The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Biddle held out longer. An aristocratic Philadelphian and Grotonian, proudly conscious of his inheritance from the Randolphs of Virginia and full of a fastidious noblesse oblige, he was not one to be swept off his feet by generals and regional politicians. But his political resources were small. He was a new member of the Cabinet, highly impressed by Stimson and somewhat mystified by Roosevelt. He did not enlist his potential Cabinet allies, Ickes and Morgenthau; indeed, there was no Cabinet discussion. Finding himself almost alone, he resorted to expedients and technicalities and was lost. Only a great outcry of protest on the highest moral grounds could have stopped the drift toward evacuation, and Biddle was neither temperamentally nor politically capable of it.

  So the fate of 110,000 aliens and citizens was bucked over to the White House—and into a void. Because there had been no clarion call of protest the President was never faced with a compelling set of alternatives and arguments. He confronted on February 11 a War Department memo that tried simply to put the onus of decision on him. The President would not have it. This was the same day he was answering Quezon’s query about neutralization; Singapore was on the verge of surrendering. The evacuation may have seemed to him a tricky and second-level question. He told Stimson and McCloy to do whatever they thought necessary, and asked only that they be as reasonable as they could. Eight days later the President signed an order for evacuation prepared by Biddle and Stimson and their men. A month later Congress passed a bill supporting the President’s action. During the debate Representative John Rankin, of Mississippi, demanded that Japanese in concentration camps be segregated by sex so that they would not multiply twenty-five times in two generations.

  Hindsight would prove that there was little military necessity for mass evacuation. The American Civil Liberties Union would call it “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.” Hindsight would also put responsibility not only on the obvious factors of racism and frustration, but also on a great negative factor—the opposition that never showed up. The liberal dailies and weeklies were largely silent. Walter Lippmann, so zealous of individual liberties back in New Deal days, urged strong measures because, he said, the Pacific Coast was officially a combat zone and no one had a constitutional right to “do business on a battlefield.” Westbrook Pegler, citing Lippmann’s argument, cried that every Japanese in California should be under guard, “and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.” A few Congressmen protested—most notably Senator Taft, in querying the congressional validation—but they were ineffectual. Doubting administration officials did not carry their protests to the Chief Executive.

  Only a strong civil-libertarian President could have faced down all these forces, and Roosevelt was not a strong civil libertarian. Like Jefferson in earlier days, he was all for civil liberties in general but easily found exceptions in particular. He related to friends that at a Cabinet meeting (in March 1942) he had told Biddle that civil liberties were okay for 99 per cent but he ought to bear down on the rest. When Biddle pleaded that it was hard to get convictions, Roosevelt answered that when Lincoln’s Attorney General would not proceed against Vallandigham, Lincoln declared martial law in that county and then had Vallandigham tried by a drumhead court-martial. Earlier he had treated Biddle’s earnest support of civil liberties as a joking matter—in fact, had solemnly told him that he was planning to abrogate freedom of speech during the war and then he let Biddle declaim against the idea at length before telling him he was joking.

  Indeed, Roosevelt seemed to enjoy shocking the shy Philadelphian. Once, when J. Edgar Hoover confessed to the President, in the Attorney General’s presence, that an FBI agent had tried to tap the telephone wire of left-wing union leader Harry Bridges, and had been caught in the act, Roosevelt roared with laughter, slapped Hoover on the back, and shouted gleefully, “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!”

  The President assumed that the German saboteurs who landed on the East Coast in June 1942 were guilty and should be executed. He liked the idea of quick drumhead courts in wartime. To be sure, Roosevelt’s civil-liberties derelictions were not numerous, but certainly the wartime White House was not dependably a source of strong and sustained support for civil liberties in specific situations.

  This expedient departure from principle was nothing new in American history, but it had a dangerous edge in 1942. The supreme irony of the evacuation was that while Germans and Italians offered the same alleged threats to military security as the Nisei and Issei, their guilt was established on an individual basis, not a racial basis. Roosevelt was quite aware of the distinction and supported it. Nor did he seem concerned that his friends the Chinese were part of the same yellow race against which he was discriminating. He was following unconsciously a kind of Atlantic First policy in civil liberties as well as military strategy. By allowing his subordinates to treat aliens and citizens on a racial basis, he was unwittingly validating the political strategy that Tokyo was directing during the early months of 1942.

  THE WAR AGAINST THE WHITES

  While Washington was interning over 100,000 American citizens and aliens mainly on racial grounds, Tokyo was conducting its main political offensive in Southeast Asia on largely the same basis.

  The aims of the war, proclaimed the Imperial Rescript in December, were to insure the peace and stability of East Asia and to defend that region against Anglo-American exploitation. The struggle was named the Greater East Asia War; its aim was to build the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Late in January 1942 Premier Tojo told the Diet that Japan would grant independence to South Pacific peoples who undertook to help build the new sphere. These plans were hoisted on a wave of popular exultation. Propagandists attacked white Western rule, its individualism, materialism, class and group strife. Soon newspapers were gleefully picturing white Europeans, naked to the waist, forced to do the physical labor once reserved for Asiatics. “Remember December Eighth!” proclaimed a Japanese poet:

  “This day world history has begun anew

  This day Occidental domination is shattered All through Asia’s lands and seas.

  Japan, with the help of the gods

  Bravely faces white superiority.”

  The Japanese were shrewd enough to adapt their anti-Western strategy to specific situations. Tokyo signed an alliance with Thailand granting it sovereignty, independence, extensive assistance, and the return of lost territories; and promised Burma independence within the year. The Japanese interned the Dutch officials of Java, dismantled the colonial administrative system, rewrote the textbooks to champion anti-Western and pan-Asiatic doctrines, freed nationalist leaders, including Achmed Sukarno, who had been imprisoned by the Dutch, and promised political concessions.

  But it was in the Philippines that the invaders found their most auspicious state of affairs. Proclaiming that they had come to emancipate the Filipinos from America’s oppressive domination, they promised to set up the “Philippines for the Filipinos” as part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Collaborators were quickly found to adorn the new Japanese-controlled regime. American influence was denounced as hedonistic, materialistic, corrupting of the family. The local Japanese Commander in Chief admonished the Filipinos: “As a leopard cannot change its spots you cannot alter the fact that you are Orientals.”

  This imperious summons to an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic, nationalist crusade could not cloak potential weaknesses and divisions. Extremists in Tokyo made clear that while all the nations would be equal in the new Asia, Japan would be more so, as “center and leader.” Indiscriminate cruelty was inflicted on native populations. Japan’s long-term strategic stake in liberating colonial nations ran counter to the short-run needs of the Japanese military, which wanted to control and exploit local populations for immediate war needs. Still, the potential of an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic movement seemed almost limitless in the early months of 1942. Even more, the Japanese showed their skill in appealin
g to Moslem elements in Southeast Asia and thus raised the specter of an ultimate appeal to Islam and to antiwhite feeling in the Middle East.

  Long critical of white colonial policies in Asia, Roosevelt did not underestimate the threat of Tokyo’s war against the whites. With the Philippines and the other countries clamped firmly in the Japanese vise, there was little that he could do. But there was one potential battleground where he could try to wield influence—India. With the fall of Singapore in February and the impending overrunning of Rangoon, the subcontinent would soon lie almost naked before a Japanese advance.

  Only a President with Rooseveltian self-confidence would have even dared touch the Indian cauldron in the early months of 1942. The looming threat from the east seemed to be sharpening all the old hopes, fears, and antagonisms in that steaming subcontinent. Indian nationalists saw their chance to win freedom from British rule, but they ranged from bitter pan-Asiatics willing to fight along with the Japanese against the whites to those who feared Japanese conquest even more than they hated British rule. Moslems dreaded a grant of independence that would inundate them in Hindu rule; a host of local princes depended on the British to help protect their accustomed prerogatives; separatist interests and sects throughout the country clamored for recognition; in the endless villages millions labored for their daily rice with only the haziest idea of the decisions of far-off London, Tokyo, or even Delhi.

  Proud and powerful personalities stood amid the tumult: Jawaharlal Nehru, both a Western intellectual and an Indian patriot, anticolonial and antifascist, leader of Indian nationalists but also their agent; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, wary chief of the Moslem League; Subhas Chandra Bose, eager to form an Indian national army to help the Japanese throw the British out of India. And brooding over the scene was the gnarled, loinclothed figure of Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, pacifist, vegetarian, the most powerful man in India, because of his ability to grip the attention of the masses.

  Roosevelt had raised the question of India with Churchill in Washington after Pearl Harbor; the Prime Minister had reacted so hotly that the President never—or so Churchill later claimed—dared raise the matter to his face again. By late February the President was concerned with India more for military than ideological reasons. Along with influential Senators and administration officials he feared that the Indians would not rally in support of the British defenders. He asked his embassy in London to sound out Churchill anew, but the Prime Minister had not changed his views a whit. Most of the Indian troops, he said, were Moslems. The fighting people were mainly from the northern areas antagonistic to Congress party leaders. The big population of the low-lying center did not have the vigor to fight anybody. He would not risk alienating the Moslems or the princes.

  Undaunted, the President now tried a different gambit. “With much diffidence,” he wrote to Churchill, in making any suggestions on a subject which “of course, all of you good people know far more about than I do,” he suggested that the American experience with the Articles of Confederation might be a helpful precedent. He presented in detail the idea that a temporary government in India, headed by a small group representing different castes, occupations, religions, regions, and princes, might direct the public services during the war, and at the same time plan for a more permanent government. “Perhaps the analogy of some such method to the travails and problems of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself, and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination, together with the advantage of peaceful evolution as against chaotic revolution….

  “For the love of Heaven don’t bring me into this, though I do want to be of help. It is, strictly speaking, none of my business, except insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are making.”

  The President might well be diffident. Churchill rejected both the analogy and the proposal. He and George III, the Prime Minister felt, were facing altogether different problems. There was no time for a constitutional experiment and a period of trial and error. But because he was under intense pressure to try to break the developing deadlock in New Delhi, he decided to send Sir Stafford Cripps, now back from Moscow and a member of the War Cabinet, to India to make a last effort. Earlier the President had dispatched Louis Johnson, his former Assistant Secretary of War, to New Delhi on a vaguely defined military mission as his personal representative. The choice of Johnson seemed a curious one. A prosperous West Virginia lawyer and politico, he was a founder and onetime national commander of the American Legion, with no known views, if indeed he had any, on the great issues of colonialism, nationalism, and race that racked India.

  For a brief moment events played a sardonic game of ducks and drakes with the visitors to New Delhi. Cripps, left-wing Labourite, vegetarian, anti-imperialist, friend of Nehru, acted essentially as an agent of Churchill’s Cabinet and found the Congress leaders adamant. The Indians demanded a greater share in the conduct of the war than London would grant them, and they wanted at the end of the war a unified nation that would not be pulled to pieces by secessionist groups. The British feared that control of defense by Congress leaders would inflame the Moslem troops, fragmentize the conduct of the war, and convert Indian defense against the Japanese into a paltry guerrilla war at best. They would not renege on their old pledge to Moslems and princes; but neither would Nehru permit the Balkanization of India.

  It was not Cripps the British radical but Johnson the West Virginia politician who for an intoxicating moment seemed about to break the deadlock. Undiscouraged by word from Welles that the President was now keeping hands off, Johnson hurried from Cripps to Nehru to Wavell and around the circle again to keep negotiations alive. Agreement seemed all the more imperative when word reached Delhi that the Japanese Navy in one foray had sunk 100,000 tons of shipping along India’s east coast and was preparing to rout the small British fleet. Indians and British alike were turning to Washington for help.

  “The magic name over here is Roosevelt,” Johnson cabled to Hull, “the land, the people would follow and love, America.”

  Two days later Johnson’s efforts collapsed. He suspected that Churchill was curbing Cripps. He was half right; Churchill was also curbing Johnson. Hopkins, in London, exposed to the Prime Minister’s wrath, had urged Roosevelt to play down Johnson’s mediatory role. In New Delhi, Cripps saw little hope; he cabled to Churchill that he was coming home. The Prime Minister replied that Cripps would be cordially welcomed for proving how great was the British desire to reach a settlement; the effect in Britain and America had been “wholly beneficial.”

  Roosevelt made a final effort. In one of the bluntest messages he ever sent to Churchill he urged him to postpone Cripps’s departure to allow a final effort at negotiations. American public opinion was almost unanimous, he said, “that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government” and could not understand why Britain was delaying it. The cable reached Churchill at Chequers at three in the morning, Sunday, April 12; Hopkins was still with him, despite Roosevelt’s constant urging that his aide get his sleep. It was too late, Churchill cabled back; Cripps had already left, and, anyway, everything could not be thrown into the melting pot again.

  “Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart…” Churchill concluded. Privately he was bitter. He indicated to Hopkins that he would be ready to resign on the issue—but that if he did, the War Cabinet would continue his policy. Roosevelt had nothing more to say. In appealing to Churchill on the ground of American public opinion rather than of higher political, military, or even moral considerations, he had weakened his position, for Churchill must have known that in fact the American press, at least, broadly supported London’s position. Roosevelt’s next message was not to Churchill but to Marshall, who was in London:

  “Please put Hopkins t
o bed and keep him there under 24-hour guard by Army or Marine Corps. Ask the King for additional assistance if required on this job.”

  A message arrived at the White House from Nehru. He only wanted the President to know, he said, “how anxious and eager we were, and still are, to do our utmost for the defense of India and to associate ourselves with the larger causes of freedom and democracy. To us it is a tragedy that we cannot do so in the way and in the measure we would like to.” Yet, he went on, India would not submit to Japanese aggression. “We, who have struggled for so long for freedom and against an old aggression, would prefer to perish rather than submit to a new invader.” He concluded with a tribute to the President, “on whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom.…” The President did not reply directly; he had Welles ask Johnson to tell Nehru that the President was gratified by the pledge to resist Japan.

  By mid-April the Japanese Navy had occupied India’s Andaman Islands, smashed the harbor of Colombo, in Ceylon, and chased the crippled British fleet out of the Bay of Bengal and into East African waters.

  For a century white rule had been symbolized and enforced by awesome battleships and gunboat diplomacy. Where was the United States Navy now? In hiding, said the Japanese. Rumors circulated that naval losses were much higher than reported. Willkie proclaimed that “we want our Navy seeking out the enemy, not hugging our shores….”