Fear Itself (49 page)

Building on this analysis, Republicans proposed to recommit the bill, with instructions to the Committee on Military Affairs to redo it by reiterating the twelve-month restriction on the service of those who had been drafted, allowing an exception only for those who would choose to stay on a voluntary basis. This proposal was rejected in the House by merely a 190–215 vote. With Republicans strongly opposing the draft and nonsouthern Democrats badly divided, the only cohesive bloc to support conscription was that of the southern Democrats.
¹⁷⁶
Without a united South, the bill would have been gutted well before a vote on passage.

When the time came to vote on the bill itself on August 7, the Senate voted 45–30, a reasonably comfortable margin, buttressed once more by southern solidarity.
¹⁷⁷
The House, by contrast, approved conscription five days later by just one vote, 203–202, “in an atmosphere of hushed tension alternating with clamorous uproar. . . . By that narrow margin,” the
Los Angeles Times
conveyed, the House “saved the administration from a devastating defeat.”
¹⁷⁸
With fully sixty-five Democrats joining almost every Republican in voting no, only a nearly united South, voting 123–8 in favor, rescued the draft.
¹⁷⁹
Lacking the 100-vote majority provided by the South, the measure would have failed.

On December 7, what the Japanese called the Hawaii Operation launched a successful attack at Pearl Harbor. One day after the event, Franklin Roosevelt reported to Congress that “the casualty list . . . included 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians killed, and 1,178 wounded,” and he conveyed to a stunned nation how “over a thousand crewmen aboard the
USS Arizona
battleship were killed after a 1,760 pound aerial bomb penetrated the forward magazine causing catastrophic explosions.”
¹⁸⁰

By December 11, the United States was irrevocably at war with the three Axis powers. On December 17, the House approved by voice vote “a bill to amend the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940.” The Senate followed the next day. With its vote of 79–2,
¹⁸¹
military service was extended to an indeterminate date, six months after the end of the war, and it became “the duty of every male citizen of the United States, and of every other male person residing in the United States . . . between the ages of 18 and 65 to present himself for and submit to registration,” with those “between the ages of 19 and 45 at the time fixed for his registration . . . liable for training and service under this act.” The law had been introduced at the behest of the Department of War by none other than North Carolina’s Bob Reynolds. Even this long-committed isolationist and Nazi sympathizer voted yes.
¹⁸²

“Overnight,” Lippmann wrote on December 9, “we have become . . . at long last a united people . . . an awakened people—wide awake to the stark truth that the very existence of the Nation, the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of all of us are in the balance.”
¹⁸³
What once had been a southern cause at once became the nation’s. With uncommon solidarity, America’s first crusade had begun.

9
Unrestricted War

“W
E ARE DETERMINED
that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle,” declared Gen. George C. Marshall, addressing a West Point graduating class in May 1942, “our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming power on the other.”
¹
Liberty and might, America would soon learn in the decade that followed, did not always go comfortably hand in hand. Characterized by tense and often bewildering paradoxes and moral fluidity, the fight against the Axis nations demanded tough choices and exceptional powers that challenged so many of America’s ethical, legal, and political tenets. The war inspired national unity, energetically committing Americans to the strong and appealing purposes declaimed by their leaders. In the process, extraordinary concentrations of executive power, evoking Lincoln’s behavior during the Civil War, and actions that otherwise would have been judged to violate decent conduct and constitutional constraints frequently became routine.

The powerful crusade Marshall helped to lead stemmed from a global cause so compelling that more than one kind of compromise with the values and institutional conduct it was advancing seemed allowable, even necessary. With the ability of democracies to marshal might and wage war brought in question both by friends and foes, the fight against rampant militarism and oppressive dictatorships provoked decisions about allies, cruelty, and liberal democracy that often violated the very norms for which the global struggle was being waged. It would be facile simply to denounce, or even regret, such compromises. Nonetheless, it is important to assess their character and implications, especially because the challenges and questions posed by the requirements of the world war—a war in which, on average, 23,000 persons died every single day—did not end with the Allied victories in Europe and Asia.

Some of the country’s leading thinkers were not unmindful of these grave issues in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Observing, even from a distance, Hitler’s military mobilization and expansion, Japan’s push into mainland Asia, Italy’s plunge into Africa, the rearmament of the Soviet Union, coupled with the incapacity of the League of Nations, they began to ponder how attempts to defeat the nefarious dictators might compromise liberty at home. Some, of course, thought what was at stake was a choice between competing conceptions of the good, between which the United States should remain neutral. Others believed there existed a choice between right and wrong from which America could not abstain. Irrespective, they agreed, as one of the nation’s leading military analysts, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study’s Edward Meade Earle, put the point in 1938, that “it is difficult to see how . . . the cherished heritage of Anglo-American freedom can be maintained in a world so thoroughly dominated by war and the war mentality.”
²

These dilemmas, of course, were not new. Federalist Paper No. 8 had famously commented as long ago as 1787 that “safety from external danger is the most powerful dictator of national conduct,” and observed how “a state of continued danger will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have the tendency to destroy their civil and political rights.” In states of “continual danger,” its author, Alexander Hamilton, cautioned, “even the ardent love of liberty will after a time, give way to its dictates.”
³
Watching the enemies of liberal democracy transforming their countries into armed camps, the New School’s Emil Lederer, a German émigré, had warned shortly before Germany invaded Poland in early 1939 that democratic states could no longer choose a traditional way of life, for “the pressure of the totalitarian powers makes it daily more difficult for men and women . . . to pursue their accustomed way of living.”
⁴
A year later, Earle called “tragic” the fact that military mobilization would inevitably cause the United States to “lose some of the values which it is essential to retain,”
⁵
and one of the country’s most respected political scientists, Harold Lasswell, sought to understand “what democratic values can be preserved, and how,” in light of growing demands for internal as well as external security.
⁶

Almost weekly, confirmation of these alarms abounded, and the academics and policy specialists responded accordingly. One of the most visible and influential instances was a report on “mobilizing civilian America” published by the Council on Foreign Relations in late May 1940, just as Nazi troops were sweeping into the Low Countries and France. Chaired by Allen Dulles, a future director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the council’s Committee on Research convened a study group in 1939 to judge how government should act “in this time of emergency when national defense is of paramount concern” and consider what would be at stake in “the direction and control of war by a democracy.”
⁷
Following a review of the inadequate state of war planning, the document explored how America’s political and economic institutions could be made fit for war. First on its list of proposals was “propaganda” to create “attitudes favorable to loyalty and sacrifice,” and “censorship” that would aim “to keep out of the public press, the motion pictures, the radio and even oral communications, information and opinions which might weaken popular enthusiasm for war.” The study also called for assertive procurement planning and the control of prices and profits, and it offered detailed mobilization plans for the armed forces, industrial labor, and business. To put this program into effect, the council called on Congress to confer “sweeping and complete control” to the president, as “mobilization depends upon concentration of authority,” and “the logical place for its concentration is in the hands of the Executive.” Should Congress balk, it added, the president already possessed “emergency powers” to restrain radio stations and manage the dissemination of news, to “commandeer any system of transportation,” to speed up work by lifting restrictions in government contracts, and to fix the price of coal and “take control over the banks and stock exchanges.”
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I.

T
HE SHOCK
of Pearl Harbor was still fresh when Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation from the Oval Office by radio on December 9, 1941. Casting the confrontation in principled terms, he explained why this would not be a traditional war between states about contested territory, but a fundamental battle between different ways of living and governing. Japan, which had come to possess virtually all the coastal areas of China, and had extended its control from Russia to French Indochina, had shown itself ready, the president reported, to embrace the “international immorality” and “international brutality” of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Led by “powerful and resourceful gangsters [who] have branded together to make war upon the whole human race,” the Tripartite Pact of 1940
⁹
represented “immediate evil.” The United States, he declared, would act on behalf of “the vast majority of the members of the human race” in order to combat a “world dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.”
¹⁰

The president adopted similar Manichean language on the eleventh, when Germany and Italy declared war on the United States two days after the Japanese strike force had taken out every battleship in America’s Pacific Fleet.
¹¹
“Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization,” he proclaimed in asking Congress to reciprocate with an American war declaration. With “the forces endeavoring to enslave the entire world now . . . moving toward this hemisphere,” only the “rapid and united effort by all of the peoples of the world who are determined to remain free” could “ensure a world victory of the forces of justice and of righteousness over the forces of savagery and of barbarism.”
¹²

Months earlier, well before the United States was formally at war, the president had enlisted the country in this principled cause. On May 27, 1941, he had described how “the whole world is divided, divided between human slavery and human freedom—between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal.”
¹³
Concluding a conference off the coast of Newfoundland ten weeks later, on August 12, the very day the House of Representatives renewed America’s peacetime draft by a one-vote margin, Roosevelt had joined Prime Minister Winston Churchill in issuing the Atlantic Charter, a declaration of shared “war and peace aims.” With the horrors of war on the eastern front unfolding in Russia, and with Japanese assets recently frozen by the United States and diplomatic relations suspended, the two leaders identified the ideals—including self-determination, human dignity, multilateral peacemaking, open seas, and “freedom from fear and want”—that would guide their quest to secure the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.”
¹⁴

Even at the beginning of hostilities, World War II came to be seen as a crusade that pit decency and freedom against malevolence. This proved to be a steady and persuasive American theme. During the war, America’s Office of War Information (OWI) distributed hundreds of thousands of posters that reprinted this charter, and its standards were resonantly repeated time and again by the administration. The distinguished poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish, the librarian of Congress, who worked for the OWI before becoming the Department of State’s first assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs, gave voice in just these terms to “the basic issue of the war” some four months after D-day, in October 1944. He declared that the global battle between the democracies and the dictatorships posed the choice of how “individual men and women would live under government for generations to come—and not only in fascist countries and in the countries conquered by the fascists but in other countries as well.”
¹⁵

The scope of this struggle both demanded and justified a new balance between its imperatives and the values for which the war was being waged. From the very start, President Roosevelt warned the country that pursuing the battle could not but restrict freedom. His fireside speech two days after the hammer blow at Pearl Harbor explained that Washington would provide information to the public only when it “will not prove valuable to the enemy directly or indirectly. . . . It must be remembered by each and every one of us that our free and rapid communication these days must be greatly restricted in wartime.” He further cautioned the press that “you have no right in the ethics of patriotism to deal out unconfirmed reports in such a way as to make people believe they are the gospel truth.”
¹⁶

FDR also warned Americans against spreading rumors and untruths, though he had done much the same in July 1941, when he had reported the existence of secret German papers outlining plans to reorganize a conquered Latin America into five dependent states, despite having “made no effort to demonstrate the validity of the Nazi documents.” Two months later, he willfully exaggerated an exchange of fire in the North Atlantic southeast of Greenland between an American ship and a German U-boat. His radio address of September 11 reported that the submarine had “fired first . . . without warning” on the destroyer
Greer,
whose “identity as an American ship was unmistakable.” He also insisted that there had been a “deliberate design to sink her,” notwithstanding a U.S. Navy report that had questioned whether the German commander had actually known the nationality of the ship that had been stalking it, or of the plane that had attacked it with depth charges.
¹⁷

At best half-truths, these claims became rationalized through an enlarged conception of national security.
¹⁸
In a radio address from the White House on May 26, 1940, the president warned the country that within the United States the “undiluted poison” of “spies, saboteurs, and traitors” composed a “Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery.”
¹⁹
Four months later, on September 23, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, warned the American Legion, the country’s leading veterans organization, that “a fifth column of destruction” was on the march in the United States.
²⁰
Against the advice of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General Robert Jackson, who would later lead the American prosecution team at Nuremberg, FDR authorized wiretaps against Americans thought to be Nazi spies, even though Congress had explicitly banned the practice in the Communications Act of 1934, and despite the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled that evidence obtained in this manner was inadmissible.
²¹
The Court, he argued, had not anticipated “grave matters involving the defense of the nation.” Without legal sanction, Hoover also instructed the FBI to initiate a mail-opening program. In addition, he initiated a Bureau investigation of persons who had telegraphed their backing to Charles Lindbergh, who had been leading the opposition to the administration’s program of military mobilization.
²²
Further pressing against traditional boundaries, the administration in July 1941 charged William J. Donovan, later the head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to plan “covert offensive operations” as the country’s coordinator of information (COI).
²³