The War Department argued that the president should sign the legislation. “In spite of imperfections of the bill,” Stimson wrote, “it has enough good points on the vital issues of having young men at home perform their duties without discrimination like the soldiers, making it an important moral issue to have the bill passed.”
The sentiment of the country was overwhelmingly in favor of the bill. A woman from Sewanee, Tennessee, spoke for many in a stormy letter to the president. “We the people are getting fed up with you and your spineless treatment of labor . . . . I was one of your ardent admirers when you first went into office but now I can hardly wait for the day you go out of office. Between you and your treatment of labor and Mrs. Roosevelt and the niggers, this is one hell of a place.”
The president kept the country and the Congress waiting for the maximum time he could—nine and one-half days plus two Sundays—while he pondered his decision. On June 25, at 3:15 p.m., he sent his answer to the Congress: he had decided to veto the bill. “Let there be no misunderstanding of the reasons which prompt me to veto this bill at this time,” he began. “I am unalterably opposed to strikes in wartime. I do not hesitate to use the powers of government to prevent them.” He clearly understood, he said, that it was the will of the American people “that no war work be interrupted by strike or lockout.” But the American people should realize that, for the entire year of 1942, “99.95 percent of the work went forward without strikes, and that only 5 one-hundredths of 1 percent of the work was delayed by strikes. That record has never been equaled in this country. It is as good or better than the record of any of our Allies in wartime.”
He conceded that laws are often necessary “to make a very small minority of people live up to the standards that the great majority of the people follow,” but he contended that, far from discouraging strikes, the bill’s provisions would stimulate labor unrest.
Eleanor was pleased by the president’s veto, as was organized labor. “In vetoing the Smith-Connally bill, President Roosevelt has demonstrated once more,” CIO President Philip Murray said, “his sound understanding of the nature of the democracy for which we are fighting and the need for full mobilization of the nation for victory.” But the euphoria was short-lived. At 3:30, only fifteen minutes after it had received the president’s veto message, the Senate overrode the veto fifty-six to twenty-five. As soon as word of the Senate action reached the House, the members immediately laid aside debate on a Commodity Credit Corporation extension and took up the override. Representative Clifton Woodrum set the tone when he called for “action, not tomorrow, not Monday, but today, so that we can send the message to our boys in the foxholes that the American people are behind them.” At 5:28 p.m., the House joined the Senate in the override, and the Smith-Connally Act became law.
Stimson considered the congressional override, only the eighth time in ten years that the Congress had enacted a bill into law over Roosevelt’s veto, “a bad rebuff and an unnecessary rebuff . . . . His administration really is beginning to shake a little and throughout the country there is evident feeling that he has made a mistake in regard to labor.”
In a conversation at Hyde Park the following week, Eleanor asked Franklin if he thought “our lack of leadership and discipline in Congress came about because we’d been in power too long.” The president replied reflectively. “Perhaps, we certainly have no control. I think the country has forgotten we ever lived through the 30s.”
Unchastened by the congressional slap, Lewis struggled on in defense of the miners. Twice again in the months ahead, he ordered his men on strike. Twice again, the president seized the mines. There was more idleness in 1943 due to strikes in the mining industry than in any other. Finally, an ingenious solution was reached whereby the United Mine Workers shifted their focus from a straight pay raise to “portal to portal pay.” For years, the miners had suffered under a system which saw their hourly wage begin only when they reached their place of work deep within the mine. The long ride in a metal cart from the top of the mine to the bottom was not considered work. Through Ickes’ intervention, an agreement was reached that allowed the miners to be paid “portal to portal,” from the moment they entered the mine to the moment they left. Since extra time did not violate the “Little Steel” formula, the solution was approved by the War Labor Board.
“We were thrilled at the news,” coal miner Michael Lilly recalled. “Once you entered the coal mines, you were in danger. It was dark from the moment you went in. Anything could happen on the way down. I was always afraid. Now I knew from the moment I got into the cart at the top of the hill the money was kicking in. That eased everything a great deal.”
• • •
As Eleanor worked on her column in Hyde Park on Sunday morning, June 20, she was wrapped in gloomy spirits. “The domestic scene,” she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, “is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”
Three weeks earlier, in Mobile, Alabama, a racial incident in the Addsco shipyard had resulted in the loss of ten thousand workers for seven days. “No city in the deep South has felt the war more sharply than Mobile, Alabama,” journalist Selden Menefee concluded after a nationwide tour of the United States in the first half of 1943. “Here is an historic town that slept for 230 years, then woke up in two. The population of Mobile’s metropolitan area has increased by 60%, from 79,000 in 1940 to an estimated 125,000 in the spring of 1943.” Drawn by the magnet of the great shipyards of Mobile, many of the new arrivals were poor whites from the hinterlands. “If these ‘poor whites’ are full of anti-Negro prejudices, as they are,” Menefee observed, “it is because the whiteness of their skins is the one thing that gives them a degree of social status.”
The trouble began when a group of skilled Negro welders were upgraded and assigned to work on the same job with white welders. To the white welders, the idea of being forced to work side by side with Negroes was an unacceptable wedge in the time-honored system of segregation. “We realize the fact that they are human beings,” Archie Adams wrote in a letter to the Mobile Register, but “we don’t any more want to work or want our women to work alongside a Negro than you would want to take one into your dining room and sit him down between your wife and mother to eat dinner, or for your wife to invite the cook in for a game of bridge, or take her to the movies.”
As the morning shift began, a group of white welders, armed with bricks, clubs, and bars, attacked the Negro welders. “No nigger is goin’ to join iron in these yards,” one worker shouted. The fighting soon spread to other parts of the yard. Before it ended, eleven Negroes were carried to the hospital. Peace was restored only when the company decided, in a move reluctantly approved by the FEPC, to assign the skilled Negro welders to a separate shipway, where they would not mingle with whites. With vital production heavily curtailed, it seemed the only way to avoid future trouble. But it was clearly a step backward, as Eleanor assuredly understood.
Worse was to come. A few hours after Eleanor finished her cheerless column, while she and Franklin were entertaining Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in the library after dinner, word was received at Hyde Park of bloody rioting in Detroit. The disturbance had begun at Belle Isle, a public park frequented mostly by blacks. By midafternoon, the temperature in Detroit had hit ninety-one and the park was filled to capacity, with a hundred thousand people. As evening approached, the bridge to the mainland was jammed with cars and pedestrians. A few scuffles broke out between whites and blacks. A young white couple was assaulted and robbed of $2 by a group of seven Negroes. Two white girls got into a fight with a Negro girl. One of the white girls knocked the Negro girl down; the Negro girl bloodied the white girl’s nose and blackened her eye. A rumor floated that a group of whites had thrown a Negro woman and her baby off the bridge. Shortly after midnight, at a night
club on Hastings Street, in the heart of “Paradise Valley,” the Negro district, a well-dressed Negro carrying a briefcase took the microphone, stopped the music, and announced that fighting was in progress on Belle Isle, that three Negroes had been killed and a Negro woman and her baby drowned. He urged everyone to get guns and cars and join the fight. The rioting spread.
Groups of Negroes came out into the streets, smashing windows, stopping streetcars, stoning whites. Gangs of whites charged into Negro areas, chasing and beating Negroes as they walked down the street. By midnight, four hundred were injured and ten were dead. Later in the morning, a milk driver making his rounds in the Negro district and an Italian doctor answering an emergency call were beaten to death. During the worst hours of the fighting, Governor Harry Kelly of Michigan stubbornly insisted that he could handle the situation with local and state police. Without a request from the governor for federal troops, or certification that state authorities could not control the violence, the president was constitutionally unable to act. It was not until Monday morning, eighteen hours after the rioting had begun, that the governor finally asked for help. The federal troops, thirty-eight hundred strong, arrived at 11 a.m., and by late afternoon peace was restored, but by then death had come to twenty-five Negroes and nine whites, while nearly one thousand were injured.
That night, in Detroit’s Receiving Hospital, reporters noted that bleeding Negroes and whites sat side by side, joined by a common bewilderment at the incomprehensible events they had seen. The story was told of a colored woman of light complexion who was beaten to death by colored men who mistook her for a white woman. In another part of the city, white youths had begun to close in on a Negro. Three white sailors stepped in and broke it up. “He’s not doing you any harm,” one of the sailors said. “Let him alone.” “What’s it to you?” snapped one of the gang. “Plenty,” replied the sailor. “There was a colored guy in our outfit and he saved a couple of lives. Besides you guys are stirring up something that we’re trying to stop.”
In the days that followed, politicians and reporters sought to understand why the explosion had taken place. To many people in both the North and the South, the answer was clear: Eleanor Roosevelt was “morally responsible” for the riot. “It is blood on your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt,” the Jackson Daily News declared on June 22. “You have been personally proclaiming and practicing social equality at the White House and wherever you go, Mrs. Roosevelt. What followed is now history.” Detroit resident John Lang pointed his finger in the same direction. “It is my belief,” he wrote the president, that “Mrs. Roosevelt and Mayor [Edward] Jeffries of Detroit are somewhat guilty of the race riots due to their coddling of negroes.”
Eleanor responded with composure. “I suppose when one is being forced to realize that an unwelcome change is coming, one must blame it on someone or something,” she replied.
Stimson’s initial reaction was to blame “the deliberate effort that has been going on on the part of certain radical leaders of the colored race to use the war for obtaining the ends which they were seeking, and these ends are very difficult because they include race equality to be social as well as economic and military and they are trying to demand that there will be this complete intermixing in the military.” But when Stimson saw the pictures in Life magazine that showed Negroes being beaten and assaulted by whites, generally young white boys, he told General Somervell he had “come to the conclusion that we have got to do something . . . or there will be real trouble in the tense situation that exists among the two races throughout the country.”
The truth was that dozens of causes had coincided to bring about the riots. C. E. Rhetts, special assistant to Attorney General Francis Biddle, spent the first week of July in Detroit, interviewing hundreds of people, including politicians, policemen, FBI agents, labor leaders, civil-rights leaders, and journalists. “Many newspapers and individuals have charged that the enemy fomented this riot,” Rhett stated at the beginning of his report. “But though there is no doubt that the riot gave great comfort and some aid to the enemy, no evidence has yet been developed to indicate that he contrived it.” On the contrary, Rhett concluded, the riot was the product of the spontaneous combustion of a number of troubling elements.
For one thing, Detroit had grown phenomenally during the previous two years, adding nearly 500,000 people, including 150,000 Negroes, to its population of 2.5 million. As Negroes and whites competed for what little housing, transportation, and recreation was available, the fascist exhortations of radio commentators Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald K. Smith found fertile soil. The Ku Klux Klan took on new life. “The old, subdued, muted, murderous Southern race war,” one journalist noted, “was transplanted into a high-speed industrial background.” Housing conditions for Negroes, Rhett reported, were “deplorable.” Time and again, real-estate investors had blocked any chance for the construction of adequate federal housing, and “the vacillation which characterized the federal government’s position in the case of the Sojourner Truth Negro housing project last year did not help.”
Trailer camps were everywhere, and with them, as one reporter described it, “a sizable population of delinquent, rootless ‘trailer boys’—the cruel, pitiable, negative young savages who are good for riots and fascist putsches.” For months, conflicts between whites and blacks in the high school had been on the increase. “Large segments of the negro community hate the police, probably not without reason.” All these factors, taken together, created a “highly explosive community.”
The riots cast a baleful shadow on the home front, rendering false the image of a united people in time of war. “Like a defective screw in a great machine, though apparently insignificant,” Eleanor’s friend Pauli Murray warned the president, the problem of race “can literally wreck our national endeavor . . . . This matter has become a national menace.” Civil-rights leaders entreated Roosevelt to address the nation in a fireside chat. “We urge you to go on the radio at the earliest possible moment,” Walter White wrote. The only solution to the racial problem, Mary McCleod Bethune observed, is “a straight forward statement and program of action from the President.”
For her part, Eleanor believed that the race riots put us “on a par with Nazism which we fight, and makes us tremble for what human beings may do when they no longer think but let themselves be dominated by their worst emotions.” In countless memos she had warned her husband about the disgraceful living conditions that accompanied the overcrowded boomtowns. For months, she had worried about rising racial tensions, calling at one point for an interracial conference of Negro and white leaders. Now that the long-anticipated explosion had taken place, she was convinced that the conservative Southern bloc in Congress, which repeatedly refused to better conditions for Negroes, was largely to blame. “Detroit should never have happened,” she wrote Trude Pratt, “but when Congress behaves as it does why should others be calmer?”
While Eleanor suffered outwardly, the president reacted calmly, telling reporters at his weekly press conference that he refused to become aroused as long as war production continued at top levels. At one point, a week after the riots, he considered making a nationwide statement about race, but in the end he abandoned the idea. He was convinced, Eleanor told Lash, that “he must not irritate the southern leaders as he feels he needs their votes for essential war bills.” Better to wait, he decided, until later in the summer, when he intended to deliver a more general address to the nation on the home front.
The presidential silence on race was not easy for liberals to understand. “Why,” New Republic writer Thomas Sanction asked, “hasn’t Mr. Roosevelt come to us with one of his greatest speeches, speaking to us as Americans, speaking to us as the great mongrel nation . . . why hasn’t he come to us and talked to us in the simple and genuine language that Lincoln might have used, why hasn’t he come waking memories of the old American dream, of live and let live, of a land where all men are endowed with inalienable rights, of a country where all men
are created equal?”
• • •
As the riots faded from the national consciousness, the president turned his attention to the invasion of Sicily, which was scheduled to begin in early July. At the end of his working day, Roosevelt frequently visited the map room to follow the buildup of the Allied landing force. By the first week of July, one-third of the invading force, 160,000 men, with six hundred tanks and two thousand landing craft were assembled in Malta, waiting for the weather to clear so they could make their move. At dawn on July 10, the landings began. Despite the high winds, which blew the paratroopers too far inland, Allied forces successfully fought off both Italian and German troops. The Axis, having lost a quarter of a million troops in Tunisia, had only ten Italian divisions and two German panzer units stationed in Sicily at the time of the invasion. Two weeks later, as the invading forces swept toward Palermo, on the western half of the northern coast, Roosevelt headed to Shangri-la with Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman to begin work on a major speech to the nation—his first fireside chat on the war since February.
Between the coal strike and the riots in Mobile and Detroit, national morale was suffering. “The whole world is watching our domestic troubles,” reporter Edwin James wrote in The New York Times. “Our President has said, and often, that we would show the world that a democracy could be made to work at war as well as any totalitarian state . . . . Therefore, much depends on how we run our democracy at war. And we are not running it any too well.”
In his speech, Roosevelt wanted to make it clear to the American public that the home front and the war front were one and the same; that the factory worker at home was as crucial to the war as the soldier abroad. If the identity between the two fronts could be reinforced, he believed, morale and productivity would go up. What the home front worker needed was neither to be reprimanded nor flattered; he simply needed information about the relationship between his workaday job and the effort to beat the Nazis. Once he had that information, he could be trusted to do his job.
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