The families gathered in the lobby of the Hotel Johnson, next door to the Western Union Station, and tried to make sense of what was happening. Someone recalled seeing something in the papers about a difficult engagement at a place called Kasserine Pass, but it would take weeks for the people of this small town to come to understand that their entire National Guard unit had been destroyed in a single battle. Red Oak had suffered a disproportionate loss, greater than any other town in the United States. Only two years earlier, the members of Company M had marched side by side through the streets on their way to war; now their names were listed side by side on the official casualty list.
Red Oak, Iowa, was the “hometown we dreamed of overseas,” one serviceman wrote after the war, “rich and contented, with chicken and blueberry pies on Sundays, for whose sake, some said, we were fighting the war.” Looking up the main street, one could see the newly painted store fronts of J. C. Penney and Montgomery Ward, the sandstone structure of the Hudson State Park, and, across the way, the Green Parrot, an ice-cream parlor full of young people. On the road into Red Oak was the Grand Theater, where farmers from surrounding towns brought their children on Saturdays for a double feature. Everyone in this small town knew someone on the list.
By March, the Americans had recovered from their reversal at Kasserine Pass and were pushing forward aggressively. By April, with General Patton in command, American troops had finally joined up with General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, having started two thousand miles apart. The Axis forces were driven eastward and trapped in the Tunisian tip, where they surrendered. Nearly a quarter-million Germans and Italians were taken prisoner. The Allied victory in Africa was complete.
The Tunisian victory cast a bright light on the May summit, which became known as the “Trident Conference.” Goebbels noted in his diary on the eve of the conference that “the Americans are happy as children to be able for the first time to take German troops into custody . . . . My thoughts often turn to North Africa and to our soldiers . . . . The only comforting thought is the fact that they are falling into the hands of a civilized opponent.” For his part, Churchill could not help recalling “the striking change which had taken place in the situation since he had last sat by the President’s desk and had heard the news of the fall of Tobruk. He could never forget the manner in which the President had sustained him at that time.”
Much had happened in the past year. At Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, and Tunis, the Allies had shown that the Axis powers could be defeated in battle. But, as Martin Gilbert has written, these places “stood on the periphery of the areas under Axis control. The continent of Europe, and the vast island expanses of South East Asia, were still under the military rule of those who had chosen to make war. The Allies, for all their recent triumphs, stood at the edge of immense regions confronted by hugely powerful forces still to be overthrown.”
The central issue at the Trident Conference was the timing of the cross-Channel invasion—in particular, what to do with the twenty divisions that would come free when the invasion of Sicily was completed, sometime in August. Once again, the old disagreements emerged. Churchill wanted to use these divisions to invade Italy, postponing still further the cross-Channel invasion; Roosevelt wanted to send them to England to build up the monstrous force that would be needed to invade France in the spring of 1944. In the days ahead, the discussions would become increasingly intense, but first, Roosevelt insisted, it was time to relax with drinks and dinner.
Since Eleanor was en route to New York for a meeting of the Committee for the Care of European Children, the president asked his daughter, Anna, to be his hostess at dinner. Anna had come to Washington earlier in the week to bid farewell to her husband as he sailed overseas to North Africa, and she was thrilled by her father’s request. Since her girlhood, she had yearned to be important to her father, to be needed by him. Indeed, the presiding image from her childhood was the memory of her father coming home from work and shutting himself up for hours in a room with cigarsmoking politicians. Forbidden to interrupt or even to peek inside, she could imagine nothing more wonderful than to be invited, as she now was, to take her mother’s place in the inner sanctum of her father’s political life.
Seated opposite the president, with Hopkins on her left and Churchill on her right, Anna made a striking impression. Her blue eyes shone, her warmth radiated. After dinner, the guests were treated to a preview of an unreleased film, The Battle of Britain. It was excellent, Anna told John, “so much so that the PM wept.” All in all, Anna enthused, the entire evening was “intensely interesting.”
That weekend, the president took Churchill to Shangri-la, along with Eleanor, Anna, Hopkins, and Beaverbrook. As the guests piled into the cars for the two-hour trip to the wooded Maryland retreat, Eleanor insisted that Churchill sit beside Franklin in the back seat while she occupied one of the small front seats. Churchill would have none of this, insisting that Mrs. Roosevelt take her proper place by her husband’s side. The conflict of wills went on for three minutes, Churchill recalled, as “the British empire went into action” against the formidable Mrs. Roosevelt. In the end, Eleanor relented, agreeing to sit beside her husband while Churchill sat up front.
As the motorcade approached Frederick, Maryland, Churchill asked if he could see the house of Barbara Frietchie, whose courage in placing a Union flag outside her attic window as the Confederate army marched by inspired John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Barbara Frietchie.” The discussion prompted Roosevelt to quote the famous lines “ ‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” When it was clear that this was as far as Roosevelt could go, Churchill chimed in, quoting from memory the entire poem. While his companions were asking themselves how he could do this when he hadn’t read the poem for thirty years, Churchill went on to give a brilliant review of the Battle of Gettysburg, along with a lengthy disquisition on Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
Eleanor was impressed by Churchill’s memory, his wit, and his extensive knowledge. “He is always using quotations & can quote endless poetry,” she wrote Lash. She was also impressed by Lord Beaverbrook, who “fell completely for Anna & offered to help her on her paper,” yet “none of them,” she remarked, with evident pride in her husband’s personality, has “the geographic knowledge, nor all around historical knowledge & grasp of the whole picture today which our own raconteur has & he can outtalk them all too which amused Anna & me very much.”
On the trip to Shangri-la, the president told Churchill he was looking forward to a few hours with his stamp collection. Later, Churchill sat by his side, watching “with much interest and in silence for perhaps half an hour as he stuck them in, each in its proper place, and so forgot the cares of State.” But all too soon, Churchill noted, General Walter Bedell Smith arrived, carrying an urgent message from Eisenhower. “Sadly FDR left his stamp collection and addressed himself to his task.”
The evening was great fun, Anna reported to John, though she discovered that “the PM picks his teeth all through dinner and uses snuff liberally. The sneezes which follow the latter practically rock the foundations of the house and he then blows his nose about three times like a fog horn.” But the conversation was sparkling, Anna enthused, as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Beaverbrook vied with one another in telling stories. The only unpleasant moment came when Eleanor insisted on telling a story of her own, “which showed all too plainly her dislike for a certain lady [most likely Princess Martha] whom you and I and the boss like!”
In the morning, the president took Churchill fishing in a nearby stream. “He was placed with great care by the side,” Churchill recorded, “and sought to entice the nimble and wily fish. I tried for some time myself at other spots. No fish were caught, but he seemed to enjoy it very much, and was in great spirits for the rest of the day.”
After the relaxing weekend, the presidential party descended the Alleghenies and returned to Washington, where, Stimson recorded, “a very
decided deadlock” arose between the president and the prime minister. “The British are holding back dead from going on with [Operation] Bolero . . . and are trying to divert us off into some more Mediterranean adventures. Fortunately the President seems to be holding out. I talked with Marshall . . . . He seems to be glad to have my backing in the matter because the burden of the whole thing has been falling on him.”
The debate went on for days, and the longer it continued, the hotter it became. As the tension mounted, Churchill’s mood darkened, shifting from anger to irritation to despair. After one heated session, Lord Moran found him pacing up and down his room, scowling at the floor. “The President is not willing to put pressure on Marshall,” Churchill lamented. “He is not in favor of landing in Italy. It is most discouraging. I only crossed the Atlantic for this purpose. I cannot let the matter rest where it is.” For his part, Marshall thought Churchill was acting like “a spoiled boy,” and Hopkins found him “a little subdued—for Winston that is.”
As Churchill got ready to leave, a compromise was achieved: a general resolution was drafted calling on the Allied commander-in-chief “to plan such operations in exploitation of Husky [the Allied invasion of Sicily] as are best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces.” In other words, Roosevelt was willing to consider the possibility of taking action in Italy if and only if he was assured that such action would not detract in any substantial way from the buildup for the cross-Channel attack. This was not the firm commitment to invade Italy that Churchill wanted, but it was a step in the right direction.
Churchill’s departure on May 27 brought a collective sigh of relief to the White House staff. As much as everyone revered the prime minister, the president’s aide William Hassett observed, he was “a trying guest—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routine, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clock upside down.” Even Franklin, Eleanor observed, who “really likes the PM and believes he can manage him in the end,” was utterly exhausted. The morning after Churchill left, Roosevelt took Princess Martha and Harry Hopkins to Hyde Park, where he slept ten hours a day for three days straight until he recovered from Churchill’s visit.
• • •
When the president returned to the White House on June 2, he was greeted with the unwelcome news that the nation’s coal miners, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, had gone on strike. For months, Lewis had been engaged in a running battle with the War Labor Board to secure an increase of $2 a day for the miners. He had used every weapon in his armory, including the threat to strike, but he had been unable to shake the WLB from its position that any wage increase would violate the “Little Steel” formula promulgated by the president the year before to restrain both wage advances and cost-of-living increases. Under the formula, wage increases were allowed only if necessary to correct serious maladjustments or gross inequities. The ink was scarcely dry on the latest WLB refusal when Lewis and the miners decided to strike.
The effect of the strike—which took five hundred thousand miners off the job and closed more than three thousand mines—was devastating. Without coal to process the iron ore or fire the steel plants, eleven blast furnaces had to be shut down. Steel production faltered. Railroad schedules were cut back for lack of fuel. Production of guns and tanks slowed. The chain of losses reached deep into the national economy.
While Roosevelt considered his options in long meetings with Ickes and Jimmy Byrnes, angry letters poured into the White House from citizens and soldiers at home and abroad. “You must have lace on your pants for allowing John L. Lewis to pull such a stunt,” Sophia Carroll wrote from Maryland. “I think you are equally guilty with John L. Lewis for the mess we are in,” Esther Morrow wrote. “You babied and petted him until he thinks he is boss also.”
Opinion among the GIs was even more damning. Pfc. John Adkins spoke for 90 percent of the soldiers, according to Stars and Stripes, when he wrote from North Africa, “While these American boys are over here sweating, bleeding and dying to protect America and even the right to strike, those people back there have the gall to quit their jobs.”
“What sort of traitors are those miners?” one marine asked. “I’ve just come down from the North with a plane load of men who were injured in the Attu fighting. One of them was minus a leg . . . . His entire life is pretty well ruined. Imagine it must be rather bewildering to return from battle . . . to find the defenders of the homefront bargaining for another dollar or two to add to already mountainous wages.”
“If I were on the front lines, and a Marine was scared or tired and refused to fight or advance I would have to shoot him,” another soldier, John Jaqua, observed. “Unless my sense of values is completely warped, he is doing no more than a laborer who strikes.”
As the strike continued, public anger at the miners turned against the labor movement as a whole. Labor spokesmen tried in vain to set the record straight, pointing out that the great majority of labor leaders had kept the no-strike pledge they had given after Pearl Harbor. To be sure, disgruntled employees at various plants had engaged in unauthorized wildcat strikes from time to time. In July 1942, scattered employees at the Detroit diesel-engine division at General Motors, upset because their departments were not included in a pay-raise award, had walked out. A few weeks later, workers at Monroe Auto Equipment brought claims of “speed-up” and walked out when new gears were installed in their machines. Most of these wildcat strikes had been quickly settled, and production had continued with little interruption. But with the country at war, the general public refused to make fine distinctions. By an overwhelming majority, the people believed that strikes should be outlawed.
In the halls of Congress, the protest reached a crescendo. In the second week of June 1943, the House joined the Senate in supporting a bill, the Smith-Connally Act, that imposed drastic penalties and restrictions on any person encouraging a strike in government-owned plants. The bill was a humiliating setback to the entire labor movement. “It is the judgment of the CIO,” CIO President Philip Murray wrote Roosevelt, “that this proposed legislation if enacted into law would constitute one of the most serious blows directed against our national war effort and be the equivalent of a major military disaster.”
Eleanor told a New York Times reporter she was sick at heart about the whole situation. Though she could not condone the stoppage of work in an industry so vital to war production, she knew from her visits to the coal mines in Appalachia that the miners had genuine grievances that badly needed remedying. She had seen the unpainted shanties with muddy yards on muddy streets where the miners lived. She understood the tremendous risks the miners endured—in 1941, 64,764 were killed or injured as a consequence of gas explosions, bad ventilation, defective timbering, and cave-ins. She had witnessed the miners’ helpless dependence on high-priced company stores that kept them “in hock” forever by running a tab which was then deducted from their weekly pay checks. “I have seen pay envelopes containing three cents,” she said. For all these reasons, she believed that “the settlement of the strike should be brought about in the light of what the miners and their families have lived through for the past ten years. I think they are entitled to some concessions.”
Eleanor’s opinion was not popular, but the president listened to her words. Despite his fury at John L. Lewis, which led him, in the privacy of the Oval Office, to crack that “he would be glad to resign as President if Lewis committed suicide,” he kept a tight rein over his temper in public, allowing the situation to speak for itself. “I understand the devotion of the coal miners to their union,” he said, speaking more in sadness than in anger. “Every improvement of the conditions of the coal miners of this country has had my hearty support. And I do not mean to desert them now. But I also do not mean to desert my obligations and responsibilities as President of the U.S. and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. The first necessity is the resumption of coal mining.”
Acting under t
he cover of his emergency war powers, Roosevelt instructed Ickes to take over the mines in the name of the government. At the same time, he ordered the five hundred thousand miners to return to work, reminding them that they were working for the government “on essential war work and it was their duty no less than that of their sons and brothers in the Armed Forces to fulfill their war duties.” Stimson wanted the president to go even further, to tell the miners that they would all be inducted if they refused to go back to work, but for the time being, Roosevelt was hesitant to use induction as a penalty.
While Lewis was deciding how to respond, a telephone call brought one of the striking miners the sad news that his son, who was in the navy, had been killed in the Pacific. “I ain’t a traitor,” the miner burst out, “damn ’em I ain’t a traitor. I’ll stay out until hell freezes over. Dickie was fighting for one thing, I’m fighting for another and they ain’t so far apart.” But on the sixth day of the strike, Lewis ordered his men back to work.
There remained the thorny problem of the Smith-Connally Act, which arrived in the White House pouch for the president’s signature in the middle of June. “If I were FDR I wouldn’t sign it,” Eleanor confided to Joe Lash, “but I’m not enough of a politician to judge the temper of the country.” William Hassett agreed. “This is a bad bill, through which, if approved, labor stands to lose its hard won gains.”
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