Roosevelt

by James Macgregor Burns

  Still, Gulick could not but be impressed by the military impact of war organization. Somehow “it worked”—somehow it produced a “mobilization of total national power and a welding together of world military operations beyond the highest dreams of 1939 or 1940 or the greatest fears of Hitler. Those of us who write recipes should taste their pudding!”

  TWELVE The Strategy of Freedom

  FOR MONTHS THE PRESIDENT had watched the shining white pantheon rising block by block on a swell of ground beyond the Tidal Basin. From his study window he could see the figure of the third President standing stiff and erect in its austere sanctuary; at night, when the lights were not blacked out, the figure would glow like a beacon. Through the tall columns Thomas Jefferson stared straight at the White House, his face set and stern.

  By April 13, 1943 all was in readiness for the dedication of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. In commemoration, as in life, the Virginian had been able to divide as well as unite people. Bitter controversy had arisen over the design and location of the pantheon. Some had suggested that the memorial be built outside Washington—perhaps out in Virginia somewhere—but Roosevelt had insisted that the shrine be as conspicuous in the capital as the monuments to Washington and Lincoln. The removal of cherry trees had stirred further controversy, which the President had only exacerbated by suggesting that if ladies carried out their threat to chain themselves to the trees, a hoisting device be used to lift the trees and the enchained ladies out of the earth—new holes should then be dug and the trees and the ladies be placed in them—all to be done in a strictly humane manner.

  Even on the day of commemoration, controversy continued. The Memorial Commission sponsoring committee included men who had fought bitterly in past years but were united now in tribute: James M. Cox, John W. Davis, Alfred E. Smith, Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie. Their voices were muted on this day, but Republican Senator Edward H. Moore, of Oklahoma, was ready with a speech in which he assailed the New Deal party for paying lip service to Jefferson and charged that Roosevelt’s rule was leading to the same outcome as in Germany—Hitlerism. The President prefered to dwell this day on the Jeffersonian ideas and symbols that united Americans: freedom of mind and conscience, inalienable rights, liberty, the end of privilege.

  Before a throng that included Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, the President doffed his black cape and stood bareheaded in the sharp breeze that whipped across the water. He had banned silk hats and frock coats from the ceremony “on penalty of being shot.”

  “Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.

  “To Thomas Jefferson, Apostle of Freedom, we are paying a debt long overdue….

  “He faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact….

  “He loved peace and loved liberty—yet on more than one occasion he was forced to choose between them. We, too, have been compelled to make that choice….

  “Jefferson was no dreamer—for half a century he led his State and his Nation in fact and in deed. I like to think this was so because he thought in terms of the morrow as well as the day—and this was why he was hated or feared by those who thought in terms of the day and the yesterday….

  “The words which we have chosen for this Memorial speak Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning; and we are proud indeed to understand it and share it:

  “ ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ ”

  “A WORLD FORGED ANEW”

  The Presidency, Roosevelt had said shortly before he took office, is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. He had cited Jefferson as one of the great Presidents who were “leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” When he paid tribute to Jefferson in April 1943 Roosevelt found himself in a dilemma of moral leadership at a time when a profound idea in the life of the planet had to be clarified.

  The brightening prospects of victory had produced in early 1943 an eruption of books, articles, speeches, polemics on the question of postwar organization for peace and for security for all nations. On the eve of that year, Henry Wallace had proclaimed, in a national broadcast commemorating the eighty-sixth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s birth, that it was not Wilson who had failed, but the world. Internationalists in Britain and America hailed the speech. Three days later Wallace called for a world air force to defend the peace. The Vice President had already won liberal plaudits for challenging Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American Century.” “The century we are now entering—” Wallace retorted, “the century which will come out of this war—can and must be the century of the common man….”

  The most electrifying vision of the future came from no Democrat or socialist but from the leader of the presidential Republicans, Wendell Willkie. Early in 1943 he published One World, the tale of his globe-girdling trip of the year before. After reporting his adventures and dialogues in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China, Willkie called, in the book, for a war of liberation, for an end to racial imperialism at home and abroad, and for a “council today of the United Nations—a common council in which all plan together…a council of grand military strategy on which all nations that are bearing the brunt of the fighting are represented.” An instant hit, One World sold a million copies in eight weeks. Willkie’s central and most original proposal was that “nothing of importance can be won in peace which has not already been won in the war itself,” that during the fighting the United Nations must develop mechanisms for working together after the fighting was over, that the alternative to carefully linked war and postwar planning was “moving from one expediency to another, sowing the seeds of future discontents—racial, religious, political—not alone among the peoples we seek to free, but even among the United Nations themselves.” This view—so critical of Roosevelt’s whole approach to the problem—Willkie carried to victory rallies throughout the country.

  A multitude of other, divergent voices were heard during these days. Thomas Mann warned against political antagonisms between East and West, favored “Americanization of the world, in a certain fundamental moral sense,” and urged that his native Germany pass through hard decades of tribulation and atonement. Norman Thomas cautioned against a peace of vengeance. Bertrand Russell called for an international authority with enough force to win any possible future war. CIO President Philip Murray proposed a world federation backed by an international police force. William L. Shirer was dubious about a United Nations police force; solving the German question, he felt, was the key step. Max Lerner predicted that the United States could work with Russia, despite the many hurdles, and warned against being too dogmatic about Soviet boundaries. Colonel McCormick also had a postwar plan—to wit, that Scotland, Wales, and the British Dominions should join the United States as states of the union.

  And Roosevelt? As the war progressed he had become more explicit about his postwar ideals and goals. He had definite ideas about the transition period after the war: the world was to be policed by the victorious powers. The Big Four would act as sheriffs. Eventually a true world organization—a successor to the League of Nations—would take over, but the President was vague as to the specifics. During wartime, he told Congress in his State of the Union message, “we should confine ourselves to the larger objectives and not get bogged down in argument over methods and details.”

  The President’s reluctance to get into the hard specifics of postwar security was due in part to his old aversion to making decisions and commitments before he had to. In part it was due to divisions among his advisers. Hull worried about isolationist feelings, urged Roosevelt to dampen down Wallace and others in the administration who were taking an “evangelical” approach to postwar questions. Welles felt that discussions should go ahead within the administration. Hopkins wished that the President would move faster. Certainl
y the President was happy to see people outside the administration send up trial balloons, as long as the White House was not touched when they were shot down.

  Roosevelt’s main reason for moving slowly on postwar political questions was probably more intellectual than political. Repeatedly over a quarter of a century he had had to confront the question of world organization, and he had taken about every stand that an internationally minded man could. As a member of the Wilson administration, and later as candidate for Vice President, he had advocated the League vigorously, though his arguments had tended to be somewhat more pragmatic, Wilson’s more moralistic. Roosevelt had been tepid about the League during the 1920’s, and almost deserted it under the pressure of 1932 nomination politics. As President he had co-operated with League organizations, and he advocated United States membership in the World Court. But, growing more disenchanted with the League during the mid-1930’s, he seemed to prefer inter-American security arrangements, as a possible model for the world; and he catered to neutralist feeling. In 1937 he proposed some kind of quarantine for aggressor nations, then hastily dropped the idea, ostensibly because of opposition to it. During the prewar months he leaned toward Anglo-American guardianship of world peace, but later broadened the police force to include Russia and China. To some in 1943 Roosevelt’s Big Four police plan was hard to distinguish from a new Holy Alliance. But in supporting some kind of new League, however amorphous, he had come almost full circle since 1918.

  How long could the President put off the pressing, concrete postwar issues? He seemed in no hurry; he probably even toyed with the notion that Big Four policing might work so well that it could go on indefinitely. Yet he could hardly evade some of the specific problems, and certainly he did not, in “practical” areas. He helped sponsor global programs in munitions, food, raw materials, trade, and of course military planning. Here he was marvelously concrete, bold, and innovative; here he was making day-to-day decisions that ultimately would influence and even control the political options. But on political planning as such the politician in chief was cautious and halting.

  He was not alone. In retrospect the striking quality of the myriad postwar peace proposals of 1943 was their lack of political realism and explicitness. Most of them were not Utopian or foolish or shortsighted; they simply failed to relate closely moral ends, political means, and stubborn institutions. Thus the issue of working with Russia after the war was debated on the basis of hope or faith or even history, but few took the trouble to think concretely and imaginatively about specific Soviet experiences, ideology, expectations, and strategies in relation to the moods, optimism, utopianism, and biases of American people in their foreign-policy attitudes, the peculiar machinery through which they made decisions, and the attentive public, patriotic groups, and ethnic voting blocs that closely influenced foreign policy. Thus Michael Straight, a twenty-six-year-old former New Deal junior official, brought out in 1943 a brilliant, eloquent volume, Make This the Last War, that marshaled facts of history, economics, resources, production, dependent peoples in ample and glittering array, but turned mushy when it came to the harsh, restricted choices that politicians would confront. Roosevelt did not enjoy such a privilege. He could orate, dream, aspire, sermonize with the other would-be architects of peace, but he could not ignore such mean facts as, say, the rising controversy over Russia’s western borders, significant Polish-American populations in a dozen states, the foreign-policy influence of the Senate and of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the importance of one Arthur H. Vandenberg, Republican Senator from Michigan. Certainly Vandenberg ignored none of these facts. In the spring of 1943 he was busy studying various congressional declarations on postwar security and making clear his own sensitivity to the Polish question. The President could not forget that it was not only bitter-enders like Hiram Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, but also Republican moderates—men who were then much like Vandenberg now—who had destroyed Wilson’s League.

  “IF WE CAN CO-OPERATE FOR WAR, WHY CANT WE CO-OPERATE FOR PEACE?”

  October 25, 1943, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  Still, Hopkins was doubtless justified in complaining to Clapper that his chief was too conscious of Congress and of Wilson’s failure. The problem was not simply the delay in planning and the failure, despite Willkie’s advice, to convert actual war planning and processes into peace machinery and structure. The more serious problem was in the realm of political warfare. The ideal of permanent peace was the single most gripping vision in a world at war. Roosevelt’s refusal to put himself at the head of world-wide thinking and planning and building for peace narrowed his chances of competing for world attention and world allegiance with the Nazis and the Communists, who had their own peace plans for a “world forged anew.”

  On the domestic front the President felt less constraint in planning policy and programs.

  People at home and at the front, he had said in his State of the Union address, were “wondering a little about the third freedom—freedom from want.” They were expecting after the war to have full employment—to work, to run their farms, their stores, to earn decent wages. “They are eager to face the risks inherent in our system of free enterprise.” They did not want undernourishment, slums, or the dole. They wanted assurance against the evils of all major hazards—“assurance that will extend from the cradle to the grave.”

  “From the cradle to the grave”—these words touched the mood of the day. In England an elderly Oxford don, Sir William Beveridge, had written for the government a report on “Social Insurance and Allied Services.” Three hundred pages of small type, loaded with tables, bristling with officialese, the “Beveridge Plan” was nevertheless so explicit and bold a manifesto for “the abolition of want as a practicable post-war aim” that it set off a social-security boom in Britain. An American edition, reproduced photographically from the English, was a quick best seller.

  “Frances, what does this mean?” the President asked Miss Perkins as he read newspaper accounts of the plan. “Why does Beveridge get his name on this? Why does he get credit for this? You know I have been talking about cradle to the grave insurance ever since we first thought of it. It is my idea. It is not the Beveridge plan. It is the Roosevelt Plan.”

  The President was only half joking. He was proud of his fight for Social Security in 1934 and 1935, against one of the most reactionary oppositions in the history of the nation. And perhaps he knew that in his concluding paragraphs Beveridge quoted, as a warranty for his plan, the fifth clause of the Atlantic Charter—which by chance had been signed on the sixth anniversary of the day in 1935 when the Social Security Act became law. On the eighth anniversary—August 14, 1943—the President asked that Social Security be extended to farmers, farm laborers, small businessmen, and the self-employed, and to “the serious economic hazard of ill health.”

  It was clear, even with the anti-New Deal Congress of 1943, that many a progressive proposal that had failed in the face of the conservative coalition could muster support as a war or veterans measure. Such was the case with the “GI Bill of Rights.” The President appointed a committee of educators in November 1942 to frame a program for postwar education and training of veterans. The committee acted more quickly than most such presidential commissions; within a year Roosevelt’s recommendations were ready for Congress: federal support for veterans to study up to one year, and “for a limited number of ex-servicemen and women selected for their special aptitudes, to carry on their general, technical, or professional education for a further period of one, two, or three years.” The localistic, states’-rights, and religious objections that long had blocked federal support for schooling magically dwindled when it came to helping veterans. The President’s proposal of the measure, which was enthusiastically welcomed by Congress, in itself was a tribute to Thomas Jefferson, educator.

  When it came to paying for the war and stabilizing the economy, however, the President ran head on into congressional opposition.
Most of the legislators seemed to share neither the Jeffersonian concern for equality of sacrifice nor the Hamiltonian doctrine of prudent fiscal management in an economy under stress. In April, Congress terminated the President’s authority to limit salaries, by means of a rider attached to a public-debt measure that he was compelled to sign. Roosevelt bitterly attacked the rider, which was aimed mainly against limitation of salaries (including, incidentally, Roosevelt’s own) to $25,000 a year. “I still believe that the Nation has a common purpose—” he told Congress, “equality of sacrifice in wartime.”

  Certainly a large measure of sacrifice was possible. The statistics of the war economy were staggering to a nation raised on Depression scarcities. By mid-1943 war expenditures were reaching the monthly level of seven billion dollars. The national debt would soon be 150 billion. Since the outbreak of war in September 1939 Americans had saved about seventy billions. A third of this was in currency and checking accounts, a third in redeemable or marketable bonds—“liquid dynamite,” the Treasury’s General Counsel, Randolph Paul, called it. Taxes were running around forty billion a year. The Treasury estimated that income payments to individuals would be over 150 billion for fiscal 1944. Direct personal taxes, at current rates, would skim off about twenty billion, leaving about 130 billion of disposable income. During fiscal 1943 banks had increased their holdings of federal securities by about thirty billion—a key factor in a huge expansion of the total coin, paper money, and checking deposits held by the public.

  The President had called for sixteen billion of additional taxes and/or savings in his budget message of 1943. Congressional and public attention had been diverted by a heated dispute in the spring of that year over a scheme of Beardsley Ruml, Treasurer of Macy’s, for a pay-as-you-go income-tax plan that would “forgive” all or part of 1942 taxes. Roosevelt favored pay-as-you-go, but he publicly opposed the Senate version of tax forgiveness on the ground that he could not “acquiesce in the elimination of a whole year’s tax burden on the upper income groups during a war period when I must call for an increase in taxes and savings from the mass of our people.” After the President’s intervention the Senate version was narrowly defeated in the House, which then passed a compromise acceptable to the administration.