Schlesinger needed a stiff whisky all the same. Although he had been dispatched to investigate the drinking culture in and around army bases, in fact, he reported to Pringle, “people would show no interest in the drunkenness question and say, ‘If you really want to investigate something, you ought to investigate the race question.’ ” Thus while Marian had been writing to him of “your beautiful children . . . now peacefully sleeping in their little beds . . . tucked up to the chin with warm blankets and completely surrounded by soft animals,” Schlesinger confronted for the first time in his life the brutal reality of what race relations meant in the southern United States.7
In a long memo to Pringle, Schlesinger embarked on a tour d’horizon on “the Negro question.” It was as revealing of its author as of race relations in the South. “You would always expect,” he started off, “to find bitter anti-Negro feeling among poor whites” who took out “their own frustrations and insecurities” on their African American neighbors. What had changed recently, however, was the relationship between “a majority of the southern ruling class and a majority of the Negro population.” Previously “they have understood each other, and this sense of mutual confidence has made a very real kind of feudal and paternalistic relation possible between the races.” Now, “so far as I could see, the whole white South is feeling toward the Negro the way that formerly just the poor white felt.”
Why the transformation? For Schlesinger, “the basic cause of this change seems to be the steady and unremitting aspiration of the Negro.” Increased economic opportunity as a result of a shortfall in manpower aggravated by the draft had “increased the confidence and the intransigence of the Negro.” The labor shortage had resulted “not only in higher wages, but in increased impertinence on the part of the servants, and considerable (and unapologetic) absenteeism.”
And what to do? “The tragedy of the situation,” Schlesinger concluded jarringly in his memorandum, “is that no improvement would be made by giving more power to the Negro. The southern Negro would abuse power even more than the reactionary southern white. . . . The only hope in the situation lies in activity by the southern liberals, and this hope is scant. It is very difficult in the war situation to see any steps which might be taken without antagonizing either the conservative whites or the radical Negroes. The situation just looks bad.”8
In his 2000 memoir, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950, Schlesinger made much of how “the true horror of the black predicament had not burst upon me until I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line,” where “I felt that I had never imagined such misery and wretchedness in America.”9 There can be no doubting his shock at what he heard and saw, which were both far removed from the subtle forms of institutional and personal racism that he would have encountered growing up in the Midwest and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Schlesinger would later admit that “my conclusion was grim and contained statements I would soon renounce.” Yet subtle differences remain between what he wrote at the time and the vulpine eliding of detail he presented more than half a century later. Some of this difference amounted to no more than a shift away from anachronistic language. More significant were the subtle fakes and feints as he shifted from broad identification with the white population to empathy with embattled African Americans. So, for example, where in 1942 Schlesinger reports how “a charming southern lady of Fayetteville, wife of the local Episcopalian minister, presumably relatively enlightened, told of a brush with her maid over lynching,” in 2000 the story becomes that of “a charming southern gentlewoman—charming, at least, till she launched into a hysterical tirade on race [my italics]”—the “charming at least” artfully recalibrating the balance of sympathy within the whole experience. Similarly, in 1942, southern whites feared that “their physical security is essentially imperilled, along with the purity of their womanhood and the lives of their children. These fears,” Schlesinger judged baldly, “are probably justified.” In 2000, he added, “so long, that is, as the white south maintained its rigid belief in white supremacy.”10
In such ways, the older Schlesinger parsed the casual racism of his 1940s self, carefully re-presenting his views in line with those he held later on racial equality and thereby carefully protecting his progressive reputation in the process. His views on race were not untypical even among progressives. Certainly Franklin Roosevelt, in the words of his aide Tommy Corcoran, “ain’t gonna lose votes for it.” Instead it was the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who set the liberal bar with a series of important symbolic gestures such as rising to get a glass of water for a black speaker at Bethune-Cookman College or resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they barred world-renowned singer Marian Anderson from performing.11
Schlesinger did warn Pringle that the South would see “a shocking explosion one of these days,” but once he was back at the OWI, the writers were too concerned about bureaucratic disputes to worry about what they had seen. In the fall of 1942, when Schlesinger was on his field trip in the South, the OWI was coming under increasing fire from Congress. Prominent Republican figures such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts denounced its publications as propaganda for the New Deal. Some of the antagonism was procedural; pamphlets such as “Battle Stations for All” on inflation weighed in on policy topics that were under active review in Congress. The rest was fury that OWI often looked like a committee to reelect the president. The first issue of the OWI’s Victory magazine featured an article on Roosevelt, “President, Champion of Liberty, United States Leader in the War to Win Lasting and Worldwide Peace.” Under a huge color photo, it portrayed FDR as a saintly figure whose political philosophy contrasted with “the toryism of the conservative reactionary.” John Taber, a Republican congressman from New York, denounced the magazine as “outlandish, ridiculous, expensive.” OWI protested that it was meant for overseas, not home consumption. But a groundswell of opinion quickly developed on both sides of the aisle in Congress that OWI was actually doing more to hinder the war effort than help it. It was no surprise when Harry F. Byrd, senator from Virginia, announced that his Joint Committee for the Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenses would soon be investigating “government propaganda ventures.”12
Responding to the spiraling political situation, OWI in early 1943 embarked on an internal reorganization, with new figures brought in from advertising and business to help shape the message of its reports. That outraged Schlesinger and most of his fellow writers. “The issue is whether you can sell the war the way you sell cigarettes,” Schlesinger wrote to his old tutor, Bernard DeVoto. “There are two kinds of propaganda,” he went on, “one makes people think, and the other does their thinking for them; and OWI is presumably to do the second.” The new people were nothing more than “advertising prostitutes.” In truth it was an old-fashioned clash of cultures and politics. The OWI had started life as the Office of Facts and Figures, committed to a “strategy of truth” and staffed by the likes of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Pringle. The more recent recruits, often brash, business-savvy ad men, were a poor fit for the left-leaning, intellectually scornful, high-end journalists and academics who made up the Writers Division of the OWI. “The new order,” Schlesinger raged, “contemplated a glorified advertising agency, with a cage of copy writers to leap around as the idea men directed.”13
Schlesinger joined a delegation that “presented very forcibly our opinions” to the administration on these issues, but the “internecine difficulties” continued. When Pringle was dismissed and publicly accused of incompetence, Schlesinger and fourteen other writers resigned in protest. On the day he went, April 14, 1943, Schlesinger had expressed his fury in person to the director of OWI, Elmer Davis, but on every point found his “terribly sad” boss able to provide nothing more than “unhappy and, to my mind, evasive answers.” Schlesinger “came out feeling very lousy.” Writing his letter of resignation to Davis that same day, he repeated his condemnation of the changes that had put the
work of the Writers Division “into the hands of men for whom putting out the truth is a secondary consideration.”14
Schlesinger and the fourteen other departing writers also issued a statement to the press. “There is only one issue,” it said plainly, “the deep and fundamental one of the honest presentation of war information. We are leaving because of our conviction that it is impossible for us, under those who now control our output, to tell the full truth.” Predictably, the statement created a stir. The Washington Daily News reported, “concerning that OWI upheaval, it was facts vs. ballyhoo and the fact boys walked out.” The Washington Post columnist, Ernest K. Lindley, weighed in portentously that the “row within OWI again poses [a] perennial question: What is Truth?”15
Back at OWI, Davis was so angry with the public embarrassment that he had all the writers struck off the payroll with immediate effect. He rejected their offers to finish work in progress. When Chester Kerr, chief of the OWI book department and later author of the influential “Report on American University Presses,” slyly tried to recruit Schlesinger to his own department, Davis informed him in abrupt terms that the rebels would never work for OWI again. “When people jump out of a ten story building,” the director observed, “they ought to consider such things in advance.”16
Davis had a point. There had been a naïveté in Schlesinger’s stand—the wartime context had muddied the waters for OWI in ways that he seemed unwilling even to consider—but he had stood his ground on a point of principle and had acted honorably. But neither of those qualities put food on the family table. For all that Schlesinger had found the whole thing “a valuable and enlightening experience,” he was at the end of the day unemployed. Clearly that prospect gave him pause before resigning. It was true “that there was no future for me in OWI,” he told DeVoto glumly, but “two babies make one hesitate before indulging in romantic gestures.”17
The odd timing of the government querying his loyalty to the state gave fuel to the fires of conspiracy theorists. That spring, Schlesinger was hauled in front of the Civil Service Commission, which judged the suitability of candidates for employment at agencies such as OWI, to answer questions about his political past. “The examiner would say, ‘Information has reached the Civil Service Commission that one Arthur M. Schlesinger . . .’ and then the charge would follow,” he wrote home to his parents. It soon became clear that “actually I had inherited Dad’s dossier, so that I could answer in every case that I was not the person involved.” (Later, when Arthur was vetted for the Kennedy administration, investigators found that Schlesinger Sr. had “unwittingly associated with communist front groups in [the] 1930s and early 1940s”—notably in campaigns supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.) Stony-faced questioners in 1943 charged Schlesinger Jr. with being a “commie,” but he was unable to ferret out “how seriously” any of them took their accusations. All told, “it was rather a silly business,” but, unspoken, also an unsettling one that anticipated future “red scare” tactics that would also ensnare Schlesinger.18
Schlesinger’s discomfort at government questions after his leaving OWI in controversial circumstances was intensified by his inability to join the military—an obvious step in 1943 for a man of his age needing employment. When he took soundings about a naval commission, he was firmly rebuffed. In part, his bad eyesight counted against him. But that was hardly an insuperable problem, as the navy was unlikely to have used him to command a ship (or even a boat). Certainly poor vision had not barred McGeorge Bundy from joining the army; this Society of Fellows confrère simply memorized the eyesight test chart beforehand. No, what seemed more important was whether the navy believed Schlesinger would be a security liability. Later in 1943 he would test that security question with a formal application to become a naval officer. For now, however, he concluded that he must “reluctantly accept” the situation on “the naval commission business.”19
Unemployed, shunned by the navy, and feeling vaguely threatened by the government, Schlesinger might have been concerned about his future. But he had been brought up since childhood as a Harvard man and, now in straitened circumstances, he reverted to type by asking another for help. For most of Schlesinger’s life, he had pressed Harvard friends and colleagues of his father into action at crucial moments. Applying to the university in 1933, James Phinney Baxter III, the head of Adams House, the very house that Schlesinger himself joined as an undergraduate and where his father was a fellow, served as Schlesinger’s referee. By 1943, Baxter had taken wartime leave from Harvard to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he headed the Research and Analysis Branch. Come and work for me, Baxter now told him when he became aware of Schlesinger’s predicament. “His proposition did not appeal to me particularly,” Schlesinger admitted to his parents, but short of returning to Cambridge with his tail between his legs, he had no other option.20
OSS began in June 1942 as a successor to the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) set up the previous year. The agencies were part of an attempt to harmonize US intelligence efforts and were forerunners of the modern Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). William “Wild Bill” J. Donovan, a charismatic, fearless Irish-American war hero from Buffalo, headed both ventures. Donovan had married into money and had the good luck to be a classmate of FDR’s at Columbia Law School. He inspired fierce loyalty among those who worked for him, although not, as it turned out, Arthur Schlesinger. “He is simply an amiable fool,” the new recruit wrote home sourly after a few weeks on the job. The cultural historian Louis Menand would later go so far as to say that the visceral Donovan was the “human opposite” of the cerebral Schlesinger.21
Schlesinger’s scathing judgment on Donovan reflected a broader sense of disappointment that he felt on joining OSS. He had not wanted to work there in the first place, so the frustration became a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The job is very disappointing,” he complained, adding, “please do not spread this; I don’t want it to get back to OSS until I am ready to leave.” Part of the problem was the culture of OSS itself. In Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, Schlesinger’s friend Robin Winks would describe, in a way that cannot entirely have amused Arthur, how Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counterintelligence (X-2) were “the coaches, the clever men, the quarterbacks,” while Special Operations (SO) “housed the rest of the jocks.” Research and Analysis (R&A) on the other hand, where Schlesinger was billeted, “gave refuge to the weenies and wimps, the glassy-eye students on campus who came out to cheer the team on and who burrowed in the libraries.” For Schlesinger, it was unhappily like being back at Phillips Exeter Academy.22
R&A was charged to find Axis strengths and weaknesses using open sources such as books, newspapers, and government publications. “R&A,” notes Winks, “could, with a good library at its back and scholars skilled in drawing secrets from a library, get at most of the material of the operational branch of OSS, and equally important, of the Army and Navy, State or Treasury, needed.” There was even a card index retrieval system that mirrored a great library such as the Widener. But as more recent historians of R&A have pointed out, “it could not always answer the ‘so what?’ question posed by decision-makers.” Information for its own sake was not enough: it needed to serve a strategic or tactical purpose. Both of those characteristics were part of the problem for Schlesinger. There was no question whether he could do the work; rather, the job simply bored him. “Everyone just does research and writes reports which, except for the content, might be carried on in any library, and has about that atmosphere,” he griped. But R&A was too much of a back office experience for Schlesinger. He missed the esprit de corps of the OWI writers. And he missed their influence. “It is a tremendous anti-climax after the OWI job,” he wrote to Cambridge. “OSS is terrifically remote from the politics of the capital. For all the deathly secrecy of much of the material, there is a kind of ivory-tower serenity about the place; no one seems to care very much about what is happening in Congress or [the War Producti
on Board].” The contrast with his past life in OWI was almost unbearable. “I had some sense of effectiveness,” he groaned. “Someone would give a speech or issue a statement which I wrote; but here the effort seems to me largely wasted.” As an undergraduate in 1937 he had expressed his great cri de coeur as one who must not become “insulated from most of the currents that electrify vital life.” Now those fears of irrelevance seemed to have come true in, of all places, the nation’s capital.23
At R&A Schlesinger edited an in-house classified journal on psychological warfare called PW Weekly. Right from the beginning, he loathed it. After his first few editions, he wrote a memorandum making the point that the whole premise was flawed. Hard information, such as the movement of ships or trains, the availability of raw materials, the placement of bridges, harbors, beaches: this was the information and research that was essential for military action. But psychoanalysis of Nazi propaganda, he argued, was a waste of time. How could R&A know the extent to which the German Propaganda Ministry was inside the loop? Certainly if it was anything like the OWI, then it would be “in the dark” about military intentions. And propaganda by its nature was unreliable. “Can we escape from the fact,” Schlesinger warned, “that Nazi propaganda, in making a point, may choose to make that point directly, or to make the diametrically opposite point, or to make any number of points in between?”
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