Roosevelt (48 page)

All the President’s action—and his inaction—on discrimination aroused sharp responses. Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, then and for years afterward head of public safety in Birmingham, wrote in to charge that the Employment Service and the FEPC were causing disunity, that venereal disease was the number-one Negro problem, and that the Ku Klux Klan would be revived in opposition. “Don’t you think one war in the South, however, is enough?” An equally withering fire descended on the administration from black militants.

It was not surprising, given Roosevelt’s fear of any divisive act, that he would shun a frontal attack on discrimination in private enterprises or even in state and local government. His support of Stimson’s policies reflected better his personal views. The War Department was proud of the fact that by the spring of 1942 about 10 per cent of registrants under Selective Service were black, several hundred black aviation cadets would soon be in training, and over three hundred Negro officers—including three colonels—shared in the command of five black combat units. But the Army was still segregated except for black troops under white officers—and Stimson believed in this. “The Negro still lacks the particular initiative which a commanding officer of men needs in war,” he
wrote to a friend. “…Also the social intermixture of the two races is basically impossible….”

If a “little group of agitators, led by a man named White,” would only keep their hands off, Stimson felt, things would be better. He was pained to discover that MacLeish was planning to speak to Negroes in New York on the discrimination against them in the Army, and that McGeorge Bundy, the son of his close friend and assistant, Harvey Bundy, was helping MacLeish with his speech. After inviting the poet to see him, Stimson told him that he had been brought up in an abolitionist family, and his father had fought in the Civil War, but that the crime of slavery had produced a problem impossible of solution in wartime, that the only thing to do was to be patient and care for individual cases, that the foolish Negro leaders were actually seeking social equality, which was impossible. MacLeish appeared unmoved. Stimson felt secretly that Mrs. Roosevelt was behind MacLeish’s activity—the latest example of her “intrusive and impulsive folly,” he complained to his diary. But he did not blame
Mr.
Roosevelt, except for letting his Navy shut its doors “absolutely to the Negro race” while making the War Department carry the extra load. The President was more sympathetic to black aspirations than either his War or his Navy Secretary, but his tendency in wartime to look on race relations more as a problem of efficient industrial mobilization than as a fundamental moral problem left policy largely in their hands.

If Stimson seemed weak on Negro rights, within the military circle he was virtually a reformer. Early in 1942 Eisenhower rounded up reports on the “colored troop problem.” Not only did army generals in the South and even in multiracial Hawaii oppose the assignment of “colored troops” to their domains, but so also did the Australian government, the President of the Republic of Panama, Governor Ernest Gruening, of Alaska, the government of Bermuda, the British authorities in Trinidad, the South American governments and—absurdity to the point of hilarity—an army colonel advising as to Liberia. Stimson’s responses to most of these pleas ranged from “Don’t yield” to “Nonsense”; he reminded the Panamanians that the Panama Canal itself was built with black labor; and he asserted that the Southerners would have to get used to Negro troops; but neither he nor anyone else in high command reflected on the implications of the fact that it was
segregated
black units that were being objected to.

For all their troubles, Negroes for once were better off than some other group. This other group was also racial—the Japanese-Americans in the process of being “relocated” from their West Coast homes to inland areas. By the end of spring, Milton Eisenhower, first head of the War Relocation Authority, could report to Roosevelt
that about 81,000 Japanese-Americans were in temporary assembly centers, about 20,000 in permanent relocation centers, another 15,000 had been “frozen” in eastern California, and from 5,000 to 8,000 voluntary evacuees were living precariously in Rocky Mountain states. He also reported that inland governors and attorney generals had fought bitterly the earlier plan of voluntary evacuation on a large scale. Mass meetings had been held, violence threatened, Japanese-Americans arrested. So eleven huge camps had had to be set up to hold 130,000 evacuees, schools and hospitals planned, farms and public works started.

But Milton Eisenhower did not report—and Roosevelt, with all his insight and compassion, could not have grasped—the dismal experience of thousands of evacuees: the sad departure from hard-won homes and farms, the hurry-up-and-wait journey through detention centers to relocation camps, the shock of arrival at Poston or Tule Lake or Gila or some other camp, with its burning heat and numbing cold and clouds of dust, endless barracks with one room to a family, lack of privacy, red tape, boredom—and always the military police and the barbed wire. Not that the President was kept in the dark about the episode. All major decisions were cleared with him; his office received all the information, good and bad. Roosevelt himself termed the centers “concentration camps,” as indeed they were. But the psychic cost of the experience was probably beyond his ken, or was simply written off as a sad but necessary casualty of war.

The President might have been more sensitive to the situation if the evacuees had protested vigorously, had demonstrated, gone on strike, fought their guards. But they did not, at this time. The authorities were impressed by their almost cheerful determination to make the best of their lot; their resourcefulness in knocking together tables and benches for their ill-equipped rooms, their quick reconstruction of a semblance of community life through dances, sports, handicrafts, schools. But as the hot months of summer 1942 passed, the mood in some camps changed. The WRA did not live up to its earlier promises or expectations about wages, clothing, garden plots, jobs, and ordinary comforts. Tension rose among the inmates and between them and their Caucasian superiors. There were demonstrations, picket lines, strikes, and beatings of suspected informers.

By fall the very policy that Roosevelt had approved out of military necessity was creating its own military threat. The Office of War Information’s chief, Elmer Davis, urged him to speak publicly against anti-Nisei bills in Congress and to authorize loyal American citizens of Japanese descent to enlist in the Army and Navy. “Japanese propaganda to the Philippines, Burma, and elsewhere
insists that this is a racial war,” Davis reminded the President. “We can combat this effectively with counter-propaganda only if our deeds permit us to tell the truth.” At least 85 per cent of the Nisei were loyal Americans, he added. The Navy agreed with this estimate—but still did not want Nisei enlistments.

The contrast between Washington’s treatment of Italian and German-Americans and of Japanese-Americans was revealing. Roosevelt had assured Herbert Lehman, then Governor of New York, that he was “keenly aware of the anxiety that German and Italian aliens living in the United States must feel as the result of the Japanese evacuation of the West Coast.” Would Lehman assure them “that no collective evacuation of German or Italian aliens is contemplated at this time”? This was little solace to “Japanese” baking on the flatlands of Colorado—but of keen satisfaction to the Japanese propagandists broadcasting from Manila, Singapore, and Rangoon.

By late summer 1942 the President was giving in to an urge to “go to the country”—an urge as powerful in some politicians as the migratory instinct in the wild goose. He had told Mike Reilly, his bodyguard, that he wanted to travel during the second half of September and he wished to see everything he possibly could from coast to coast. But one thing would be different. He wanted the trip completely off the record until he returned to Washington. He would take along representatives of the three wire services, but that was all. No publicity, no parades, no speeches, he hoped, and if governors and other politicians were to ride with the President they had to be Republicans as well as Democrats.

On September 17 the presidential train pulled out of Washington with the Chief Executive and the First Lady (who went only as far as Milwaukee), a dozen members of the White House staff, the three privileged newsmen—and eight photographers.

The President packed his days as full as if he were running for office. On the first day, overhead cranes came to a sudden stop as the presidential phaeton, its top down, its bulletproof windows up, rolled into the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Detroit and moved between two huge assembly lines making General Lees, the new all-welded medium tank. Sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt and production officials, the President watched tanks grind through mud and dust on the testing ground; Secret Service agents shuddered as one tank drove straight at the presidential car and lurched to a halt ten feet away. The President shouted, “Good drive!” to the grinning operator. Later in the day he rode with Henry and Edsel Ford down the half-mile assembly line of the enormous Willow Run bomber plant. Next day he inspected the Great Lakes Naval
Training Station, the nation’s largest; watched steam turbines and propeller shafts being made at Allis-Chalmers, scene of bitter strikes the year before. In the evening he was in the Twin Cities area for the night shift of a cartridge plant making thirty and fifty-caliber ammunition, but which had not yet achieved full production. He always arrived unannounced, and sat on the right-hand side of the car, sometimes in back, sometimes in front, smiling, radiant, observant. Plant officials bustled about; ripples of excitement spread as workers stared, then hollered at one another; women peeked while trying to keep their eyes on their machines. As they drove through the plant, Reilly remembered later, the Secret Service men heard such sweet sounds as “Geeze, Mamie, look. It’s Roosevelt!”—indicating that the security men had achieved tactical surprise.

No one would later describe the trip with more gusto than the President, who reported first to the press and then in a fireside chat. After leaving the Twin Cities, he said, the party had gone right on to a place called Pend Oreille, in Idaho.

“It’s a great lake out there. That and the Coeur d’Alene are the two largest lakes in northern Idaho; and because we have tried, as you know, to disseminate the congestion which has always existed on the east coast and the west coast for Navy facilities, we put this naval training station inland. They had gone into commission five days before I was there, and they already had about a thousand trainees who were coming in at the rate of two or three hundred a day….Then we went on to a place just outside of Tacoma—Fort Lewis—which is one of our principal Army posts on the west coast. We saw a post, which I had known before as a relatively small post, multiplied four or five times in its capacity for troops….Then from there we motored to the Bremerton Navy Yard, and saw wounded ships and wounded men….”

The President and his party took the ferry to Seattle, where he inspected the big Boeing plant and had supper with his daughter, Anna, and her husband, John Boettiger, and their children, Buzzie and Sistie. At Henry Kaiser’s Portland shipyards he watched the launching of a ship whose keel had been laid only ten days before. Cries of
“Speech”
rose from the thousands of workers watching. When a portable microphone was pressed into the President’s hand, the old campaigner could not resist it.

“You know,” he said in a resonant conspiratorial whisper, “you know I am not supposed to be here today.” The crowd laughed and cheered. “So you are possessors of a secret—a secret that even the newspapers of the United States don’t know. I hope you will keep it a secret….” Merriman Smith, one of the three reporters, who had not yet filed any stories on the trip, was damned if he saw anything to laugh about.

“From there we went down to the Mare Island Navy Yard and saw again a Navy Yard just about three times as big as it ever had been before,” the President reported later. “We saw the Jap two-man submarine which had been captured at Pearl Harbor, and we saw one of our own submarines with nine Japanese flags painted on the conning tower.

“From there we went down to the Army embarkation port at Oakland, which is an enormous organization from which a large portion of our supplies of men and materials go out to many parts of the Pacific….Then from there down to Los Angeles, and we saw the Douglas plant at Long Beach, California….Then, from there down to San Diego, we saw the naval hospital, and a lot more wounded men from actions in the Pacific….Then to the naval training center. Then to the old Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, and from there to the Consolidated plant, where they are stepping up production all the time….”

Turning east, the President spent most of a day at the ranch of his daughter-in-law Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, and played with three grandchildren there. He stopped in Uvalde to see his onetime Vice President, John Garner, who had left Washington for good the year before. Pulling up in his little car in front of the Casey Jones Café, Garner strode to the presidential train, swung up the steps, and shouted to the President: “Well, God bless you, sir. I’m glad to see you.” The President held Garner at arm’s length to survey him. “Gosh, you look well.” They talked about local affairs and asked after each other’s wife, like old country gentlemen. “How are things going around here?” the President wanted to know. Garner slapped his Texas hat against his leg and roared, “They’re one hundred per cent for you.” Garner spied Dr. McIntire as he left. “Keep that man in good health,” he told him, “and all the rest will take care of itself.”

On to the big Southern installations—to Kelly Field, Randolph Field, Fort Sam Houston, to the Higgins Yard in New Orleans, where small boats were building, to Camp Shelby, Fort Jackson, where the Commander in Chief reviewed infantry divisions.

Back in Washington after two weeks and 8,754 miles, the President was in a benign mood about the state of the nation. The people as a whole, he told reporters, had “the finest kind of morale. They are very alive to the war spirit.” But he was not happy about the state of the nation’s capital. He complained about reporters who discussed military matters without knowing anything about military matters, about inaccurate news reports, especially by columnists and radio commentators, about subordinates in the administration itself who sought publicity by rushing into print about their particular “ism” without having a rounded picture of what the government was doing.