American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  What vexed Stimson more than anything was FDR’s penchant for making far-reaching decisions with no apparent method beyond whim or instinct. As Stimson saw it, two-thirds of the government’s problems came from “the topsy-turvy, upside-down system of poor administration [by] which Mr. Roosevelt runs the government.” After a particularly tiresome discussion on war production, Stimson told his diary, “Conferences with the President are difficult matters. His mind does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussion from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room.” 8

  Occasionally, however, the vagrant beam of sunshine surprised Stimson. Once he complained to FDR that the administration’s price control board was retarding war production by holding prices artificially low. Roosevelt, an old hand at economic manipulation, knew that high wages and consumer-goods shortages were a recipe for crippling inflation. He told Stimson he did not want weapons production spurring a “boom of rising prices” before the war, because after the war he wanted no severe price drops disrupting the economy. The nation’s long-term interest required prices to remain relatively stable, and that required government to regulate prices in the arms market.

  Stimson, the son of a Wall Street investment banker, believed in the free market like he believed in gravity or an all-powerful God. But he admitted he had not considered the economic impact of the war over the long run. As secretary of war, he didn’t have to. But the president had to think about it every day.

  The more he saw of Roosevelt, the more Stimson admired the man. Some months later, after watching him digest a War Department study of tank production, Stimson mused, “It is marvelous how he can give so much attention to a detail and to do it so well as he has done this. . . . He has spread himself out extremely thin but nevertheless he does carry a wonderful memory and a great amount of penetrative shrewdness into each of these activities.”9

  •

  There was one question neither Roosevelt nor Stimson could answer, because in 1940 there was no practical answer. The Regular Army, numbering nearly half a million men, included 4,700 black soldiers, two black line officers—one nearing retirement age—and four colored combat units led by white officers. Most black enlisted men were assigned as laborers in quartermaster, engineer, or infantry units.

  Compared to its sister services, the Army was progressive. The Air Corps would not train black pilots. The Navy had no black Annapolis graduates, and no black marines; with the exception of six petty officers, black sailors onshore were assigned dock and warehouse duties. Shipboard assignments for a Negro sailor were limited to cook or valet—“seagoing bellhops,” the black press called them.

  Given the tremendous manpower expansion the war would require, it made sense to find ways to boost non-white enlistment. But the most Roosevelt would back in an election year was a Selective Service Act provision pledging to increase black military participation to the Negro proportion of the civilian population, about 10 percent.

  The catch, buried within the statute’s language, was a proviso that no man of any race would be inducted “until adequate provision shall have been made for shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements, medical care and hospital accommodations.” Whites had these accommodations, but since segregated facilities would require construction of a new set of barracks, hospitals, and other infrastructure, the “separate but equal” philosophy prevailing since Plessy sued Judge Ferguson would ensure that the Army remained all but closed to new black enlistees.10

  Civil rights leaders, led by the Urban League’s T. Arnold Hill and union organizer A. Philip Randolph, called on Roosevelt to open military doors to greater Negro participation. Their demand put FDR in a vise between two groups he could not afford to alienate—moderately conservative whites and reliably Democratic blacks. Under the pressure of an election year, Roosevelt had no choice but to meet with Randolph and Hill.

  On September 27, Roosevelt, Knox, and Stimson’s assistant Robert Patterson met in the Oval Office with Randolph, Hill, and Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As they talked, Roosevelt’s secret office recorder documented the exchange.11

  “Mr. President,” Randolph began, “it would mean a great deal to the morale of the Negro people if you could make some announcement on the role the Negroes will play in the armed forces of the nation. . . . I might say that it is the irritating spot among the Negro people.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” agreed Roosevelt.

  “They feel that they’re not wanted in the various armed forces of the country and they feel that they have earned the right to participate.”

  Roosevelt said he would add something about that in a speech he would give in the near future.

  “It’s a start,” said Randolph.

  “Hell, you and I know it’s a step ahead,” agreed Roosevelt.

  FDR explained his next steps in his typically serpentine fashion. “Now, you take the divisional organization. What are your new divisions? About twelve thousand men.”

  “Fourteen. They vary—” began Patterson.

  “Yes, and twelve, fourteen thousand men,” said Roosevelt. “Now suppose you have in there one—what do they call the gun units? Artillery?”

  “Batteries,” said Patterson.

  “What?”

  “Batteries.”

  “One battery, with Negro troops and officers, in there in that battery, uh, like for instance from New York, and another regiment, or battalion—that’s half a regiment—of Negro troops. They go into a division, a whole division of twelve thousand. And you may have a Negro regiment, you would, here, and right over here on the right in line would be a white regiment in the same division, maintain the divisional organization. Now what happens? After a while, in the case of war those people get shifted from one to the other. The thing we sort of back into.”

  As for the Navy, Roosevelt vaguely claimed that inroads were being made for black sailors outside the messmen’s corps. Turning to Knox, he said, “Another thing I forgot to mention, I thought it about, oh, a month ago, and that is this: We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship, the ship’s band. Now there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a colored band on these ships, because they’re darn good at it.”

  The dismay on the faces of the black leaders set Roosevelt on his heels.

  “At worst, it will increase the opportunity,” he said defensively. “That’s what we’re after.”12

  But Knox was not interested in opportunity. He had to work with the admirals whose officers would revolt, and he flatly declared that the Navy’s special circumstances—men living and working in confined quarters—made integration unworkable.

  “We have a factor in the Navy that is not so in the Army, and that is that these men live aboard ship,” he said. “In our history we don’t take Negroes into a ship’s company.” He added that it was a particular problem for sailors and officers from Southern states.

  Trying to lighten the atmosphere, Roosevelt joked, “If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it would be different.”13

  The civic leaders were not amused. But they left the Oval Office believing Roosevelt sympathized with them enough to act on their rather modest requests.

  FDR left the meeting torn between his notion of equality and the demands of the moment. His conscience told him that if war came, the Negro soldier deserved the right to etch his place among the nation’s war monuments. Colored troops had fought bravely at Battery Wagner, San Juan Hill, and the Meuse-Argonne, and he saw acceptance of black troops as a morally compelling step.

  But the country was also facing a grave foreign threat, and he was facing an election year. The day Roosevelt met with Randolph, Hill, and White, General Marshall was writing Senator Henr
y Cabot Lodge Jr. that it was no time “for critical experiments which would have a highly destructive effect on morale,” such as service integration. With Europe under Hitler’s jackboot, America could not afford to weaken its anemic military power through a new social initiative.14

  Stimson agreed. He was the son of an abolitionist who had fought for the Union, but Henry Stimson’s job was to build an Army, not reform society or rectify inequities rooted in 300 years of slavery. He told his diary, “This crime of our forefathers had produced a problem which was almost impossible of solution in this country and I myself could see no theoretical or logical solution for it at war times like these.” 15

  • • •

  A stumble by the president’s press secretary, Steve Early, triggered another lurch toward desegregation. When the September White House meeting produced no apparent results, black leaders turned to Eleanor Roosevelt. She began hounding the War Department to make concessions to the concept of equality, and aggressively followed up on complaints of discrimination by colored soldiers in training camps and surrounding towns.16

  Pushed by Eleanor, the Army agreed to induct colored units into each major branch of service, including aviation training. It refused to integrate units below the brigade level, however. “The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations,” it announced. “This policy has proven satisfactory over a long period and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense.”17

  When the White House acknowledged the statement, Early gave journalists the misleading impression that the black leaders who met with Roosevelt agreed with the War Department’s policy. The outraged trio called Early’s statement a gross mischaracterization of their meeting with Roosevelt and denounced the Army’s policy as “a blow at the patriotism of twelve million Negro citizens.”

  Black newspapers picked up the cry, which echoed in the mainstream press. Harlem’s Amsterdam News lashed out at the “Jim Crow Army,” while the Kansas City Call carried the story under headlines blaring, “Roosevelt Charged With Trickery in Announcing Jim Crow Army Policy.”18

  The attacks stung FDR, who would be counting on heavy black voter turnout in November. When Eleanor explained to her husband the predicament the civil rights leaders were in—they had to respond to Early’s statement, or their constituents would accuse them of selling out—Roosevelt issued a clarifying statement of his own. There was no fixed policy regarding future units, he said, so the War Department’s policy was not necessarily the way things would always be. “At this time and this time only, we dare not confuse the issue of prompt preparedness with a new social experiment, however important and desirable it may be.”19

  Roosevelt’s clarifying statement actually made his position less clear. But as a sop to civil rights leaders, he announced the promotion of Colonel Benjamin Davis, 36th Coast Artillery Regiment, to brigadier general. He also had Stimson appoint Howard Law School’s Dean William Hastie as civilian aide to the secretary of war on matters of race.20

  Stimson was furious at the election-year concessions. He frumped to his diary, “There is a tremendous drive going on by the negroes, taking advantage of the last weeks of the campaign in order to force the Army and the Navy into doing things for their race which would not otherwise be done and which are certainly not in the interest of sound national defense.” The root cause, he grumbled, was “Mrs. Roosevelt’s intrusive and impulsive folly.” 21

  Whether folly, political gamesmanship, or sound policy, the War Department made limited efforts to accommodate its commander-in-chief. Marshall formed a cavalry brigade from its two traditional colored regiments, the Ninth and Tenth, and he placed General Davis at the brigade’s head. The Army Air Corps also began providing limited, indirect support for black pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program based near Tuskegee, Alabama.22

  An annoyed Stimson doubted that the newly inducted men would develop the leadership skills required of combat officers, and he did little more than pay lip service to Dean Hastie’s cause. During an unusually lighthearted cabinet meeting, he wrote, “I had a good deal of fun with Knox over the necessity that he was now facing of appointing a colored Admiral and a battle fleet full of colored sailors. . . . I told him that when I called next time at the Navy Department with my colored Brigadier General I expected to be met with the colored Admiral.” 23

  •

  FDR had declared Wendell Willkie’s prospects dead in August, but by late September the morbid campaign had a curiously strong heartbeat. After a soft start, Willkie began throwing hard rhetorical punches hitting on the evils of a third-term presidency, and blistered Roosevelt’s warmongering foreign policy. Cheering supporters in Republican strongholds played up the theme with the fervor of a tent-revival choir. If Roosevelt won, Willkie told an audience in October, “You can count on our men being on transports for Europe six months from now.”24

  Willkie’s wave was rising, and no one knew when it would crest. By October, Roosevelt’s lead appeared vulnerable, and just as the Gallup organization showed Willkie gaining in strength, John Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations spurned Roosevelt, his longtime ally, and endorsed Willkie as the lesser of two evils. When the defection became public, labor leader Sidney Hillman remarked after the meeting that he had never seen Roosevelt “so thoroughly scared.”25

  Against Willkie’s rising fortunes, Roosevelt took a deep breath and plunged into the campaign’s final weeks. It would be an uphill fight, because over his shoulders lay one of the heaviest political burdens a presidential candidate has ever borne: the imposition of a peacetime draft.

  • • •

  After passage of the Selective Service Act, American men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five assembled before their local draft boards. Each man was given a registration number, the magic sequence of digits that would determine when he would be drafted. On October 29, six days before voters headed to the polls, Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Stimson formally inaugurated the draft on the stage of Washington’s War Department auditorium.26

  The scene for the first lottery drawing emphasized the event’s solemn nature. There were no military bands, no rousing speeches, no color guards shouldering guidons and rifles. Instead, President Roosevelt stood at a podium next to Secretary Stimson and made a few short remarks about the awful necessity that had forced the nation to defend itself. He did nothing to minimize the gravity of the occasion—though he studiously avoided the word “draft,” substituting the word “muster,” a term reminiscent of the patriot armies of George Washington and Old Hickory.

  A large glass fishbowl containing hundreds of cobalt capsules was placed before Stimson. A blindfold, made of yellow linen cut from a chair used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was placed over Stimson’s eyes. Stimson lowered his left hand into the bowl and withdrew the first capsule he touched. He handed the capsule to Roosevelt, who opened it and read the paper slip inside.

  In a firm, low voice Roosevelt called out, “Drawn by the secretary of war, is serial number one-fifty-eight.”27

  • • •

  The decision to hold the draft lottery one week before Election Day created a bitter division among the president’s men. “Any old-time politician would have said [it] could never take place,” said FDR’s speechwriter Sam Rosenman. FDR’s men had urged their boss to schedule the lottery for late November, and Roosevelt knew that photos of himself, standing before a fishbowl representing millions of young men, would be inserted into Republican flyers and imprinted onto the minds of voters heading to polling stations.28

  But Roosevelt, like Willkie, felt he must be candid with the public. War might be coming, and men might die. The issues were too grave for political gamesmanship and too big to be swept under someone else’s rug.

  Democ
ratic allies saw a wave of fear washing over the electorate, and party leaders begged him to assure mothers and fathers that their boys would be sent to training camps, not to war in France. Roosevelt refused to underwrite such a sweeping commitment. He promised he would not send them into “foreign wars” unless America was attacked, but that was as far as he would go.

  On October 31, during a short campaign swing, Roosevelt included in a Boston Garden speech a line underscoring his peaceful intentions. Before a crowd of enthusiastic New Englanders, he told the mothers and fathers of America, “I have said this before, and I shall say this again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”29

  In this speech, he did not include his customary phrase “except in case of attack.” He felt the caveat went without saying. “It’s clearly implied,” he told an uneasy Rosenman. “If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.” Surely the American people would understand that by now.30

  • • •

  As Roosevelt and Eleanor took the train home to Hyde Park on the fourth of November, surveys showed Willkie pulling even. Yet Roosevelt smiled gamely as he drove to his polling station in the white-framed town hall. He chatted up the locals, most of whom he knew, and signed the register, listing “tree farmer” as his occupation. One reporter watching him wrote, “Nothing in the President’s demeanor, at the polling place or in his home circle, indicated concern over the outcome of the election. In fact, he was extraordinarily jovial.”31

  He was less jovial as the evening’s early returns trickled in. Willkie was no Alf Landon, and the prognosis looked grim. Sweating from anxiety, Roosevelt retreated to his dining room and ordered his Secret Service guard, Mike Reilly, to keep everyone out.32

  His able assistant, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, shuttled in fresh returns from chattering teletypes as FDR watched the final battle unfold. Willkie’s early lead was disheartening, but as the evening sky deepened, the center of Roosevelt’s battle line held. The big northern states, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, advanced across the electoral map, breaking for the incumbent. The labor vote, the black vote, the lower-class vote, and the foreign-born vote held steady on the flanks. When the smoke cleared, FDR’s banner, singed and frayed, still flew over the battlefield.33