The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The FBI insisted that there was no justification for Roosevelt’s action, and not a single documented wartime case of espionage would ever be registered against a Japanese American. But there is no evidence that the president ever regretted signing Executive Order 9066.

  As hundreds of their fellow citizens look on from an overhead walkway, Japanese Americans who had been living peacefully on Bainbridge Island are marched under armed guard to a waiting train at the Colman Ferry Dock in Seattle, Washington, March 30, 1942. Because of the island’s proximity to a naval base, they were the first internees to be rounded up and spirited away.

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  Two brothers wait atop their family’s belongings for the bus that will take them from their home in Los Angeles to the hastily constructed assembly center at the Santa Anita Racetrack, where they would stay until housing was readied for them at Manzanar in the California desert.

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  “Waiting for the Signal From Home.” Millions of Americans across the political spectrum initially believed that no Japanese American living along the West Coast could be trusted, that somehow Pearl Harbor could never have happened without their help. This cartoon by Dr. Seuss appeared in the liberal New York newspaper PM, February 13, 1942, six days before FDR signed Executive Order 9066.

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  Roosevelt, C. in C.

  The initial German invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled outside Moscow, but a summer offensive in 1942 sent 225 fresh divisions—more than four and a half million men—racing across Russia, and Joseph Stalin demanded that the Allies open a second front in western Europe to relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people.

  American planners had a straightforward idea of how to beat the Germans: invade France in the spring of 1943 and drive right for Berlin.

  But the British, haunted by memories of the butchery on the Western Front in the Great War, were wary of moving so fast: a defeat on the French coast, Churchill warned, was “the only way in which we could possibly lose this war.” Instead, he favored attacking German and Italian forces in North Africa to keep Egypt and the oil fields of the Middle East from falling into enemy hands.

  American commanders thought invading Africa would be a dangerous, wasteful diversion. Rather than accept the British plan, General Marshall proposed that the United States abandon the Germany-first strategy and go on the offensive in the Pacific.

  Roosevelt overruled him. A premature attack in the Pacific was exactly what Germany wanted, he wrote; it would only mean the recapture of a “lot of islands,” and would do nothing to help the Russians. The proposal was therefore “disapproved.” He signed his response “Roosevelt, C. in C.”—Commander in Chief.

  The invasion of occupied France would have to be delayed. Preparations began for American troops to land in North Africa. News from the Pacific continued to be bad.

  But even the president’s critics were astonished at his serenity.

  Once he had made a decision, nothing seemed to faze him. Franklin had learned from his struggle against polio, his wife said, “that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you’d better try to put it out of your mind.”

  The president worked at his stamp collection, chatted with visitors, and presided over a carefree cocktail hour every afternoon.

  He established his own secret map room in a former ladies’ cloakroom in the White House basement so that he could personally follow the movements of American ships and armies. A special pin marked the whereabouts of the destroyer aboard which his son Franklin was serving. When Roosevelt was rolled into the map room every morning that was always the first pin he looked for.

  Wartime security allowed the president to spend as much time as possible out of public sight and away from the White House—in the cottage he’d built for himself at Warm Springs; at a new hideaway in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland that he called “Shangri-La,” which would later come to be called Camp David; and at home at Springwood, where the grounds were now patrolled day and night.

  He was there on May 6 when he learned that Corregidor, the last American outpost in the Philippines, had surrendered.

  Just four days later, before dawn, he, Daisy Suckley, and a handful of aides and Secret Servicemen drove to a nearby pond to take part in the annual census of Dutchess County birds. From the backseat of his car, a seemingly unconcerned FDR claimed to have identified 108 species—22 of them by their songs alone. Daisy was delighted: “He seemed really to enjoy every minute. It is the kind of thing he has privately given up any idea of ever doing again, so it did him lots of good. In that far-off silent place, with myriads of birds waking up, it was quite impossible to think much of the horrors of war.”

  The president’s handwritten note overruling his army chief of staff: “General Marshall. Copy to Admiral [Ernest J.] King [chief of naval operations] and General [Henry “Hap”] Arnold [commander, U.S. Army Air Force]. I have carefully read your estimate of Sunday. My first impression is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. Secondly, it does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting except in a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next. Third: it does not help Russia or the Near East.

  “Therefore it is disapproved as of the present.

  “Roosevelt C. in C.”

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  A Russian woman watches helplessly as her home, set ablaze by advancing German troops, burns to the ground in the late spring of 1942.

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  American troops surrender at Corregidor, May 6, 1942. That evening, their commander, General Jonathan Wainwright, wired President Roosevelt: “With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame I report to your excellency that today I must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay.… With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander. Good-bye Mr. President.” The Philippines had now fallen to Japan.

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  The White House map room, modeled after a traveling version that Winston Churchill had brought with him to Washington. It was manned by army personnel twenty-four hours a day, and FDR had himself wheeled in frequently to get the latest war news.

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  FDR, Daisy Suckley, and fellow birders enjoy what Daisy called “the bird chorus at dawn,” at Thompson’s Pond, Dutchess County, May 10, 1942.

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  Here’s Our Answer, President Roosevelt

  Congress granted Roosevelt sweeping wartime powers to reorganize American industry, and he made the most of them. The result was improvised, inconsistent, and often inefficient—six new federal agencies with overlapping responsibilities were established in a single year. But it would ultimately make possible the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

  “If you are going to try to … prepare for war in a capitalist country,” Secretary of War Stimson said, “you have to let business make money out of the process.”

  FDR now found himself working hand in glove with many of the “economic royalists” whose hatred he’d welcomed just five years earlier.

  The biggest companies got the biggest contracts—and earned the biggest profits. Antitrust laws were overlooked. Taxes on ordinary Americans rose.

  Again and again, the president urged industry to greater efforts. When advisers handed him estimates of what they thought could realistically be achieved, he crossed them out and wrote in larger numbers of his own. “The production people can do it if they really try,” he said. They did try—and they did do it.

  Idle factories were soon back in business. Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort. In 1941, more than three million cars had been manufactured in the United States. Only 139 more were made during the entire war. Instead, Chrysler made fuselages; General Motors made airplane engines, guns, trucks, and tanks. And at its vast Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan—sixty
-seven acres of assembly lines under a single roof that one observer called “the Grand Canyon of the mechanized world”—the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle, twenty-four hours a day. The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts. The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000 parts. By 1944, one was coming off the line at Willow Run every sixty-three minutes.

  War mobilization would give the Allies the “crushing superiority” in arms Roosevelt insisted they needed for victory. It also brought the Great Depression to an end, creating so many new jobs so fast that for the first time in a generation there was soon a labor shortage in the United States.

  The first lady smashes a champagne bottle over the bow of the brand-new liner SS America at Newport News, Virginia, in 1939. Acquired by the navy and renamed the USS West Point in 1941, she became a transport ship and carried 350,000 U.S. troops to and from battle over the course of the war, more than any other vessel.

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  The Boy Scouts of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, answer the president’s call for rubber with eighty tons of old tires.

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  The 1,500-ton submarine USS Peto is launched sideways into Lake Michigan by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, 1941. She would see action in the Pacific and survive the war.

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  B-24 Liberator bombers lined up at the Ford Willow Run plant, 1943. The following year, American workers would produce 96,318 warplanes, exceeding the combined output of Britain, Germany, and Japan.

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  Women welders at work in a U.S. shipyard. Initially, shipbuilders were often reluctant to hire them, but they quickly proved their worth. “Let me tell you,” said one personnel director, “it takes stuff to handle a welding arc all day long—stuff and skill.”

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  New jeeps parked and ready for shipment overseas, outside the Willys-Overland plant in Toledo, Ohio. Before the war ended, some 640,000 of them would roll off the assembly lines.

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  Artillery shells stored at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey, 1940. Four years later, the United States would be producing 60 percent of all Allied munitions and 40 percent of the world’s total arms.

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  Dear God, Please Make Eleanor a Little Tired

  A wartime Washington story had it that the president prayed every night, “Dear God, please make Eleanor a little tired.” The story was apocryphal, but the sentiment was understandable. Eleanor Roosevelt shared her husband’s sense of urgency about American defense, and, like any other mother, she had wept when her boys went off to war. But she was also unhappy with what seemed to her to be FDR’s abandonment of reform.

  The president was “Dr. Win-the-War” now, he explained, no longer “Dr. New Deal.” He made only token objections when Congress voted to end the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration. Further domestic progress would have to wait until the fighting ended.

  Eleanor could not easily accept that decision. For her, the challenge was to defeat fascism abroad while extending the benefits of democracy at home to every citizen regardless of color, creed, or sex.

  If her husband was no longer interested in listening to other New Dealers, she would speak for them. “No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt … facing her husband,” an aide remembered, “and, holding his eye firmly, say to him, ‘Franklin, I think you should …’ or, ‘Franklin, surely you will not …’ will ever forget the experience.”

  She was an early and enthusiastic champion of women in war industries. “I’m pretty old, 57 you know, to tell girls what to do with their lives,” she said, “but if were a debutante of a certain age I would go into a factory—and any factory where I could learn a skill and be useful.” Eventually, women would comprise 60 percent of the workforce in defense industries.

  In the spring of 1943, word reached the White House that conditions within the Japanese American relocation camps were breeding dangerous resentment, that internees who had once been willing to accept the government’s policy “philosophically” were growing increasingly angry at their government for keeping them behind barbed wire. FDR sent Eleanor to the Gila River Relocation Center near River, Arizona, to assess conditions for herself. She had loyally supported her husband’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066—“I regret the need to evacuate,” she told a friend, “but I recognize it has to be done”—but had subsequently learned that there had been no truth to the early stories of spying and sabotage by Japanese Americans.

  She came away from her visit convinced that all internees should be allowed to return to their homes and resume their lives, and was only dissuaded from bringing an interned family home to live in the White House when the president told her the Secret Service would not allow it. Internment had been a “mistake,” she told him, and mistakes needed to be “corrected.”

  The president never conceded that he’d made a mistake, and he ordered that any internees whom the War Department deemed likely to be troublemakers be segregated in a single camp near Tulelake, California, but he also agreed that individuals who had jobs and homes to go to could begin to leave the camps, along with young men willing to join the army. (Still, he did not agree to close the camps until after the 1944 election.)

  Eleanor was also painfully aware of the absurdity of continuing to ask young African Americans to fight for democracy while serving in armed forces that were still stubbornly segregated. She did all she could behind the scenes to improve things.

  She often cautioned black citizens to be patient—and some young African Americans criticized her bitterly for it—but her unshakable devotion to their cause infuriated some whites. When black women in the South began giving up their jobs as domestics for better pay in defense industries, the rumor spread that they belonged to secret “Eleanor Clubs” devoted to getting black women out of white kitchens. When the FBI found the rumors baseless, she was relieved: “Instead of forming clubs of that kind,” she wrote, “they should enter a union and make their household work a profession.”

  During the war, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved north, where they found defense jobs—and encountered trouble from a society not yet willing to accommodate them. In 1943 alone there were race riots in forty-seven cities. Some blamed the first lady for all of it. “It is blood on your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt,” wrote the editor of the Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi. “You have been personally proclaiming and practicing social equality at the White House and wherever you go. What followed is now history.”

  “Unless we make the country worth fighting for by Negroes,” she answered her critics, “we [will] have nothing to offer the world at the end of the war.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Eleanor Roosevelt during her three-week whirlwind tour of Great Britain in the fall of 1942: she salutes during a lightning visit to her son Elliott’s photo-reconnaissance unit at Steeple Morden, not far from Cambridge, and meets with flag-waving workers at a Women’s Voluntary Services nursery in London. During the nursery visit, a British reporter asked if she ever relaxed, slept late, or missed an appointment. “Not since I can remember,” she said. “Why do you ask?” “Because,” the newspaperman said, “I wish you would [rest] now—because I’m tired out.”

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Eleanor meets internees at the Gila River Relocation Center and inspects their camp with Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, April 1943. Both agreed that all ten internment camps should be closed as soon as possible. “This is just one more reason to hate war,” she told a friend. “Innocent people suffer for a few guilty ones.”

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  The first lady’s propensity for turning up in unexpected places delighted the press. Herblock’s cartoon “Just Don’t Be Surprised, That’s All” was published by the Newspaper Enterprise Associ
ation during Eleanor’s visit to England, the first overseas trip ever taken by a first lady on her own.

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  Over the protests of the Secret Service, flight instructor Charles A. Anderson, the first African American ever to earn an air transport license, prepares to take the first lady for an hour’s flight above the Tuskegee Army Air Field at Tuskegee, Alabama. Eleanor’s advocacy—and this photograph—helped persuade her husband to approve combat missions for the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron, which came to be called the Tuskegee Airmen. They would distinguish themselves escorting bombers over North Africa and Europe.

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The first lady pins a medal on a black serviceman in Seattle, 1943, and shakes the hand of an African American delegate to a Democratic Women’s Council meeting in Pittsburgh the following year. When a white woman wrote to ask if she had “colored blood in your family as you seem to derive so much pleasure from associating with colored folks,” Eleanor answered, “I haven’t as yet discovered … any colored blood, but, of course, if any of us go back far enough, I suppose we can find that we all stem from the same beginnings.”

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  A black man, already bleeding from a beating, tries to outrun his tormentors during a three-day Detroit race riot that left thirty-four dead and ended only after FDR sent in federal troops in June 1943. Afterward, there were calls for the president to address the nation about race. He demurred, convinced, Eleanor explained to a disappointed friend, that “he must not irritate the southern leaders as he feels he needs their votes for essential war bills.”