The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  “You New Dealer!” Avery exploded, using the worst epithet in his vocabulary. A photograph of the portly executive leaning back in two soldiers’ arms, his hands folded benevolently over his stomach, hit the front page of hundreds of newspapers. A great hubbub followed. Government by bayonet, one editor termed it.

  The President calmly reviewed with reporters “a little history that the country doesn’t know,” reciting the long story of Montgomery Ward recalcitrance. A lot of people were seeing things under their bed, he complained; having been at Hobcaw Barony he could view the whole thing with some detachment. He did not mention Avery by name. The President’s judicious mien had little effect. The company continued its defiance, and later in the year Roosevelt ordered Stimson to take it over. This time the President did not mince words. Montgomery Ward, he said, under Avery’s leadership “has waged a bitter fight against the bona fide unions of its employees throughout the war….We cannot allow Montgomery Ward to set aside the wartime policies of the United States Government just because Mr. Sewell Avery does not approve of the Government’s procedure for handling labor disputes.”

  Roosevelt had backed Biddle all the way through. When the Attorney General had to face a special House investigating committee, his chief wrote to him: “Don’t let the boys get you down,” adding in his own hand, “bite ’em!”

  One day during the height of the mobilization effort, Steve Early telephoned Rosenman to say that Mrs. Roosevelt wanted them to talk to a young man about something very important. When Early and Rosenman met with the rather wild-eyed man in Early’s office they were astonished when the visitor asked whether the walls were bugged, whether the secretaries ever eavesdropped—and suddenly flung open a door to see if anyone was listening. They were even more astonished when he told them that he worked on atomic energy and told them about the bomb; neither Early nor Rosenman had heard of it. The visitor said he had come because the big corporations in general and Du Pont in particular were taking control of the atomic project in order to monopolize postwar energy. Early and Rosenman could only report the problem—and the visitor—to the War Department.

  It was a zany item in the whole complex of secrecy that surrounded the atomic project. It was so secret that Bush’s progress reports to Roosevelt were returned, with no copies made even for the White House files. The President withheld knowledge of the project from Hull and from other key decision-making officials. Grace Tully remembered the President saying, around June 1944, “I can’t tell you what this is, Grace, but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many American lives.”

  The work on the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos was carried out in utmost secrecy and isolation. Exceptional security precautions were taken. Very few of the 150,000 people employed in the Manhattan Project knew the real purpose of their work. General Leslie R. Groves, head of the project, wanted no communication among scientists working in different sectors, so he enforced a policy of compartmentalization. This policy was virtually ignored, however, in the Los Alamos laboratories, where the free exchange of information was vital and unavoidable. Security officials thoroughly investigated the scientists, censored their mail, listened in on their telephone conservations, forbade them to tell their families the nature of their work, assigned them code names and bodyguards. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of Los Alamos and chief recruiter of the glittering assemblage of scientists there, was kept under continuous surveillance by the Army and the FBI.

  Secrecy infected every level of government, including Congress. Until 1944 the Manhattan Project had been supported by funds available from various War Department sources, but expenditures were rising so steeply that appropriations had to come directly from Congress. Early in February Stimson, Marshall, and Bush met secretly with Rayburn, McCormack, and Martin and described the program to them in general terms; later they met with Senate leaders. Appropriations were then pushed through a blind Congress without debate. Several Congressmen grew suspicious and proposed to visit the Oak Ridge and Hanford installations; they were headed off by their colleagues and by Stimson and Marshall.

  Atomic secrecy strained Anglo-American relations, too. Despite Roosevelt’s agreement with Churchill in 1942 on joint conduct of atomic work, a veil of secrecy closed in on the program after the Army took over the Manhattan Project, and by the end of 1942 Roosevelt seemed to support the Army’s wish to share no more information with the British than was necessary. At Casablanca, Churchill said that if the exchange of information was not continued Britain would develop their bomb independently, and that would be a somber decision. After Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, told the President in May 1943 that Britain wanted the atomic bomb mainly for military purposes to counteract Soviet might, and was not interested in industrial use of atomic energy, Roosevelt decided in favor of “complete exchange of all information.” As a result of a communications mix-up, however, Bush, in England, did not get Roosevelt’s instructions and persuaded Churchill to accept a limited interchange of information directly relating to war plans. At Quebec in August the two leaders ratified this agreement in essence and set up an Anglo-American-Canadian policy committee to supervise the joint atomic work of the three nations.

  Sharing atomic information with Britain was one thing; with Russia, quite another. In this momentous field the Soviets found themselves once again excluded by the Atlantic partners.

  By early 1944 Bohr was arousing sharp concern among his fellow scientists and others about the prospect of a fateful nuclear competition after the war. The Danish physicist did not oppose developing the bomb or even using it in the war, but he was convinced that the enormous power of the atom then being released for destructive purposes offered supreme danger and opportunity after the war. He felt it imperative that before the bomb was ever used the Allies establish international control and inspection of atomic energy to build an open world of friendly international co-operation. Bohr wanted the United States and Britain to approach the Soviets about the matter while Russia was still an ally in order to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust. If the two democracies did not make an early agreement with Moscow, he contended, a suicidal nuclear-arms race was sure to break out after the war.

  Bohr won the enthusiastic support of several British officials, including Ambassador Halifax, in Washington, and Sir John Anderson, who was in charge of the British atomic-energy project, as well as Mackenzie King. Introduced to Felix Frankfurter by the Danish Ambassador, Bohr sounded the Justice out cautiously to see if he knew of the project; when Frankfurter obliquely mentioned “X,” he saw that he did. Frankfurter knew little about science as such but a lot about the nature and nurture of ideas. He knew, Max Freedman says, that it was repugnant to the ethics and philosophy of scientific research to think of exclusive secrets and of building a barbed wire of security regulations to barricade atomic secrets from the rest of the world. He promised to pass Bohr’s views on to the President.

  Frankfurter found Roosevelt “worried to death” about the whole postwar atomic problem. The President knew that he and Churchill would have to confront it; he knew about Churchill’s fear of sharing secrets with the Russians. Bohr was incredulous when Frankfurter told him that the President wanted him to fly to London and discuss the whole matter with Churchill. While waiting to see the Prime Minister in London, Bohr received word from an old Russian scientific friend, Peter Kapitza, inviting him to Moscow, where everything necessary for scientific work would be made available. Bohr inferred from this and other items that the Russians knew of the work in the West on the bomb and wanted him to work on fission.

  Bohr’s meeting with Churchill was a disaster. Busy with the impending invasion of France, the Prime Minister quickly became impatient with Bohr’s quiet discursiveness, and the interview ended before Bohr could make his key point. Crushed, he returned to Washington in June and sought out Frankfurter, who promptly reported to the White House. The President was amused that anyone would tackle Churchill in
one of his belligerent moods; he said that he would see Bohr. He had not been thrown off by Bohr’s long memos, in which the scientist, in contrast to the reporter who makes his key points first and embellishes them, built up a long theoretical background before coming to his conclusions.

  Bohr found a different reception in the White House from that at 10 Downing Street. The President greeted him warmly, sat him down next to his gadget-littered desk, told some stories about Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, listened to his views, stated that he generally agreed with them, and sympathized with Bohr’s reception by Churchill, adding that the Prime Minister often behaved this way in the face of a new idea. He was confident, the President went on, that atomic power created vast possibilities for good as well as evil, that it would help build international co-operation and even open a new era in history. He seemed to feel that Stalin should be approached on the matter. The President’s clear-cut, enthusiastic words elated Bohr—and even more when the President said he would take all this up with Churchill at their forthcoming meeting.

  There is no record of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s discussion of the bomb at their Hyde Park meeting on September 19, 1944, following their Quebec meeting, but the outcome suggests what happened. The Prime Minister, suspecting that Bohr might be leaking information to Moscow, evidently succeeded in shattering Roosevelt’s confidence in the physicist. It was a lugubrious example of what happened when Roosevelt’s idealistic impulses and amorphous policy collided with Churchill’s narrower, Atlantic-oriented outlook. The aide-mémoire issued by the two men spoke with shattering finality.

  “1. The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding tube alloys, with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy, but when a ‘bomb’ is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.

  “2. Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing tube alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement.

  “3. Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information particularly to the Russians.”

  Behind Roosevelt’s turnabout was not only his own ambivalence, but also a fundamental change in the Realpolitik of the atomic weapon. By the fall of 1944 it was becoming evident that Germany was not succeeding in making the bomb. The terrible fear of the scientists that the Führer would possess the ultimate weapon was dwindling; some scientists were beginning to wonder about their own leaders. The leaders—especially Churchill—were pondering the implications of the weapon being in the hands of the Russians, whom they suspected of conducting atomic espionage. Russia, not Germany, was now the issue. The anti-Hitler coalition was under a new strain.

  For the moment the prophetic voice of international science desperately trying to forestall a disastrous nuclear-arms race was cut off from reaching the top levels of the American government. The awesome and deadly new atomic age was being born in secrecy and suspicion, not as a shared adventure in scientific co-operation and world unity, but as a military means of beating the Axis and perhaps containing the Russians. Moscow was reacting with suspicion and espionage. Some notes of Stimson’s for a meeting with Roosevelt late in August illustrated the strange combination of idealism and narrow realism that was being brought to bear on S1, Stimson’s code name for the atomic project:

  “The necessity of bringing Russian orgn. into the fold of Christian civilization….

  “The possible use of S1 to accomplish this….

  “Steps toward disarmament

  “Impossibility of disclosure—(S1)

  “Science is making a common yardstick impossible.”

  THE MOBILIZED SOCIETY

  As the President was driven along the streets of Washington he could see the artifacts of a mobilized society. The Mall, with wings and annexes branching out from the drab “temps” of World War I, looked like a vast construction project. Sidewalks were crowded with GI’s, sailors, Marines, WAC’s, WAAF’s, WAVES, soldiers of Allied nations. Not far from the White House was the Stage Door Canteen, in the old Belasco Theatre. Gasoline rationing had cut civilian driving; some government workers rode to their offices on bicycles.

  Thousands of girls in their teens and twenties had flocked to Washington; Arlington Farms, across the river, housed 8,000 of them, including 3,300 WAVES, and came to be known as Girl Town. WAC’s encamped in the sprawling South Post. Whole agencies had been packed up and moved to other cities—the Rural Electrification Administration to St. Louis, the Farm Credit Administration to Kansas City, the Wage and Hour and Public Contracts Division to New York—but the nation’s capital still labored under the housing pressure. Army officers pleaded for apartments, offering bonuses for leads, promising “no pets or parties.” Hotels set up cots in dining rooms after mealtime.

  Less visible from a presidential limousine but all too clear in the data flowing to the White House from the agencies—from the Pentagon, Isador Lubin’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, McNutt’s Federal Security Agency, and other offices—were the phenomena of a nation pulsing with fecundity, change, and stress. Despite cutbacks in the output of raw materials, war production was soaring. Early in June 1944 the President reminded a news conference of business-newspaper editors of the “most awful howl all over the country” when he had once asked Congress for 50,000 planes a year. “Couldn’t be done—just couldn’t be done.” Well, he went on, “we are now up to a hundred thousand a year, and we are keeping on going—keeping on making records. American industry has done a lot better than the non-business press thought it could do.” The 200,000th United States-financed airplane since July 1, 1940 had just been accepted, Roosevelt added; the first 100,000 had taken 1,431 days to build, the second only 369.

  The United States was spending over three hundred million dollars a day on the war. Income—real, disposable, per capita—was soaring to new heights, heading from under $1,000 in 1940 toward almost $1,300 four years later. The total labor force in 1944 was sixty-six million, twelve million over 1940, with women providing five million of the increase. Unemployment had dropped from the eight million of 1940 to 670,000 four years later; the huge lump of Great Depression joblessness had vanished at last. For the first time in history the participation rate (per cent of population over fourteen years employed) rose to over 60 per cent. In 1944 over two-thirds of teen-age boys (fourteen to nineteen) were gainfully employed. One of the biggest jumps in participation was among men sixty-five and over. War had dramatically solved the problem that Roosevelt had struggled with for a decade.

  Behind the bounding economic figures was a social panorama etched in hope and anguish. Most evident was the war migration. Eleven million young men and women were uprooted from their communities and sent off to the four corners of the globe; a civilian migration to better jobs was changing the face of the South, the inner cores of major cities, and the industrialized metropolitan outskirts. The war sharply accelerated the decades-old flow of blacks and whites out of the South and into the coastal and inland industrial regions of the North and West. Within metropolitan areas whites were moving to the fringes of the cities, while Negroes settled in the urban cores, where they became more socially visible, economically significant, and politically potent than they had been in the old rural cultures of the South.

  Over the frantic protests of the War Manpower Commission, the placement of plants lured workers from their homes, communities, parents, and families to lucrative new jobs. But the migration of able-bodied young men was not enough, for the armed services and industry had an insatiable demand for manpower, and one by one all groups were pulled in. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Stimson found that color was no barrier to war us
efulness; next, women were urged to work; then the young and the old were summoned, along with the illiterate, the handicapped, the leisured, aliens, students, and finally Japanese-Americans from the concentration camps. The people responded, but the demand was infinite. Even as the participation rate for women climbed over 36 per cent, Roosevelt and Stimson pleaded for drafting women into the Army.

  Since for war purposes all bodies were equally necessary, and the war priority was all-powerful, traditional distinctions and ties diminished. The kinship system, never very strong, was virtually dismantled. The demands for young men in the services and on the assembly line lessened their economic dependence on their elders and projected anew the cult of youth. The freedom and importance of young people—almost instant adulthood—sent the marriage rate skyrocketing. The demand for women as economic producers on assembly lines caused a new move toward sexual equality and a de-emphasis on the wife-mother role. Families, separated geographically and functionally, spent less time together. Long overtime hours, migration to job centers, the induction of husbands into the services, and the loss of control by parents over marriage, all weakened family stability.

  The equality of bodies virtually destroyed the old yardstick of status, identity, and legitimacy. New income taxes, high wages, and rationing undercut the economic stratification system. Conspicuous consumption was difficult when, for example, yachts were donated to the Navy for shore patrol. The status of jobs in economic sectors changed drastically; the lowly military, political, and governmental jobs suddenly became highly prized. Draft-board regulations made manual labor in factories and on farms more important—and sometimes more rewarding—than the work of salesmen, small businessmen, and college professors. No one planned these changes; few foresaw them.

  The hierarchy of age, income, sex—in fact, the whole stratification system—was eroding. From the disorder there gathered, among other forces, a new social energy of black Americans. As a consequence of moving north, blacks became better paid, more educated, better fed and clothed. They were also becoming more frustrated and socially disorganized. Negroes moved into city slum areas as whites departed for the suburbs—and into the hand-me-down housing left behind. Crowding intensified; 60,000 Negroes moved into Chicago areas previously occupied by 30,000 whites. As usual, black income lagged behind white, and many blacks felt more keenly than ever the gap between the egalitarian, antiracist ideals of the war and the pervasive discrimination around them. In May 1944 a clear majority of respondents across the nation told pollsters that whites should have a better chance at jobs than Negroes because whites were superior, or better trained, or more intelligent, or more dependable, or because this was a white man’s country.