Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  But to civilians who had lived through the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, their newfound prosperity was exhilarating. In 1944, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 1.2 percent—the lowest ever recorded, probably the lowest that will ever be recorded. Gross national product grew by more than 60 percent in real terms from 1940 to 1944.7 The gains were broadly distributed: indeed, they were proportionally greatest at the low end of the income scale. The war boom completed what the New Dealers had started—it lifted the fortunes of the poorest Americans, including blacks, Latinos, and poor rural whites. In 1944, 19 million women of all races were working outside the home, including about 2 million in the munitions industries. Surging wages ran up against rationing and the enforced unavailability of certain big-ticket goods, such as automobiles and major household appliances. The result was unprecedented savings and a near-quintupling of household wealth. Personal savings, deposited in banks or invested in war bonds, grew from $8.5 billion in 1940 to $39.8 billion in 1944.8

  Most remarkable of all, perhaps, wartime inflation was kept in check by effective price- and wage-control measures, so that the consumer’s real buying power rose even as the government preached the virtues of wartime austerity. On December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Macy’s department stores rang in the largest single day of sales in the company’s history. Shoppers were not deterred by shortages of certain luxury and consumer goods. “People want to spend money,” said a store manager, “and if they can’t spend it on textiles, they’ll spend it on furniture, or we’ll find something else for them.”9 In the opinion of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “Never in the history of human conflict had there been so much talk of sacrifice and so little sacrifice.”10

  Rich as it was, said the critics, this “home front” America had grown meaner, colder, and less charitable. About 4 million families, or 9 million people altogether, picked up and moved to a different part of the country in pursuit of war work. Trains and intercity buses were jammed to capacity, with passengers sitting on suitcases in the aisles. Scalpers roamed through the stations offering tickets at steep markups. Everywhere one saw young military wives with infants and small children, doggedly following their husbands from post to post. Many migrated to the West Coast to find a home nearer to the Pacific War. Sailors on ships deployed in the Pacific might put into San Diego or San Francisco at any time, without advance notice, and be given a three-day liberty pass. If they wanted a reunion, the families had better be living nearby. In California, however, there were millions of new migrants—the Golden State’s population grew by more than one-third during the war—and never enough housing. A city official in San Francisco reported: “Families are sleeping in garages, with mattresses right on cement floors and three, four, five to one bed.”11

  Marjorie Cartwright married a sailor a week before he shipped out with MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet. She accompanied him to San Francisco, his ship’s home port, and promised to wait there for his return. It was the first time she had traveled beyond the borders of West Virginia. “I was on my own, living in a city I didn’t know and where I knew very few people. It was like being an orphan. I felt completely alone.” She found a furnished room in an apartment and took a job as a keypunch operator for Standard Oil. “I learned to knit at that time and spent many nights knitting socks for my husband and listening to the radio for war news,” she recalled years later. “I lived alone for four years during the war, and they were the most painful, lonely years I think I will ever spend. I look back and wonder how I ever got through those years, but when you’re young you can do a lot of things that you can’t do as you grow older. I spent many nights by myself in my room, crying because I was so lonely.”12

  In a normally functioning market economy, the great population movements of 1941–1945 would have touched off a residential building boom. But to guide labor and materials into the munitions industries, the federal government clamped down on new housing construction. In 1941, $6.2 billion had been invested in residential construction. The figure plummeted to a low of $2.0 billion in 1943, recovering only to $2.2 billion in 1944.13 Wartime boomtowns were overrun with newcomers who could not find a place to live, and the landlords were rapacious. Around Ford’s Willow Run factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, one of the largest aircraft manufacturing plants in the country, there was almost no residential housing at all. The workforce was bused in from Detroit or crowded into squalid trailer camps along the roads. Shantytowns of tar paper shacks sprung up in the Michigan mud. In existing dwellings, owners made a killing by renting out their spare rooms. Old Victorian homes became overcrowded bunkhouses, with beds rented out by the hour. Two or three people alternated in the same bed—“hotbunking”—with their sleeping schedules synchronized to their work schedules at the plant.

  With thousands of workers leaving the factories at midnight, retail and entertainment businesses found it profitable to stay open all night. Bars were open around the clock and crowded even in the small hours of the morning. Long lines stretched down the sidewalks outside nightclubs, where “swing shift” shows featured C-list entertainers between midnight and dawn. One could go bowling at three o’clock in the morning. Movie theaters screened films back to back, twenty-four hours per day, and were always full. Homeless workers bought a ticket for a midnight showing and tried to sleep in their seats. Parents dropped their children off at a movie theater, worked a shift at the plant, and then returned to pick them up. The journalist Max Lerner described the all-night cinemas of wartime New York: “They are always long and narrow and smell to high heaven, and there is a tough character who patrols them to see that the ranker forms of murder, arson, mayhem, and rape are not carried out successfully. You have not really seen a movie until you have seen it in an all-night theater.”14

  Mass migration squeezed Americans of different races, classes, and ethnicities into congested cities, where they suddenly found themselves living and working in each other’s pockets. The war industries, by executive order, were integrated. The war accelerated the exodus of African Americans from the American South to the industrial North and Midwest; about 700,000 blacks picked up and moved during the war. The promise of high-wage jobs also enticed hundreds of thousands of rural whites into the cities, where they found a new and unfamiliar way of life.

  In the hot summer of 1943, an epidemic of racial violence swept through many American cities. The largest and most infamous riots of the war broke out in Detroit, where the population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1943. An early flashpoint was the construction of a public housing project, the Sojourner Truth Homes, on the border of a predominantly Polish-American neighborhood in February 1942. Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations turned violent, and the National Guard was called in to protect black residents as they moved into the newly opened homes. That dispute eventually simmered down, but in June 1943, a wider conflict erupted on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, as racially charged fights broke out in the Belle Isle Park on the Detroit River. At dusk, as thousands of citizens walked back across the bridge connecting the city to the island, dozens of individual fights began to merge into a general melee pitting blacks against whites. Rumors and incitements to violence spread quickly through the city by word of mouth. Thousands of young men of both races headed into downtown Detroit, looking for trouble. Violence, vandalism, arson, and looting spread and continued all night and into the next day, when white mobs were seen accosting, beating, and murdering black men at random while the police looked the other way. A newspaper photographer caught a mob dragging a black man from a streetcar and beating him in the street. Many whites caught in the wrong place at the wrong time got similar treatment at the hands of black rioters. The Detroit Police Department arrested a few whites and shot dozens of blacks. According to reports, the police declared an unofficial curfew in black neighborhoods and executed many young black men caught outdoors after hours.

  After three days of rioting, federal troops poured into the city and rest
ored order, but the city would never be the same. Afterward, a sixteen-year-old white boy boasted of what he had done: “There were about 200 of us in cars. We killed eight of them. I saw knives being stuck through their throats and heads being shot through. They were turning over cars with niggers in them. You should have seen it. It was really some riot.”15

  In the same month, violence broke out in Los Angeles, in the predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine (near the present-day site of Dodger Stadium). The riots were touched off by simmering tensions between sailors posted to a nearby naval reserve training center and local Latino youths who wore “zoot suits” and broad-brimmed hats. The zoot suiters, as they were called, resented the influx of thousands of servicemen to their “barrio.” Angry confrontations on the streets were common. Los Angeles newspapers, especially the two local Hearst dailies, began campaigning against the zoot suiters in 1942, accusing them in sensationalistic terms of violence, theft, rape, indolence, draft-dodging, and smoking marijuana. On June 4, 1943—the first anniversary of the Battle of Midway—a rumor swept through the naval and military bases of the region. It was said that a gang of zoot suiters had attacked a sailor and then retreated into a local movie theater. Carloads of sailors wielding baseball bats converged on Chavez Ravine. They stormed into the cinemas, forced the projectionists to turn on the lights, strode up and down the aisles, and dragged anyone wearing a zoot suit out into the street. The victims were beaten and the suits ripped from their bodies. The Los Angeles Police Department and navy shore patrol stood by, for the most part, and did not intervene. On the second day of the riots, when a new crop of sailors and marines arrived from San Diego, the attackers targeted all young Latino males, whether or not they wore zoot suits. The mayhem spilled into downtown and East L.A. The Hearst papers blamed the violence on the Mexican-American community. “A lot of people got hurt, a lot of innocent people, a lot of these young Mexican kids,” said Don McFadden, an eighteen-year-old who witnessed the riots. “I saw a group of servicemen stop a streetcar. They spotted one zoot-suiter on it. They got on, he couldn’t get off. They carried him off unconscious. Here’s a guy riding a streetcar and he gets beat up because he happens to be a Mexican. I actually saw that happen.”16 A serviceman who did not approve remarked, “I could find nothing to distinguish the behavior of our soldiers from the behavior of Nazi storm trooper thugs beating up outnumbered non-Aryans.”17

  In the South, where the federal desegregation edict collided with Jim Crow laws, rioting broke out in several cities—most infamously in Mobile, Alabama, where savage violence followed the promotion of twelve black workers at a local shipyard, and in Beaumont, Texas, where a predominantly African American residential district was burned to the ground. At Camp Stewart in Georgia, a gun battle broke out between white and black MPs; one was killed and four others wounded. Racially charged disputes escalated into riots in El Paso and Port Arthur, Texas. Lawlessness and violence spread across northern and midwestern cities as well, including Philadelphia, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Springfield, Massachusetts. In Harlem, New York, in August 1943, rioting broke out after a police officer shot a black soldier.

  In the hard-fought presidential election campaign of 1944, Republican candidate Thomas Dewey was heavily disadvantaged. His challenge, which would have been daunting even in peacetime, was to keep his party’s voting base together while also peeling away a slice of FDR’s thrice-victorious New Deal voting coalition. The GOP was fractured by internal arguments over both domestic and foreign policies. Many Republicans remained unyielding in their determination to roll back all of the New Deal—but repealing Social Security, labor protections, or banking reform laws were unpopular propositions. Leading Republican officeholders, such as Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, retained their isolationist instincts of the prewar era, and wanted to limit U.S. participation in postwar treaties and multilateral organizations. But isolationism had earned a bad name on December 7, 1941, and a clear majority of Americans now favored international engagement to prevent another global war. Anti-Roosevelt animus was the glue that held the Republican coalition together, but Dewey sounded a “me too” message on the leading issues of the campaign, promising to retain most New Deal reforms while also pledging to win the war faster and at a lower cost in American lives. Dewey wanted to charge the administration with negligence in missing advance signs of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but doing so would disclose that the U.S. military had broken Japanese diplomatic codes prior to the war. General Marshall persuaded him to hold his fire, warning that Americans would lose access to that message traffic if the Japanese were tipped off to the breach. Dewey had also heard (accurate) reports of FDR’s failing health, and considered making it an issue in the campaign, but finally concluded that such attacks might backfire by arousing the public’s sympathy for the president. He was reduced to making obscure allusions to the “tired old men” of the Roosevelt administration, a line of attack that probably hurt more than helped his chances.

  The highlight (or lowlight) of the campaign was a speech given by the president on September 23 at the Statler Hotel in Washington. The occasion was a banquet hosted by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. FDR was seated at a long dais at the head of the great ballroom, flanked by some twenty teamster leaders, including (to his immediate left) the Brotherhood’s Irish-born president, Daniel J. Tobin. He spoke into a forest of radio microphones, and his remarks were carried live to a national radio audience. The “Fala speech,” as it came to be known, was a partisan stemwinder—the angriest, most caustic, most hard-hitting philippic of FDR’s long political career. Referring to Dewey’s attempts to disassociate his party from its long history of opposition to popular labor laws, he said: “We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back.” (At this, Tobin appears to have almost fallen backward out of his chair in laughter.) The president refuted his opponent’s charge that he had failed to prepare the nation adequately for war—“I doubt whether even Goebbels would have tried that one”—by reviewing the history of Republican opposition to military spending prior to 1941. Dewey and other leading Republicans had recently given speeches blaming FDR’s policies for extending and deepening the Great Depression. With his eyes widened in theatrical incredulity, the president feigned amazement at this new line of attack. “Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage which says: ‘Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged,’ ” he intoned. “In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word ‘depression.’ ”

  Wine and liquor flowed freely in the Statler ballroom that night. One guest, a journalist employed by the OWI, feared that the teamsters might erupt into violence. Again and again they leapt to their feet and thrust their fists into the air with savage glee. One pounded a silver tray with a soup ladle, and another smashed wine glasses to punctuate each of FDR’s attack lines.

  The president’s parting shot, and the one that his audience would remember best, concerned a rumor that had circulated during his sea voyage to Hawaii and Alaska that summer—that Fala, the president’s dog, had accidentally been left behind on an Aleutian island, and that a navy destroyer had been dispatched from Seattle to retrieve him. The story was nonsensical on its face: How could the dog have been forgotten by the entire presidential entourage? How could his absence have gone unnoticed until the party returned to Seattle? Why send a ship instead of a plane? But it was repeated widely in the anti-FDR press. As the rumor snowballed, the destroyer was upgraded to a cruiser, then to a battleship, and the cost of the imagined rescue operation rose as high as $20 million. After a week or so, Admiral Leahy felt compelled to deny the story publicly, causing it to vanish from the headlines. But FDR knew that his opponents had overreached, and he was not going to let the opportunity pass. With deadpan earnestness, and long pauses to acco
mmodate the audience’s lusty roars of laughter, he delivered his cornball coup de grâce. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” he told the teamsters. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.”

  Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself—such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.