Roosevelt (83 page)

Government decisions often aroused even more social unrest when announced goals were sacrificed to political or war expediency. Vacillation and delay in constructing the black Sojourner Truth housing project were one cause of the 1942 race riots in Detroit. Roosevelt’s reluctance to restore the Japanese-Americans to their homes helped produce riots at the Tule Lake concentration camp. The President’s continual frustration of FEPC work touched off a furore among liberals and blacks. Without goals, without strong organizations to implement social policies, social transformations were uncontrolled.

Organizations have a way of enduring. By refusing to build strong organizations for social policy, Roosevelt insured that the government would not control domestic society. While large residuals of presidential government, the military-industrial complex, and other wartime controls persisted, the dominance of American society by the national government ended with the war. Standards and mechanisms to insure that the social antagonisms enhanced by the war did not tear society apart would have to be a peacetime creation. Some new sources of integration, compounded from the prewar yardstick and the mobilization experience, would have to link together the black cities and the white suburbs of metropolis, the vast military and social-welfare bureaucracies of presidential government, the skyrocketing marriage and divorce rates, the disenchanted students and weapons researchers on campuses. Urban riots, family dissolution, feckless bureaucracy, and campus strife would be the price of not finding such new links.

“…There are no two fronts for America in this war,” the President had said early in the year. “There is only one front….When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground—we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his Government.”

Noble words, and perhaps true in the way Roosevelt meant. But in fact there had developed by the third year of war an ambivalence in the American way of war—an ambivalence that would have more significance in the long run than the consensus that the President sought to invoke.

On the one hand Americans were giving massive support to the war. In June 1944 the President reported proudly in a fireside chat that while there were about sixty-seven million persons who had or earned some form of income, eighty-one million parents and children had bought more than six hundred million individual bonds totaling more than thirty-two billion dollars. Americans were growing almost twenty million victory gardens; housewives were canning three billion quarts of fruit and vegetables a year. Boy Scouts, with the motto “Junk the Axis,” were tracking down the last remaining worn-out bicycles, old license plates, and scrap metal. In remote towns civil-defense wardens were still manning key buildings with sand buckets and stirrup pumps and scrutinizing the heavens for enemy planes that would never come.

On the other hand there was little indication, as American soldiers came more and more to grips with the enemy, of any deepening or broadening of popular understanding of the meaning of the war. After closely studying American popular attitudes, Jerome Bruner concluded in 1944 that people said that they were fighting for freedom, liberty, and democracy, but that was not why we went to war. “We went to war because our security demanded it.” The popular attitude toward the great peace documents of the war, he concluded, was symptomatic. A few weeks after the Atlantic Charter conference some three-fourths of the American people knew that a meeting had taken place and that a charter of some sort had emerged from it. Five months later less than a quarter of the American public said that they had ever heard of the Atlantic Charter. The same was true of the Four Freedoms, he found; only a handful of people would take exception to any of the four points, but they had not become a symbolic rallying cry for the future.

The
Nation
was quick to put the blame on Roosevelt. The American people were asking why we were fighting, and what is our foreign policy. People were asking Roosevelt and Hull this and receiving no answer. There were long, earnest debates as to whether Johnny felt he was simply fighting for Mom and blueberry pie. The “other side” of the war—the black and gray markets, widespread theft of rationing stamps, profiteering—was cited by observers as proof of lack of purpose and faith among the people.

On this score Roosevelt had little patience with his critics. Had he not proclaimed eloquent war aims over and over again? Late in March he stated them once more, and more flatly and succinctly than ever. “The United Nations,” he said, “are fighting to make a
world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.” He pointedly read the statement to reporters and added, “Some of you people who are wandering around asking the bellhop whether we have a foreign policy or not, I think that’s a pretty good paragraph.”

Others wondered. John Dos Passos, exploring wartime Washington, had heard of the quiet and serenity of the White House. He asked a friend who worked there: Did the very stateliness of the place help keep the President out of touch with the country? Was the whole place under a bell glass? His friend thought the President might have lost touch with what real people did and thought and felt. Another man “close to the White House” was more reassuring. Every time the President took a trip, he told Dos Passos, he came back refreshed; perhaps it was a little like the Greek mythical giant who lost strength as soon as he ceased touching the earth. But the President was still seeing old friends—giving them too much time, some felt. Did people hesitate to tell him bad news? The President had a genius for handling that kind of problem.

Later Dos Passos watched the President at a press conference. He noted the two Secret Service men behind the chair, the green lawn sloping down to the great enclosing trees, the President’s fine nose and forehead etched against the blue Pacific Ocean on the big globe behind him. Roosevelt was boyishly gay as he described the war, puffing out his cheeks while searching for a word, lifting his eyebrows, scratching the back of his head as he prepared to shoot out an answer. But when the talk turned to strikes and rationing and price control, Dos Passos noted, his manner changed. He became more abrupt, almost querulous. His face took on the sagging look of a man who had been up late at his desk, Dos Passos felt, and had known sleepless nights.

Had the people lost touch with Roosevelt? Dos Passos did not ask this question. The people had no clear way of showing their support or their understanding between elections except through answering questions someone else had framed. So tested, public confidence in Roosevelt as a person and as President was fairly high, but it seemed to turn much more on his experience and competence than on the ideals and war goals he represented. Thus when asked in June the strongest reason for voting for Roosevelt for re-election in 1944, the great majority of voters endorsed his “superior ability to handle present and future situations”; others approved his past record of handling internal affairs; only a handful stressed his personality and general ability. Dr. Win the War did indeed seem to overshadow men’s perspectives of their leaders; the long-run goals were still vague in the popular mind.

Ideologies are shaped and hardened in the crucibles of fear and stress. Unlike the British and Russians, Americans as a whole had never had the experience or prospect of fighting for their lives and lands against a foreign invader. Most Americans, even in the darkest days after Pearl Harbor, had never feared a major invasion and certainly not defeat. They had differed only over the question of how long it would take to win, with most expecting victory over Germany within a year or two. But the cause of American optimism and lack of ideology lay much deeper—perhaps in what D. W. Brogan in mid-1944 described as the permanent optimism of “a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America.”

A country has the kind of army its total ethos, institutions, habits, and resources make possible, Brogan wrote. The American Army was the army of a nation whose motto was “Root, hog, or die,” of a country that, just as it slowly piled up great economic power as a special kind of corner, piled up military power for a final decisive blow; of a mechanized country of colossal resources and enterprises. “Other countries, less fortunate in position and resources, more burdened with feudal and gentlemanly traditions, richer in national reverence and discipline, can and must wage war in a very different spirit.” But Americans were interested not in form but in manpower, resources, logistics; not in moral victories, but in victory.

“Manpower, resources, logistics…” The admirals and generals passed through the gates to the White House grounds in their limousines and command cars and strode into Leahy’s quarters or into the map room or into the oval office. The military police, walking their hundred-foot beats in their white leggings, belts, and gloves, marched to and from the military installation nearest to the White House, a barracks behind the State Department built in the shadow of the Peace Monument put up after World War I. WAVES, quartered on the Mall, hung up their underthings to dry a stone’s throw from the Washington Monument. Encampments stretched alongside the Navy Yard, the Pentagon, the airport. The military dead slept at Arlington.

Unending caravans passed through the city, following occult unit designations posted along the streets. Along the highways and railways north and south of the capital sprawled vast embarkation areas, airfields, dumps, hospitals, depots, encampments, war plants, ports, proving grounds. At the ports of embarkation armies of men and mountains of equipment, clothing, weapons, ammunition were gathered, divided, allocated, paired, and dispatched on aged merchantmen, on Liberty and Victory ships, on converted liners like the
Queen Mary
that could carry a whole division. Overseas, men and munitions were sluiced into more camps and dumps,
redistributed, assigned, loaded, shipped to the fronts: artillerymen, engineers, medical corpsmen, storekeepers, cooks, torpedomen, tail gunners, clerks, aircraft spotters, chaplains.

Near the front the manpower and supply routes branched off into corps and division headquarters and dumps, forked off to regiments, twisted along stream beds and jeep roads and mule paths to companies and platoons and squads. At the end of the long road bulging with war supply from the overflowing war plants of America was a thin, irregular line of soldiers with stubby faces, in shapeless fatigues, hardly distinguishable from the earth in which they lived and to which they clung. This was the seemingly fragile shield that held and advanced with tensile force. That force lay not in these few expendables, but in the colossal technology that lay behind the front.

American soldiers were workmen. They did not advance as in a pageant or charge the enemy in splendid array. Occasionally men fought with bayonets and pistols in Hollywood fashion, but for the most part soldiers wormed ahead on their bellies, came up against strong points, manhandled their light weapons into place, poured in fire and explosives; moved on; or if the strong point held, they called up reinforcements, asked for bigger tools, waited, summoned artillery, heavy mortars, planes, directed the holocaust of fire, waited….This was the “cutting edge” of war, glorified by combat reporters, but the Army really moved on the ocean supply routes and the endless lines of trucks clogging the highways.

Behind the front there rose a whole new culture, symbolized more by the quartermaster than the combat soldier. The GI had his own myths and credo, his own humor, his own blasphemy and invective invariably and irrelevantly garnished by one fuckin’ expletive, his own press—
Yank
and
Stars and Stripes
and countless unit publications—his own food, clothing, laundries, postal system, schools, recreation, paperbacks, shops, doctors, libraries. Like the soldier himself, all these were Government Issue.

There was no deep gulf between soldiers and civilians, in part because they shared the same ideology or lack of it. The area of consensus among Americans both in and out of the armed forces, investigators found, lay simply in the belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor meant war. Now they had to win the war to get back to home and blueberry pie. Like the civilians, the soldiers remembered little about the Four Freedoms, had no doubt that their side would win, felt little sense of personal commitment even while, in the soldiers’ case, sacrificing years of their lives and sometimes life itself. There was considerable distrust of Russia and some distrust of Britain. The soldiers lacked a consistent rationale by which to justify the war; they lacked a context; the war had no
connection with anything that had gone before, except Axis aggression, or would come after it. It had to be fought, to be gotten over quickly so that men could go home.

The Commander in Chief was neither loved nor hated by most soldiers, but simply taken for granted as the top man in charge. He was the only President the younger men had known since the dawn of their political consciousness. A little of the old cynicism remained. Occasionally a vexed soldier would burst out to no one in particular: “Ah
hate
wah.
Eleanor
hates wah.
Sistie
hates wah….” But this was exasperation, not isolationism. By and large there was not much interest in the upcoming national elections. The average GI did not feel that
his
Commander in Chief would be tested at the polls in November. Ernie Pyle reported from Italy that, sure, the average combat soldier wanted to vote, but if there was going to be any red tape he would say nuts to it.

Washington was aware of the problem. The Army searched for Tolstoy’s quantity X, “the spirit of the army, the greater or less desire to fight and to face dangers….” Colonel Frank Capra directed a series of films called “Why We Fight,” based mainly on Allied and captured enemy newsreels. The films were eloquent, professional, relatively factual; they were required to be shown to all personnel; they provided men with a better knowledge of the prelude to war; they were found to have influenced specific opinions. But they had virtually no effect on general opinions, on commitment and conviction, on ideology. The GI had not ideology, but faith—faith in the Tightness of his cause, the iniquity of the enemy, the certainty of victory. He was persuaded mainly by the fact of war, just as the people had been after Pearl Harbor—and just as Roosevelt helped them to be. The GI was a realist, a workman, a practical achiever, just as, in large measure, his Commander in Chief was.