Roosevelt (23 page)

For a few weeks suspense mounted as to whether the prize would go to Jackson or Stone—or to a dark horse. “We all think you should be C.J.,” a noted lawyer wrote to Stone, “but who can predict what F.D.R. will do? He has not the faintest idea of what goes to make a judge. ‘Views’ are all he seems to value….” The President consulted his old friend Felix Frankfurter, still a chief New Deal recruiting sergeant, who emphasized a point that was already clear to Roosevelt: the appointment of Stone, a Republican, would bolster the image of the President as a nonpartisan chief of state in time of emergency. The issue was not long in doubt; perhaps it never had been, for Roosevelt was able to give Stone’s empty seat to Jackson and thus put him in the running as the new Chief Justice’s likely successor.

Stone’s appointment won plaudits from most quarters; it was “so clearly and certainly and surely right,” said Archibald MacLeish, “it resounded in the world like the perfect word spoken at the perfect moment.”

Not all the President’s appointments were as easy or felicitous. The defense effort was creating an urgent demand for imaginative executives who could deal with business effectively without bending unduly to pressures. In April the President placed 85,000 additional positions under Civil Service. This action drew praise from “good-government” quarters, but it also betrayed weakness, for the Civil Service system that thwarted corruption and improper influence was also a shield for routineers lacking drive and imagination in the face of new defense needs, and hence for government as usual.

Roosevelt continued to be somewhat ambivalent about political appointments. In defense agencies he saw the need for nonpartisan policies. But he was under pressure from within the White House—even from his aides and secretaries, including Missy LeHand and Grace Tully—to crack down on appointments of lame-duck Republicans, or their assistants, to civilian agencies. He did not mind, he wrote to Jesse Jones, who was considered by New Dealers to be the most notorious offender, that in some of the defense agencies
“we are employing dozens of men who have hated the Administration and fought all constructive change for years.” But in the regular agencies “I honestly think that we ought to have people work for us who believe in us—not just lip-service….What to do?” Jones stayed mute.

But amid “government as usual” one action of the President during these troubled days of mid-1941 was a sharp departure from tradition—a departure, indeed, that opened a shaft of broken light down the whole course of American life in the years to follow. By the spring of 1941 discrimination in defense industries and—ironically—in federally sponsored training and employment programs was stirring Negro leaders to a new militancy. In April the National Negro Council urged the President to abolish discrimination in all federal agencies by executive order. Meetings of Walter White and fellow black leaders with Hillman and other defense officials brought little but promises; the Negroes wanted an antidiscrimination program with teeth. As a last resort the militant A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had proposed a march on Washington unless the administration took stronger action against discrimination. Now White and Lester Granger, of the Urban League, and other leaders picked up the idea. The threatened march would bring tens of thousands of blacks into Washington on July 1.

Roosevelt’s attitude toward Negro rights had been a compound of personal compassion, social paternalism, political sensitivity to their increasing articulateness and to racism in Congress, and a practical realization of their importance to the defense effort. For years Eleanor Roosevelt had been trying to develop some rapport between Negro leaders and her husband and his staff; as early as 1935 she had tried to persuade Steve Early that Walter White did not mean to be rude and insulting, that if he was obsessed with the antilynching bill, “if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has,” that his martyr complex was typical of minority-group people and was “probably an inferiority complex.” The general policy of the administration, if it had one, was separate but equal, in the armed forces, in civilian agencies, and—by exhortation—in defense industries, but the separation often thwarted the equality. Roosevelt had discouraged black militance and civil-rights controversy; he had reluctantly conferred with restless Negro leaders; he had also preached “equality of opportunity” again and again in speeches and in letters to Negro organizations. And in the campaign of 1940 he had made more definite pledges to black leaders than ever before. Now civil-rights spokesmen were asking him to deliver on both his principles and his promises.

He watched apprehensively the growing plan for the march. It
seemed to offer a rude threat to the image of national unity he was carefully fostering. When direct but quiet pressure failed to budge the leaders, the President appealed to them through his wife. “I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Randolph three weeks before the planned march. “I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made, in the Army at least, towards better opportunities and less segregation.” During this tense period, she went on, an incident might arouse in Congress “even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.” Crusades were successful sometimes—but not this time.

It was clearly a message from the President as well as the First Lady; still Randolph would not retreat without an executive order against discrimination. Roosevelt tried every compromise move he could: he met with Randolph and White along with his defense chiefs; he ordered the OPM to deal “effectively and speedily” with the problem; he tried all his arts of persuasion and conciliation. He still flatly opposed the march. “What would happen if Irish and Jewish people were to march on Washington?” he asked at the meeting, and answered the question himself: the American people would resent it as coercion.

But the President was beginning to weaken. In late June, with the march still scheduled, he sponsored a meeting of Mrs. Roosevelt, Aubrey Williams, head of the National Youth Administration, and Mayor La Guardia with the Negro leaders in New York. The meeting soon deadlocked, and Randolph and White threatened a march on the Little Flower’s City Hall, too. “What for, what have I done?” the Mayor cried. But they managed to negotiate the draft of an executive order, and the President approved it. At almost the penultimate moment the march was called off.

Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued on June 25, 1941, was a pontifical document with very small teeth. The duty of employers and labor unions was “to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Defense contracts were to include such a provision, and federal agencies concerned with vocational and training programs for defense production were ordered to administer them without discrimination. A Committee on Fair Employment Practices was set up in OPM, but without any real policing power. The order—which someday would be called a landmark step in the nation’s greatest internal struggle—was greeted with mixed feelings by Negro leaders and with subdued interest on the part of the big-city press. The President granted the committee limited funds, and it was slow to get under way. But it was a beginning.

Late in the morning of Sunday, August 3, 1941, the presidential train pulled out of a muggy Washington and headed north. Franklin Roosevelt and a small group of friends were off on a boating and fishing expedition. Late in the day the presidential party arrived in New London, Connecticut. There the Commander in Chief was piped aboard his yacht
Potomac,
which in the afterglow of sunset headed into Long Island Sound.

Next morning the yacht, with her presidential banner flapping atop the mast, anchored off South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in full view of hundreds on shore, took on Princess Martha, of Norway, and her two daughters, Prince Karl, of Sweden, and his party, and sailed out into Buzzards Bay, where the President and his royal guests bottom-fished from the stern of the yacht. They had only fair luck. In the evening the
Potomac
put back into South Dartmouth, the President taking the wheel of a Chris-Craft speedboat to land his guests at the yacht club. Next day the
Potomac,
still flying the presidential flag, proceeded north through the Cape Cod Canal, where onlookers gaped at the big figures of the President and his cronies sitting on the afterdeck.

But it was not the President they saw. Late the evening before, the
Potomac
had sped to the quiet waters off the western end of Martha’s Vineyard, where seven darkened warships were waiting. Early the next morning the President and his mess crew were transferred to the heavy cruiser
Augusta.
His top military command were already on board. Soon the
Augusta
was steaming east past Nantucket Shoals Lightship; then it swung north. Admiral Ernest J. King, in command, had taken all precautions; destroyers were disposed ahead off both bows; swinging out from the prow of the
Augusta
were batteries of sharp steel knives to cut mine cables; recently installed radar peered through the mists. Two days later the little fleet sighted the coast of Newfoundland and soon put into Argentia Harbor, in a small bay rimmed by low hills covered by scrawny pines and brush. Here the Americans awaited Winston Churchill, who was proceeding west on the
Prince of Wales.

It would be a meeting the President and the Prime Minister had long hoped for, a meeting that had been forced to wait on the tumultuous events of 1940 and 1941. As experts in the dramatic, they had set the stage carefully. To sharpen the suspense—and to discourage undue fears and expectations at home—Roosevelt had insisted on the tightest secrecy; even Grace Tully had had no hint of the trip. Such precautions meant hasty staff preparation and no agenda; the military chiefs were given the latest possible notice.
The President’s son Franklin was ordered to report so abruptly to the “Commander in Chief” on the
Augusta
that he feared he was in for some kind of dressing down from Admiral King; Elliott Roosevelt, summoned from his air-reconnaissance squadron in Newfoundland, was equally mystified. Churchill had preferred a more publicized rendezvous; he wanted to dramatize Anglo-American unity, conduct meaningful discussions, plan definite steps, win major commitments. Roosevelt wanted merely to meet Churchill, feel him out, exchange ideas and information, and achieve a moral and symbolic unity.

Early on August 9 the huge battleship
Prince of Wales,
still scarred from her encounter with the
Bismarck,
loomed out of low-hanging mists and dropped anchor. Soon Churchill was clambering aboard the
Augusta,
while the President stood arm in arm with Elliott and the band played the national anthems. “At last,” said Roosevelt, “we’ve gotten together.” The Prime Minister handed the President a letter from the King; staffs were presented to each other; soon the two men were meeting alone, except for Hopkins, who had come over on the
Prince of Wales
with Churchill. By the time Elliott joined them after lunch the men were deep in problems of Lend-Lease, diplomacy, and American public opinion. In the evening, after the two leaders and their staffs shared broiled chicken, spinach omelet, and chocolate ice cream in the
Augusta
’s mess, Churchill, at Roosevelt’s invitation, gave one of his enthralling appreciations of the military situation.

Rearing back in his chair, slewing his cigar around from cheek to cheek, hunching his shoulders forward, slashing the air with his hands, the Prime Minister described battles won and lost, spoke dourly of Russia’s chances, and in his great rolling phrases conveyed all at the same time a sense of Britain’s indomitability and its need for American intervention.

Roosevelt listened intently, fiddled with his pince-nez, doodled on the tablecloth with a burned match, occasionally put in questions. Next day, Sunday, he paid a return visit to the
Prince of Wales.
On the quarterdeck under the big guns President and Prime Minister attended religious services in the company of several hundred intermixed tars, bluejackets, and Marines spread out over the decks and turrets. It was another unforgettable ceremony, the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes draped side by side on the lectern, the President grave and attentive, Churchill, his Navy cap slightly askew, tearfully singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” American and British chaplains sharing in the reading of the prayers. It was a time to live, Churchill later reflected; nearly half of those who sang were soon to die.

Then to the business at hand. As the President expected,
Churchill pressed from the start for stepped-up American action in the Atlantic and a stronger line in the Pacific. Despite the hopeful reports of Hopkins from Russia and continuing intelligence that the forces before Moscow were holding out, the two leaders evaluated aid to Russia on the basis of what could be spared from Atlantic and home needs. Churchill still was seeing Soviet aid as a temporary expedient; Roosevelt, more as a long-term enterprise; but neither was yet ready to gamble heavily on Soviet survival.

Roosevelt did not want to go, in the Atlantic, beyond the recently agreed-on policy of American escorts for all fast convoys between Newfoundland and Iceland. But his willingness to stretch neutrality past this breaking point was clear from his commitment on other Atlantic islands. Churchill told him that he planned to occupy the Canary Islands, perhaps even before a still-feared Nazi attack through Spain. Such a move, Churchill conceded, would inevitably cause a German-supported counterattack by Spain, in which case Britain could not live up to its promise to Portugal to defend the Azores. Would the United States do so instead? Roosevelt agreed, on the understanding that Portugal would make the request of him. Later Churchill called off the attack on the Canaries, but the incident showed how far Roosevelt was willing—given a crisis situation in Iberia—to allow a move as important as the occupation of the Azores to turn on Churchill’s initiative.