American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  It would remain for World War II to supply Washington with the authority, the planning and enforcement tools, and the purposefulness that earlier New Deal efforts had lacked. Massive doses of “war Keynesianism” and military manpower drafts finally enabled the “fourth New Deal” to realize its supreme aim of ending unemployment. In the mushrooming of federal agencies and personnel, the huge military planning agencies, the centralization of authority, the subordination of courts and Congress, the New Deal found the firm linkage of ends and means that had eluded it during Roosevelt’s first two terms. The irony of war prosperity was inescapable.

  The domestic New Deal ended up as a lavish policy feast, which later Presidents and Congresses could use as precedents and learning experiences, especially in the realms of economic reform and social welfare. The New Deal recruited a brilliant corps of innovators, planners, and dreamers who invigorated later administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, for decades. The tragedy of the domestic New Deal was that it failed to fashion an effective economic strategy and stick with it. Conceivably a rigorous and sustained budget-balancing effort from the start would have encouraged, as in past economic cycles, a sharp recovery of investor confidence, but Roosevelt for reasons both humanitarian and political soon rejected this harsh policy. Conceivably the NRA could have been reorganized after its voiding by the High Court and converted into a comprehensive venture in industrial rationalization and economic planning, but the President gave up on it. He favored somewhat redistributionist tax policies, but not to the extent where they might have served as a decisive step toward a more egalitarian society. He played with antimonopoly policies, regionalization, encouragement of local initiatives without ever surrendering his strong reliance on national action. Above all he failed to carry through the one strategy that was politically the most feasible and economically the soundest for a depressed economy—broad fiscal planning encompassing monetary, investment, pricing, interest rate, public works, and welfare policies, a strategy based not on occasional “pump priming” but on the heavy and continuous deficit spending that later fueled the war economy.

  If the New Deal domestic heritage was mixed at best, the image of the head New Dealer remained clear and vibrant in the people’s memory—that of a cheerful, buoyant, warmhearted man absolutely committed to his goals of economic recovery and social justice, a very political man who could strike deals and manipulate men and win elections, an orator who could touch people’s hearts as they sat by a fireside, a man who always seemed in motion despite the polio-wasted legs of which, at least in public, he never complained and never explained. He had his bad days when he was negative and critical and even spiteful but he always bounced back, causing Morgenthau or Ickes or some other complainer to put his resignation statement back into his pocket and hearken anew to his boss’s uncertain trumpet.

  A dozen years later Holmes’s perception could be both affirmed and extended—a first-class temperament and second-class intellect, yes, but also, throughout the presidential years, superb intelligence and rarely failing insight.

  As a war leader too, Roosevelt was a deeply divided man—divided between the Soldier of the Faith, the principled leader, the man of ideals, crusading for a spacious and coherent vision, and the man of Realpolitik, Machiavelli’s Prince, the leader intent on narrow, manageable, short-run goals, careful always to protect and husband his power in a world of shifting moods and capricious fortune. This dualism not only cleft Roosevelt but divided his advisers within themselves and from one another. And it reflected central dichotomies within the American people, who vacillated between the evangelical moods of idealism, sentimentalism, and utopianism and traditions of national self-protection, prudence, and power politics.

  Roosevelt demonstrated his purposeful, principled, steady, and coherent leadership most strikingly as Commander-in-Chief and war propagandist. He brilliantly articulated the ideals of freedom for which the nation fought and he provided ample and steadfast support to the men and women who were fighting for those ideals. For a leader who had intervened almost promiscuously in the decisions of his domestic agencies he was remarkably self-restrained in dealing with his generals and admirals. Even when he might have exploited some incident for his own political gain—as in the case of General George Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily—he was silent. For a highly political man, he left selection of his generals to the top command; even Stimson acknowledged his “scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” He overturned few sentences after courts-martial.

  As an old navy man the Commander-in-Chief offered numerous suggestions and queries to the armed services, but he largely left them alone. Only when it came to political matters did he exert close authority. He insisted on the principle of unconditional surrender, arousing misgivings among some in the Pentagon even though it flowed directly out of the American military tradition. Roosevelt recognized the political significance of the doctrine, which had been fully vetted in the State Department, for maintaining unity among the Rainbow Coalition, discouraging divisive surrender offers by the enemy, and setting things straight for postwar peacekeeping efforts. Robert Dallek concluded that Roosevelt was the “principal architect” of the basic strategic decisions that brought the early defeat of the Axis.

  Roosevelt the Prince, the global politician, the Machiavellian leader, lived uneasily with Roosevelt the Soldier of the Faith. FDR dealt not only with Churchill behind Stalin’s back but with Stalin behind Churchill’s. He misled the American people on his aggressive posture in the Atlantic. He failed to communicate to Polish leaders—or to the American people—the full gravity of Soviet intransigence about their western borders. He did not share atomic secrets with his Russian ally. Remembering talks with Roosevelt during wartime, de Gaulle was to write of FDR’s “light touches,” made “so skillfully that it was difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer, in any categorical way.” In numberless other political decisions—or in military decisions involving politics—Roosevelt manipulated, dissimulated, horse-traded, always on the grounds that this was the prudent or practical or realistic way to act.

  He appeared to combine the most striking qualities of his two great presidential mentors—the martial vigor of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. But just as both those qualities were evident in both those men, FDR appeared to embrace principle and Realpolitik almost indiscriminately. Part of his strength lay in this; it was hard to know what Roosevelt one was dealing with. William James had spoken of the “once-born,” those who easily fitted into the ideology of their time, and of those “divided selves” who went through a second birth, seizing on a second ideology. Raised in a stable and secure home, comfortable in his self-identity despite some injuries to his self-esteem, Roosevelt in many respects was the classic once-born leader. But he shifted so widely in his priorities of political leadership during his long career that he appeared at least thrice-born—not only as Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win-the-War but ultimately as Dr. Win-the-Peace.

  Both Roosevelt’s idealism and his Realpolitik were effective; the problem lay in the linkage between the two. He often failed to work out the intermediary ends and means necessary to accomplish his purposes. Thus he could proclaim unconditional surrender but practice some kind of deal with Darlan and later the Italians. The more he preached his lofty ends and practiced his limited means, the more he widened the gap between popular expectations and actual possibilities. Not only did this derangement of ends and means lead to crushed hopes and disillusion at home; it would help sow the seeds of cold war later. The Kremlin contrasted Roosevelt’s coalition rhetoric with his Britain-first strategy and falsely suspected a bourgeois conspiracy to destroy Soviet communism. Indians and Chinese contrasted his anticolonial words with his military concessions to colonial powers, and falsely inferred that he was an imperialist at heart and a hypocrite to boot.

  Like most of the more effective Presidents, Roosevelt made his White House years a magnific
ent learning experience for himself and those around him. Like the great teaching Presidents in the early years of the republic—notably Washington, Jefferson, Jackson—he educated the American people in the uses of government to achieve great national purposes. Like the other world leaders of his time, he aroused people’s hopes, converted them into expectations and entitlements, and then responded to the demands that his followers—now become leaders—put on him. Like the stronger Presidents of the past century—notably Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson—he moved broadly to the left of the political spectrum in which he operated. But if his commitment to liberty and equality—to freedom—was realized most fully and paradoxically in the war years, he ended up in this posture as the result not of a steady evolution but rather of a series of jumps from role to role, as in the case of Dr. New Deal shifting suddenly to Dr. Win-the-War.

  This capacity to compartmentalize his presidency and even his personality over time, and at any one time, gave him political advantages. It also helped explain the greatest moral failure of his presidency—a failure even greater and far more disastrous than his authorization of relocation camps for Japanese-Americans. This was his inaction in the face of the Holocaust. For years Roosevelt, like other Western leaders, had denounced Nazi persecution of the Jews. During the months after Pearl Harbor, reports began to reach the White House that something unspeakably more horrible was taking place—the “final solution of the Jewish question”: calculated, mechanized, bureaucratized murder on a colossal scale. Reports came too of people by the hundreds and thousands buried or burned alive, of infants swung by the heels and dashed against walls, of boxcars groaning with their loads of sick, freezing, starving, suffocating, dying “passengers.”

  The totality of this holocaust was matched by the near-totality of failure on the part of everything that was supposed to stand guard against barbarism—press, church, public opinion, government itself. Newspapers became so inured to the reports, or found them so “beyond belief,” that an authentic account of the murder of tens of thousands of Jews might be put on an inside page next to marriage announcements. Leaders of the Christian churches within the United States and outside were almost silent. The public, misled by atrocity stories about the Germans during World War I, wondered if it was being bamboozled again. State Department officials, irresponsibly slow to react to anguished pleas and demands for help, appeared to reflect the moral lethargy and the endemic anti-Semitism among the public and Congress.

  The President was not wholly passive. Persuaded by Morgenthau and others that Hull’s people were hopelessly inadequate to the situation, he established the War Refugee Board under his direct supervision. He authorized hostage deals and other specific operations that saved a number of Jews. He periodically denounced the slaughter in the strongest terms. But between his word and his deed lay a void. Urged to disrupt the shipment of human cargo by bombing the rail lines to the extermination factory of Auschwitz in Poland, he reverted to his role of Dr. Win-the-War, contending that all resources must be directed to the military destruction of Nazism and that such diversions would postpone that day. Yet even as that day approached, even as American bombers overflew the rail lines, overflew Auschwitz itself, European Jewry fell as steadily to its destruction as sand through an hourglass, until only three million, then only two million, then only one million, and finally only a handful of Jews remained alive, and these physically and psychologically devastated. On this ultimate crime against humanity the President never displayed—never sought to display—the consistent and compelling moral leadership that would break through bureaucratic callousness, legislative resistance, popular ignorance and apathy.

  So Franklin Roosevelt left a highly divided legacy to a people themselves classically devoted on the one hand to lofty global ideals and on the other to narrow isolationist self-protection, with weak linkage between. But he left also a living legacy—living on in the unquenchable memories of his own leadership, living on also in the persons to whom he immediately passed on the legacy. One was his Vice President, a practical politician. The other was his wife, an impractical politician. They would become both allies and antagonists, politically and symbolically, in the nation’s postwar leadership. Isaiah Berlin spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “greatness of character and goodness of heart.” She possessed much more than this, including some of the militance and tenacity of her Uncle Theodore—but character and goodness of heart would not be the least of the qualities she would bring to the struggle for peace.

  The Long Telegram

  So swiftly did the cold war envelop the Rainbow Coalition during 1945 that for decades historians would search for the sources of this early and acrimonious falling-out between Moscow and Washington. Two comrades-in-arms, who had come together from opposite sides of the globe to beat down the most murderous and monstrous threat the modern world had known, appeared suddenly to turn on each other in a new war of words and weapons. The turnabout seemed to defy conventional explanation. These two great nations had no common land borders to fight over, no heritage of ancient rivalries, no dire economic conflict, no clashing territorial ambitions. For a century before 1917 their main contact had been a mutually satisfactory real estate deal over Alaska.

  American visitors to the Soviet Union noted how the two countries appeared to resemble each other: huge continental nations with comparable populations, both boasting revolutions to celebrate and world-famous leaders—Lincoln and Wilson, Lenin and Trotsky—to glorify or denigrate. Visitors from the American Midwest felt at home when they observed the immense, gently undulating plains, the seasons suddenly changing from the deep snow of winter to the bottomless mud of spring to blinding summer light and drought, the “deep, mournful, yet mellifluous and muted bellowing” of the huge steam locomotives as they rumbled across the flat plain. Russians, when you got to know them, seemed a lot like Americans—friendly, talkative, boastful, fascinated by new cars, machines, household gadgets.

  Most of these appearances were deceptive. Russian history, society, psychology, culture were profoundly different from the American. The flat plains that for Americans were havens of peace and isolation—at least since the dispersion of the Indians—were for Russians avenues of attack from neighboring countries. The vast majority of Soviet citizens were peasants—religious, fatalistic, isolated in their remote and scattered villages, tending to suspicion toward outsiders. The Russian temperament, far more than the American, appeared to be at odds with itself—a popular craving for authority, leadership, and collective controls clashing with a tendency to be “independent to the point of anarchy,” in Edward Crankshaw’s words, “and expansive to the point of incoherence.” Although both peoples apotheosized common values in their sacred documents—freedom, justice, equality, human rights—American children in their families and schools and churches had been taught to abhor communism, Soviet children to abhor capitalism and the fascism it allegedly spawned. Each side not only hated the other’s ideology but feared it. The “reds” were seeking to arouse the world proletariat against the democratic—the American—way of life; the American warmongers sought to encircle and crush the Russian Revolution—had they not tried to stifle it in its cradle in 1919?

  A quarter century after the Russian Revolution, each nation grotesquely misperceived the other’s “plot” for “world domination.” United States propagandists and press quoted Marxist predictions of inevitable war, not bothering to point out that Lenin had preached the inevitability of war among the capitalistic nations rather than between communism and capitalism. Soviet propagandists seized on the more extreme statements of American leaders—notably that of a then obscure American senator named Harry S Truman, who had said during the frightful summer days of 1941, as the Nazis were rolling across the Russian plains, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible,” though he added that he did not want to see Hitler victorious under an
y circumstances.

  Many on each side misperceived the other side’s wish for world communism or world capitalism to become the global way of life as an elaborately blueprinted plot for world conquest. These fears persisted throughout World War II, certainly among Americans and probably among Soviet citizens as they were continually reminded of the West’s “perfidious” failure to mount the cross-Channel invasion. Even during the euphoria of wartime collaboration, polls showed that many Americans were not counting on the Russians to “cooperate” after the war.

  Was any reality perceivable through the mists of ideology? Patterns of behavior were discernible to those who looked for them, but the patterns were mixed. The Bolsheviks had waged ideological warfare against the West ever since winning power, but the trumpet calls were rarely more than bombast. In Finland and Poland and elsewhere, Moscow had shown a ferocious determination to exert control over border countries, but its aim seemed far more to prevent these nations from serving as stepping-stones for invading armies than to make them bases for Red Army moves against Western Europe or Japan. The Kremlin subsidized Communist parties around the world, but invariably subordinated those parties’ interests to its own state interests when they collided. And the West had some knowledge of Stalin’s massive party purges, in which thousands of old comrades perished, and of his “de-kulakization” and forced collectivization campaigns, in which millions of peasants were executed or sent to Siberian labor camps or died of starvation—but these were “internal matters.”