The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Whatever his public posture, the President was not one to deceive himself for long about the economic situation. Aside from all his other sources of information on inflationary troubles, he could always resort to “look-see.” He told reporters that on a visit to Hyde Park he drove twelve miles down the Post Road at a steady thirty-five miles per hour; prevented by police (as standard policy) from passing the President, twenty-two cars piled up behind him in that distance. It all showed, Roosevelt went on, that people were driving too fast, using up gasoline, not living up to the request of their President and government. “And we have got to enforce the thing some way.”

  How could the thing be enforced without laws? Some in the White House, including Rosenman and Sherwood, urged Roosevelt to bypass Congress and carry out his stabilization program through his war powers. The President was sorely tempted. In his electrifying Inaugural Address in 1933, amid numbing economic crisis, he had warned that if Congress did not face up with him to the emergency, he would ask it for broad executive power “as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Now he had that kind of power under his war authority. He remarked to reporters that “in the old days, in 1933, when the country was economically on its back, and people’s pocket-books were being hit” he had been able to get measures from Congress at the rate of two or three a week or even one a day, but now that the nation’s very existence was threatened he could not get action. Still, the President would not, even in wartime, rely on his war powers. Rather, he relied on an ingenious—and ingenuous-power ploy.

  First he lectured and scolded Congress, in a message on September 7, for stalling on taxes and stabilization of the prices of farm products. Its delay “has now reached the point of danger to our whole economy.” Then he dramatized that danger in short paragraphs studded with concrete examples of inflation. He talked about the price of pork chops, butter, oranges, sweet potatoes, corn, oats, rye. He warned that wages could not be stabilized unless farm products were. What was needed was an “over-all stabilization of prices, salaries, wages, and profits.” Then he sprang his surprise:

  “We cannot hold the actual cost of food and clothing down to approximately the present level beyond October first. But no one can give any assurances that the cost of living can be held down after that date.

  “Therefore, I ask the Congress to pass legislation under which the President would be specifically authorized to stabilize the cost of living, including the prices of all farm commodities….

  “I ask the Congress to take this action by the first of October. Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable responsibility to the people of this country to see to it that the war effort is no longer imperiled by threat of economic chaos.

  “In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.

  “At the same time that farm prices are stabilized, wages can and will be stabilized also. This I will do….”

  As usual the President saved his main dramatics for his fireside chat in the evening. He began with the story of an American dive bomber pilot who had promised to lay a bomb on a Japanese flight deck for the “folks back home” and who had died in the Coral Sea doing it. He “hereby and now” awarded him the Medal of Honor.

  “You and I are the ‘folks back home’ for whose protection” the brave pilot had fought and repeatedly risked his life. “How are we playing our part ‘back home’ in winning this war?

  “The answer is that we are not doing enough….”

  If Congress did not act, he warned again, he would assume responsibility, to prevent “economic chaos.”

  “This is the toughest war of all time. We need not leave it to historians of the future to answer the question whether we are tough enough to meet this unprecedented challenge. We can give that answer now. The answer is ‘Yes.’ ”

  A few days later a reporter asked the President a question many in Washington were asking: “If by October 1 it appears that your anti-inflation bill is on the way in Congress but has not yet passed, in that case will you wait and give them a chance?”

  “What was the first word of that question?” he asked. The reporter mentioned the fatal word “if.” Roosevelt would not tip his hand; the only game he would play was his own. He summoned Rayburn back from Texas and asked him to have his flock on hand within a week.

  Smarting under the Chief Executive’s reprimand and ultimatum, Congress glumly went back to work on an anti-inflation program. Within one week bills were introduced, hearings were held, and measures were reported to both chambers. Once again the farm groups stood like tollkeepers over the legislative roadways; they demanded a recomputation of parity that would mean higher farm prices. Roosevelt publicly denounced the proposal; a presidential veto and assumption of extraordinary economic power seemed in the offing. But Senate moderates concocted a compromise on parity and delegated extensive power to the President to take production costs into consideration. The final measure provided other protection to farmers. Congress passed the bill on October 2, and the President, though not wholly satisfied, signed it the same day.

  He had to wait another three weeks for a tax bill, and a disappointing one to boot. The measure would raise only seven billion dollars in new revenues by Treasury estimate. It reduced personal exemptions; lifted the top surtax on individual incomes a little, the top tax on corporate income moderately, and the top excess-profits rate sizably; and it boosted a number of excises on luxuries and scarce goods. Roosevelt had no choice but to sign it; he joked to Morgenthau that he had hardly read it because he could not understand it. The Secretary despaired of ever getting “total war on taxes.”

  The President had already chosen his man to direct the new stabilization program—Justice James Byrnes, a hardheaded negotiator and operator, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the high court the year before. Liberals were worried by his Southern background and essential conservatism, but Roosevelt was aware of Frankfurter’s high opinion of him and impressed by Hopkins’s advice that “Jimmy has loyalty and knowledge, judgment and political sense.” Byrnes moved into the new east wing of the White House as Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. Shortly he was telling Hopkins, with a smile, “There’s just one suggestion I want to make to you, Harry, and that is to keep the hell out of my business.”

  THE PEOPLE AT WAR

  Four groups had been especially vulnerable during periods of turbulent economic and social change in America—industrial labor, Negroes, ethnic groups, and women. All these groups went through critical transitions during 1942; all established new dependencies on the federal government; all directly or indirectly turned to the President for help.

  Women, to be sure, did not seem to be a deprived minority in the war boom of 1942. Besides donning sober uniforms for the women’s branches of the military services, they were wearing trousers for war work, and by the middle of the year were pouring into factories, taking over men’s jobs, such as driving trucks and running heavy machinery, and bringing home pay checks to swell the family income and civilian spending. Women workers increased by almost two million in the year after Pearl Harbor. The President was impressed by the visual evidence, especially by the large number of women workers he saw on inspection trips. Time and again he recalled seeing women doing a variety of work in the plants he visited.

  Booming war employment was boosting income for millions of workers, male and female. National War Labor Board wage decisions were far less important than the enormous war contracts and the heightened competition for labor. Workers and their unions were also winning a bigger voice in production decisions. In April the President shifted all labor-supply functions from the WPB’s Labor Division to the new War Manpower Commission, and set up in the WPB a new Labor Production Division as a channel to Nelson for labor information and ideas. Sidney Hillman, now ailing and under criticism from his old union comrades, was eased out of the l
abor unit; Roosevelt tried to placate him with an offer to serve as special assistant to the President on labor matters, but the union chief, hurt and mystified by the President’s seeming loss of confidence in him, preferred to return to his beloved Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The Labor Production Division, under a new chief who had to conciliate both the AFL and the CIO, did not itself have a major role, and indeed encountered considerable criticism from labor, but it helped arouse further union demands for participation in war-production decisions. By the end of 1942 joint labor-management committees were operating in many industries and at many levels.

  It was clear that rising wages and a greater union voice in running plants might not outlast the war. The crucial long-run question was whether labor could exploit the war to bolster its organized economic and political power. Left-wing union leaders had claimed in speeches that war would bring a vast union-busting drive and a shift toward the open shop; businessmen had warned of the compulsory unionism of the closed shop. There was a deeper, more philosophical issue: during a time of crisis should the status of unions be frozen for the duration, or did a war of democracies against fascism mean vesting labor with more rights and duties? Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had bluntly warned Lewis and Murray that the “Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop”—but on December 7 federal arbitrators had granted a union shop to Lewis’s captive mine workers. The whole disruptive issue had been passed on to the War Labor Board.

  During the early months of 1942 the chairman and the three public members of the WLB conducted a search for a formula that would resolve for wartime labor one of the oldest and toughest problems in the Western world: the reconciliation of liberty and order in groups undergoing change and stress. This remarkable quartet—Davis, Morse, Graham, and Professor George W. Taylor—shared Roosevelt’s mixture of practicality and lofty idealism. They knew that in the dynamic, expanding productive period of a war economy, as Graham said, union status could not be frozen. But what kind of union status would produce the right balance of flexibility and stability? After much discussion and delay, with the union and employer members contributing both threats and constructive suggestions, the board reshaped an old formula, maintenance of membership, into a new one, maintenance of voluntarily established membership. Under the first, all employees who were members of a union or later became members must stay in the union for the life of the contract, or lose their jobs. Under the second, the same rule prevailed, except that an escape clause would give employees ten or fifteen days to quit the union without penalty before maintenance might take effect. Seemingly a slight change, the new formula provided a compromise to which management and labor reluctantly agreed, provided a practical reconciliation of liberty and security for employees, and was so widely adopted that by war’s end it covered almost a third of all workers under union agreement. In the long run it both strengthened and stabilized union power. It was the most brilliant application—some would say the only successful application—of Roosevelt’s notion of a moving consensus overcoming a sharply divisive problem.

  The President’s efforts at a rolling consensus were meeting far less success in another critical sector in 1942. The Fair Employment Practices Committee encountered frustrations and setbacks from its first days. Roosevelt had started it off with a broadly representative six-member board headed by Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, an old friend and an unusually strong civil-rights advocate for a man born in Mississippi. Murray, Green, David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America, Milton Webster, of the Sleeping Car Porters, and Earl B. Dickerson, a Chicago alderman, made up the rest of the board. The committee was slow to get organized and starved for funds; by the time it was transferred from OPM to WPB, its staff included fewer than seven field investigators. Murray and Green proved unable to attend meetings; the President had to appoint alternates. Ethridge aroused a storm among blacks when in Birmingham he defended segregation, at least for Southerners. But the main obstacle was the sheer intractability of the problem: a corporal’s guard was trying to breach the citadels of Jim Crow. Training and jobs, for example, were linked in a vicious circle—employers turned away Negroes because they had inadequate training; training classes were closed to Negroes because of an alleged lack of jobs. The United States Employment Service was supposed to refer workers without discrimination, if possible, but not if employers insisted on discriminatory orders; in Southern states the service still maintained segregated employment facilities. AFL craftsmen were hostile. And almost every move of the commission provoked outcries from one side or even both.

  In its frustration the FEPC often turned to the President for support, communicating through Marvin McIntyre. On these matters Roosevelt was somewhat unpredictable. He was personally concerned and was quick to respond to specific injustice—for example, when the nonpolitical Negro tenor Roland Hayes and his wife were victims of brutality in a Southern store, and when black troops landing overseas were identified by the War Department as “service troops.” But he seemed reluctant to spend any of his own personal political capital to mobilize support for the committee, even within the government, or to give much time to the problem. When Welles opposed public FEPC hearings on discrimination against Mexicans because of their effect south of the border, Roosevelt asked the committee to cut the hearings off. And suddenly in midsummer 1942, without advance warning to the FEPC and against its wishes, he transferred the little agency to Paul V. McNutt’s War Manpower Commission and thus cut the presidential apron strings that had been one of the few sources of the FEPC’s strength.

  All the President’s action—and his inaction—on discrimination aroused sharp responses. Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, then and for years afterward head of public safety in Birmingham, wrote in to charge that the Employment Service and the FEPC were causing disunity, that venereal disease was the number-one Negro problem, and that the Ku Klux Klan would be revived in opposition. “Don’t you think one war in the South, however, is enough?” An equally withering fire descended on the administration from black militants.

  It was not surprising, given Roosevelt’s fear of any divisive act, that he would shun a frontal attack on discrimination in private enterprises or even in state and local government. His support of Stimson’s policies reflected better his personal views. The War Department was proud of the fact that by the spring of 1942 about 10 per cent of registrants under Selective Service were black, several hundred black aviation cadets would soon be in training, and over three hundred Negro officers—including three colonels—shared in the command of five black combat units. But the Army was still segregated except for black troops under white officers—and Stimson believed in this. “The Negro still lacks the particular initiative which a commanding officer of men needs in war,” he wrote to a friend. “…Also the social intermixture of the two races is basically impossible….”

  If a “little group of agitators, led by a man named White,” would only keep their hands off, Stimson felt, things would be better. He was pained to discover that MacLeish was planning to speak to Negroes in New York on the discrimination against them in the Army, and that McGeorge Bundy, the son of his close friend and assistant, Harvey Bundy, was helping MacLeish with his speech. After inviting the poet to see him, Stimson told him that he had been brought up in an abolitionist family, and his father had fought in the Civil War, but that the crime of slavery had produced a problem impossible of solution in wartime, that the only thing to do was to be patient and care for individual cases, that the foolish Negro leaders were actually seeking social equality, which was impossible. MacLeish appeared unmoved. Stimson felt secretly that Mrs. Roosevelt was behind MacLeish’s activity—the latest example of her “intrusive and impulsive folly,” he complained to his diary. But he did not blame Mr. Roosevelt, except for letting his Navy shut its doors “absolutely to the Negro race” while making the War Department carry the extra load
. The President was more sympathetic to black aspirations than either his War or his Navy Secretary, but his tendency in wartime to look on race relations more as a problem of efficient industrial mobilization than as a fundamental moral problem left policy largely in their hands.

  If Stimson seemed weak on Negro rights, within the military circle he was virtually a reformer. Early in 1942 Eisenhower rounded up reports on the “colored troop problem.” Not only did army generals in the South and even in multiracial Hawaii oppose the assignment of “colored troops” to their domains, but so also did the Australian government, the President of the Republic of Panama, Governor Ernest Gruening, of Alaska, the government of Bermuda, the British authorities in Trinidad, the South American governments and—absurdity to the point of hilarity—an army colonel advising as to Liberia. Stimson’s responses to most of these pleas ranged from “Don’t yield” to “Nonsense”; he reminded the Panamanians that the Panama Canal itself was built with black labor; and he asserted that the Southerners would have to get used to Negro troops; but neither he nor anyone else in high command reflected on the implications of the fact that it was segregated black units that were being objected to.