“I have a single, responsible head; his name is Knudsen & Hillman.”
“Two heads.”
“No, that’s one head. In other words, aren’t you looking for trouble? Would you rather come to one law firm or two?”
“I don’t think that’s comparable.”
“Just the same thing, exactly. Wait until you run into trouble.”
“I would rather avoid trouble.”
“I think they will. They think they will—that’s an interesting thing….”
“Wait until you run into trouble”—this might have been the motto of Roosevelt’s defense mobilizers throughout 1941. By early spring they were running into serious materiel shortages. After much false optimism the OPM chiefs had to cope with a dearth of aluminum—so vital for planes—and with the near-monopoly of aluminum produced by the Aluminum Company of America. When the question rose of expanding supply more quickly through Alcoa or more slowly by a new and potentially competitive company, New Dealers opposed the aluminum “trust,” but Stimson remarked: “I’d rather have some sinful aluminum now than a lot of virtuous aluminum a year from now.” Machine tools, the cutting edge of any defense effort, were limited, and despite optimistic statements from the industry a shortage of electric power loomed. Coal reserves were vast, too, but here the problem was a threat of strike action by the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis, who was still smarting from his vain election appeal to his miners to support Willkie over Roosevelt.
The President seemed to retain his usual debonair optimism about the nation’s capacity to produce in the pinch. A crucial potential bottleneck was steel. Late in 1940 he had asked Stettinius to assess steel capacity; when Stettinius’s man Gano Dunn, working with the steel industry, predicted a surplus of ten million tons of steel in 1942, Roosevelt canonized the report by devoting a whole press conference to it and accepting its findings. Dunn had to issue a more pessimistic report within five weeks.
Watching these happenings through skeptical pince-nez was a veteran of World War I mobilization struggles. Bernard Baruch had long enjoyed a friendly relation with the President, who paid the old Wilsonian every compliment except following his advice. For months Baruch’s advice had been simple and flat: centralize all controls—allocations, priorities, price-fixing—in one agency, with one boss. Many editorial writers agreed; so did many high administration officials. Stimson, too, had urged this move, on the ground that someone clearly in charge would feel the “sting of responsibility.” Morgenthau wanted his chief to set up a Cabinet-level department of supply to run the whole mobilization program. Everyone seemed to want a czar—especially if he himself could be the czar.
Roosevelt would have none of it. It was impossible to find any one “Czar” or “Poohbah” or “Ahkoond of Swat,” he had said in explaining the OPM to reporters, and only amateurs thought otherwise. Under the Constitution only one man—the President—could be in charge. But as spring 1941 approached, it was clear that the President, with his other multifarious responsibilities, could not be the co-ordinating head of defense production. Yet he would not budge. Clearly he had deeper reasons—reasons distilled from his diverse tactics of moving step by step, avoiding commitments to any one man or program, letting his subordinates feel less the sting of responsibility than the goad of competition, thwarting one man from getting too much control, preventing himself from becoming a prisoner of his own machinery, and, above all, keeping choices wide in a world full of snares and surprises—that prompted him to drive his jostling horses with a loose bit and a nervous but easy rein.
On the day after Roosevelt’s inaugural in January 1941 the liberal newspaper PM in New York ran across its front page not an account of the Washington glitter but a picture of row upon row of men on the benches of a Bowery mission. They sat, their heads lowered, not in prayer, but on the hard narrow top of the bench ahead, their coats pulled up over their heads, babbling, coughing, snoring, scratching. They were part of an army of 7,000 homeless men in New York City—men who lived on handouts during the day and in missions, lodges, and flophouses at night. In the morning, young and old, amply nourished or not, well-clad or ill-dressed, able-bodied or lame, they would be turned out at 5:00 A.M. sharp, no matter how bitter the weather, to begin another day of aimless wandering.
It was a cruel comment on the end of two terms of “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” under Roosevelt. But it was not unfair. Four years after Roosevelt had pictured “one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed,” four years after he had demanded that “if we would make democracy succeed…we must act—NOW,” economic and social conditions in the nation had not markedly improved. Nourishment: a national nutrition conference for defense, meeting in Washington in the spring of 1941, reported that over 40 per cent of the people were not getting enough food or the right food. Housing: private construction was still lagging; in defense areas people were living in shacks, cabins, trailers, tent colonies, and “motor courts,” often a whole family to a room, and towns were flooded by defense workers while rents soared. Health: of the first million men selected for the draft, almost 40 per cent were found unfit for general military service; one-third of the rejections were due directly or indirectly to poor nutrition. These were evils in themselves; they also showed marked social weaknesses in a nation girding for defense.
March 3, 1940, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
As usual, the plight of the Negro caricatured the social malaise of the whole people. A brilliant group of social scientists, under the leadership of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was discovering that the percentage of Employment Service placements in major defense industries was actually declining for nonwhites during early 1941. Most of the big war plants had no blacks at all among their workers. Many unions discriminated against them, in part because of their fear that if Negroes came in, white workers might well go out. The future looked no more encouraging; in December 1940 less than 2 per cent of the trainees under defense pre-employment and refresher courses were black. Negroes could find opportunities for education and equal pay in the Army, but the services were still almost completely segregated, Negro trainees were concentrated mainly in the South, and as late as 1940 there were only two Negro combat officers in the Regular Army and none in the Navy. In the next year a detail of black soldiers, marching on an Arkansas highway, was pushed off the road by state troopers; when the white detail officer protested, he was called a “nigger lover.”
It was not that the federal government lacked agencies to cope with this sharpening problem. The New Deal had immensely enlarged the machinery of action—perhaps too much so, in some sectors, considering the eleven federal agencies dealing with housing. But most of the programs were badly underfinanced; research and planning units had been starved by congressional conservatives; and the government was heavily dependent on state and local agencies and funds. Employment services, so crucial in a time of manpower mobility and mobilization, were an arresting example.
Confronting these problems almost daily in his double task of getting workers into the right jobs and keeping them there was the second half of the ungainly OPM leadership of “Knudsenhillman.” Sidney Hillman was Roosevelt’s kind of union man: opportunistic in meeting problems but principled in outlook; flexible in negotiations but right-minded in the final test; a tenacious defender of union rights who could also operate in the wider political arena; and with a solid and deliverable constituency in his Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Long accustomed to pacifying Communists, socialists, ethnic groups, hardboiled garment-industry bosses, “labor’s politician” now had to thread his way between his old comrade in arms CIO chief John L. Lewis and William Green, of the AFL, between liberal labor ideologists all out for defense and pragmatic Washington politicians, between industry representatives in the defense establishment and New Dealers operating out of their old Washington enclaves.
Hillman needed all his rough-and-tumble union skills in Washington, for fro
m the start he had to fight to maintain labor standards in the defense industry and his own influence among the loosely organized defense agencies in Washington. He got along with Knudsen—he could get along with almost anyone. They had easily agreed on their jurisdictions: Knudsen would concentrate on production and priorities, and Hillman on manpower supply, strike prevention and mediation, and safeguarding labor standards. But different constituencies, conflicting responsibilities and perceptions, and the pushing and hauling of interest groups and staff assistants around the two men brought constant strain. Racked by tension and illness, Hillman would turn to the White House for support.
He liked Roosevelt—he liked his cordiality, the very tilt of his cigarette holder; the man had style, Hillman told friends. But Roosevelt, too, had to bargain and conciliate and compromise, in a much wider orbit than Hillman did, and labor’s politician was often left to build and repair his own fences in the Battle of Washington.
And so in early 1941 Hillman and Knudsen and their colleagues and rivals and clients carried on as best they could, coping with the social ills of twelve years of depression, partial recovery, and recession; often running separately under Roosevelt’s loose rein; trying to convert men and plans to a war that was swiftly changing, to an American strategy that was obscure, to a leadership that delayed decisions for agonizing weeks and then moved overnight without warning. During the early weeks of 1941 a strike by thousands of workers at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee—holder of a forty-million-dollar contract for turbines—seemed to symbolize OPM’s problems. Hillman had to deal with left-wing union leaders, AFL and CIO factions, a company president who was antiunion and an isolationist, and a dispute over union status that was legally complex and ideologically explosive. He and his aides managed to get the workers back on the job, only to have the management in effect go on strike. As these and other disputes seized the nation’s headlines, conservative Congressmen denounced Hillman as pro-Communist and prepared measures to limit the right to strike.
The President had called for “speed now”; in the late winter of 1941 everything seemed to conspire against action by a still-floundering democracy.
ROOSEVELT’S WHITE HOUSE
One morning early in April, John Gunther, already famous for his inside reports on Europe and Asia, visited Roosevelt to give his impressions from a recent tour of Latin America. Pa Watson told him that he could have only six or seven minutes; it was a crowded day, and the President was running behind. Gunther waited tensely. At the moment, Roosevelt was talking with the Commissioners of the District of Columbia; they took so long that Gunther’s appointment had to be reset for the afternoon. When he finally was admitted to the oval office, the President was leaning back in his chair, Fala was biting a squealing doll, Missy LeHand was clearing up some papers. Roosevelt shoved himself forward. “Hello, how are you?” he called out brightly. Quickly put at ease, Gunther mentioned that he had visited all twenty Latin-American republics. The President asked one question: “What are the bad spots?” Panama, said Gunther, adding that its president was an adventurer—and also a Harvard man.
“My goodness,” Roosevelt said. “Not really. Is he a Harvard man?” The President mentioned two other Latin-American dictators. “They’re both bad men, really bad, shocking, but they’ve done good things.”
Then, while Gunther sat in embarrassment thinking of the presidential time he was taking, his host began a monologue. The chatty, discursive talk went on and on—how the President had once met President Stenio Vincent, of Haiti; how Argentina really was a problem, but that one solution might be (Gunther shuddered) “colonizing” it; how Lend-Lease was going to help all along the line because (a big wink) “money talks”; how Iquitos, Peru, should become a free port; how he once told President Getulio Vargas, of Brazil, that if he were in his place he simply wouldn’t stand for most Brazilian public utilities being owned outside Brazil; how the tourist business might be stimulated in Chile; how some foolish American politicians had opposed the Pan-American Highway because it might be a route for invasion of the United States (“as if a real enemy would use roads!”);how Gunther ought to have met a certain chap in Puerto Rico, who lived on Such-and-Such street, had once been married to So-and-So, and liked very dry Martinis; how he often made idealistic speeches but knew full well that what really counted in Latin America was power; and how (laughing) no Latin American knew how to sail a ship.
Suddenly a quick movement of the eyes, Gunther noticed, and the President began talking about Europe. Gunther’s embarrassment grew, but now more because of the President’s seeming indiscretions. We were not ready for convoys across the Atlantic “yet.” Yes, the power of the Japanese was overestimated. Yes, we already had full plans to take over the whole Atlantic sphere, including Greenland. No, it would take about two months to get effective relief to Yugoslavia. Yes, Natal was necessary, but we could have it for the asking. Gunther got a remark in here; he said that he thought before the war was over the Union Jack and the Hammer and Sickle would be on the same side, and that the Red Army “might save us all.” “Really! What makes you think that?” Roosevelt said, and laughed.
“The phone rang with a low buzz, and I made to go,” Gunther wrote later. “He picked up the receiver, waving me to stay. Then began ten or eleven long minutes during which he said, ‘Yes, Harry…No, Harry…Why, I thought that had been done, Harry!’ He looked angry and nervously, forcefully, stabbed with a pencil at a pad. ‘All right, I’ll see to it, it’s done now, thanks, Harry.’ ” Gunther thought this must be Harry Hopkins, but when Roosevelt leaned back in his chair, cupping the phone to his ear, and began a long discussion of the history of American foreign policy and of “your” Manchurian doctrine, Gunther realized it was Stimson. “Then I saw a quick rather hurt expression on FDR’s face, and he laid the phone down suddenly. Obviously, Mr. Stimson had cut him off.” Roosevelt stuck out his hand to Gunther and said, “So long! I’ve got to run along now!”
Scores of visitors had Gunther’s experience: the long anxious wait outside, while Watson bustled around trying to keep a semblance of the agenda, the sudden admission to the ample room, the radiant smile and flung-up arm of welcome, the disconcerting use of the visitor’s first name (disconcerting especially to Englishmen), and then the talk—bright, smooth, animated, discursive, but rarely on the purpose of the visitor’s call. Many visitors felt cheated; they inferred that the President did not want to confront their problem, that he was deliberately diverting them. They were right only in part, perhaps the lesser part. Roosevelt had to talk, to laugh, to tell stories, to dramatize, to dominate the room, to exhibit his amazing array of information, to find bearings and moorings in his own experiences and recollections. But there were no histrionics; there was not even an attempt at grandeur. Sitting behind his desk, with its casual display of mementos, souvenirs, and gimcracks, the President put his visitors at ease with his expansiveness, openness, geniality.
The White House seemed to mirror its master’s personality. By now journalists were picturing the President’s home as the center of Free World decision making, the pivot of American power, the economic GHQ of the anti-Nazi coalition. Roosevelt had become President of the World, said the New Republic’s TRB after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. Visitors from abroad, accustomed to showy palaces for even pip-squeak dictators, were astonished by the lack of front and ostentation in the President’s home. Even more they were charmed by the simplicity and grace of the White House architecture, grounds, and some of its decor. And if they were important or lucky enough to visit the second floor of the house, they were surprised and a bit abashed by the casual appointments and cluttered quarters.
The second floor was pure Roosevelt; indeed, it seemed to Robert Sherwood that the President’s and the First Lady’s rooms had come almost to duplicate the rooms at Hyde Park. Bisecting the second floor was the same kind of long, narrow hall, haphazardly furnished with bookcases, photographs of crowned heads—most of them throneless,
Sherwood noted—and prints. In 1941 Hopkins was living in a small suite in the southeast corner; Eleanor Roosevelt had a sitting room and bedroom in the southwest corner. Between them was the President’s oval study, and off that were a bedroom and bath. The north side of the hallway was taken up mainly by guest rooms, large and small. In one of them hung Dorothy McKay’s famous Esquire cartoon showing a moppet writing ROOSEVELT on the pavement in front of his house while his sister called out to their mother in the doorway: “Wilfred wrote a bad word.”
The oval study—the decision-making center of the Free World—was actually a modest room, rather casually furnished, with naval prints and family phototgraphs pinned to the walls. Here Roosevelt liked to sit in the evening making an occasional phone call, sorting out his stamps, telling long anecdotes to his secretaries. On the third (and top) floor Missy LeHand, who was seriously ill by 1941, had a small sitting room and bedroom; the other rooms were used for overflow guests, especially for grandchildren at Christmastime. There was an air of small-town friendliness about the place extending through all the members of the staff, Sherwood remembered, and even to the Secret Service and White House police.
Washington reporters happily noted the symbolism: the President lodged in the center of the second floor, with Eleanor Roosevelt on his left and Harry Hopkins to his right. This was a comment on Hopkins’s reputed desertion of the New Deal for the war, but actually both the First Lady and the First Assistant were committed liberals and internationalists. If they diverged in their approach to politics, much of their divergence was reflected in Roosevelt himself.
After eight years in White House service Eleanor Roosevelt was still the compassionate, idealistic, wholly engaged woman who had thrown herself into social welfare and liberal politics during the 1930s. Assisted by her faithful “Tommy,” Malvina Thompson, she was still leading the seven lives of wife, mother, chief hostess, White House columnist, nationwide lecturer (one hundred lectures in 1940, about one-third of them paid), Democratic party voice and organizer, and spokeswoman in the White House for labor, Negroes, youth, tenant farmers, the poor, and women in general. If inevitably she could not wholly devote herself to any of these roles, she had learned to be well organized and efficient. And she still possessed the vigor that had awed and amused the country in the earlier White House years; in 1941, in her late fifties, she occasionally worked the whole night through and went right on the next day.
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