Roosevelt (82 page)

The United States was spending over three hundred million dollars a day on the war. Income—real, disposable, per capita—was soaring to new heights, heading from under $1,000 in 1940 toward almost $1,300 four years later. The total labor force in 1944 was sixty-six million, twelve million over 1940, with women providing five million of the increase. Unemployment had dropped from the eight million of 1940 to 670,000 four years later; the huge lump of Great Depression joblessness had vanished at last. For the first time in history the participation rate (per cent of population over fourteen years employed) rose to over 60 per cent. In 1944 over two-thirds of teen-age boys (fourteen to nineteen) were gainfully employed. One of the biggest jumps in participation was among men sixty-five and over. War had dramatically solved the problem that Roosevelt had struggled with for a decade.

Behind the bounding economic figures was a social panorama etched in hope and anguish. Most evident was the war migration. Eleven million young men and women were uprooted from their communities and sent off to the four corners of the globe; a civilian migration to better jobs was changing the face of the South, the inner cores of major cities, and the industrialized metropolitan outskirts. The war sharply accelerated the decades-old flow of blacks and whites out of the South and into the coastal and inland industrial regions of the North and West. Within metropolitan areas whites were moving to the fringes of the cities, while Negroes settled in the urban cores, where they became more socially visible, economically significant, and politically potent than they had been in the old rural cultures of the South.

Over the frantic protests of the War Manpower Commission, the placement of plants lured workers from their homes, communities, parents, and families to lucrative new jobs. But the migration of able-bodied young men was not enough, for the armed services and industry had an insatiable demand for manpower, and one by one all groups were pulled in. Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Stimson found that color was no barrier to war usefulness; next, women were urged to work; then the young and the old were summoned, along with the illiterate, the handicapped, the leisured, aliens, students, and finally Japanese-Americans from the concentration camps. The people responded, but the demand was infinite. Even as the participation rate for women climbed over 36 per cent, Roosevelt and Stimson pleaded for drafting women into the Army.

Since for war purposes all bodies were equally necessary, and the war priority was all-powerful, traditional distinctions and ties diminished. The kinship system, never very strong, was virtually dismantled. The demands for young men in the services and on the assembly line lessened their economic dependence on their elders and projected anew the cult of youth. The freedom and importance of young people—almost instant adulthood—sent the marriage rate skyrocketing. The demand for women as economic producers on assembly lines caused a new move toward sexual equality and a de-emphasis on the wife-mother role. Families, separated geographically and functionally, spent less time together. Long overtime hours, migration to job centers, the induction of husbands into the services, and the loss of control by parents over marriage, all weakened family stability.

The equality of bodies virtually destroyed the old yardstick of status, identity, and legitimacy. New income taxes, high wages, and rationing undercut the economic stratification system. Conspicuous consumption was difficult when, for example, yachts were donated to the Navy for shore patrol. The status of jobs in economic sectors changed drastically; the lowly military, political, and
governmental jobs suddenly became highly prized. Draft-board regulations made manual labor in factories and on farms more important—and sometimes more rewarding—than the work of salesmen, small businessmen, and college professors. No one planned these changes; few foresaw them.

The hierarchy of age, income, sex—in fact, the whole stratification system—was eroding. From the disorder there gathered, among other forces, a new social energy of black Americans. As a consequence of moving north, blacks became better paid, more educated, better fed and clothed. They were also becoming more frustrated and socially disorganized. Negroes moved into city slum areas as whites departed for the suburbs—and into the hand-me-down housing left behind. Crowding intensified; 60,000 Negroes moved into Chicago areas previously occupied by 30,000 whites. As usual, black income lagged behind white, and many blacks felt more keenly than ever the gap between the egalitarian, antiracist ideals of the war and the pervasive discrimination around them. In May 1944 a clear majority of respondents across the nation told pollsters that whites should have a better chance at jobs than Negroes because whites were superior, or better trained, or more intelligent, or more dependable, or because this was a white man’s country.

Negroes by the thousands were now coming into contact with whites in war jobs. And though racial strikes constituted only .00054 of all work stoppages, the confrontation was usually troublesome. After a year of war, OWI reported that “Southern whites who came with the construction crews brought racial attitudes foreign to the community.…As a matter of fact, racial tensions actually developed to the acute stage under the influence of these new attitudes….”

In 1943 Ickes wrote to Roosevelt that discrimination, “although it can be nibbled at ineffectively locally, cannot be handled except on a comprehensive national scale. This is not a local question. It is a national one.” The Fair Employment Practices Committee and other fragile efforts, however, could not begin to grapple with social resistance and change of this magnitude. The FEPC admitted its impotence in the face of flagrant discrimination by the railroads and the railway unions. The first FEPC report, on defense training by the Office of Education, was suppressed by Roosevelt on the advice of the War Department and Marvin McIntyre. At the urging of the State Department, Roosevelt stopped FEPC hearings on discrimination against Mexican-Americans “for international reasons.” When the Office of Education in Washington called on white universities in the South to admit Negro scholars, the Jackson, Mississippi,
Daily News
told it to “go straight to hell….Nobody but an ignorant, fat-headed ass would propose such an unthinkable and
impossible action.” The South Carolina legislature declared, “We are fighting to preserve white supremacy” in the war, and J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt that “a good proportion of unrest as regards race relationships results from Communist activities.” Two months before Pearl Harbor, Selective Service Director Hershey wrote to Roosevelt, “It is obvious we must sooner or later come to the procedure of requisitioning and delivering men in the sequence of their order numbers without regard to color.” After three years of coping with white racism, however, Hershey changed his mind: “what we are doing, of course, is simply transferring discrimination from everyday life into the Army.”

Roosevelt was ambivalent. In midwinter 1944 members of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association met with him for a special press conference. Roosevelt had hardly finished his cheery greetings when John Sengstacke, of the Chicago
Defender,
read a statement. For long moments, while Roosevelt listened, Sengstacke recited grievance after grievance arising from discrimination in jobs, schools, voting, civil rights. Second-class citizenship, he said, violated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and hurt the war effort. An awfully good statement, the President commented. He liked to think, he said, that mere association helped things along. But he admitted that “we are up against it.” When Chairman Ross of the FEPC suggested facilities for black victims of infantile paralysis at Warm Springs, Roosevelt wrote to his wife, “you can tell Mr. Malcolm Ross that Tuskegee Institute has a whole unit devoted to the care of Negro children,” and worriedly asked an aide, “what should I do about this?”

The other race bearing the sting of discrimination in America at the height of the war—Japanese-Americans in concentration camps—also received lukewarm support from the President. In September 1943 Roosevelt had publicly promised, “We shall restore to the loyal evacuees the right to return to the evacuated areas as soon as the military situation will make such restoration feasible.” When Stimson admitted to the President in May 1944 that the Army saw no military reason for keeping loyal Japanese in the camps, Roosevelt suggested that he investigate attitudes in California. At a Cabinet meeting Stimson warned that if the Japanese were freed there might be riots and Tokyo would retaliate against American prisoners of war. The President decided that suddenly ending the order excluding Japanese from the West Coast would be a mistake; the whole problem should be handled with the greatest discretion by seeing how many families would be acceptable to public opinion in specific West Coast localities, and by the gradual shifting of one or two families to individual counties throughout the nation. He had found that some Japanese-Americans would be
acceptable to Dutchess County. Then it turned out that Ickes, to whose jurisdiction the War Relocation Authority had been transferred early in 1944, favored immediate release; and Hull warned that Tokyo was more likely to react to incidents involving Japanese-Americans in custody than those at large. That put a different face on the problem. By September, Undersecretary of Interior Abe Fortas could report that out of 114,000 evacuees, over 30,000 had been relocated on indefinite leave, 60,000 were in relocation centers and were being released at the rate of 20,000 a month, and over 18,000 were still at Tule Lake and not eligible for relocation.

The old system was gone, replaced by government agencies, and the wartime bureaucracy had but a single standard: military usefulness. Like many institutions, education fragmented under this test. The public schools thrived; working mothers and the move to urban centers sent more six to fourteen-year-olds into the schools, though there was a drop in high-school attendance. War fervor helped the social-involvement and learning-by-doing emphases of progressivism, which took more control over the public schools. Roosevelt had said, “We ask that every school house become a service center for the home front,” and the schools responded with bond drives, courses in Asian geography, and paramilitary school organizations. The boom in public education was only half the story, for colleges and universities were out of a job. Male students and teachers were drafted, women left for factory work; so the colleges stood idle. In 1943-44, liberal-arts graduates were less than one-half and law-school graduates only one-fifth the prewar level. Vannevar Bush estimated to the President that science lost 150,000 college graduates and 17,000 advanced-degree graduates to the war.

Clearly war mobilization meant educational disruption. As protests poured in from college presidents, Roosevelt sought a short-term solution. “Federal participation in this field should be limited, at least for the present, to meeting defense needs,” the President said, and asked Stimson and Knox for an immediate study of the fullest use of American colleges for war purposes. By the end of 1943 the Army Specialized Training Program and the Navy V-12 program had used idle college buildings at about five hundred institutions to provide training for about 300,000 men. But as the result of a strong letter from Marshall pleading for young men for the forthcoming invasion of France, the Army cut its program to the bone in early February 1944, and, on Rosenman’s advice to the President, the Navy did the same. The war came first; everything else must wait.

Higher education would never return to the prewar system. The drafting of students, the military-training programs, and OSRD
weapons research had changed it permanently. Students marched in the Army; the Army marched in the classrooms; science professors improved bombs and medicines in the laboratories. After consultations among Stimson, Smith, Hopkins, Rosenman, and Oscar Cox, Roosevelt, on November 17, 1944, wrote to Bush requesting a program for postwar government subsidy of research and “discovering and developing scientific talent”; from this request evolved the National Science Foundation and the incorporation of universities into a new defense-industry complex. Together with the GI Bill of Rights educational giants, the government subsidies transformed local liberal-arts institutions into centers for national research and vocational instruction. The temporary war-research organizations and the temporary termination of teaching produced a lasting reorganization of education.

The temporary became permanent, the means became ends, as emergency change lasted into the postwar world. Roosevelt himself was responsible for much of the confusion, for he tried artificially to separate war from postwar, temporary crisis from permanent tasks, means from ends. “I am not convinced,” he declared, “that we can be realists about the war and planners for the future at this critical time.” Yet the future would not wait for peacetime planning; it was growing from the narrowly conceived war organization. Roosevelt demanded the authority to mobilize for war, but he disclaimed responsiblity for planning against the social disruptions brought by mobilization.

With peacetime institutions dismantled, only government organizations could deal with social turmoil. Where government mechanisms persisted into the war period, disruption was transformed into progress. With the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the War Labor Board, and a host of New Deal agencies agreeing on union policy, union membership during the war jumped more than six million. In 1944 one-quarter of the work force belonged to unions, strikes were a third the prewar level, defense workers received one day of rest in seven, a thirty-minute meal period in the middle of each shift, a vacation period, overtime pay, and a host of other stabilizing and humanizing benefits. Clear policies, established organizations, and the obvious military benefits of good labor relations prevented the turmoil potential in the migrations, conversions of industries, and new entrants to the labor field.

For labor, Roosevelt had a policy and stuck to it; for other social problems there were limited goals and faulty means. In the absence of effective programs, Roosevelt was often confronted by social disruptions that were the product of day-to-day military-industrial decisions. The disruptions were inevitable in a quickly mobilized country, but in the absence of social goals, unrest provoked
ad-hoc
responses seeking vainly to restore prewar arrangements. In housing, the need to shelter millions of black and white war workers thrust the government into deciding for or against segregated housing. In the absence of any social goals, housing agencies decided to abide by prewar “local custom.” Migration to defense communities, however, was so massive as to make “local custom” irrelevant; local custom quickly became whatever the government decided. In these communities, the more numerous whites had more political power than the blacks, so cities such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which prewar segregation was virtually unknown, received segregated housing, starting a new “local custom” still in force many years later.