American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For business, voluntary cooperation was patriotic, and also good for both its image and its profits. Industry received lush incentives to maximize production. Contracts were made on a cost-plus basis; the government undertook to pay all costs plus a fixed fee, or guaranteed profit, and thereby freed the contractor of risk. “Of course it contributes to waste,” said the president of Bell Aviation. “For maximum economy, go flat price. If you want maximum output, you have to go fixed fee.” The government also subsidized or made low-interest loans for expanding production facilities—which would be made available to companies at fire-sale prices when the war ended. Not surprisingly, net corporate profits rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to $10.8 billion in 1944. In five years corporate assets almost doubled to nearly $100 billion. Said Secretary of War Stimson: in a capitalistic society at war, “you have to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”

  Big business certainly. For many small enterprises, the war years brought anxiety and disappointment. The Administration lacked a firm policy on using small business, which in turn had few friends among military procurement officers; these tended to favor large corporations with whom they had established contacts. The Truman Committee took up the cause of small business and two agencies were created: the Small War Plants Division within WPB and the separate Small War Plants Corporation. Nevertheless small firms received only a tiny percentage of army contracts, and half a million small enterprises went out of business from 1941 to 1943. At the top of the pyramid two-thirds of all wartime contracts went to a hundred firms, with ten corporations receiving almost one-third of the business.

  Organized workers also made out relatively well. Union membership, fueled by the huge job expansion, rose from under nine million in 1940 to almost fifteen in 1945. The AFL claimed seven million members, the CIO six million. Five weeks after Pearl Harbor the President established the National War Labor Board, composed of four public members, four from industry, and four representatives of labor. Much stronger than its predecessor agency, the Defense Mediation Board, the NWLB could take over a labor dispute on its own authority and impose settlement rather than merely recommend it. The board boldly took on the problem of closed shop versus open. Under a statesmanlike formula, “maintenance of voluntarily established membership,” workers were given a fifteen-day grace period during which they could quit their union and still keep their jobs. After that they had to pay union dues for the life of the contract.

  The Labor Board epitomized the three-way partnership among government, industry, and labor that was supposed to preside over economic mobilization. Labor had demanded an equal partnership—after all, it provided the sinews of production—but soon felt relegated to a junior status. In return for a no-strike pledge that some national union leaders made after Pearl Harbor, labor expected more than token representation in the industry-dominated mobilization agencies. But labor “advisory committees” were appointed and ignored. When Walter Reuther, an astute young vice president of the auto workers, early on proposed an ambitious plan to convert the auto industry’s excess capacity to the production of 500 aircraft a day under the supervision of a government-industry-labor board, the idea was dismissed as “socialism.”

  CIO president Philip Murray had joined in the no-strike pledge, but later he began to lose control of the rank and file, who he said were showing an “attitude of rebellion.” Grass-roots leaders, unfettered by “partnership” promises, responded to the grievances of men and women working perhaps eleven hours a day, living in shacks and trailers, driving or busing for hours to and from work. Wages for some had risen 15 percent under a 1942 “Little Steel” formula, but this was barely enough to compensate for inflation, and prices continued to rise during 1942 and 1943—another 8 percent, the government admitted, another 28 percent, labor claimed. As in the past, the tight labor market put extra leverage in the hands of union organizers and strike provokers. The result was 3,700 work stoppages in 1943, even more in 1944. Ford alone experienced 773 wildcat strikes between 1941 and 1945.

  The most conspicuous nonpartner was John L. Lewis, more militant and truculent than ever. True to his 1940 pledge, Lewis had resigned as CIO president after FDR’s reelection. As head still of the United Mine Workers he kept his base in the pits, but in the early war years he was an isolated figure nationally. The miners too, after early wage boosts, suffered with frozen wage rates and rising prices. “When the mine workers’ children cry for food,” Lewis thundered, “they cannot be satisfied with a ‘Little Steel Formula.’ ” Pledged to support the war effort, Lewis was reluctant to strike, but his oratory inspired militant rank-and-file miners who moved ahead of him. In January 1943 they staged unauthorized walkouts, with the demand that Lewis immediately negotiate a $2-a-day pay boost. Emboldened by the miners’ demands even as he put them back to work, Lewis negotiated fruitlessly with the mine owners for six weeks, boycotted the NWLB when it took over the case, and resisted both presidential appeals and presidential threats, including one to draft men up to the age of sixty-five (Lewis was sixty-three).

  “Speaking for the soldiers, John Lewis,” trumpeted the service journal Stars and Stripes, “damn your coal black soul.” Earl Browder, at this point militarized as well as communized, denounced Lewis’s “insurrection against the war.” The conflict drifted on into the fall, the miners remaining adamant and Lewis maintaining a public image of inflexibility while in fact making compromise after compromise. FDR joked that he would gladly resign his presidency if only Lewis would commit suicide. The agreement finally signed in November 1943 brought the miners $2 more a week rather than $2 a day, but Lewis had demonstrated that he and his union were willing to arouse the public’s wrath if necessary to make the Little Steel formula bend a bit.

  The least organized Americans, of course, were women and blacks. The increase in income for these groups, as for the poor in general, was in contrast to their actual well-being. Although firms were reluctant to hire women until the pool of male workers was depleted, by 1943 women made up a big part of the work force in such war industries as steel (18.5 percent), aircraft (39), communications equipment (51), small-arms ammunition (47), and rubber products (38). Women operated drill presses, milling machines, cranes, turret lathes. They burred and painted and doped, riveted and welded and loaded. They drove buses and taxis, served as police officers and football coaches. Ford put a team of manicurists to work filing precision instruments. By August 1944 over 18 million women had jobs, nearly twice as many as in early 1941.

  But even in wartime, when “equal pay for equal work” was proclaimed, women in manufacturing earned $34.50 weekly in 1944, while men made $57.50. Many unions admitted women, if only because they feared that employers would otherwise use them to undercut union wage scales, but some unions, including the Teamsters, admitted women only “for the duration,” as though they were industrially dispensable when the war ended. That was the myth of Rosie the Riveter. Though Rosie had been happy as a housewife, she went to work for patriotic reasons. She enjoyed her war work but would eagerly return to housework after the duration, when men would return to reclaim their jobs.

  Like white women, black men had to wait for jobs until the manpower shortage became acute, and that wait could be “mighty slow.” As of September 1941 more than half the jobs created by federal defense contracts were as a matter of company policy closed to blacks, but by 1944 Negro workers made up 7.5 percent of employment in war production. The wage differential between whites and blacks closed somewhat—from worse than a ratio of one to two in 1940 to that of $2,000 to $2,600 in 1944. Sometimes unions were more discriminatory than employers. Blacks had their own “unions” in the NAACP, its membership expanding explosively with the enrollment of black servicemen, and in the newly founded Congress of Racial Equality, which used sit-ins in its strategy of nonviolent direct action. In the human pressure cookers of the big industrial centers, race riots exploded in Detroit and Los Angeles in June 1943, both touched off by
white servicemen stationed nearby.

  And to be both black and female? In September 1942 only fifty black women worked in war plants, and even two years later only 13.4 percent of employed Negro women worked in manufacturing of any sort. More than half provided domestic and personal services. In a St. Louis electric company 64 percent of the employees were white women, 24 percent black men, and 12 percent white men, but the company hired not a single black woman despite a government order to do so. Black women were typically the sweepers, janitors, and material handlers; one in a Baltimore arsenal lifted fifty-five-pound boxes of TNT all day long for $18 a week.

  And so the production of war drew on the vast industrial energies of Americans, lifting some out of money poverty but not out of social poverty, reflecting both the power of the organized and the vulnerability of the unorganized but leaving class relationships essentially unchanged. Except in one respect—there was a new instant underclass created by anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast, popular fears of a “Jap invasion,” army overzealousness, and timid politicians in Washington and Sacramento. This consisted of almost the entire West Coast population of 120,000 Japanese-Americans now living behind barbed wire in concentration camps.

  They had been routed out of their homes some weeks after Pearl Harbor, tagged like checked parcels, and dispatched to assembly centers— hastily converted racetracks, fairgrounds, stockyards—where they might be housed in stables, searched at will, and ringed by guards and searchlights. After a few months they were loaded onto trains and shipped, with blinds drawn, to camps in the deserts of Arizona and California, the barren flatlands of Utah, the swampy lowlands of Arkansas—ten camps in all. Families lived in cramped tar-paper barracks, ate in mess halls, used communal showers and toilets. They cleared sagebrush, dug irrigation canals, produced vegetables and poultry. They were the new money-poor, earning $8 to $16 a month.

  “When I first entered our room, I became sick to my stomach,” Stanley Shimabukuro wrote from the Santa Anita assembly camp. “There were seven beds in the room and no furnishings nor any partitions to separate the males and the females of the family.” The food was terrible. “I feel so sorry for granduncle and grandauntie.” Two weeks later he found a ray of hope. His parents, he wrote, were showing signs of a new faith in “what I’d like to call a Brotherhood of Mankind” as against the persecution of yellow men by whites. In another camp a child asked, “When can we go back to America?”

  No protesting voice of consequence was raised as Americans watched their friends and neighbors lose their most precious possession, liberty. Few wondered why Japanese were penned up but not Germans or Italians. No party of consequence opposed the “relocation,” as it was called. The normal checks and balances of politics were suspended, as were the normal checks and balances of the Constitution. Congress later ratified the act and the Supreme Court much later validated it. The relocation deeply disturbed Morgenthau and Ickes, but the cabinet registered no opposition. Walter Lippmann, so zealous of individual liberties back in New Deal days, urged strong measures on the ground that the Pacific Coast was officially a combat zone. Senator Taft challenged the legislation, but his objection was to the wording and form of the bill, not to the relocation itself. Attorney General Francis Biddle at first strongly opposed evacuation, then washed his hands of the matter.

  “Politics is out,” Roosevelt told reporters in March 1942. In assuming nonpartisanship the Commander-in-Chief had suspended some of the traditional political processes. There was now no loyal opposition to confront the White House and propose major alternatives—only individual critics shooting from all directions. But politics in democratic America could never be adjourned, war or no war. The only question was what form politics would assume.

  It would take an electoral form in any event, since the 1942 congressional and state elections lay ahead. Well aware of Woodrow Wilson’s setback in 1918, the President adopted a hands-off policy. “When a country is at war,” he told reporters, “we want Congressmen, regardless of party—get that—to back up the Government of the United States.” But the Politician-in-Chief could no more abstain from politicking than a toper from a drink. He tried without success to produce a strong Democratic challenger to Thomas Dewey’s gubernatorial quest in New York. He was no more successful in seeking to unite Democrats and liberal Republicans against his old Dutchess County neighbor and antagonist Hamilton Fish. He publicly endorsed the independent reelection campaign of Senator George Norris, sending him a note—“If this be treason, let every citizen of Nebraska hear about it”—but failed in his effort to keep a Democrat out of the race.

  With a low turnout on election day, Republicans gained a surprising 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate. Wilson had called for a Democratic Congress in 1918, a commentator noted, and had lost seats in both House and Senate; FDR had not called for anything and had lost twice as many. Republican gubernatorial candidates Dewey in New York, Earl Warren in California, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, John Bricker in Ohio, all won. The independent Norris lost. When Congress convened in 1943, southern and border-state Democrats held 120 of the 222Democratic seats in the House and 29 of 57 in the Senate. With conservative Republicans they could form a majority. The anti-Roosevelt conservative coalition was alive and well again.

  The new Congress set about gutting whatever was vulnerable in the remaining New Deal. The legislators in 1942 had already refused to allocate funds for the firstborn of the New Deal agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and even ardent New Dealers had to grant with FDR that the WPA now deserved an “honorable discharge.” But the same could not so easily be said of the National Resources Planning Board, the Farm Security Administration, or the Rural Electrification Administration, which Congress axed, gutted, or starved in 1943. In that year Congress rejected the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to expand Social Security coverage, even though Roosevelt had gone out of his way to take any New Deal label off it. And the Smith-Connally bill, giving the government wide powers to end work stoppages, was passed over his veto. John L. Lewis had got his comeuppance.

  Having now doffed the garb of “Dr. New Deal,” as he put it, and donned that of “Dr. Win-the-War,” Roosevelt could accept the counterattack on New Deal measures with some equanimity. But the attack on his domestic war program was something else. On the critical issue of financing the war, he believed he could not afford to surrender. Congress in 1942 had passed tax legislation that raised $7 billion in additional revenue, boosted corporation taxes and the excess-profits tax, and brought millions of Americans onto the tax rolls for the first time. By mid-1943, however, the government was spending nearly $7 billion a month on the war, the national debt had risen since 1939 from $40.4 billion to $136.7 billion, and consumers would be left with more than $40 billion that available goods and services could not soak up. A flood of debt and inflation threatened the war economy.

  To dam this flood Treasury Secretary Morgenthau in October 1943 called for $10.5 billion in new revenue, over half to come from personal income taxes and the rest from corporate, excise, and gift and estate taxes.

  The House Ways and Means Committee threw out the Administration proposals and drafted a bill of its own that would raise just $2 billion in new taxes. This bill the full House and Senate passed after their conferees had merrily ratified the tax concessions the two chambers had granted business. It was “really a vicious piece of legislation,” Rosenman said, riddled with special-interest provisions.

  His boss agreed. In a biting veto message FDR called the congressional measure “a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” He would not be content with this “small piece of crust.” Now it was Majority Leader Barkley’s turn to become indignant. He had advised the President against a veto, he brooded; now here was this sarcastic message. In high dudgeon Barkley stood before the Senate to denounce the President’s “relief for the greedy” crack as a “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member
of Congress.” The stage was now set for a political charade. Barkley indicated he would resign as Majority Leader. FDR wrote him a placatory letter hoping that he wouldn’t, and that the Senate Democrats would reelect him if he did. Barkley resigned anyway, the Senate Democrats met and reelected him—all amid exploding flashbulbs and torrents of excited newspaper talk.

  The flap was over in a few days, with Barkley back in his post as the Administration workhorse. But a residue of bitterness remained. And a fiscal crisis in the making, for Congress by heavy majorities passed its tax bill, the first time in history a revenue bill had become law over a presidential veto. For all practical purposes, Roosevelt now felt, the nation had a Republican Congress.

  The penning up of over 100,000 fellow Americans, the wartime restrictions on almost everyone’s individual liberty, the continued subordination of women and blacks, the contrast between the material well-being of tens of millions of Americans and the deep and ceaseless sorrow of those who had lost fathers, brothers, and sons (and the first few mothers, sisters, and daughters), the impoverished lives of even high-flying, big-spending war workers—all this should have sharpened questions about the fundamental meaning of the war. Yes, avenging Pearl Harbor—yes, beating Hitler—yes, winning, winning—but beyond that, what? Four months after Pearl Harbor half the respondents in a survey admitted that they had “no clear idea of what the war was all about.” A year after Pearl Harbor fully one-third still had no “clear idea.” The vast majority had no notion—or only the foggiest—of the Atlantic Charter or of the freedoms the nation was defending.

  Still, the concentration on winning the war, under the leadership of Dr. Win-the-War, had a profound psychological impact on people. They felt included, involved, integrated with their fellow citizens. Even in remote areas people could tend Victory gardens, take part in civil defense, collect rubber or scrap metal or paper, turn in cans of fat, serve on rationing boards. Six hundred thousand people manned observation posts against enemy planes that never came. One such sentinel at the gates was a Connecticut woman of eighty-six years, three-quarters blind but with 20/20 hearing and sense of duty. For many this feeling of participating and sharing helped make up for the shabbiness of their wartime living and the emptiness of their war lives. At least for a time—the longer the war continued, Richard Polenberg concluded, the more people turned to “private and personal concerns.”