The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  “God Bless America” was number three on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, and older people choked up whenever Hildegarde sang “The White Cliffs of Dover,” but the swing generation remained loyal to its own. In five years they had increased the sales of phonograph records a hundredfold. They argued over who was the best canary—Martha Tilton, Helen O’Connell, and Marion Hutton were much favored—and whenever possible they went to hear live jive. New York’s West Fifty-second Street was known as the Street of Swing: at spots like the Famous Door, the Onyx Club, and Kelly’s Stables you could, within a single evening, hear Count Basie, Bunny Berigan, and Bud Freeman. T. Dorsey was playing at the Terrace Room of the New Yorker Hotel, Goodman in the Manhattan Room of the Pennsylvania Hotel. And if you really wanted to swing out and shine, you and your date headed for such gymnasiums as the Roseland Dance Hall on Broadway, with its mirrored walls, its ceiling studded with electric stars, and its sharp hostesses.

  Those who suspect that there was more than a little hanky-panky amid all this innocence are quite right. Sex went with swing, was even a part of it. The girl whose 1-A date kept playing “Please Give Me Something to Remember You By” knew exactly which something he wanted. The Lynds found that seven of every ten interviewees admitted having premarital sexual relations. While the figure was doubtless lower in the college population, the percentage of “technical virgins” was certainly high. Marriage was out of the question for most. Until long after the war, middle-class Americans regarded early marriage as a lower-class phenomenon, so campus pregnancies were avoided by recourse to what Dr. Kinsey would later call substitute “outlets.”

  Predictably, the older generation expressed displeasure at the customs of the young. Professor William H. Kilpatrick, formerly of Columbia Teachers College, deplored the breakup of “old authoritarian morals,” which was pretty nervy, considering the job he had been doing to traditional values in the classroom. The Pope appealed to Catholic girls urging them to abandon their “immodest fashions,” which made little sense, because most of the time everything was covered except the shins, hands, and face. Maybe he meant bathing suits. The New York Times did, and protested against the “almost naked people on beaches.”

  In Alhambra, a Los Angeles suburb, high school girls moving into a new building discovered that they would have to undress and shower in a common shower room. Sixteen-year-old Joan Aveline Lawrence refused. She would rather flunk gym than have other girls see her in all her nakedness, and her father, an engineer, backed her modesty 100 percent. Joan filed suit for an injunction on the grounds that requiring her to show her birthday suit was immoral, violated a California statute about disrobing in public, and encroached upon her constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was a popular stand, even within her peer group; 275 of Joan’s classmates signed a petition demanding private showers.

  The judge was on a spot. He leaned on Solomon: since the school had already been built, the girls had to choose between having their parts examined and going dirty. No injunction was issued. The New York judiciary was of sterner stuff, however, and perhaps nothing is more illustrative of prewar Grundyism and the permissiveness of the 1970s than the case of the third Earl Russell—Bertrand Arthur William Russell. Everybody in academia knew Bertrand Russell was a caution, with unusual ideas above love and marriage. Nevertheless, he was at the height of his mathematical and philosophic powers, he wrote the clearest prose on either side of the Atlantic, and he had taught at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The College of the City of New York rejoiced when he agreed to become a CCNY professor and chairman of its philosophy department. New York reporters, descending upon him, described the philosopher as an elderly man with very blue eyes, an outsize nose, and a receding chin. One wrote: “The British upper classes believe that he is mad.”

  The Right Reverend William T. Manning, Episcopal Bishop of New York and himself a Briton, thought his lordship was just a dirty old man, and in a letter to newspaper editors he said so. Quoting Russell’s books (“Outside human desires there is no moral standard…. In the absence of children, sexual relations are a purely private matter which does not concern either the state or the neighbors”) the bishop demanded to know whether this was the sort of man to hold up before youth as an example. CCNY’s acting president answered, “Mr. Russell has been invited to teach courses in mathematics and logic and not to discourse on his personal ethical and moral views.”

  Round one to his lordship. But by now indignation was spreading in all the places one might expect it to spread: the Hearst papers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Catholic Daughters of America, the Lutheran Society, the Baptist Ministers Conference, and the American Legion. All of them passed resolutions, wrote to newspapers, held rallies, and staged protest marches. The city’s Board of Higher Education went into executive session. It voted to stand by the philosopher. He had won round two.

  Today that would have been the end of it—assuming that any modern bishop would launch such a crusade, which seems improbable. In the early 1940s, however, parents would go to great lengths to save their children from wickedness. Mrs. Jean Kay, the wife of a Brooklyn dentist, was such a mother. Suppose, she reflected, that her little daughter grew up, went to CCNY, and fell into the clutches of this fiend? Mrs. Kay consulted Joseph Goldstein, an attorney, who filed a taxpayer’s suit in her behalf. They appeared before New York Supreme Court Judge John E. McGeehan with four of Lord Russell’s books, which Goldstein described as “lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venereous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, untruthful, bereft of moral fiber,” and “narrow-minded.”

  Judge McGeehan was a Tammany appointee. He knew a good issue when he saw one. In press clippings he found rumors that Russell had run an English nudist colony, tolerated homosexuality, and enjoyed obscene limericks. Then he dashed off a sizzling seventeen-page decision. McGeehan said that in making this appointment the Board of Higher Education had, in effect, established a “Chair of Indecency” at CCNY. Academic freedom, he ruled, could not permit a teacher to teach that sexual intercourse between students was proper. Besides, Lord Russell was an alien. The judge revoked CCNY’s appointment and cast the offender into outer darkness, which, in his case, was a full professorship at Harvard—and Harvard couldn’t have been happier about it.

  Bertrand Russell had at first been stunned. When a reporter told him the judge’s verdict, he gasped. “It strikes me between the eyes,” he said. “I don’t know what to think or say. I want it understood that I am not as interested in sex as Bishop Manning.” He authorized the American Civil Liberties Union to act in his behalf. After a while he began to brood. Three years later he returned to England to become one of the most caustic and bitter critics of the United States.

  ***

  In the spring of 1940 Pat Ryan and Dick Nixon became engaged, and after a June wedding they rented an apartment over a Whittier garage. On the weekend of December 6–7, 1941, he was thinking of applying for a government job. Twelve miles northwest of Whittier, Norma Jean Baker, a fifteen-year-old, sexually precocious girl, was spending less time in her tenth-grade classes than in movie theaters. Dean Acheson left a California Street mortuary in Washington, where he had bowed his head over the body of Justice Louis Brandeis. On the morning of December 7 he had visitors on his Maryland farm; Archibald MacLeish and his wife had driven out to help clear fallen timber in the woods and share a picnic lunch. President Roosevelt was in his oval study, wearing an old pullover sweater and going through his stamp collection. Hamilton Fish was celebrating his fifty-third birthday. Senator Harry S. Truman was writing letters, trying to get more defense contracts for small Missouri businessmen. Richard Whitney, who had been paroled four months earlier, was resting at the home of a friend. At Fort Sam Houston in Texas, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, exhausted by his staff work during the recent maneuvers, was taking a nap. Donald Nelson, one of the able executives who had come to the capital to help mobilize the
economy, was enjoying a Sunday luncheon at the Maryland farm of Harold Ickes and redheaded young Mrs. Ickes. Senator Nye was enroute to an isolationist rally in Pittsburgh. Myron Taylor had just praised the peace efforts of the Pope and the President at a communion breakfast of the Notre Dame Club of New York. Three days earlier the Chicago Tribune, attempting to prove Roosevelt a warmonger, had published top-secret plans—the hypothetical kind that all war offices prepare, to meet any emergency—showing an invasion of Germany by five million Americans in 1943, and at weekend parties Justice Department lawyers were seriously debating the wisdom of charging Colonel McCormick with treason. Norman Mailer was playing scrub football on a Harvard lot. Edward R. Murrow was shaving with particular care; he was to be the President’s dinner guest that evening. Seventy-year-old Cordell Hull was on his way to the old State, War and Navy Building, beside the White House. He had just scheduled a meeting with two Japanese diplomats at their urgent, inexplicable request.

  Two of the best sellers that weekend were Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leach and The Sun Is My Undoing by Marguerite Steen.

  The Sunday papers advertised Matson Line cruises to Hawaii.

  ***

  The rising sun, Japan’s ensign, appeared over Pearl Harbor on the wings of hostile aircraft that morning, and bombing with devastating precision, the enemy proceeded to cripple the U.S. battle fleet, damage the base, and kill 2,403 Americans.

  The attack can never be adequately explained, because it was an irrational response to a miscalculated provocation—or, more accurately, a series of provocations. The first step in the long minuet which ended that disastrous Sunday had been taken nearly two years earlier, when Congress, at the urging of Senator Vandenberg, ended the U.S.-Japanese trade agreements of 1911. Hull then informed Tokyo that future trade between the two nations would be on a day-to-day basis. At the time Walter Lippmann had strongly condemned the move as a step toward war. It put the United States, Lippmann wrote, “in the position of challenging a great power.” It did more. It opened the way to a chain of diplomatic moves which made the Japanese jittery, cost them face, and deprived them of vital imports, including, toward the end, the lifeblood of their armed forces—oil.

  All that is clear now. It was not so obvious at the time. The administration was too busy following developments on the Atlantic to give the Pacific more than an occasional glance. To the President, the issue in Asia was a moral one. The Japanese were aggressors; they should go home. But he regarded Hitler as the prime disturber of the international peace and dreaded a two-front war. He was always ready to negotiate, and as late as December 6 he sent a message to Emperor Hirohito urging Japanese withdrawal from Indochina. Had it arrived in time, the course of events would almost certainly have been altered. Grew, his ambassador in Tokyo, wanted a softer line from Washington. But Hull and his senior advisers at State were hard-liners, and they could be steely because Congress, including most of the isolationist bloc—even Senator Wheeler—was vehemently anti-Japanese.

  The fall of France, Holland, and Belgium had wholly altered the strategic picture in Asia. Their colonies there were now almost defenseless, and Washington felt avuncular. Hull warned Tokyo on September 4, 1940, to leave Vietnam alone. Later in the month the President proclaimed an embargo on scrap iron and steel to all nations outside the western hemisphere, Great Britain excepted. The following day the Japanese, goaded by what they called this “unfriendly act,” signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

  The point of no return was reached in the summer of 1941. On July 24 Japanese troops formally occupied Indochina, including Vietnam. Two days later President Roosevelt froze all Japanese credits in the United States, which meant no more oil from America. Great Britain took the same action. This was serious but not desperate; Japan’s chief source of petroleum was the Netherlands East Indies, which sold her 1,800,000 tons a year. Then came the real shock. The Dutch colonial governor in Djakarta froze Japanese assets there—and immediately suspended its current oil contract with Tokyo. For Prince Fumimaro Konoye, Hirohito’s premier, this was a real crisis. Virtually every drum of gas and oil fueling the army’s tanks and planes had to be imported. Worse, the navy, which until now had counseled patience, joined the army in calling for war. Civilian petroleum was rationed immediately; when Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura arrived in Washington in September he sadly told the press, “All over Tokyo are no taxicab.”

  His country could hold out for a few weeks; no more. Until Christmas they could count on a trickle of petroleum from private sources, Anglo-American companies with storage tanks on neutral soil. But every day counted now. Konoye submitted his government’s demands to Grew: if the United States would stop arming Chiang-kai Shek, stop building new fortifications in the Pacific, and help the emperor’s search for raw materials and markets, Konoye promised not to use Indochina as a base, to withdraw from China after the incident there had been “settled,” and to “guarantee” the neutrality of the Philippines. Grew warned Washington that there were worse men around the throne than Konoye; humble him, and one of them would replace him. Unimpressed, Hull sent back an ultimatum: Japan must withdraw all troops from China and Indochina, denounce the Tripartite Pact, and sign a nonaggression pact with neighboring countries.

  Hull seemed to feel that the United States could treat the Japanese in any way it chose. As far as politics was concerned, he could. If such an ultimatum had been sent to Berlin, there would have been America First rallies all over the country and impeachment proceedings on the Hill. But Grew had been right; Konoye stepped down on October 16 and was succeeded by General Hideki Tojo, the fiercest hawk in the Orient.

  The embargoed Japanese now believed that they had no choice. They had to go to war, unless they left China, which was unthinkable. They began sharpening samurai swords. American intelligence, in possession of the Japanese code, could follow almost every development. On November 22 a message from Tokyo to Nomura and Saburo Kurusu, who were still negotiating in Washington, warned that in a week “things are automatically going to happen.” On November 27 the Signal Corps transcribed a conversation between Kurusu in Washington and Isoroku Yamamoto in Tokyo. They were using a voice code in which “Miss Umeko” referred to Hull and “Miss Kimiko” meant President Roosevelt. The term “matrimonial question” meant the negotiations in Washington. Yamamoto asked, “How did the matrimonial question go today?” Kurusu replied, “There wasn’t much that was different from what Miss Umeko said yesterday.” Then he asked, “Does it seem as if a child will be born?” Yamamoto answered in a very definite tone, “Yes, the birth of the child seems imminent. It seems as if it will be a strong, healthy boy.” Finally, on November 29, a conversation was monitored in which an embassy functionary asked, “Tell me what zero hour is. Otherwise I can’t carry on diplomacy.” The voice from Tokyo said softly, “Well, then, I will tell you. Zero hour is December 8”—that is, December 7—“at Pearl Harbor.”

  Washington now knew that the negotiations were a meaningless minuet, a stall for time; that an attack was coming, and when it would come. The objective of the assault was unknown, so commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines received this message:

  THIS DISPATCH IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING. NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN LOOKING TOWARD STABILIZATION OF CONDITIONS IN THE PACIFIC HAVE CEASED. AN AGGRESSIVE MOVE BY JAPAN IS EXPECTED WITHIN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. EXECUTE AN APPROPRIATE DEFENSIVE DEPLOYMENT PREPARATORY TO CARRYING OUT THE TASKS ASSIGNED IN WPL-46.

  WPL-46 was the war plan. On December 6 General Walter Short, the Army commander in Hawaii, was handed another message, from Army intelligence:

  JAPANESE NEGOTIATIONS HAVE COME TO PRACTICAL STALEMATE. HOSTILITIES MAY ENSUE. SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES MAY BE EXPECTED.

  Short concluded that this was a reference to Japanese civilians on Oahu. Therefore he ordered all aircraft lined up in the middle of their fields, wing tip to wing tip—where they could be instantly destroyed by hostile warplanes. He and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the na
val commander in the Pacific, decided not to execute the war plan. Put on constant alert, they felt, the men would become exhausted. In fact, officers and men were given their customary Saturday evening liberty. No special guards were mounted on the United States Pacific Fleet—94 ships, including eight battleships and nine cruisers—the only force-in-being which could prevent further Japanese invasions.

  ***

  All this is baffling. Short and Kimmel later testified that neither had considered an attack on Pearl Harbor a possibility. Yet it is difficult to think of many moves in military history which had been predicted more often. Confronting one another across the Pacific, each nation had long pondered the strategy of a surprise raid on the base. The U.S. naval maneuvers around Pearl in 1932 have been noted. Japan’s interest in them arose from the fact that beginning in 1931, every member of each graduating class in Japan’s naval academy had been required to answer one question: “How would you execute a surprise assault on Pearl Harbor?” In January 1941 Ambassador Grew alerted Washington to the possibilities of a sneak raid on Pearl. (In his diary he wrote, “There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. I rather guess the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”) The Peruvian ambassador in Tokyo heard the same talk, and obligingly sent it to Washington via Grew. The American military establishment was not perturbed. Men in striped pants! Peruvians! What would they know about war?

  But other Americans had seen the future clearly. In July 1941 Richmond Kelly Turner, then chief of the Navy War Plans Division, had named Hawaii as the “probable” target of any Japanese offensive, and he also predicted that the attack would be made by aircraft. Navy Secretary Knox had written Stimson, “Hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.” There were warning flags everywhere. An intercepted Tokyo message on December 3, four days before the raid, had inquired whether there were “any observation balloons above Pearl Harbor,” and on December 5 FBI agents in Honolulu had told the high command at Pearl that the Japanese consulate there was burning its confidential papers. Admiral Kimmel himself—his memory to the contrary—had warned his staff that “Declaration of war might be preceded by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.”