The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  But, while Roosevelt lost some support in almost every major group, he dropped off only slightly in the huge lower and lower-middle income groups. His continued substantial support among the “masses” was the key to his victory. Labor, including coal miners, stayed with the President. Lewis’s efforts had fallen flat, and he duly surrendered the CIO presidency as a symbol of his total defeat by Roosevelt in the political arena. There were indications that class voting in 1940 was more solid than four years before. “I’ll say it even though it doesn’t sound nice,” a Detroit auto unionist told reporter Samuel Lubell shortly after the election. “We’ve grown class conscious.”

  If Willkie’s appeals to the workers on economic issues had proved unavailing, his raising of the war issue did cut into Roosevelt’s vote. Pro-German and Italian and anti-British elements swung sharply against the President, and these were only partly offset by the Jews, eastern seaboard Yankee internationalists, and national groups such as Poles and Norwegians who could not forget Hitler’s occupation of the “old country.” Roosevelt actually increased his vote in northern New England over 1936, though by a small margin.

  Unquestionably Roosevelt had been lucky in at least two respects: the crisis in Europe and the first flush of returning prosperity. The former took the force out of Willkie’s main foreign policy appeal; the latter took the sting out of his main domestic argument, namely the Depression. Poll after poll showed that the sharper the crisis, the more the voters clung to Roosevelt. The emergency situation seemed also wholly to counteract Willkie’s third-term warnings.

  Luck—but marvelous skill as well. The President’s political timing had never been better, his speeches for the most part had never been more skillful, his thrusts at enemy weak points never more telling. More than this, he had exploited his one great line of communication to the people—the radio—while countering Willkie effectively in the very medium—the newspapers—that the latter could claim as peculiarly his own. Willkie was ineffective over the radio; and, while Willkie got more favorable mention in the press, Roosevelt got more attention in the press. The old political adage held: bad publicity is better than no publicity.

  In the last analysis Roosevelt himself was the issue. His campaign poses with the guns and ships had paid off; but his captaincy of a generation paid off too. His victory was largely a personal one; the Democrats gained only six seats in the House in 1940 after the slump of 1938, and lost three in the Senate. The future had been made possible for Roosevelt, but what was foretold for his party, his program, his country, and his world, no man could tell.

  EPILOGUE

  The Culmination

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: The war years are treated synoptically for reasons explained in the preface. The concluding observations on Roosevelt’s character in the third section of this Epilogue are based mainly upon the previous chapters, but these observations, I hope, may throw some light on the events pictured in broad strokes in this Epilogue.

  A MONTH AFTER ROOSEVELT’S ELECTION Hitler threw down the gage of world battle. In a fiery speech to the Berlin armaments workers the Fuehrer pictured the global conflict as a gigantic class struggle. Britain and America, rich nations ruled by capitalists, had millions of unemployed; in Germany all had jobs, and work was the supreme value. “There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other.… With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. … I can beat any other power in the world.…”

  Three weeks later Roosevelt answered the challenge. Quoting Hitler’s words, he said in a fireside chat that the Axis “not merely admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” Hence, he said, the United States could not encourage talk of peace until the aggressors abandoned all thought of conquering the world.

  The President interpreted the election as a mandate for the United States to become a great “arsenal of democracy.” In the last weeks of 1940 he slowly worked out the policies underlying Lend-Lease, under which the President would be empowered to lend or lease equipment to nations whose defense he considered necessary to the security of the United States. Britain was being stripped to the bone, Churchill had warned the President privately, and Roosevelt told reporters that he was merely trying to get rid of the “silly, foolish, old dollar sign.” When Lend-Lease passed Congress, Roosevelt scored a legislative victory that was a milestone in the organizing of world resistance to Hitler.

  So far, so good—even the isolationists could hardly deny that the act was a logical projection of the election mandate to step up aid to the democracies, especially at a time when Hitler was scoring a series of striking victories in the Balkans and elsewhere. But what would happen if circumstances called for something more than material help from the arsenal? Forced back on the defensive during the election, Roosevelt had made peace the supreme issue. Rearmament, aid to Britain, the destroyer deal, hemispheric unity—all these he had proclaimed as means of keeping America out of war. To be sure, in his December fireside chat he faced up to the perils involved. “If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take.” But then he drew quickly back on the limb. The cardinal aim was not American security, not democratic survival, not destruction of Nazism, but peace.

  Circumstances soon were forcing the President’s hand. With German submarine packs and battle cruisers roaming the North Atlantic in early 1941, the crucial question was insuring the safe arrival of the cargoes. Churchill sent reports of grave losses. The direct solution to the problem was outright naval escort for shipping, but Roosevelt’s cautious tactics—defending Lend-Lease as a method of assuring Hitler’s defeat without serious risk of war for America— now boomeranged. The more vigorously the navy tried to protect the lifelines to Britain the more likely were provocative incidents.

  Once again Roosevelt was caught between divided administration counsels, between the conflicting demands of isolationists and interventionists. Once again there was a period of veering and drifting in the White House; once again Roosevelt’s advisers—Stimson, Ickes, and others—lamented the President’s failure to lead. And once again Roosevelt responded to the situation by improvisation and subterfuge. He publicly ordered intensified naval patrolling in the now enlarged security zones; he privately ordered a policy of seeking out German ships and planes and notifying British units of their location. On May 27, while pickets trudged dourly back and forth in front of the White House with their antiwar signs, Roosevelt announced his issuance of a proclamation of “unlimited national emergency.” The next day, however, he took much of the sting out of his move by disclaiming any positive plans along new lines.

  The President, said Hopkins, “would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” Indeed, as Roosevelt anxiously examined public opinion polls during 1941, he once again was failing to supply the crucial factor of his own leadership in the equation of public opinion. His approach was in sharp contrast to that of his great world partner. “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime,” Churchill said later in the year, “than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.… There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”

  ROOSEVELT AS WAR LORD

  The shattering Nazi attack on Russia on June 22 came like a thunderclap amid the torpid Washington calm. Many Americans were caught between a loathing for communism as a philosophy and the practical need to work with the Russians against Nazism—but not the President. When Fulton Oursler of Liberty magazine sent him a proposed editorial titled “We Still Say ‘To Hell with Communism,’ ” Roosevelt wrote back that he would condemn the Russian form of dictatorship equally with the German form but also would make clear that the immediate threat to America was Germany. The President spurred the sending of supplies to Russia and took steps to forestall organized opposition to such aid.

&n
bsp; So intent was the President on immediate tactical moves rather than grand strategy that his loftiest pronouncement of the year—the Atlantic Charter, proclaimed jointly with Churchill—was almost a by-product of the Atlantic Conference of the two leaders in July. Most of the conference discussions were devoted to an intensive consideration of the host of production, logistical, co-ordinating, and intelligence matters in which the affairs of the two nations were so intertwined. The lofty pronouncements were actually scribbled on pieces of paper and issued as a press release, but their reception by a people yearning for presidential leadership and direction converted them into a historic act.

  “Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” the two leaders proclaimed. “… They respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.… They will endeavor … to further the enjoyment of all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access … to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.… They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all Nations” for social security and economic welfare. “They believe that all of the Nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.…”

  But high-sounding words were not enough by themselves. What would Roosevelt do? The activists around him burned with anxiety over the President’s refusal to take decisive action—to provide naval escort, to order all-out naval attack in the Atlantic, even to declare war. The President still proceeded cautiously. He felt that he could act decisively only in answer to a decisive act by the enemy. Hitler, now concentrating on Russia, refused him such an act. No incidents or provocations, the Fuehrer told his admirals. The lack of an overt act deprived the President of the weapon he needed—the chance to dramatize a situation, to interpret an event. He needed such an opportunity both to arouse the people and, even more, to galvanize Congress. For legislative support was never assured; in mid-August the House of Representatives threw a scare into the administration when it extended selective service by a margin of only one vote.

  Then, early in September 1941, there occurred the incident that seemed to give Roosevelt his chance—an incident implicit in presidential orders given months before. While en route to Iceland the American destroyer Greer learned from the British of a German submarine, trailed it for several hours, and periodically notified the British of its position; finally the submarine loosed two torpedoes against the Greer, both of which missed; then the Greer depth-charged the submarine, with unknown results. Quickly seizing on the incident, Roosevelt reported in a fireside chat that the Greer had been attacked, but said nothing of the preliminaries. Soon orders went out to the fleet to set up full-scale naval escorting and to “shoot on sight.”

  Still Hitler rejected his admirals’ renewed pleas for all-out attacks on the Atlantic supply lines. Russian conquest was his goal; the United States could be dealt with later. It was in a different quarter that the decisive event occurred.

  In Tokyo in mid-October 1941, the cabinet of Prince Konoye, caught between the militarists’ zeal for expansion and foreign efforts to contain Japan’s Asiatic ambitions, surrendered power to a new government headed by the fire-breathing general Hideki Tojo. The change tightened the Far Eastern deadlock. Tokyo was willing to settle matters with Washington only if its long-developed plans for expansion were accepted. Roosevelt and Hull wanted stabilization in the Far East but not at the expense of China or of the Good Neighbor ideals they had so often preached. Unlike Konoye, Tojo would not brook delay in further expansion. “If a hundred million people merge into one iron solidarity to go forward,” the new prime minister boasted, “nothing can stop us.”

  The new Japanese cabinet then embarked on an elaborate double game. Conversations were to be continued with Washington, but the moment they broke down—as the militarists, at least, expected—the decision for war would be taken up at once. On November 5 operational orders were issued, with the warning: “War with Netherlands, America, England inevitable.…” The date for the attack was set tentatively for December 8, 1941.

  Intensive negotiations then ensued between Washington and Tokyo. Roosevelt was eager to work out any acceptable stopgap arrangement in order to play for time, and the Japanese negotiators were genuinely hopeful of agreement. But fundamentally it was a case of the immovable object and the irresistible force: Japan was intent on expansion, the United States opposed further aggression in the Orient. And all the discussions took place under the harsh time limits imposed by Tojo.

  Proposals and counterproposals followed, but all to no avail. By early December the President knew that the Japanese would strike soon—but he knew not where. Most reports to Washington stressed the likelihood of Japanese moves in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific. On the night of December 6, as Roosevelt, still fighting for time, dispatched a plea and a warning to Emperor Hirohito, Japanese carriers were plowing toward their positions northwest of Oahu.

  That same night, commenting to Roosevelt that the Japanese would attack at their own convenience, Hopkins lamented that the United States could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.

  “No,” said the President, “we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people. But we have a good record.…”

  Early on the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, December 7, Roosevelt and Hopkins had just finished eating lunch when the telephone rang. It was Knox.

  “Hello, Frank.”

  “Mr. President, it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

  “No!”

  The bombs that shattered the fleet in Pearl Harbor shattered as well the stalemate in Roosevelt’s war policy. In the first hours of turmoil after news of the attack there were some who could think only of the fleet’s lack of readiness. Connally turned savagely on Knox with a barrage of questions. Others thought the President should issue a long review of his policy toward Japan in his war message.

  But the President would have none of it. To him the only important fact was the fact of war itself. “We are in it,” he kept saying to his advisers. When he appeared before a joint session next day and somberly asked Congress to declare the existence of a state of war, the two most important words in his short speech were “Hostilities exist.” The crucial act had occurred for which the President could find no substitute in speech or deed. “Hostilities exist”—a few climactic hours had taught the lessons that Roosevelt had never quite been able to teach.

  “I think the Boss really feels more relief than he has had for weeks,” one cabinet member said to another as they left his study. When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, world battle lines had formed.

  From the President’s behavior during the following weeks one might have thought that all that had gone before had been merely preparation for this hour—as perhaps it was. Roosevelt, said Sumner Welles, a close observer at the time, “demonstrated the ultimate capacity to dominate and control a supreme emergency, which is the rarest and most valuable characteristic of any statesman.” It was like 1933 all over again, but projected onto an infinitely larger stage. Roosevelt was businesslike, serene, cheerful, grave, tireless, confident.

  Backed now by a united people, he could exploit his superb flair for bringing warring parties together behind a common goal. Labor-management unity was a brilliant case in point. During the year before Pearl Harbor coal miners, shipbuilders, airplane-engine workers, and tens of thousands of others had gone on strike. The President had had to seize several defense plants. The central issue was “union security”—an issue so divisive that it had caused the collapse of the nation’s chief mediation agency. Ten days after Pearl Harbor a “warm, confident, buoyant, serious” President summoned labor and employer delegates to the White House, told them it would be a “thrilling thing” if they could agree soon on basic problems, and proceeded to set up a board to work out a compromise on union security that was to prove on
e of the most creative and enduring achievements of the war administration.

  All the President’s command and confidence were needed during the early months of 1942, as the nation suffered staggering reversals along the vast Pacific front. Japanese forces swallowed Guam, Wake, the Philippines. Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies fell. Everywhere the Axis maintained its relentless advance: in North Africa the Germans drove the British back into Egypt; they seemed to have the Russians on the point of collapse; they still exacted a heavy toll in the Atlantic. The Japanese landed in the Aleutians, reached the borders of India, threatened Australia.

  Not only did Roosevelt have to maintain an air of resolution and confidence during the long, dreary days of defeat, he had to stick to the central strategic decisions—to make the main effort first against Germany while holding off Japan—in the face of the “Japan-firsters” who looked on that nation as America’s only real enemy. Roosevelt worked amid a thousand pressures. He had to mediate among his own rival services, among theater commands, between war front and home front, between the desperate needs of Russians and British. As usual the more exacting problems moved relentlessly along the lines of command into his office; as usual the President tackled them cheerfully, turning quickly from crucial questions of strategy, to administrative minutiae, to galling problems of personnel; as usual he operated tirelessly among the never-ending babble of politicians, admirals, legislators, generals, diplomats, bureaucrats.

  The President understood, too, that his soldiers’ slow, grudging retreat was buying time for the economy to shift into high gear. Having turned from one expedient to another in the months before Pearl Harbor, he established in January 1942 a relatively centralized mobilization direction in the War Production Board. Exploitation of the nation’s enormous resources was the main job of 1942 and one that called for a tenacious fight against inflation as war spending neared one hundred million dollars a day. Here again, Roosevelt seemed to have been superbly trained for the job. No longer did he face the need to decide between the agonizing alternatives—between spending and budget balancing—for which he had never been educated. That decision had been made for him. Now his job was to stave off the inflationary pressures of businessmen, labor, farmers. The notions that had run through his economic thinking for years—notions of a balanced economy, of a central harmony of interests, of mutual sacrifice for mutual gain—supplied an indispensable background for his efforts toward stabilization.