The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Negroes by the thousands were now coming into contact with whites in war jobs. And though racial strikes constituted only .00054 of all work stoppages, the confrontation was usually troublesome. After a year of war, OWI reported that “Southern whites who came with the construction crews brought racial attitudes foreign to the community.…As a matter of fact, racial tensions actually developed to the acute stage under the influence of these new attitudes….”

  In 1943 Ickes wrote to Roosevelt that discrimination, “although it can be nibbled at ineffectively locally, cannot be handled except on a comprehensive national scale. This is not a local question. It is a national one.” The Fair Employment Practices Committee and other fragile efforts, however, could not begin to grapple with social resistance and change of this magnitude. The FEPC admitted its impotence in the face of flagrant discrimination by the railroads and the railway unions. The first FEPC report, on defense training by the Office of Education, was suppressed by Roosevelt on the advice of the War Department and Marvin McIntyre. At the urging of the State Department, Roosevelt stopped FEPC hearings on discrimination against Mexican-Americans “for international reasons.” When the Office of Education in Washington called on white universities in the South to admit Negro scholars, the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News told it to “go straight to hell….Nobody but an ignorant, fat-headed ass would propose such an unthinkable and impossible action.” The South Carolina legislature declared, “We are fighting to preserve white supremacy” in the war, and J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt that “a good proportion of unrest as regards race relationships results from Communist activities.” Two months before Pearl Harbor, Selective Service Director Hershey wrote to Roosevelt, “It is obvious we must sooner or later come to the procedure of requisitioning and delivering men in the sequence of their order numbers without regard to color.” After three years of coping with white racism, however, Hershey changed his mind: “what we are doing, of course, is simply transferring discrimination from everyday life into the Army.”

  Roosevelt was ambivalent. In midwinter 1944 members of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association met with him for a special press conference. Roosevelt had hardly finished his cheery greetings when John Sengstacke, of the Chicago Defender, read a statement. For long moments, while Roosevelt listened, Sengstacke recited grievance after grievance arising from discrimination in jobs, schools, voting, civil rights. Second-class citizenship, he said, violated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and hurt the war effort. An awfully good statement, the President commented. He liked to think, he said, that mere association helped things along. But he admitted that “we are up against it.” When Chairman Ross of the FEPC suggested facilities for black victims of infantile paralysis at Warm Springs, Roosevelt wrote to his wife, “you can tell Mr. Malcolm Ross that Tuskegee Institute has a whole unit devoted to the care of Negro children,” and worriedly asked an aide, “what should I do about this?”

  The other race bearing the sting of discrimination in America at the height of the war—Japanese-Americans in concentration camps—also received lukewarm support from the President. In September 1943 Roosevelt had publicly promised, “We shall restore to the loyal evacuees the right to return to the evacuated areas as soon as the military situation will make such restoration feasible.” When Stimson admitted to the President in May 1944 that the Army saw no military reason for keeping loyal Japanese in the camps, Roosevelt suggested that he investigate attitudes in California. At a Cabinet meeting Stimson warned that if the Japanese were freed there might be riots and Tokyo would retaliate against American prisoners of war. The President decided that suddenly ending the order excluding Japanese from the West Coast would be a mistake; the whole problem should be handled with the greatest discretion by seeing how many families would be acceptable to public opinion in specific West Coast localities, and by the gradual shifting of one or two families to individual counties throughout the nation. He had found that some Japanese-Americans would be acceptable to Dutchess County. Then it turned out that Ickes, to whose jurisdiction the War Relocation Authority had been transferred early in 1944, favored immediate release; and Hull warned that Tokyo was more likely to react to incidents involving Japanese-Americans in custody than those at large. That put a different face on the problem. By September, Undersecretary of Interior Abe Fortas could report that out of 114,000 evacuees, over 30,000 had been relocated on indefinite leave, 60,000 were in relocation centers and were being released at the rate of 20,000 a month, and over 18,000 were still at Tule Lake and not eligible for relocation.

  The old system was gone, replaced by government agencies, and the wartime bureaucracy had but a single standard: military usefulness. Like many institutions, education fragmented under this test. The public schools thrived; working mothers and the move to urban centers sent more six to fourteen-year-olds into the schools, though there was a drop in high-school attendance. War fervor helped the social-involvement and learning-by-doing emphases of progressivism, which took more control over the public schools. Roosevelt had said, “We ask that every school house become a service center for the home front,” and the schools responded with bond drives, courses in Asian geography, and paramilitary school organizations. The boom in public education was only half the story, for colleges and universities were out of a job. Male students and teachers were drafted, women left for factory work; so the colleges stood idle. In 1943-44, liberal-arts graduates were less than one-half and law-school graduates only one-fifth the prewar level. Vannevar Bush estimated to the President that science lost 150,000 college graduates and 17,000 advanced-degree graduates to the war.

  Clearly war mobilization meant educational disruption. As protests poured in from college presidents, Roosevelt sought a short-term solution. “Federal participation in this field should be limited, at least for the present, to meeting defense needs,” the President said, and asked Stimson and Knox for an immediate study of the fullest use of American colleges for war purposes. By the end of 1943 the Army Specialized Training Program and the Navy V-12 program had used idle college buildings at about five hundred institutions to provide training for about 300,000 men. But as the result of a strong letter from Marshall pleading for young men for the forthcoming invasion of France, the Army cut its program to the bone in early February 1944, and, on Rosenman’s advice to the President, the Navy did the same. The war came first; everything else must wait.

  Higher education would never return to the prewar system. The drafting of students, the military-training programs, and OSRD weapons research had changed it permanently. Students marched in the Army; the Army marched in the classrooms; science professors improved bombs and medicines in the laboratories. After consultations among Stimson, Smith, Hopkins, Rosenman, and Oscar Cox, Roosevelt, on November 17, 1944, wrote to Bush requesting a program for postwar government subsidy of research and “discovering and developing scientific talent”; from this request evolved the National Science Foundation and the incorporation of universities into a new defense-industry complex. Together with the GI Bill of Rights educational giants, the government subsidies transformed local liberal-arts institutions into centers for national research and vocational instruction. The temporary war-research organizations and the temporary termination of teaching produced a lasting reorganization of education.

  The temporary became permanent, the means became ends, as emergency change lasted into the postwar world. Roosevelt himself was responsible for much of the confusion, for he tried artificially to separate war from postwar, temporary crisis from permanent tasks, means from ends. “I am not convinced,” he declared, “that we can be realists about the war and planners for the future at this critical time.” Yet the future would not wait for peacetime planning; it was growing from the narrowly conceived war organization. Roosevelt demanded the authority to mobilize for war, but he disclaimed responsiblity for planning against the social disruptions brought by mobilization.

  With peacetim
e institutions dismantled, only government organizations could deal with social turmoil. Where government mechanisms persisted into the war period, disruption was transformed into progress. With the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the War Labor Board, and a host of New Deal agencies agreeing on union policy, union membership during the war jumped more than six million. In 1944 one-quarter of the work force belonged to unions, strikes were a third the prewar level, defense workers received one day of rest in seven, a thirty-minute meal period in the middle of each shift, a vacation period, overtime pay, and a host of other stabilizing and humanizing benefits. Clear policies, established organizations, and the obvious military benefits of good labor relations prevented the turmoil potential in the migrations, conversions of industries, and new entrants to the labor field.

  For labor, Roosevelt had a policy and stuck to it; for other social problems there were limited goals and faulty means. In the absence of effective programs, Roosevelt was often confronted by social disruptions that were the product of day-to-day military-industrial decisions. The disruptions were inevitable in a quickly mobilized country, but in the absence of social goals, unrest provoked ad-hoc responses seeking vainly to restore prewar arrangements. In housing, the need to shelter millions of black and white war workers thrust the government into deciding for or against segregated housing. In the absence of any social goals, housing agencies decided to abide by prewar “local custom.” Migration to defense communities, however, was so massive as to make “local custom” irrelevant; local custom quickly became whatever the government decided. In these communities, the more numerous whites had more political power than the blacks, so cities such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which prewar segregation was virtually unknown, received segregated housing, starting a new “local custom” still in force many years later.

  Government decisions often aroused even more social unrest when announced goals were sacrificed to political or war expediency. Vacillation and delay in constructing the black Sojourner Truth housing project were one cause of the 1942 race riots in Detroit. Roosevelt’s reluctance to restore the Japanese-Americans to their homes helped produce riots at the Tule Lake concentration camp. The President’s continual frustration of FEPC work touched off a furore among liberals and blacks. Without goals, without strong organizations to implement social policies, social transformations were uncontrolled.

  Organizations have a way of enduring. By refusing to build strong organizations for social policy, Roosevelt insured that the government would not control domestic society. While large residuals of presidential government, the military-industrial complex, and other wartime controls persisted, the dominance of American society by the national government ended with the war. Standards and mechanisms to insure that the social antagonisms enhanced by the war did not tear society apart would have to be a peacetime creation. Some new sources of integration, compounded from the prewar yardstick and the mobilization experience, would have to link together the black cities and the white suburbs of metropolis, the vast military and social-welfare bureaucracies of presidential government, the skyrocketing marriage and divorce rates, the disenchanted students and weapons researchers on campuses. Urban riots, family dissolution, feckless bureaucracy, and campus strife would be the price of not finding such new links.

  THE CULTURE OF WAR

  “…There are no two fronts for America in this war,” the President had said early in the year. “There is only one front….When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground—we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his Government.”

  Noble words, and perhaps true in the way Roosevelt meant. But in fact there had developed by the third year of war an ambivalence in the American way of war—an ambivalence that would have more significance in the long run than the consensus that the President sought to invoke.

  On the one hand Americans were giving massive support to the war. In June 1944 the President reported proudly in a fireside chat that while there were about sixty-seven million persons who had or earned some form of income, eighty-one million parents and children had bought more than six hundred million individual bonds totaling more than thirty-two billion dollars. Americans were growing almost twenty million victory gardens; housewives were canning three billion quarts of fruit and vegetables a year. Boy Scouts, with the motto “Junk the Axis,” were tracking down the last remaining worn-out bicycles, old license plates, and scrap metal. In remote towns civil-defense wardens were still manning key buildings with sand buckets and stirrup pumps and scrutinizing the heavens for enemy planes that would never come.

  On the other hand there was little indication, as American soldiers came more and more to grips with the enemy, of any deepening or broadening of popular understanding of the meaning of the war. After closely studying American popular attitudes, Jerome Bruner concluded in 1944 that people said that they were fighting for freedom, liberty, and democracy, but that was not why we went to war. “We went to war because our security demanded it.” The popular attitude toward the great peace documents of the war, he concluded, was symptomatic. A few weeks after the Atlantic Charter conference some three-fourths of the American people knew that a meeting had taken place and that a charter of some sort had emerged from it. Five months later less than a quarter of the American public said that they had ever heard of the Atlantic Charter. The same was true of the Four Freedoms, he found; only a handful of people would take exception to any of the four points, but they had not become a symbolic rallying cry for the future.

  The Nation was quick to put the blame on Roosevelt. The American people were asking why we were fighting, and what is our foreign policy. People were asking Roosevelt and Hull this and receiving no answer. There were long, earnest debates as to whether Johnny felt he was simply fighting for Mom and blueberry pie. The “other side” of the war—the black and gray markets, widespread theft of rationing stamps, profiteering—was cited by observers as proof of lack of purpose and faith among the people.

  On this score Roosevelt had little patience with his critics. Had he not proclaimed eloquent war aims over and over again? Late in March he stated them once more, and more flatly and succinctly than ever. “The United Nations,” he said, “are fighting to make a world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.” He pointedly read the statement to reporters and added, “Some of you people who are wandering around asking the bellhop whether we have a foreign policy or not, I think that’s a pretty good paragraph.”

  Others wondered. John Dos Passos, exploring wartime Washington, had heard of the quiet and serenity of the White House. He asked a friend who worked there: Did the very stateliness of the place help keep the President out of touch with the country? Was the whole place under a bell glass? His friend thought the President might have lost touch with what real people did and thought and felt. Another man “close to the White House” was more reassuring. Every time the President took a trip, he told Dos Passos, he came back refreshed; perhaps it was a little like the Greek mythical giant who lost strength as soon as he ceased touching the earth. But the President was still seeing old friends—giving them too much time, some felt. Did people hesitate to tell him bad news? The President had a genius for handling that kind of problem.

  Later Dos Passos watched the President at a press conference. He noted the two Secret Service men behind the chair, the green lawn sloping down to the great enclosing trees, the President’s fine nose and forehead etched against the blue Pacific Ocean on the big globe behind him. Roosevelt was boyishly gay as he described the war, puffing out his cheeks while searching for a word, lifting his eyebrows, scratching the back of his head as he prepared to shoot out an answer. But when the talk turned to strikes and rationing and price control, Dos Passos noted, his manner changed. He
became more abrupt, almost querulous. His face took on the sagging look of a man who had been up late at his desk, Dos Passos felt, and had known sleepless nights.

  Had the people lost touch with Roosevelt? Dos Passos did not ask this question. The people had no clear way of showing their support or their understanding between elections except through answering questions someone else had framed. So tested, public confidence in Roosevelt as a person and as President was fairly high, but it seemed to turn much more on his experience and competence than on the ideals and war goals he represented. Thus when asked in June the strongest reason for voting for Roosevelt for re-election in 1944, the great majority of voters endorsed his “superior ability to handle present and future situations”; others approved his past record of handling internal affairs; only a handful stressed his personality and general ability. Dr. Win the War did indeed seem to overshadow men’s perspectives of their leaders; the long-run goals were still vague in the popular mind.