Roosevelt (35 page)

“I realize that this is a terrific directive,” Roosevelt said, “but I feel certain that in this very great emergency we can attain it.”

The nation must strain every existing arms-producing facility to the utmost, the President warned in his State of the Union message. In mid-January he established the War Production Board under the Office of Emergency Management in his Executive Office. The WPB was headed by the same eight officials who had manned SPAB, but with one major difference—the chairman would have unprecedented powers to “exercise general direction over the war procurement and production programs and determine plans and procedures for purchasing, contracting, building, requisitioning, plant expanding.” OPM was put under the new board; SPAB was abolished. At last the President had responded to congressional and popular clamor to set up a czar of czars in production.

“Production for war is based on men and women—the human hands and brains which collectively we call Labor,” the President
told Congress in his message. “Our workers stand ready to work long hours; to turn out more in a day’s work; to keep the wheels turning and the fires burning twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week.…” A week later he established the National War Labor Board, with four public, four industry, and four labor members. In contrast to the old Defense Mediation Board, the new agency would have authority to take jurisdiction over a dispute on its own initiative; it would have major wage-stabilization responsibilities; and, above all, it could under its own rules impose arbitration rather than merely recommend it.

“War costs money,” the President said in his State of the Union address. “So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it. We have devoted only 15 per cent of our national income to national defense.” The war program for the coming year, he said, would cost fifty-six billion dollars—more than half of the estimated annual national income. “That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials….”

In his budget message early in January the President urged that seven billion in additional taxes be collected during the fiscal year 1943 and that Social Security trust funds be raised by two billion. “An integrated program, including direct price controls, a flexible tax policy, allocations, rationing, and credit controls, together with producers’ and consumers’ cooperation will enable us to finance the war effort without danger of inflation.” If inflation could be controlled during the war, a recession could be prevented after it.

“…We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God,” Roosevelt concluded his message on the state of the union. “Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image—a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.

“This is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives. No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.”

It was one thing for the President to issue clarion calls for production, discipline, sacrifice—but something else to set up the necessary agencies and give them adequate powers. The impact of the new war agencies would depend on the kind of men he chose, the leadership he supplied them from the top, the power resources he could help them mobilize to carry out their programs in hostile terrain. The bleak fact was that industrial mobilization had been
faltering to the point of crisis during the weeks before Pearl Harbor. The priorities system—the heart of effective mobilization—was breaking down as manufacturers demanded and often received the highest ratings to obtain materials. Machinery and staff were inadequate for ordering priorities in terms of a comprehensive plan; there was, indeed, no real general plan. Disputes between civilian and war agencies, between New Dealers and conservative businessmen, between cautious expansionists and “all-outers” boiled beneath the surface and often erupted in the press—or at least in indignant memorandums to the Commander in Chief. SPAB and OPM could not program, allocate, order, deny, penalize; at best they could bargain, negotiate, mediate, persuade, and exhort.

Production figures were proof of the pudding. Aircraft production had soared; then the rate of increase fell off during 1941. Of 1,279 combat aircraft scheduled for production in October, Isador Lubin of OPM informed the President, war plants had turned out 923, most of which went to other countries. Fewer naval ships were produced in the third and fourth quarters of 1941 than in the second. Cargo-ship production declined during the last half of 1941; even more ominously, so did the production of copper, lead, and zinc. Steel production rose only a million tons between the first and last quarters.

The failures had a multitude of causes, but not least the President’s reluctance to make strategic commitments, his determination not to plan ahead too far, his fear of vesting too much authority in one man or office. Pearl Harbor jarred these old predilections of his. The declared war not only gave him a plenitude of authority to clear the decks, boost production goals, and grant power; it also gave him the popular backing for crisis action and the self-assurance that he was acting for a consensus. He was aware, too, that events had dramatized the failures of SPAB and OPM. The Truman Committee was digging up production delays and muddles, and its chairman was urging that a strong man with full authority be placed at the head of the production effort.

Roosevelt was under pressure from within his administration, too: Stimson urged him to concentrate executive power into a single head on the business side of munitions making; Felix Frankfurter, who was still sending the President notes of unabashed admiration and praise, wrote him a long memo favoring the appointment of a man who would serve as the President’s eyes and ears in overseeing the defense program and would be an instrument of the “centralized execution of the President’s will—an instrument of dispatch, concentration and responsibility.” The CIO was still pressing for faster conversion through the establishment of industry councils. Walter Reuther, of the Auto Workers, charged a week after Pearl
Harbor that his year-old plan to convert auto plants to airplane manufacture had been sabotaged by Knudsen.

Even with all this, Roosevelt took a gingerly approach. It was clear that Knudsen had to go; but the old GM boss had been so utterly loyal and had become such a symbol of mobilization that the President did not know how to let him go, until Hopkins came up with the idea of making him a lieutenant general and production expediter. For a time Roosevelt dallied with the notion of setting up a committee of Willkie, Donald M. Nelson, of OPM, and Justice William O. Douglas to “explore” the problem of defense organization for him; Hopkins talked him out of that notion. For a time he thought of making Douglas the new czar of czars, but Stimson felt that this would be a “hideous” appointment. In the end the job went to Nelson, who had proved himself no superczar, but a skilled conciliator, and had won the backing of most—or, at least, antagonized the fewest—of Roosevelt’s defense chiefs.

“It took Lincoln three years to discover Grant, and you may not have hit on your production Grant first crack out of the box,” Frankfurter wrote to him. “But the
vital
thing is that you have created the function—the function of one exclusive ‘final’ delegate of your authority…indispensable for
your
conduct of the war.”

The labor situation before Pearl Harbor had been equally critical and far more visible. Four times as many workers struck during 1941 as in the year before. The defense boom and AFL-CIO rivalry were major causes, but the thorniest issue was union security. Labor chiefs contended that new workers flooding into the defense plants could not enjoy the benefits unions had fought for without joining; employers denounced any effort to use the defense crisis to boost union power. On this explosive issue the National Defense Mediation Board had followed a wavering course, always denying the union shop, once even granting a closed shop, and sometimes recommending maintenance of membership (under which all employees who were members of a union or who later became members must stay in the union for the life of the contract, or lose their jobs). The NDMB was under pressure to set a more definite policy, but, lacking clear direction from the President or credible authority of its own, the board continued to straddle the issue.

Roosevelt’s old adversary John L. Lewis happily fished in these troubled waters. Wrangling in turn with employers, rival unionists, and the White House, he demanded a union shop for the “captive” miners working in pits controlled by Big Steel. In mid-September 1941 he pulled the captive mine workers out on strike. Fearful of strengthening his already powerful union, the Mediation Board repeatedly denied him the union shop. In mid-November the two CIO members of the board denounced both the employer and the AFL members for opposing the union shop, and resigned. The miners kept striking, returning to work on the President’s request, and then striking again. At the White House Roosevelt bluntly warned Lewis and CIO President Philip Murray that “the Government of the United States will not order, nor will Congress pass legislation ordering, a so-called closed shop.”

May 2,1941, Hugh Hutton, by permission of the Philadelphia
Inquirer

Once again Roosevelt and Lewis were at loggerheads. When the President asked the union chief to let the question be arbitrated, Lewis replied loftily that the President was so prejudiced that no one he chose would be impartial.

The gauntlet had been thrown. By now—two weeks before Pearl Harbor—the Mediation Board was expiring. Its chairman, William H. Davis, was urging Roosevelt to request legislation authorizing the government to seize and operate the mines. Trouble flared on another labor front, as the five railway brotherhoods rejected the findings of an emergency presidential board. The White House asked both the miners and the railroad workers for further parleys,
but clearly parleying was no longer enough. Both employers and union chiefs needed a command, and Roosevelt would not command them. Rather, he had become a one-man mediation appeals board. Pressure was applied on him directly from all sides. He had to devote hour after hour to negotiating, placating, maneuvering—and do so during the feverish days of rising military and diplomatic crisis of late November and early December.

But the President was still the master broker. While Lewis stalled on the question of arbitration, the President blandly went ahead and set up a tripartite board of arbitration, under John R. Steelman, head of the conciliation service of the Labor Department. The Mine Workers grumpily ordered its men back to work. The President’s man was not as susceptible to Big Business blandishments as Lewis had charged, for Steelman promptly sided with labor to decide in favor of the union shop for the captive coal mines. That decision was handed down on December 7, and hence buried in the press—another bit of lucky timing for the President, and for Lewis.

After Pearl Harbor, in the exuberant new mood of national unity, the President convened his labor-management conference to reach agreement on basic policy for maintaining labor peace. The conferees labored five days. They agreed to discountenance all strikes and lockouts for the duration and to submit disputes to a new war labor board for binding settlements. But on the emotional issue of union security, the conference soon became deadlocked. Industry representatives wanted to freeze union status for the duration; labor would not have it. The session became tense.

Like an old stage manager, the President pulled down the curtain before the peace conference turned into a battle royal. He ingenuously accepted the no-strike pledge and announced that he would set up a new board to handle disputes. Since he did not exclude the union shop as an issue that the new board could properly arbitrate, the President in effect passed the spiky issue on to the new agency. This was a victory for laborites and liberals who wanted government to accept the challenge and opportunity of the union-security issue. Then in appointing men like Davis, Wayne Morse, long friendly to labor, and Frank P. Graham, a liberal educator, as public members, Roosevelt made an indirect commitment to some form of union security. With this lead from the White House everything would now turn on the decisions of the board under the day-to-day pressure of new disputes.

The President had long recognized that workers would not sacrifice wages and status unless the cost of living and industry profits were held down, but it was on this economic front that his power was most limited. He had had a price-control bill introduced in
the House Banking and Currency Committee in August, only to open a Pandora’s box of special interests. During three months of hearings, well-organized groups pressed for special exemptions; most vociferous and effective were the Farm Bureau Federation and other farm groups. Under their pressure Roosevelt and Henderson reluctantly went along with a provision for no per cent of parity. The bill that passed the House ten days before Pearl Harbor was already a tattered remnant of what Roosevelt had wanted. The Senate, even more vulnerable to farm pressures than the House, so riddled the bill with further concessions to cotton, wheat, oats, barley, and hog growers that Majority Leader Alben Barkley himself branded it a “farm relief” measure.