Roosevelt’s evaluation was mixed. Ike seemed rather “jittery,” he told Marshall. Observing that Eisenhower was in a rather difficult position as commander of British officers who held higher rank, Marshall recommended a promotion to four-star status. The president stated firmly that there would be no promotion until the campaign was over and Eisenhower had definitively earned it. (Marshall persisted. On February 11, a week and a half after Roosevelt’s return to the United States, Eisenhower received his promotion.)44
In a conversation with his aide, Captain Harry Butcher, Eisenhower recalled Roosevelt as believing that he could “dictate the peace” at the end of the war. “Perhaps lend-lease gives him a feeling Uncle Sam can foreclose on its mortgage,” mulled Butcher. “Wonder what luck we will have ‘dictating’ a peace to Uncle Joe Stalin?”45
Josef Stalin hovered over all the deliberations. Ever since Hopkins’s report of his first mission to Moscow, Roosevelt had been anxious to meet the Soviet leader. By the beginning of 1943, with Soviet forces clearly on the verge of a crushing victory at Stalingrad, such a rendezvous seemed especially necessary. Stalin declined an invitation to the Casablanca conference, pleading his day-to-day command responsibilities. In fact, at no time during his long tenure as dictator of the Soviet Union would he venture into territory not controlled by Soviet troops. Roosevelt, like most Americans, seems never to have plumbed the implications. Stalin’s formal and businesslike correspondence, while thanking the United States for its massive Lend-Lease aid, continually reminded his allies of their pledge to open a second front in Europe. The lack of a face-to-face meeting contributed to an uncertainty about the Soviet-American relationship that would endure for most of the rest of the year.46
Roosevelt also was increasingly uncomfortable with the imperialist implications of his alliance with Churchill. Snap impressions from his overnight stopover in Bathurst had deepened his sense of the British Empire as a cruelly exploitative project. Elliott later recalled his observations: the natives in rags, working for one shilling, nine pence and a bowl of rice a day. “Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. . . . Life expectancy—you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. Those people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer!” On January 22, the president entertained the sultan of Morocco at dinner. He needled Churchill much as he had done a year earlier in front of Louis Adamic, telling the sultan to beware of European exploiters and promising American aid to modernize his nation.47
Elliott later wrote that his father declared, “Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.” The remark, if accurately remembered, was astonishing. How could European imperialism, however deplorable, be held responsible for Japan’s own imperial ambitions and loathsome behavior? The emerging breakup of the wartime alliance affected Elliott’s recollections, published three years later based on memories formed and notes he took at the time, but they are consistent with other indications of his father’s attitude. After the war, the president told Elliott, the empires would become trusteeships under the supervision of a new United Nations Organization that would require European masters to develop educational and health systems, higher standards of living, and an eventual option for independence.48
That future was as utopian as anything Woodrow Wilson had ever envisioned. And it lacked elementary perspective. Had the people of Gambia been prosperous and happy before British rule? Had they enjoyed more freedom? The normally tough-minded and realistic Roosevelt condemned Western imperialism in the same categorical fashion on other, mostly private, occasions.49
For liberals of the time, living in the fevered atmosphere of a world at war, the rhetoric of a new order of things was intoxicating. Given the sacrificial nature of the war effort, it was perhaps necessary to believe that a new world would transcend the imperfections of the old, that oppressed peoples would universally embrace liberal-democratic virtues. Yet it was also true that when Roosevelt and the wider liberal community talked about the breakup of empires, somehow the Soviet empire, stretching from the Bering Strait to the Baltic Sea and harboring open designs on eastern Europe, seems never to have come to mind. Were the people of Gambia more oppressed than the people of Ukraine? Some questions were best left unasked.
On the last day of the Casablanca meeting, January 24, Roosevelt and Churchill held a press conference. Roosevelt began with a statement about war aims, meandered into a recollection of U. S. (“unconditional surrender”) Grant, then announced a policy to which he had secured Churchill’s agreement: “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, or Japan. . . . It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.” Nazi propagandists would misrepresent the policy as a determination to eradicate the German Volk. Perhaps it stiffened Germany’s resistance, but it also signaled to the Soviet Union that the Allies were in the fight to the finish. In truth, no one could believe that another “armistice” like that of 1918 would end this war.50
At Churchill’s insistence, he and Roosevelt drove 150 miles south to Marrakesh, where in earlier days the prime minister had spent time relaxing and painting the Atlas Mountains. That evening, at a villa located outside the city, they had a happy dinner—no one-upmanship, no talk of portentous issues or the hard days ahead. Local servants carried the president to the roof of the villa to view the peaks, illuminated by the setting sun. The next day, Churchill, roused from his sleep and wearing as an overcoat a gaudy robe emblazoned with a large dragon, went to the airport for a final farewell as his friend embarked on the long trip back to America.
Roosevelt returned to the United States by the same route he had taken, pausing briefly in Brazil for a meeting with his favorite Latin American dictator, Getulio Vargas. On the morning of January 27, 1943, newspapers across the United States filled their front pages with the revelation of his “daring flight” to North Africa, the productive meeting with Churchill, and the goal of unconditional surrender. Early on the evening of January 31, the president was back in the White House, reveling in his triumph but also facing daunting political headwinds at home.51
Chapter 23
Dr. New Deal at Bay
Mobilization and Mortality, 1942–1944
Pearl Harbor had brought the United States at last into a total conflict that required mobilization of nearly the entire population, a sharp escalation of economic controls, and conversion of the economy to war production. Demanding widespread sacrifice and utilizing mechanisms of government control and coercion, the process generated widespread resentment of a metastasizing, all-controlling federal bureaucracy. The war had overwhelming popular support, but the way it was run at home kept Roosevelt and his administration constantly on the defensive. Underneath a veneer of national unity, the president’s diminishing personal and political resources steadily eroded his leadership.1
The crisis impacted virtually every American household. Rubber and scrap-metal drives recycled junk into war weaponry. Housewives saved jars of cooking fat that went into the production of explosives. “Hoarders” had to turn in extra automobile tires they had accumulated in expectation of shortages. The auto industry converted wholly to military production. Gasoline was tightly rationed.
Women, once never seen working on factory floors, became a common presence on assembly lines. Negroes also found new opportunities, in part because of the president’s Fair Employment Practices Committee but largely because of the ever-tightening supply of white male labor. Social revolutions lurked in these developments. So did widespread resentment of regimentation, shortages, broken families, and all the inconveniences of wartime austerity. The war resoundingly ended the Great Depression and brought fu
ll employment to a degree never before experienced, but it was an unsatisfactory, feverish prosperity tinged by the tens of thousands of personal tragedies that accompany any major war and by a scarcity of civilian goods.
The engines of mobilization were new executive agencies with such names as War Production Board, War Manpower Commission, Office of Economic Stabilization, Office of War Mobilization, National War Labor Board, War Food Administration, and Office of War Information. In the main, New Deal liberals seemed to administer those agencies primarily in the business of telling people what they could not have or do. Especially pervasive was the Office of Price Administration, which established a system of price controls, sometimes set detailed standards for consumer products, and issued ration coupon booklets to every man, woman, and child in the nation. Merchants widely evaded price controls despite strong enforcement efforts. The worst offenders might be caught and disciplined, but no federal agency could police the billions of transactions, most of them small, that characterized a continental economy and a population of 130 million people. Few individuals felt guilty about handing over an extra dollar for a prime cut of beef or a pair of scarce nylon stockings.2
The selective service system administered a military draft that conscripted 10 million men into the armed forces, providing exemptions primarily to defense workers, productive farmers, and, until manpower shortages enforced revision of the rules, fathers. The draft, though not loved, was widely accepted.
The “tame millionaires” Roosevelt had brought into the administration before Pearl Harbor remained, and new recruits augmented their ranks. Averell Harriman established himself as an indispensible man in foreign policy. Edward R. Stettinius Jr., former chairman of US Steel, would succeed the ailing Cordell Hull as secretary of state at the end of 1944. Dean Acheson returned to the administration as an influential assistant secretary of state. Wall Street banker James Forestall would succeed Frank Knox as secretary of the navy. Two other Wall Streeters, Robert Patterson and John J. McCloy, managed most of the operations of the Department of War for Secretary Henry Stimson.
Major industrialists became heroes of production as they oversaw the manufacture of vast quantities of weaponry and equipment. Their emblematic figure, shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser, would turn out, in previously unimaginable numbers, the merchant vessels that carried American weaponry across the oceans and made possible the defeat of the Axis. Corporations that had been politically at odds with the New Deal produced jeeps, tanks, and aircraft at unbelievable rates. Seattle’s Boeing transformed the agricultural state of Kansas into the major producer of B-17 bombers with a main assembly plant in Wichita. Ford rolled out huge numbers of B-24 bombers and Sherman tanks. Operating out of New Orleans, a small entrepreneur named Andrew Jackson Higgins developed and built the landing craft used to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe.3
Given shortages of raw materials and labor, along with the need to either retool civilian assembly plants or build new ones from the ground up, the production process was messy. A generation of Washington lawyers became rich helping industrialists negotiate contracts and obtain vital equipment or raw materials. The kingpin among them was Roosevelt’s old aide Tommy Corcoran, who rejected the president’s efforts to bring him back to the White House.4
Efforts at centralized coordination were at best semieffective. William Knudsen, the onetime shop floor worker who had made General Motors the dominant force in the auto industry, could not accomplish it and was fired as head of the Office of Production Management. Roosevelt created the War Production Board and named Donald Nelson, the head of Sears, Roebuck, as its chairman. Nelson was no more effective. Neither man received the expansive powers an industrial czar required. New Deal liberals, proceeding from the assumption that all big businessmen were morally and intellectually deficient, constantly assailed them.
Roosevelt nearly gave the job to Bernard Baruch, who had run the War Industries Board in World War I. Called to the White House and informed of the president’s intentions, Baruch instead endured a rambling conversation that ended without a job offer. The relationship between the two men had always been difficult, despite FDR’s willingness to accept large amounts of campaign money and other favors from Baruch. In the end, Roosevelt simply could not bring himself to tender the open-ended mandate the job would have required. He knew, as presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns has expressed it, “that every delegation of power and sharing of authority extracted a potential price in the erosion of presidential purpose, the narrowing of options, the clouding of the appearance of presidential authority, the threat to his reputation for being on top.”5
Industrial mobilization was an unruly mix of inflated expectations, excessive demands, competing interests, clashing ideologies, and battling egos. But for all the false starts, administrative snarls, and spot shortages of vital materials, the United States produced war equipment in astonishing quantities and gave the Allies the needed edge to achieve victory.
Roosevelt managed the war with structures and attitudes similar to those of the 1930s. Republicans and conservative Democrats viewed the wartime order as essentially the latest incarnation of the New Deal. The president and his loyalists, convinced that a vision of a new and better society at home and abroad must supplement the goal of total victory over Germany and Japan, largely agreed.
By November 1942, with victory in the Pacific at Midway, American progress at Guadalcanal, and the stalled German drives at Stalingrad and El Alamein, the momentum of the war was beginning to shift in favor of the Allies. But that would be more evident in retrospect than it was at the time. More obvious was the chaos and irritation of an unwanted conflict. The Doolittle raid notwithstanding, Pearl Harbor seemed as yet unavenged. On November 3, the nation voted in the congressional elections not knowing that American troops were boarding transports for the invasion of North Africa.
The Republicans scored big gains, winning an additional forty-six seats in the House of Representatives, leaving the Democrats a scant ten-vote majority in that chamber, and gaining nine in the Senate. The conservative coalition that had emerged from the 1938 election was stronger than ever, ready for the most part to give grudging support to the war but deeply skeptical of any initiative aimed at reviving the New Deal at home. For the first time since 1929, many of its representatives spoke more convincingly to the American public than did the president.
Other than the administration itself, the conservatives primarily targeted organized labor, which had grown increasingly dissatisfied with wartime mandates against strikes and strict limitations on wage increases. Most of the unions, however, took and maintained a no-strike pledge. Employers made the situation tolerable by developing such fringe benefits as health insurance, which the government did not count as wage compensation.
There was one big exception to labor’s general cooperativeness: John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers. Lewis’s palpable resentment of Roosevelt was coupled with the historic militancy of his workers. They held strong cards in a nation whose heavy industries ran on coal. In 1943, Lewis, prodded by local wildcat strikes, called a series of walkouts that raised the specter of an industrial shutdown. Pitting himself and his union against the administration’s wage-control apparatus, he displayed both legitimate concern for the economic difficulties of his men and an ego-driven need to humiliate Roosevelt.6
The president sharply condemned the strike, declaring in a fireside chat on May 2, 1943, “Every American coal miner who has stopped mining coal—no matter how sincere his motives, no matter how legitimate he may believe his grievances to be—every idle miner directly and individually is obstructing our war effort.” He placed the mines under government seizure, to be managed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. For the balance of the year and into 1944, intermittent work stoppages continued to hamper the coal industry. Lewis and Ickes cobbled out a deal that stretched government wage guidelines without ostentatiously breaking them. The episode
demonstrated that determined labor chiefs willing to accept the hostility of the public could defy Roosevelt with relative impunity.7
The labor union movement as a whole came out the loser. In response to the coal strikes, the conservative bloc in Congress pushed through the Smith-Connally labor relations act, which broadened presidential power to seize war industries and provided stiff penalties for unions that engaged in strikes against seized industries. Roosevelt, with an eye to his labor support, vetoed the bill, although it sanctioned powers he had already exercised. Congress overrode the veto.
Other labor actions occurred from time to time. At the end of 1943, the government took over the railroads for a month to head off a strike. A new executive agency, the Office of Economic Stabilization, dealt extensively with labor-management issues. Federal policy supported a “maintenance of membership” arrangement that allowed the mainstream industrial unions to add tens of thousands of members to their rolls. In general, defense workers made good money, enjoyed exemptions from the military draft, accepted as best they could the many inconveniences of wartime life, and had minimal interest in striking. Roosevelt could count on their support.
Corporate management had its counterpart of John L. Lewis in the person of Sewell Avery, the reactionary chairman of Montgomery Ward, the nation’s largest catalog retailer. When Avery refused to hold a union representation election, Roosevelt took the advice of Attorney General Francis Biddle and authorized the seizure of the company. Personally directed by Biddle, US Army troops surrounded Montgomery Ward’s headquarters in Chicago on April 27, 1944, entered the building, made their way to Avery’s eighth-floor office, and carried the sixty-nine-year-old executive out to the sidewalk. Photographs of the aged man adamantly sitting in a sling fashioned from the arms of two sturdy soldiers were, depending on one’s point of view, either comical or scandalous evidence of authoritarian rule. Furious at Biddle, Avery resorted to the nastiest epitaph that sprang to mind: “You New Dealer!”8
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 49