the opening week Mr. Goldstine had personally brought in $500. The committee
added a finishing touch to its program. “To give it swank,” the gifts were to be
delivered by uniformed messengers from the telegraph companies. 9
*
War would not stop the social whirl in the nation’s capital. One mother declared:
“We’re not cutting off a thing in our younger set parties.” It was, she said, a mat-
ter of morale. The hostesses had sons and daughters at college and none could tell
what they might face before the war was over. “We’re going to give them all the
fun we can,” she added, “while we can.” 10
Another holiday event that was not cancelled was the Smith College musical
comedy Ladies on the Loose in which the Smith coeds were joined by Amherst
men. Six of the players from the Chicago area were shown in the Tribune in all their holiday finery, a glowing testament to youth and joy. They were Keith Shay
of Highland Park, Harline Ward of Wilmette, Margaret Jon of Winnetka, Robert
Jarchow of Evanston, Nancy Hoffman of Winnetka, and Nancy Davis of Chi-
cago, who would one day become Ronald Reagan’s and the nation’s First Lady. 11
*
With the West Coast in a state of anxiety, the question was not whether the Rose
Bowl football game between Duke and Oregon State should be played but where.
The Pasadena event was cancelled after game officials met with Fourth Army
Commander General John J. DeWitt, not a usual party to such deliberations. In the
event the game was played at Duke Stadium in Durham, North Carolina. No diri-
gibles over the Atlantic troubled the contest, which Oregon State won, 20 to 16. 12
The Commander-in-Chief: Calm and Resolute
Great men and great tyrants bestrode the thundering stage of a world at war.
Adolf Hitler had let loose the dogs of war first in the East in Poland, in the West
in France and then in the East again in Russia. Stalin had raised gigantic forces
246 First Sunday at War: December 14, 1941
that no sooner melted away than they were replaced by new sacrifices on the
altar of war and tyranny. Churchill had, by character and courage, held the pass
when others had fallen, and under him his nation had stood alone.
But to the American people, recovering from the shock of December 7, set-
ting off in an optimistic spirit that grim future events, sacrifices and tragedy to
come would belie, the greatest of them all was and would be the President and
Commander-in-chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This is how he appeared to two thoughtful and informed contemporaries.
Ernest K. Lindley, writing in The Washington Post , appraised the President’s performance. He had seen the President hundreds of times, he wrote, and while the
country went around in a sort of daze, the President was “magnificently calm and
resolute.” The crisis was far greater than that of 1933. The President had indubita-
ble charm, though he was not without annoying traits and faults of character. But
his character had been tempered by his personal ordeal of twenty years past when
he had declined to accept a life of comfortable invalidism, and emerged from the
shadows into the full glare of public life. Lindley painted an inspiring view of the
President: “[He] is in fighting fettle, his resolution undaunted by adversity and his
judgment calm and clear.” 13
If, as some would have wished today, the President did not appear in public in
a wheelchair, his disability was still widely known. Frank L. Kluckhorn, writing
in The New York Times , noted his need when walking, if indeed it was walking, to lean on someone’s arm. He referred to the President’s near-fatal illness that still
handicapped him.
But, Kluckhorn wrote, the President was a fighter, courageous, stubborn, acute.
He was exceptionally well qualified to serve as Commander-in-chief. He had
faced and handled the crisis of the past nine years; he had valuable knowledge of
the armed forces dating from his service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
But what counted above all was his character and his temperament. In the hey-
day of the New Deal, the President had sometimes seemed happy-go-lucky with
a bravado that had now been replaced with a solemnity and courage that reflected
inner tranquility and self-confidence.
There had been a hardening in spirit and body. His face appeared as carved in
granite, head held high, chin thrust out. In the end it came down to a matter of tem-
perament. Mr. Justice Holmes had appraised the President shortly before he took
office in 1933. “A second class intellect,” he had said, “but a first class temperament.”
The President now faced the toughest job in the world. “But,” Kluckhorn
concluded, “Mr. Roosevelt, because of his temperament, takes it in his stride. ” 14
And despite its many divisions a mere two weeks before, the same might now
be said of the nation as a whole.
Notes
1.
New York Times , December 14, 1941, 4/8
2.
Washington Post , December 14, 1941, B6
3.
Houston Chronicle , December 14, 1941, 6B
A First Class Temperament 247
4.
Atlanta Constitution , December 14, 1941, 3B
5.
Atlanta Constitution , December 14, 1941, 12D
6.
New York Times , December 14, 1941, 3
7.
Los Angeles Times , December 14, 1941, 2H
8.
Oregonian , December 14, 1941, 28
9.
Chicago Tribune , December 14, 1941, M3
10. Washington Post , December 14, 1941, IV
11. Chicago Tribune , December 11, 1941, 23
12. Oregonian , December 14, 1941, 1
13. Atlanta Constitution , December 14, 1941, B7
14. New York Times , December 14, 1941, 1
EPILOGUE
Americans All
FIGURE 23.1 See color plate section.
Poster by Bernard Perlin. Courtesy of Northwestern University Library World War II poster collection, Pr32.5015:15.
Epilogue 249
The strange optimism that pervaded the U.S. press in the week after the Pearl
Harbor attack soon faded into harsh reality. Japanese forces, seemingly unstop-
pable, swarmed to the attack in Malaya, where the direst surrender in British
history took place at Singapore. Japanese troops overran Thailand and the Dutch
East Indies, while the Japanese Navy swept the combined naval forces of the
United States, Britain, and the Dutch East Indies from the Java Sea.
The last of the Allied forces to hold out were at the Philippine fortress of
Corregidor, where the beleaguered garrison was forced to surrender on May 6,
1942.
Yet only six months after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable reversal of fortunes took
place. Admiral Nagumo, seeking to finish off the U.S. Navy in the waters around
Midway Island, met the American fleet under Admiral Nimitz there on June 4,
1942. An attack by American torpedo bombers failed utterly, with the loss of all
but one attacking plane. But the next attack, by American SBD Dauntless dive
bombers, caught the Japanese aircraft carriers in the midst of refueling and rearm-
ing. In a space of minutes, three Japanese carriers were engulfed in flames, total
w
recks, while a fourth was pursued and sunk on the following day. The lost carri-
ers were the Kaga , the Soryu , the Akagi , and the Horyu , the very ships from whose decks the attack on Pearl Harbor had been launched.
This was the decisive battle of the Pacific War. A single squadron of dive
bombers, far fewer than the Few of the RAF who had defended Britain, achieved
a stunning victory, leaving Japan on the defensive for the rest of the war. It would
take five years of hard fighting, a bitter slog through island fortresses in the Central Pacific, and the long journey from the Solomon Islands across New Guinea and
into the Philippines, until at last, with the final battle of Okinawa and the atomic
blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan, final and unconditional,
took place.
Emblematic of Japan’s defeat was the battleship Haruna. Far from having been
sunk by the gallant Captain Kelly, America’s first hero of the Second World War, as
was reported, it fought an active wartime career. It covered the Japanese invasions
of Southeast Asia and Guadalcanal, and took part in the climactic naval battles of
the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. It ended the war ingloriously bombed and sunk
at its moorings, at Kure Naval Base, on July 28, 1945.
When America entered the European war, Axis forces were menacing Europe
from blitzed London to the gates of Moscow. In the West hard fighting was to be
required from the shores of Morocco across North Africa and Italy and from the
beaches of Normandy through France into the heart of Germany. In the East
the war was fought across vast expanses of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
to crush and utterly defeat the Nazi empire.
In addition to standing fast alone in 1940, Britain had made extraordinary
contributions to the victory in many theaters of action. The Soviets had borne the
brunt of the war against Germany, suffering and inflicting the greatest portion of
the butcher’s bill.
The Pacific War was almost exclusively American. Americans, too, dominated
the war in Western Europe, and the Soviets were sustained by American supplies
250 Epilogue
of arms and armaments, trucks and planes, boots, and food, without which they
might have been vanquished. All this was achieved by the deep and profound
unity of the American people, a unity sweeping away the divisions and the ran-
cor of the past. The contributions of the American home front were prodigious.
Without them victory was not possible. A few statistics will testify to the scope of
the American achievement. In the war years America produced 324,750 military
aircraft of all types (the Soviet Union 143,145 and Britain 131,549) versus a total
of 119,307 for Germany and 76,320 for Japan. In aircraft carriers, the decisive
weapon of the Pacific War, the United States built 141, including “Jeep” carriers
built on merchantman hulls, versus 16 for Japan. Here indeed was the measure
of the dedication and passion of the American people meshed with the technical
genius of the nation.
In surveying this vast effort, military, naval, civil, and industrial, it must be
borne in mind that the American people had never made up its mind to engage
in all of these wars so far from its own borders and heartland. There is no doubt
that American boycotts and embargos had pressed a Japan attempting to build
the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But the Japanese attack on Amer-
ica was a deliberate decision in the pursuit of long-held ambitions. It has been
observed in the long-running debate about the origins of the First World War
that whatever else may have been said, no one could claim that Belgium had
attacked Germany.
In a like vein no one could say that the United States had attacked Japan.
Indeed, a peaceful Japan had nothing to fear from America. But Japan was far
from peaceful with its ten-year campaign of aggression in Asia. What one could
say is that nothing could more effectively have united the American people
than the attack on Pearl Harbor, which finally laid to rest the bitter debate
between isolation and intervention, between America’s nineteenth century and
its twentieth.
So, too, America had adopted a stance vis-à-vis Germany and its allies of “all
aid short of war.” Surely there was Lend-Lease. Surely there was the occupation
of Iceland; the swap of bases for destroyers; and the orders to the Navy, convoy-
ing goods to the nation’s friends and allies, to shoot on sight. But even after
December 7, America had not yet arrived at the decision to make war against
Germany and its allies on the European continent and wherever else it might find
them. It took Germany and Italy to do that by declaring war against the United
States. Germany was Japan’s partner in the Tripartite Pact; and there is little doubt
that the sensational Japanese success at Pearl Harbor had encouraged the German
leadership to believe that this was an opportune time to dispose of an America
they hardly knew and whose war potential they disbelieved.
In another reversal of fortune, the British Empire had entered the war rich
and it emerged impoverished. America had entered the war Depression-poor and
emerged richer than it had ever been, richer than all the others. America had not
entered the war in pursuit of these riches. It had not entered the war inspired
by dreams of empire. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese and the Soviets, it had
Epilogue 251
FIGURE 23.2 See color plate section.
Poster by Allen Saalburg.
Courtesy of Northwestern University Library World War II poster
collection, Pr32.5015:14/3.
cherished no dreams of world domination. Its prowess on the battlefield and on
the production lines promoted America into a superpower, untouched at home
while both its allies and adversaries found themselves amid ruins.
All this happened not because of deliberate plans and programs that America
had created, then executed. It came about as it did because of the most signifi-
cant reversal of them all: the metamorphosis of a bitterly divided America, rooted
in its past, into an America united by patriotism, across all its divides—north
and south, east and west, rich and poor, old and young, male and female, white
and black—looking outward toward the future, together. Americans might argue
252 Epilogue
among themselves; but when challenged, they rose to the occasion as one, facing
the world, and the future, with a single voice and a steely determination. Paper-
boy or FDR himself, debutante or farm girl, old soldier or new recruit—they all
proved, by some kind of alchemy, to be made of the same metal.
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans didn’t know themselves. After-
ward, they did. The few days around the attack were truly a crucible: they gal-
vanized Americans into a discovery of their own identity as Americans all. The
credo of pulling together, of unity across all boundaries, forged in those few fateful
days, became a proud part of what it meant to be American. It has been ever since.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The Newspapers
In a certain sense the eight notable newspapers from whose pages the drama of
&nb
sp; The Crucible of a Generation is reported were themselves players in the drama.
Accordingly, a brief account follows for each paper of its history, its character, its
personality, its tone and temper, its orientation and reach.
Circulation figures are taken from the 1941 edition of N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia) .
Only two of these newspapers, The Atlanta Constitution and the Houston Chronicle, had endorsed President Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. In a broader view, it has been estimated that the U.S. press was overwhelmingly in favor of
Willkie’s Republican candidacy in 1940—by a 72 percent to 28 percent margin.
On November 30, 1941, The New York Times could claim to be, as indeed as it could today, the nation’s newspaper of record. Its storied boast, boxed and prominent on the front page of every issue was and is “All the News That’s Fit To Print.”
Perhaps it was the fullness of its content and the seriousness of its style that earned
it the nickname the Gray Lady of American journalism. Its 1941 average daily
circulation was 477,385, far less than the 1,948,754 of the mass-market tabloid
New York Daily News. But the influence of The Times was measured, not only by the breadth, but by the depth of its reporting. Founded and continually published
since 1851, the paper had been acquired in 1896 by Adolf Ochs, publisher of the
Chattanooga Times . Control has remained in family hands since then. The Times was not as rigid in its political outlook as some of its journalistic colleagues. In
1932 and 1936 it had supported Roosevelt for president, but in 1940 it endorsed
the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie; it would back Roosevelt again in his
1944 run against Thomas Dewey.
The Washington Post , founded in 1877, had colorful associations. To promote the paper, John Philip Sousa composed his celebrated “Washington Post March.”
The paper was acquired in 1905 by John Roll McLean, owner of the Cincinnati
254 A Note on Sources
Enquirer , and also the owner of the celebrated Hope diamond with its mysterious
curse. Lacking confidence in his playboy son, Edward “Ned” McLean, on John
McLean’s death in 1916 he put the paper into a trust. The wayward son broke the
trust to the detriment of the paper, which descended into a bankruptcy in 1933
from which it was bought by Eugene Meyer, a Washington financier. The Wash-
Crucible of a Generation Page 39
