American Experiment (320 page)

“Politics is out,” Roosevelt told reporters in March 1942. In assuming nonpartisanship the Commander-in-Chief had suspended some of the traditional political processes. There was now no loyal opposition to confront the White House and propose major alternatives—only individual critics shooting from all directions. But politics in democratic America could never be adjourned, war or no war. The only question was what form politics would assume.

It would take an electoral form in any event, since the 1942 congressional and state elections lay ahead. Well aware of Woodrow Wilson’s setback in 1918, the President adopted a hands-off policy. “When a country is at war,” he told reporters, “we want Congressmen, regardless of party—get that—to back up the Government of the United States.” But the Politician-in-Chief could no more abstain from politicking than a toper from a drink. He tried without success to produce a strong Democratic challenger to Thomas Dewey’s gubernatorial quest in New York. He was no more successful in seeking to unite Democrats and liberal Republicans against his old Dutchess County neighbor and antagonist Hamilton Fish. He publicly endorsed the independent reelection campaign of Senator George Norris,
sending him a note—“If this be treason, let every citizen of Nebraska hear about it”—but failed in his effort to keep a Democrat out of the race.

With a low turnout on election day, Republicans gained a surprising 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate. Wilson had called for a Democratic Congress in 1918, a commentator noted, and had lost seats in both House and Senate; FDR had not called for anything and had lost twice as many. Republican gubernatorial candidates Dewey in New York, Earl Warren in California, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, John Bricker in Ohio, all won. The independent Norris lost. When Congress convened in 1943, southern and border-state Democrats held 120 of the 222Democratic seats in the House and 29 of 57 in the Senate. With conservative Republicans they could form a majority. The anti-Roosevelt conservative coalition was alive and well again.

The new Congress set about gutting whatever was vulnerable in the remaining New Deal. The legislators in 1942 had already refused to allocate funds for the firstborn of the New Deal agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and even ardent New Dealers had to grant with FDR that the WPA now deserved an “honorable discharge.” But the same could not so easily be said of the National Resources Planning Board, the Farm Security Administration, or the Rural Electrification Administration, which Congress axed, gutted, or starved in 1943. In that year Congress rejected the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to expand Social Security coverage, even though Roosevelt had gone out of his way to take any New Deal label off it. And the Smith-Connally bill, giving the government wide powers to end work stoppages, was passed over his veto. John L. Lewis had got his comeuppance.

Having now doffed the garb of “Dr. New Deal,” as he put it, and donned that of “Dr. Win-the-War,” Roosevelt could accept the counterattack on New Deal measures with some equanimity. But the attack on his domestic war program was something else. On the critical issue of financing the war, he believed he could not afford to surrender. Congress in 1942 had passed tax legislation that raised $7 billion in additional revenue, boosted corporation taxes and the excess-profits tax, and brought millions of Americans onto the tax rolls for the first time. By mid-1943, however, the government was spending nearly $7 billion a month on the war, the national debt had risen since 1939 from $40.4 billion to $136.7 billion, and consumers would be left with more than $40 billion that available goods and services could not soak up. A flood of debt and inflation threatened the war economy.

To dam this flood Treasury Secretary Morgenthau in October 1943 called for $10.5 billion in new revenue, over half to come from personal income taxes and the rest from corporate, excise, and gift and estate taxes.

The House Ways and Means Committee threw out the Administration proposals and drafted a bill of its own that would raise just $2 billion in new taxes. This bill the full House and Senate passed after their conferees had merrily ratified the tax concessions the two chambers had granted business. It was “really a vicious piece of legislation,” Rosenman said, riddled with special-interest provisions.

His boss agreed. In a biting veto message FDR called the congressional measure “a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” He would not be content with this “small piece of crust.” Now it was Majority Leader Barkley’s turn to become indignant. He had advised the President against a veto, he brooded; now here was this sarcastic message. In high dudgeon Barkley stood before the Senate to denounce the President’s “relief for the greedy” crack as a “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress.” The stage was now set for a political charade. Barkley indicated he would resign as Majority Leader. FDR wrote him a placatory letter hoping that he wouldn’t, and that the Senate Democrats would reelect him if he did. Barkley resigned anyway, the Senate Democrats met and reelected him—all amid exploding flashbulbs and torrents of excited newspaper talk.

The flap was over in a few days, with Barkley back in his post as the Administration workhorse. But a residue of bitterness remained. And a fiscal crisis in the making, for Congress by heavy majorities passed its tax bill, the first time in history a revenue bill had become law over a presidential veto. For all practical purposes, Roosevelt now felt, the nation had a Republican Congress.

The penning up of over 100,000 fellow Americans, the wartime restrictions on almost everyone’s individual liberty, the continued subordination of women and blacks, the contrast between the material well-being of tens of millions of Americans and the deep and ceaseless sorrow of those who had lost fathers, brothers, and sons (and the first few mothers, sisters, and daughters), the impoverished lives of even high-flying, big-spending war workers—all this should have sharpened questions about the fundamental meaning of the war. Yes, avenging Pearl Harbor—yes, beating Hitler—yes, winning, winning—but beyond that, what? Four months after Pearl Harbor half the respondents in a survey admitted that they had “no clear idea of what the war was all about.” A year after Pearl Harbor fully one-third still had no “clear idea.” The vast majority had no notion—or only the foggiest—of the Atlantic Charter or of the freedoms the nation was defending.

Still, the concentration on winning the war, under the leadership of Dr.
Win-the-War, had a profound psychological impact on people. They felt included, involved, integrated with their fellow citizens. Even in remote areas people could tend Victory gardens, take part in civil defense, collect rubber or scrap metal or paper, turn in cans of fat, serve on rationing boards. Six hundred thousand people manned observation posts against enemy planes that never came. One such sentinel at the gates was a Connecticut woman of eighty-six years, three-quarters blind but with 20/20 hearing and sense of duty. For many this feeling of participating and sharing helped make up for the shabbiness of their wartime living and the emptiness of their war lives. At least for a time—the longer the war continued, Richard Polenberg concluded, the more people turned to “private and personal concerns.”

Even participation and sharing were not enough—what was the war
for?
During World War I, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, with its wide powers of propaganda and censorship, had aroused such intense opposition that Roosevelt shied away from any similar agency. He created first the Office of Facts and Figures, under poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and later the Office of War Information, which absorbed OFF and was directed by Elmer Davis, a journalist much respected for his terse and factual radio reporting. Charged with both putting out information and facilitating understanding of the war, Davis soon encountered the traditional opposition of the military to full dissemination of war news.

More surprising was OWI’s internal division over how to explain the meaning of the war. The “writers” followed MacLeish’s belief that Americans should begin at once to try to grasp what they were fighting for and hence that OWI should dramatize issues in a way that would “excite and encourage discussion.” The “advertisers” contended that OWI should “state the truth in terms that will be understood by all levels of intelligence.” The advertisers gained such ascendancy within OWI that many writers resigned in the spring of 1943, one of them leaving behind a mock poster displaying a Coke bottle wrapped in an American flag with the legend: “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms.”

Such government-sponsored shows as
This Is War!
explained the fighting to “all levels of intelligence” by trivializing it. Broadcast into 20 million homes,
This Is War!
began with
“Music: ominous”
—“What we say tonight has to do with blood and with love and with anger, and also with a big job in the making. Laughter can wait. Soft music can have the evening off.… There’s a war on.” OWI encouraged radio stations to broadcast one-minute plugs of the war. At least there was some down-to-earth humor. On Jack Benny’s “Victory Parade” his partner, Mary Livingston,
told of her uncle who had shed twenty-three pounds by eating nothing but soup. “Nothing but soup?” exclaimed Benny, the straight man. “S-a-a-y, he must a had a lot of will-power!” Then Livingston’s punch line: “No, my Aunt gave his teeth to the Rubber-drive.”

Hollywood was quick to get into uniform. Producers met the demands of the OWI advertisers and the public by playing up martial themes, casting servicemen as romantic leads, and replacing gangsters as public enemies with Nips and Huns. The Japanese, usually played by Chinese-Americans or Korean-Americans—except for Peter Lorre, a German who could also do Nazis—were portrayed as treacherous, sly, cruel, and prone to saying things like “The Rising Sun never sets, so her spies never sleep.” The GIs were average Joes, modest, stoic, loyal to the sweet girl they’d left behind. They explained the war in simple terms: “It doesn’t matter where a man dies, so long as he dies for freedom.” At its peak Hollywood was packing war themes into a third of its films, from
God Is My Co-Pilot
to
We’ve Never Been Licked
to
Four Jills in a Jeep.
But filmmakers lost interest in war themes about the same time audiences did. In July 1943,
Variety
headlined:
“STUDIOS SHELVE WAR STORIES AS THEY SHOW
40%
BOX OFFICE DECLINE.”

Tin Pan Alley chimed in with “We’ll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis,” “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific,” “Over Here,” “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’.” None of these measured up to World War I’s “Over There.” The most popular tune of the war— dolefully sung by men on sunny atolls and by their wives and sweethearts back home—was Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” crooned by Bing Crosby.

Even more pervasive than the sentimentalizing and trivializing of the war was its commercialization. “Fertilizer can win the war.” Prune juice was good for “America behind the guns.” A maker of bedroom furniture advertised that “America’s greatest fortress is the American home.” Mineral water helped “keep America fit in war time.” A manufacturer of air conditioning claimed that a Japanese ship was torpedoed because part of a periscope had been produced in an air-conditioned factory. The makers of Coca-Cola, seeking to keep their sugar allotment, persuaded the government to make Coke an essential war product. A bomber pilot coming across an ad headed “Who’s Afraid of the Big Focke-Wulf?” scrawled across it
“I
am” and mailed it to the manufacturer.

But few soldiers objected to the commercialization, especially when the ads spoke of home. If the GIs had an ideology, that was it. They wanted to win the war so they could go home. Meanwhile they made ersatz homes of their bivouacs. “The American soldier is a born housewife,” Ernie Pyle
wrote from the front. “They wish to hell they were someplace else,” Bill Mauldin wrote. “They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot. They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then climb out and crawl through minefields and fight some more.” They fought to go home.

“What would you say you were fighting for?” John Hersey asked a group of Marines on Guadalcanal. “Today, here in this valley, what are you fighting for?” The men fell silent, they looked distracted. Finally one of them spoke: “Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.” Soldiers talked less about returning to democracy, historian John Blum observed, than about creature comforts and affluence after the war. They talked about hot baths, flush toilets, a nice little roadster, a mother’s cooking, a blonde on each arm, a bottle of Scotch, a cabin on five acres, running their own filling station, fresh eggs.

Some would never come home. A new war photograph repelled soldiers and civilians alike. It showed a gray sea lapping at three men, armed, helmeted, booted, swelling into their fatigues, face down, sinking into the sand, dead. Was it an epigraph to the Japanese martial song about “across the sea, corpses in the water” when an American soldier-poet wrote of

… the slow, incessant waves

curving and falling,

the white foam lifting the white sand drifting

over your face, your outflung hand … you have come a long way, a world away, to sleep …

For Roosevelt and Churchill 1943 was a year of conferring and planning, as they presided over an almost nonstop series of traveling strategy meetings. The President met with Churchill at Casablanca in January 1943, as well as with the feuding French generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle; with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in Washington in March; with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington in May. Late in August he met with the Prime Minister and their military and diplomatic staffs in Quebec, and these meetings continued in Washington the next month. Then these sessions broadened into a series of global climaxes: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and military staffs in Cairo in late November; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Teheran at the end of November; Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo in early December.