Roosevelt seemed curiously passive about the manpower crisis, which had been predicted months ahead. The War Manpower Commission under Paul McNutt had been unable to cope with the situation in advance, in part because the WPB and the armed services had far more control of the situation than did the commission, in part because the manpower crisis was slower in showing up than rival crises, in part because McNutt neither was a strong chief nor ran a strong agency. The President toyed with a plan to make Ickes Secretary of Labor, with control of manpower, but gave up the idea when people—including Ickes’s young wife—warned that the two jobs would be too much for the sixty-nine-year-old Interior chief. Roosevelt seemed far more upset by charges that too many federal civilian employees were receiving deferments than by the broader problem.
“I will make you a good-sized bet,” he complained to Harold Smith, “that in the hundreds of Government offices people—young men without a lot of children—are running mimeograph machines or blue-printing machines when the work could just as well be done by women or older men.” Manpower was, perhaps, too vast and collective and even impersonal a problem to engage Roosevelt’s feelings, which usually seized on specifics close at hand. In the end he kept McNutt as head of manpower. As it turned out, the steps that might have headed off some labor shortages—use of occupation rather than dependency status as the main test in Selective Service, for example, or the placing of war plants and contracts in areas of high labor supply—were not taken when they could have had full effect. Problems were met mainly by improvisation, such as emergency recruitment campaigns and furloughing trained workers from the Army. By mid-1943 the White House was deeply concerned about the growing manpower crisis; by the end of the year it was facing the grim need of national-service legislation.
All these emergencies paled, however, next to the labor ferment of 1943—at least in the crisis management of the White House. “The labor problem is again to the fore—” Roosevelt wrote to Mackenzie King late in the year, “but then scarcely six months have ever gone by since I have been in office, the past ten and a half years, without a ‘labor crisis.’ ” In 1943 hardly a week went by without a crisis. The year had just started when 15,000 coal miners left their jobs in a wildcat strike, and the President had to order them back to work. Walkouts in rubber, plastics, railroads, coal—several times—and a host of other industries followed. So often was Roosevelt forced to order men back to work that the White House lost something of its legitimacy and force as a court of last appeal. Throughout these troubles the administration was under heavy pressure from Congressmen who were worried about their constituents’ fuel and other needs—or who saw good fishing in troubled waters.
Bituminous-coal mines became the stormiest battleground. A two-year contract between miners and operators was due to expire in the spring of 1943. John L. Lewis, as truculent and histrionic as ever, was demanding a two-dollar-a-day wage boost in a flat challenge to the President’s stabilization program. Lewis had become a towering but isolated figure. His wife had just died; he had broken angrily with Murray; he hated Roosevelt; he was now the villain of the radicals, as once he had been their hero. Having led in the demolition of the old mediation board, he now welcomed his chance to boycott the War Labor Board, which he publicly exhorted to resign and cease casting its “black shadow” over American workers.
Late in April the miners began walking out. “Not as President—not as Commander in Chief—but as the friend of the men who work in the coal mines,” the President urged the men to return to the pits.
In the fall of 1940, when Lewis had appealed to his miners to vote against Roosevelt, they had stood by their friend in the White House; now the President was appealing to these same friends to stick to the battle of production—and they were standing by Lewis. The Commander in Chief moved to seize the mines; he, Byrnes, and Sherwood prepared a fireside chat to the people. Even while the President was on his way to the oval office and its microphones, word came that the miners would return to work in two days. The President went ahead with his talk anyway. He spoke in urgent tones.
“A stopping of the coal supply, even for a short time, would involve a gamble with the lives of American soldiers and sailors and the future security of our whole people.” He blamed the strike directly on the leaders of the mine workers. “You miners have sons in the Army and Navy and Marine Corps. You have sons who at this very minute—this split second—may be fighting in New Guinea, or in the Aleutian Islands, or Guadalcanal, or Tunisia, or China, or protecting troop ships and supplies against submarines on the high seas.” He cited case after case of miners or sons of miners who had been wounded or decorated. He appealed to the miners’ pride: “The toughness of your sons in our armed forces is not surprising. They come of fine, rugged stock….” He concluded: “I believe the coal miners will not continue the strike against their government.”
February 2, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
That night, with the miners headed back to work, the President celebrated Byrnes’s birthday by throwing a party for those who had worked on the broadcast. The President led in singing “Happy Birthday” and then rendered “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” jointly with his War Mobilizer. Sherwood was the life of the party, dancing and flapping his arms as he sang “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.”
But the speech had been wasted on the wrong occasion. The miners, now back at work, awaited the Labor Board’s decision, then struck again when they were denied their pay boost. The summer weeks were full of snarls. Lewis “recommended” that the miners return to work but somehow his order now had less effect. Ickes, who held possession of the pits as Solid Fuels Administrator, bickered with the War Labor Board, which suspected him of making secret deals with Lewis, and demanded that the President order Attorney General Biddle to stop arresting strikers. Congress fretted and thundered—and passed the Smith-Connally bill, restricting labor’s right to strike. Roosevelt vetoed the bill, in part because it collided with labor’s no-strike pledge, only to have Congress pass it over his veto by wide margins.
The White House was cabled the text of an editorial in the army paper Stars and Stripes: “…Speaking for the American soldier, John Lewis, damn your coal black soul.”
His patience running out, the President ordered Stimson, McNutt, and Selective Service Director General Lewis B. Hershey to waive the age-deferment provisions and start drafting striking miners between thirty-eight and forty-five years old. This was only a temporary expedient. Miners drifted back to work during the summer, then began walking out again in the fall. Once again the President appealed to them; he ordered Ickes to repossess the mines and let the Labor Board offer more money for more work. Most miners returned; some stayed out. But coal troubles badgered the President until well into 1944. It seemed impossible to come to grips with Lewis. Byrnes was convinced that the miners’ chief was sabotaging production even when he seemed to be co-operating, and wanted his chief to tell Lewis so, but Roosevelt would not. He knew the limits of his power.
Coal was not the President’s only burden. The railroad unions were equally militant and equally hungry for a wage increase, but the circumstances were markedly different. The railroad unions had long held a special relation with the federal government under the Railway Labor Act, with its orderly mediation procedures. When an emergency board recommended an eight-cents-an-hour increase for railroad employees early in 1943, and the Director of Economic Stabilization set it aside, the Chairman of the National Railway Labor Panel, William M. Leiserson, appealed to the President to sustain the emergency board. A deadlock ensued between Leiserson, who had for so long umpired railroad labor disputes that in a later day he would have been dubbed “Mr. Railroad Labor,” and stabilization officials. There were continuing appeals to the President. But railroad labor, divided between operating and “non-op” unions and into various crafts, was far less united than the mine workers. After the wage dispute had simmered th
rough the summer and early fall, several of the unions became restive, and Leiserson raised Byrnes’s temper by virtually boycotting the economic stabilizers.
Matters came to a head just before Christmas. With the railroad unions threatening to strike, Roosevelt met for hours, day after day, with the parties. Railroad labor split: the chiefs of the trainmen, engineers, and non-ops agreed to White House arbitration, but the heads of the other brotherhoods would not yield despite direct appeals by the President. Two days after Christmas 1943 the President directed Stimson to seize and operate the railroads. Three weeks later the government gave up control after the President had arbitrated the dispute.
On New Year’s Eve Marshall had been so concerned by the railroad situation, Byrnes heard, that he considered going on the radio, describing the military aspect, and then resigning. So 1943 had ended on the labor front as it had started—in crisis.
The disputes that had crowded into the White House were complex and varied, but they had one common aspect: resort to the President. The White House became a conciliation office, mediation board, arbitration court, all in one. And it was not well equipped for this function. Pressure, haste, and improvisation in crisis marked its procedures. The President, as usual, maintained his marvelous temper under the stress, but his personal approach exacted its price. Thus when union chiefs were claiming that the President himself had promised them the eight cents, Byrnes had to inform his chief gently that he probably had done so. And the labor crises cut deeply into the President’s time, often during periods when great strategic decisions were being shaped.
If Roosevelt depended all too readily on his flair for personal management in handling home-front crises during 1943, those crises were also having an impact on his presidential organization. Under constant pressure the White House was not only expanding, but it was gaining new form and power. Even while the President stuck to his old administrative habits, a new executive structure was arising around him.
Changes came by fits and starts. A year after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s defense organization was still a public issue. Appointing czars, shoring up the WPB, making Byrnes Economic Stabilization Director—these and other steps did not long satisfy the critics. In Congress the Truman and the Migration Committees continued to call for more centralized authority. A Senate Military Affairs Subcommittee reported that war mobilization was “in crisis.” Nelson was under fire for not standing up to the military in the scramble for supplies and production, and the WPB was racked by disputes among its top officials. In the Senate friends of the President sponsored a bill for a super-superagency that would take over and boss a dozen war agencies. Byrnes, struggling with a tide of stabilization problems that cut across bureaucratic empires and their czars, began to lean toward the idea of an office of war mobilization with broad powers to direct the whole war effort.
For a moment the President toyed with a move he had long resisted—to re-establish the WPB as the supreme mobilization agency on the model of the War Industries Board of World War I. And he even decided to appoint the very man, Bernard Baruch, who had headed the earlier board and had the prestige, status, and self-assurance to rebuild and command an agency rivaling the White House in publicity and power. He must have been sorely disturbed by the state of mobilization and the conflicts between and within his war agencies—especially the WPB—to appeal to Baruch. But appeal to him he did, in a letter that frankly admitted that he was “coming back to the elder statesman for assistance.” Surprised and pleased, Baruch debated whether he should give up his freedom—as symbolized by his “office” on a Lafayette Park bench—and whether he was physically up to it. He was on his way to New York City to consult his doctor when, as luck would have it, he fell ill, and it was a week before he returned to Washington to tell the President he had decided to accept. Roosevelt, leaning back in his chair and puffing on an uplifted cigarette, greeted him with his usual geniality.
“Mr. President,” Baruch began, “I’m here to report for duty.” Roosevelt did not reply; he seemed not even to have heard. Baruch knew something had gone wrong. The President said: “Let me tell you about Ibn Saud, Bernie.” He chatted a bit about the Mid-East. Then he abruptly stopped talking, excused himself, and departed for a Cabinet meeting. He never again mentioned the WPB post to Baruch. Swallowing his pride, groping for some explanation, Baruch concluded that there must have been intervention by Hopkins, who seemed to Baruch full of the suspicion and self-protectiveness that grip men so close to the throne.
Doubtless Hopkins did influence Roosevelt’s change of heart, but a far more important factor also intervened. Both the President and his Economic Stabilization Director were leaning more and more during early 1943 toward the idea of a mobilization office directly under the President rather than in a vast, independent new agency under a new superczar. Byrnes had been working in the east wing for some months and was already dealing with a variety of problems outside his stabilization duties. He proposed a new office of war mobilization with wide powers over war production, allocation, and manpower (except for men in uniform), that he take on this broader role, and that his job as Economic Stabilizer be passed on to Fred M. Vinson, a former Congressman and an old friend.
It was not easy for Roosevelt to go along with this plan. The press had already dubbed Byrnes “Assistant President” and “Chief of Staff”—terms Roosevelt disliked—and throughout his presidency he had resisted sharing his powers with any rival person or office of this sort. On the other hand, he trusted Byrnes. The former Justice was not one to jump onto a white charger and gallop off with the war effort. Long sanded and buffed in the Southern folkways and parliamentary grooves of Capitol Hill, he was cautious, judicious, if narrow-gauged in vision and imagination. He preferred to deal with appeals from clashing agencies rather than to issue plans and commands from on high. He proposed to continue to operate with a tiny staff, headed by Roosevelt’s old friend and adviser Benjamin Cohen. Instead of congealing into a whole new bureaucratic layer, his office would co-ordinate policy among the existing war agencies. And he would claim the services of the ablest people—even of Baruch, who gamely continued to advise Byrnes and the White House.
Roosevelt’s fight against inflation went on amid crises, controversy, and congressional onslaughts. Exhausted, ill, and bleeding from his political wounds, Henderson resigned as OPA head at the end of 1942. The President replaced him with former Senator Prentiss M. Brown, in the hope of improving the agency’s relations with Congress, but, with Henderson out of the way, Congressmen redoubled their efforts to pressure OPA into relaxing price controls and raising price ceilings, at least for their more organized and articulate constituents. Business condemned it for being too tough, labor for being too soft, and even its own officials for lacking direction and drive.
Prices in turn squeezed farmers and workers, whose own income was regulated by agencies other than the OPA. By heavy majorities Congress passed the Bankhead bill, which would bar the deduction of subsidies paid to farmers in the computation of parity prices. Roosevelt was painfully aware that every increase in prices—especially food prices—fueled the drive of militant unions like the Mine Workers to break through the Little Steel wage formula. Proclaiming that nobody had fought harder than he to help farmers get parity prices for their crops, he vetoed the Bankhead bill and a week later issued a dramatic call to “hold the line” on prices and wages. The next day Senators and Representatives deluged the White House with requests to see the President personally; Roosevelt told Watson to pass them on to Byrnes. Philip Murray, the usually soft-spoken union chief, banged on Byrnes’s table to drive home his point that unless he could deliver wage increases to CIO members he would be outflanked by Lewis and his Mine Workers. But Roosevelt seemed unmoved by the clamor and the complaints. He had the OPA follow his hold-the-line call with a rollback order that actually shaved the prices of some foods.
The biggest feud within the administration was yet to come. All through the spring of 1943 a
dispute was brewing that would erupt into the most spectacular rupture among Roosevelt’s crisis agencies. The antagonists were Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce and boss of the RFC, and Vice President Henry Wallace, head of the Board of Economic Warfare. Even for Roosevelt’s administration the two were gloriously antipodal: Jones, a onetime RFC member under Hoover, taciturn, shrewd, practical, cautious; Wallace, hero of the Lib Labs, dreamy, Utopian, even mystical, yet with his own bent for management and power. Jones’s distaste for Wallace was less ideological than professional; he could not abide the BEW’s speculative practices, its overbuying, its dubious projects. War or no war, the business of the RFC was business. His corporation, Jones announced flatly, “does not pay $2 for something it can buy for $1.” Liberals roared over the story—possibly true—that when a fire consumed a New Jersey warehouse filled with tons of precious rubber, Jones remarked, “What’s the trouble? It was insured, wasn’t it?”
Roosevelt’s penchant for overlapping assignments had joined the two men in unholy wedlock. The BEW was empowered to obtain strategic materials from foreign sources through preclusive buying and other methods, but it was not given its own funds, and the RFC remained banker for BEW’s foreign activities. BEW ordered RFC to finance the planting in Haiti of Cryptostegia—a rubber project dear to Roosevelt’s heart. Jones refused. BEW then asked RFC to finance an experimental rubber project in Africa. Again RFC resisted. For months Jones and Wallace waged an intensive but quiet fight at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over the key question of which agency could veto what.
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