These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Even before the United States entered the war, FDR had claimed new powers for the office of the president. During the Civil War, Lincoln had invoked “presidential war power,” but Roosevelt claimed a range of emergency powers never heard of before. In July 1939, he’d placed the secretaries of war and the navy under his own authority as commander in chief, removing them from the military chain of authority. After Germany invaded Poland, he’d issued an executive order declaring a “limited national emergency,” a concept without precedent. Senator Robert Taft described the president as “a complete one-man dictatorship.”

  Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress passed the War Powers Act, granting to the executive branch special powers to prosecute the war, including the power to surveil letters, telegraph messages, and radio broadcasts. Some of the new agencies created by the administration ultimately wielded little power. The War Production Board, created in January 1942, consisted chiefly of corporate executives doubtful about state planning. “The arsenal of democracy,” I. F. Stone wrote, “is still being operated with one eye on the war and the other on the convenience of big business.” Other wartime agencies had more authority. A Second War Powers Act, passed in March of 1942, granted the president authority over “special investigations and reports of census or statistical matters” and established the National War Labor Board and the Office of Price Administration, ceding considerable control over the economy to the federal government and, in particular, to the executive branch.45

  Just as the administrative state had grown in both size and power during the First World War, it grew during the Second. The Pentagon opened in March 1943, having been built in sixteen months. The number of civil servants in the federal government grew from 950,000 in 1939 to 3.8 million in 1945. As federal spending skyrocketed, so did the national debt, which reached $258 billion in 1945 and called not only for war bonds but for an unprecedented rise in taxes. New Dealers sold tax hikes to the public as emergency measures, “taxes to beat the Axis,” while the Revenue Act of 1942, which included a steeply progressive income tax, vastly broadened the tax base: 85 percent of American families filed a return.46

  Business grew, and so did labor. Membership in trade unions rose from 6.6 million in 1939 to 12.6 million in 1945. Science grew, too. The Manhattan Project, a secret federal project to develop an atomic bomb, begun in 1939, had, by the end of the war, employed 130,000 staff, and cost $2 billion. The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), established by FDR in 1940, was headed by Vannevar Bush, the so-called czar of research, who by 1941 was also head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Before the end of the war, the NDRC employed some two thousand scientists, including three out of four of the nation’s physicists.47

  Roosevelt liked to say that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced with “Dr. Win-the-War” but the war itself, by extending the powers of the federal government, extended the New Deal.48 The war also reshaped the role of the press. In the First World War, George Creel’s government-run propaganda program had stirred up so much hysteria and hatred against Germany that Americans had taken to calling hamburgers “Salisbury steaks.”49 FDR, sharing Americans’ bitter memories of earlier American wartime propaganda, had been reluctant to wield the power of government to tell the American people what to think about the war.50 But the establishment of a government information agency had assumed a new urgency in 1940, after the publication of a book by Edmond Taylor, Paris bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. In The Strategy of Terror—Europe’s Inner Front, Taylor reported firsthand on the campaign of propaganda waged by the Nazis in France to break the will of the French people and divide the population. “Words exercise a strange tyranny over human affairs,” Taylor wrote. He called propaganda “the invisible front.”51

  Two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing a new government information agency: the Office of Facts and Figures. To head it, he appointed Archibald MacLeish, a poet and writer whom he’d earlier named Librarian of Congress. The agency’s mandate was not terribly clear. MacLeish said the executive order establishing it “read like a pass to a ball game.” MacLeish’s ideas about how to write about war could hardly have been more different than Creel’s. MacLeish had fought in World War I, after which he lived in Paris, where he wrote poems about places where lay “upon the darkening plain / The dead against the dead and on the silent ground / The silent slain.”52

  After MacLeish returned to the United States from Paris, he’d been an editor for Fortune from 1929 to 1938 before serving as the Librarian of Congress. “Democracy is never a thing done,” he said in 1939. “Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.” He believed that artists and writers have an obligation to fight “a revolution created out of disorder by a terror of disorder,” and that the real battle was the battle for public opinion. “The principal battleground of this war is not the South Pacific,” he said. “It is not the Middle East. It is not England, or Norway, or the Russian Steppes. It is American opinion.”53

  In directing the Office of Facts and Figures, MacLeish hoped not to produce propaganda but instead to educate the public about the danger of it. One of his office’s earliest pamphlets, Divide and Conquer, relied heavily on Taylor’s book to explain to Americans how the Nazi strategy of terror had worked in France. To illustrate, it quoted Mein Kampf. “At the bottom of their hearts the great masses of the people are more likely to be poisoned than to be consciously and deliberately bad,” Hitler had written. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.” MacLeish’s pamphlet aimed to defeat Nazi propaganda: “The United States is now subject to a total barrage of the Nazi strategy of terror. Hitler thinks Americans are suckers. By the very vastness of his program of lies, he hopes to frighten us into believing that the Nazis are invincible.”54

  Dorothy Thompson, who once described Mein Kampf as “eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction,” had long been making the same argument. “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a fine art, and propaganda as a form of government.” The challenge to Western journalists, she said, was “to represent a theory of journalism, a theory of what journalism stands for, a thesis of journalism, a philosophy of journalism, in countries where this philosophy is fundamentally repudiated.”55

  In this same spirit, MacLeish insisted that his office wouldn’t take positions but instead would give people the figures and facts: “The duty of government is to provide a basis for judgment; and when it goes beyond that, it goes beyond the prime scope of its duty.” Journalists were doubtful. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized: “OFF is just going to superimpose its own ‘well organized facts’ upon the splendid confusion, interpret the interpreters, redigest those who now digest the digesters, explain what those who explain what the explainers of the explanations mean, and co-ordinate the coordinators of those appointed to co-ordinate the co-ordinations of the co-ordinated.”56

  MacLeish clung to his idealism, which he grounded in the nation’s founding truths and in its founding commitment to truth. In an April 1942 speech at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, against the Nazi “strategy of terror,” he proposed a new, American strategy:

  It is the strategy which is appropriate to our cause and to our purpose—the strategy of truth—the strategy which opposes to the frauds and the deceits by which our enemies have confused and conquered other peoples, the simple and clarifying truths by which a nation such as ours must guide itself.

  To deploy the strategy of truth, he called upon American journalists: “No country has ever had at its disposal greater resources wi
th which to fight the warfare of opinion than the practice of the profession of journalism in this country has produced.”57 Critics, not unreasonably, called MacLeish naïve: war requires deceit. And FDR himself had little interest in what MacLeish proposed. Early on, Roosevelt ordered MacLeish to announce that gasoline would be rationed, when it was perfectly clear to Americans that there was no shortage of gasoline. Instead, there was a very concerning shortage of rubber, but the president, knowing that revealing the rubber shortage would undermine the war cause, refused to allow MacLeish to reveal the truth.58

  MacLeish soldiered on, especially keen to use the Office of Facts and Figures to mark the occasion, in 1941, of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. His surest vehicle was the radio. The Radio Division of the Office of Facts and Figures, headed by former CBS executive William Lewis, commissioned writer Norman Corwin to compose a radio play about the Bill of Rights. We Hold These Truths, broadcast eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was the first radio drama broadcast on all four networks. Its stars included Jimmy Stewart, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles, with music provided by the New York Philharmonic. We Hold These Truths was as much a call to arms as a celebration of the nation’s founding creed, the original strategy of truth: “The Congress of the thirteen states, instructed by the people of the thirteen states, threw up a bulwark, wrote a hope, and made a sign for posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race-haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists, the men who give up fights that have just begun.”

  MacLeish and Lewis then signed Corwin up to write a thirteen-week series called This Is War! Parts were hard-hitting, but, as FDR’s critics pointed out, much of it aimed to shore up support for the president: it compared him to Washington and Lincoln.59 Yet in courting public opinion, Roosevelt found MacLeish’s Office of Facts and Figures too restrained, and in June of 1942 he replaced it with the Office of War Information, headed by former CBS reporter Elmer Davis, who was far more willing to use the methods of mass advertising than MacLeish had been. A frustrated MacLeish resigned and returned to the Library of Congress. Without MacLeish as a force of resistance, the agency drifted, much of the staff at one point resigning in protest over the hiring of a former advertising manager for Coca-Cola. Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Henry Pringle made a mock Office of War Information poster. “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms,” it read. “It’s a refreshing war.”60

  EVEN AS THE WAR raged on unremittingly, Roosevelt looked ahead to the peace, concerned not to repeat the travesty of Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations. To that end, he invited Churchill to spend Christmas 1941 at the White House. During the visit, Roosevelt came up with the name for their planned new international organization, “United Nations.” He hastened to the prime minister’s room to get his agreement to it. Churchill had just emerged from a bath. Roosevelt entered his room and found him naked. “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide from you,” Churchill said calmly.61

  Weeks later, on January 1, 1942, the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union—the “Big Four”—adopted a “Declaration by United Nations.” The document was signed on January 2 by twenty-six nations. All subscribed to the “common program of purposes and principles” of the Atlantic Charter and forswore the making of a separate peace. The Big Four also agreed to a military strategy: to concentrate on defeating Germany, first by bombing Germany and then by landing in France. The Allied victory against a far more loosely confederate Axis would depend on this unity of purpose.

  The State Department, meanwhile, formed a secret fifteen-person Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy, headed by Undersecretary Sumner Welles. This study group devised much of the framework for the founding of the United Nations as an international organization. More publicly, Wendell Willkie dedicated himself to the work of convincing the Republican Party to abandon isolationism once and for all. “He who wins the war must maintain the peace,” he said in February 1942, warning Republicans that to cede internationalism to the Democrats would destroy the GOP. That spring, he convinced the Republican National Committee to pass a resolution declaring that “our nation has an obligation to assist in bringing about comity, cooperation, and understanding among nations.” Roosevelt asked Willkie to undertake a world tour to publicize the idea of a United Nations. He left in August, flying on a bomber named the Gulliver. Forty-nine days of travel included stops in Russia, the Middle East, and China. In a radio address that he gave when he got back, he called for an end to Western imperialism and the beginning of a new arrangement among nations. One World, the book he wrote about his trip and his vision, headed every best-seller list in the country, becoming only the third book published in the United States to sell more than a million copies. Roosevelt called for a United Nations, but it was Willkie who raised public support for it.62

  Roosevelt’s Office of War Information asked Americans to understand the war as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and fascism. For most soldiers, this meant something less lofty. When reporters asked GIs what they were fighting for, they generally said that they were fighting for home. Ernie Pyle, a reporter from Indiana, hauled his Underwood typewriter along as he followed American infantrymen fighting in Europe and Africa. “I love the infantry,” Pyle said, “because they are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. . . . And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.” He wrote of the ordinary soldiers, the “dogfaces,” and their bravery, and their misery, and the terribleness of their deaths. “Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules,” he wrote from Italy, describing a soldier who stopped to sit by the body of a captain, holding the dead man’s hand. “Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”63

  Soldiers communicated from the trenches by way of radio, here in the Philippine island of Leyte in 1944. They fought in the mountains and on the seas. In 1942, much of the American fighting took place in the Pacific, where the Allies hoped to halt the Japanese advance. In the spring, U.S. intelligence broke Japan’s ciphers and, in the spring of 1942, defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Hawaiian island of Midway. Allied troops then challenged and eventually defeated the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, at the Battle of Guadalcanal. In Guadalcanal, marines told reporter John Hersey that they were fighting for blueberry pie. “Home is where the good things are,” Hersey wrote. “The generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie.”64

  Meanwhile, on the home front, the federal government had instituted a policy of imprisoning people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. As early as 1934, the State Department had reported to FDR on the possibility of sabotage by Japanese Americans. In 1939, the president had asked the FBI to compile a list of possible subversives, a list known as the ABC list because of its ratings system: people on the list were labeled: A, immediately dangerous; B, potentially dangerous; or C, a possible Japanese sympathizer. In the hours after receiving word of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI began rounding up suspects; by nightfall, the bureau had detained nearly eight hundred Japanese on the A list.65

  On February 19, 1942, another day that would live in infamy, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to establish military zones. The U.S. Army issued Public Proclamation 1 in March, directing aliens to demarcated zones. Restrictions began with curfews and proceeded to relocation orders. Eventually, some 112,000 Japanese, a number that included 79,000 U.S. citizens, were ordered from their homes and imprisoned in camps in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington.66 They packed what they could in duffel bags and stiff suitcases, their distress captured in pictures taken by photographers including Dorothea Lange.

&n
bsp; Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she’d taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. “Cripples know about each other,” she said of her ability to capture suffering on film. Lange disagreed with Roosevelt’s executive order. “She thought that we were entering a period of fascism,” her assistant said, “and that she was viewing the end of democracy as we know it.” Her photographs, commissioned by the War Relocation Authority for purposes of documentation, serve as testament to that objection. Lange’s FSA photographs became iconic; her WRA photographs were, for decades, locked in archives, hidden from view, many of them stamped IMPOUNDED.67

  Dorothea Lange photographed the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in California in 1942. Appeals to the courts proved unavailing. Gordon Hirabayashi, an American citizen and a Quaker who was a senior at the University of Washington, refused to abide by the curfew. “I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives,” Hirabayashi said. He turned himself in to the FBI but sought a legal remedy, arguing that the executive order was “unconstitutional because it discriminates against citizens of Japanese ancestry.” In Hirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1943 upheld the constitutionality of a curfew, if narrowly. “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” Chief Justice Harlan Stone said, in the majority opinion, but in time of war, such discriminations “which are relevant to measures for our national defense and for the successful prosecution of the war” were perfectly constitutional. Justice Frank Murphy, while concurring, nevertheless regretted the ruling, which, he said, “goes to the very brink of constitutional power” and which he considered, whether constitutional or not, an American tragedy. “To say that any group cannot be assimilated is to admit that the great American experiment has failed.” The curfew and internment orders had deprived American citizens of their liberty “because of their particular racial inheritance,” and “in this sense it bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Germany and in other parts of Europe.”68