by I. F. Stone
One Year After Pearl Harbor
In this overview of the international and domestic fronts one year into the American phase of the war, Stone attempts, as so often, to offer a sweeping historical perspective on the current political to-and-fro. The underlying question: What is America fighting for? Is our national objective simply to defeat the Axis and then return to business-as-usual, or is social reform part of our broader agenda?
. . .
December 12, 1942
LOOKING BACK ACROSS THE YEAR since Pearl Harbor, the President has much with which to be pleased. The task of mobilizing a fairly prosperous and contented capitalist democracy for war is like trying to drive a team of twenty mules, each stubbornly intent on having its own way. Only by continual compromise with the ornery critters is it possible to move forward at all. Examined closely, by the myopic eye of the perfectionist, Mr. Roosevelt’s performance in every sphere has been faulty. Regarded in the perspective of his limited freedom of choice and the temper of the country, which has never really been warlike, the year’s achievements have been extraordinary. The curtailment and conversion of civilian industry for war, the peaceful resolution of capital-labor difficulties, the preservation to a remarkable extent of both social gains and civil liberties, the great expansion of arms output, the successful launching of our first major offensive represent stupendous and back-breaking tasks. The President is only a man, with twenty-four hours a day at his disposal, and amid the clamor of criticism, much of it justified, it will not hurt to pause a moment in gratitude for his work in the service of our country.
Someone has said that politics is the art of the possible, and Mr. Roosevelt achieved what he did largely by taking the easiest route; the easiest was difficult enough. He let big business mobilize our economy for war pretty much on its own terms, and established what is in effect a government of coalition with the right. Just as King John had to sign on the dotted line for the barons before they would fight, so the President had to come to terms with the quasi-independent corporate sovereignties that control so much of our productive resources. In criticizing him for this, we must also in fairness criticize ourselves. Had labor and the middle-class progressives been better organized, politically more astute, less divided, more competently led, they would have exerted more pressure in the national tug-of-war. The last Congressional elections were an adequate if rough test of just how much influence the labor and liberal elements have in national and local politics. The things that count are not our speeches or our pieces in the paper but the votes we can muster in Congress in support of the measures we demand. It is easy to identify ourselves emotionally with “the people.” At the moment the people are not identifying themselves with us.
The Attorney General is the first public official here to say this publicly, at least by implication. “Is the sentiment of the public,” Mr. Biddle asked despondently at Charlottesville last Friday, “really moved by the vision of a better world or is it merely disturbed by anxiety about increased taxation and the threat of unemployment after the war? Do the people of our land fight only to win the war and have it over—or to use the war for great and democratic ends?” The answer of big business had been given at the convention of the National Association of Manufacturers two days before. “I am not making guns or tanks,” the president of the N.A.M. said, “to win a ‘people’s revolution’ . . . I am not fighting for a quart of milk for every Hottentot or for a TVA on the Danube.” In this the N.A.M. spoke also for the War Production Board [WPB] and for most of our military-diplomatic bureaucracy. Is the answer of the people very different? The Attorney General made it clear that he is afraid that the dominant feeling toward fighting the war is to “get it over.” Congress already reflects this desire for “normalcy.”
The trend toward the right has gone to ugly extremes “on the hill.” In executive committee sessions on the new War Powers bill, the principal objection to the measure was the fear that the President might use it to let in a lot of “non-Aryan” refugees after the war was over. The old slur about the Jew Deal has made a covert reappearance. Sumners of Texas on the floor of the House Wednesday attacked New Deal administrators as “this bunch of people who . . . do not much more than get into this country before they are trying to tell us how to run this government.” It would be a mistake to identify “Send ’Em to the Electric Chair” Sumners with the voice of the American people, but there are enough like him in the Democratic Party and in Congress to cheer the Axis and bedevil the Administration. The one part of the war machine generously left to New Dealers is that in which they are certain to become unpopular—the political-suicide assignment of price control and rationing. Sumners and his kind are making the most of it to set the farmer against the New Deal. Wait till they get started on how Lehman is taking food from Americans to feed foreigners!
Coffee of Nebraska thought the Sumners speech “wonderful.” Cox of Georgia rose to suggest that perhaps the time had come to break away from party lines in order to get rid of these “carpetbaggers.” Rankin of Mississippi and Hoffman of Michigan joined in, unrebuked, though next day Hook of Michigan gave Hoffman a drubbing in debate. Hoffman suggested that Congress set up a new committee to investigate the Marshall Field publications, the left and liberal weeklies, and the Washington Post for attacking Congressmen of this odorous variety in the last campaign. Hook threw Hoffman into confusion by asking whether this meant that the latter had lost faith in the Dies committee. Hoffman replied lamely that Hook and others had criticized the Dies committee so much that “they now have too big a job on their hands to handle all this.”
As Congress moves right, the Administration may move with it, if only out of necessity. The precarious course of the Panama agreement through the Senate last week showed how dependent the President and his party leaders are on right-wing Democrats. The debate and the vote were a foretaste of what is coming when we begin to make the peace. The power of a Cordell Hull, who can swing Southern votes, is likely to increase, that of a Henry Wallace to wane, as the drift continues. In a sense we are already losing the peace more rapidly than we are winning the war, for the shape of our society is being determined by the undemocratic and monopolistic fashion in which it has been mobilized for war production. This trend will only be reversed if the Axis staying power proves much greater than, in the present optimistic mood, is now expected.
Is the outlook for the liberals hopeless? Not at all. The pendulum now swinging away from social reform will swing back. At present, in the full flush of boom employment, after twelve years of the New Deal, the country is ready for a change, and 1944 may see a right-wing Republican elected. The reaction is likely to go too far. Workers and farmers will not easily give up what they have won through Mr. Roosevelt since 1933. The idea of social security is too potent to be stifled. The Republicans must either submit to these currents or go under in trying to combat them. The immediate outlook for progressivism is dark, but it has been dark before, and it is some comfort to know that its future is nowhere near as bleak as Adolf Hitler’s.
Relaxing Too Soon
For those not immersed in the history of World War II, it’s startling to realize that in April 1943—two years away from ultimate victory and more than a year away from the belated opening of the second front in Normandy—many American voices were already calling for a relaxation of war production efforts. Savor the classic I. F. Stone “gotcha” in the last paragraph—the sentence quoted from a Fortune article by General Lucius D. Clay, in which the easy-to-overlook clause italicized by Stone unintentionally exposes the shakiness of the government’s entire industrial strategy.
. . .
April 24, 1943
A CURIOUS ATMOSPHERE IS VISIBLE in the world of business. Though we are as yet only ankle-deep in the war, the impression is growing that the job of war production has passed its peak, and that we can now begin to think of a return to greater civilian production. The service-equipment division of the War Production Board [WPB] has prep
ared a plan for resuming the manufacture of office machinery. The WPB has issued an order easing its prohibition against the use of steel for non-essential purposes. Manufacturers may use stocks of partially or wholly fabricated steel parts in the production of a wide variety of gadgets ranging from electric haircurlers to shoe buckles. Trade papers began to talk last fall of the possibility of obtaining materials for renewed civilian output, and the same sort of speculation has now reached the daily press. The financial section of today’s New York Times, for example, carries no fewer than three articles on the prospect of greater civilian output.
William J. Enright, who covers business circles for the Times, says “war agencies intend to start the reconversion of industry to the production of essential civilian goods by the end of the summer.” Kenneth L. Austin, who reports on finance and heavy industry, declares New York and Washington are hearing “forecasts that the supply of steel for military, naval, and shipbuilding needs soon will appear to have been more than amply covered, and . . . metal will be available for non-essential civilian needs within the next six months or less.” C. F. Hughes, who writes the enlightened and well-informed Merchant’s Point of View for the Times, reflects widespread opinion at the capital when he says, “In guns, bombs and shells, motor vehicles and tanks we have already produced more than enough for any reasonable requirements of [our] armed forces or those of our allies.”
This feeling that the job of war production is in its declining phase has found expression in the ranks of both capital and labor. Walter D. Fuller, president of the Curtis Publishing Company and chairman of the executive committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, said here last week that the country was suffering from overproduction of certain types of war materials. Fuller declared that we had built up a sufficient backlog of weapons to justify more emphasis on civilian needs. Philip Murray, president of the C.I.O., told the Institute of Women’s Professional Relations that the United States is confronted with mass unemployment because we have produced more war materials “than the United Nations can use or the United States can transport.” He was unwise enough to speak of difficulties created by “a mad desire to expedite war materials.”
There are many parts of the earth in which talk of this kind must make painful and puzzling reading. Our men in the Southwest Pacific are not suffering from an excess of supplies. Australia is worried about a possible Japanese offensive. Last year’s widely ballyhooed offensive in Burma has subsided, for lack of material, into the faintest kind of nudge. The Chinese, who have done more with less than any of the United Nations, must think us mad. Our French allies in North Africa, from latest reports, are still using outmoded equipment. The Soviet Union, still the only nation fighting Hitler on a major scale, continues to look for a second front, a military enterprise that will require huge amounts of material if it is to be successful. Granted that we may be producing more than we need on the present scale of our operations, granted even that in some items we have produced enough for any scale of warfare, is it possible that in the over-all picture we have reached a stage where we can relax and turn back to more normal production?
There is evidence that even on the present scale we are still far from the point where we can begin again to make gadgets. Expansion of steel-making facilities is behind schedule and is being curtailed on the general view that we now have enough steel not only for war but for more civilian output. Yet WPB [War Production Board] Chairman Donald M. Nelson said last week that ordinary carbon steel had now become our most serious bottleneck. Production for the third quarter of this year, according to Nelson, will be only about 14,450,000 tons. The demands of our various military and lend-lease agencies and essential civilian supply for that quarter total 20,830,000 tons. There is a deficit of more than 5,000,000 tons, or 25 per cent.
The full significance of those figures becomes more apparent if we recognize that the President’s Victory program of January, 1942, has been quietly revised downward not once but several times. “The earlier question of whether we would need eighty billions in war output this year,” C. F. Hughes writes, “is on the way to being answered with a flat ‘No.’” The phrase “on the way” is an understatement. Except in shipbuilding, even in aircraft, we not only are failing to meet those goals but have reduced them. In this connection I should like to call attention to an authoritative article on the Army Supply Program by Major General Lucius D. Clay in the February issue of Fortune. Major General Clay is assistant chief of staff for matériel in the General Staff Corps. His article is extraordinary reading. It shows how long the War Department waited before drawing up plans for an all-out effort and how soon it relinquished them.
“Immediately after Pearl Harbor,” General Clay writes, “the Supply Division of the General Staff recognized the necessity for the revision of the Army Supply Program for all-out war. By early February it had completed the first Army Supply Program for this purpose.” The Pearl Harbor mentality seems to have dominated the General Staff as well as the commanding officers in Hawaii. General Clay says this first program “was based on the mobilization rate and the composition of troops deemed desirable at that early stage of war, and it included large quantities of matériel that our allies had ordered or requested the year before.” This first program called for $62 billion in supplies “through the calendar year 1943” or $31 billion a year in 1942 and 1943. This was reduced, according to General Clay, to $45 billion in April, 1942. Later it was reduced again, to $38 billion. In November, 1942, it was further reduced—to $31 billion. “For 1943,” General Clay reports, “our problems in materials and facilities appear to be solved—to the extent that objectives have finally been brought within the limit of available supplies and facilities” (my italics). The production problem was solved by reducing the production program! It is measured by these reduced goals that we now have “overproduction of war material.” It is on the basis of these reduced goals that plans for expanding production in steel and other basic materials are being curtailed and the resumption of non-essential production is planned. The monopolies which fought expansion have succeeded in cutting the war effort down to size, and “business as usual” is again raising its head. This is a dangerous tendency, which may yet prove costly in terms of lives.
How Washington Took the News
At last, the opening of the second front. Stone offers a marvelously atmospheric collage of scenes from Washington, D.C., on the day when news of the invasion broke, from “the couples making love . . . in Lafayette Park” to the shaking hand of Roosevelt, “happy and confident but tired,” as he addressed a packed news conference.
. . .
June 17, 1944
MOST OF THE WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS, like most of official Washington, slept peacefully through the early hours of D-Day. The first announcement that the second front had been opened came at 12:37 A.M., long after the usual deadlines of the morning-paper bureaus and long before that of the evenings. The German source of the news and the absence of any confirmation here or in London made bureau chiefs skeptical, and decided them against staff mobilizations. The few who came down town after the German broadcast noted the usual sights—an occasional light in the darkened Navy Department, the lonely sentries before the White House, the couples making love across the way in Lafayette Park. The moon was full, the weather mild.
The Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff had left their offices at 5 P.M. the day before and were safe abed. The big military secret was that Elmer Davis, on leaving the National Press Club at 9:30 that night, had gone back to his office at the OWI [Office of War Information]. The one exciting place in town was the foreign news bureau of the OWI in the Social Security Building near the Capitol, but in the huge adjoining press room as late as 3 A.M. there were only two reporters waiting for the big news—Libby Donahue of PM and Joe Laitin of the United Press, neither certain that anything would turn up. There was a guard at the door to keep them away from Elmer Davis’s office, and a terrific clatter and clang
issued from the foreign news room, with its huge battery of tickers, each with a bell that rings when particularly hot news comes over the wires. The bells rang often and the place was a mad scramble of OWI foreign staff members, but as Libby says, “those boys are crazy even on a clear day,” and one couldn’t be sure. Five minutes before United Nations confirmation of the second front at 3:32 A.M. Miss Donahue was confidentially informed from an authoritative source that she might as well go home as there would be a long delay. She decided, however, to stay.
By the time news of the invasion was confirmed, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and an Acme photographer had also arrived, and all were ushered into Elmer Davis’s office to hear General Eisenhower’s broadcast over short wave. Davis looked tired and dazed but perked up over General Eisenhower’s delivery, which was good. “That man could go places on radio when the war’s over,” Davis said admiringly.
The State Department moved its regular press conference from noon to 11 A.M. on D-Day, perhaps out of a sense of the urgency of the occasion. On the way there we saw a group of curious people, police, and photographers waiting to get a glimpse of the visiting Polish Premier. He had an appointment with Under Secretary Stettinius at 10:30, and the latter, in full protocol, walked across the street to escort Mikolajczyk over. What they said to each other, then or later, remains a secret, but the Soviet Ambassador arrived at the department an hour afterward. In between, the Under Secretary met the press. Hull was away resting at Hershey, Pennsylvania, and as always it was a pleasure to see Stettinius’s youthful face and quick smile in his place. The Under Secretary read a prepared statement, “The liberation of Europe has begun . . . ”—one of many like it on D-Day from departmental and embassy mimeographs. Then he went on to announce recognition of the new Ecuadorean government, the arrival of the Gripsholm at Jersey City, an agreement by the Japanese government to pick up supplies at Vladivostok for interned Allied nationals.