The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  So while he was poised to challenge Roosevelt when necessary, MacArthur was prepared to support the president when it was in the army’s interest. MacArthur got his first chance within weeks of Roosevelt’s inauguration, when the administration announced the creation of a Civilian Conservation Corps, one of Roosevelt’s cherished dreams. The CCC was a government-funded program that envisioned putting hundreds of thousands of young men to work in the nation’s forests and national parks—building and revitalizing roads and drainage systems, clearing brush, erecting fire towers, fighting soil erosion, planting trees, and constructing campgrounds and picnic areas. The government would organize, train, and house the volunteers; pay them thirty dollars a month; and oversee their work. Within days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, the legislation forming the CCC was drawn up and then passed on to the cabinet departments for fine-tuning. MacArthur was breathlessly cooperative—when the White House requested that the army draw up plans for organizing and supplying the new workforce, MacArthur pressed his staff to provide a detailed plan for doing so and presented it to Roosevelt at the end of March 1933. The plan was approved, and in early April, it passed in Congress.

  The CCC’s czar was Louis Howe. A chain-smoking and grizzled veteran of New York’s political wars, the gnome-like Howe had manned Roosevelt’s war room during the Democratic convention and then, after Roosevelt’s election, had accompanied him to Washington, where he took up residence in the White House. Officially, Howe was secretary to the president, but in reality, he was the most powerful man in the administration. Twice in twenty years, Howe had saved Roosevelt’s political career. When, in 1918, Roosevelt considered divorcing Eleanor to marry Lucy Mercer—Eleanor’s trusted social secretary—Howe intervened, telling the young Roosevelt that if he had any hopes of being president he could never get a divorce. He then intervened with Eleanor to save the marriage, while helping her become an articulate and independent political voice. Howe intervened a second time, in 1921, when Roosevelt was stricken with polio. The advisor sat by Roosevelt’s bedside for days, then saw him through his recovery and therapy. Thereafter, Howe expertly managed every Roosevelt campaign and was at his side during his four-year term as governor of New York. Howe’s reward was seeing Roosevelt elected president, an event that the savvy advisor had foreseen back in 1911 as the editor of the family-owned Saratoga Sun.

  Like many other Roosevelt advisors, Howe mistrusted MacArthur, though the army chief’s early work on the CCC impressed him. While the CCC was to be operated by the Agriculture, Interior, Labor, and War Departments, MacArthur was convinced that the army was actually best placed to administer it. Additionally, MacArthur calculated, if the army could take over running the CCC, it might inoculate itself against Roosevelt’s planned budget cuts. In fact, MacArthur thought, the CCC was a military windfall: Its training camps could be converted to military use, its reserve of young men were potential military recruits, and its program would provide senior officers valuable experience in planning, mobilization, and leadership. MacArthur’s pledge to use military officers as CCC trainers also strengthened his argument that the army needed to retain as many officers as possible. In all of this, MacArthur’s goal was not to increase the army’s budget, but to keep it from being cut too drastically.

  MacArthur’s view that the army should take over the administration of the CCC had few supporters inside the administration. But when the program failed to meet its early expectations (a mere 100,000 young men signed up in the first two months), CCC director Robert Fechner recommended that the War Department and MacArthur take over the program. Howe and Roosevelt reluctantly agreed, and on May 10, the CCC was placed under the War Department’s control. With the enabling legislation putting the CCC in MacArthur’s hands due to pass Congress by May 12, MacArthur had twenty-four hours to put in place a plan to make the program a reality. He was more than ready. Through all of May 11, MacArthur’s staff prepared a program to transport, supply, and train 275,000 recruits, then assigned officers and training grounds for their receipt. The operation involved deploying some two hundred trains and thirty-six hundred army trucks, supplying tens of thousands of trousers, shirts, and socks, and upgrading hundreds of barracks and military receiving areas. “It was a momentous day,” one of MacArthur’s staff later recounted. “In a few hours more had been accomplished than in the previous month. . . . That night, instead of a stray light here and there the War Department’s windows were ablaze. The big machine was rolling in a war effort.”

  MacArthur was overjoyed by the army’s response. In a circular to senior officers, he described CCC planning as “the greatest peacetime demand ever made upon the Army and constitutes a task of character and proportions equivalent to emergencies of war.” But in one sense, it is not surprising that the army met the CCC challenge: Recruiting, housing, and training men is what senior officers spent their careers doing. MacArthur’s agenda on the CCC became apparent in his official chief of staff report for 1933. His message was aimed at both Roosevelt and the congressional budget committees: “To epitomize the military lessons of the 1933 mobilization, it [the CCC] has given renewed evidence of the value of systematic preparation for emergency, including the maintenance of trained personnel and suitable supplies and the development of plans and policies applicable to a mobilization. Particularly it has served to emphasize again the vital need for a strong corps of professional officers and for an efficient body of commissioned Reserves.”

  For MacArthur, the CCC success proved that the military’s officer corps was the seed corn of American national security, the one part of the War Department budget that must remain untouched. Roosevelt’s budget planners conceded the point, though grudgingly, and only because cutting into the army officer corps meant trimming the CCC. Eisenhower was among the first to understand MacArthur’s agenda and acknowledge the victory: “Gen. MacA. finally won the most important phases of his fight against drastic cutting of National Defense,” he wrote in June 1933. “We will lose no officers or men (at least at this time) and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and of Gen. MacA’s skill and determination in the fight.”

  MacArthur was pleased with his CCC victory, but it made him uneasy. The army hadn’t been established to run public-works programs, but to defend the country. MacArthur was not alone in his feeling. Senior army officers harbored deep doubts about involving the military in an initiative promoted by a president who wanted to cut their budget—and by an administration filled with officials who described their leader as a “warmonger.” Then too, the army’s oversight of the CCC blurred the line between civilian and military spheres: Civilian leaders, army officers privately observed, were quick to condemn the military for intervening in policy debates, but shed their worries when the interference increased their popularity—or the likelihood that they would be reelected. MacArthur’s role in saving the CCC might have been good for the army budget, but there was no denying that organizing a domestic program putting hundreds of thousands of young Americans to work strengthened the political hand of an elected president. No matter how well-meaning they were—and no matter how deep the economic crisis—MacArthur and the military had signed on to a program that made Roosevelt look good.

  MacArthur was caught up in the contradiction. In June, he sent Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, a photograph of young men at a religious service in a CCC camp in California, appending a note intended for the president: “This photograph exemplifies to a marked degree one of the President’s essential ideals of the entire Civilian Conservation Corps project, the making of better citizens.” Roosevelt must have been struck by this, for being employed didn’t make someone a good citizen any more than being unemployed made someone a bad one. The point of the CCC was not to provide citizenship training, but jobs. Even so, Roosevelt responded that he would have the photograph framed and hung in the White House. But this nod from Roosevelt did not ease MacArthur’s worries, and
in the same month that he extolled the virtues of the CCC to the White House, he began to distance himself from personal oversight of the program, turning its management over to its director, Robert Fechner, and to Louis Howe. Then, in early 1934, he directed that the army replace its officers working as CCC trainers with officers of the Organized Reserve.

  Even then, the army’s withdrawal from CCC oversight was halfhearted, for the CCC was not only keeping the army’s officer corps intact, but also keeping army officers busy. So when Roosevelt suggested that CCC recruits be offered an educational program, MacArthur made certain that the army had a hand in setting its curriculum. While MacArthur hoped that in overseeing “the outlines of instruction, teaching procedure, and the type of teaching material” used in CCC camps he could head off the promotion of doctrines that (he believed) were undermining the country, his action broadened the army’s exposure to young men who, in less than a decade, it would be leading in battle. As it turned out, the CCC’s educational component was a success: nearly forty thousand of its recruits learned to read and write as a result of it.

  As time went on, the army officer corps’ discomfort with the CCC disappeared, particularly after serving officers came in contact with recruits. The experience of then Lieutenant Colonel George Marshall is instructive. At the outset of the army’s management of the program, in June 1932, Marshall was put in charge of nineteen CCC camps in District F of the army’s IV Corps area, which put to work tens of thousands of young men in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. What Marshall saw of the recruits dismayed him; unkempt and disheveled, the early recruits had been without work for so long they arrived at the camps with their eyes on the ground. From the moment he saw them, Marshall later said, he “ate, breathed and digested the many CCC problems.” The first challenge army officers had was to supply the young men with shoes, but the second was to give them self-respect. Marshall instructed his officers, now assigned as CCC “camp commanders,” to be upbeat but above all to put their recruits to work. “I’ll be out to see you soon,” he told one of his officers, “and if I find you doing something, I will help you, but if I find you doing nothing, only God will help you.” Years later, in looking back at his CCC experience, Marshall said that the army’s management of the CCC program provided “the best antidote for mental stagnation that an Army officer in my position can have,” adding that it was “the most instructive service I have ever had, and the most interesting.”

  But while army officers eventually set aside their discomfort with the program, a number of influential political voices did not, and the army’s role in the program remained controversial. The CCC’s promotional campaign inadvertently fed the controversy: Some of its most widely publicized photographs showed young men marching, shovels over their shoulders, to do battle with the underbrush. “Such work camps fit into the psychology of a Fascist, not a Socialist, state,” prominent Socialist leader Norman Thomas intoned. For conservatives, the lesson seemed as obvious. The photographs of regimented young men working in the wilderness was suggestive of what was happening in Bolshevik Russia, with its five-year plans and programs of forced collectivization. Marshall didn’t help the cause when he described the CCC program as “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia” to a local civic club in conservative Charleston, South Carolina. That wasn’t exactly what Roosevelt, let alone MacArthur, had in mind.

  Yet, in all of this, there was only one misstep. For just as MacArthur recommended that army officers be replaced as CCC trainers by officers of the Organized Reserve, he also suggested that the nation would benefit if the program’s recruits be introduced to a military course of instruction. Nothing would be “finer,” he told a congressional committee, “than to take the CCC men who have had six months in camp and give them, perhaps, two months more, in which they would receive military training.” MacArthur’s suggestion was met with a firestorm of protest. Eminent historian Charles Beard led the phalanx of critics, telling Roosevelt that “it is your bounden duty to yourself and your administration to wash your hand of this fascist doctrine.” Roosevelt refused to condemn MacArthur, but quietly let it be known that while the CCC program had been organized by the military, it remained a civilian agency. MacArthur did not need to read his mind and dropped the idea.

  Strangely, in the years ahead, MacArthur would never mention his role in making the CCC a success. Nor did he extol the budget victory he won by tying his service to Roosevelt’s progressive domestic program. Perhaps he understood the irony of his position: Having established himself as an outspoken conservative—the derided “General Goober of Anacostia”—he had become an accomplice in a program promoted by an administration that included his harshest critics. It is for this reason, perhaps, that he never mentioned the CCC in his memoirs or referred to it in his public speeches—it was as if it never existed. And yet, he found an odd fulfillment in running the program, as he made clear in a letter to CCC Director Robert Fechner: “It is the type of human reconstruction that has appealed to me more than I sometimes admit.”

  While Franklin Roosevelt owed a debt of gratitude to MacArthur for his work on the CCC, the president wasn’t going to let this interfere with the budget cuts he planned to force on the army chief. While the army’s work on the CCC had saved its officer corps from evisceration, the victory was temporary, with planned cuts to the army’s budget in place for the coming years. Roosevelt believed he had sound economic reasons for doing so: He remained an outspoken advocate for a balanced federal budget (making a distinction between the “regular” budget and the “emergency budget” that funded his New Deal programs) and knew it would be relatively easy to persuade the Democrat-dominated Congress to cut War Department spending. Then too, given the public’s dark memories of World War One, Roosevelt could credibly argue that money spent on preparing for war was money wasted and that the economy’s downward spiral was far more worrisome than the military’s lack of readiness. Finally, in the midst of the whirlwind of Roosevelt’s first hundred days—when legislation was passed regulating banks, markets, railroads, and putting young men to work in the nation’s forests—cutting the army budget could serve as evidence of the administration’s commitment to fiscal austerity. The president was in a strong position.

  MacArthur, on the other hand, was not. Under Roosevelt’s proposed Economy Act, federal employees had had their pay cut by some 15 percent, while veterans’ pensions were also reduced. When Congress passed the army appropriations bill for fiscal 1933, it set aside some $277.1 million for the military, which was $600,000 less than what had been proposed by Hoover. Three weeks later, the White House budget director said that that amount needed to be cut again, by another $80 million. MacArthur railed privately against the cuts, but he was hesitant to confront Roosevelt on them: Everyone was being asked to make sacrifices—why not the army? Yet, there were some cuts that MacArthur considered dangerous, including provisions in the proposed budget allowing the president to furlough thousands of military officers at half pay and cutting retiree pensions. In April, as MacArthur was telling the White House that the army should be administering the CCC, he was on Capitol Hill telling members of Congress that Roosevelt’s proposed cuts to the army budget constituted “a stunning blow to the national defense.”

  MacArthur’s lobbying succeeded; he was able to restore some $30 million to the army budget, but he’d had to enlist conservative pressure groups, veterans organizations (including some veterans who, as a result of the Bonus March, were his most outspoken critics), and newspaper editorialists to win his fight. When the battle was won (a half victory, MacArthur thought, but better than no victory at all), the army’s senior leadership praised him for his triumph—as did retired and ailing General John Pershing, whose own pension had been saved. Pershing even sent MacArthur a note of thanks.

  MacArthur’s victory on the furlough and officer pensions had kept Congress from eating the seed corn, as MacArthur might have phrased it, but the budget crisis didn’t go aw
ay. A new round of cuts was scheduled for 1934. To help stop them, MacArthur turned to Secretary of War George Dern. Although Dern had once been mentioned as a potential Roosevelt running mate, the former mining magnate and governor of Utah was viewed as too conservative by Roosevelt’s brain trust, who convinced the new president to shuttle him off to the War Department, where he could do the least damage. There was nothing happening there, they argued.

  But Dern proved to be more forceful than Roosevelt’s young New Dealers anticipated. When he arrived at the War Department, he unveiled a new set of modern business practices that included stringent savings measures and a streamlined budget process. In addition, Dern was an admitted MacArthur admirer and a student of MacArthur’s campaigns in the Great War—and was a surprisingly adept military thinker, setting in motion a five-year plan to improve military munitions and weapons. His accomplishments sparked MacArthur’s admiration, and his loyalty. “He was in thorough agreement with army plans and was a pillar of support for the military,” MacArthur later said. “My esteem for him grew daily.” In fact, MacArthur needed Dern as a front man for his own views, which he had to sell to the White House and Congress. It was nearly unprecedented for a senior military officer to lobby against a budget promoted by his commander in chief—which is what MacArthur was intent on doing—but it was a lot easier to do so with Dern present.