And this appeal fell with a dull thud into the half-empty chambers of the United States Congress.
“He’s like a king trying to reduce the barons,” Senator Wheeler had cried out against Roosevelt in the early New Deal years. He himself was the baron of the Northwest; Huey Long, the baron of the South; Roosevelt had once been just a baron, too. Ten years later most of the old barons, including Wheeler himself, dominated the political life of Capitol Hill. But now they were less the lords of regions—except, always, the South—than masters of procedure, evokers of memories, voices of ideology—and contrivers of deadlock. Power holding on Capitol Hill had changed little since before Pearl Harbor. There was the ancient and ailing Carter Glass, who, with his protégé Harry Byrd, still ran the Virginia Democratic party; Gerald Nye, as forceful, shrewd, and fundamentally isolationist as ever; Bennett Champ Clark, rotund and forensic, a spokesman for veterans; the stocky, smooth-faced Robert La Follette, less isolationist than his father but wary of Roosevelt’s foreign commitments; Hiram Johnson, seventy-seven, a true baron of the West, a bit feeble now but still a commanding presence with his noble features and snow-white hair. There were a brace of ambitious Republicans: Robert Taft, already high in the Senate establishment for a first-termer, dry, competent, assured; Arthur Vandenberg, now midway in his long, troubled retreat from isolationism, looking both wise and naïve , with his owlish little features setting off a big round face; the handsome, towering Henry Cabot Lodge, grandson of the great isolationist and a living invocation of the battles of 1919, a soldier who would soon go off to the wars again. There was a handful of vigorous internationalists: Warren Austin, of Vermont, Joseph H. Ball, of Minnesota, Harold H. Burton, of Ohio. Many an internationalist Democrat was there, too: Alben Barkley, Abe Murdock, of Utah, Theodore Green, James E. Murray, of Montana, Harry Truman, and others. But the Democrats were divided in war as in peace. Walter George, Kenneth McKellar, of Tennessee, Theodore G. Bilbo, of Mississippi, William B. Bankhead, of Alabama, E. D. (“Cotton Ed”) Smith, of South Carolina, and others were guardians of the South, lords of their committees, and as a group not dependably internationalist.
One way or the other Roosevelt had taken the measure of such men, Republican and Southern Democrat alike. But in early 1944 the rules of the game were different because the stakes had drastically altered. The issue was no longer welfare or domestic reform or economic policy, for which presidential pressure, persistence, and politicking could be counted on to bring a satisfactory if delayed victory. The President’s adversaries on the Hill now had the power to deny his supreme ambition—to lead the United States into an effective world-security organization.
Ridden by the memory of Wilson’s defeat, Roosevelt had been proceeding all through 1943 with almost fanatical cautiousness on postwar organization. He had let Hull and a group of State Department experts move ahead quietly with planning for postwar peace and security. He had let Willkie and other internationalist Republicans proclaim the postwar security underpinnings of “one world.” In Congress the internationalist Democrats were restive. J. William Fulbright, a low-ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the President to support his resolution favoring international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace, and for United States participation therein. He had always felt, he wrote, that the President’s success had been largely due “to your courage in boldly taking the lead” on troublesome problems. Roosevelt would not take the lead on even such an innocuous resolution, but after conferring with Hull he told Fulbright that he favored action on his resolution if it gained wide backing and if no prejudicial amendments were tacked on it.
As usual Roosevelt’s cautiousness was well calculated. His views on postwar organization had developed slowly before Teheran; he still favored Big Four domination and regional security organization. Hull and his State Department planners were strong for one universal organization. Questions were already arising—of a Big Power veto, of the method of representing nations, of a world-security force, of the relation between postwar peace treaties and the establishment of a permanent world organization—questions that aroused disturbing echoes of the controversies that had done the League to death.
Roosevelt wanted to still those echoes. The history-minded President was, indeed, so worried about improper parallels being drawn between 1919 and 1943 that he asked Hull to postpone publication of notes of conversations among Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau; such notes should not have been made in the first place, he added. He was resolved that any congressional planning for a new League must be very gradual and wholly bipartisan. Above all, discussion must not get bogged down in minor details. But there was considerable feeling in the Senate that specifics were the crucial matter. Willkie Republicans wanted a more explicit plan. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported out the Connally Resolution, calling for United States participation, through its constitutional processes, in the “establishment and maintenance of international authority with power to prevent aggression and to preserve the peace of the world,” the President favored an even more general statement.
“Mr. President,” he was asked at a press conference late in October 1943, “does the Committee Resolution reported out by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meet that specification [of generality]?”
“That’s the whole trouble,” Roosevelt answered. “Now you put your finger right on it. How could I answer that question? I couldn’t. Now you are getting down to specific language. You and I could sit down, if we were the dictators of the world, and work out some language that you and I thought was 100 per cent. And then Earl Godwin would come in and give us something that was better.”
“Earl Godwin thinks that it does,” Godwin said, amid laughter. “Now, if it’s just a matter of words, it’s sort of silly to take up time—”
“Well,” the President interrupted, “I think the Senate has every right to talk about it just as long as they want.”
“Exactly, sir, we shouldn’t say anything else. But suppose the Senate had adopted the Resolution, which it may at any moment, and you may be over in Europe, will the United States or will the President of the United States feel bound by this kind of Resolution?”
“That’s a difficult thing to say. I might not like it.”
“Well, it’s an expression of the Senate. It isn’t the ratification of anything.”
The President would not show his hand.
“Well, if the general sentiment is all right that’s fine. I have told you what the general sentiment I think ought to be. This country wants to stop war….”
By the end of 1943, however, things were falling into place for Roosevelt. The Republicans at Mackinac had, in the words of Vandenberg, who had exerted skillful conciliatory leadership, “put down in black and white the indispensable doctrine that Americans can be faithful to the primary institutions and interests of our own United States and still be equally loyal to the essential postwar international co-operations which are required to end military aggression for keeps….” Hull had found in Moscow, as Roosevelt had in Teheran, considerable convergence among the Big Three on postwar security policy. Always flexible on ways and means, the President himself had shifted from a regional emphasis to Hull’s universalism.
Roosevelt was also heartened by the the success of international wartime programs and institutions that would undergird postwar co-operation. Lend-Lease, the Combined Chiefs of Staff and its vast Anglo-American supporting and planning machinery, international agricultural and commodity programs, world-wide resource allocation, technical and scientific co-operation—all these activities, and the institutions that embodied and expanded them, appealed to Roosevelt’s preference for practical co-operation and progress without labels and controversy. In November he signed an agreement establishing the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. “As in most of the difficult and complex things of life,” he said on that occasion, “Nations will
learn to work together only by actually working together.”
By 1944 the time had come to move ahead on more definite postwar security planning. During January the President went over a State Department paper embodying the work of its experts. On February 3 he gave Hull formal word to go ahead with his planning for the United Nations on the basis of the State Department proposals, which would later become, with little change, the administration’s proposals to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. But not for a moment did Roosevelt forget the potential role of the barons on the Hill—or the ambitions and passions that might be aroused by the November elections.
THE REVOLT OF THE BARONS
Despite Roosevelt’s talk about keeping issues “out of politics,” nothing important could be insulated from the pressures of campaign year 1944. Barkley, Taft, Nye, and a score of other notable Senators would be up for re-election. So would 435 members of the House of Representatives. And so would the President—perhaps. Nothing at this time could have aroused campaign sensitivities more acutely—along with ideological feelings about states’ rights, fair play, GI’s, the poll tax—than the question of the servicemen’s vote.
Late in January the President put the issue directly before Congress. The people, he said, feared that the vast majority of the eleven million servicemen would be deprived of their right to vote in the fall elections. Men stationed all over the world could not comply with the different voting laws of the forty-eight states. A federal absentee-balloting act passed in September was an advance, but a small one; only 28,000 servicemen had voted that year. A bill endorsed by the Senate in December 1943 “recommending” to the states that they pass absentee-ballot legislation was meaningless—a fraud to the servicemen, a “fraud upon the American people.” He asked Congress to enact a pending administration bill that would provide for quick and simple voting for federal candidates by name or—if the name of the candidate was still unknown—simply by checking the party preferred.
“Our millions of fighting men do not have any lobby or pressure group on Capitol Hill to see that justice is done for them,” the President added pointedly. As Commander in Chief he was expressing their resentment for them. And, admitting that as Chief Executive he had no right to interfere in legislative procedures, as an “interested citizen” he demanded that every member in Congress stand up and be counted in a roll-call vote rather than take cover in a voice vote.
The message hit Congress like a declaration of war. The 1944 campaign was under way, the Commander in Chief himself a likely candidate for President. His face red and his arms flailing, Senator Taft charged that Roosevelt was planning to line up soldiers for the fourth term as WPA workers once were marched to the polls.
January 28, 1944, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
GOING UP AGAINST SOMETHING
“That’s okay, Joe—at least we can make bets.”
Drawing copyrighted 1944 by United Features Syndicate, Inc., reproduced by courtesy of Bill Mauldin
Privately Republicans and Southern Democratic Senators poured out their feelings. “Roosevelt says we’re letting the soldiers down,” a Senator said. “Why, God damn him. The rest of us have boys who go into the Army and Navy as privates and ordinary seamen and dig latrines and swab decks and his scamps go in as lieutenant colonels and majors and lieutenants and spend their time getting medals in Hollywood. Letting the soldiers down! Why, that son of a bitch…”
Roosevelt was the issue. If he would only eliminate himself as a fourth-term candidate, Republican Senator Rufus C. Holman, of Oregon, announced, the bill would pass. Democratic Senator Murdock answered mockingly: “I know it is the prayer in his heart, and it is the prayer in the heart of every other good, old, stand-pat Republican in the United States today…that Franklin D. Roosevelt would eliminate himself from politics and give them at least a shadow of a chance to bring in the Grand Old Party again. But I say to them…the American people still want Roosevelt.” At this the Senate gallery broke into applause and jeers.
Debate took an uglier turn in the House. Southerners feared that a soldiers’-vote act would override the poll tax and enable Negroes to vote. “Now who is behind this bill?” Rankin demanded of the House. “The chief publicist is PM, the uptown edition of the Communist Daily Worker that is being financed by the tax-escaping fortune of Marshall Field III, and the chief broadcaster for it is Walter Winchell—alias no telling what.”
“Who is he?” prompted a conservative Republican.
“The little kike I was telling you about the other day, who called this body the ‘House of Reprehensibles.’ ” No one rose to protest, and after Rankin closed with a quavering appeal to the Constitution and states’ rights, scores of Congressmen rose and applauded him.
For weeks the Senate and House worked the bill over, slowly squeezing out its substance. By the time it reached Roosevelt the measure was little more than a shell. The President was so vexed by the confusion and delay wrought by his conservative foes and by the bill’s limited scope that he refused to sign it. Under the bill that became law without his signature, 85,000 servicemen voted in the November election by means of the federal ballot, though a larger number—mainly those still in the country—voted via regular state ballots.
David Lilienthal ran into a special brand of Southern racism and reaction. All through the early months of 1944 he was facing congressional inquisitors hostile to the TVA in general and to him in particular. Rankin had been a champion of the TVA—he claimed, indeed, to be its “co-father”—but in the middle of his struggle Lilienthal learned that the Mississippian was threatening to “blow us out of the water” because the TVA had permitted a Negro girl to take an examination for a clerical position. Lilienthal’s main threat was not Rankin, but McKellar, an aging spoils-man and probably the most parochial member of the Senate. After baiting Lilienthal for hours before the Appropriations Committee, McKellar told the press that he had the “pledge” of the President that Lilienthal would be gotten rid of. Later, Presidential Assistant Jonathan Daniels lunched with Lilienthal and told him that he had mentioned McKellar’s statement to the President, who said that Daniels could tell Lilienthal that the previous spring McKellar had come in with bitter complaints about the TVA Chairman and that the President had replied:
“Well, Kenneth, I have been thinking about getting Lilienthal out of Tennessee myself. I would like to see a Columbia Valley Authority set up in the Northwest, and put Lilienthal in charge of it, since he has done such a good job. But I have never been able to get Congress to pass the bill for a CVA. So if you want to get rid of him, you go back on the Hill and get that bill passed.” How much of this was banter, Lilienthal wondered. But he stayed on.
Like other Presidents, Roosevelt found that his dextrous political management and manipulation could not overcome Congress when great political interests and risks were at stake. National-service legislation in 1944 demonstrated the limits of his influences on the Hill. For many months before Teheran he had vacillated on the matter. Stimson pressed him for a strong proposal to Congress, but WMC and WPB officials were cool to the idea. Baruch argued that the best way to mobilize and allocate manpower was by allocating materials; men would shift to high-priority industries to get jobs. His mind set, but tired of the endless debate, Roosevelt, on returning from Teheran, told Rosenman to draft a proposal for a national-service bill for his State of the Union address, but not to tell a soul about it.
Rosenman was aghast. Not even tell Byrnes or McNutt or Stimson or “Bernie,” men who had been laboring on the problem? No, said his chief, he did not want to argue about it any more. “I want it kept right here in the room just between us boys and Grace.” Byrnes was so indignant when he heard the recommendation over the radio, Rosenman was told, that he stalked into the President’s office and bitterly tendered his resignation; Roosevelt talked him out of it. Stimson was equally surprised, but also so delighted that he forgot to be indignant.
Congress was as cool to national-ser
vice legislation in early 1944 as it always had been to proposals that united labor and business in opposition. A gulf yawned between the legislators, sensitive to economic pressures, and Stimson, who saw a moral purpose in the bill transcending even the practical needs of war. A national-service law, he told the Congressmen, was a question of responsibility. “It is aimed to extend the principles of democracy and justice more evenly throughout our population….” Congress did not see it that way; the bill died in committee. Roosevelt had finally come around to Stimson’s point of view. National service transcended politics, he told Congress. “Great power must be used for great purposes.” But he had come to this view late, he had not marshaled his administration behind his position, and he failed to convince the men on the Hill.
The President still met, the first thing on Monday mornings, with the congressional Big Four—Vice President Wallace, Speaker Rayburn, Senate Majority Leader Barkley, House Majority Leader McCormack. Years later Barkley would remember these sessions-Roosevelt sitting in his plain mahogany bed amid a pile of papers, wrapped in an aging gray bathrobe that he refused to give up, puffing on a cigarette through his long uptilted ivory holder, Wallace in turn voluble and quiet, Rayburn laconically sagacious, Barkley himself often speaking for the whole leadership on the Hill.
Late in February 1944 these usually amiable talks took a sharper turn. Even since the previous October, when Morgenthau had presented the President’s stiff revenue proposals to the House Ways and Means Commute, the administration bill had been running-more often crawling—a legislative gantlet. The fiscal committees patiently heard scores of special-interest representatives. Most of the nation’s press opposed the administration’s tax program; the people, as reflected in a Gallup Poll, were as divided as usual. The Ways and Means Committee not only scrapped the Treasury’s program, but also barred Treasury officials from attending its executive sessions. Eventually the committee’s new bill, which would produce barely two billion dollars, was passed by a lopsided vote in the House. The Senate let the bill go over until the next session. In January the President warned that a realistic revenue law would tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and that the tax bill then pending did not begin to meet that test. Undismayed, the Senate passed a bill that would raise only a fraction of the 10.5 billion requested by the President and that bristled with what the administration viewed as inequities and favors to special interests.
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