“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously trying to tell the committee that any large number of workers in the United States don’t get enough to eat? That is demagoguery, pure and simple, and you know it.”
Lewis, sitting forward on the edge of his chair, a dark scowl across his massive face, responded angrily in a deep stentorian voice that filled the room:
“If you ask the question, I will answer it. But when you call me a demagogue before you give me a chance to reply, I hurl it back in your face, sir.”
Truman broke in. “Now, Mr. Lewis, we don’t stand for any sassy remarks marks to the members of this committee,” he said, “and your rights will be protected here just the same as those of everybody else. I don’t like that remark to a member of the committee.”
“Senator, did you object when the Senator called me a demagogue?” replied Lewis, a man of fierce pride.
“Yes,” Truman said, “it works both ways. I don’t think the Senator should have called you a demagogue.”
The documenting of waste and mismanagement in the construction of Army camps had been comparatively easy work, a way to give the committee credence in about the least time possible, which was why Truman had started with the camps. The larger work—more difficult, more time-consuming, more important, and much more risky politically—was the investigation of defense production, the gathering of facts, figures, specific detail, and no end of opinion on the building of ships and warplanes, on ordnance plants, automobile plants, labor unions, government contracts, the roles played by the giant corporations and small business, the stockpiling of vital materials. And what the committee turned up was extremely alarming: bad planning, sloppy administration, sloppy workmanship, cheating by labor and management, critical shortages everywhere.
There was too little aluminum, so vital for warplanes, too little copper, zinc, and rubber. Even after drastic cutbacks in production for civilian use, the annual output of aluminum was only about half the demand for building planes. One producer, Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America, had a near monopoly on the manufacture of the lightweight metal and kept claiming it could supply both domestic and defense needs, yet could not come even close. Production of magnesium was even more woefully behind, and the reason, when revealed, would cause a sensation. An arrangement had been made through an interlocking cartel, between Alcoa and the giant German firm of I. G. Farben. To safeguard its American market for aluminum, Alcoa had agreed to hold back on producing magnesium, also to sell what magnesium it owned to the Germans at a cut price, with the result that Germany had far more magnesium than the United States.
Standard Oil of New Jersey, through its agreements with I. G. Farben, had intentionally delayed the development of synthetic-rubber plants. “Standard Oil,” reported Truman,
had agreed with the German I. G. Farben Company that in return for Farben giving Standard Oil a monopoly in the oil industry, Standard Oil would give the Farben Company complete control of patents in the chemical field, including rubber. Thus when certain American rubber manufacturers made overtures to Standard Oil Company for licenses to produce synthetic rubber, they were either refused or offered licenses on very unfavorable terms…. Needless to say, I. G. Farben’s position was dictated by the German government.
There was no “unpatriotic motive” involved here, concluded the committee in its report. It was only “big business playing the game according to the rules,” with a heavy price “to be borne by the entire nation.”
The American government, too—specifically the Office of Production Management—had been negligent in seeing the need for a greatly increased output of copper, lead, and zinc. For his part, Truman worried that shortages of steel were the most serious of all.
Automobile manufacturers had been allowed to do as they wished, which was to keep turning out cars as usual in 1941, on the grounds, they said, that only 10 percent of their equipment could be used for war production anyway. Automobile production for the first eight months of 1941 actually exceeded production during the same months in 1940, and consumed quantities of strategic materials—some 18 percent of the nation’s available steel, 80 percent of available rubber. The aircraft program was dawdling because the Army and the Navy had left it largely to the manufacturers to decide what planes to build. “There is no planned or coordinated program for the production of aircraft,” Truman would report. The committee uncovered “negligence and willful misconduct” in the Navy Bureau of Ships. (When Admiral S. M. Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships, said he believed the efficiency of private and Navy shipyards to be about the same, but told the committee that comparisons were difficult because of different bookkeeping systems, the committee declared that in a matter of such importance the Navy should take steps to ascertain the actual facts.) With private shipbuilders the Navy was found to be “extremely liberal.” A representative of the Todd Shipyards Corporation in testimony about one contract with the Navy said that if it weren’t for taxes the company could not have handled its profits with a steam shovel.
By late October the German Army had advanced to within seventy miles of Moscow and Roosevelt offered Stalin a billion dollars worth of supplies.
The root of most troubles and delays, the committee concluded, was the Office of Production Management, the President’s own ungainly creation, where there were two heads instead of one, William S. Knudsen, formerly of General Motors, and labor leader Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Roosevelt wanted the power divided. He had no wish to create a so-called “production czar,” which, the committee decided, was exactly what was needed most, a strong man with clear authority. This was the conclusion of the committee’s first annual report being prepared in the final months of 1941. Truman in particular had been outraged to discover Hillman withholding a construction contract from a low bidder because of his fear of trouble from “irresponsible” elements in the American Federation of Labor. “First of all,” Truman told the Senate on October 29, “the United States does not fear trouble from any source…. If Mr. Hillman cannot, or will not, protect the interests of the United States, I am in favor of replacing him with someone who can and will.”
The record of the OPM, said the report, was not impressive. Its leadership was inept. “Its mistakes of commission have been legion; and its mistakes of omission have been even greater. It has all too often done nothing when it should have realized that problems cannot be avoided by refusing to admit that they exist.”
The committee had also decided it would be best for the country and for the defense effort to dispense as soon as possible with all dollar-a-year men, of whom there were more than 250 in the Office of Production Management. Such corporate executives in high official roles were too inclined to make decisions for the benefit of their corporations. “They have their own business at heart,” Truman remarked. The report called them lobbyists “in a very real sense,” because their presence inevitably meant favoritism, “human nature being what it is.” They should be paid government salaries in keeping with other government positions of comparable responsibility, concluded the committee, and required to disassociate themselves from any other employment or any payment from companies with defense contracts. Divided loyalties, like the divided command at the top of the Office of Production Management, were a bad idea.
On October 30, the American destroyer Reuben James was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland, with a loss of 115 men. Talk of war had become commonplace in Washington, though no one seemed to be doing anything very specific about it. Writing in his diary on December 2, during a stop in the city, David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said it looked as if a war with Japan, not Germany, was only days off. Yet people seemed unconcerned. He wondered if the democratic system was capable of coping with the world as it was. On December 4, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared, “No matter what happens the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
Having no wish to embarrass the admi
nistration—and thereby harm the defense effort—Truman saw that the President received an advance copy of the committee’s findings, and in an eleventh-hour decision, before the report was released, Roosevelt disbanded the OPM and announced the establishment of an all-new War Production Board under a single head, Donald M. Nelson of Sears, Roebuck. Others had been pressing Roosevelt to make the change, including Secretary of War Stimson, but for the Truman Committee it was a signal victory. “We have fought to get you this job,” Truman would tell Nelson later. “We are going to fight to support you now in carrying it out.”
But by then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and it was Nelson’s task to mobilize for all-out war. By then even the likes of Burton K. Wheeler were saying that the only thing left to do was beat the hell out of them.
Truman had been in Missouri the first week in December, busy with political chores. The night of December 6, he checked into a hotel in Columbia, hoping to catch up on some greatly needed sleep. How he heard the news the next day and managed to get back to Washington in time for Roosevelt’s momentous address to Congress on December 8, he recounted a week later in a letter to Ethel Noland, probably because he had always seen her as the one in the family with the greatest feeling for history.
Dec. 14, 1941
Dear Ethel:
Well at last I am sitting at my desk, the office is empty for the first time since I returned. One reason is the doors are locked and it’s Sunday, I came down to clean off my desk and find out just how many important letters were covered up on it. Do you remember that picture with W. C. Fields as the efficiency filing expert. Well my desk is just like his was. Whenever the girls can’t find a letter in the files they are morally certain it’s lost on my desk and the pitiful part about it is sometimes it’s true.
Well there’s been a lot of happenings since I was calling on you on my daddy’s birthday [December 5]. I have been afraid it would come but not just the way it did. We’re always surprised of course even when the expected happens—if it’s war anyway. I left Saturday for Columbia to get a good night’s sleep over the weekend before Monday at Jeff City. In fact I was hoping for two. Went to bed at the Pennant Hotel outside of town about seven o’clock Saturday night and had breakfast Sunday at 8. Called the madam and went back to bed. The boy who drove me down left about noon and at three o’clock called me from Cross Timbers (I bet you never heard of it) and told me that the Japs had bombed Honolulu. The boy was a Deputy U.S. Marshal and he was on his way to Springfield. Well I phoned the St. Louis office of T.W.A. and told ’em I had to be in Washington the next morning and about that time Bess called and said the Sec. of the Senate had called to say there’d be a joint session Monday and that I should be there. Well I had no car and no driver so I called the little airport at Columbia right across the road from the hotel and the manager said he had a plane and would take me to St. Louis. We left at 4:50 and I was on the ground and in the station of the St. Louis Airport at 5:35. It took us just 40 minutes to fly 130 miles. Then my trouble began. I tried to go to Chicago and then tried Memphis and finally I think T.W.A. dumped somebody off and I got on the 11 P.M. plane for Pittsburgh. Sat up all night and listened to the radio, got to Pittsburgh at 3:30 where I met Senator Chavez of N. Mex who came from Chicago, Sen. Davis of Pa. who lives there and Curley Brooks, the great Republican Isolationist from Chicago. He’s a new Senator from Ill, Legionnaire, fat, curly haired, has a small synthetic blonde wife and is a most important Chicago Tribune Senator. He looked as if he’d swallowed a hot stove and that’s the way all those anti-preparedness boys looked the next day. It wasn’t because they’d been up all night getting there either.
I went home (we got here at 5:30 A.M.), found Bess up getting breakfast. My new secretary, Harry Vaughan, was at the airport with my car and I was at home by 6 o’clock. Went to bed and slept until ten and then came to the Senate. It was quite an occasion. Guess you heard it on the radio. Then on the 11th we had to accept another invitation from Germany and Italy. Goodness knows where it will end. I wish I was 30 and in command of a Battery. It would be a lot easier….
II
“Harry Truman was one of the liveliest, most vital Senators in my time,” wrote a veteran Senate employee, the liaison for the press, Richard Riedel, who had first come to work as a Senate page at the age of ten in 1918. Riedel had observed them all, from the days of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., and doubted that any had ever enjoyed public life as much as Truman, or took it so in stride. “An easygoing joviality emanated from him…[he had] an interest in everything and everyone….” But often at the hearings of his committee, Truman seemed to present a different face to the world. “When he got down to business, the twinkle in his eyes would be replaced by a look of concentration. At such times, at close range the thick lenses of his glasses gave his eyes a fearsome, eerie stare so stern that it gave the weird illusion that one was confronting an entirely different person.” At such times, said Riedel, he was grateful Senator Truman was his friend.
In the frenzied, confusing weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, had urged the President to do away with the committee, saying it would “impair our activity if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But Roosevelt had no such wish, and as the work of the committee continued, the energy and effectiveness of its chairman drew increasing attention. The first annual report was presented to the Senate on January 15, 1942. In time would come 50 additional reports, as a consequence of extensive, careful research, and more than 400 hearings at which 1,798 witnesses appeared. Amazingly, all reports of the committee were to be unanimous. Asked how this could happen, Republican Owen Brewster said it was not hard to get men to agree when the facts were known.
Early 1942 was a dark time. Singapore fell to the Japanese, then Bataan, with the surrender of General Wainwright and some 75,000 American and Filipino troops, the largest surrender of an American fighting force since Appomattox. Leningrad was still under siege, after more than six months, and along the eastern seaboard of the United States, off shores long thought safe from Europe’s wars, German U-boats were sinking oil tankers almost at will—and “so close,” wrote Eric Sevareid, “that a chorus girl in a Miami penthouse could see men die in flaming oil.” Washington made ready for air raids. Bess Truman had blackout curtains on order for the Connecticut Avenue apartment. The senator took his World War I helmet to the office and at night would lie awake tossing and turning, “fighting the war.” In April, driving through North Carolina on committee business, he tried to think only of spring returning, “the return of Ceres from Pluto’s palace.” The dogwood and apple orchards were in bloom along the winding road, and at the hotel at Chapel Hill all was quiet and restful. Still he couldn’t sleep, fretting over the course of the war.
In a speech on the Senate floor that summer of 1942, he called for a second front in Europe to relieve the Russians—as a matter of clear military necessity. In a speech at home in Jackson County he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again.
Disclosures produced by his committee were shocking. Curtiss-Wright was discovered manufacturing faulty airplane engines for delivery to combat forces. One inspector for Curtiss-Wright, a man with two nephews in the Army Air Corps, broke down and wept as he told a committee investigator what was going on. “If I were the executive in charge of a plant of that sort, I would know what was going on,” Truman told an Air Corps officer who testified, “and I think it is plain negligence, and maybe worse than that…that they didn’t know. They should have known.” The officer agreed. “No doubt about it,” said Truman. The Air Corps had denied that there were problems. Curtiss-Wright launched an advertising campa
ign stressing the company’s contribution to winning the war. But the faulty engines were a reality, and as Truman surmised, more than negligence was involved. As an aftermath of the committee’s investigation one Air Corps general involved was sent to prison.
Questioning the cause of troubles with the B-26 bomber built by the Glenn Martin Company, the committee was informed by Martin himself that the wings were not wide enough. Truman asked why the wings weren’t fixed. Martin said plans were too far along and that besides he already had the contract. Truman said that if that was how Martin felt, then the committee would see the contract was ended. Martin said he would correct the size of the wings.
They saw a lot of the seamy side of the war effort, Truman once remarked, speaking for the committee. Yet for Truman the disclosures appeared to confirm many of his worst suspicions about big business in America. He was truly a Jeffersonian in spirit; William Jennings Bryan remained a political hero. The things Truman had said in the Senate in earlier years about the evils of big banks, big insurance companies, big corporations had been said in earnest. He had never really known any industrialists or heads of giant corporations, most of whom were Republicans. He had never counted such people among his personal or political friends.
Nor, at this stage, does he appear ever to have accepted the view that a certain amount of corporate stupidity and corruption was inevitable in an undertaking so massive and involving so many interests as the war effort. In fact, the American industrial powerhouse, America’s phenomenal productivity was what would turn the tide against Germany and Japan. It would prove the decisive factor in the war, and Truman was to give too little credit to the vast majority of patriotic business people and industrialists who were making this happen. At times, in what he wrote and said, he made it seem as though the committee and its investigators were the only ones doing their duty. He didn’t believe that, of course. Also, from what he and his investigators were finding, it is easy to understand why he might have felt as he did.
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