Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Maximalist at Home, Minimalist at War

“GOD’S GOOD TIME” CAME FINALLY TO THE UNITED STATES ON December 7, 1941. The attack against the naval base at Pearl Harbor did what Nazi Germany’s conquest of Europe could not: it turned American public opinion and brought the United States into the war. Now, with the United States finally committed to the liberation of Europe and the defeat of all of the Axis powers, one might have thought that FDR would have fully committed the nation with “all its power and might” to the swift and efficient defeat of the adversary. If we are to judge by the proportion of US wealth dedicated to the war effort, then we must judge Roosevelt a maximalist in defense of American freedom. While the German upper middle class continued to enjoy ready access to consumer goods until late in the war, Americans more widely faced rationing starting in 1942. As we can see in Figure 4.3, which extends Figure 4.2 through the end of the war and to just before the start of the cold war, once the United States was in the war, the president devoted a huge percentage of gross domestic product to the military: by 1944–1945 about forty cents of every dollar produced in America was spent on national defense. Never before, and, thank goodness, never since have Americans been called upon to dedicate so much of their labors to a war effort.

Yet, we should be careful not to overstate the financial and material sacrifices that were demanded of US citizens in World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, the arming of America and its allies nearly doubled the size of the US economy (Figure 4.1). The enormous growth of the economy and huge proportion of the nation’s wealth dedicated to the war effort largely offset each other. Not until the war ended and spending declined could Americans enjoy the fruits of their labors.

The story of war spending portrays a Franklin Roosevelt who was true to Churchill’s expectation that finally, in God’s good time, the United States would enter the war “with all its power and might.” In reckoning all that power and all that might, however, Churchill surely did not count on Roosevelt’s unwillingness to commit those portions of the nation’s power and might that might prove politically unpopular. Yet, the cautious, minimalist, electorally hungry president showed just such an unwillingness.

Figure 4.3. The Burden of Defense in World War II

Political expediency dictated FDR’s slow-as-molasses approach to entering the war and, once in, it dictated his reluctance to fight with all of the nation’s power and might. The first Roosevelt came to office with new ideas on how to resuscitate the American economy. He was bold in the pursuit of those ideas, perhaps because that is exactly why he had been elected in 1932 and again in 1936. To borrow a term from economics, his “comparative advantage” as a politician was in promoting new domestic policies. In doing so, he reset public opinion by creating popular programs like social security. But he seems to have lacked bold ideas about how to be a wartime president.

Foreign affairs was not his policy passion and perhaps he lacked the courage to implement the policy experimentation indicative of his first two terms. Perhaps he simply lacked the energy to do so. By this time his health was in serious decline and he would survive only four months into his fourth term.27 In the absence of big ideas, lacking the will to experiment and perhaps being thoroughly exhausted, he reverted to a more hesitating, cautious approach. Like most successful politicians, Roosevelt was willing to risk long-term disaster (with the long-term defined as after his watch) for America to avoid short-term political defeat. His policies before and after entry into the war reflected his sensitivity to what the electorate favored and what they opposed. FDR just does not seem by 1940 and beyond to have had the big ideas that he had in addressing the Great Depression.

In May 1939, for instance, Roosevelt turned away hundreds of Jews who had escaped Nazi Germany on board the ship St. Louis . After being denied entry into Cuba in May 1939, the Jewish passengers sought refuge in the United States. To their request, the State Department responded that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”28 As the Holocaust Encyclopedia notes in explaining the decision not to admit these refugees, “President Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to admit the St. Louis refugees, but this general hostility to immigrants, the gains of isolationist Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1938, and Roosevelt’s consideration of running for an unprecedented third term as president were among the political considerations that militated against taking this extraordinary step in an unpopular cause.”29

Hitler’s morally despicable policies against Jews and others were well known to Roosevelt and anyone else who was reading the daily newspaper. Indeed, he may well have been personally sympathetic with those oppressed by Hitler’s regime. What we do know is that anti-Semitism was an electoral reality at the time in the United States and Roosevelt had no interest in risking his political fortunes on behalf of oppressed foreign Jews. A public opinion poll a year after the German anti-Jewish laws were passed still indicated that 82 percent of Americans were against the admission of large numbers of Jewish refugees.30 The US immigration quota for German Jews was not increased. The Roosevelt administration followed the policy that was popular rather than the policy that was humane.

Before the United States became a combatant in the war, Roosevelt, the social reformer, had won over some new constituents as African American voters (of whom there were some in the North and virtually none in the Jim Crow South, where only 3 percent of African-Americans were registered to vote).31 Blacks began to defect from the Republican Party in 1936 and give their support to FDR’s New Deal policies, especially after his 1935 executive order that prohibited (more in theory than in practice) racial discrimination in employment on New Deal projects. Still, after his election in 1936 and until the middle of 1941, Roosevelt had been long on sympathetic words but short on action. As William Doyle observed, Roosevelt “was torn between his sense of decency and fair play . . . and his pragmatic, political side, which feared those powerful Southern Democrats who prevented him even from supporting a federal anti-lynching campaign. By the mid-1930s, his juggling act was succeeding, as the party held together in the South while his wife spoke out for civil rights and convinced blacks moving onto voter rolls of northern cities that they had friends in the White House.”32 The conviction that African Americans had a friend in the White House began to wear thin as the 1940 campaign—in which Willkie, not Roosevelt, was the more actively pro–civil rights candidate—unfolded and as the imminence of war became more apparent.

Following pressure from civil rights leaders and the threat of a march on Washington, the president issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. By this order, Roosevelt prohibited discrimination on account of race in the defense industry, creating real opportunities for the African American labor force to benefit from his lend-lease program. One might have looked at this action, taken after the election, and concluded that now, unfettered by electoral competition, FDR might have done everything he could to improve the efficient use of manpower as the likelihood of the US entry into the war grew. Such an expectation, however, would have been dashed by the reality of the second Roosevelt’s keen sensitivity to following, rather than leading, public opinion. Yes, his third presidential election campaign was over, but there was always a congressional election looming on the near-term horizon and then, too, there was the possibility of a fourth term in a few years.