Read an Excerpt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The War Years, 1939-1945
By Roger Daniels UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Roger Daniels
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09764-5
CHAPTER 1
Reform, Neutrality, and War
1939
Roosevelt's annual message in early 1939, and the congressional response to it, prefigured his relations with Congress for the remainder of his presidency. As long as his chief concern was national defense and eventually the prosecution of the war, he could usually count on majority support drawn from both sides of the aisle for most of his proposals. But when he endeavored to expand the New Deal, he would often encounter serious difficulties.
The president began by speaking of the endangered peace, asserting that although war had been "averted ... storms from abroad" threatened America. He went on to warn that "the world has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift that no nation can be safe in its will to peace ... weapons of defense give the only safety." He promised to send a special message on defense in a few days. As long as he spoke of danger and defense, it was clear from the response in the Capitol chamber and the remarks that followed that he had the support of the overwhelming majority. Isolationists, however, were troubled by his use of the phrase "methods short of war" and his observation, made as the final victory of Franco's revolt in Spain became increasingly certain, that "our neutrality laws ... may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim." They feared, correctly, that this presaged an attempt to alter the Neutrality Act.
Roosevelt went on to redefine national defense, dividing it into three elements. The first two — "armed forces ... strong enough to ward off sudden attack [and achieve] ultimate victory" and "key facilities [that can be] rapidly expanded to meet all needs" — were generally agreed upon. But his insistence that the nation's program of social and economic reform was "a part of defense, as basic as armaments themselves," did not receive similar acceptance.
Much of the rest of the address was a defense of New Deal liberalism, comparable in many ways to his recent speech at the University of North Carolina. But, thinking of his national audience, Roosevelt avoided using either the words New Deal or any form of the word liberal. Instead, he spoke of "what we have accomplished since 1933" and of "reform," while arguing that all of it contributed to "national preparedness." The president itemized his achievements: "conserving and developing national resources"; "trying to provide necessary food, shelter and medical care"; "putting agriculture on a sounder basis"; "strengthening the weakest spot in our system of industrial supply — its long smouldering labor disputes"; "cleaned up our credit system"; and "giving ... youth new opportunities and education."
While admitting that some things remained to be done — "better provision for our older people" and better care "for the medically needy" — there was no trumpet call for a vast program of reform. The major immediate goal he set for the Congress was his revised reorganization bill, and he allowed that since 1933 Congress had met all or part of the nation's "pressing needs." "We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform. Our full energies may now be released to reinvigorate the processes of recovery in order to preserve our reforms, and to give every man and woman who wants to work a real job at a living wage."
Since, as he spoke, unemployment, always a lagging indicator, was still about 18 percent — in round numbers some ten million persons — providing jobs for everyone was a herculean goal for which he made no concrete proposals. The Works Progress Administration rolls had peaked in November at 3.35 million, serving at best a third of the unemployed, and were already being cut by his administration. One of the fights with Congress in 1939 would be over how much to cut the WPA. At no time during the 1930s did the administration attempt to provide directly for even half of the unemployed. Roosevelt did not talk about unemployment in any detail, but there would soon be a special message on the WPA, which he did not mention in the annual message. The president admitted that "dictatorships," using methods "we abhor," had at least temporarily solved their unemployment problems. He asked: "Can we compete with them by boldly seeking methods of putting idle men and idle capital together and, at the same time, remain within our American way of life, within the Bill of Rights, and within the bounds of what is, from our point of view, civilization itself?" He spoke of the "great unemployment of capital" and argued, correctly, with his newfound economic sophistication, that the widespread notion that "we are overburdened with debt" was false: "Despite our Federal Government expenditures the entire debt of our national economic system, public and private together, is no larger today than it was in 1929, and the interest thereon is far less than it was in 1929."
This kind of macroeconomic thinking was too counterintuitive to be effective and, in fact, would have been rejected by the Roosevelt of 1936–37. Most Americans, including most members of Congress, believed that the economic maxims of Ben Franklin's Poor Richard or Dickens's Mr. Micawber applied equally to personal and governmental budgets. Roosevelt never got traction with this argument and stopped using it.
He did, however, directly challenge those in Congress who sought to cut spending. He again used the concept of national income. In the June 1938 Fireside Chat, with the outcome of his stimulus package in doubt, he could only offer the hope that national income would not "fall below sixty billion dollars." Eighteen months later, with that level seemingly sustained, he could raise the possibility of increased spending — he called it "investing" — to create an $80 billion economy, but he warned that some thought the United States was "only a sixty billion dollar country"
He insisted that it did not seem logical, "at the moment we seek to increase production and consumption, for the Federal Government to consider a drastic curtailment of its own investments." He acknowledged the point of view that advocated eliminating "enough activities of government to bring the expenses of government immediately into balance with the income of government." But to accomplish this, Congress "will have to reduce the present ... activities of government by one third" drastically curtailing a number of big-ticket items ranging from "aid to agriculture" to "national defense" "The Congress" he continued, "has the power to do this."
Rejecting that point of view, he argued that maintaining the current level of government was necessary and that the United States could not become "an eighty billion dollar nation in the near future if government cuts its operations by one-third. ... [I]f we were to try it, we would invite disaster." Referring to his mistakes of 1937 without specifically admitting them, he added that "we have learned that it is unsafe to make abrupt reductions at any time in our net expenditure program."
Although his argument was not particularly effective, Roosevelt had assimilated enough of what some of his tutors had been telling him to put forth an essentially Keynesian position — though he never let the dreaded word pass his lips in public. Sam Rosenman, who helped write this speech and devotes four pages to it in his memoir, never discusses the argument and probably did not understand that it was a Keynesian premise. His only mention of the economist is to recount what "Lord Keynes" said to him about Lend-Lease in London in 1945.
The budget message the next day proposed spending $9 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1940. It estimated that the national debt — the accumulated deficit — which had been some $37 billion on June 30, 1938, would be $44.5 billion by mid-1940. Aware of the growing hostility toward deficit spending — what he termed "recovery spending" — Roosevelt put a colloquial passage into the otherwise ponderous budget message. "We have not been throwing the taxpayers' money out of the window or into the sea. We have been buying real values with it. Let me repeat: The greater part of the budgetary deficits that have been incurred have gone for permanent, tangible additions to our national wealth. The balance has been an investment in the conservation of our human resources, and I do not regard a penny of it as wasted."
It probably did little to change popular preconceptions. A Gallup poll published a day after the budget message but taken sometime in the previous fall reported that 61 percent of respondents (46 percent of Democrats and 89 percent of Republicans) thought that the government was spending "too much" and that the numbers had not changed significantly since 1935. A similar poll in 1934 had found that only about 40 percent thought that the government was spending too much. Other poll numbers published two days later showed the president's popularity at 58 percent, up from 54.4 percent just before the 1938 elections.
Two other messages supplemented the budget message: a deficiency request for $875 million to keep the WPA going went to Congress at the same time as the budget message, while the promised additional request for national defense expenditures went up a week later. Predictably, the WPA request drew initial negative reactions. Roosevelt's message reviewed the results of the stimulus package that Congress had approved and observed that the money then appropriated would run out at the end of the month. His request, he thought, would fund 3 million WPA jobs in February and March, with the number gradually diminishing until it reached 2.7 million in June.
The House cut the appropriation to $725 million, and early in February the Senate agreed; Roosevelt signed it and immediately sent a request for the missing $150 million. When that was not forthcoming, he repeated his request on March 14, which resulted in the appropriation of $100 million on April 11. Thus, Roosevelt had gotten all but $50 million of the requested appropriation, 95 percent of what he asked for.
Two more major appointments followed: Frank Murphy to be attorney general and Felix Frankfurter to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of the liberal Benjamin Cardozo the previous July. Both, plus recess appointee Hopkins, had to be confirmed. Murphy replaced Homer Cummings, who resigned at age sixty-nine after serving almost five years. His undistinguished tenure's most important event was the terrible advice he gave Roosevelt in the Court fight. If Murphy had been reelected governor of Michigan, the post would have probably gone to Roosevelt's confidant Robert H. Jackson, who was solicitor general.
It was thought that Murphy would have a difficult confirmation hearing in view of his refusal to use the power of the state to break the sit-down strikes in Detroit in 1937, but that was not to be the case. To the surprise of many, Vice President Garner made efforts on his behalf after Murphy's production of a letter he had written to John L. Lewis, informing Lewis that if a settlement were not reached quickly he would enforce the court order that the strikers leave or be removed from the General Motors plants. Murphy was confirmed 87–7, with a majority of GOP senators positive. Frankfurter, known as the mentor of many New Dealers, won Senate approval without a dissenting vote. Harry Hopkins's appointment drew a heavy attack, though confirmation was never in doubt; the vote was 58–27.
During the entire session, Roosevelt filled 631 positions requiring Senate confirmation, of which 12 were turned down, only 2 of them major positions. Both were federal circuit court judgeships — one in Virginia, the other in Nevada — which ran afoul of the extraconstitutional tradition of "senatorial courtesy" whereby the Senate refuses to "advise and consent" to the appointment of federal judges and prosecutors opposed by a senator from the state in which they would serve. Roosevelt made an issue of one and ignored the other. He had originally made a recess appointment of state judge Floyd H. Roberts to a new judgeship in the Western District of Virginia on July 6, 1938, despite the fact that the state's senators, Carter Glass and Harry Byrd, had recommended two other candidates. Roberts sat until the full Senate defeated his nomination by a vote of 72–9 without debate. Roosevelt, who had corresponded with Glass about his appointment philosophy as early as March 1938, was putting down a marker by deliberately challenging the extraconstitutional tradition begun during George Washington's administration. The Senate has almost always rejected appointments to positions in the home state of senators who have declared that the appointment is "personally obnoxious" to them. After the rejection, Roosevelt wrote a public letter to Judge Roberts, praising his service and attesting that there had been no criticism of him as a judge. The president insisted that the Constitution intended the "advice" to come from the Senate as a whole.
The Jackson Day Dinner that wound up the first week of the year gave Roosevelt a chance to rally Democrats and speak for the first time about the 1938 election. He began by acting out an imaginary conversation with the seventh president that had Jackson saying to him:
Young fellow, do you realize that if you live out the term you now have, you'll be the only president of any party who had two full terms with a majority of his own party in both the House and the Senate all the time, the only President since — who do you suppose? — why, son, since James Monroe ... Tell your fellows to learn to count. Some of you Democrats today get scared and let the other fellows tell you you've lost an election just because you don't have majorities so big that you can go to sleep without sentries.
Switching back to his own voice, Roosevelt offered a formula for victory in 1940, noting that "millions who had never been Democrats" put the party in power in 1932 and kept it there in 1936 to get "certain things done." The way for the party to stay in power was to continue to "get those things done which non-Democrats, as well as Democrats, put it in power to do." He continued to insist that to win again, the Democrats must continue to be a liberal party and "act as a party in power" by continuing to pursue liberal policies. He invited "nominal Democrats ... convinced that our party should be a conservative party" to join the Republicans. As Roosevelt surely expected, no such defections occurred among congressional Democrats.
The national defense proposal was ready late in the second week: the basic decisions had been made at a White House meeting in September 1938. At that meeting, Roosevelt, against the wishes of many of the military brass, initiated a policy of giving top priority to aircraft production and pilot training, which General Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold (1886-1950), who led the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1938 to 1946, called the Air Corps' "Magna Carta." Initial goals of seventy-five hundred military planes, total aircraft production of twenty thousand planes, and training twenty thousand pilots had been established later in the fall. These and similar decisions were very much presidential decisions, and for the rest of his presidency the problems of military preparedness would absorb more and more of Roosevelt's time and energy. All American presidents have been, by virtue of the Constitution, "commanders in chief," but no previous peacetime president had exercised those powers so fully, and only Abraham Lincoln had actually functioned in that role. From his earliest days in the White House, Roosevelt did not merely decide on options presented to him by civilian and military officials but actively participated in shaping those decisions, often revamping and rejecting his official advice.
The national defense message began with Roosevelt reemphasizing that it was "imperative that we take immediate steps for the protection of our liberties" but warning that "it would be unwise to yield to any form of hysteria." Seeking to appear to be moderate on the subject, he warned against both extremes: those who claimed that it was necessary to spend "billions of additional money" as well as those who felt that "no further additions" were needed. Citing his experience — "those of us who took part in the conduct of the World War" — he explained that after the declaration of war in April 1917, no American units took part in engagements until May 1918, and that relatively speaking "we are not much more ready" to conduct large-scale land or air operations today. He also assured the public that neither "the Congress or the President have any thought of taking part in any war on European soil."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Franklin D. Roosevelt by Roger Daniels. Copyright © 2016 Roger Daniels. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
