from the top was not enough. The great bulk of the population simply couldn’t create the demand needed to keep up with the increasing supply. The American consumer could not consume all goods that American manufacturers were producing.

Yet thousands of Americans were drawn to the lure of fortunes made in the market. Like moths to the flame, people pulled their life savings from banks and put them into stocks and securities, like Insull Utilities Investments. The easygoing rules of the day meant that investors had to put down only ten to twenty percent in cash to buy stock; the rest was available on cheap credit. The Federal Reserve fed the frenzy with artificially low interest rates set by old-line Republicans beholden only to their corporate pals. Banks loaned millions to feed speculative schemes. The American public was in enormous debt and their “wealth” was all on paper.

By late 1929, barely a year after Hoover had spoken about the abolition of poverty, the cracks in the foundation began to show. Steel and automobile production, two centerpieces of the American economy, were in decline. Yet still the stock market rose, reaching its peak in late September 1929. But the house of cards was about to tumble. Skittish European investors began to withdraw their investments in the United States. When brokers called customers to pay off the amounts owed on stocks bought with borrowed money, these investors had to sell off their stocks to raise cash. This created a wave of fear—the fear of losing everything—that quickly gained momentum. As stock prices fell, more brokers called on customers to put up more cash, and a vicious cycle was unleashed, sending prices on the stock exchange plunging. On October 24, Black Thursday, 13 million shares of stock were sold off. A combine of bankers led by John P. Morgan Jr. set up a pool of cash to prop up prices, as Morgan’s father had done in 1907 during a similar panic in the market. This attempt to inspire confidence failed. By the following week, on October 29—Black Tuesday—more than 16 million shares were sold off as panic swept the stock exchange. (In today’s world, hundreds of millions of shares change hands daily. But in 1929, the market was much smaller and there were no computers recording deals.) Within days, the “wealth” of a large part of the country, which had been concentrated in vastly inflated stock prices, simply vanished.

AMERICAN VOICES

FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN, in his social history of the period, Since Yesterday:

The official statistics of the day gave the volume of trading as 16,410,030 shares, but no one knows how many sales went unrecorded in the yelling scramble to sell. There are those who believe that the true volume may have been twenty or even twenty-five million. Big and small, insiders and outsiders, the high-riders of the Big Bull Market were being cleaned out: the erstwhile millionaire and his chauffeur, the all-powerful pool operator and his suckers, the chairman of the board with his two-thousand-share holding and the assistant bookkeeper with his ten-share holding, the bank president and his stenographer. . . . The disaster which had taken place may be summed up in a single statistic. In a few short weeks it had blown into thin air thirty billion dollars—a sum almost as great as the entire cost of the United States participation in the [first] World War, and nearly twice as great as the entire national debt.

What was so “great” about the Great Depression?

Wall Street’s Great Crash of 1929 did not “cause” the decade of the Great Depression that followed, any more than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had “caused” World War I. The crash was a symptom of the economy’s serious disease. It was the fatal heart attack for a patient also suffering from terminal cancer. By the time the market rallied a few years later in the Little Bull Market, it was too late. The damage had been done. The crash had been the last tick of a time bomb that, when it exploded, brought down the world economy.

America had suffered depressions before. But none of them had been capitalized like the Depression of the 1930s. None had ever lasted so long, and none had ever touched so many Americans so devastatingly. After the crash, the economy was paralyzed. In one year, 1,300 banks failed. There was no such thing as Federal Deposit Insurance guaranteeing the savings of working people. Hard-earned savings disappeared as 5,000 banks closed during the next three years, their assets tied up in the speculating that created wealth but disappeared in the crash, or in mortgages that the jobless could no longer pay. Without banks to extend credit and capital, businesses and factories closed, forcing more workers onto unemployment lines. In 1931, Henry Ford blamed the laziness of workers for the calamity. A short time later, he closed a plant and, with it, 75,000 jobs were lost.

The jolted American system got two more shocks when the empires of Ivar Krueger and Samuel Insull came tumbling down. Insull had built a pyramid of holding companies and used them to push up the value of his stock. By 1932, the artificial values had fallen to their true worth, declining in value by some 96 percent. Indicted by a Chicago grand jury, Insull fled to Greece, where he hoped to escape extradition. When Greece later signed an extradition treaty with the United States, Insull, who had once surrounded himself with three dozen bodyguards, disguised himself as a woman and sailed for Turkey. Eventually he was brought back to the United States and tried. But Insull escaped punishment. The holding companies he had used were outside regulation; all his manipulations were technically legal.

Ivar Krueger was less lucky. Living in a luxurious Paris apartment, he was also revealed as a swindler. Once an adviser to President Hoover, he had stolen more than $3 million from investors. Krueger didn’t wait for an indictment. He shot himself in the spring of 1932, before the worst of his schemes was even brought into the open.

Before the Great Depression, America had absorbed periodic depressions because most people lived on farms and were able to produce what they needed to survive. But the American and world economy had been thoroughly revolutionized in the early twentieth century. This was an urbanized, mechanized America in which millions were suddenly unemployed, with no farms to go home to. Statistics are virtually meaningless when it comes to the magnitude of joblessness. Official numbers said 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. Other historians have said the number was more like 40 to 50 percent.

Through his last three desperate years in office, Herbert Hoover continued to voice optimism. Like most economists of his day, Hoover believed that depressions were part of the business cycle. America had suffered them before and had shaken them off after a period of dislocation. But this time was different. Hoover made a long, steady stream of pronouncements about how the corner had been turned. Instead, things turned bleaker. As millions were losing their homes, unable to pay rent or mortgages, Hoover and other members of the wealthy class made some incredible statements. When the International Apple Shippers’ Association, overstocked with apples, decided to sell its vast surplus to unemployed men on credit so that they could resell them on street corners for a nickel apiece, Hoover remarked, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” Henry Ford, who put 75,000 men out of work and on the road as “hoboes” in search of work, said of the hundreds of thousands of wandering men, women, and children, “Why, it’s the best education in the world for those boys, that traveling around! They get more experience in a few months than they would in years at school.” J. P. Morgan believed that there were 25 or 30 million families in the “leisure class”—that is, able to employ a servant. He was startled to learn that there were fewer than two million servants in the entire country.

Hoover clung to his optimistic line. “Business and industry have turned the corner,” he said in January 1930. “We have now passed the worst,” was the cheery word in May. Prosperity was always right around the corner. But the country never seemed to reach that corner. Hoover has come down in history as a do-nothing Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. That portrait is not quite accurate. The problem was that just about everything he tried either backfired or was too little, too late. In 1930, he went along with a protectionist bill—the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill—which threw up trade barriers around the United States. This simply prompted the European countries to do the same thing, worsening the crisis both in the United States and in Europe. By 1931, the Depression had spread throughout Europe, where the scars of the war were still not healed and the crush of wartime debt contributed to the crisis. Austria, England, France, and, most ominously, Germany were all sucked into a violent whirlpool of massive unemployment and staggering inflation.

Hoover was steadfast in his refusal to allow the government to help the jobless, homeless, and starving through government relief programs he viewed as Socialist and Communist. He did, at least, ignore the advice of one of the nation’s wealthiest men, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (1855–1937), whose tax policies in the 1920s had contributed to underlying flaws in the American economy. Mellon advised a complete laissez-faire response, proposing to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate.” He thought that through this scorched-earth policy, “people will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” Hoover eased the aging Mellon out of the Treasury and made him ambassador to England.

Hoover set up a belated public works program that, by the time it started, was woefully inadequate, unable to replace all the local building projects that had been killed by the banking collapse. In 1932, bowing to the pressure of the time and going against his deep conservative grain, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which loaned money to railroads and banks.

But even in this, Hoover was snakebit. To the millions of unemployed and starving, the RFC was a bitter symbol of Hoover’s willingness to aid corporations while showing complete indifference to the poor. In spite of the growing misery, the lengthening bread lines, the “Hoovervilles” of cardboard shacks being thrown up in America’s large cities, the utter despair of hundreds of thousands without homes or hope, Hoover staunchly refused to allow government to issue direct aid. By his lights, it was socialism to do so, and was completely contrary to his notion of “rugged individualism.”

What was the Bonus Army?

In the midst of the Depression, buglers called President Hoover and the first lady to seven-course dinners served by a small army of white-gloved servants. President Hoover thought that keeping up regal trappings and spiffy appearances was good for national morale. Outside, Americans were fighting for scraps from garbage cans. But some “rugged individuals” were going to give Hoover an unpleasantly close look at life on the other side of the Depression fence.

In the summer of 1932, the Depression’s worst year, 25,000 former “doughboys”—World War I infantrymen, many of whom were combat veterans—walked, hitchhiked, or “rode the rails” to Washington, D.C. Organizing themselves into a penniless, vagrant army, they squatted, with their families, in abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and pitched an encampment of crude shacks and tents on the banks of the Anacostia River. They had come to ask Congress to pay them a “bonus” promised to veterans in 1924 and scheduled to be paid in 1945. Starving and desperate men, they had families going hungry, no jobs, and no prospects of finding one. They needed that bonus to survive. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), they were better known as the Bonus Army.

Their pleas for relief fell on deaf ears. To Hoover, Congress, lawmen, and the newspapers, these weren’t veterans but “Red agitators.” (Hoover’s own Veterans Administration surveyed the Bonus Army and found that 95 percent of them were indeed veterans.) Instead of meeting the BEF’s leaders, Hoover called out the troops, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) with his young aide Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969). The assault was led by the Third Cavalry, sabers ready, under the command of Major George Patton (1885–1945). Behind the horses, the U.S. Army rolled out to meet the ragged bunch of men, women, and children with tear gas, tanks, and bayonets.

Patton’s cavalry first charged the Bonus Marchers, now mixed with curious civilians who were getting off from work on this hot July afternoon. Following the cavalry charge came the tear-gas attack, routing the Bonus Army from Pennsylvania Avenue and across the Eleventh Street Bridge. Disregarding orders—a common thread running through his career—MacArthur decided to finish the job by destroying the Bonus Army entirely. After nightfall, the tanks and cavalry leveled the jumbled camp of tents and packing-crate shacks. It was all put to the torch. There were more than one hundred casualties in the aftermath of the battle, including two babies suffocated by the gas attack.

Pushed out of the nation’s capital, the Bonus Army dissipated, joining the other two million Americans “on the road.” Some states, like California, posted guards to turn back the poor. The violence in Washington, D.C., was the largest but not the only demonstration of a growing anger and unrest in America. During 1931 and 1932, there had been a number of riots and protests, mostly by the unemployed and hungry, sometimes by children, that were put down with harsh police action.

The assault on the Bonus Marchers came as the 1932 presidential campaign was getting under way. A grim Herbert Hoover had been renominated in June by the Republicans on a platform that promised to balance the budget, keep tariffs high on foreign goods, and—in a reversal of its position four years before—repeal Prohibition, allowing the states to control alcohol.

Believing that only a major disaster could prevent them from recapturing the White House, held by Republicans for twelve years, the Democrats met in Chicago. Three leading candidates emerged for the nomination: Al Smith, the 1928 standard-bearer who had been swamped by Hoover; the powerful Speaker of the House, John Nance Garner of Texas, who had the support of newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst, who in turn controlled the California delegation; and Al Smith’s handpicked successor as governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945). Roosevelt led after the first ballot, but lacked the votes to win the nomination. In a classic “smoke-filled room” deal, Garner was promised the vice-presidency in return for his support of Roosevelt. On the fourth ballot, with Hearst throwing California’s delegates to Roosevelt, the popular governor won the nomination. Roosevelt immediately wanted to demonstrate that he was not going to be bound by any traditions. He flew to Chicago to accept the nomination, launching the tradition of the nominee’s speech to the convention. Roosevelt also wanted to demonstrate to the country that although crippled by polio, he would not be stopped from going where he wanted.

Not everyone agreed that it was a great choice. Two of the leading newspapermen of the day were H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann (1899–1974). Mencken said the convention had nominated “the weakest candidate.” Lippmann, perhaps the most influential columnist in the country at the time, was even more disparaging. He called FDR an “amiable boy scout” who lacked “any important qualifications for the office.”

It didn’t matter. The Democrats could have run an actual Boy Scout that year and won. The country might not have been sure about wanting FDR, who ran a conservative campaign but promised a “new deal” for the country and the repeal of Prohibition, establishment of public works, and aid to farmers. But they were sure they didn’t want Herbert Hoover. “General Prosperity” led the way for Hoover in 1928. But “General Despair” knocked him out in 1932. Roosevelt won the election with 57 percent of the popular vote, carrying forty-two of forty-eight states. The Democrats also swept into majorities of both houses of Congress.

After Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Bonus Army returned to Washington. Roosevelt asked his wife, Eleanor (1884–1962), to go and speak to the men, and let them have plenty of free coffee. The first lady mingled with the marchers and led them in songs. One of them later said, “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife.”

Must Read: The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 by Robert S. McElvaine.

AMERICAN VOICES

From FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S
first inaugural address, March 4, 1933:

This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Most of Roosevelt’s campaign speeches had been written for him, but a handwritten first draft of the inaugural address shows this to be Roosevelt’s own work. Yet the speech’s most famous line was old wine in a new bottle. Similar sentiments about fear had been voiced before. The historian Richard Hofstadter notes that Roosevelt read Thoreau in the days before the inauguration and was probably inspired by the line “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

What were the New Deal and the Hundred Days?

When he took the Democratic nomination with a ringing acceptance speech, Roosevelt promised the people a “new deal.” In his inaugural, he promised a special session of Congress to deal with the national economic emergency. He came through on both promises.

The legislative centerpiece of Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, the New Deal was a revolution in the American way of life. A revolution was required because Roosevelt’s election did not signal a turnaround for the depressed American economy. Between Election Day and the inauguration, the country scraped bottom. Bank closings continued as long lines of panicky depositors lined up to get at their savings. Governors around the country began to declare “bank holidays” in their states. On March 5, his first day in the White House, Roosevelt did the same thing, calling for a nationwide four-day bank holiday. That night he talked to Americans about how banking worked in the first of his “fireside chats”—radio addresses aimed at educating the public, soothing fears, and restoring the confidence and optimism of a nation that had little left.

Then he called Congress to a special emergency session. From March through June, the One Hundred Days, the U.S. Congress passed an extraordinary series of measures, sometimes without even reading them. Roosevelt’s approach was, “Take a method and try it. If it fails, try another.”

The result was the “alphabet soup” of new federal agencies, some of them successful, some not.

Like the other President Roosevelt of an earlier era, FDR looked to the nation’s human resources and created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided jobs for young men from eighteen to twenty-five years old in works of reforestation and other conservation.

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was created to raise farm prices by paying farmers to take land out of production. This plan had two major drawbacks. The nation was outraged to see pigs slaughtered and corn plowed under by government decree to push up farm prices while there were so many people starving. And thousands of mostly black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, lowest on the economic pecking order, were thrown off the land when farmers took their land out of production.

The object of even greater controversy, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federally run hydroelectric power program, was one of the most radical departures. Under the TVA Act, the federal government created a huge experiment in social planning. The TVA not only produced hydroelectric power, but built dams, produced and sold fertilizer, reforested the area, and developed recreational lands. (The TVA also created the Oak Ridge facility, which later provided much of the research and development of the atomic bomb.) It was an unprecedented involvement of government in what had once been the exclusive—even sacred—domain of private enterprise, and was wildly condemned as communistic.

The Hundred Days also saw creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), designed to protect savings; the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced mortgages and prevented foreclosures; and a Federal Securities Act to begin policing the activities of Wall Street. In 1934, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created, and Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy, a notorious speculator in his day, to be its first chief. The thinking was that Kennedy would know all the tricks that any crooked brokers might try to pull. In May 1933, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was created and given $500 million in federal relief funds for the most seriously destitute, the beginning of a federal welfare program.

One of the final acts of the Hundred Days was passage of the most controversial New Deal bill, the National Industrial Recovery Act, aimed at stimulating industrial production. This act was a huge attempt at government control of production, labor, and costs. To gain the acceptance of business and labor, it contained goodies for both. It allowed manufacturers to create “business codes,” a legal form of price fixing that would have been forbidden under antitrust laws while giving workers minimum wages, maximum hours, and collective bargaining rights.

To its organizers, the act took on the trappings of a holy crusade. To oversee the law, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was created, with its Blue Eagle symbol. Companies and merchants pledged to the NRA displayed the eagle and the motto “We Do Our Part,” and consumers were advised to buy only from those places that displayed the NRA symbol. Massive marches and parades in support of the program took place across the country. A million people marched in an NRA parade in New York City.

But abuses by industry were widespread. Prices were fixed high, and production was limited in most cases, creating the opposite of the intended effect of increasing jobs and keeping prices low. The NRA did spur labor union recruitment, and the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis (1880–1969) grew to half a million members. A barrel-chested dynamo, Lewis then joined with other unions to form the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which splintered off from the conservative AFL in 1938 but soon was its rival in numbers and influence.

The first Hundred Days came to an end with passage of the NIRA bill, but the Great Depression was still far from over. Yet in this short time, Roosevelt had not just created a series of programs designed to prop up the economy. His New Deal marked a turning point in America as decisive as 1776 or 1860. It was nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of the federal government from a smallish body that had limited impact on the average American into a huge machinery that left few Americans untouched. For better or worse, Roosevelt had begun to inject the federal government into American life on an unprecedented scale, a previously unthinkable reliance on government to accomplish tasks that individuals and the private economy were unwilling or unable to do. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, there is little in modern America that is unaffected by the decisions made in Washington. It is difficult to imagine a time when a president, creating the federal machinery designed to carry the country out of crisis, was viewed as a Communist leading America down the road to Moscow.

What was the WPA?

The New Dealers worked overtime, but the Depression went on. While production and consumption rose, they remained well below precrash levels. The unemployment figures never fell much below 10 percent, and they were much higher in some cities. The mid-thirties brought the droughts and winds that created the Dust Bowl of the plains states, sending thousands of farmers off the foreclosed farms and on the road. This was the woeful exodus immortalized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

With the “try anything” approach, Roosevelt set up new programs. For each program that died or failed to do its job, he was ready to create a new one. When the Supreme Court unanimously killed the NRA as unconstitutional, Roosevelt tried the WPA. The Works Progress Administration, created in 1935 with Harry Hopkins (1890–1946) as its head, was set up for federal construction projects. (In 1939 its name was changed to the Work Projects Administration.) Critics immediately called the WPA a “make-work boondoggle,” and it provoked the common image of the workman leaning on a shovel. But under Hopkins, the WPA was responsible for 10 percent of new roads in the United States, as well as new hospitals, city halls, courthouses, and schools. It built a port in Brownsville, Texas; roads and bridges connecting the Florida Keys with the mainland; and a string of local water supply systems. Its large-scale construction projects included the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River connecting New York and New Jersey; the Triborough Bridge system linking Manhattan to Long Island; the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C.; the East River Drive (later renamed the FDR Drive) in Manhattan; the Fort Knox gold depository; and the Bonneville and Boulder dams. (Boulder Dam was renamed Hoover Dam by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1946.) Apart from building projects, the WPA set up artistic projects that employed thousands of musicians, writers, and artists.

But Roosevelt’s greatest contribution may have been psychological rather than simply legislative. He possessed a singular, natural gift for restoring confidence, rebuilding optimism, and creating hope where all hope seemed to have been lost. Herbert Hoover had embarked on some of the same paths that FDR took toward recovery. But the stern, patrician Hoover, totally removed from the people, lacked any of the sense of the common person that FDR possessed naturally, despite being a child of wealth and privilege. His “fireside chats” over the radio gave listeners the distinct impression that Roosevelt was sitting in their parlors or living rooms speaking to them personally. While Roosevelt’s name was unmentionable in conservative Republican households, where he was referred to as “that man,” he was practically deified by the larger American public, including blacks, who began to desert the Republican Party, their home since Reconstruction days, for Roosevelt’s Democrats.

Why did Franklin D. Roosevelt try to “pack” the Supreme Court?

The New Deal and the NRA in particular were bitter medicine to conservative Wall Streeters and corporate leaders, most of them Republicans. To them, they reeked of socialism and Communism. Even though things were getting better, obscene whispers and cruel jokes were common about the crippled Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor: Eleanor had given FDR gonorrhea, which she had contracted from a Negro; she was going to Moscow to learn unspeakable sexual practices. Some of the rumors were tinged with anti-Semitism, like the one that Roosevelt was descended from Dutch Jews who had changed their names. Roosevelt was undaunted by the critics. He was interested only in results. And the larger public seemed to agree.

The first proof came in the 1934 midterm elections. Traditionally the party in power loses strength between presidential contests. Instead, the Democrats tightened their control of both the House and the Senate. In the presidential race of 1936, Roosevelt’s popularity climbed to new heights. He told Raymond Moley, the Columbia professor who led Roosevelt’s “brain trust” of academic advisers, that there was only one issue in the campaign of 1936: “It’s myself,” said Roosevelt. “The people must either be for me or against me.” Opposed by Kansas Governor Alf Landon, a progressive Republican, FDR racked up an overwhelming reelection victory with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, carrying every state but Maine and Vermont. After the election, someone suggested FDR balance the budget by selling the two states to Canada.

Following his reelection, FDR seemed at the peak of his power and prestige. But he was about to be dealt the most crushing defeat of his political life. A year after it was created, the National Recovery Administration was killed. In Schechter v. United States (May 1935), the Supreme Court, dominated by aging, conservative Republicans, ruled that the NRA was unconstitutional. This was followed by Court decisions that killed off the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Securities and Exchange Act, a coal act, and a bankruptcy act. In all, the conservative judges shot down eleven New Deal measures. Emboldened by his recent victory, Roosevelt went on the offensive against the Court. Reviving an old proposal that would allow the president to appoint an additional justice for each member reaching the age of seventy, Roosevelt wanted to “pack” the Supreme Court with judges who would be sympathetic to New Deal legislation.

It was, perhaps, the greatest misjudgment of his career. Even when one of the older judges retired and Roosevelt was able to appoint Hugo Black, a New Dealer, FDR remained committed to the bill. But he was almost alone. Alarmed by the measure’s threat to the system and constitutional checks and balances, the Senate beat it back. It was Roosevelt’s first loss in Congress in five years, and it opened a small floodgate of other defeats. In 1938, Roosevelt, looking to avenge his Court measure defeat, targeted a number of southern senators who had opposed his Supreme Court plan for defeat in the midterm elections. The strategy backfired, resulting in a costly Election Day defeat for Roosevelt’s handpicked candidates. Roosevelt’s once-invincible armor seemed to be cracking.

But even after the court-packing debacle and his 1938 political defeats, Roosevelt remained the most powerful man in the country and perhaps the world. Only one man might have rivaled FDR’s power at the time. Ironically, he had come to office in March 1933, a few days before Roosevelt’s first inauguration. Like Roosevelt, he had come to power largely because he offered a desperate nation a means of dealing with its economic crisis. He, too, would have the young men of his country go into the countryside in a uniformed group like Roosevelt’s CCC. But these young men would be called Brownshirts. When the Reichstag (the German parliament building) burned to the ground in February 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was only the chancellor of Germany, appointed to the post by an aging and weak German president Hindenburg. Blaming the Communists for the fire that destroyed the seat of Germany’s parliament, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had the scapegoat it needed to unite the country behind its cause and its fuehrer.

Roosevelt may have lost the fight with the “nine old men” of the Supreme Court in 1937, but he was looking to Europe and what surely would be much bigger battles.

What happened to Amelia Earhart?

After Charles Lindbergh, the most famous flier of the day was Amelia Earhart (1897–1937). Born in Kansas, she graduated high school in Chicago in 1915 and became something of a wanderer, taking up flying along the way. In 1928, she flew across the Atlantic with two men, becoming overnight an outspoken American heroine and a model of “rugged feminism.” When she married the publisher George Putnam in 1931, Earhart made it clear that she would continue her career. By 1932 she had set the record for a transatlantic flight and was going on to pile up an impressive list of achievements.

Her boldest plan came in 1937, when she planned to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan. Departing from Miami, Florida, in June, Earhart reached New Guinea and took off for Howland Island in the Pacific on July 1. Then her radio messages stopped and she disappeared. A naval search found no sign of the plane, and speculation about the flier’s fate fed newspapers for months. The remains of her plane were never found. Many people believed that she was a great pilot—others, a lousy one—who had attempted the impossible. Perhaps she got lost over the Pacific, ran out of fuel, and crashed in the vast expanses, ending in a watery grave.

But another of those theories, strongly held by the historian William Manchester, indicates the temper of the times. The late 1930s was an era of increasing military buildup in answer to the economic crisis of the Depression, especially by Italy, Germany, and Japan, the three nations that would later join in the Axis. Looking to become predominant in its Asian sphere, Japan was arming heavily and building strong defenses on a string of Pacific islands it had been granted in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian were part of the Mariana Islands chain, unknown to most Americans at the time but soon to become a painful part of America’s wartime vocabulary. Passing over the Marianas, Earhart caught a glimpse of the fortifications that the Japanese were building on the islands, Manchester contends in his book The Glory and the Dream. Under existing treaties, these fortifications were illegal and an indication of Japan’s intentions. Manchester says, “She was almost certainly forced down and murdered.”

The irony may be that given the country’s isolationist temper at the time, even if Earhart had seen this buildup and lived to tell what the Japanese were doing, her warnings might have been ignored. In 1937, America was in no mood for joining anybody else’s wars.

What was Lend-Lease?

“Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire,” said FDR to a press conference on December 17, 1940. “If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.”

This was part of FDR’s brilliance. What was complex, he made simple; the dangerous seemed innocuous. With this homey analogy, President Roosevelt was preparing to bring the country one step closer to a reality it had been avoiding for most of a decade. The neighbor’s house was not only on fire—it was about to burn to the ground.

Even as Roosevelt spoke, the German Luftwaffe was throwing everything it had at England during the devastating Battle of Britain. In this sixteen-week air war, which cost Britain more than nine hundred planes and thousands of civilian lives, while Germany lost 1,700 aircraft, London and the industrial heart of England were being bombed into ruin. Down to only $2 billion in gold reserves, England was about to run out of the cash it needed to keep its defenses alive. Publicly pledged to neutrality, FDR was doing everything in his power—and even beyond his legal powers—to assist the British cause. But his hands were tied by the strong isolationist mood in the country and in Congress, and the president could only watch and wonder how to stop Hitler.

The answer came a few weeks after the “garden hose” press conference, as Roosevelt introduced the Lend-Lease bill. Under it, he was granted unprecedented powers to aid any country whose defense was deemed vital to the defense of the United States. America would “lend” tanks, warplanes, and ships that could be returned “in kind” after the war. Congress almost unanimously sided with Roosevelt, except for the hard-line isolationists like Senator Robert A. Taft, who compared the loan of war equipment not to a garden hose but to chewing gum—you wouldn’t want it back.

The path to Lend-Lease had been a long and torturous one for Roosevelt. Preoccupied with the Depression crisis, Roosevelt was little concerned with events in Europe. Too many Americans had fresh memories of the horrors of 1918, and isolationist sentiment in the country was overwhelming. When a congressional investigation showed that munitions makers had garnered enormous profits during World War I, the desire to avoid Europe’s problems gained greater strength.

Of even less concern than events in Europe was the changing scene in Asia. In 1931, while Herbert Hoover was still in office, the Japanese invaded China and established a puppet state called Manchukuo in Manchuria. Little was said or done by the United States or anyone else. A few months later, Japan bombarded Shanghai and extended its control over northern China. The League of Nations condemned Japan, which laughed and withdrew from the League. Adolf Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, a few days before Roosevelt was inaugurated, watched with interest as Japan’s aggressive empire building went unpunished.

Who were the Fascists?

The word “fascist” gets thrown about quite a bit these days. In the 1960s, the police were called “fascist pigs.” Anybody who doesn’t like another government simply calls it fascist. Generally, fascism has come to mean a military dictatorship built on racist and powerfully nationalistic foundations, generally with the broad support of the business class (distinguishing it from the collectivism of Communism). But when Benito Mussolini adopted the term, he used it quite proudly.

The first of the modern dictators, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), called Il Duce (which simply means “the leader”), was the son of a blacksmith, who came to power as prime minister in 1922. A preening bully of a man, he organized Italian World War I veterans into the anti-Communist and rabidly nationalistic “blackshirts,” a paramilitary group that used gang tactics to suppress strikes and attack leftist trade unions. Riding the anti-Communist fervor in Italy, he was accepted by a people who wanted “order.” His rise to power was accompanied by the beatings of opponents and the murder of a key Socialist Party leader.

In 1925, Mussolini installed himself as head of a single-party state he called fascismo. The word came from fasces, a Latin word referring to a bundle of rods bound around an ax, which had been a Roman symbol of authority and strength. While most of Europe disarmed, Mussolini rearmed Italy during the twenties. A failure at actual governing, Mussolini saw military adventurism as the means to keep the Italian people loyal, and Italy embarked on wars in Africa and in support of General Francisco Franco’s Spanish rebels.

The rise to power of the three militaristic, totalitarian states that would form the wartime Axis—Germany, Japan, and Italy—as well as Fascist Spain under General Franco, can be laid to the aftershocks, both political and economic, of the First World War. It was rather easy, especially in the case of Germany and Italy, for demagogues to point to the smoldering ruins of their countries and the economic disaster of the worldwide depression and blame their woes on foreigners. Under the crushing weight of the war’s costs, the people might be said to have lacked the will not to believe.

Mussolini blamed Italy’s problems on foreigners, and promised to make the trains run on time. (Contrary to popular belief, he did not.) The next step was simply to crush opposition through the most ruthless form of police state. In Germany, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) made scapegoats not only of the Communists and foreign powers who he claimed had stripped Germany of its land and military abilities at Versailles, but also of Jews, who he claimed were in control of the world’s finances. The long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, going back for centuries, simply fed the easy acceptance of Hitler’s argument.

Like Mussolini and his blackshirts, Hitler organized his followers into a strong-arm gang of Brownshirts, and later into an elite uniformed guard called the SS. In 1930, his National Socialist (Nazi) Party, with its platform of placing blame for Germany’s economic misery on Jews, Marxists, and foreign powers, attracted the masses of unemployed and began to win increasing numbers of seats in Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, and Hitler was named chancellor by an aging President Hindenburg. When the Reichstag burned and Communists were blamed, Hitler had the incident he needed to grab dictatorial powers and concentrate them under a police state that simply crushed all opposition. Skilled in nationalistic theatrics, bankrolled by militant industrialists, supported by an increasingly powerful army and secret police, and able to captivate and enthrall his country with pomp and jingoism, Hitler was the essence of the fascist leader.

Hitler made no secret of his plans. From the start, he announced that he wanted to reunite the German-speaking people separated when the map of Europe was redrawn following the Treaty of Versailles. He also pledged to rearm Germany so that it would never be forced to accept terms as it had at Versailles in 1918. By 1935, Germany was committed to a massive program of militarization, modernizing its armaments and requiring universal military service. That same year, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, which bordered Italian Somaliland in Africa. American attempts to avoid entanglement in these “European” problems led to passage of the Neutrality Act in 1935, which barred the sale of munitions to all belligerents. Facing strong isolationist sentiment, led by Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the vitriolic, anti-Semitic Catholic “radio priest,” Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979), Roosevelt had to swallow the unpleasant bill. Curiously unrestricted by the embargo were petroleum products. Oil and gasoline sales to Italy tripled as the modernized Italian army crushed the nearly primitive Ethiopian resistance.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. The Fascist (Falangist) rebels under General Francisco Franco (1892–1975), with the military support of Germany and 50,000 Italian troops, sought to overthrow the left-leaning Spanish Republic, which in turn was receiving support from the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War was a proxy war in which German arms, weapons, and tactics were being battle-tested. Again, America’s official position remained neutral and isolationist, even as many Americans went to Spain to fight in the losing loyalist or Republican cause.

The pace of events became more rapid. In July 1937, Japan attacked China once more, this time conquering Peking. The following October, Roosevelt made a subtle shift from isolationism. Like Wilson before the First World War, Roosevelt always sympathized with England, and like Wilson, Roosevelt professed a desire to avoid American involvement in the war. Saying that “America actively engages in the search for peace,” he recommended “quarantining” the aggressors, acknowledging without identifying them.

In March 1938, Germany absorbed Austria in the Anschluss (annexation), and in September, Hitler demanded the return of the German Sudetenland, which had been incorporated into Czechoslovakia after 1918. At a conference in Munich, the prime ministers of Great Britain and France accepted this demand and pressed the Czechs to turn over the land. That was simply Hitler’s prelude to a more ambitious land grab.

Recognizing the paucity of resistance, Hitler simply took the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. He next set his sights on Poland, demanding the city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk). Hitler now had Roosevelt’s full attention, but Roosevelt lacked the votes at the time even to overturn the Neutrality Act that prevented him from arming France and Great Britain for the war that everyone now knew was surely coming.

In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact, a prelude to a joint attack on Poland by Germany from the west and Russia from the East. France and England could stand by and appease Hitler no longer. Both countries declared war on Germany on September 3.

As the German military had planned in 1914, Germany went for a quick, decisive victory that would crush France and give it control of Europe. But unlike 1914, when the British and French held off the German assault, the Nazi plan was far more successful. The Nazi onslaught, the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), leveled resistance in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. By the summer of 1940, Hitler controlled most of western Europe, and the British and French armies had been sent reeling from Dunkerque, on the Strait of Dover.

Roosevelt was able to force through a stopgap “cash and carry” bill that allowed the Allies to buy arms. After Italy joined Germany in the attack on France, Roosevelt froze the assets of the conquered nations still held in the United States, to prevent the Germans from using them. Without legal authority, FDR began to sell the English “surplus” American arms. After the fall of France, FDR came up with the idea of “trading” aging American destroyers to the British in exchange for bases, the deal that was the prelude to Lend-Lease.

What did FDR know about a Japanese attack, and when did he know it?

At 7 A.M., Hawaiian time, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, two U.S. Army privates saw something unusual on their mobile radar screens. More than 50 planes seemed to be appearing out of the northeast. When they called in the information, they were told it was probably just part of an expected delivery of new B-17s coming from the mainland United States. The men were told not to worry about it. What they saw was actually the first wave of 183 Japanese planes that had arrived at Hawaii on Japanese carriers and struck the American naval base with complete surprise.

At 0758 the Pearl Harbor command radioed its first message to the world. AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. An hour later, a second wave of 167 more Japanese aircraft arrived. The two raids, which had lasted only minutes, accounted for eighteen ships, of them eight battleships, sunk, capsized, or damaged, and 292 aircraft, including 117 bombers, damaged or wrecked. And 2,403 Americans, military and civilian, had been killed, with another 1,178 wounded. The following afternoon, President Roosevelt requested and won a declaration of war against Japan. With that done, Germany declared war on America under its treaty terms with Japan. Soon America was at war with Germany and Italy as well.

No question has tantalized historians of the wartime period more than this one: Did President Roosevelt know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he deliberately allow the attack that took more than 2,000 American lives in order to draw America into the most deadly, destructive war in history?

There are two basic camps regarding FDR and America’s entry into the war. The first holds that FDR was preoccupied with the war in Europe and didn’t want war with Japan. American strategic thinking of the time, perhaps reflecting Anglo-Saxon racism about Japanese abilities, dismissed the Japanese military threat. War with Japan would sap American resources that should be directed toward the defeat of Germany. Supporting this camp is the large body of evidence of the American diplomatic attempts to forestall war with Japan.

The other camp holds that FDR viewed Japan—allied to the German-Italian Axis—as his entrée into the European war. This stand holds that FDR made a series of calculated provocations that pushed Japan into war with America. The ultimate conclusion to this view is that FDR knew of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and not only failed to prevent it, but welcomed it as the turning point that would end isolationist obstruction of his war plans.

Neither view is seamless, and the reality may lie in some combination of the two, with such factors as human frailty, overconfidence on both sides, and the tensions of a world already at war thrown in. You might also cast a vote for historical inevitability. A clash between Japan and the United States and other Western nations over control of the economy and resources of the Far East and Pacific was bound to happen. A small island nation with limited resources but great ambitions, Japan had to reach out to control its destiny. That put the highly militarized and industrialized empire on a collision course with the Western nations that had established a colonial presence in the Pacific and Asia, and had their own plans for exploiting that part of the world.

With that in mind, certain facts remain. Japanese-American relations were bad in the 1930s, and worsened when the Japanese sank an American warship, the Panay, on the Yangtze River late in 1937, a clear violation of all treaties and an outright act of war. But America was not ready to go to war over a single ship. Attempting to influence the outcome of China’s struggle against Japan, Roosevelt loaned money to the Nationalists in China and began to ban exports to Japan of certain goods that eventually included gasoline, scrap iron, and oil.

Were these provocations to force Japan into war, or sensible reactions to Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere in Asia? The Japanese were intent on dominating the Asian world and proved themselves quite ruthless in achieving that goal. In Nanking, China, atrocities committed against the Chinese rank with the worst of human behavior. The people of Korea still bear historic grudges against the Japanese for the cruelty of their wartime rule, such as forced labor and the forced prostitution of thousands of Korean women as “comfort maidens” who were made to work in brothels servicing Japanese soldiers.

Historical opinion divides on this point. It is clear that moderation on either side might have prevailed. But in the United States, the secretary of state was demanding complete Japanese withdrawal from their territorial conquests. At the same time in Japan, hawkish militants led by General Hideki Tojo (1884–1948) had gained power. Moderation was tossed aside, and the two speeding engines continued on a runaway collision course.

By late in 1941, it was more than apparent that war was coming with Japan. American and foreign diplomats in Japan dispatched frequent warnings about the Japanese mood. Nearly a year before the Pearl Harbor attack, Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo, had wired a specific warning about rumors of an attack on Pearl Harbor. And more significantly, the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken by American intelligence. Almost all messages between Tokyo and its embassy in Washington were being intercepted and understood by Washington.

There is no longer any doubt that some Americans knew that “zero hour,” as the Japanese ambassador to Washington called the planned attack, was scheduled for December 7. They even knew it would come at Pearl Harbor. According to John Toland’s account of Pearl Harbor, Infamy, Americans had not only broken the Japanese code, but the Dutch had done so as well, and their warnings had been passed on to Washington. A British double agent code-named Tricycle had also sent explicit warnings to the United States.

Here is where human frailty and overconfidence, and even American racism, take over. Most American military planners expected a Japanese attack to come in the Philippines, America’s major base in the Pacific; the American naval fortifications at Pearl Harbor were believed to be too strong to attack, as well as too far away for the Japanese. The commanders there were more prepared for an attack by saboteurs, which explains why the battleships were packed together in the harbor, surrounded defensively by smaller vessels, and why planes were parked in neat rows in the middle of the airstrip at Hickam Field, ready to be blasted by Japanese bombing runs.

Many Americans, including Roosevelt, dismissed the Japanese as combat pilots because they were all presumed to be “nearsighted.” The excellence of their eyes and flying abilities came as an expensive surprise to the American military. There was also a sense that any attack on Pearl Harbor would be easily repulsed. Supremely overconfident, the Navy commanders on Pearl Harbor had been warned about the possibility of attack, but little was done to secure the island. The general impression, even back in Washington in the Navy secretary’s office, was that the Japanese would get a bad spanking, and America would still get the war it wanted in Europe.

In his history of espionage and presidential behavior, For the President’s Eyes Only, Christopher Andrew makes this case: “The ‘complete surprise’ of both Roosevelt and Churchill reflected a failure of imagination as well as of intelligence. It did not occur to either the president or the prime minister that the ‘little yellow men,’ as Churchill sometimes spoke of them and Roosevelt thought of them, were capable of such a feat of arms. When General Douglas MacArthur first heard the news of the attack by carrier-borne aircraft on Pearl Harbor, he insisted that the pilots must have been mercenaries.”

Regardless of whether or not the attack was invited and why specific warnings were ignored or disregarded, the complete devastation of the American forces at Pearl Harbor was totally unexpected. Even today, the tally of that attack is astonishing. Eighteen ships were sunk or seriously damaged, including eight battleships. Of these eight, six were later salvaged. Nearly two hundred airplanes were destroyed on the ground, and 2,403 people died that morning, nearly half of them aboard the battleship Arizona, which took a bomb down its smokestack and went to the bottom in minutes.

A day after the attack, Roosevelt delivered his war message to Congress. The long-running battle between isolationists and interventionists was over.

While the revisionists and conspiracy theorists persist, a convincing case for Roosevelt trying to avoid war with Japan has been made by many prominent historians. Among them are Joseph Persico, who wrote:

The revisionist theory requires a certain path of logic. First, FDR had to know that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed. His secretaries of State, War and Navy either did not know or, if they did, they all lied and conspired in the deaths of twenty-four hundred Americans and the near-fatal destruction of the Pacific Fleet. . . . For FDR to fail to alert the defenders of an attack that he knew was coming, we must premise that the president had enlisted men of the stature of Stimson, Hull, Knox and Marshall in a treasonous conspiracy, or that he had a unique source of information on Japanese fleet movements unknown to anyone else in the government.

The eminent British military historian John Keegan is equally dismissive of the conspiracy notion. “These charges defy logic,” Keegan wrote in The Second World War. “Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler. . . . Roosevelt’s foreknowledge can be demonstrated to have been narrowly circumscribed. Although the American cryptanalysts had broken both the Japanese diplomatic cipher Purple and the naval cipher . . . such instructions did not include details of war plans.”

There is another issue, as Americans have learned since September 11, 2001, a new generation’s day of infamy. Having intelligence and using it well are two very different things. The left hand does not always know what the right is doing, as the FBI and CIA demonstrated in revealing the pieces of the puzzle they had before the terrorist attacks of September 11. But that does not suggest that their failure to see the whole puzzle complete leads to a conspiracy theory in which America wanted to create a war against Islam. While understanding the past can sometimes help understand the present, this may be one case in which knowing the present can help reconcile the mysteries of the past.

Must Read: For an overview of the period leading up to Pearl Harbor and an account of the days surrounding the attack, The Borrowed Years: 1938–1941, America on the Way to War by Richard M. Ketchum; for the “Roosevelt knew” side, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert B. Stinnet, an exhaustive collection of the information American intelligence had collected about the impending attack. There are several excellent books that address the other side. Among them are For the President’s Eyes Only by Christopher Andrew; Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage by Joseph E. Persico.

AMERICAN VOICES

From FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S war message to Congress (December 8, 1941):

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

. . . The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. . . .

Yesterday, the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

. . . No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

MILESTONES IN WORLD WAR II

1938

March 13 The Anschluss (annexation of Austria). German troops march into Austria to “preserve order.” Hitler declares Austria “reunited” with Germany.

September 30 The Munich Pact. The British and French allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a largely German-speaking population. Through this policy of “appeasement,” British prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) believes that Germany will be satisfied and that there will be “peace in our time.” Winston Churchill, later first lord of the admiralty, thinks otherwise. “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor,” says the future prime minister. “They chose dishonor. They will have war.”

October 3 Hitler triumphantly enters the Sudetenland.

1939

March 14 After taking the Sudetenland, Germany invades the rest of Czechoslovakia.

April 1 The three-year-old Spanish Civil War ends with German- and Italian-supported Fascist victory. The United States recognizes the new government of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975).

April 7 Italy invades Albania, its small neighbor across the Adriatic Sea.

July 14 Reacting to growing international tension over Germany’s provocations in Europe, President Roosevelt asks Congress to repeal an arms embargo so that the United States can sell arms to England and other nonfascist countries.

September 1 Germany invades Poland. Claiming a Polish attack on German soldiers, Germany’s modernized forces overrun the small, unprepared, and outdated Polish army.

September 3 After Hitler ignores their demand for German withdrawal from Poland, Great Britain and France formally declare war on Germany. Twenty-eight Americans die aboard a British ship torpedoed by a German submarine, but Roosevelt proclaims American neutrality in the war. Five days later he declares a limited national emergency, giving him broad powers to act. A few weeks later he announces that all U.S. offshore waters and ports are closed to the submarines of the warring nations.

September 28 Germany and Russia partition Poland, which Russia invaded from the east on September 17, two weeks after Germany entered Poland from the west. The United States refuses to recognize the partition, and maintains diplomatic relations with a Polish government-in-exile in Paris.

October 11 A letter written by Albert Einstein is delivered to Roosevelt by Alexander Sachs, a financier and adviser to the president. In it, Einstein discusses the implications of a nuclear chain reaction and the powerful bombs that may be constructed. He says, “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.” Roosevelt orders a plan to develop the atomic bomb, which becomes the Manhattan Project.

November 4 The Neutrality Act is signed. This measure will allow the United States to send arms and other aid to Britain and France.

1940

January “The Battle of the Atlantic.” German submarines begin torpedo attacks on Allied shipping, sinking nearly 4.5 million tons of ships in the first two months of the year.

March 18 Mussolini and Hitler announce Italy’s formal alliance with Germany against England and France. Mussolini calls this the “Axis” on which Europe will revolve.

April 9 Norway and Denmark are overrun by Germany.

May 10 Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands are invaded by Germany. On the same day, Winston Churchill replaces the disgraced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister.

May 26–June 4 Dunkerque. Pressed to the coast of France, British and French troops converge on this small coastal town on the Dover Strait. The Royal Navy, assisted by hundreds of small fishing and merchant ships, evacuates more than 300,000 troops as the advancing Germans bomb and shell the fleeing troops. Churchill makes one of his memorable speeches: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and the streets. . . . We shall never surrender.”

June 5 Germany invades France. Ten days later, Paris falls. By June 22, France surrenders and a pro-German government is installed in the city of Vichy. In London, a Free French government headed by General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) vows to resist.

June 10 President Roosevelt announces a shift from neutrality to “non-belligerency,” meaning more active support for the Allies against the Axis.

June 28 The Alien Registration Act (the Smith Act) is passed. It requires aliens to register and makes it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

July 10 The Battle of Britain. The first aerial attack on England by the German air force begins the devastating air war over England. For four months, German bombers pound London and other strategic points. Taking heavy civilian and military losses, the staunch British air defense destroys 1,700 German planes. Failure to control the airspace over England is a key factor in the Nazi decision not to launch an invasion across the Channel.

July 20 Congress authorizes $4 billion for the construction of a two-ocean navy.

September 3 Roosevelt gives fifty American destroyers to England in exchange for the right to construct bases in British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. This trade inspires the Lend-Lease program.

September 16 The Selective Training and Service Act requires men from twenty-one to thirty-five years of age to register for military training.

September 26 President Roosevelt announces an embargo on shipments of scrap metal outside the Western Hemisphere, aimed at cutting off supplies to Japan.

November 5 Roosevelt wins reelection to an unprecedented third term, defeating Republican Wendell Willkie by 449 electoral votes to 82.

December 29 In a year-end “fireside chat,” Roosevelt says that the United States will become the “arsenal of democracy.” Many peacetime factories are converted to war production, and this shift to a wartime economy shakes off the last effects of the Great Depression. During the war, America will produce 297,000 planes, 86,000 tanks, 12,000 ships, and enormous quantities of other vehicles, arms, and munitions. As in the case of the North in the Civil War and the United States in World War I, the American industrial capacity to mass-produce war materials provides the margin of victory. America and its allies do not so much outfight Germany and Japan as outproduce them.

1941

March 11 The Lend-Lease Act is signed into law. It narrowly passes Congress as isolationist sentiment remains strong.

May 27 A limited state of emergency is declared by President Roosevelt after Greece and Yugoslavia fall to the Axis powers. An American merchant ship, Robin Moor, is sunk by a U-boat near Brazil.

June 14 German and Italian assets in the United States are frozen under President Roosevelt’s emergency powers. Two days later, all German consulates in the United States are ordered closed, and on June 20, all Italian consulates are also shut down.

June 22 Germany invades Russia, breaking the “nonaggression” pact signed in 1939. Two days later, President Roosevelt promises U.S. aid to Russia under Lend-Lease.

July 25 After the Japanese invade French Indochina, President Roosevelt freezes Japan’s assets in the United States, halting trade between the countries and cutting off Japanese oil supplies. This move is later cited by the Japanese as a cause for attacking the United States.

August 14 After meeting secretly on warships stationed near Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill announce the Atlantic Charter, a document that lays out eight goals for the world, including open trade, international economic cooperation, safe boundaries, freedom of the seas, and abandonment of the use of force. Its call for “self-determination” is aimed at freeing nations under Axis domination rather than the many Allied colonial interests in such places as India, Indochina, and the Philippines.

October 17 The U.S. destroyer Kearney is torpedoed by a U-boat, leaving eleven Americans dead. Two weeks later, the destroyer Reuben James is sunk by a U-boat, with 100 Americans lost. Hitler knows that war with the United States is now inevitable.

November 3 The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, warns of a possible Japanese surprise attack. Roosevelt and the cabinet receive his message on November 7.

November 17 Japanese envoys in Washington propose removing restrictions on trade. American secretary of state Cordell Hull rejects the proposal, calling for Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina.

December 7 One day after President Roosevelt appeals to Emperor Hirohito to use his influence to avert war, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, the major U.S. base in Hawaii, killing 2,403 American soldiers, sailors, and civilians. Eighteen ships and 292 aircraft are destroyed or damaged. Defying all American expectations of their military capabilities, the Japanese make simultaneous strikes on Guam, Midway, and British bases in Hong Kong and Singapore. Japan declares war on the United States.

December 8 Addressing a joint session of Congress, Roosevelt asks for a declaration of war on Japan. The Senate vote is unanimously in favor; the House approves 388–1, with pacifist Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the House, the lone dissenter.

December 11 (Europe) Responding to the state of war between the United States and Japan, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States, giving President Roosevelt the fight with Hitler that he wanted.

December 17 (Pacific) Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885–1966) is given command of the Pacific fleet, replacing Admiral Kimmel, who was in charge of Pearl Harbor and is the scapegoat for the disaster. Nimitz will organize and direct the American counterattack in the Pacific.

December 23 (Pacific) The Japanese take Wake Island, an American possession in the middle of the North Pacific.

December 25 (Pacific) Hong Kong falls to Japan.

1942

January 2 (Pacific) Japan takes control of the Philippines as General MacArthur withdraws to Corregidor, an island fortress in Manila Bay.

January 14 (Home front) A presidential order requires all aliens to register with the government. This is the beginning of a plan to move Japanese-Americans into internment camps in the belief that they might aid the enemy.

January 26 (Europe) For the first time since the end of World War I, American troops arrive in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland.

February 20 (Home front) Roosevelt approves the plan to remove Japanese-Americans from their homes and send them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states. Eventually 100,000 Japanese-Americans will be moved, losing their homes and possessions. Many of the young men who are relocated join special U.S. Army units that perform with high honor.

February 23 (Home front) In one of the only assaults on the continental United States, an oil refinery in California is shelled by a Japanese submarine.

February 27–March 1 (Pacific) A Japanese fleet virtually destroys the American and British fleet in the Java Sea.

March 11 (Pacific) General MacArthur leaves the Philippines for Australia, vowing, “I shall return.” General Jonathan Wainwright (1883–1953) is left in command of the American forces, who move to the Bataan Peninsula.

AMERICAN VOICES

GENERAL BENJAMIN O. DAVIS, commander of the Tuskegee Airmen and the first black general in the U.S. Air Force:

All the blacks in the segregated forces operated like they had to prove they could fly an airplane when everyone believed they were too stupid.

Benjamin O. Davis (1912–2002) was the son of the Army’s first black general, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. The first black cadet to graduate from West Point, he was one of the first black pilots in the military. His leadership of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black unit that was highly decorated during World War II, helped integrate the Air Force, and he became its first black general in 1954.

During his four years at West Point, no one would room with Davis. He later said, “Living as a prisoner in solitary confinement for four years had not destroyed my personality nor poisoned my attitude toward other people. When my father told me of the many people who were pulling for me, I said, ‘It’s a pity none of them were at West Point.’” At first rejected by the Air Corps, which did not accept blacks, Davis went to Tuskegee Army Air Field in 1941 when the Roosevelt administration told the War Department to create a black flying unit. Davis commanded the squad—the 99th Pursuit Squadron, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

In 1948, after the war, President Truman signed the order providing for the complete integration of America’s armed forces.

April 9 (Pacific) Seventy-five thousand American and Philippine troops surrender to the Japanese after a stoic resistance to overwhelming Japanese numbers. The captives are marched over 100 miles in the infamous Bataan Death March, during which thousands of prisoners are executed or die of starvation and thirst before they reach Japanese prison camps. A few weeks later, General Wainwright is captured by the Japanese, surrendering all American forces in the Philippines. (A classic photograph later shows an emaciated Wainwright embracing MacArthur after the Japanese surrender.)

April 18 (Pacific) Led by Major General James Doolittle, U.S. bombers raid Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Although the raids have little military effect, carrying the war to Japan provides an important psychological boost to American morale and alters Japanese strategic thinking.

April 28 (Home front) Coastal “blackouts” go into effect along a fifteen-mile strip on the eastern seaboard. Following Pearl Harbor, there are real fears of bombing attacks by Germany as well as the more realistic threat of German U-boats operating in the Atlantic.

May 4–8 (Pacific) The Battle of the Coral Sea. In an early turning point off New Guinea, U.S. Navy planes severely damage a Japanese fleet, forestalling a Japanese invasion of Australia. For the first time in naval history, ships in battle do not engage each other directly; all the fighting is carried out by carrier-launched planes.

May 15 (Home front) Gasoline rationing goes into effect. A few days later, price ceilings on many retail products take effect.

June 3–6 (Pacific) The Battle of Midway. In a major naval confrontation off the small North Pacific island, the U.S. Navy wins another crucial battle in the Pacific war. Although the carrier Yorktown is damaged, the Japanese lose four carriers and many of their best-trained pilots, and the Japanese naval advantage is eliminated, ending the threat to Australia. By this time the Japanese control an enormous area extending westward to Burma, north to Manchuria, south to New Guinea, and including the small islands of the Pacific. The territory represents about 10 percent of the Earth’s surface.

June 13 (Home front) Eight German saboteurs land in various spots on the East Coast from submarines. They are quickly captured and tried as spies, and six are executed.

In Washington, two important new agencies are established. The Office of War Information (OWI) will become the government’s wartime propaganda arm and home to numerous writers and filmmakers. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), led by William Donovan (1883–1959), is the country’s espionage agency and forerunner to the postwar CIA.

August 7 (Pacific) In the first U.S. offensive of the war, marines land on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. It is the beginning of a two-pronged offensive aimed at dislodging the Japanese from islands that will provide stepping-stones for an eventual invasion of Japan. The war in the Pacific has been given a strategic backseat to the war in Europe, and American Pacific forces will often be poorly supported, lacking ammunition and other supplies. This is the case on Guadalcanal, the first in a series of bloody, savagely fought battles in the Pacific.

August 22 (Europe) The Battle of Stalingrad. The Germans begin an offensive against the city that they expect will complete their conquest of the Soviet Union. This is the beginning of an epic Russian stand that costs hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, but is a turning point as Hitler’s eastern offensive ends in a harsh failure.

October 25–26 (Pacific) Attempting to stop the American landing on Guadalcanal, the Japanese fleet is met by the U.S. Navy in the Battle of Santa Cruz. The Japanese again suffer heavy aircraft losses.

November 12–15 (Pacific) In the naval battle of Guadalcanal, the U.S. fleet under Admiral William Halsey (1882–1959) destroys a Japanese fleet, sinking twenty-eight warships and transports, rendering the Japanese unable to reinforce their troops on Guadalcanal.

November 18 (Home front) The draft age is lowered to eighteen years.

November 25 (Europe) The three-month siege of Stalingrad has turned against the German army, which is eventually surrounded. By the time the German army surrenders, in February 1943, its casualties will surpass 300,000. The Russian victory marks the end of the German offensive in Russia, and Germany begins its long retreat from the eastern front.

December 1 (Home front) Coffee and gasoline join the list of rationed items.

1943

January 14–24 (Europe) Meeting at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill map out strategy for the eventual invasion of Europe.

February 7 (Home front) Shoe rationing is announced, limiting civilians to three pairs of leather shoes per year.

February 9 (Pacific) U.S. Marines take control of Guadalcanal after four months of savage combat in which they have been cut off from supplies and were reduced to eating roots.

February 14–25 (Europe) At the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the Afrika Korps of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) defeats U.S. forces. But American troops regroup under the new command of George S. Patton (1885–1945) and stop Rommel’s drive. They eventually link up with British forces under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976), who was chasing Rommel from Egypt. Probably Germany’s best wartime field commander, Rommel is recalled to Germany and is later involved in a botched attempt to assassinate Hitler, which will lead to Rommel’s suicide.

March 2–4 (Pacific) The U.S. Navy scores another major victory over a Japanese convoy in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea off New Guinea.

April 1 (Home front) Meats, fats, and cheese are now rationed. Attempting to stem inflation, President Roosevelt freezes wages, salaries, and prices.

May 7 (Europe) In a pincer action, Montgomery and Patton link their armies in Tunis, forcing the surrender of all German and Italian troops in North Africa. Ignoring the warnings of Rommel to withdraw these troops, Hitler and Mussolini have pressed more troops into North Africa in a drive aimed at gaining control of the Suez, through which England’s oil supply moves. In a few weeks, more than 250,000 Axis soldiers lay down their weapons. Combined with combat casualties, more than 350,000 Axis troops are killed or captured in North Africa, against 18,500 American casualties.

May 16 (Europe) In Warsaw, Poland, the last fighters in the Jewish ghetto are overwhelmed after their stoic but doomed resistance against the Nazis. The survivors are shipped to death camps, and the ghetto is razed.

May 27 (Home front) President Roosevelt issues an executive order forbidding racial discrimination by government contractors. At about this time, anti-black riots in Detroit leave thirty-four people dead.

May 29 (Home front) An issue of the Saturday Evening Post is published with a cover illustration by Norman Rockwell that introduces an American icon known as Rosie the Riveter. The character is a sandwich-munching, brawny, yet innocent-looking woman in coveralls, cradling her rivet gun in her lap, goggles pushed up onto her forehead. Her feet rest on a copy of Mein Kampf. Rockwell borrowed the idea for Rosie from a figure in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Rockwell’s Rosie is an admiring tribute to the more than 6 million women who have entered the job force during the war, many of them taking up positions in what was considered “man’s work,” including the defense industries.

July 10 (Europe) The invasion of Sicily. Allied forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s command begin an assault that will capture the strategic island by August 17, giving the Allies control of Mediterranean shipping and a base from which to launch an invasion of mainland Italy. Allied casualties in the five weeks of fighting top 25,000, while more than 167,000 Germans and Italians are killed or wounded.

July 19 (Europe) Preceded by an air drop of millions of leaflets calling on Italians to surrender, the Allies begin to bomb targets in and around Rome. Within a week, Mussolini is forced to resign by King Victor Emmanuel, and the new prime minister, Pietro Badoglio, considers an Italian surrender. By September 3, when the Allies launch an invasion of the mainland from Sicily, Prime Minister Badoglio has signed a secret armistice ending Italian military resistance.

September 9 (Europe) The invasion of Salerno. More than 700 ships deliver an Allied invasion force that meets fierce resistance, as the Germans have prepared for this invasion by reinforcing Italy with their best troops. Every inch of the Allied advance is hard-fought, as the Germans are dug into well-defended mountain positions and the Italian winter is one of the harshest on record. By October 1, the port of Naples is in Allied hands, but the departing Germans put the torch to books and museums as retribution for Italy’s “betrayal.” Italy declares war on Germany.

November 20 (Pacific) The Battle of Tarawa. One of the equatorial Gilbert Islands, the Tarawa atoll possesses an airstrip, an important prize in the Pacific fighting. Using British guns captured at Singapore, the Japanese are well defended on the small island of Betio, about half the size of Central Park. Ignoring islanders’ warnings of tricky tides, the landing’s commanders send in waves of marines who are trapped before reaching the beaches. The marines’ casualties total 3,381, although the airstrip is eventually taken.

November 28–December 1 (Europe) The Teheran Conference brings together Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the first time all three have met in person. They confer about the coming invasion of Europe.

1944

January 22 (Europe) The invasion of Anzio. Allied forces hit this coastal town near Rome in an attempt to encircle German forces in central Italy. But the Germans pin down the Americans on Anzio’s beach. At the inland monastery town of Monte Cassino, fierce fighting takes a heavy toll on both sides.

January 31 (Pacific) After taking control of the airstrip at Tarawa, the U.S. amphibious invasion force under Admiral Nimitz continues its step-by-step sweep into the North Pacific with an invasion of the Marshall Islands.

February 20–27 (Europe) The U.S. Army Air Corps begins a massive bombing campaign against German aircraft production centers. A week later, on March 6, more than 600 U.S. bombers make their first raid on Berlin. While it is presumed that the strategic bombing has been costly to the German economy and morale, a survey initiated by President Roosevelt will later show that the bombing was devastating but did not work “conclusively.” Just as the British economy has survived the German Blitz, the Germans are able to shift production around with no discernible fall-off.

May 3 (Home front) Meat rationing ends, except for certain select cuts.

May 18 (Europe) The German stronghold at Monte Cassino in central Italy finally falls. It has been under Allied siege for months, a costly campaign of dubious strategic value. A few weeks later, at Anzio, Americans trapped on the beaches for months break through as British troops mount an offensive from Italy’s west. The Allies are driving toward Rome, and arrive in the city on June 4.

June 6 (Europe) D-Day. The Allied invasion of Europe, code-named Operation Overlord, commences just after midnight. The largest invasion force in history, it comprises 4,000 invasion ships, 600 warships, 10,000 planes, and more than 175,000 Allied troops. Although an invasion has been expected by the Germans, the secret of Overlord is well kept. The plan, at the mercy of the weather, includes a feint farther north near Calais, but the true objective is the Normandy coast between Cherbourg and Le Havre—beaches that have been given names like Juno and Sword, Omaha and Utah. It takes four days of fierce fighting and heavy casualties on both sides before the two main beachhead armies are joined. Despite heavy casualties, the Allies send the Germans backward toward Germany, and a million Allied troops are soon on the continent. But this is only the beginning of the end. It will take almost a full year of fierce combat before the German surrender.

June 13 (Europe) Germany launches the world’s first guided missiles, the ramjet-powered V-1 “buzz bombs,” across the English Channel at London; only one reaches its target, but by the end of summer, they kill some 6,000 people. These “vengeance weapons” are the creation of a team of rocket scientists led by Dr. Wernher von Braun, who will become an American citizen in 1955 and boost the American space program.

June 15 (Pacific) B-29 Superfortress bombers, based in China, begin to raid Japan. At the same time, U.S. troops begin an offensive on the Marianas—Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. The first target, Saipan, is supposed to be captured in three days. But these islands have been held by the Japanese for twenty-five years, and their defenses are strong. The battle for Saipan is a monthlong fight that claims 3,400 American lives and more than 27,000 Japanese. A grisly aftermath of the fighting is the mass suicide of civilians who jump from a cliff because Japanese propaganda has warned them of American sadism.

June 22 (Home front) President Roosevelt signs the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act that will provide funds for housing and education after the war. It is better known as the GI Bill.

June 27 (Europe) The French port of Cherbourg is captured by the Allies, although it has been badly sabotaged and booby-trapped by the departing Germans.

July 9–25 (Europe) After the British take Caen, and St.-Lô falls, Patton’s tank troops of the Third Army break through a German line, isolating German troops in Brittany.

July 20 (Europe) With defeat becoming more certain, a group of German officers plot to kill Hitler and take control of the government. The coup fails when Hitler escapes injury from a bomb planted in a suitcase at his headquarters. The leaders of the plot are discovered and executed, and thousands of possible conspirators are killed.

August 10 (Pacific) Guam falls to U.S. forces after three weeks of intense fighting. The Japanese losses are put at 17,000; some 1,200 Americans die and another 6,000 are wounded. The completed conquest of the Marianas will give the United States an airbase from which to begin a large-scale bombardment of Japan. Napalm is used for the first time in these bombings, and the island of Tinian is the base from which the Enola Gay will make its fateful flight a year later.

August 14 (Home front) With war production requirements easing, production of vacuum cleaners and other domestic products is allowed to resume.

August 15 (Europe) A second invasion front is opened in southern France as Allied troops sweep up the Rhone River valley, meeting little resistance.

August 25 (Europe) French troops led by General LeClerc retake Paris. On the following day, General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, enters Paris in a ceremonial parade. On August 27, Eisenhower and other Allied leaders enter Paris. Relatively untouched by the war, Paris has flourished under German occupation, and the great fashion houses have prospered. Frenchwomen who are suspected of having slept with Germans are led into the streets to have their heads shaved.

September 12 (Europe) The second wave of von Braun’s missiles, the V-2s, which are the first modern rockets, are launched across the Channel. Five hundred hit London. These are more accurate, but they are too few, too late to make any impact on the war’s outcome.

October 20 (Pacific) General Douglas MacArthur, in the now-famous photograph, wades ashore at Leyte Island, the Philippines, fulfilling his promise to return. Three days later, the Battle of Leyte Gulf results in a major Japanese naval defeat. The Japanese now begin to resort to the infamous kamikaze suicide attacks, in which Japanese pilots attempt to crash their explosive-laden planes into American ships. Kamikaze attacks will result in the loss of some 400 ships and nearly 10,000 American seamen.

November 7 (Home front) President Roosevelt wins his unprecedented and unequaled fourth term by defeating New York governor Thomas Dewey.

December 16 (Europe) The Battle of the Bulge. In the last major German counteroffensive, Allied troops are pushed back in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest. (As Allied lines fall back, a “bulge” is created in the center of the line, giving the battle its familiar name.) Two weeks of intense fighting in brutal winter weather follow before the German offensive is stopped. One of the most famous moments in the long battle comes when the American 101st Airborne Division is encircled by Germans in Bastogne. When the German general demands surrender, General Anthony McAuliffe reportedly replies, “Nuts.” The 101st is relieved a few days later as Patton sends in his tanks. This last-gasp German gamble is followed by rapid defeat for Germany.

1945

February 1 (Europe) One thousand American bombers raid Berlin.

February 4–11 (Europe) The Yalta Conference. Meeting in the Crimea, Churchill, Stalin, and an ailing Roosevelt discuss plans for the final assault on Germany, and agree to create a peace organization that will meet in San Francisco on April 25 and will become the United Nations. More significantly, the meeting also produces the groundwork for the postwar division of Europe among the Allies.

February (Pacific) A monthlong siege in the Philippines ends with U.S. troops retaking Manila.

February 13 Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, is firebombed by 1,400 Allied planes as part of an all-out air assault on Germany. With no strategic value and undefended, Dresden was also near a POW camp holding more than 25,000 Allied prisoners. Some 650,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Dresden, killing more than 100,000 Germans.

March 7 (Europe) American forces cross the Rhine River at Remagen, and by the end of the month, all German forces have been pushed back into Germany.

March 9 As U.S. planes begin to bombard Japan more heavily, Tokyo is attacked by a massive firebombing. Two thousand tons of gasoline-gel and oil-gel incendiary bombs are dropped on the city, beginning a firestorm, fanned by winds, that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey called a “conflagration.” The water in Tokyo’s shallow canals actually boiled. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” More than 100,000 men, women, and children die in Tokyo on this night, and another million are injured; a million lose their homes. In the next few days, the cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe are also firebombed until the U.S. Air Force literally runs out of bombs. In ten days, the firebombings kill at least 150,000 people and burn out the centers of Japan’s four largest cities.

March 16 (Pacific) Iwo Jima. A monthlong struggle for this rocky, eight-square-mile piece of volcanic island comes to an end. Possessing Japan’s last line of radar defense to warn against American air attacks, Iwo Jima is a strategically significant prelude to the invasion of Okinawa. The combined naval and ground attack begins one of the most terrible and hard-fought battles of the war.

The U.S. military considers the use of poison gas shells before sending in troops but decides against it, probably because of the outcry against poison gas in World War I. The famous image of the six marines—three of whom will die on Iwo Jima—raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi becomes an American icon of the day. Losses on both sides are horrifying, with the U.S. Marines suffering 6,821 killed and more than 21,000 wounded; the 50 percent casualty rate was the highest in Marine Corps history. More than 20,000 Japanese defenders died while only 1,083 were taken prisoner.

April 1 (Pacific) In the next stepping-stone, U.S. troops invade Okinawa on Easter Sunday, or, as the soldiers note ironically, April Fool’s Day. The Japanese allow the troops to land, and then systematically attempt to destroy their naval support, beginning a fight that will last almost three months, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific, which will eventually cost 80,000 American casualties.

April 11 U.S. troops reach the Elbe River. They halt there and meet advancing Russian troops on April 25.

April 12 (Home front) After suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage, President Roosevelt dies at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. Vice President Harry S Truman (1884–1972) is sworn in as president.

April 14 President Truman, aware of the existence of the Manhattan Project but not its purpose, is told about the atomic bomb. Truman is initially reluctant to use the weapon, and orders a search for alternatives. He is also confronted with the idea that the secret of the bomb should be shared with America’s allies, including Stalin’s Russia. Development continues, and a search for potential Japanese targets of an atomic bomb is proposed.

April 30 With Russian shells falling on Berlin, Hitler marries his mistress, Eva Braun, in his bombproof Berlin bunker. He then poisons her and kills himself. His remains are never recovered.

May 7 (Europe) The Germans formally surrender to General Eisenhower at Rheims, France, and to the Soviets in Berlin. President Truman pronounces the following day V-E Day.

June 5 (Europe) The United States, Russia, England, and France agree to split occupied Germany into eastern and western halves, and to divide Berlin, which is within the eastern, Russian-occupied half of Germany.

June 21 (Pacific) Okinawa falls. The Japanese have lost 160,000 men in fighting on the island; more than 12,500 Americans die on Okinawa.

July 5 (Pacific) General MacArthur completes the recapture of the Philippines; 12,000 Americans have died in the ten-month fight for the islands. With the reconquest of the Philippines and the securing of Okinawa as a base, the United States begins to plan for an invasion of Japan.

July 16 (Home front) The first atomic bomb is successfully detonated in a secret test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the fruits of the top-secret Manhattan Project begun in 1942 by President Roosevelt and continued under Truman.

August 6 (Pacific) Hiroshima. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay drops the atomic bomb on this industrial city. The destructive capacity of this now-primitive weapon levels the city, killing some 80,000 immediately, seriously injuring another 100,000 (out of a total population of 344,000), and leveling 98 percent of the city’s buildings. The bomb’s force astounds even its makers, who have not truly understood its destructive potential or the effects of radiation. Three days later, on August 9, a second bomb is dropped on Japan, this one on the city of Nagasaki, and Stalin declares war on Japan, launching an invasion of Manchuria.

August 14 (Pacific) Fighting ends in the Far East. Three days later the Allies divide Korea along the 38th parallel, with Soviet troops occupying the northern half and U.S. troops holding the south.

September 2 (Pacific) General MacArthur, named Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Japan, accepts the formal, unconditional surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. In December, MacArthur is appointed by Truman to attempt to negotiate a settlement between the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong.

What was the cost of World War II?

While there is no “official” casualty count for the Second World War, it was clearly the greatest and deadliest war in history, costing more than 50 million lives. The estimates of battle losses are numbing: 7.5 million Russians; 3.5 million Germans; 1.2 million Japanese; 2.2 million Chinese. Great Britain and France each lost hundreds of thousands of men. The civilian toll was even higher. Probably 22 million Russians died during the war years. The German “final solution,” or extermination of the Jews, took the lives of at least 6 million Jews, most of these dying in the concentration camps. Millions more Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Gypsies, and homosexuals were similarly engulfed by the Holocaust. For the United States, combat casualties were close to 300,000 dead and nearly 700,000 wounded.

The wartime cooperation between the Soviets and the West, the creation of the United Nations, and the frightful power of the atomic bomb raised hopes that this truly would be the war to end all wars. But just three months into the new year, former prime minister Winston Churchill, turned out of office in the 1945 elections, addressed a college audience at Fulton, Missouri. He told the gathering and the world, “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent, allowing ‘police governments’ to rule Eastern Europe.”

One war was over. The next—the Cold War—was under way.

What was the Yalta Conference?

In February 1945, the war in Europe was moving toward its final days. Soviet armies were already in Hungary and Poland and approaching Berlin. On the western front, Allied forces pushed back Hitler’s personally planned counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest in the brutal Battle of the Bulge. American and Soviet troops were moving toward their meeting on the Elbe River. But the Pacific war was still going strong. Japan was far from defeated, although plainly in retreat.

Against this background the Allied Big Three—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the men who conducted the war against Germany—met together in Yalta, in a former czarist palace on the Black Sea. This was to be a “mopping-up” meeting. The major wartime decisions had been made earlier at meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca, and at a summit of the Big Three in Teheran.

Recently inaugurated for a fourth term, but greatly aged by twelve years of governing a fractious nation through the Depression and the war, Roosevelt was in poor health. He came to Yalta with three goals: to establish a meaningful United Nations; to persuade the Russians to declare war on Japan and thereby to hasten the end of that part of the war; and to decide the fate of Poland, that sizable chunk of territory that had been at the heart of the war since Germany and Russia both invaded it.

Of these three issues, Russian commitment to the war against Japan was uppermost in Roosevelt’s mind. Work on a secret weapon to be used against Japan was still going on, but even the few who knew of the existence of the Manhattan Project held no great hopes for the atomic bomb’s usefulness. Roosevelt had to consider the advice of his generals, like MacArthur, who conservatively estimated that a million American casualties would result from the eventual invasion of Japan. To Roosevelt and Churchill, obtaining Stalin’s commitment to join the fight against Japan was crucial. To Roosevelt’s generals, it was worth any price.

Stalin knew that.

Roosevelt and Churchill, who had held most of the cards during the war, found themselves in the dangerous position of dealing with the master of the Soviet Union from a position of weakness. Stalin finally agreed to enter an anti-Japanese alliance, but the price was substantial: the Soviets would control Manchuria and Mongolia, and would be ceded half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands, off northern Japan; a Soviet occupation zone would be created in Korea; and in the United Nations, a veto power would be given to the major nations, of which the Soviet Union was one, along with the United States, Great Britain, France, and China (still under the wavering control of Chiang Kai-shek’s American-supported Nationalists).

Later it would be said that Roosevelt, the “sick man” of the Yalta Conference, had given away Poland (and the rest of Eastern Europe). In fact, he couldn’t give away what wasn’t his to give. The Red Army and Communist partisan forces in Eastern Europe held control of almost all this territory. In private, Churchill urged Eisenhower to continue pushing his armies as far east of the Elbe River as possible, a position with which U.S. General George Patton was in complete agreement. But Ike disagreed. Patton had to pull back, and the Russians “liberated” Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and Berlin.

At Yalta, the Polish issue was “solved” by redrawing its borders and, in a replay of Versailles, adding lands that had been Germany’s. In the spirit of Allied unity, Stalin agreed to guarantee all Eastern European countries the right to choose their governments and leaders in free elections. Roosevelt believed that a United Nations, with American commitment (which the League of Nations lacked), could solve problems related to these issues as they arose. Perhaps more tragically, Roosevelt saw his personal role as the conciliator as a key to lasting peace.

As the historian James McGregor Burns wrote in The Crosswinds of Freedom, “Holding only weak hands in the great poker game of Yalta, Roosevelt believed he had won the foundations of future peace. It was with hope and even exultation that he and his party left Yalta for the long journey home. Above all he left with confidence that, whatever the problems ahead, he could solve them through his personal intervention.”

How did FDR die?

Any hopes Roosevelt had of maintaining peace through his personality went to his grave with him. On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while resting at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was staying with his longtime mistress, Lucy Rutherford. His death left the nation and much of the world dizzy and disoriented. Even the Japanese issued a sympathetic message. He was still vilified by many, but to most Americans, FDR had been an immutable force, a Gibraltar-like presence on the American scene. He had guided America as it licked the Great Depression and the Nazis. To younger Americans, including many of those in uniform, he was the only president they had known.

Practically beatified by a generation of Americans, Franklin D. Roosevelt appears, more than fifty-five years after his death—like Washington, Lincoln, and other “great men” of American history—less a saint than a man flawed by his humanity. He was foremost a politician, perhaps the greatest ever in America, and like all politicians, he made bargains. There are large questions left by his legacy. For instance, although he was greatly admired and overwhelmingly voted for by blacks, FDR’s approach to the question of blacks in America was confused. His wife, Eleanor, consistently pushed for greater social equality for blacks and all minority groups. But American life and the Army remained segregated, although blacks slowly reached higher ranks, and war contractors were forbidden to practice segregation.

Another lingering question has concerned his response to the Holocaust. Prior to the American entry into the war, the Nazi treatment of Jews evoked little more than weak diplomatic condemnation. It is clear that Roosevelt knew about the treatment of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and about the methodical, systematic destruction of the Jews during the Holocaust. Clearly, saving the Jews and other groups that Hitler was destroying en masse was not a critical issue for American war planners.

The Pearl Harbor issue also refuses to go away. Few historians are willing to go so far as to condemn Roosevelt for sentencing 2,000 Americans to die when they might have been saved. Instead, the consensus is that his military advisers underestimated the abilities of the Japanese to reach Hawaii, and exaggerated the U.S. military’s ability to defend itself against such an attack. The internment of Japanese Americans during the war is an everlasting stain on Roosevelt and the entire nation.

In a private light, FDR was later shown to have carried on a long-term relationship with Lucy Rutherford. If revealed, this secret might have brought him down. But in contrast to what has befallen politicians in more recent times, no stories about FDR and Rutherford ever appeared, much less film or photographs. He was protected by the press and the Secret Service, just as John F. Kennedy would be for sexual behavior far more indiscreet and dangerous than Roosevelt’s love affair had been.

Yet FDR’s legacy remains. Just as Washington was “the indispensable man” of his time, so was FDR in the era of Depression and war. If history does come down to the question of personality, was there another man in America who could have accomplished what Roosevelt did? Despite flaws and contradictions, he knew that a failure to improve the nation’s economic and psychological health might produce a victory for the forces of racism and militarism that produced different leaders in other countries. Few presidents—none since Lincoln during the Civil War—held the near-dictatorial powers Roosevelt commanded during the Depression and the war. Yet, if he was a quasi-dictator at the height of his political power, FDR’s overall record is certainly benign. The same economic shock waves that brought Roosevelt to power produced Mussolini and Hitler, demagogic madmen with visions of world conquest, who ruled brutal, racist police states. Like many another canonized American hero, Roosevelt was far from sainthood. Yet consider the alternative.

Must Read: No Ordinary Times: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

AMERICAN VOICES

HARRY TRUMAN, from his diaries (as quoted in The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes):

We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley Ersa, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.

Anyway we “think” we have found a way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling—to put it mildly. . . .

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leaders of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capital or the new.

He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will give them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made to be the most useful.

Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Okay, Mr. President. Here’s the situation. You’re about to invade Japan’s main islands. Your best generals say hitting these beaches will mean half a million American casualties. Other estimates go as high as a million. General MacArthur tells you that the Japanese will continue guerrilla-style resistance for ten years. Based on horrific battle experience—from Guadalcanal to Okinawa—you believe the Japanese will fight to the death. They have 6 million battle-hardened troops who have shown complete willingness to fight to the death for their homeland—a samurai tradition of complete devotion to the divine emperor that is incomprehensible to Americans. Japanese civilians have jumped off cliffs to prevent capture by Americans, and there are reports that mainland Japanese civilians are being armed with sharpened bamboo spears. But you also remember Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March and other wartime atrocities committed by Japanese. Vengeance, in the midst of a cruel war, is not incomprehensible.

Now you have a bomb with the destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. It worked in a test, but it may not work when you drop it out of a plane. Why not give a demonstration to show its power? Your advisers tell you that if the show-detonation is a dud, the Japanese resistance will harden.

Modern history has presented this pair of options—the Big Invasion versus the Bomb—as “Truman’s choice.” It was a choice Truman inherited with the Oval Office. President Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s 1939 warning—a warning Einstein later regretted—of the potential of an atomic bomb by ordering research that became the Manhattan Project in 1942. Known to only a handful of men, Truman not among them, the project was a $2 billion (in pre-inflation 1940s dollars) effort to construct an atomic weapon. Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a “Nazi bomb.” That effort was later proved to be far short of success. The first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Truman was alerted to the success of the test at a meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, a city in defeated Germany.

Before the test detonation, there were already deep misgivings among both the scientific and military communities about the morality of the bomb’s destructive power. Many of its creators did not want it to be used, and lobbied to share its secrets with the rest of the world to prevent its use. Truman ignored that advice. With Churchill and China’s Chiang Kai-shek, he issued the Potsdam Declaration, warning Japan to accept a complete and unconditional surrender or risk “prompt and utter destruction.” Although specific mention of the bomb’s nature was considered, this vague warning was the only one issued.

When the Japanese first failed to respond to, and then rejected, his ultimatum, Truman ordered the fateful go-ahead. It was a self-perpetuating order that took on a life of its own. After Hiroshima, nobody said, “Don’t drop another one,” so the men proceeded under the orders they had been given.

Almost since the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, critics have second-guessed Truman’s decision and motives. A generation of historians has defended or repudiated the need for unleashing the atomic weapon. The historical justification was that a full-scale invasion of Japan would have cost frightful numbers of American and Japanese lives.

Many critics have dismissed those estimates as implausibly high, and say that the Japanese were already nearing their decision to submit when the bombs were dropped. A study made after the war by a U.S. government survey team reached that very conclusion. But coming as it did a year after the war was over, that judgment didn’t help Truman make his decision.

Other historians who support the Hiroshima drop dispute that criticism. Instead, they point to the fact that some of the strongest militarists in Japan were planning a coup to topple a pro-surrender government. Even after the Japanese surrender, Japanese officers were planning kamikaze strikes at the battleship on which the surrender documents would be signed. The view that accepts “atomic necessity” offers as evidence the actual Pacific fighting as it moved closer to Japan. And it is a convincing exhibit. Each successive island that the Americans invaded was defended fanatically, at immense cost on both sides. The Japanese military code, centuries old and steeped in the samurai tradition, showed no tolerance for surrender. Indeed, even in Hiroshima itself, there was anger that the emperor had capitulated.

But were the bomb and an invasion the only options? Or was there another reality? A top-secret study made during the period and revealed in the late 1980s says there was, and destroys much of the accepted justification for the Hiroshima bombing. According to these Army studies, the crucial factor in the Japanese decision to surrender was not the dropping of the bombs but the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. These documents and other recently revealed evidence suggest that Truman knew at Potsdam that Stalin would declare war against Japan early in August. Nearly two months before Hiroshima, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had advised the president that the Soviet declaration of war would force Japan to surrender, making the need for an American invasion unnecessary. It was a fact with which Truman seemed to agree.

So if the estimates of an invasion’s costs and ending the war quickly were not the only considerations, why did the United States use these terrible weapons?

What history has confirmed is that the men who made the bomb really didn’t understand how horrifying its capabilities were. Of course they understood the destructive power of the bomb, but radiation’s dangers were far less understood. As author Peter Wyden tells it in Day One, his compelling account of the making and dropping of the bomb, scientists involved in creating what they called “the gadget” believed that anyone who might be killed by radiation would die from falling bricks first.

But apart from this scientific shortfall, was there another strategic element to the decision? Many modern historians unhesitatingly answer yes. By late 1945 it was clear to Truman and other American leaders that victory over Germany and Japan would not mean peace. Stalin’s intention to create a buffer of Socialist states surrounding the Soviet Union and under the control of the Red Army was already apparent. Atomic muscle-flexing may have been the overriding consideration in Truman’s decision.

The age of nuclear saber rattling did not begin with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, but with the Potsdam meeting, where Stalin and Truman began the deadly dance around the issue of atomic weaponry. Truman was unaware that Stalin, through the efforts of scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs, who was working at Los Alamos and passing secrets to the Soviets, knew as much about the atomic bomb as the president himself—if not more.

Some historians have pointed to the second attack on Nagasaki as further proof of this atomic “big stick” theory. Having demonstrated the thirteen-kiloton bomb at Hiroshima, Truman still wanted to show off a large bomb used against Nagasaki to send a clear message to the Soviets: We have it and we’re not afraid to use it.

If Truman viewed these bombs as a message to the Soviets, that message, and the frightful nuclear buildup on both sides in the postwar years, dictated American and Soviet policies in the coming decades of Cold War confrontation.

Must Read: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes; Truman by David McCullough.