For all their troubles, Negroes for once were better off than some other group. This other group was also racial—the Japanese-Americans in the process of being “relocated” from their West Coast homes to inland areas. By the end of spring, Milton Eisenhower, first head of the War Relocation Authority, could report to Roosevelt that about 81,000 Japanese-Americans were in temporary assembly centers, about 20,000 in permanent relocation centers, another 15,000 had been “frozen” in eastern California, and from 5,000 to 8,000 voluntary evacuees were living precariously in Rocky Mountain states. He also reported that inland governors and attorney generals had fought bitterly the earlier plan of voluntary evacuation on a large scale. Mass meetings had been held, violence threatened, Japanese-Americans arrested. So eleven huge camps had had to be set up to hold 130,000 evacuees, schools and hospitals planned, farms and public works started.
But Milton Eisenhower did not report—and Roosevelt, with all his insight and compassion, could not have grasped—the dismal experience of thousands of evacuees: the sad departure from hard-won homes and farms, the hurry-up-and-wait journey through detention centers to relocation camps, the shock of arrival at Poston or Tule Lake or Gila or some other camp, with its burning heat and numbing cold and clouds of dust, endless barracks with one room to a family, lack of privacy, red tape, boredom—and always the military police and the barbed wire. Not that the President was kept in the dark about the episode. All major decisions were cleared with him; his office received all the information, good and bad. Roosevelt himself termed the centers “concentration camps,” as indeed they were. But the psychic cost of the experience was probably beyond his ken, or was simply written off as a sad but necessary casualty of war.
The President might have been more sensitive to the situation if the evacuees had protested vigorously, had demonstrated, gone on strike, fought their guards. But they did not, at this time. The authorities were impressed by their almost cheerful determination to make the best of their lot; their resourcefulness in knocking together tables and benches for their ill-equipped rooms, their quick reconstruction of a semblance of community life through dances, sports, handicrafts, schools. But as the hot months of summer 1942 passed, the mood in some camps changed. The WRA did not live up to its earlier promises or expectations about wages, clothing, garden plots, jobs, and ordinary comforts. Tension rose among the inmates and between them and their Caucasian superiors. There were demonstrations, picket lines, strikes, and beatings of suspected informers.
By fall the very policy that Roosevelt had approved out of military necessity was creating its own military threat. The Office of War Information’s chief, Elmer Davis, urged him to speak publicly against anti-Nisei bills in Congress and to authorize loyal American citizens of Japanese descent to enlist in the Army and Navy. “Japanese propaganda to the Philippines, Burma, and elsewhere insists that this is a racial war,” Davis reminded the President. “We can combat this effectively with counter-propaganda only if our deeds permit us to tell the truth.” At least 85 per cent of the Nisei were loyal Americans, he added. The Navy agreed with this estimate—but still did not want Nisei enlistments.
The contrast between Washington’s treatment of Italian and German-Americans and of Japanese-Americans was revealing. Roosevelt had assured Herbert Lehman, then Governor of New York, that he was “keenly aware of the anxiety that German and Italian aliens living in the United States must feel as the result of the Japanese evacuation of the West Coast.” Would Lehman assure them “that no collective evacuation of German or Italian aliens is contemplated at this time”? This was little solace to “Japanese” baking on the flatlands of Colorado—but of keen satisfaction to the Japanese propagandists broadcasting from Manila, Singapore, and Rangoon.
By late summer 1942 the President was giving in to an urge to “go to the country”—an urge as powerful in some politicians as the migratory instinct in the wild goose. He had told Mike Reilly, his bodyguard, that he wanted to travel during the second half of September and he wished to see everything he possibly could from coast to coast. But one thing would be different. He wanted the trip completely off the record until he returned to Washington. He would take along representatives of the three wire services, but that was all. No publicity, no parades, no speeches, he hoped, and if governors and other politicians were to ride with the President they had to be Republicans as well as Democrats.
On September 17 the presidential train pulled out of Washington with the Chief Executive and the First Lady (who went only as far as Milwaukee), a dozen members of the White House staff, the three privileged newsmen—and eight photographers.
The President packed his days as full as if he were running for office. On the first day, overhead cranes came to a sudden stop as the presidential phaeton, its top down, its bulletproof windows up, rolled into the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Detroit and moved between two huge assembly lines making General Lees, the new all-welded medium tank. Sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt and production officials, the President watched tanks grind through mud and dust on the testing ground; Secret Service agents shuddered as one tank drove straight at the presidential car and lurched to a halt ten feet away. The President shouted, “Good drive!” to the grinning operator. Later in the day he rode with Henry and Edsel Ford down the half-mile assembly line of the enormous Willow Run bomber plant. Next day he inspected the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, the nation’s largest; watched steam turbines and propeller shafts being made at Allis-Chalmers, scene of bitter strikes the year before. In the evening he was in the Twin Cities area for the night shift of a cartridge plant making thirty and fifty-caliber ammunition, but which had not yet achieved full production. He always arrived unannounced, and sat on the right-hand side of the car, sometimes in back, sometimes in front, smiling, radiant, observant. Plant officials bustled about; ripples of excitement spread as workers stared, then hollered at one another; women peeked while trying to keep their eyes on their machines. As they drove through the plant, Reilly remembered later, the Secret Service men heard such sweet sounds as “Geeze, Mamie, look. It’s Roosevelt!”—indicating that the security men had achieved tactical surprise.
No one would later describe the trip with more gusto than the President, who reported first to the press and then in a fireside chat. After leaving the Twin Cities, he said, the party had gone right on to a place called Pend Oreille, in Idaho.
“It’s a great lake out there. That and the Coeur d’Alene are the two largest lakes in northern Idaho; and because we have tried, as you know, to disseminate the congestion which has always existed on the east coast and the west coast for Navy facilities, we put this naval training station inland. They had gone into commission five days before I was there, and they already had about a thousand trainees who were coming in at the rate of two or three hundred a day….Then we went on to a place just outside of Tacoma—Fort Lewis—which is one of our principal Army posts on the west coast. We saw a post, which I had known before as a relatively small post, multiplied four or five times in its capacity for troops….Then from there we motored to the Bremerton Navy Yard, and saw wounded ships and wounded men….”
The President and his party took the ferry to Seattle, where he inspected the big Boeing plant and had supper with his daughter, Anna, and her husband, John Boettiger, and their children, Buzzie and Sistie. At Henry Kaiser’s Portland shipyards he watched the launching of a ship whose keel had been laid only ten days before. Cries of “Speech” rose from the thousands of workers watching. When a portable microphone was pressed into the President’s hand, the old campaigner could not resist it.
“You know,” he said in a resonant conspiratorial whisper, “you know I am not supposed to be here today.” The crowd laughed and cheered. “So you are possessors of a secret—a secret that even the newspapers of the United States don’t know. I hope you will keep it a secret….” Merriman Smith, one of the three reporters, who had not yet filed any stories on the trip, was damned if he saw anything
to laugh about.
“From there we went down to the Mare Island Navy Yard and saw again a Navy Yard just about three times as big as it ever had been before,” the President reported later. “We saw the Jap two-man submarine which had been captured at Pearl Harbor, and we saw one of our own submarines with nine Japanese flags painted on the conning tower.
“From there we went down to the Army embarkation port at Oakland, which is an enormous organization from which a large portion of our supplies of men and materials go out to many parts of the Pacific….Then from there down to Los Angeles, and we saw the Douglas plant at Long Beach, California….Then, from there down to San Diego, we saw the naval hospital, and a lot more wounded men from actions in the Pacific….Then to the naval training center. Then to the old Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, and from there to the Consolidated plant, where they are stepping up production all the time….”
Turning east, the President spent most of a day at the ranch of his daughter-in-law Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, and played with three grandchildren there. He stopped in Uvalde to see his onetime Vice President, John Garner, who had left Washington for good the year before. Pulling up in his little car in front of the Casey Jones Café, Garner strode to the presidential train, swung up the steps, and shouted to the President: “Well, God bless you, sir. I’m glad to see you.” The President held Garner at arm’s length to survey him. “Gosh, you look well.” They talked about local affairs and asked after each other’s wife, like old country gentlemen. “How are things going around here?” the President wanted to know. Garner slapped his Texas hat against his leg and roared, “They’re one hundred per cent for you.” Garner spied Dr. McIntire as he left. “Keep that man in good health,” he told him, “and all the rest will take care of itself.”
On to the big Southern installations—to Kelly Field, Randolph Field, Fort Sam Houston, to the Higgins Yard in New Orleans, where small boats were building, to Camp Shelby, Fort Jackson, where the Commander in Chief reviewed infantry divisions.
Back in Washington after two weeks and 8,754 miles, the President was in a benign mood about the state of the nation. The people as a whole, he told reporters, had “the finest kind of morale. They are very alive to the war spirit.” But he was not happy about the state of the nation’s capital. He complained about reporters who discussed military matters without knowing anything about military matters, about inaccurate news reports, especially by columnists and radio commentators, about subordinates in the administration itself who sought publicity by rushing into print about their particular “ism” without having a rounded picture of what the government was doing.
The President waited over a week, until Columbus Day, to report to the nation on its home front. It was a long chatty speech. The main thing he had observed on his trip, he said, was not exactly new—“the plain fact that the American people are united as never before in their determination to do a job and to do it well.” He described some of the things he had seen, skillfully interweaving praise for accomplishments and criticism for employers who refused to hire Negroes or women or older people. He announced almost in passing that it would be necessary to lower the existing minimum-age limit for Selective Service from twenty to eighteen. He scorned “typewriter strategists” who were full of bright ideas but little information. He would “continue to leave the plans for this war to the military leaders.”
He mentioned the millions of Americans in army camps, naval stations, factories, shipyards. “Who are these millions upon whom the life of our country depends? What are they thinking? What are their doubts? What are their hopes? And how is the work progressing?” He could not really answer these questions on the basis of a two weeks’ tour, nor did he try. But perhaps he sensed that the American people were a strange compound of determination to win the war and to avoid its exactions and harshness, of an emotional involvement in the war without wholly understanding it, of constant exposure to war excitement and problems and an effort to elude them.
On the surface the war dominated everything. People were singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “The Fuehrer’s Face,” “He’s A-1 in My Heart,” “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” “You’re a Sap Mr. Jap.” Theater marquees featured Wake Island, Atlantic Convoy, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Torpedo Boat, Remember Pearl Harbor, Flying Tigers. Practically all big institutional advertising played on the war theme. Even Munsingwear’s foundation garments pictured a WAAC saying, “Don’t tell me bulges are patriotic!” and Sergeant’s Flea Powder showed “Old Sarge” exclaiming, “Sighted flea—killed same.” The stage was not yet inundated by war plays, but John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down told of heroism in a Nazi-occupied town and Maxwell Anderson’s The Eve of St. Mark had a remarkable reception on Broadway for a war play.
Some of the promotion and huckstering had a latent radicalism. Pan American Airways ran full-page advertisements presenting answers by John Dewey, Hu Shih, the Archbishop of Canterbury to the question: “What kind of a world are we fighting to create?”; Canterbury’s answer was a radical version of the Four Freedoms. Movie documentaries were appearing: Native Land, a dramatization of American labor’s fight for civil rights; Henry Browne, Farmer, a government film on the importance of the Negro to the war effort. The communications media could not always keep up with fast-moving military and ideological developments. Twentieth Century-Fox put out a movie glorifying the Yugoslav Chetniks at a time when General Draja Mikhailovich was losing favor with progressives and the Partisans were winning it. Books were slower to mobilize for war. In the fall of 1942 people were reading Matthew Josephson’s Victor Hugo, James Thurber’s My World—and Welcome to It, and Hesketh Pearson’s G.B.S.; but they were also reading John Scott’s Duel for Europe, Ethel Vance’s Reprisal, Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness.
In sum—if one could summarize a vast array of opinions marked by strange combinations of volatility and opaqueness—Americans toward the end of their first year of war seemed emotionally intent on fighting the war but not fully mobilized physically or intellectually to win either the war or the peace to follow. Trying to look at the scene with the detachment she had applied to Samoans and Balinese, anthropologist Margaret Mead feared that Americans were too passive, or at least that the government was treating them as if they were passive. One of the nation’s greatest strengths, she wrote this same fall, was in the American character. If her definition of this character was hazy, her conclusions went to the heart of the problem of an ill-mobilized nation. As a nation we had to honor our leaders, she granted, as something like ourselves—as part of ourselves. “But if the war should ever come to seem a battle in which Roosevelt and MacArthur and Kaiser are supermen—father figures who do our fighting or our thinking for us while we simply watch the show—then there would be danger, for such an attitude would bring out not the strengths of the American character—but its weaknesses.
“To win this war, we need the impassioned effort of every individual in the country,” she continued. “…The government must mobilize people not just to carry out orders but to participate in a great action and to assume responsibility. Above all government must tell the truth….It’s not that we need victories; but we gotta feel we have victories in us.”
She went back to the Puritans for the mixture of practicality and faith in the power of God, for a sense of moral purpose, back to Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan emerging from the Anglo-Saxon tradition—“Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!”
By coincidence the provocative, forty-year-old anthropologist was saying the same thing as the conventional, aging Secretary of War Stimson: the battle against Nazism must be fought with a sense of moral purpose. A moral purpose was exactly what Roosevelt felt he was supplying in his sermonizing speeches. Certainly his personal popularity remained high; the question was whether he was helping people see connections between the lofty, compelling symbols such as Freedom and Democracy and the practical political and economic choices
which people could make and which in turn would influence the great decisions of the war.
The most important of these practical choices would come with the congressional elections of fall 1942.
THE POLITICS OF NONPOLITICS
At a press conference some weeks after Pearl Harbor the President had been extolling a new book by Marquis Childs, This Is Your War. He quoted approvingly from the jacket blurb: “A pampered nation in the past, America is inexperienced in war.” What the country needed was the practical energy of every citizen. “This is your war.” Right, said the President.
Could there be a greater concentration of effort on the main problem among various political groups and newspapers, he was asked.
“Yes. Very distinctly. I would say it was about time for a large number of people—several of whom are in this room—to forget politics. It’s about time. We read altogether too much politics in our papers altogether….They haven’t waked up to the fact that this is a war. Politics is out. Same thing is true in Congress.”
Did that include Cabinet members?
It was pretty rare in the Cabinet, said Roosevelt. “Whenever I see any implications of that kind I step on it with both feet.”
It was Roosevelt in one of his favorite roles—the high-minded chief of state acting for the whole nation, rising above sordid group and party interests. It was not the first time he had tried to adjourn politics since Pearl Harbor, and it would not be the last. When Democrats gathered at hotel banquet halls across the nation to pay off the party’s debt, which survived war and peace, they heard the President discuss the war and denounce “selfish politics” with nary a mention of either the Democratic party or party saints Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
The Commander in Chief’s nonpolitical posture faced several difficulties from the start. It was not clear just what he meant. Was he against politics in general, or just party politics, or just “selfish” politics? When he publicly called for Congressmen who would “back up the Government,” did he mean that they would be tested—even purged—on the basis of support of current war policies of the government only, or even on the basis of their pre-Pearl Harbor support of the administration’s foreign policy? Certainly the President could not oppose politics in general in a nation that was proudly flaunting its democratic institutions and processes—including free, regular elections—in a war against totalitarianism. As for selfish politics, everyone was against that—but what was it? Defining what was selfish and unselfish politics was at the heart of the democratic struggle.
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