Fear Itself (101 page)

146
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 1st sess., August 1, 1941, p. 6590.

147
Cited in Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy
, pp. 290–91.

148
The term comes from the Latin
conscribere milites.
For a discussion of the history of the conscript system, including how it had become common in Continental Europe before World War I, see Herman Beukema, “Social and Political Aspects of Conscription: Europe’s Experience,”
Military Affairs
5 (1941): 21–31.

149
For discussions, see George Q. Flynn,
The Draft, 1940–1973
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); George Q. Flynn, “Conscription and Equity in Western Democracies, 1940–1975,”
Journal of Contemporary History
33 (1998): 5–20; Harrop A. Freeman, “The Constitutionality of Wartime Conscription,”
Virginia Law Review
31 (1944), 40–82; Elliot Jay Feldman, “An Illusion of Power: Military Conscription as a Dilemma of Liberal Democracy in Great Britain, the United States, and France” (Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1972).

150
Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in
Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development,
ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 82–110; Margaret Levi,
Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 58–66, 96–102.

151
Cited in Sherry,
In the Shadow of War,
p. 45.

152
Beukema, “Social and Political Aspects of Conscription,” p. 29; Philip Jowett,
The Japanese Army, 1931–1945
(Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002);
New York Times,
May 10, 1940.

153
Washington Post,
August 18, 1940;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
June 20 and August 29, 1940;
Los Angeles Times,
November 7, 1940.

154
Los Angeles Times,
July 9, 1940.

155
Washington Post,
July 4, 1940. Harvard University president James Conant testified that there is “no method of building an army in a free democracy more efficient and more just than that of compulsory selective service.” Another visible university president, Henry Wriston of Brown, opposed conscription as “the tragic prelude to war.” See ibid., September 9, 1940.

156
Atlanta Constitution,
September 19, 1940.

157
Congressional Record
, 76th Cong., 2d sess., September 3, 1940, p. 11363. Similarly, a front-page
Washington Post
editorial described the conscription bill as “the most important measure to come before Congress in a long time.” See
Washington Post,
August 4, 1940. Passions ran high. During the House debate, Martin Sweeney, an isolationist Democrat from Ohio, “landed a hard right” to the nose of Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who had called Sweeney a “traitor” for his views. See Ibid., September 5, 1940.

158
Atlanta Constitution,
March 21, 1938.

159
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 2d sess., September 3, 1940, p. 11381.

160
Ibid., September 4, 1940, p. 11482.

161
New York Times,
August 26, 1940.

162
“States where conscription sentiment has reached the greatest peaks are Mississippi (87 percent), Texas (80 percent), Georgia (79 percent), and Florida (75 percent), well above the national average of 66 percent, and a good deal higher than in skeptical Indiana (55 percent).” See
Atlanta Constitution,
August 11, 1940.

163
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 2d sess., September 3, 1940, pp. 11363, 11387, 11401; September 4, 1940, p. 11426; September 3, 1940, p. 11400.

164
Ibid., September 4, 1940, p. 11489.

165
Their cohesion scores were a nearly unanimous 98, 94, and 93. By contrast, Republicans and nonsouthern Democrats were internally divided, with cohesion scores, respectively, of 76, 37, and 31, and 70, 58, and 55.

166
For an overview, see J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer Jr.,
The First Peacetime Draft
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to restrict draftees to the Western Hemisphere (67–4, on an amendment proposed by Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, who later was one of eight Republicans who supported conscription in that chamber), it rejected a more restrictive measure advanced by one of the few southern Democratic isolationists, Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, that would have limited the use of conscripts to the United States and its possessions. That vote was close, 32–39, and would have passed without overwhelming southern opposition. See
Washington Post,
August 27, 1940. On reports of German subversion in the Western Hemisphere, see Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
p. 233.

167
The largest category of rejected persons was declared ineligible because of defective teeth. See
Chicago Daily Tribune
, February 17, 1941; Sherry,
In the Shadow of War,
p. 48. On literacy, see
Atlanta Constitution
, May 4, 1941.

168
For a discussion, see Ira Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 95–102.

169
On how the new army was put together, and the difficulties it faced, see Gregory,
America 1941,
pp. 25–49.

170
Atlanta Constitution,
July 5, 1941;
New York Times
, July 22, 1944; Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
p. 277.

171
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 1st sess., August 1, 1941, p. 6579.

172
On July 26, 1941.

173
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 1st sess., August 1, 1941, p. 6591.

174
For a summary of these arguments, see Elias Huzar, “Selective Service Policy, 1940–1942,”
Journal of Politics
4 (1942): 221.

175
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 1st sess., August 7, 1941, p. 6851.

176
The least cohesive bloc was that of nonsouthern Democrats, who scored only 37. By contrast, both Republicans, at 71, and southern Democrats, at 83, exhibited significant cohesion.

177
The majority was composed of less than half the chamber’s members; twenty-one chose not to vote. Fully “thirty percent of the Democrats, including mainly members from states west of the Mississippi River,” voted no, as they “equated the peacetime draft with forced regimentation and preferred voluntary enlistment.” Democratic aye votes were predominantly southern. They were joined by Republicans, “particularly those from New England and the Middle Atlantic states” who “supported peacetime selective service.” See Porter,
Seventy-sixth Congress and World War II,
p. 179.

178
Los Angeles Times,
August 13, 1941. This was not a popular bill. “Strong popular opposition to this revision of the draft law almost gave the anti-militarist forces a belated victory as the House approved the extension by a margin of only one vote. While the people wanted the boys back home, the soliders who had been promised a one-year tour of duty were often the most bitter of all.” See Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.,
The Civilian and the Military
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 261.

179
From within the South, only Missouri’s Democrats, four of six, voted in the negative. They were joined by the state’s three Republicans.

180
See http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/fdr-infamy.htm.

181
Both negative votes were cast by California’s senators Sheridan Downey, a Democrat, and Hiram Johnson, a Republican.

182
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 1st sess., December 17, 1941, p. 9943; December 18, 1941, p. 9985.

183
Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow: Wake Up, America,”
Washington Post,
December 9, 1941, p. 19.

CHAPTER 9
UNRESTRICTED WAR

1
George Catlett Marshall,
The Papers of George Catlett Marshall,
vol. 3,
“The Right Man for the Job,” December 7, 1941–May 31, 1943
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 214. This sentence is carved on the Washington Mall’s National World War II Memorial. Marshall was appointed to his chief of staff post on September 1, 1939.

2
Edward Meade Earle, “American Military Policy and National Security,”
Political Science Quarterly
53 (1938): 2.

3
Clinton L. Rossiter, ed.,
The Federalist Papers
(New York, Mentor Books, 1999), p. 35.

4
Emil Lederer, “Domestic Policy and Foreign Relations,” in
War in Our Time,
ed. Hans Speier and Alfred Kähler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), p. 56.

5
Edward Meade Earle, “National Defense and Political Science,”
Political Science Quarterly
55 (1940): 487, 495. A useful overview that considers the pioneering work by Earle and other scholars in the late 1930s and early 1940s concerning liberal democracy and matters of might and international relations is Gene M. Lyons, “The Growth of National Security Research,”
Journal of Politics
25 (1963): 489–508. See also Gene M. Lyons,
The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969).

6
Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,”
American Journal of Sociology
46 (1941): 467.

7
General Frank R. McCoy, “Foreword,” in
Mobilizing Civilian America
, by Harold J. Tobin and Percy W. Bidwell (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1940), pp. vi, vii. McCoy, who had served in the Spanish-American War, including the Battle of San Juan Hill; the Philippine-American War, where he was an aide to Governor-General Leonard Wood; and World War I, where he was a member of the General Staff of the American Expeditionary Forces.

8
Tobin and Bidwell,
Mobilizing Civilian America,
pp. 75–222, 226, 225, 227–30.

9
Other countries joined before Pearl Harbor. These included Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Croatia.

10
See http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16056#axzz1OTlT29Jg.

11
Hitler, at this moment, was expressing contempt for the United States. “I don’t see much future for the Americans,” he told a gathering at his headquarters on January 7, 1942. “It’s a decayed country. . . . My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. . . . Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar.” See William Shirer,
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 895.

12
See http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411211awp.html.

13
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat17.html. After the outbreak of the European war, Roosevelt had issued a proclamation of limited emergency, on September 8, 1939, declaring “that a national emergency exists in connection with and to the extent necessary for the proper observance, safeguarding, and enforcing of the neutrality of the United States and the strengthening of our national defense within the limits of peacetime authorizations.” See http://www.lawandfreedom.com/site/executive/execorders/Roosevelt.pdf.

14
For an important discussion that highlights the significance of the Atlantic Charter as the moment when a global quest for human rights was born, see Elizabeth Borgwardt,
A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

15
Archibald MacLeish, “The People Are Indivisible,”
Nation,
October 28, 1944, p. 509.

16
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat19.html.

17
Robert Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 287.

18
Writing a decade later, Arnold Wolfers offered a particularly thoughtful consideration of “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol,”
Political Science Quarterly
67 (1952): 481–502. He stressed how “decision makers are faced with the moral problem . . . of choosing first the values which deserve protection, with national independence ranking high not merely for its own sake but for the guarantee it may offer to values like liberty, justice and peace. He must further decide which level of security to make his target. . . . Finally, he must choose the means” (p. 500).

19
See http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/052640.html. “The term ‘fifth column’ was coined by a Fascist general who boasted of his strength: General Mola, when he was closing in on Madrid with four columns of his army, declared that he had a fifth one within the gates of the city.” See Hans Speier, “Treachery in War,”
Social Research
7 (1940): 258.

20
New York Times,
September 24, 1940.

21
Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox,
The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 169–71.

22
Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
p. 225; Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 51–52.

23
Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
p. 290.

24
Paul A. C. Koistinen, “The ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ in Historical Perspective: The InterWar Years,”
Journal of American History
56 (1970): 823–24, 826, 827.

25
Sherry,
In the Shadow of War,
p. 43.

26
W. Eliot Brownlee, “Social Investigation and Political Learning in the Financing of World War I,” in
The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States
, ed. Michael Lacey and Mary O. Furner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Grosvenor B. Clarkson,
Industrial America during the World War: The Strategy behind the Line, 1917–1918
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923); Robert D. Cuff,
The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Paul A. C. Koistinen,
Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

27
Fireside chat, December 29, 1940; available at http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat16.html.

28
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat14.html.

29
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat20.html.

30
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat21.html.

31
The only issue that generated significant Republican opposition, in a 249–86 roll call, was the proposal to create a Women’s Auxiliary Corps in the army. In the Senate, questions about agricultural draft deferments generated some controversy, but otherwise cross-partisanship also easily prevailed. Even matters like price control, which ordinarily would have been resisted by Republican members, passed the Senate in January 1942 by a vote of 84–1.

32
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat16.html.

33
Here I draw on Judith N. Shklar, “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile,”
Political Theory
21 (1993): 181–97.

34
See http://www.lawandfreedom.com/site/executive/execorders/Roosevelt.pdf.

35
For an overview, see Clinton Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in Modern Democracies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. 240–54.

36
Christopher Capozzola,
Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 188.

37
John Sparks, “Civil Liberties in the Present Crisis,”
Antioch Review
2 (1942): 134; James R. Mock,
Censorship, 1917
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941). Writing about the public’s response to the Sedition Act of 1918, Mock observed how “the war was the center of national attention,” and how “questions of freedom of speech and of the press were not newsworthy” (p. 54).

38
Cappozola’s
Uncle Sam Wants You
is the best treatment of repression during World War I. See also William Preston Jr.,
Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), which is particularly useful in its account of postwar deportations and the anti-Communist Palmer Raids.

39
John Andrew Costello, “Congress and Internal Security: The Overman Committee, 1918–1919” (M.A. thesis, American University, 1965), Richard L. Watson, “Principle, Party, and Constituency: The North Carolina Congressional Delegation, 1917–1919,”
North Carolina Historical Review
56 (1959): 298–323; Regin Schmidt,
Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anti-Communism in the United States, 1919–1943
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), pp. 136–46.

40
It collected published and unpublished materials, created files on some 60,000 persons within four weeks (200,000 within four months), and began to infiltrate the Communist Party USA, which was founded that year. See Max Lowenthal,
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950), pp. 83–93; Cappozola,
Uncle Sam Wants You,
p. 202. See also Preston Jr.,
Aliens and Dissenters.

41
Hoover had been serving as director of the Bureau since 1924. It was designated as the FBI in 1935.

42
By getting the State Department into the act, it became possible to bypass existing statutory limitations on the activities of the FBI, since the wartime Appropriations Act of 1916, “which was still on the books, allowed the bureau to use its funds for investigations requested by the secretary of state, even if no violations of law had yet occurred.” See Jay Feldman,
Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America
(New York: Pantheon, 2011), p. 151.

43
Athan Theoharis,
The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 45–47.

44
Robert Edwin Herzstein,
Roosevelt and Hitler: Prelude to War
(New York: Paragon House, 1989).

45
Cited in Jeffrey R. Stone,
Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 285.

46
Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Roosevelt Administration and Black America: Federal Surveillance Policy and Civil Rights during the New Deal and World War II Years,”
Phylon
48 (1987): 20.

47
Speier, “Treachery in War,” p. 259.

48
Bob Kumamoto, “The Search for Spies: American Counterintelligence and the Japanese-American Community, 1931–1943.”
Amerasia Journal
6 (1979): 49.

49
Greg Robinson,
A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 47.

50
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The FBI: A History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 107; Lowenthal,
The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
p. 425; James T. Sparrow,
Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 83. For an overview of anti-Communism in the 1930s, see Richard Gid Powers,
Not without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism
(New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 117–54.

51
Stone,
Perilous Times,
p. 285.

52
New York Times,
January 18, 1931.

53
Martin Dies Sr., who represented Texas’s Second District from 1909 to 1919, was best known for his nativist views. He spoke often about the wrong kind of foreigners, Catholic and Jewish, who were coming to America. The son’s political life came to reflect many of the father’s ideas. Both were haunted by southern parochialism, nativism, and an isolationism that, in retrospect, made the father look wise indeed during World War I but that led the son (along with a lot of other people) to support a disastrous isolationism in the 1930s. See Dennis McDaniel, “The First Congressman Martin Dies of Texas,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
102 (1998): 156.

54
He continued, “That burr-headed wife of DePriest may be good enough for Mrs. Herbert Hoover, but I’ll tell you here and now that she’s not good enough for you and your wife nor me and mine.” See
Chicago Defender,
July 26, 1930.