Roosevelt (49 page)

The President waited over a week, until Columbus Day, to report to the nation on its home front. It was a long chatty speech. The main thing he had observed on his trip, he said, was not exactly new—“the plain fact that the American people are united as never before in their determination to do a job and to do it well.” He described some of the things he had seen, skillfully interweaving praise for accomplishments and criticism for employers who refused to hire Negroes or women or older people. He announced almost in passing that it would be necessary to lower the existing minimum-age limit for Selective Service from twenty to eighteen. He scorned “typewriter strategists” who were full of bright ideas but little information. He would “continue to leave the plans for this war to the military leaders.”

He mentioned the millions of Americans in army camps, naval stations, factories, shipyards. “Who are these millions upon whom the life of our country depends? What are they thinking? What are their doubts? What are their hopes? And how is the work progressing?” He could not really answer these questions on the basis of a two weeks’ tour, nor did he try. But perhaps he sensed that the American people were a strange compound of determination to win the war and to avoid its exactions and harshness, of an emotional involvement in the war without wholly understanding it, of constant exposure to war excitement and problems and an effort to elude them.

On the surface the war dominated everything. People were singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “The Fuehrer’s Face,” “He’s A-1 in My Heart,” “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” “You’re a Sap Mr. Jap.” Theater marquees featured
Wake Island, Atlantic Convoy, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Torpedo Boat, Remember Pearl Harbor, Flying Tigers.
Practically all big institutional advertising played on the war theme. Even Munsingwear’s foundation garments pictured a WAAC saying, “Don’t tell
me
bulges are patriotic!” and Sergeant’s Flea Powder showed “Old Sarge” exclaiming, “Sighted flea—killed same.” The stage was not yet inundated by war plays, but John Steinbeck’s
The Moon Is Down
told of heroism in a Nazi-occupied town and Maxwell Anderson’s
The Eve of St. Mark
had a remarkable reception on Broadway for a war play.

Some of the promotion and huckstering had a latent radicalism. Pan American Airways ran full-page advertisements presenting answers by John Dewey, Hu Shih, the Archbishop of Canterbury to the question: “What kind of a world are we fighting to create?”; Canterbury’s answer was a radical version of the Four Freedoms. Movie documentaries were appearing:
Native Land,
a dramatization of American labor’s fight for civil rights;
Henry Browne, Farmer,
a government film on the importance of the Negro to the
war effort. The communications media could not always keep up with fast-moving military and ideological developments. Twentieth Century-Fox put out a movie glorifying the Yugoslav Chetniks at a time when General Draja Mikhailovich was losing favor with progressives and the Partisans were winning it. Books were slower to mobilize for war. In the fall of 1942 people were reading Matthew Josephson’s
Victor Hugo,
James Thurber’s
My World—and Welcome to It,
and Hesketh Pearson’s
G.B.S.;
but they were also reading John Scott’s
Duel for Europe,
Ethel Vance’s
Reprisal,
Herbert Agar’s
A Time for Greatness.

In sum—if one could summarize a vast array of opinions marked by strange combinations of volatility and opaqueness—Americans toward the end of their first year of war seemed emotionally intent on fighting the war but not fully mobilized physically or intellectually to win either the war or the peace to follow. Trying to look at the scene with the detachment she had applied to Samoans and Balinese, anthropologist Margaret Mead feared that Americans were too passive, or at least that the government was treating them as if they were passive. One of the nation’s greatest strengths, she wrote this same fall, was in the American
character.
If her definition of this character was hazy, her conclusions went to the heart of the problem of an ill-mobilized nation. As a nation we had to honor our leaders, she granted, as something like ourselves—as part of ourselves. “But if the war should ever come to seem a battle in which Roosevelt and MacArthur and Kaiser are supermen—father figures who do our fighting or our thinking for us while we simply watch the show—then there would be danger, for such an attitude would bring out not the strengths of the American character—but its weaknesses.

“To win this war, we need the impassioned effort of every individual in the country,” she continued. “…The government must mobilize people not just to carry out orders but to participate in a great action and to assume responsibility. Above all government must tell the truth….It’s not that we need victories; but we gotta feel we have victories in us.”

She went back to the Puritans for the mixture of practicality and faith in the power of God, for a sense of moral purpose, back to Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan emerging from the Anglo-Saxon tradition—“Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!”

By coincidence the provocative, forty-year-old anthropologist was saying the same thing as the conventional, aging Secretary of War Stimson: the battle against Nazism must be fought with a sense of moral purpose. A moral purpose was exactly what Roosevelt felt he was supplying in his sermonizing speeches. Certainly his
personal popularity remained high; the question was whether he was helping people see connections between the lofty, compelling symbols such as Freedom and Democracy and the practical political and economic choices which people could make and which in turn would influence the great decisions of the war.

The most important of these practical choices would come with the congressional elections of fall 1942.

At a press conference some weeks after Pearl Harbor the President had been extolling a new book by Marquis Childs,
This Is Your War.
He quoted approvingly from the jacket blurb: “A pampered nation in the past, America is inexperienced in war.” What the country needed was the practical energy of every citizen. “This is your war.” Right, said the President.

Could there be a greater concentration of effort on the main problem among various political groups and newspapers, he was asked.

“Yes. Very distinctly. I would say it was about time for a large number of people—several of whom are in this room—to forget politics. It’s about time. We read altogether too much politics in our papers altogether….They haven’t waked up to the fact that this is a war. Politics is out. Same thing is true in Congress.”

Did that include Cabinet members?

It was pretty rare in the Cabinet, said Roosevelt. “Whenever I see any implications of that kind I step on it with both feet.”

It was Roosevelt in one of his favorite roles—the high-minded chief of state acting for the whole nation, rising above sordid group and party interests. It was not the first time he had tried to adjourn politics since Pearl Harbor, and it would not be the last. When Democrats gathered at hotel banquet halls across the nation to pay off the party’s debt, which survived war and peace, they heard the President discuss the war and denounce “selfish politics” with nary a mention of either the Democratic party or party saints Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

The Commander in Chief’s nonpolitical posture faced several difficulties from the start. It was not clear just what he meant. Was he against politics in general, or just party politics, or just “selfish” politics? When he publicly called for Congressmen who would “back up the Government,” did he mean that they would be tested—even purged—on the basis of support of current war policies of the government only, or even on the basis of their pre-Pearl Harbor support of the administration’s foreign policy? Certainly the
President could not oppose politics in general in a nation that was proudly flaunting its democratic institutions and processes—including free, regular elections—in a war against totalitarianism. As for selfish politics, everyone was against that—but what was it? Defining what was selfish and unselfish politics was at the heart of the democratic struggle.

Presumably the President was hoping to minimize traditional party politics, for he carefully avoided Wilson’s call for a Democratic Congress, and he dismissed as “perfectly silly” a
New Republic
claim that the fall elections would be the most important since the Civil War. Obviously, in wartime the President needed the backing of the two liberal, internationalist parties, the presidential Democrats and the presidential Republicans, for his coalition strategy and war policies. Did he, then, favor a party realignment with all liberals and internationalists in one party, all conservatives and isolationists in the other? Some liberals so concluded and looked eagerly toward an ideological party split. Others were not so sure. Anti-Roosevelt newspapers took advantage of the confusion to hint darkly that the President would cancel the fall congressional elections.

Adjournment of party politics would require the co-operation of the other party. And the Republicans in election year 1942 had no intention of surrendering their monopoly of the opposition. Nor did their leader, Wendell Willkie, whose party position now was even more anomalous than Roosevelt’s.

In the weeks after Pearl Harbor the two men had conducted a political minuet. The President offered Willkie a war job as arbitrator under the War Labor Board, and considered him for director of manpower; he did not offer the one job that Willkie doubtless would have accepted—production chief. Willkie suspected that the President had finally appointed a production boss mainly because of his own proddings. The White House announced the offer of the arbitration job before Willkie had had a chance to answer. As for Willkie’s demand that MacArthur be brought back to unify the defense effort, Roosevelt told his aides that that was downright silly. Even Winston Churchill stumbled into the strained situation when during his stay in Palm Beach he telephoned Willkie to arrange to see him—only to discover after some conversation that he was talking to Roosevelt. Still, despite all the troubles, Roosevelt and Willkie had a sneaking affection for each other. They met at the White House occasionally and kept in touch through intermediaries.

Whatever the climate at the White House, however, Willkie stuck to his main job as he saw it—constructive criticism. Again and again he demanded that America face up to its postwar
obligations, especially the keeping of the peace through international organization. He attacked isolationism, colonialism, race hatred; he joined with Eleanor Roosevelt, La Guardia, Dorothy Thompson, and other notables in founding Freedom House; he denounced the persecution of minorities, though stopping just short of opposing the Japanese relocation program; he took advanced positions on civil rights, civil liberties, colonial peoples, a second front in Europe in 1942. In the four-party battle that survived Pearl Harbor he was lambasting congressional Republicans for their isolationism and conservatism and congressional Democrats for their racism and conservatism.

The absence of a strong, institutionalized opposition party shortened Willkie’s reach; it also gave him far greater leeway. Indeed, in the endless Virginia reel of political couplings and cleavings, Roosevelt and Willkie were brought into slightly embarrassing embraces. They met in April to talk, among other things about getting Ham Fish out of Congress. “I did enjoy that little party the other night a lot,” Roosevelt wrote to Willkie later, but he admitted that they had not got far on the Fish matter. Willkie later openly opposed the conservative Congressman’s renomination. That effort failed, but he also battled and overcame Taft and other congressional Republicans in persuading the Republican National Committee to take a moderately internationalist position at its spring meeting in Chicago, under the very nose of Colonel McCormick. He tried to conduct a “shadow purge” by intervening in Republican primaries against extreme isolationists and reactionaries. He tolerated for a while a short boom for himself as Republican candidate for governor of New York, then firmly stepped on it. Thomas E. Dewey, far more restrained than Willkie, more cautious, was out front for the choice as Republican standard-bearer for the seat Herbert Lehman was vacating.

By summertime hope was rising among some Republican and Democratic liberals that Roosevelt and Willkie might join hands to found a new party, or at least a party coalition, to win the war and organize the peace. The two men seemed agreed on policy; Willkie simply enjoyed a freedom to speak out that was denied the President. Then, on the heels of the 1942 New York Republican convention, Willkie suddenly announced that he was planning to leave the country—and the campaign—to travel around the world. His purposes, he said, were to demonstrate American unity, to “accomplish certain things for the President,” and to find out “about the war and how it can be won.”

The trip had been Willkie’s idea, but the President had seized on it eagerly and fully co-operated. Since Willkie would not be back until shortly before the election, any hope of real collaboration
between the presidential parties was gone for 1942 at least. It was easy to see why Willkie wanted to make the trip, but what were Roosevelt’s motives? Earlier in the year Eleanor Roosevelt had remarked to her husband that the Democratic party was beginning to creak from disuse. The Republicans creaked more, Roosevelt had said, and would creak even more when he took Willkie into the government. Now the titular Republican leader would be away during the height of the campaign. He was deserting a host of political comrades—men who had fought by his side in 1940 and were running for office two years later—in their hour of need. For weeks he would be the President’s personal representative. Did the President want a loyal opposition? Did he hope that the Grand Old Party would creak and creak—and then crumble into the dust?

Certainly the Democracy was creaking. National Chairman Edward J. Flynn, accustomed to good, simple party fights back home in the Bronx, had never fought an election like this one. When he merely tuned up for the fray by suggesting gently that a Republican House would be a disaster, the President repudiated him. The National Chairman was supposed to define issues for the campaign—but what were the issues? Flynn did not even hold the party reins in an off-year election, for oversight of the congressional campaigns was vested in Democratic campaign committees in the Senate and the House. These committees were tied in with the congressional party leadership, however, and had limited funds, few issues on which congressional Democrats agreed, and virtually no control over Democratic candidates for Congress. The only force that might influence such elections from outside was the White House, the only party leader, Roosevelt—but he had adjourned politics for the duration and stressed that winning the war was the only issue. And how could a campaign be fought on that?