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

The oddity of all of this discrimination and willingness to import Jim Crow into the military was twofold. First, when late in the war the military finally began to experiment with volunteer integrated units, they enjoyed success and found no unusual difficulties in white and black soldiers working together. So, from a military perspective, once the experiment was run, the evidence was that integration was an enhancement and not a detriment to the military. Second, FDR’s fear of losing southern electoral support may have been correct but it was irrelevant.

Roosevelt won the 1940 election with 449 Electoral College votes to Wendell Willkie’s 82. Even had Willkie taken the approximately 100 southern Electoral College votes, Roosevelt would still have won handily. And then, too, we should not forget that Willkie was a civil rights advocate, so it was not as if Roosevelt was in grave danger of losing support from segregationists who were exceedingly unlikely to view Willkie as the lesser of two evils. No, lacking the vision that he had in 1932, Roosevelt was just a cautious candidate and a cautious politician committed, as so many politicians naturally are, to personal victory over doing what he surely believed was right. The integration of the United States military was forced to wait until after he died and Harry Truman believed he was unelectable. He desegregated the military in 1948 as the polls declared his presidential candidacy—incorrectly—as dead in the water. With nothing to lose politically, finally the right thing got done!

FDR’s electoral caution and personal vanity for victory combined in 1944 to further demonstrate how the second Roosevelt, the post-1939 Roosevelt, followed rather than led. Recall that the president had ordered the internment of Japanese Americans, fearing that they were spies or otherwise likely to engage in sabotage of the American war effort against Japan. By 1944, his close adviser and secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, was urging Roosevelt to release the internees. Doing so was politically unpopular in California, which was where most of the internees were from. Roosevelt put off Ickes, not having been willing to risk losing California in the 1944 presidential election. He lifted his executive order in December 1944, after he had been reelected.

What If?

ROOSEVELT PLAYED IT SAFE IN TERMS OF REELECTION. HE CONTINUED to press the popular New Deal policies and he continued to insist, commensurate with the indications in the Gallup polls, that he would keep the United States out of the war. By these means he won an unprecedented third term. No one who thinks of him primarily as a politician can fault his cautious approach to the war, but that does not mean that he did not have an alternative strategy that could have won him a third term and possibly saved vast numbers of lives in the process. Consider the facts on the ground as he and Wendell Willkie competed against each other for the support of the American voter.

Willkie’s campaign against Roosevelt was three-pronged. He argued that the social safety net aspects of the New Deal were good policies and should be preserved, but that the New Deal had also made the government into an unfair competitor against private business. Willkie, a corporate executive with no prior political experience, had become an opponent of Roosevelt in large measure because of such New Deal projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produced energy without having to turn a profit and so drove its private sector competitors out of business. This prong of Willkie’s campaign against Roosevelt was popular with many businessmen who were, by and large, already inclined to vote Republican. It was not likely to win over many working-class or middle-class voters who saw the New Deal as a great benefit to them.

The second prong of Willkie’s campaign focused on the threat of war. Willkie had risen in the ranks of prospective nominees in the Republican Party as Nazi Germany swept across Europe. Still, the Republican Party was, broadly speaking, an isolationist party. Consequently, Willkie felt political pressure to run toward the party’s core voters by emphasizing that he, more so than Roosevelt, was likely to keep the country out of the war. Earlier we quoted a section of his nomination acceptance speech in which he highlighted the danger for the United States if Britain fell and Germany controlled the Atlantic. The speech then went on to assure the Republican nominating convention and the American people that Willkie was the man to keep the United States at peace. As he said,

I cannot follow the President in his conduct of foreign affairs in this critical time. There have been occasions when many of us have wondered if he is deliberately inciting us to war. I trust that I have made it plain that in the defense of America, and of our liberties, I should not hesitate to stand for war. But like a great many other Americans I saw what war was like at first hand in 1917. I know what war can do to demoralize civil liberties at home. And I believe it to be the first duty of a President to try to maintain peace. But Mr. Roosevelt has not done this. He has dabbled in inflammatory statements and manufactured panics. . . . The President’s attacks on foreign powers have been useless and dangerous. He has courted a war for which the country is hopelessly unprepared—and which it emphatically does not want.

So, while Willkie accused FDR of plotting war, both he and Roosevelt assured the American voter that the other candidate was more likely to take the country into the war. The facts provided the voter with little basis to believe that Willkie or Roosevelt was more likely to keep America out of the war.

The third prong of Willkie’s campaign emphasized the danger to democracy represented by Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term. This was on the surface a sound campaign strategy, as polls, such as the Gallup survey in December 1939, showed the electorate was more opposed to a third term for FDR than in favor (“If President Roosevelt is a candidate for a third term, will you vote for him?” the poll asked; 47 percent said yes and 53 percent said no). But that was long before the campaign was under way. By May 1940, in response to the question, “Do you think Roosevelt has done a good job or a poor job in dealing with the war crisis in Europe?” 79 percent responded that he was doing a good job.

Apparently, Willkie’s three prongs were not working. He was largely undifferentiated from FDR on the war; his views of the New Deal were less popular than the president’s; and the fear of a third term did not resonate with that many voters. Given these facts—that Willkie’s campaign was essentially doomed to failure—Roosevelt could have afforded to take a bit more risk. Every indication was that he believed the right thing to do was to come to the defense of Britain and of democracy in Europe. Although the opposition to going to war was strong, everyone knew that Willkie won his party’s nomination because he was the more hawkish Republican on the question of war. Thus, Roosevelt might readily have entered the war earlier without sacrificing any precious votes to his rival. Early entry into the war probably would have quickly crushed Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia, especially if the president had decided to expand US defense spending seriously in 1936 after Germany remilitarized the Rhineland. Then, he could have produced increased employment, as he did later, through arms production, and achieved full employment by seriously expanding the manpower of the armed forces to protect democracy. Then, he would have been in a position to argue that the New Deal and economic recovery were fully compatible with the advance of freedom and democracy and won election on that basis. His caution in not doing so was, in our view, a mistake if one is to place doing what is right in first place, and electoral politics—which he still would almost certainly have succeeded at—in second.