The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The failures had a multitude of causes, but not least the President’s reluctance to make strategic commitments, his determination not to plan ahead too far, his fear of vesting too much authority in one man or office. Pearl Harbor jarred these old predilections of his. The declared war not only gave him a plenitude of authority to clear the decks, boost production goals, and grant power; it also gave him the popular backing for crisis action and the self-assurance that he was acting for a consensus. He was aware, too, that events had dramatized the failures of SPAB and OPM. The Truman Committee was digging up production delays and muddles, and its chairman was urging that a strong man with full authority be placed at the head of the production effort.

  Roosevelt was under pressure from within his administration, too: Stimson urged him to concentrate executive power into a single head on the business side of munitions making; Felix Frankfurter, who was still sending the President notes of unabashed admiration and praise, wrote him a long memo favoring the appointment of a man who would serve as the President’s eyes and ears in overseeing the defense program and would be an instrument of the “centralized execution of the President’s will—an instrument of dispatch, concentration and responsibility.” The CIO was still pressing for faster conversion through the establishment of industry councils. Walter Reuther, of the Auto Workers, charged a week after Pearl Harbor that his year-old plan to convert auto plants to airplane manufacture had been sabotaged by Knudsen.

  Even with all this, Roosevelt took a gingerly approach. It was clear that Knudsen had to go; but the old GM boss had been so utterly loyal and had become such a symbol of mobilization that the President did not know how to let him go, until Hopkins came up with the idea of making him a lieutenant general and production expediter. For a time Roosevelt dallied with the notion of setting up a committee of Willkie, Donald M. Nelson, of OPM, and Justice William O. Douglas to “explore” the problem of defense organization for him; Hopkins talked him out of that notion. For a time he thought of making Douglas the new czar of czars, but Stimson felt that this would be a “hideous” appointment. In the end the job went to Nelson, who had proved himself no superczar, but a skilled conciliator, and had won the backing of most—or, at least, antagonized the fewest—of Roosevelt’s defense chiefs.

  “It took Lincoln three years to discover Grant, and you may not have hit on your production Grant first crack out of the box,” Frankfurter wrote to him. “But the vital thing is that you have created the function—the function of one exclusive ‘final’ delegate of your authority…indispensable for your conduct of the war.”

  The labor situation before Pearl Harbor had been equally critical and far more visible. Four times as many workers struck during 1941 as in the year before. The defense boom and AFL-CIO rivalry were major causes, but the thorniest issue was union security. Labor chiefs contended that new workers flooding into the defense plants could not enjoy the benefits unions had fought for without joining; employers denounced any effort to use the defense crisis to boost union power. On this explosive issue the National Defense Mediation Board had followed a wavering course, always denying the union shop, once even granting a closed shop, and sometimes recommending maintenance of membership (under which all employees who were members of a union or who later became members must stay in the union for the life of the contract, or lose their jobs). The NDMB was under pressure to set a more definite policy, but, lacking clear direction from the President or credible authority of its own, the board continued to straddle the issue.

  Roosevelt’s old adversary John L. Lewis happily fished in these troubled waters. Wrangling in turn with employers, rival unionists, and the White House, he demanded a union shop for the “captive” miners working in pits controlled by Big Steel. In mid-September 1941 he pulled the captive mine workers out on strike. Fearful of strengthening his already powerful union, the Mediation Board repeatedly denied him the union shop. In mid-November the two CIO members of the board denounced both the employer and the AFL members for opposing the union shop, and resigned. The miners kept striking, returning to work on the President’s request, and then striking again. At the White House Roosevelt bluntly warned Lewis and CIO President Philip Murray that “the Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop.”

  May 2,1941, Hugh Hutton, by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer

  Once again Roosevelt and Lewis were at loggerheads. When the President asked the union chief to let the question be arbitrated, Lewis replied loftily that the President was so prejudiced that no one he chose would be impartial.

  The gauntlet had been thrown. By now—two weeks before Pearl Harbor—the Mediation Board was expiring. Its chairman, William H. Davis, was urging Roosevelt to request legislation authorizing the government to seize and operate the mines. Trouble flared on another labor front, as the five railway brotherhoods rejected the findings of an emergency presidential board. The White House asked both the miners and the railroad workers for further parleys, but clearly parleying was no longer enough. Both employers and union chiefs needed a command, and Roosevelt would not command them. Rather, he had become a one-man mediation appeals board. Pressure was applied on him directly from all sides. He had to devote hour after hour to negotiating, placating, maneuvering—and do so during the feverish days of rising military and diplomatic crisis of late November and early December.

  But the President was still the master broker. While Lewis stalled on the question of arbitration, the President blandly went ahead and set up a tripartite board of arbitration, under John R. Steelman, head of the conciliation service of the Labor Department. The Mine Workers grumpily ordered its men back to work. The President’s man was not as susceptible to Big Business blandishments as Lewis had charged, for Steelman promptly sided with labor to decide in favor of the union shop for the captive coal mines. That decision was handed down on December 7, and hence buried in the press—another bit of lucky timing for the President, and for Lewis.

  After Pearl Harbor, in the exuberant new mood of national unity, the President convened his labor-management conference to reach agreement on basic policy for maintaining labor peace. The conferees labored five days. They agreed to discountenance all strikes and lockouts for the duration and to submit disputes to a new war labor board for binding settlements. But on the emotional issue of union security, the conference soon became deadlocked. Industry representatives wanted to freeze union status for the duration; labor would not have it. The session became tense.

  Like an old stage manager, the President pulled down the curtain before the peace conference turned into a battle royal. He ingenuously accepted the no-strike pledge and announced that he would set up a new board to handle disputes. Since he did not exclude the union shop as an issue that the new board could properly arbitrate, the President in effect passed the spiky issue on to the new agency. This was a victory for laborites and liberals who wanted government to accept the challenge and opportunity of the union-security issue. Then in appointing men like Davis, Wayne Morse, long friendly to labor, and Frank P. Graham, a liberal educator, as public members, Roosevelt made an indirect commitment to some form of union security. With this lead from the White House everything would now turn on the decisions of the board under the day-to-day pressure of new disputes.

  The President had long recognized that workers would not sacrifice wages and status unless the cost of living and industry profits were held down, but it was on this economic front that his power was most limited. He had had a price-control bill introduced in the House Banking and Currency Committee in August, only to open a Pandora’s box of special interests. During three months of hearings, well-organized groups pressed for special exemptions; most vociferous and effective were the Farm Bureau Federation and other farm groups. Under their pressure Roosevelt and Henderson reluctantly went along with a provision for no per cent of parity. The bill that passed the House ten days before Pearl Harbor was
already a tattered remnant of what Roosevelt had wanted. The Senate, even more vulnerable to farm pressures than the House, so riddled the bill with further concessions to cotton, wheat, oats, barley, and hog growers that Majority Leader Alben Barkley himself branded it a “farm relief” measure.

  Thoroughly disappointed in the bill, the President took the unusual step of calling House members of the conference committee to his office to persuade them to moderate the farm provisions in the Senate version. Once again his persuasion seemed to work. After a long and bitter session, the conference committee agreed on a suffer measure. Roosevelt’s establishment of the new War Labor Board, with power to stabilize wages, mollified some Congressmen; even so, the price bill passed the House by a margin of only twenty-five votes over the opposition. Despite the negative recommendation of at least one OPA administrator, the President signed the bill. Perhaps he sensed even then that he would have to ask Congress for broader anti-inflation powers—a move that he did make within three months. Meanwhile, he would proceed one step at a time.

  In a graceful statement on signing the compromise bill he concluded—perhaps a bit wryly after all the vexing delays—by quoting a remark of Woodrow Wilson: “The best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” But it was Wilson, too, who had extolled presidential leadership of a free people.

  SIX The Endless Battlefields

  GRADUALLY THE WHITE HOUSE changed into a military command post during the early weeks of 1942. Soldiers and heavy chains barred the gates. Listening devices lay in the grounds. Artillerymen manned antiaircraft guns on the roof of the mansion and behind false terraces on the lawns. The long line of tourists passing through the first-floor rooms came to an end by order of the Secret Service. Employees had to have passes; visitors had to be listed in advance and carefully checked through the gates. The President could no longer dine out at a hotel; the annual Cabinet dinner given to him and the First Lady had to be held at the White House.

  The President was half-amused, half-exasperated by the precautions. What a wonderful opportunity, he speculated at the Cabinet dinner, for Hitler to drop a bomb and catch so many important people at one gathering. “If all of us except Frances were killed we would have a woman President!”

  In his oval study on the second floor and in his oval office in the executive wing Roosevelt’s routine was much the same as before. Now, however, he had a map room like Churchill’s, and on his way to and from the office he liked to look in at the large charts with task forces and convoys clearly indicated, scan the latest bulletins, and chat with the young officer in charge. But the White House was a somewhat cheerless place, especially after Churchill left. Roosevelt had no family there. Eleanor was busier than ever with her work in the Office of Civilian Defense and in countless other activities. The burden of events—now most of it of a crisis nature—pressed harder than ever on staff and President alike. Evenings were less relaxed; there were more telephone calls, more messages and queries that could not wait.

  He had occasional relief from pressure. At some point during the harrowing months just before or after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt began seeing Lucy Mercer again. Their romance had seemed to be finished forever in 1920 when she had married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a well-to-do widower almost thirty years her senior, and even more the next year when Roosevelt had become an invalid and the ward of his mother and his wife. But some time later he managed to get back in touch with her, and she had shown up in Washington occasionally for official ceremonies during the first two terms. Her husband had recently suffered a stroke and was slowly dying, and the White House had become a lonelier place for Roosevelt than before. He found her the same poignant, diverting woman he had known a quarter-century earlier.

  The revival of this affaire de coeur was well known to some in the White House but not to Eleanor Roosevelt. He would meet Lucy on a road beyond Georgetown and they would drive for a couple of hours; very occasionally friends arranged other meetings. When he once asked Anna whether she would mind if “an old friend” came to dinner, his daughter hesitated for two or three seconds, then said of course she would not. Doubtless the relationship was essentially temperamental rather than physical. Lucy Mercer still epitomized Roosevelt’s ideal of womanliness. She had a charming smile, almost bittersweet features, and graceful, statuesque figure; she attracted him, too, with her relaxed vivacity, complete absorption in his talk of politics, people, and olden times, and her lack of demands on him—except to see him again.

  But even more than Lucy’s diversions, Roosevelt felt the pull to Hyde Park, to the place where he could throw off some of his cares and escape some of his burden, especially the burden of appointments. He firmly opposed his wife’s suggestion that the big house there be turned into a convalescent home; he reminded her that he would not be able to cruise at sea and doubted that he could even use the Potomac because of the target she would make for planes from a hostile carrier. “O.K. My conscience is free,” she wrote on the memo. So every two or three weeks during the winter and spring the President took the long slow train to Hyde Park for stays of five to ten days.

  These trips were unpublicized, by the President’s emphatic instructions. With his small party—Hassett, Grace Tully, one or two secretaries, a doctor, sometimes Hopkins, and always some Secret Service men—he would drive from the White House behind an army truck carrying his luggage and papers and board the presidential train at a secluded siding. On the B&O he slept, talked, sipped cocktails with his staff, watched the passing people and foliage, occasionally went over reports and signed executive orders.

  From Manhattan a New York Central locomotive would take him to Highland, across the river from Poughkeepsie and seven miles from Hyde Park. Soon the President would be happily installed in what was now his own home, with his staff in the Vanderbilt mansion three miles up the river. He had an intense interest in that mansion, its former owners, and present appointments; he quizzed Hassett and the others about their rooms and laughed with them over the Vanderbilts’ effort to copy the decor of French royalty. He contrasted the artificial grandeur of the mansion with the plainer and simpler houses of the old Hudson Valley families; he was maintaining his own home as his mother had, he told Hassett, and as his family had for a century or more. What he really meant, Hassett concluded, was that old-fashioned families did not show off.

  During these trips Hassett became in effect Roosevelt’s first secretary. While sitting with the President on the train, or meeting him in the morning in the bedroom or even the bathroom—“Have a seat on the can, and remember your pants are up,” Roosevelt told him once—or spreading documents out in the little study while the President’s heavy signature dried, he and his chief talked about their common interests: old books and authors, old family friends and national personages, birds, trees—above all, Dutchess County politicians, places, and happenings. Roosevelt had a comfortable sense of ownership of the place; he happily listed for the authorities his possession of a farm truck, dump truck, station wagon, and his little Ford, though he was not sure whether he also owned a little garden truck. And he never lost his feeling for the local flora and fauna. He timed one of his Hyde Park visits to see his dogwood in bloom, and later the same May he left the house at four in the morning to go bird watching at Thompson’s Pond in Pine Plains. His face lighted up later when he told how at daybreak he heard the note of a marsh wren, then a red-winged blackbird, then a bittern. He claimed to have identified the notes of twenty-two birds in all.

  Roosevelt probably never had a “typical day” in his life, but a Saturday at Hyde Park late in March impressed people around him with the range of his interests and the continual flux of his mind. In the morning he chatted with Hassett about a variety of matters, including Sir Basil Zaharoff and American munitions makers who dealt with the Nazis. He then told Hassett of his plans to make a quick, unpublicized visit to New York City, without escort (a plan that failed). Later he discussed Pacific command problems w
ith Hopkins. Then he motored over to the Vanderbilt mansion, called down Hackie (Louise Hackmeister, White House head telephone operator) and Hassett, whom he addressed as Empress Josephine and Cardinal Richelieu, and exchanged more Vanderbilt lore with them. Later he worked on antitrust matters and other affairs of state. In the evening he drove his old Ford, with its special hand levers, over to Eleanor’s Val-Kill cottage for dinner, bringing with him Grace Tully, Hopkins, and Hopkins’s daughter, Diana. In front of the fireplace there was much talk of cousins, grandchildren, and friends. At dinner Eleanor peppered her husband with questions she had picked up in her travels—questions about destroyers being sent out without detectors, a rumored lack of incendiaries, the fall in bomb output resulting from a strike. Roosevelt dismissed the reports as “scuttlebutt.” He talked about the clamor for a unified command but said Marshall knew nothing about ships and King nothing about the Army. He waxed indignant about isolationist newspapers that would not keep military secrets—and the failure of the Justice Department to crack down on them. He then admitted a certain affection for Arthur Krock and Mark Sullivan as ancient but dependable fixtures, claimed that he got along better with Stalin than the British did—this was only a hunch, he admitted, when challenged by his wife—discussed new methods of dental treatment in the Army, remembered the time he gave his dentist a “haymaker” by mistake when coming out of laughing gas, defended Walter Winchell, teased Grace Tully for allegedly snitching a piece of ham on Friday, then wondered what would be substituted for rubber girdles during the war shortage and was assured by the ladies that the problem had been solved. The President left for the big house about ten. It was a godsend that he could relax this way, Mrs. Roosevelt said to her guests afterward; otherwise he could not have stood three terms in office, especially this last one.