but they cannot altogether alter it.” 7
To Walter Lippmann, the philosopher king of the punditocracy, the whole aim
of Japanese diplomacy had been not to promote peace in the Pacific, but to iso-
late the Chinese and create an irreparable breach between China and the United
States and Britain. Lippmann advised that there could be no settlement in the Far
74 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
East other than a general settlement that respected the interests of all the parties.
Anything else would be a repeat of Munich. It would, moreover, set the stage for
the nightmare of two generations, a war between East and West, a war he did not
hesitate to label a war between the “yellow peoples and the whites.”
America’s Role: Political Responses
American public opinion continued to be fiercely divided. America First
announced that it would campaign actively for Senator Wayland (Curley) Brooks
of Illinois, a leading isolationist. Its polls, it said, showed members unanimous for
action at the polls and clamoring for a firm front against the “interventionists.” 8
A stalwart among the isolationists—or, as they preferred to call themselves,
the noninterventionists—was Colonel Joseph V. Kuznick of Chicago, who had
commanded combat troops in France. He announced his resignation from the
American Legion. In his opinion it was misrepresented by a handpicked Execu-
tive Committee, most of whom had never seen overseas combat. Worse yet, the
Executive Committee had surrendered to the New Deal, in Kuznick’s view part
and parcel of “an un-American hell-bent-for-war administration.” Only one-
third of the Legion’s members had actually fought in World War I, he grumbled,
and three-quarters opposed fighting Nazi Germany “just to save Bolshevism.”
The statements of a small but vociferous section of the Legion were representative
neither of its own membership nor of the American people. 9
*
While the Soviet Union was engaged in massive defensive battles from Leningrad
in the north to Rostov to the Caucasus in the south, the American Communist
Party and its allies were also embattled. Deep suspicion of its members and its activ-
ities was interwoven in the continuing debate about America’s role in the war and
in the world. In New York, Actors’ Equity Association was in the process of submit-
ting an amendment to its constitution barring members of the Communist, Nazi
or Fascist parties or their sympathizers from holding office in or being employed
by Equity. A January 9 final vote would require a quorum of 750 paid members
present; if there were fewer, the council would be empowered either to accept the
vote of a majority or to order another referendum. Also objects of the amendment
were members of the Communist Party of the United States, the National Socialist
Party of Germany and the Fascist Party of Italy, and in a basket clause, sympathiz-
ers with or persons who knowingly and willingly advocated the overthrow of the
government of the United States by force or other unlawful means. Such persons
would be ousted from the union. 10 There were tangled loyalties involved here. The amendment provided for the ouster of members of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union at a moment when the Soviets were basking in favorable public opin-
ion occasioned by their sturdy defense and now offense against the invading Nazis.
*
In a letter to The New York Times , Merle Miller, later to become the biographer of Harry Truman, sounded a strident call to arms. He spoke in the name of
Wednesday, December 3, 1941 75
his generation arguing that their fathers had not succeeded in a “war to end all
wars.” Indeed, they had lost the peace to a group of “disillusioned old men in the
United States Senate.” But that hardly proved them wrong, Miller wrote, citing
the heritage of the Revolution and the Civil War.
His generation Miller labeled a generation of idealists, but idealists who were
hardheaded enough to know that, together with the youth of England, of Rus-
sia, and of China, they could set free the conquered countries and the world.
His generation, Miller wrote, might shrink from the sound and the fury, from
meaningless slogans. But, speaking as one of draft age, he did not hesitate to claim
that the majority of his generation were unafraid of the struggle for freedom. He
echoed the President’s words that his generation had a “rendezvous with destiny”
and assigned to it Lincoln’s well-known words that America could “nobly save
or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.” He closed with his own words: “As
courageously as we can, as wisely as we are able, we mean to say that, and now.” 11
Joining Miller in calling for action, author and ex-Soviet agent Jan Valtin had
told a Houston audience that America would have to adopt the methods of the
totalitarian states, to learn that it could chop off heads, too. Democracy was all
very well but played into the hands of the enemy.
*
In addition to the suspicion of communism, there was always abroad in the land
latent anti-British sentiment. This was based in part upon Ireland’s grievances;
in part upon concern for those hundreds of millions in the British Empire who
did not enjoy the freedoms for which it was ostensibly fighting; and in part upon
Americans’ distaste for so many manifestations of the British class system. But,
Valtin assured his audience, it was not necessarily pro-British or pro-Russian
to join in the struggle with those countries as allies. It was simply a matter of
the preservation of America’s own freedom and of its own daily life. Until the
Germans invaded Russia, he said, communists had been a menace to the United
States. As soon as the war was over, they would be so again: they would resume
their aims and their activities. Valtin spoke for many when he argued that it was
a case of fighting now or fighting later, alone. 12
*
There were, to be sure, other voices, other opinions. No one is or has been more
highly esteemed in America than its mothers. To slap the “Mothers” label on
any activity or opinion is a much favored method of gaining public support.
An organization calling itself Mothers Mobilized For America, Inc. (the notion
of incorporation also lends solidity) sent letters of “condolence” to mothers of
American sailors whose sons had been lost in the U-boat attack on the U.S.
destroyer Reuben James. These letters did not stop at expressions of personal sorrow or sympathy. They intimated that it was not the German U-boats but the
administration in Washington that had been responsible for the loss of these
lives. This, The Oregonian editorialized, was “utter shamelessness” exceeding any boundary of isolationist criticism: it smelled of Nazi propaganda and might just
as well have borne the label “Made in Berlin” and been mailed with a Nazi
76 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
stamp, so typical was it of the work of the “jabbering Herr Goebbels.” There
would always be in America, The Oregonian said, dupes for such transparent
ploys. Even if they were not real fifth columnists, only unwitting fifth colum-
nists, they needed to be dragged out into the light. 13
*
Yes, the war and its impacts were the talk of the town. In New York various
groups gathered to consider its progress and its prospects. The Namesake Towns
Destroyers Committee of the English Speaking Union was meeting at 4:00 p.m.
at Rockefeller Plaza. A dinner honoring Dr. Israel Goldstein, held by the Inter-
faith Committee for Aid to Democracy, was paralleled by a dinner at the Waldorf
Astoria for the British War Relief Society to aid British children, and a 7:30 p.m.
dinner at the Commodore Hotel honoring Russian Counsel Victor Felduishiny
of the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Biro Bidjan.
Economic Indicators: Massive Defense Spending
America was going back to work and the new demand was for swords, not plow-
shares. The New York Times listed previously unpublished government contracts.
Transparency was important as a protection against self-serving and under-the-
table dealing. Improprieties in government contracting were, as they had always
been, a continuing concern.
Instead of its standard printing presses, R. Hoe and Co., Inc. of New York
undertook a $1,900,876 contract to produce gun-recoil mechanisms, while Otis
Elevator Company contracted for $1,930,400 of gun mechanisms and castings.
Growing armies needed more than guns, as indicated by a contract with Supe-
rior Linen Company for sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, and the like. Materials
parts and $827,049 to La France Truck Corporation—historic producer of fire
engines—for trucks, and more trucks.
If many suppliers ventured into new product lines, Antoneri Fireworks Com-
pany of Rochester was only doing what came naturally in supplying a million
dollars’ worth of ammunition. But in the early stages of a great defense buildup,
the real urgency was in machine tools and other essentials of the production lines
that would be critical in filling all the other contracts. This was typified by con-
tracts for a modest $2,600 with Manning, Maxwell, and Moore of Jersey City for
drill presses, punches, and shears; with J. H. Williams & Company of Buffalo for
forgings and dies for $6,410; for $4,211 with Ole Engstrom of New York City
for punches and dies; and with Producto Machine Company of Bridgeport for
$15,850 for milling machines. The largest of the contracts reported that day was
with New Haven’s High Standard Manufacturing Company for over $10 million
for guns.
Democracy’s arsenal was gearing up and producing the spectrum of goods
and components necessary to make fighting vehicles, planes and ships. Thus the
Navy in the month of November was growing at the rate of a ship a day, with
Wednesday, December 3, 1941 77
thirty-three vessels completed in November, including the mighty battleship Indi-
ana , destroyers, submarines, submarine chasers and auxiliary vessels. 14 , 15
This scale of activity enabled William T. Witherow, chairman of the National
Association of Manufacturers, to tell the opening session of its annual convention
that American industry had already finished and delivered a volume of defense
goods greater than had been specified in the government’s plans. Indeed, since
March 11, 1941, when the first Lend-Lease bill had been enacted into law, industry
had supplied nearly $10 billion in equipment against orders for $9.3 billion. “No
matter how frequently the specifications are raised,” Witherow told his audience,
“industry will produce to meet them.” The importance of the defense program
was brilliantly illustrated by Witherow’s closing remarks, an unusual acknowledg-
ment by an industry group that “only the unthinking can find fault with stricter
government controls required to accomplish this titanic defense task with the
speed necessary to do the job on time.” 16
What was more usual was the warning by Senator Walter F. George of Georgia
that federal taxes were nearing the danger line; that any increase would hurt the
nation; and that the costs of the defense program must be spread over generations. 17
The products of the defense program were on display for a day in a special
defense train, one of three touring the country, that would be open at Houston’s
Southern Pacific Station to local manufacturers and others interested in taking
part in the defense program. More than 700 local manufacturers and machine
shop operators were expected to visit the train in groups cycling through it every
forty-five minutes.
Other special groups would be formed of OPM representatives, city council
members, and other officials not only from Houston, but also from Mississippi,
Arkansas and Louisiana.
Liberty and Justice for All: In the Matter of Race
The contrast between the American promise and American performance was
evident every day in the area of race relations, and it often took extreme, not to
say grotesque, forms. In Jacksonville, Texas, the Central Texas Colored Meth-
odist Conference in convention condemned the unjustifiable, indefensible, and
horrible slaying of Matt Flournoy, a seventy-year-old black farmer, in the very
courtroom where he stood trial on November 24 at Lufkin for the alleged assault
and attempted slaying of Ray Morehouse, a nineteen-year-old white woman.
Flournoy was stabbed to death in open court. His assailant, Ray’s twenty-five-
year-old husband, was charged with the killing and released on a $3,000 bond.
The Conference wrote to the U.S. Attorney’s office lamenting the negligence of
the officers in the court and their failure to protect Flournoy. It asked in turn for
Was there hope for justice in such an environment and in the face of such
attitudes? Modest progress appeared on the same day in a Georgia courtroom
where a prison camp warden was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the
death of black inmate Lewis Gordon. The victim and twenty-one others had
78 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
been confined in a “sweat box” for eight or ten hours. The warden had left the
camp after ordering the punishment. When the prisoners cried out that they were
dying, the warden’s deputy had refused to reverse the fatal order.
The defense made the unlikely claim that the cause of death was shock from
cold water poured upon the dying inmate in an attempt to revive him. This did
not go down well with the jury, which took only forty minutes to return with its
guilty verdict; the warden was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. 19
*
For blacks in the South, the first priority was survival in a world where a black
defendant was stabbed dead in the courtroom and a black prisoner became the
victim of prolonged confinement in a sweat box. Against the odds, there were
African Americans who fought to maintain their dignity, their sense of pro-
portion, and a degree of participation in the system that so degraded them.
Mrs. Mary Lee had written to “The Pulse of the Public,” the letters column of
The Atlanta Constitution , expressing her fear that an increase in the number of
“negroes” registered to vote was a threat—she did not hesitate to say it pl
ainly—
to white supremacy. Her letter evoked a penetrating response from Benjamin J.
Davis of Atlanta. Mrs. Lee ought not to be alarmed, he wrote. White supremacy
was nowhere in danger and she ought to look on Negro voters not as a menace
to white supremacy but as a complement to real democracy. If white supremacy
was unable to take care of itself, he observed, then it ought to get out of the way
of real democracy.
Mrs. Lee would do well, Davis wrote, to inform herself of the facts—that
Atlanta had been so thoroughly gerrymandered that no ward had the possibility
of a black majority. So Mrs. Lee, whom he had the grace to describe as “this good
woman,” would do better to help her neighbors qualify to vote.
The deep sense of inferiority imposed upon blacks over three centuries of sub-
mission is evidenced in Davis’s forthright declaration:
I am a Negro man and I confess that the Negro is not prepared to take over
and run this government and the white man has no cause to fear calamity
if he has faith in his own intelligence. . . .
The Negro, he continued, didn’t want to dominate the white man, but taxation
without representation was as onerous now as it had been in 1776. All the Negro
wanted, he concluded, was a fair voice in a system administered in the interests
of all and not only of a part of the people. His closure was as eloquent as it was
simple: “The Negro wants a working democracy based upon the principles of
Christianity.” 20
Deflationary Times: A Lingering Depression
If delivery of goods for the growing defense program was measured in the bil-
lions, there were millions of Americans whose economics were on a humbler
Wednesday, December 3, 1941 79
scale. In Carrollton, Georgia, following a custom that had outlasted the memory
of the oldest inhabitant, the first Tuesday in every month was Trading Day.
Trading Day this week found a crowd of more than 200 milling around in the
wagon yard between Louis Heatin’s mule barn and the Masonic Hall. What
they brought to trade were the fraying and hard-worn goods of a hard-pressed
peasantry. They brought their dogs: rabbit dogs, coon dogs, fox dogs, and bird
dogs. There were all manner of musical instruments, guitars, banjos, fiddles, and
mandolins. On display were broken shotguns crudely wired together. There was