The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.

  From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

  Still, Roosevelt resisted turning the war into one to save the Jews, or to save any single group, and specific issues of rescue or of refugees tended to be put to the periphery.

  Then, in early 1944, pressed by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board in order to deal with as many such issues as possible. It was an imperfect solution, but it was a step forward. In 1998, the historian Gerhard L. Weinberg concluded:

  Every single life counts, and every individual saved counts. There cannot be the slightest doubt that more efforts could have been made by an earlier establishment of the War Refugee Board and by any number of other steps and actions. The general picture in terms of overall statistics would not have been very different; but the record of the Allies would have been brighter, and each person saved could have lived out a decent life. The exertions of the Allies in World War II saved not only themselves but also the majority of the world’s Jews. But the shadow of doubt whether enough was done will always remain, even if there really were not many things that could have been done.

  One wishes for a better outcome, for wiser heads, for a more compassionate public. Yet one wishes in vain. The only comfort, if we can call it that, is that a knowledge of our past failings may equip us to confront evil without delay when evil comes again. For it will.

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  Eleanor Roosevelt brought her husband word of the opening of Operation Overlord, the Allied assault on Hitler’s Fortress Europe on the northern coast of France. “On D-Day, about three o’clock in the morning, I was called by the White House switchboard and told to awaken the President, that the War Department wanted him on the telephone—General Marshall was speaking himself,” Mrs. Roosevelt recalled of Tuesday, June 6, 1944. “I went in and wakened my husband. He sat up in bed and put on his sweater, and from then on was on the telephone.”

  Overlord was a vital turning point. Churchill called the landings at Normandy “the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place.” In his bedroom in the White House, Roosevelt “was tense waiting for news,” Eleanor recalled, and his mind was on the fates of the men who were hitting the beaches and scaling the cliffs. “I wonder how Linaka will come out,” Mrs. Roosevelt recalled the president saying. Russell Linaka, a World War I veteran, had worked on FDR’s tree plantations at Hyde Park and was now commanding a landing craft. (He made it through.)

  The president, who loved the King James Version of the Bible and the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, was to broadcast a prayer that evening. His daughter, Anna, and son-in-law, John Boettiger, had helped him draft it during a weekend stay at Kenwood, his aide Edwin “Pa” Watson’s estate in the shadow of Monticello. The White House released the text of the prayer to the afternoon newspapers. That night, with an estimated audience of one hundred million Americans, FDR recited his words in what was one of the largest mass prayers in human history:

  Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

  Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

  They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

  For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home….

  With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace—a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

  Thy will be done, Almighty God.

  Amen.

  Listening to the broadcast, FDR’s cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley wrote that the prayer had been “beautifully read by the P. this evening. It is wonderful, in these days, to find the head of this huge nation lead the people in prayer.”

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  When news came of Roosevelt’s death, Robert Sherwood could not fathom the reports. “I couldn’t believe it when somebody told me he was dead,” Sherwood recalled. “Like everybody else, I listened and listened to the radio, waiting for the announcement—probably in his own gaily reassuring voice—that it had all been a big mistake…and everything was going to be ‘fine—grand—perfectly bully.’ ”

  But it was true. “It finally crushed him,” Sherwood thought. “He couldn’t stand up under it any longer….The fears and the hopes of hundreds of millions of human beings throughout the world had been bearing down on the mind of one man, until the pressure was more than mortal tissue could stand.”

  In his cottage at Warm Springs—where a porch had been designed to resemble the prow of a ship, giving the paralyzed president the illusion of movement, of freedom—Roosevelt left the draft of a speech he had been scheduled to deliver on Saturday, April 13, 1945, on the occasion of the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. “Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another,” Roosevelt was to have said. “Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace….The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

  They were, in a way, his last words.

  Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, with Joseph N. Welch, who was serving as the U.S. Army’s chief counsel in the televised Army-­McCarthy hearings of 1954.

  The fact that we have a well-informed so-called middle class in this country is what makes it the greatest republic the sun has ever shone upon, or ever will shine upon again.

  —HARRY S. TRUMAN, 1948

  He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had….He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.

  —New York lawyer ROY M. COHN, on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy

  The president, as usual, was up early. At eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, October 30, 1952, Harry S. Truman stepped out on the rear platform of his train at Muskegon, Michigan. He was doing what he loved: conducting a whistle-stop tour of the country, delivering fiery campaign remarks. Four years earlier, in 1948, as an underdog in the contest to win a full term o
f his own, Truman had made the barnstorming train stop a political hallmark. Now he was out there again, this time for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee who was facing Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Truman had been reading a recent issue of Business Week, a newsmagazine that was hardly a friend to the administration. The cover story was about John Jay Hopkins, the head of General Dynamics, and the defense contractor’s mission to build an atomic submarine. But Truman was, for the moment, more interested in a story headlined “Making Everyone Middle Class.”

  “It used to be true,” the magazine said, “as the old saying goes, that the rich got richer and the poor had children. But for the past 50 years at least, the U.S. economy has been making nonsense out of the adage. The poor have had children all right. But the children, by and large, have got richer.”

  Armed with the piece, Truman cheerfully addressed the crowd in Muskegon. “The Democratic Party has done great things for the people of this country in the past twenty years,” Truman said. “We gave you social security, minimum wage laws, sound farm programs, and full employment. That is what the New Deal and the Fair Deal mean to you. Try to think of one thing the Republican Party has done to advance your interests. You will have a hard time finding it.”

  Truman then turned to Business Week. “The article points out that ten percent of the people at the very top of the economic scale get a smaller proportion of the national income than they used to, and the other ninety percent of the people get more of it,” the president said. “This means that most of the people are better off than ever before. And the magazine points out that this is due to the things your Government has been doing.” He quoted the piece: “ ‘High levels of employment have put millions of jobless onto somebody’s payroll, cut unemployment to rock bottom. In addition, the number of women workers has jumped sharply, giving many low-income families a double paycheck. Farm prosperity has lifted a whole economic class out of the bottom brackets and into the middle class.’ ”

  Truman was pleased. “Now there you have it,” he said. “There you have it—in the words of an opposition magazine. That is what the Democratic Party means to you. So, my friends, when you go to the polls on Tuesday, think of the welfare of this great country of yours. The welfare of this United States, the greatest and the most powerful Republic in the history of the world is at stake.”

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  The product of both government action and of market forces, the creation of the post–World War II middle class was one of the great achievements in history. When the historian James T. Patterson, writing a volume on the America of 1945 to 1974 for the Oxford History of the United States, sat down to lay out the statistics for growth in the postwar years, he gave his chapter on the subject a simple but telling title: “Booms.” America’s economy in the quarter century after World War II, the former British prime minister Edward Heath observed, was “the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.”

  By 1945, average weekly earnings had nearly doubled since December 1941, and Americans had saved about $136 billion during the war—a staggering sum. By 1949 per-capita income in the United States handily outpaced that of the nearest global contenders. Birth and employment rates, college educations, home ownership, life expectancy—by just about every measure, many Americans in the years after V-E and V-J Days were enjoying unparalleled good fortune.

  The engines of prosperity propelled millions into the broad middle class—an economic, cultural, and political ethos in which these millions of people had stakes in the present and future of the nation. “Of the three classes,” Euripides had written, “it is the middle that saves the country.” Rhapsodizing about the New World, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur observed, “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims….Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?” To Walt Whitman, “The most valuable class in any community is the middle class.”

  Theodore Roosevelt appears to have been the first president to use the term “middle class” in a state paper. In 1906, in his Sixth Annual Message to Congress, TR wrote approvingly of the bourgeois, observing, “The best Americanism is that which aims for stability and permanency of prosperous citizenship, rather than immediate returns on large masses of capital.” Two years later, in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, William Howard Taft said that the “farming” and “middle” classes tended “to build up a conservative, self-respecting community, capable of self-government.” In 1948, in an address on healthcare, President Truman said, “The fact that we have a well-informed so-called middle class in this country is what makes it the greatest republic the sun has ever shone upon, or ever will shine upon again.” In 1955, speaking to the AFL-CIO, President Eisenhower brought the architect of Communism into the conversation, saying, “The Class Struggle Doctrine of Marx was the invention of a lonely refugee scribbling in a dark recess of the British Museum. He abhorred and detested the middle class. He did not foresee that, in America, labor, respected and prosperous, would constitute—with the farmer and businessman—his hated middle class.”

  The middle mattered—and as the middle grew, it mattered ever more. As long ago as the American Founding, it was an accepted truth that an economic unit that was neither very rich nor very poor offered a republic vital political stability. Definitions of middle-class are elusive and elastic. The scholar Ganesh Sitaraman holds with one offered by The Economist magazine (the journal edited by Walter Bagehot, of the “dignified” and “efficient” construct of constitutions): “To be middle class,” Sitaraman wrote, summarizing the magazine’s criteria, “means that you have enough spending money to provide for yourself and your family without living hand to mouth, but not enough to guarantee their future.” Nothing, in other words, can be taken for granted, for there’s always the risk that your prosperity might fall victim to time and chance.

  Whatever one’s class status, there’s a tendency for many to think that they’re a Horatio Alger hero—an emblem of rugged individualism and singular success. The American ideal of what Henry Clay had called “self-made men” in 1832 is so central to the national mythology that there’s often a missing character in the story Americans like to tell about American prosperity: government, which frequently helped create the conditions for the making of those men.

  Many Americans have never liked acknowledging that the public sector has always been integral to making the private sector successful. We often approve of government’s role when we benefit from it and disapprove when others seem to be getting something we aren’t. Given the American Revolution’s origins as a rebellion against taxation and distant authority, such skepticism is understandable, even if it’s not well-founded. We have long proved ourselves quite capable of living with this contradiction, using Hamiltonian means (centralized decision-making) while speaking in Jeffersonian rhetorical terms (that government is best which governs least).

  The Pacific Railroad and Homestead acts, signed by Lincoln, used the power of government to settle the West. The railway legislation gave federal support to the creation of a transcontinental railroad, a vast project that played a key role in making the United States an economic and cultural whole. Once the Golden Spike had joined the rails of East and West, the danger and duration of stagecoach rides gave way to the muscle and speed of locomotives—able to carry dreamers west, ship crops east, and shrink the psychic distance of the continent.

  The Homestead measures enabled settlers to claim small parcels of farmland, making new lives (and livelihoods) possible. The Morrill Act created land-grant universities, opening higher education to many throughout the country. The legislation of the Progressive Era brought a measure of humanity to the
rigors of the industrial age and a democratization of power through women’s suffrage, the rise of primaries, and the direct election of senators. And when the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties proved short-lived, the New Deal and particularly Social Security redefined the individual’s relationship to the state, knitting the public and private sectors together much more closely. While it took World War II to put a true end to the Great Depression, the work of the New Deal had already added a new and permanent dimension to the American experiment in the mid-twentieth century: the expectation that government could play a more direct role in individual lives.

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  That expectation was met in World War II and its aftermath. First came immense defense spending that truly transformed the United States into what FDR, in 1940, had called “the great arsenal of democracy.” Then, while the war was still under way, the GI Bill of Rights, formally called the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, would eventually help lift millions into previously unreachable economic and cultural spheres.

  Championed by the American Legion, the legislation provided veterans with college tuition, guaranteed home loans, and offered other benefits. It is not a coincidence that it was a prosperous white America, which, in the mid-1960s, became more open, however belatedly and reluctantly and incompletely, to people of color, women, and immigrants (after a 1965 law ended the quotas that had governed entry into the country since the 1920s). A sense of comfort and of economic security helped create a climate of hope—and that sense of comfort and of economic security was the result of public and private investment in a broad range of Americans.

  Officially the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill helped create a thriving middle class by providing tuition, guaranteeing home loans, and offering other benefits to returning World War II veterans.