“The President of the United States,” MacArthur announced, “ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”
By now, late March 1942, the whole Southwest Pacific defense was in disarray. Relying more on speed, surprise, and skill than massed strength, the Japanese had moved south and easily overpowered Singapore by mid-February; forced the British out of Rangoon and turned back the Chinese reinforcements; enveloped Borneo; and overrun the great Malay Barrier—4,000 miles long—stretching from northern Sumatra through Java and Timor to New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomons. The Japanese claimed almost 100,000 prisoners, and their Navy took a heavy toll of cruisers and destroyers in the Java Sea. At the end of March, ABDA was in ruins; India and Australia lay open to invasion.
THIS GENERATION OF AMERICANS
During the early months of 1942 the President had to deal at home with one towering fact: for the first time in a century and a quarter Americans were experiencing wide and sustained military defeat at the hands of foreigners.
At first, even with the shocking news of Pearl Harbor and the other disasters, people had been excited and even titillated by the war, as with a new fad. The air-raid scares, the war rallies and bond drives, the exciting reports of Axis raiders off the coasts, the blossoming uniforms, the air-raid shelters and instructions, the first war jingles (“We’re going to have to slap—the cheeky little Japs”), the roundup of aliens, the exhilarating sense of being part of a great national and world effort—all these, plus inexhaustible American optimism and the unquenchable sense of military superiority over all comers, seemed to obliterate the early bad news from the war fronts. Even the nuisances and shortages—cancellation of football games and other national ceremonies, tire rationing, endless lines—were submerged in the national mood of militancy, solidarity, purpose.
But as the weeks passed and the Japanese seemed to accelerate, rather than bog down, the mood changed. People seemed to be more querulous; they hunted for scapegoats; old differences burst through the screen of national unity; there was gambling, hoarding, profiteering. Roosevelt at this point was not much concerned about his personal popularity, which, indeed—in terms of answers to the query “Would you vote for Roosevelt today?”—spurted from the low 70 percentile in November 1941 to 84 in early January 1942, and then leveled off in the high seventies over the next six months. He was more concerned about the people’s sense of confidence in their nation’s effort and in themselves. The first three or four months of the war saw a steady decline in popular confidence that the nation was doing all it could to win the war, though there was little agreement about alternatives. Favorable press support of the President dropped on domestic affairs to 35 per cent, according to one February survey, and on his handling of foreign affairs to 52 per cent.
The President had helped create the early euphoria and he had to cope with the ensuing letdown. He had expressed the nation’s optimism about victory, without the harsh warning of early defeats and blood and tears that Churchill had sounded; he had sent an ambiguously optimistic message to the Philippines; he had honored the fallen pilot Colin P. Kelly—by asking the President of 1956 to grant his son appointment as a West Point cadet—for a feat that was widely understood to be the sinking of a Japanese battleship, which in fact had been untouched. He could not overcome his invincible optimism about victory in the long run; and doubtless would not if he could—for that kind of optimism had helped unite and invigorate the nation in the dark days of 1933.
The most galling development for the President was that the isolationists of 1941 had become the guardhouse strategists of 1942. The war cry was no longer “Stay out of war,” but “Pacific First.” SEND SHIPS TO M’ARTHUR NOW was the banner headline across the front page of the New York Journal-American on March 10. Why were war supplies still going to the Russians and British when American boys were desperately short in the Far East? Why weren’t people like Colonel Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy being used in the war administration? The Commander in Chief was rarely attacked personally, but, rather, through people close to him, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Time reported with a straight face a rumored “White House showdown” in which war chiefs said that Hopkins must quit or they would. Hugh Johnson said that nobody ever elected Harry Hopkins to any office and blamed him and his “palace janissariat” for the failure of war production.
All this was orthodox politics, however unpleasant. A more ominous note was struck by the radical right. Father Charles Coughlin was sticking to his old line as though Pearl Harbor had never happened. His journal, Social Justice, attacked Russia for not bombing Japan; charged that MacArthur was “thrown to the dogs”; implied that the battle for Malaya was really a battle for investment brokers holding tin and rubber interests there; and asked whether the common people’s most dangerous enemies resided in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, or in Washington, New York City, London, and Moscow. During early 1942 the nation was reminded of the pre-Pearl Harbor connections between pro-Nazi isolationists and right-wing Congressmen by the conviction of one of Congressman Fish’s secretaries for perjury in testifying about the franking of Nazi-inspired speeches by members of Congress.
The President was not in a wholly forgiving mood toward his old adversaries. He failed to acknowledge a Pearl Harbor day telegram from Joe Kennedy—“Name the battlefront. I’m yours to command”—and when Kennedy reminded him of it eight weeks later, the President answered him cordially, but Kennedy was never offered a major war post. The President and Stimson denied Lindbergh a combat post on the grounds that he had not wholly given up some of his old defeatist, or at least isolationist, views, and “evidently lacked faith,” as the Secretary of War put it, “in the righteousness of our cause.” Roosevelt was especially incensed by anti-British and anti-Russian criticism in the capital. “Washington is the worst rumor factory, and therefore the source of more lies that are spoken and printed throughout the United States, than any other community,” he complained to reporters.
He was intrigued by Thomas E. Dewey’s charge that an “American Cliveden set in Washington and other cities” was scheming to use the Republican party to achieve a negotiated peace with the Axis. “Who in the name of all that is mysterious are the members of the American ‘Cliveden Set’ in Washington or elsewhere?” he asked Myron Taylor. Politically he would have been delighted to have a Cliveden Set as a foil. Soon he decided that there was indeed a Cliveden Set—or a “Dower House Set,” named for the country home of Eleanor (“Cissy”) Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times Herald, and composed of Cissy, Joseph Patterson, of the New York Daily News, and Colonel McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, with William Randolph Hearst and Roy Howard as associate members. The Commander in Chief laughed at McCormick’s claim of having introduced ROTC into the schools and mechanization into the Army, and when Morris Ernst wrote to him that he was seeing Eleanor Patterson on behalf of his client Walter Winchell and proposed to “examine Cissy down to her undies,” Roosevelt asked not to be present on that occasion—“I have a weak stomach.”
To counter attitudes that he felt bordered on defeatism and disunity, the President decided late in February to make a major address on Washington’s Birthday. He asked in advance that people listen with a world map in hand.
He began by reminding Americans of the formidable odds that Washington and his Continental Army had faced. “In a sense, every winter was a Valley Forge.” Everywhere there had been fifth columnists, and selfish, jealous, fearful men who had proclaimed Washington’s cause hopeless and demanded a negotiated peace.
“Washington’s conduct in those hard times has provided the model for all Americans since then—a model of moral stamina.”
The President stumbled a bit at the start of his talk, but soon reached his smooth, measured cadence.
He then launched into a blunt defense of his strategy. He warned against Axis efforts to isolate the United States, Britain, Russia, and China from one another through the old divide-and-conquer technique.
“There are those who still think in terms of sailing ships. They advise us to pull our warships and our planes and our merchant ships into our own home waters and concentrate solely on last-ditch defense. Look at your map.…It is obvious what would happen if all these great reservoirs of power were cut off from each other either by enemy action or by self-imposed isolation.”
He then went into a detailed explanation of the interdependence of the reservoirs of power, beginning with China.
“From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo we have been described as a Nation of weaklings—‘playboys’—who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.”
Now he spoke slowly and dramatically, with great pauses and emphases for effect.
“Let them repeat that now!
“Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men.
“Let them tell that to the sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific.
“Let them tell that to the boys in the Flying Fortresses.
“Let them”—a long pause—“tell that to the Marines….”
Up in the oval study after the speech the President learned that the Japanese had provided a dramatic accompaniment to his speech: while he was talking, a Japanese submarine surfaced off the coast near Santa Barbara and fired some shells, which landed on a ranch, inflicting no casualties or real damage. The shelling produced huge headlines next day—and taught Roosevelt, Sherwood said later, never again to announce his speeches more than two or three days ahead of time.
Even though the President was pleased by the reaction to his fireside chat, he realized that words, no matter how evocative, were idle unless backed by deeds, and that if he went on the air too often his talks would lose their impact. He felt that Churchill had suffered from too much personal leadership. The real trouble, he believed, lay not in the people or their elected leaders but in the former isolationists, who wanted disunity and even a negotiated peace—the publishers, columnists, radio commentators, the “KKK crowd” and “some of the wild Irish.” But the only effective answer to them was victory—and victories were slow in coming in the winter and spring of 1942.
He could still exhibit a soldier’s wry humor under fire. He enjoyed telling friends about Elmer Davis’s comment following the Washington’s Birthday speech:
“Some people want the United States to win so long as England loses. Some people want the United States to win so long as Russia loses. And some people want the United States to win so long as Roosevelt loses.”
During these weeks of stinging defeat the President ratified an action that was widely accepted at the time but came to be viewed in later years as one of the sorriest episodes in American history. This was the uprooting of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast and their incarceration in concentration camps hundreds of miles away.
Few Americans had paid more glowing homage than had Roosevelt to the democratic idea of individual liberty. A week after Pearl Harbor he had proclaimed Bill of Rights Day, on the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and had taken the trouble, during those first harrowing days of war, to renew his and the nation’s allegiance to the ancient liberties. After flaying Hitler for crushing individual liberty, he said: “We Americans know that the determination of this generation of our people to preserve liberty is as fixed and certain as the determination of those early generations of Americans to win it.
“We will not, under any threat, or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty our forefathers framed for us in the Bill of Rights.
“We hold with all the passion of our hearts and minds to those commitments of the human spirit….”
The Bill of Rights seemed in little jeopardy at the time. Americans were treating German, Italian, and Japanese aliens in their midst with admirable restraint. There were only a few incidents, such as the sawing down by some fool or fanatic of four Japanese cherry trees in Washington’s Tidal Basin. Oddly, one of the most tolerant areas with a large “foreign” population seemed to be California. The press there was restrained, even generous, as were letters to the editor. “The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle, “…is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action.” Other papers called for fairness toward Japanese aliens as well as toward Nisei—American-born citizens of Japanese parentage. “Let’s not repeat our mistakes of the last war” was a refrain.
The new Attorney General, Francis Biddle, wished to avoid mass internment and any repetition of the persecution of aliens that occurred during World War I. Roosevelt’s attitude was less clear. When Biddle brought him the proclamation to intern German aliens, Roosevelt asked him how many Germans there were in the country. Biddle thought about 600,000. “And you’re going to intern all of them?” Roosevelt asked, as Biddle remembered later. Not quite all, Biddle said. “I don’t care so much about the Italians,” Roosevelt went on. “They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different, they may be dangerous.” Admiral McIntire was swabbing the President’s nose during this colloquium, and Biddle hastily withdrew, with the impression that his chief was reacting more to his sinuses than to subversives.
During January the climate of opinion in California turned harshly toward fear, suspicion, intolerance. Clamor arose for mass evacuation and other drastic action. The causes of the change have long been studied and defy easy explanation. Partly it was the endless Japanese advance in the Pacific, combined with a spate of false alarms—aside from the Santa Barbara episode—of attacks on the coast, stories of secret broadcasting equipment, flashing signals, strange lights, and the like. In part it was a growing feeling that the Justice Department was pursuing half-measures; paradoxically, as the federal authorities became more energetic in sealing off sensitive zones and taking other precautions, the popular demand for drastic measures seemed to grow. But the main ingredient that fired and fueled the demand for “cleaning out the Japs” was starkly obvious. The old racism—economic, social, and pathological—toward Japanese on the West Coast simmered for a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and then burst into flames.
“Personally, I hate the Japanese,” declared a prominent West Coast columnist on January 29, “and that goes for all of them.” He called for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to the interior. “I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands….”
More and more, Washington felt the heat. California officials—notably Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren, working in close touch with sheriffs and district attorneys-threw their weight behind the campaign for evacuation. In Washington the West Coast congressional delegations put unrelenting pressure on the Justice and War Departments and on their regional officials. Congressmen denounced as “jackasses” those who had failed to deal with sabotage and espionage at Pearl Harbor and would fail again.
It was the old story of a determined and vocal minority group of regional politicians and spokesmen with a definite plan united against an array of federal officials who were divided, irresolute, and not committed against racism. General John De Witt, the Army’s West Coast commander, after much vacillation finally gave his support to a general evacuation. For a while Stimson demurred on constitutional grounds. But during the first
weeks of February—a time of frightful news from the war fronts—he gave way, partly because he had concluded that “their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”
Biddle held out longer. An aristocratic Philadelphian and Grotonian, proudly conscious of his inheritance from the Randolphs of Virginia and full of a fastidious noblesse oblige, he was not one to be swept off his feet by generals and regional politicians. But his political resources were small. He was a new member of the Cabinet, highly impressed by Stimson and somewhat mystified by Roosevelt. He did not enlist his potential Cabinet allies, Ickes and Morgenthau; indeed, there was no Cabinet discussion. Finding himself almost alone, he resorted to expedients and technicalities and was lost. Only a great outcry of protest on the highest moral grounds could have stopped the drift toward evacuation, and Biddle was neither temperamentally nor politically capable of it.
So the fate of 110,000 aliens and citizens was bucked over to the White House—and into a void. Because there had been no clarion call of protest the President was never faced with a compelling set of alternatives and arguments. He confronted on February 11 a War Department memo that tried simply to put the onus of decision on him. The President would not have it. This was the same day he was answering Quezon’s query about neutralization; Singapore was on the verge of surrendering. The evacuation may have seemed to him a tricky and second-level question. He told Stimson and McCloy to do whatever they thought necessary, and asked only that they be as reasonable as they could. Eight days later the President signed an order for evacuation prepared by Biddle and Stimson and their men. A month later Congress passed a bill supporting the President’s action. During the debate Representative John Rankin, of Mississippi, demanded that Japanese in concentration camps be segregated by sex so that they would not multiply twenty-five times in two generations.
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