The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  There are many complaints that Dewey is rude and standoffish in dealing with the townspeople. Lehman was chairman of Russian War Relief in Albany; as a matter of courtesy Dewey was invited to succeed him. The invitation went unanswered. The Inter-Racial Council runs a Booker T. Washington Center here. It held a musicale to raise funds. Tickets were sent the Governor. They were returned unacknowledged. The 4-H clubs held their annual meeting here. It is customary for Governors to address the meeting. Dewey refused because the Mayor of Albany had also been invited. He agreed to speak only when the Mayor withdrew. “He can’t put his political ax aside for a moment,” said one Albany newspaperman. Albany would agree with the irate Republican lady who once said, “You have to know Dewey to dislike him.”

  Farewell to F.D.R.

  Not hagiography but a sober, appreciative assessment of Franklin D. Roosevelt a few days after his death on April 12, 1945, as well as a look back at his presidency—“for folk who scare easily . . . a series of scares”—and a cautiously optimistic look forward at the Truman era.

  . . .

  April 21, 1945

  MR. ROOSEVELT’S BODY was brought back to Washington today for the last time. The crowds began to gather early in Lafayette Park opposite the White House, as they did all along the line of the procession from Union Station. I got down to the park early and stood with many others waiting. Some small boys climbed into a tree for a better view. The gray tip of the Washington Monument showed above the White House. The trees were in full green; tulips bloomed on the lawn. Outside on the sidewalk there were soldiers in helmets every few feet, and we could hear the harsh tones of command as the guard of honor lined up on the White House lawn. Florists’ trucks pulled up at the door, and huge wreaths were taken inside. Cameras were set up on the front porch, and camera men were perched on high ladders on the sidewalks and among us in the park. Birds sang, but the crowd was silent.

  In the park I recognized a group of girls from the C.I.O. offices in nearby Jackson Place, Walter Lippmann, and an Army and Navy Club bellboy with a sensitive Negro face. There were soldiers and sailors, Waves and Wacs. There were many Negroes, some of them quite obviously housemaids. There were well-dressed women and men in shirt sleeves. I noticed a small middle-aged priest, several grave and owlish Chinese, many service men with their wives or sweethearts, a tired man in overalls and blue-denim work cap. A tall gangling Negro boy in jitterbug jacket and pork-pie hat towered above the crowd in front of me. A man who seemed to be a hobo, unshaven and dirty, jarred the silence with a loud laugh at something a child behind him had said. There were close-mouthed New England faces, Jewish faces, Midwestern faces; workers and business men and housewives, all curiously alike in their patience and in the dumb stolidity that is often sorrow’s aspect.

  A truck sped by on Pennsylvania Avenue. On the roof of the truck two navy men operated a movie camera, taking pictures of the crowd. Far above us, twenty-four Flying Fortresses roared across the skies in proud formation. One remembered the President’s 50,000-plane speech, and choked. Motorcycle police heralded the procession’s approach. The marching men, the solemn bands, the armored cars, the regiment of Negro soldiers, the uniformed women’s detachments, the trucks filled with soldiers, and the black limousine carrying officials and the President’s family went by slowly. They seemed part of an unreal pageant by comparison with the one glimpse of what we had come to see—the coffin covered with a flag. Many faces in the crowd puckered as it went past. In that one quick look thousands of us said our goodbye to a great and good man, and to an era.

  I was at the PM office in New York Thursday when it happened. There was a commotion in the newsroom. A copyboy ran out of the wire-room with a piece of United Press copy in his hand. That first flash, “The President died this afternoon,” seemed incredible; like something in a nightmare, far down under the horror was the comfortable feeling that you would wake to find it was all a dream. The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead. Later, when work was done, I went to a meeting of liberals in an apartment on Washington Square. It was a gloomy gathering, much too gloomy to honor so buoyant a spirit as Mr. Roosevelt’s. Some felt that with his passing the Big Three would split up, that hope of a new world organization was dim. One of those present reported, apropos, that an automobile-company official in Detroit had told a delegation of visiting French newspapermen, “Next we fight the Soviet Union.” Some thought the Nazis would be encouraged to hold out, that the war had been lengthened by the President’s passing. Everyone seemed to feel that trouble, serious trouble, lay ahead.

  I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna, but I can remember so many crepe-hanging sessions of this kind since 1932. The Roosevelt era, for folk who scare easily, was a series of scares. Just before he took office, when the bonus marchers were driven out of Washington, revolution seemed to be around the corner. There was the banking crisis. The NRA [National Recovery Administration] was suspected of being the beginning of fascism; one of my friends in New York cautiously erased his name from the volumes of Marx and Lenin he owned; he felt the men with the bludgeons might be in his apartment any day. The Supreme Court knocked one piece of reform legislation after another on the head, and Mr. Roosevelt, when he set out to fight back, showed a deplorable disrespect for the constitutional amenities. There were the Chicago massacre and the Little Steel strike. There was Hitler. France fell when our armed forces were in good shape for a war with Nicaragua. The Japs sank most of the fleet at Pearl Harbor. It was a lush era for Cassandras.

  Somehow we pulled through before, and somehow we’ll pull through again. In part it was luck. In part it was Mr. Roosevelt’s leadership. In part it was the quality of the country and its people. I don’t know about the rest of the four freedoms, but one thing Mr. Roosevelt gave the United States in one crisis after another, and that was freedom from fear. Perhaps his most important contribution was the example, the superlative example, of his personal courage. Perhaps some of us will feel less gloomy if we remember it. Perhaps some of us will be more effective politically if we also learn from Mr. Roosevelt’s robust realism, his ability to keep his eye on the main issue and not worry too much about the minor details.

  I found the mood of the intellectuals and New Dealers in Washington this week-end quite different from that in New York. There has been much swapping of information and sidelights, and there is a good deal of confidence in the new President. No one, least of all Mr. Truman, an impressively modest man, expects him fully to fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes. But the general feeling among those who know Mr. Truman is that he will surprise the skeptical. I can only record my own impression for whatever it is worth. I talked with Mr. Truman several years ago and liked him immediately and instinctively. The Presidency is a terrific job, and it remains to be seen how he will stand up under its pressure. But he is a good man, an honest man, a devoted man. Our country could be far more poorly served. Mr. Truman is a hard worker, decisive, a good executive. He works well with people. He is at once humble about his own knowledge and capacities, as a wise man should be, and quietly confident about his ability to learn and to rise to the occasion.

  I hate to confess it, but I think Mr. Roosevelt was astute and farsighted in picking Mr. Truman rather than Mr. Wallace as his successor. At this particular moment in our history, Mr. Truman can do a better job. Mr. Wallace’s accession might have split the country wide open, not because of Mr. Wallace but because of the feeling against him on the right. Mr. Truman has the good-will of both sides and is in a position to capitalize on the sobering influence of Mr. Roosevelt’s passing. The heaviest task of the President lies in the field of foreign relations, and the biggest obstacle to its accomplishment is in the Senate. It is fortunate that Mr. Truman’s greatest and most obvious political assets are his relations with the Senate. He is a friendly person, and was well liked on both sides of the aisle. Isolationists like Wheeler and La Follette are among his friends, and he may be able to exert an influence with
them that the circumstances and the momentum of past events denied to Mr. Roosevelt. The chances of a two-thirds’ vote in the Senate for the new peace organization are improved by the shift in the Presidency. I say this with no disrespect to our great departed leader.

  I think Mr. Truman will carry on Mr. Roosevelt’s work. He had been very effective in support of Mr. Roosevelt in the Senate. I can authoritatively report that the famous B2H2 resolution* originated in Mr. Truman’s office. Three of the sponsors, Senators Ball, Burton, and Hatch, were members of the Truman committee. Mr. Truman’s closest personal friends in the Senate were Kilgore of West Virginia and Wallgren of Washington, both sturdy progressives and good New Dealers. There will be changes in the Cabinet, perhaps some for the better. On domestic policy Mr. Truman’s record is an excellent one, and labor has nothing to fear from him. The shock of Mr. Roosevelt’s death has created an atmosphere in which the new President may be able to unite the nation more closely than ever and carry it forward to that stable peace Mr. Roosevelt so deeply desired.

  * * *

  *The historic bipartisan Senate resolution of 1943, sponsored by Senators Ball, Burton, Hill, and Hatch (hence B2H2) urging U.S. initiative in forming a United Nations.

  LaGuardia and UNRRA

  Here is a rich evocation of the life and personality of Fiorello LaGuardia, the most beloved mayor of New York City, following his death after a long and painful battle against pancreatic cancer. UNRRA was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, founded in 1943 to provide relief to areas liberated from Axis powers. LaGuardia was their director general in 1946. UNRRA provided billions of U.S. dollars of rehabilitation aid and helped some eight million refugees.

  . . .

  September 22, 1947

  THAT LONG AND LONELY FIGHT in the Bronx is ended. We have lost a great New Yorker and a great American. It is sad that the passing of Fiorello LaGuardia should have been pitiful. He was a man to provoke violent reactions—anger, hatred, enthusiasm, love, exasperation, devotion, anything but pity. He who loved combat, crowds, five-alarm fires, rough-and-tumble debate on street corners and on the floor of Congress, tumult and crisis, with all the ardor of a mischievous and exhibitionistic small boy, should not have had to wrestle unseen with a stealthy death. He should have died splendidly in battle, not slowly shrinking into skin and bone on a sickbed, restless, impatient, and frustrated, a giant spirit in a shrunken child’s body, watching with dismay as the world moved through misery he had tried to alleviate toward a new tragedy his unheeded warnings foresaw. This, for the Little Flower, the Mayor, Butch, the Hat, was a cruel end.

  LaGuardia’s background was of that richly composite and polyglot kind that is America’s glory, however much it may depress the anemic D.A.R. He was half Italian, half Jewish, and wholly American. He was born in New York but spent his childhood and youth in Arizona. From the Southwest he brought more than a fondness for sombrero-brimmed hats so broad they made the stout little fellow look like a perambulating mushroom; he brought something of the breezy independence of the frontier. No figure in American politics ever thumbed his nose so brashly at party regularity and got away with it. In the midst of the smug Coolidge era, when the party bosses tried to get rid of this maverick Republican, he defied them and was re-elected to Congress as a Socialist. He was a New Dealer before the New Deal; the leader of a rebel Republican faction which rode herd on the Hooverites in the early ’30s, fought hard for relief, blocked the sales tax, and in 1932 triumphantly put through Congress the Norris-LaGuardia anti-injunction act, forerunner of the Wagner Act and LaGuardias greatest legislative achievement.

  What were the qualities and circumstances which enabled LaGuardia to serve fourteen years in Congress, to be elected Mayor of New York for three consecutive terms, to become a national and international figure, without that loyalty to party machine which is ordinarily an essential to success in American politics? He survived in Congress because his base was on the East Side, among the poor and the politically advanced. He succeeded without a machine in New York because Tammany mismanagement, a leftward tide, and a sense of civic responsibility made it possible for LaGuardia to muster a coalition which ranged from Wall Street bankers to Union Square labor leaders. He gave the city competent, honest, and reasonably progressive government for twelve years—the best mayor New York ever had. Though he was as temperamental as an operatic tenor, and as flamboyant as a prima donna, LaGuardia was a tireless and capable administrator. He was a natural-born popular leader for a democratic people: straightforward in speech, free from cant and hypocrisy, shrewdly and disarmingly candid in tight spots, with a flair for the direct and the dramatic.

  To protest against Prohibition, LaGuardia brewed beer in his own office in Washington. To illustrate a speech on the high cost of living after World War I, he waved a lamb chop before a startled House of Representatives. To show his contempt for Hoover during the ’30s, he gave his own White House invitations to street urchins. To make Midwestern farmers realize the need abroad, LaGuardia went on a personal tour as head of UNRRA; at one rally, in Minnesota, he mounted a farm wagon, held aloft a loaf of bread, and ripped off six slices to show assembled farmers an entire day’s food allowance in some European countries—“And mark you, there’s no gravy goes with it.” This was not demagogy. LaGuardia was not a demagogue; he was not one to mouth irresponsible nonsense to inflame a crowd. But he knew how to capture popular imagination. He knew how to translate abstractions into concrete and vivid realities. He could talk the ordinary man’s language as no ordinary man could talk it—he had the gift of plain, direct, and salty speech. Fiorello was no ivory-tower intellectual.

  LaGuardia was never more earnest or more farsighted than in the efforts he made during the last year of his life to prevent the drift toward a new war. His proposal for a United Nations emergency food fund, last November, and his testimony against the Truman Doctrine, last March, were a plea for the continuance of international cooperation, a warning against the consequences if America tried to use its food and its money as instruments of political domination. “It is reminiscent,” he told a United Nations Assembly committee last November, “of the old days of politics here in my town, when the poor in the district were given a basket of food on Christmas and during the winter a bag of coal or two. Along came election time, and they were . . . taken in hordes to vote the ticket.” Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last March, on the Truman Doctrine, he pleaded, “Let us not do anything that will create the impression that we want to rule the whole world, that any government that does not please us will be put out of business.”

  He urged another approach: “We can lick Communism in this world by making democracy work, by proving to the world that people can live properly and decently.”

  The Truman administration and the State Department had decided otherwise. They had decided to abandon UNRRA for a system under which we proposed to exact a political quid pro quo for feeding hungry people; it was to be—starve, or else. “You cannot find the theory or purpose of UNRRA in the revised statutes or in the treaties,” LaGuardia told the Senate committee, “but if you will go across the street to the library and ask for a book called the New Testament, there you will find the spirit of UNRRA, and you will find the purpose of it, and you will find the way it was administered.”

  LaGuardia spoke to no purpose. It was a bitter spectacle for the dying man to see, as he predicted, that the United Nations would begin to break down once we abandoned international principles in the handling of the food problem. He died an unhappy man; in Washington the kind of men and policies he fought in the ’20s were back in power; abroad he saw the old mistakes and a new war coming. The few who saw him toward the last knew that sorrow stood at his bedside. The peace death promised was unwelcome to one whose joy it had always been to war for the good.

  Albert Einstein

  Albert Einstein, the great physicist, peace advocate, socialist, and humanist, died on April 18, 1955. His
friend I. F. Stone penned this warm and very personal tribute.

  . . .

  April 25, 1955

  PROFESSOR EINSTEIN WOULD NOT HAVE LIKED a stuffy tribute. My wife and I loved him. He was a charter subscriber to the Weekly, and often strained its primitive bookkeeping facilities by renewing when no renewal was due. We and our three children had the great pleasure on several occasions of having tea with him at his home. It was like going to tea with God, not the terrible old God of the Bible but the little child’s father-in-heaven, very kind, very wise and yet himself very much a child, too. We feel that we have lost a friend.

  If our dim understanding of his work has any validity, we thought of it as a lifelong search for a new and greater unity in physical phenomena, and the re-establishment of the possibility of law in the universe. A world made up only of statistical probabilities offended his profoundest instincts; he was like Bach or Beethoven, striving for new harmonies, but with the tools of mathematics and physics. There were times when one felt his infinite zest in the search that was his life, though he sadly called himself a has-been last time we saw him, which was last August.