News of the walkout aroused indignation in the Cabinet next day. Stimson urged strong measures; Hull wanted the Justice Department to make an example of the labor agitators; Jackson raised the question of how aliens could be deported when their motherland—including Russia—would not receive them; Roosevelt suggested loading some of the worst of them onto ships and putting them off on some distant beach with just enough supplies to carry them for a while. Even Hillman, knowing that Communists had goaded the union membership to strike despite pleas from its own leadership, favored a showdown. On June 9 the President ordered the Secretary of War to take over the plant; soon troops mustered in front of it, fixed their bayonets, and drove back the unresisting pickets. But bayonets could not make planes, and it was some time—indeed, late June—before full production was assured. Roosevelt’s action brought a flood of congratulatory mail to the White House, but it brought also many protests, especially from a wide range of union people, that this was a step toward fascism. And the episode fueled more charges from Lewis that Hillman was a betrayer of labor, and sharper demands in Congress for restrictive labor laws.
Cutting across most of the conflicts in Washington was one that combined old issues of ideology with urgent new issues of defense. This was expansionism versus “business as usual,” as the liberals defined it. New Dealers—some of them in Roosevelt’s defense agencies and in the White House itself—charged that big business was deliberately holding down defense production so that it could profit from the civilian sector, now swollen by defense spending; that it was monopolistic and restrictionist and hence unable to go all out for defense. Businessmen pointed to the extensive conversion that had taken place and contended that labor was unwilling to surrender its own restrictive practices and that New Dealers would not sacrifice labor and welfare policies that were a drain on the defense effort. Automobiles pinpointed the issue. With steel and aluminum and other metals in ever-shorter supply, the big auto plants at midyear were still turning out cars and trucks at the rate of four or five million a year. Knudsen as a symbol was an easy target for the liberals and expansionists—how could dollar-a-year men cut back their own industry?
By late spring the mobilization program seemed to be faltering. Economist John Maynard Keynes, in Washington, warned friends of the administration that it must ruthlessly convert to war production even if it meant two or three months of unemployment. There were shortages of such essential munitions as small-arms ammunition, antiaircraft guns and ammunition, and antitank guns. A private report to the President spelled out the bleak picture. Speed in placing ordnance contracts: of an eight-billion-dollar program, a little more than half contracted, and actual cash disbursements less than a billion. Lend-lease: program seven billion, contracts about two billion. Progress of heavy-bomber program: “peak production of 500 monthly not expected until middle of 1943 under present schedules.” Even training of seamen for new merchant vessels had fallen behind by more than half. Each of these figures could be documented, the report noted. It was headed simply COULD BE BETTER.
The failures and setbacks were aired in the most visible of all arenas, a Senate investigating committee whose hearings were open to press and public. A Democratic Senator from Missouri, Harry S Truman, had become highly critical of the defense effort, partly because he had been rebuffed in trying to get defense contracts for small businessmen in his state. Re-elected to a second term in 1940, he had made a quiet tour of army camps, quizzed contractors, workers, and officials. After unearthing delays and makeshift he returned to Washington determined to launch an investigation that would expose the failures without emulating earlier Senate wartime committees, which, Truman knew as a student of American history, had infringed on executive power.
The administration was cool at first. Such a probe would be at least an embarrassment and, even under a good Roosevelt man like Truman, might be the entering wedge for a Senate effort to run defense; and Truman, then fifty-seven years old, seemed little more than a parochial politician with a mediocre record of achievement. The White House was far more concerned about the threat of another investigation, proposed by Representative Eugene Cox, of Georgia, a New Deal foe. So, through Byrnes, it was agreed that Truman could go ahead. Roosevelt was not averse to having one more separate source of information on the defense situation; indeed, he had already discussed with defense chiefs a proposal to set up a small organization to prepare data.
The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the Defense Program was approved without opposition from the sixteen Senators then on the floor, though Byrnes did have its appropriation cut to $15,000 and he flanked Truman with four Democrats and two Republicans. Soon the committee was busily delving into the defense effort and winning headlines across the nation. Under the committee’s spotlight, officials conceded with unusual candor that sights had been set low, schedules had not been met, the nation had not been aroused to an all-out effort. At one point committee member Tom Connally was almost ready to ask for closed hearings. “We are just advertising to the world…that we are in a mess.”
Once again clamor arose in the land for stronger leadership by the President. The American people, proclaimed Walter Lippmann, were not being treated as they deserved to be treated. “They are not being dealt with seriously, truthfully, responsibly and nobly. They are being dealt with cleverly, indirectly, even condescendingly and nervously.” Frank Kent, in the Baltimore Sun, charged that the right kind of spirit did not exist among the people because it did not exist among the leaders. David Lilienthal, visiting Washington from Knoxville, where he ran the Tennessee Valley Authority, was reminded of the early days of 1933—the long hours, the excitement, the confusion, the griping about incompetence. He added in his diary: “But there are differences—the bold strokes of leadership, the clarion call, these aren’t quite as fresh and invigorating as then….”
How did the President react to these demands for leadership? Probably more than ever he felt that he understood pace and timing better than his critics did. They simply could not appreciate the web of restraints that surrounded him. It was not enough to cry out to high heaven for leadership and decisiveness. It was a matter of drawing millions of voters, thousands of opinion leaders, and hundreds of fellow politicians in Washington into a following that could be depended on both in the day-to-day exigencies of politics and at times of national crisis and decision making. The last group, the politicians, was the pivotal element. In midsummer the President experienced on Capitol Hill the kind of narrow escape that dramatized the divided government he was trying to lead and the dangers of sticking his chin out too far.
The Selective Service Act of 1940, enacted in the stress of an election year, had contained a politician’s compromise—a twelvemonth limitation on the selectees’ period of service. By early summer 1941 Roosevelt and his defense chiefs faced the prospect of a disintegrating army during the critical months ahead. The President was reluctant to revive the draft debate. He could see all the ingredients for trouble: servicemen charging that a solemn promise had been violated; a new isolationist uproar; a panicky Congress; a possible defeat. His congressional leaders, Rayburn and McCormack, were gloomy over the prospects of a measure to extend the service. Polls showed people to be closely divided on the question. The President allowed Stimson and Marshall to take the initiative; finally, upon their urging, he sent Congress a strong appeal for extension.
Events proceeded more perilously than even Roosevelt could have foreseen. Ham Fish saw the measure as “part and parcel of a gigantic conspiracy” to put the country into war. America First chapters sprang into action. Under Senator Wheeler’s frank a million antiwar postcards were sent out; some got into the hands of soldiers, prompting Stimson to accuse Wheeler of near-treason—a charge for which the Secretary later had to apologize. After the administration accepted a series of compromises—including an eighteen-month extension instead of an unlimited one—the bill passed the Senate handily, but the House by the closest shave—203
to 202. Defections took place in each sector of Roosevelt’s three-party coalition.
One vote had saved the Army. The episode had been a sorry one for all concerned. Neither the White House nor the War Department had dealt with Congress expertly. The House was simply craven, with even supporters of extension hunting for some way to put the onus on the President. Selectees, openly denouncing their Commander in Chief and the Chief of Staff, began to scrawl OHIO on latrine walls—OVER THE HILL IN OCTOBER. Administration men found on the Hill not only marked opposition to White House policies but also a current of deep personal hostility to and resentment of Roosevelt himself.
Even in the top councils of the administration feeling was mounting that the President was not supplying clear, sustained, and purposeful leadership.
If government as a whole in Washington had not yet responded to the world crisis, “government as usual” almost literally dominated the nondefense effort. Even the White House had to follow customs and procedures inherited from fifteen decades of presidential routine. The Chief of State threw out the first baseball of the 1941 season and watched the Yankees—also following the custom of the day—beat the Senators. He spoke feelingly to the thousands crowding the White House lawn for the annual Easter egg rolling. He greeted the usual delegations and bestowed the usual medals and other honors despite Pa Watson’s efforts to cut down on ceremonies. He received the usual tributes, serious and nonsensical; he had to accept a gorilla from Free French forces in Africa, and Fala was chosen president of Barkers for Britain. And he was the target of the usual death threats.
Like all chief executives, the President spent much of his time raising money and recruiting men. By the spring of 1941 soaring defense spending was putting heavy pressure on the peacetime tax structure. Actual spending was doubling and tripling over earlier months. There was a growing concern about equality of sacrifice during the crisis; a Treasury representative told the House Ways and Means Committee that one company with seventy million dollars’ worth of defense orders was subject to no excess-profits tax on 1940 earnings, although its profits had multiplied thirty times over the preceding year.
The President blew hot and cold on tax reform, depending in part on his reading of the political thermometer. Both Morgenthau and the House Ways and Means Committee favored a provision to require married couples to file joint income-tax reports in order to end the abuse of the existing provisions by wealthy men in community-property states like California. But Rayburn felt that was “a damn dangerous thing….All the married women and all the working women and all the Catholic priests and the Episcopalians” were against it. Roosevelt told the Treasury that for political reasons the provision must come out. But he pressed for a stronger excess-profits tax, and he astonished the Department by averring that he favored taxing all personal income above $100,000 a year at 99½ or 100 per cent.
“Why not?” he asked. “None of us is ever going to make $100,000 a year. How many people report on that much income?” But he did not press this confiscatory idea. The main need, in any event, was revenue. By summer the deficit was approaching the unprecedented figure of fourteen billion dollars. After asking in the spring for three and a half billion more in taxes, Roosevelt at the end of July recommended lowering exemptions for income-tax payers as a way to gain more revenue and also to let low-income-tax payers feel that they were making some contribution to the defense effort.
It fell to Roosevelt’s lot during these months to make the most important of all appointments—and the rarest. On July 1 Charles Evans Hughes, at seventy-nine still the very figure of a Chief Justice, retired from the Supreme Court. The obvious man to succeed him seemed to be Attorney General Jackson, forty-nine, a tested New Dealer, a friend of the President, a good lawyer, and a skillful mediator and negotiator. The press and the organized bar, however, quickly registered their preferences for a sitting member of the high bench, Harlan Stone, sixty-eight, an independent-minded, moderate liberal who had helped lead the Court away from its judicial standpattism of the 1930s toward a recognition of the need for federal power.
For a few weeks suspense mounted as to whether the prize would go to Jackson or Stone—or to a dark horse. “We all think you should be C.J.,” a noted lawyer wrote to Stone, “but who can predict what F.D.R. will do? He has not the faintest idea of what goes to make a judge. ‘Views’ are all he seems to value….” The President consulted his old friend Felix Frankfurter, still a chief New Deal recruiting sergeant, who emphasized a point that was already clear to Roosevelt: the appointment of Stone, a Republican, would bolster the image of the President as a nonpartisan chief of state in time of emergency. The issue was not long in doubt; perhaps it never had been, for Roosevelt was able to give Stone’s empty seat to Jackson and thus put him in the running as the new Chief Justice’s likely successor.
Stone’s appointment won plaudits from most quarters; it was “so clearly and certainly and surely right,” said Archibald MacLeish, “it resounded in the world like the perfect word spoken at the perfect moment.”
Not all the President’s appointments were as easy or felicitous. The defense effort was creating an urgent demand for imaginative executives who could deal with business effectively without bending unduly to pressures. In April the President placed 85,000 additional positions under Civil Service. This action drew praise from “good-government” quarters, but it also betrayed weakness, for the Civil Service system that thwarted corruption and improper influence was also a shield for routineers lacking drive and imagination in the face of new defense needs, and hence for government as usual.
Roosevelt continued to be somewhat ambivalent about political appointments. In defense agencies he saw the need for nonpartisan policies. But he was under pressure from within the White House—even from his aides and secretaries, including Missy LeHand and Grace Tully—to crack down on appointments of lame-duck Republicans, or their assistants, to civilian agencies. He did not mind, he wrote to Jesse Jones, who was considered by New Dealers to be the most notorious offender, that in some of the defense agencies “we are employing dozens of men who have hated the Administration and fought all constructive change for years.” But in the regular agencies “I honestly think that we ought to have people work for us who believe in us—not just lip-service….What to do?” Jones stayed mute.
But amid “government as usual” one action of the President during these troubled days of mid-1941 was a sharp departure from tradition—a departure, indeed, that opened a shaft of broken light down the whole course of American life in the years to follow. By the spring of 1941 discrimination in defense industries and—ironically—in federally sponsored training and employment programs was stirring Negro leaders to a new militancy. In April the National Negro Council urged the President to abolish discrimination in all federal agencies by executive order. Meetings of Walter White and fellow black leaders with Hillman and other defense officials brought little but promises; the Negroes wanted an antidiscrimination program with teeth. As a last resort the militant A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had proposed a march on Washington unless the administration took stronger action against discrimination. Now White and Lester Granger, of the Urban League, and other leaders picked up the idea. The threatened march would bring tens of thousands of blacks into Washington on July 1.
Roosevelt’s attitude toward Negro rights had been a compound of personal compassion, social paternalism, political sensitivity to their increasing articulateness and to racism in Congress, and a practical realization of their importance to the defense effort. For years Eleanor Roosevelt had been trying to develop some rapport between Negro leaders and her husband and his staff; as early as 1935 she had tried to persuade Steve Early that Walter White did not mean to be rude and insulting, that if he was obsessed with the antilynching bill, “if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has,” that his martyr complex was typical of minority-group people and was “probably
an inferiority complex.” The general policy of the administration, if it had one, was separate but equal, in the armed forces, in civilian agencies, and—by exhortation—in defense industries, but the separation often thwarted the equality. Roosevelt had discouraged black militance and civil-rights controversy; he had reluctantly conferred with restless Negro leaders; he had also preached “equality of opportunity” again and again in speeches and in letters to Negro organizations. And in the campaign of 1940 he had made more definite pledges to black leaders than ever before. Now civil-rights spokesmen were asking him to deliver on both his principles and his promises.
He watched apprehensively the growing plan for the march. It seemed to offer a rude threat to the image of national unity he was carefully fostering. When direct but quiet pressure failed to budge the leaders, the President appealed to them through his wife. “I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Randolph three weeks before the planned march. “I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made, in the Army at least, towards better opportunities and less segregation.” During this tense period, she went on, an incident might arouse in Congress “even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.” Crusades were successful sometimes—but not this time.
It was clearly a message from the President as well as the First Lady; still Randolph would not retreat without an executive order against discrimination. Roosevelt tried every compromise move he could: he met with Randolph and White along with his defense chiefs; he ordered the OPM to deal “effectively and speedily” with the problem; he tried all his arts of persuasion and conciliation. He still flatly opposed the march. “What would happen if Irish and Jewish people were to march on Washington?” he asked at the meeting, and answered the question himself: the American people would resent it as coercion.
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