Roosevelt (10 page)

“You and I are for Roosevelt because he’s a great spiritual figure, because he’s an idealist, like Wilson, and he’s got the guts to drive through against any opposition to realize those ideals…. Oh—there are a lot of small people in this town who are constantly trying to cut him down to their size, and sometimes they have some influence. But it’s your job and mine—as long as we’re around here—to keep reminding him that he’s unlimited, and that’s the way he’s got to talk because that’s the way he’s going to act….”

Hopkins was right about Roosevelt’s blowing off steam. “Do not let us waste time in reviewing the past, or fixing or dodging the blame for it,” Roosevelt told the White House correspondents once they had settled down from their annual skits and hijinks. “…The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger our democracy has gone into action….

“We believe firmly that when our production output is in full
swing, the democracies of the world will be able to prove that dictatorships cannot win.

“But now,
now,
the time element is of supreme importance. Every plane, every other instrument of war, old and new, every instrument that we can spare now, we will send overseas because that is the common sense of strategy….”

By now the reporters, normally so overexposed to Roosevelt as to seem almost apathetic, were cheering.

“Here in Washington, we are thinking in terms of speed and speed now. And I hope that that watchword—‘Speed, and speed now’—will find its way into every home in the Nation….”

It was one of Roosevelt’s most stirring speeches, but his rhetoric was running far ahead of the nation’s war capacity as of late winter 1941. Many officials were doubtful that the President’s defense organization could perform the gigantic tasks of mobilizing a still-disorganized and strike-ridden economy. Production was uneven; in places there were miracles of output, but as over-all production rose by degrees, the demand—at home, in Britain, in Greece and the Near East and the Far East—was soaring above the highest earlier efforts and even predictions.

Late the previous year Roosevelt had been hotly criticized, especially by Willkie, for clinging to an old-fashioned defense organization. In the wake of the Nazi blitz in France the President had established the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. A carry-over from World War I, the council lacked legal authority, adequate delegation of power from the President, or a single head. The NDAC was impressive less as an agency than as a collection of notable “advisers”: William S. Knudsen, an immigrant’s son who had risen through the assembly line to become famous as a General Motors production genius, was in charge of “advising” on industrial production; Edward R. Stettinius, son of a Morgan partner but friendly to the New Deal, on industrial materials; Sidney Hillman, another immigrant’s son, a curious amalgam of driving union leader and labor-management diplomat, an old friend and supporter of the President, on manpower problems; Leon Henderson, a hard-driving, highly undiplomatic New Dealer, on materials and food prices. By the end of 1940 the advisers, still lacking clear leadership and authority, themselves were urging on Roosevelt a tighter and stronger organization.

Early in the new year the President set up the Office of Production Management, headed by Knudsen, Hillman, Stimson, and Knox, staffed with most of the old advisers, and granted, on paper, wider and clearer powers than the NDAC had enjoyed. The President explained the new setup to the press. The “Big Four” would make policy and Knudsen and Hillman would carry it out,
“just like a law firm that has a case.” The reporters groped for an understanding of the shape of this Hydra-headed agency. Would Knudsen and Hillman be equals?

Roosevelt: “That’s not the point; they’re a firm. Is a firm equals? I don’t know….”

Reporter: “Why is it you don’t want a single, responsible head?”

“I have a single, responsible head; his name is Knudsen & Hillman.”

“Two heads.”

“No, that’s one head. In other words, aren’t you looking for trouble? Would you rather come to one law firm or two?”

“I don’t think that’s comparable.”

“Just the same thing, exactly. Wait until you run into trouble.”

“I would rather avoid trouble.”

“I think they will. They think they will—that’s an interesting thing….”

“Wait until you run into trouble”—this might have been the motto of Roosevelt’s defense mobilizers throughout 1941. By early spring they were running into serious materiel shortages. After much false optimism the OPM chiefs had to cope with a dearth of aluminum—so vital for planes—and with the near-monopoly of aluminum produced by the Aluminum Company of America. When the question rose of expanding supply more quickly through Alcoa or more slowly by a new and potentially competitive company, New Dealers opposed the aluminum “trust,” but Stimson remarked: “I’d rather have some sinful aluminum now than a lot of virtuous aluminum a year from now.” Machine tools, the cutting edge of any defense effort, were limited, and despite optimistic statements from the industry a shortage of electric power loomed. Coal reserves were vast, too, but here the problem was a threat of strike action by the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis, who was still smarting from his vain election appeal to his miners to support Willkie over Roosevelt.

The President seemed to retain his usual debonair optimism about the nation’s capacity to produce in the pinch. A crucial potential bottleneck was steel. Late in 1940 he had asked Stettinius to assess steel capacity; when Stettinius’s man Gano Dunn, working with the steel industry, predicted a surplus of ten million tons of steel in 1942, Roosevelt canonized the report by devoting a whole press conference to it and accepting its findings. Dunn had to issue a more pessimistic report within five weeks.

Watching these happenings through skeptical pince-nez was a veteran of World War I mobilization struggles. Bernard Baruch had long enjoyed a friendly relation with the President, who paid the old Wilsonian every compliment except following his advice.
For months Baruch’s advice had been simple and flat: centralize all controls—allocations, priorities, price-fixing—in one agency, with one boss. Many editorial writers agreed; so did many high administration officials. Stimson, too, had urged this move, on the ground that someone clearly in charge would feel the “sting of responsibility.” Morgenthau wanted his chief to set up a Cabinet-level department of supply to run the whole mobilization program. Everyone seemed to want a czar—especially if he himself could be the czar.

Roosevelt would have none of it. It was impossible to find any one “Czar” or “Poohbah” or “Ahkoond of Swat,” he had said in explaining the OPM to reporters, and only amateurs thought otherwise. Under the Constitution only one man—the President—could be in charge. But as spring 1941 approached, it was clear that the President, with his other multifarious responsibilities, could not be the co-ordinating head of defense production. Yet he would not budge. Clearly he had deeper reasons—reasons distilled from his diverse tactics of moving step by step, avoiding commitments to any one man or program, letting his subordinates feel less the sting of responsibility than the goad of competition, thwarting one man from getting too much control, preventing himself from becoming a prisoner of his own machinery, and, above all, keeping choices wide in a world full of snares and surprises—that prompted him to drive his jostling horses with a loose bit and a nervous but easy rein.

On the day after Roosevelt’s inaugural in January 1941 the liberal newspaper
PM
in New York ran across its front page not an account of the Washington glitter but a picture of row upon row of men on the benches of a Bowery mission. They sat, their heads lowered, not in prayer, but on the hard narrow top of the bench ahead, their coats pulled up over their heads, babbling, coughing, snoring, scratching. They were part of an army of 7,000 homeless men in New York City—men who lived on handouts during the day and in missions, lodges, and flophouses at night. In the morning, young and old, amply nourished or not, well-clad or ill-dressed, able-bodied or lame, they would be turned out at 5:00
A.M.
sharp, no matter how bitter the weather, to begin another day of aimless wandering.

It was a cruel comment on the end of two terms of “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” under Roosevelt. But it was not unfair. Four years after Roosevelt had pictured “one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed,” four years after he had demanded that “if we would make democracy succeed…we must act—NOW,” economic and social conditions in the nation had not markedly improved.
Nourishment
: a national nutrition conference for defense, meeting in Washington in the spring of 1941, reported that over 40 per cent of the people were not getting enough food or the right food.
Housing
: private construction was still lagging; in defense areas people were living in shacks, cabins, trailers, tent colonies, and “motor courts,” often a whole family to a room, and towns were flooded by defense workers while rents soared.
Health
: of the first million men selected for the draft, almost 40 per cent were found unfit for general military service; one-third of the rejections were due directly or indirectly to poor nutrition. These were evils in themselves; they also showed marked social weaknesses in a nation girding for defense.

March 3, 1940, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch

As usual, the plight of the Negro caricatured the social malaise of the whole people. A brilliant group of social scientists, under the leadership of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was discovering that the percentage of Employment Service placements in major defense industries was actually declining for nonwhites during early 1941. Most of the big war plants had no blacks at all among their workers. Many unions discriminated against them, in part because of their fear that if Negroes came in, white workers might well go out. The future looked no more encouraging; in December 1940 less than 2 per cent of the trainees under defense pre-employment and refresher courses were black. Negroes could find
opportunities for education and equal pay in the Army, but the services were still almost completely segregated, Negro trainees were concentrated mainly in the South, and as late as 1940 there were only two Negro combat officers in the Regular Army and none in the Navy. In the next year a detail of black soldiers, marching on an Arkansas highway, was pushed off the road by state troopers; when the white detail officer protested, he was called a “nigger lover.”

It was not that the federal government lacked agencies to cope with this sharpening problem. The New Deal had immensely enlarged the machinery of action—perhaps too much so, in some sectors, considering the eleven federal agencies dealing with housing. But most of the programs were badly underfinanced; research and planning units had been starved by congressional conservatives; and the government was heavily dependent on state and local agencies and funds. Employment services, so crucial in a time of manpower mobility and mobilization, were an arresting example.

Confronting these problems almost daily in his double task of getting workers into the right jobs and keeping them there was the second half of the ungainly OPM leadership of “Knudsenhillman.” Sidney Hillman was Roosevelt’s kind of union man: opportunistic in meeting problems but principled in outlook; flexible in negotiations but right-minded in the final test; a tenacious defender of union rights who could also operate in the wider political arena; and with a solid and deliverable constituency in his Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Long accustomed to pacifying Communists, socialists, ethnic groups, hardboiled garment-industry bosses, “labor’s politician” now had to thread his way between his old comrade in arms CIO chief John L. Lewis and William Green, of the AFL, between liberal labor ideologists all out for defense and pragmatic Washington politicians, between industry representatives in the defense establishment and New Dealers operating out of their old Washington enclaves.

Hillman needed all his rough-and-tumble union skills in Washington, for from the start he had to fight to maintain labor standards in the defense industry and his own influence among the loosely organized defense agencies in Washington. He got along with Knudsen—he could get along with almost anyone. They had easily agreed on their jurisdictions: Knudsen would concentrate on production and priorities, and Hillman on manpower supply, strike prevention and mediation, and safeguarding labor standards. But different constituencies, conflicting responsibilities and perceptions, and the pushing and hauling of interest groups and staff assistants around the two men brought constant strain. Racked by tension and illness, Hillman would turn to the White House for support.

He liked Roosevelt—he liked his cordiality, the very tilt of his
cigarette holder; the man had style, Hillman told friends. But Roosevelt, too, had to bargain and conciliate and compromise, in a much wider orbit than Hillman did, and labor’s politician was often left to build and repair his own fences in the Battle of Washington.