These Truths

by Jill Lepore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  III.

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

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

  FDR and Winston Churchill conferred on a warship at the outset of the Yalta Conference in 1945. Churchill had brought with him his traveling map room, the British embassy having sent particular instructions: “Mr. Churchill hopes that his map room may be adjacent to his private quarters at Yalta, and it should be so placed as to be accessible to President Roosevelt when wheeled in his chair.” Roosevelt, following the principles of the Atlantic Charter, arrived at Yalta determined not to slice and dice Europe and hand whole peoples over to imperial rule, as had been done at the end of the last war. He hoped to agree on a plan for how to win the war and to divide up Germany in a way that was agreeable to both Stalin and Churchill, in exchange for Stalin’s agreement to enter the war with Japan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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