No Ordinary Time, Page 69

  On July 27, the day before his speech, Roosevelt was asked at his press conference what the talk would be about. “It is going to be about the war,” Roosevelt quipped, provoking laughter throughout the room. “Abroad or at home, sir?” one reporter asked. “You know, I hoped you would ask that question just that way,” Roosevelt replied, then proceeded to deliver an extemporaneous mini-version of his speech. “There are too many people in this country . . . who are not mature enough to realize that you can’t take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it and put the war abroad on one side and put the home front on the other, because after all it all ties in together. When we send an expedition to Sicily, where does it begin? Well it begins at two places practically; it begins on the farms of this country, and in the mines of this country. And then the next step in getting that army into Sicily is the processing of the food, and the processing of the raw material into steel, then the munitions plants that turn the steel into tanks and planes or the aluminum . . . . And then, a great many million people in this country are engaged in transporting it from the plant, or from the field, or the processing plant to the seaboard. And then it’s put on ships that are made in this country . . . and you have to escort and convoy with a lot of other ships . . . . Finally, when they get to the other side, all these men go ashore . . . . But all through this we have to remember that there is just one front, which includes at home as well as abroad. It is all part of the picture of trying to win the war.”

  Roosevelt was in high spirits as he sat before the microphones in the Diplomatic Reception Room at 9:25 p.m. on July 28. As the speech was being put into final form, word had come over the radio that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been ousted from power. In the wake of the Allied invasion of Sicily, the Grand Fascist Council had convened, and Mussolini had been summoned to a meeting with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy at which he was told he was being relieved of his offices. When Mussolini was leaving the palace, the king had him arrested and asked Marshal Pietro Badoglio to form a new government.

  The stunning news from Italy provided the perfect backdrop to the president’s argument that the home front and the war front were inexorably tied together. “The first crack in the Axis has come,” he began. “The criminal, corrupt Fascist regime in Italy is going to pieces. The pirate philosophy of, the Fascists and Nazis cannot stand adversity.”

  In contrast, he argued, the productivity of the democracies was “almost unbelievable.” The logistical war was entering a new phase. The margin of Allied production over the Axis was now estimated to be three to one. The month of July promised a new peak of 4,560 planes, with a total output of eighty-six thousand expected by the end of 1943, nearly double the output for the previous year.

  Production of merchant ships was even more impressive. “This year,” Roosevelt proudly observed, “we are producing over 19 million tons of merchant shipping and next year our production will be over 21 million tons. For several months, we have been losing fewer ships by sinkings and we have been destroying more and more U-boats. We hope this can continue. But we cannot be sure.” As it turned out, the decline in shipping losses during the spring of 1943 would prove to be permanent. The Battle of the Atlantic was finally being won, releasing a flood of American munitions and troops into the major overseas theaters.

  Overall, munitions output in 1943 would be 83 percent greater than in 1942, aircraft tonnage 140 percent higher, merchant ships 100 percent higher, and naval ships 75 percent higher. The United States had come a long way since 1940 and 1941, when the army and navy needed all they could get of everything—tanks, bombs, planes, ships, rifles. Now, with important exceptions—steel, landing craft, and escort vessels—stockpiles were sufficiently high to permit cutbacks.

  American ingenuity had also filled the critical gap in the rubber supply after Pearl Harbor, when the Far Eastern plantations that had supplied the United States with 90 percent of its rubber were suddenly lost to Japanese conquest. At that moment, one reporter wrote, when production of all synthetic rubber totaled a mere twelve thousand tons a year, one-fiftieth of American’s annual prewar needs, “our very national existence was at the mercy of a dwindling stockpile.” But by 1943, production of synthetic rubber had turned the corner. Eighty-three percent of the 308,000 tons of new rubber supplies produced in 1943 would come from synthetic rubber. The first tires concocted by chemists from farm alcohol and petroleum had been released to essential civilian drivers. The crisis had passed.

  “To a large degree,” army historians have concluded, “the improvement in the military situation [in 1943] was a result of the huge outpouring of munitions from American factories and of ships from American yards. These trends coincided with a basic change that was occurring in the military position of the Anglo-American coalition—the regaining of the strategic initiative.”

  “We are still far from our main objectives in the war,” Roosevelt cautioned. But, compared with the previous year, progress was being made. “You have heard it said,” he concluded, “that while we are succeeding greatly on the fighting front, we are failing miserably on the homefront. I think this is another of those immaturities—a false slogan easy to state but untrue in the essential facts . . . . Every combat division, every naval task force, every squadron of fighting planes is dependent for its equipment and ammunition and fuel and food, as indeed it is for manpower, dependent on the American people in civilian clothes in the offices and in the factories and on the farms at home . . .

  “The plans we have made for the knocking out of Mussolini and his gang have largely succeeded. But we still have to defeat Hitler and Tojo on their own home grounds. No one of us pretends that this will be an easy matter . . . . This will require far greater concentration of our national energy and our ingenuity and our skill. It’s not too much to say that we must pour into this war the entire strength and intelligence and will power of the United States.”

  Novelist Saul Bellow remembers the exhilarating experience of listening to Roosevelt speak. “I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. The light held after nine o’clock, and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island. The blight hadn’t yet carried off the elms, and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it.”

  • • •

  The weekend after the president’s speech, Eleanor entertained labor leader Walter Reuther and his wife at Val-Kill. She talked with the young couple for several hours, spending the afternoon outside in the sun and then moving onto the porch, where, she wrote, they “watched the sun go down in a brilliant red ball of fire.” Reuther had a way of talking about industrial democracy that excited Eleanor. It was his dream to change both labor and management from their narrow pressure-group thinking to create a new form of workplace governance that would draw on the strengths of both sides.

  As long as the man behind the machine was viewed as “the worker,” standing in a class apart from management, the illusion would persist that he had no ideas to contribute to the successful operation of the plant. As long as management appealed to labor with the same techniques used to sell cigarettes and toothpaste, the immense creative reservoir which lay in the minds of millions of laborers would remain untapped. But if labor could be seen as something more than skill and brawn hired by the hour, if the workers could be given a measure of responsibility for generating new ideas, then there was no limit to the productivity of the American economy.

  Reuther’s idea centered on the notion of continuing
the governmental functions of the War Production Board after the war ended, in a new entity to be called the Peace Production Board. The Peace Board would be charged with the responsibility of administering the nation’s industrial effort for the benefit of the greatest number of citizens. Its first task, Reuther suggested, would be to oversee the conversion of aircraft factories into factories for prefabricated housing.

  “He is much the most interesting labor leader I’ve met,” Eleanor wrote Anna, “and I hope you meet him. He spent two years with a younger brother bicycling around the world and earning their way. He’s been to such out of the way places as Baluchistan, worked a year in Russia. Now he’s dreaming dreams of the postwar world and you would find him intensely interesting.”

  It was typical of Eleanor, when she found someone she liked, to wish that Anna could be there, too. With Anna, Eleanor once explained, she had grown to something different from her love for her boys, “to a mature understanding and sympathy, a feeling that we think and feel alike and can visit each other as friends and companions.” For her part, Anna had come to trust her mother’s love. She knew, her son Johnny later observed, “she had more of her mother than she had earlier in her life and more than anyone else in the family” and she took pleasure in that. “Darling Mum,” Anna wrote after they spent a week together in Seattle, “somehow and no matter how long we have been separated, there is a click when we get together and a continuous clicking until we have to part once more.”

  So it was that Eleanor, knowing that Anna was having a difficult time at the paper with John away, traveled to Seattle in midsummer. In John’s absence, the burden of editing the paper and dealing with the continuing machinations of William Randolph Hearst had fallen on Anna’s shoulders. No sooner had John left than Hearst had put in place as associate publisher a man named Charles Lindemann, who Anna believed had “a terrific hatred” for the New Deal, did not like her, and was doing everything he could to ensure that she failed.

  Though Eleanor’s plane reached Seattle long past midnight, Anna was at the airport waiting. “She looks very thin,” Eleanor wrote Lash, “but is making a wonderful effort to meet what is almost an intolerable situation.” Working with people she neither liked nor trusted was very difficult for her, Eleanor explained, but “if possible she was going to stick it out.”

  For Anna, as for thousands of other women whose husbands had gone off to war, there were new burdens and new responsibilities. It was a confusing time. Yet mingled with the weight of obligation there was also a sense of exhilaration. During her first week of editing the paper on her own, Anna could honestly say that, despite the intrigue and the challenge, she loved it. “I’m having the time of my life—calling on all the tact I possess,” Anna wrote John, “enjoying making my own decisions and attempting to use my bean for all it’s worth.” The situation had become more difficult since then, but even so, Anna told John, “You’d be amazed at the timid gal you used to know—who was always hearing spooks in the house and depending on you to defend her from all sorts of imaginary dangers! Now I drive myself alone at any and all times of the day and night, through the worst as well as the best parts of town.”

  With Eleanor, Anna could talk about her feelings—her pride in her newfound independence, her anger at John for leaving, her daily struggles at the paper. “It is the first time since you left that I’ve had someone to ‘blow-off’ to and it’s been a very relaxing experience,” Anna wrote John. For six peaceful days, Eleanor accompanied Anna to the office in the morning and sat by her side in the afternoon as she banged away on her typewriter. In the evenings, they played badminton, went swimming, and then celebrated the close of the day with an “old-fashioned” cocktail.

  The more Anna extended herself to find a life of her own, the closer she felt to her mother. No longer seeing her mother with the eyes of a child, she was able to empathize with Eleanor’s lifelong attempt to establish an independent identity. For her part, Eleanor was pleased to be needed. “I think having me here relaxed her because she could talk about all sorts of things she had not felt like discussing with others,” she told her son-in-law.

  At the same time, Eleanor confided to Anna her own worries about Jimmy and Elliott. Jimmy and his second wife, Rommie, had spent a miserable Fourth of July weekend at Hyde Park. Rommie claimed the president kept mentioning Jimmy’s first wife, Betsey Cushing, and snubbed her at every opportunity. Elliott had also spent a weekend at home, but the visit was tense. She and he had such different philosophies, Eleanor told Anna, that she had to be careful around him at all time. “I only like being in close quarters with people whom I love very much,” she admitted. “I made the discovery long ago that very few people made a great difference to me, but that those few mattered enormously. I live surrounded by people, and my thoughts are always with the few that matter whether they are near or far.”

  Eleanor’s visit to Seattle served to renew both her own and Anna’s spirits, but her absence from Washington exacted a toll on her relationship with her husband. Though she talked with him once while he was in Hyde Park for the weekend with Margaret Suckley, the conversation was distant and he seemed evasive about his plans for the rest of the summer. “It was nice talking with you last night,” Eleanor wrote the following day, “but I began to wonder if you were planning to leave for parts unknown very soon. Will you call me . . . and tell me what your plans are? Of course I’ll come at once to Washington if you are leaving in the near future.”

  “I guess one of the sad things in life,” Eleanor admitted to Joe Lash, “is that rarely do a man and woman fall equally in love with each other and even more rarely do they so live their lives that they continue to be lovers at times and still develop and enjoy the constant companionship of married life.”

  • • •

  The midsummer weeks of 1943 witnessed expanding activity in the American Jewish community in behalf of the European Jews. During the last days of July, an Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe was convened at the Hotel Commodore in New York City. Through three sweltering days, fifteen hundred people listened to an impressive group of speakers, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, writers Dorothy Parker and Max Lerner, and former President Herbert Hoover, offer a range of plans for rescue.

  Roosevelt’s response to a plea for cooperation was a vague, noncommittal message, read at the end of the conference, which spoke of the government’s “repeated endeavors” to save the European Jews and promised that “these endeavors will not cease until Nazi power is forever crushed.” Yet, far from making repeated endeavors, the government had attempted very little on the rescue front, and the few actions they had taken, such as the two-power American-British Conference on Refugees which had been held in Bermuda the previous spring, had produced little or no results.

  Eleanor sent an equally unsatisfactory message to the Emergency Conference, which revealed complete misunderstanding of the situation. Though she was glad “to be of help in any way,” she could not figure out, she said, what could be done at the present time. If, however, a program of action could be formulated, she was certain that the American people, “who have been shocked and horrified by the attitude of the Axis powers toward Jewish people will be more than glad to do all they can to alleviate the suffering of these people in Europe and to help them reestablish themselves in other parts of the world if it is possible to evacuate them.”

  Contrary to Eleanor’s assumption, a program of action already existed and was spelled out in detail by the speakers at the conference. The first step, rescue advocates argued, was to form a governmental agency officially charged with rescuing Jews. With this in place, former President Hoover suggested, additional measures could be taken, including Allied protection and support for those Jews who had escaped to neutral countries, pressure on Palestine to absorb more Jews, and preparations for refugee havens in Africa. Beyond these actions, Mayor LaGuardia observed, the U.S. must open its own doors to increased immigration. “Our own govern
ment cannot urge other nations to take the initiative before it takes action of its own.”

  The stumbling block was not ignorance of what should be done but the absence of sustained will and desire on the part of either the government or the people to do anything at all. Despite Eleanor’s claim that the American public was “shocked and horrified” about what was going on, the vast majority of ordinary people had only a vague idea of what was happening to the European Jews. Most American newspapers printed very little about the slaughter of the Jews. If mass killings were mentioned, they were generally presented not as the systematic murder of an entire race of people, but as an unfortunate byproduct of the general ravages of war. Nor could most Americans, growing up in a democratic culture, comprehend the unprecedented scale and savagery of Hitler’s determination to obliterate the Jews.

  Of course, Roosevelt was privy to far greater information than the ordinary citizen. Though neither he nor anyone else in his administration fully understood the extent of what only much later came to be known as the Holocaust, he had read the Riegner report the previous November. He had met that fall with Rabbi Wise and a delegation of Jewish leaders to talk about the slaughter of European Jews. He had spent nearly an hour in July talking with Jan Karski, a leader in the Polish underground who had traveled to London and Washington at great risk to report on the terrible events he had witnessed in Poland. Disguised as a policeman, Karski had seen the insides of the Belzec concentration camp, on the western border of Poland, where thousands of Jews were being gassed. “I am convinced,” Karski told Roosevelt, “that there is no exaggeration in the accounts of the plight of the Jews. Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.”