Hopkins was now the second most powerful man in the country. He occupied a suite of rooms on the southeast corner of the White House second floor, right in the family’s private living quarters. Because Churchill admired him and respected him—he called him “Lord Root of the Matter”—he was trusted in London, too. Late in July 1941, sitting with his host in the garden behind 10 Downing Street, he remarked that the President would like to meet Churchill “in some lonely bay or another.” The prime minister was delighted. He very much wanted to see his chief ally in the flesh, and the trip would also provide first-rate propaganda. They chose one of the most desolate places in the world, Placentia Bay in southeast Newfoundland. On August 9 the Augusta and its escort steamed into position beside the British battleship Prince of Wales and its escorts; between them they formed a fleet large enough to fight a major naval engagement, which was perhaps the idea. All meetings were held aboard the Augusta except on Sunday, when Roosevelt crossed a short gangplank to attend a religious service. After the British and American crews had sung “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past,” Churchill told the President, “I’m not a religious man, but I thank God that such a man as you is the head of your government at a time like this.” For over three days the two leaders conferred with their staffs, were photographed together, and drew up a joint statement of principles called the Atlantic Charter.
After they had returned to London and Washington, the photographs were released to the press and the charter was issued in the form of a communiqué. It endorsed the rights of free peoples to choose their own leaders, regain lands wrested from them by force, trade freely with one another, have access to raw materials on equal terms, improve the lot of backward countries, disarm aggressors, and enjoy freedom of the seas, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Largely based on FDR’s most recent State of the Union address—he had also included freedom of speech and of worship—the Atlantic Charter was endorsed by fifteen anti-Axis nations, including (ironically) the Soviet Union, in September. The curious thing is that the charter, in the tactile sense at least, did not exist. A reporter asked FDR about it. The President replied, “There isn’t any copy… so far as I know. I haven’t got one. The British haven’t got one. The nearest thing you will get is the [message of the] radio operator on the Augusta or Prince of Wales…. There was no formal document.”
There was an understanding, though, and it wasn’t confined to strategies of peace. Back in the White House, the President announced that the convoy question was settled; he had settled it by executive order. American warships would convoy merchant vessels west of Iceland. U.S. ships were to darken their lights at sea and be ready for combat, and although the freighters being convoyed were presumed to be American, the operation plan for the Navy stipulated that “shipping of any nationality” could attach itself to the convoys.
The next incident was likely to involve an exchange of fire, and it did. On September 4, in the waters off Iceland, the commander of the German sub U-652, finding himself under bombardment by depth charges and noting that a destroyer was cruising in the water overhead, drew the obvious conclusion: those were Englishmen in that ship, trying to make him kaputt. He was in error. The depth charges were coming from a British plane; the destroyer, the Greer, was American. When its captain saw two torpedoes churning toward him, he took evasive action and fired his own depth charges in self-defense. Neither the sub nor the Greer was damaged, but the fact of the matter was that Germans had fired the first shot. Roosevelt called it “piracy” and changed his naval orders from “search and patrol” to “search and destroy”—in other words, to shoot on sight. The Nazis and the United States were now in an undeclared naval war, and two out of every three Americans told the pollsters that they approved.
On October 15 a sub wolf pack attacked a British convoy about four hundred miles south of Iceland. The convoy commander radioed for help, and steaming to the rescue came five American warships, led by the U.S.S. Kearny, a crack destroyer, barely a year old. She took a torpedo in the side, and though she didn’t sink, Americans read their first casualty list of World War II: two men wounded and eleven missing, presumed dead. The President declared that this was no random encounter; the Nazis were carrying out a long-range plan to drive American shipping off the seas. History had recorded which side fired the first shot, he said, “We Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations. We stand ready in the defense of our nation.”
Two weeks later another destroyer, the Reuben James, also on escort duty in Icelandic waters, came within torpedo range of a U-boat commander. This time the American ship went down; with her went over a hundred U.S. bluejackets. The sinking created a sensation in the U.S. press. Woody Guthrie wrote a ballad about it:
What were their names, tell me, what were their names?
Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?
There was real war fever now, all over the country, but the isolationists on the Hill were unimpressed. The President argued that under present circumstances, some clauses in neutrality legislation were obsolete. One of them forbade American merchant ships to carry any weapon larger than a captain’s pistol or a harpooner’s gun. It should be repealed, he said, and replaced by a measure arming the freighters and permitting them to carry cargoes to belligerent ports. The intensity of the battle in Congress was almost on the lend-lease level, and the administration margin much thinner: 13 votes in the Senate and 18 in the House. Barring dramatic developments, no declaration of war would get past this Congress. Roosevelt wasn’t at all sure he even wanted such a declaration. Under the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, all-out war between the United States and any one of the signing powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—meant war declarations against the U.S. from the other two. Roosevelt didn’t believe the United States was strong enough to take on Japan, too.
The more he and his advisers thought about it, the more dismayed they became. For seventeen months FDR had been more or less making up policy as he went along, improvising affronts to Hitler which would have brought Teutonic wrath down upon anyone else’s head. But the Führer never lost his temper; he merely knew how to use it. Twice Admiral Raeder had begged him to strike back. The flow of supplies into Britain worried the admiral. He goaded his leader by drawing up a list of twenty bellicose actions by the American Navy. Unperturbed, Hitler counseled patience; once Russia was defeated he would deal “severely” with Roosevelt. After the President’s shoot-on-sight order Raeder pleaded again; either let him attack U.S. warships, he asked, or withdraw all U-boats from the Atlantic. Hitler shook his head. Soon “the great decision in the Russian campaign” would have been reached. Then the wolf packs could be turned loose on the American Navy.
The President had hoped that by putting the United States on a collision course with Germany, events would take over and lead to outright hostilities. But Hitler was still the master manipulator of events, and he kept turning his cheek. On the other side of the world the Japanese, who had been similarly provoked, had given every sign that they, too, would refuse to be drawn. They were here in Washington now, negotiating. As the talks dragged on, the Axis powers drew ever closer to world conquest. Roosevelt felt impotent. “He had no more tricks left,” Sherwood said afterward. “The bag from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty.” Sherwood, sharing the gloom in Washington, thought he might run up to New York before Christmas and see what was new in the theater.
***
Late in November the producing firm of José Ferrer and Ruth Wilk announced the imminent arrival on Broadway of The Admiral Had a Wife, a new comedy by Lowell Barrington. Those who had seen out of town try-outs described it as a light piece, the haps and mishaps of an ambitious Navy wife in Hawaii and her attempts to win promotion for her husband by using an uncle in Washington. In its exposure of service nepotism it was also called “a good-natured spoof on the Navy.” It was scheduled to open at the Playhouse on Wednesday, December 10, 1941.
EIGHT
&n
bsp; America on the Brink
The America Kate Smith kept asking God to bless in the blitzkrieg spring of 1940 had changed mightily since the pit of the Depression, but it was still a very different country from the superpower of the early 1970s. The war boom wouldn’t bring real prosperity until the nation went to war. The morning after Roosevelt’s third inaugural, in 1941, PM—Marshall Field’s seven-month-old adless New York newspaper—covered its front page with a picture of ragged, jobless men. There were still such tableaux to be seen in the United States. Nearly nine million men were unemployed, nearly three million were on WPA rolls, and 30 percent of all Negroes were on relief. And this was more than eleven years after the Crash. Millions in their late teens or early twenties had no memories of a healthy economy. Their fathers had come to manhood in World War I, but before World War II could touch the sons they had been tempered and toughened by a struggle for sheer survival.
Since the country needed a lot of soldiers in a hurry, Roosevelt convened a National Nutrition Conference in the spring of 1941 to find out why Army doctors were turning back nearly half of the men called up by Selective Service. They discovered what any welfare caseworker could have told them; the largest single cause was malnutrition during the previous decade. According to the 1940 census, over half of the nation’s children were in families with an annual income of less than $1,500 a year. A quarter of the population still lived on farms; the typical farmer made $1,000. As late as the autumn of 1939, Toledo schools were closed two months because of lack of funds. In Manhattan, the unskilled workers who were using the ruins of bombed-out Bristol, England, to build a foundation for the East River Drive were being paid $832 a year.
Even then, visiting Europeans were scornful of American materialism, but young Europeans today would not have thought prewar America cosseted. Though rural electrification was making steady progress, three farms out of every four were still lit by kerosene lamps. Taking the country as a whole, there was one telephone for every seven Americans, one car for every five. One-fourth of all homes lacked running water, one-third were without flush toilets. The average American had left school after the eighth grade. In Washington, lobbyists for the American Medical Association had just defeated Senator Wagner’s health insurance plan, and the biggest killer of children between the ages of five and fifteen was rheumatic heart disease.
The country’s population was 132,000,000. Demographers agreed that it wouldn’t get much larger. Only 17 percent of married women were working—although the number of women working had crept up, almost unnoticed, by a half-million during the 1930s. Doing housework, wives listened to soap operas, the most popular of which was Vic and Sade, and to the new singing commercials. One ditty, “Chiquita Banana” was being sung 2,700 times a week.
The Gross National Product was 90 billion dollars a year; the Dow Jones industrial average drifted back and forth over the 150 mark. America’s economy, in short, was still depressed. Sylvia Porter, who then constituted the entire financial staff of the New York Post, has provided a vivid picture of what deflation was like then. Renters of bachelor apartments paid $25 a month. Hot dogs were a nickel. Prewar movie admission was twenty cents, most magazines were a dime, a dinner was forty-five cents, the average wristwatch repair ten cents, a fifth of scotch $1.25, and the typical bet with a friend five cents.
Business continued to blame its problems on government interference, labor unions, federal spending, lazy workers, and Roosevelt’s refusal to accept Hoover’s policy of permitting a “healthy readjustment” of wages and prices. Caroline Bird has offered another solution; the businessmen of the 1930s, she thinks, were not really very good businessmen. They thought prosperity depended upon Wall Street financiers and the so-called basic industries—steel, for example. The real key, which eluded them, was the consumer and the inexpensive goods and services he required. “Demand for shoes, drugs, foods, soap, cigarettes, clothes and gas for the jalopy grew directly with the population,” Miss Bird points out. “Buses, trucks, gas, electricity, stores, laundries, beauty parlors stayed in business.” In the last months of the prewar era, Fortune reported in amazement that one industry which had boomed since the Crash was the manufacture of disposable goods: paper napkins, cups and plates; bottles which could not be returned; and sanitary napkins. Men spent more on condoms than haircuts.
To some degree, products seem to have been withheld because entrepreneurs vaguely felt that they wouldn’t be good for people. A woman was supposed to wash dishes; it wasn’t right to let her throw them away. Drive-in services were wrong because they made everything too easy. For these and other reasons, among them simple failures of imagination, men of property refused to invest in supermarkets, postage meters, air-conditioning, ski resorts, neon lights, transistors, plywood, and motels. Except for the rich, consumer credit was almost unknown. Most people paid small bills with cash; banks discouraged checking accounts by requiring large minimum balances. The suggestion that a bank should give wigs to depositors, or finance “go now, pay later” vacations, would have been attended by as much shock as if the community’s leading citizen had committed a public nuisance in the lobby.
Many of the discoveries which were to alter the postwar landscape had been made before Pearl Harbor. Not only radar but even television was receiving finishing touches from engineers. NBC had beamed an experimental telecast from Grover Whalen’s Mad Meadow on April 30, 1939, and receivers on Manhattan had picked it up, though the picture on those early DuMont sets was tiny. Professor Chester L. Dawes of Harvard didn’t think television would ever achieve popularity, because “it must take place in a semidarkened room, and it demands continuous attention.” Fluorescent lighting was coming in, too, and just as nylon and dacron foretold a revolution in fabrics, so were plastics about to replace steel, aluminum, zinc, and nickel in everything from steering wheels to fountain pens (and, later, ballpoint pens). In the spring of 1940 Igor Sikorsky made his first ascent at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, airport in what one reporter described as “a strange, spindle-shanked machine.” A news magazine speculated that Sikorsky’s helicopters might be useful on a battlefield.
The American automobile had not yet become what one social critic would call an “insolent chariot,” but it was on its way. Oldsmobile advertised a $57 extra called its “hydraulic clutch,” which in time would dispense with the need for shifting gears, and the Lincoln Zephyr convertible actually had a magic button the mere touching of which would raise or lower the top. Conservative Detroit shrugged at such gimmicks, just as the publishing business, in those last months of peace, scorned the plans of Pocket Books, Inc. Its first paperback volume, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, was on sale at selected drugstores. It cost a quarter.
Advance information on the fate of any of these developments would have made a man’s fortune. But sometimes it is just as well that we cannot hold the mirror up to the future. As Hitler blazed his way back and forth across Europe, Washington was completing plans to extend the withholding tax principle from social security to federal income taxes, and a brief story on page 20 of the September 2, 1939, New York Times reported that a researcher named A. H. Roffo, addressing the International Cancer Congress, described how he had produced cancer in mice by painting them with tobacco tars.
***
If you were visiting a distant community in the autumn of 1941, you would almost certainly have traveled by train. The new crack diesels were at the peak of their efficiency and popularity. There were always plenty of redcaps at the station. Roadbeds were maintained so that sleepers in Pullmans—in lower berths, at least—could really rest. The porter shined your shoes, carried your bags, and tugged gently at the green curtain when it was time to wake up. If you gave him a half-dollar as you left he said, “Thank you, sir,” and meant it. Meals on the train were a pleasure. The tables were covered by immaculate linen, the menu offered a genuine choice, and everyone was courteous.
Your reasons for not flying may have been poor food, inaccessible airport
s, or fear. To be sure, service and schedules were improving, and now Pan American’s Yankee Clipper could take you from Long Island to Lisbon in twenty-six and a half hours, but most people weren’t in that much of a hurry. You might drive, though it would be an ordeal. The Merritt Parkway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike had just opened; the rest of the roads were still two-lane and three-lane highways, and every town along the way had its speed traps, fines from which paid the local constable’s salary. Tourist cabins were little known and rather disreputable; the campaign against them was being led by J. Edgar Hoover. Writing in the American Magazine, Hoover called the precursors of motels “a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery, and murder.” What’s more, he warned, husbands and wives might occupy mattresses previously sullied by people who had engaged in “illicit relations.”
As the train passed through settled areas, you would see no signs advertising discount houses or roadside food franchises. Like the superhighways that would carry customers to them, they lay over a far horizon. People didn’t need cars as much then. They could go to work, shop, or reach schools via public transportation. The number of local bus lines which have been discontinued since then is beyond calculation, but we know something about streetcars. In 1940 there were 19,600 miles of electric railway track in the United States. By the late 1960s the figure had dwindled to 2,049—most of them no longer used.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 36