Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (115 page)

A
MID THE GROWING
threats from Germany and Japan, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the American military. In May 1940, as German planes shocked the world into recognizing the destructive potential of airpower, the president called for a dramatic increase in American aircraft production. “I should like to see this nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year,” he told Congress. American factories were currently making less than a quarter of this number. He urged a speedup of the army’s plans for purchasing tanks, trucks, and artillery. To fund the buildup he asked for nearly one billion dollars in new money.

Two weeks later, as the French folded and the British fled before the Nazi onslaught, Roosevelt requested another billion dollars to prepare the army to train new recruits. “The one most obvious lesson of the present war in Europe is the value of the factor of speed,” he said. “There is definite danger in waiting to order the complete equipping and training of armies after a war begins.” He also requested authority from Congress to call out the national guard and to bring the army reserve into active service.

After the fall of France the president returned to Congress again, this time asking for five billion new dollars. “The principal lesson of the war up to the present time is that partial defense is inadequate defense,” he said. “If the United States is to have any defense, it must have total defense.” Roosevelt asserted a goal of acquiring equipment for an army of two million men, with comparable increases in the strength of the navy and the army’s air force.

As to where the soldiers would come from, Roosevelt broached a controversial subject. He mentioned “a system of selective training” to ensure that the manpower existed for most effective use of all the new weapons. He declined to specify what he meant by selective training, but other administration officials, including army chief of staff George Marshall, acknowledged that conscription—a draft—was the plan.

A conscription bill was introduced in Congress but bogged down, prompting Roosevelt to put his own shoulder behind it, albeit tentatively. A reporter prodded him at a press conference in early August: “There is a very definite feeling, Mr. President, in congressional circles that you are not very hot about this conscription legislation.”

“It depends on which paper you read,” Roosevelt responded.

“Well, I read my own, which I believe in.”

“I am damned if I do, and I am damned if I do not,” Roosevelt rejoined. “I am bound to be criticized whatever I do. Now, on this particular bill, everybody knows that if I were to come out and send up to the Hill a particular measure, what would you boys do, most of you? You would say that the President is ‘ordering Congress.’ ‘Old Mr. Dictator, he is just ordering Congress to pass his bill.’” Roosevelt talked around the subject for several minutes before citing his experience in the Wilson administration. “We figured out pretty well in 1917 that the selective training or selective draft was the fairest and in all ways the most efficient way of conducting a war if we had to go to war. I still think so, and I think a great majority of the people in the country will think so, when they understand it.”

Additional circumlocution ended with a reporter’s attempt to extract a usable statement. “There is a very quotable sentence right there, if you will permit it,” the reporter said.

“What is it?”

“That you are distinctly in favor of a selective training bill—”

“And consider it essential to adequate national defense. Quote that.”

Roosevelt’s remarks provoked the expected response from the isolationists, who condemned them as another step toward American fascism. Arthur Vandenberg approvingly circulated a letter from former War Secretary Harry Woodring denouncing the conscription bill as a measure “that smacks of totalitarianism.” Democrat Burton Wheeler of Montana contended that the compulsory enlistment of Americans ought to require a national referendum. Labor leaders opposed the draft, with the heads of five railroad brotherhoods calling conscription the “very antithesis of freedom.” Scores of faculty at the City College of New York signed a petition rejecting conscription.

Yet broader measures of opinion indicated support for Roosevelt and the draft. A survey of papers by the journal
Editor & Publisher
found that 80 percent favored some form of conscription. A Gallup poll revealed that Americans at large supported a draft by a margin of two to one, with comfortable majorities even in traditionally isolationist states of the Midwest.

(Whether registering opposition to the draft, a realistic appraisal of its chances of passage, or other emotions entirely, thousands of young couples flooded marriage license bureaus across the country, in recognition of the fact that the conscription bill would exempt married men. “This is the biggest day we’ve had this year,” the chief clerk in New York City explained. “I hear most couples talking of the proposed draft now pending before Congress. I think it’s the reason for this large crowd…. We were able to take care of all of them and send everybody home happy.”)

Despite the popular support, Roosevelt declined to push any harder for conscription without assurances that his backing wouldn’t be used against him. He approached Willkie regarding a joint statement in support of the draft. He wasn’t surprised, given Willkie’s negative response to his earlier effort on behalf of the destroyers-for-bases deal, when the Republican nominee rebuffed the overture. This didn’t prevent him from complaining that Willkie was placing his own interest above that of the country. “He has no desire to cooperate and is merely playing politics,” Roosevelt wrote to an ally in Congress.

Shortly thereafter, though, Willkie issued an independent endorsement of the draft, freeing Roosevelt to take the lead on the issue. Critics were advocating postponing a decision till the new year; reporters asked for Roosevelt’s reaction. “I am absolutely opposed to the postponement,” he said. “It means in these days—and we all know what the world situation is—nearly a year of delay…. We cannot afford a year.”

With the president, his Republican challenger, and a large majority of the American public behind conscription, not even the isolationists in Congress could stop the bill. In September the legislature approved the first peacetime draft in American history. “America stands at the crossroads of its destiny,” Roosevelt said, on signing the measure. “We must and will marshal our great potential strength to fend off war from our shores. We must and will prevent our land from becoming a victim of aggression. Our decision has been made.”

T
HE ELECTION OF
1940 should have been one of the most momentous in American history. Franklin Roosevelt was trying to break the oldest taboo in American politics, the one that had always prevented what American democrats—a group that overlapped with American Democrats, but not precisely—had feared: the emergence of a permanent presidency. They knew the power of incumbents and how incumbents could manipulate the political process to their benefit and to the exclusion of challengers. They might well have rewritten the Constitution to forbid third terms if they hadn’t assumed that the ghost of George Washington was forbidding enough.

Roosevelt’s attempted lese majesty would have provoked a fundamental debate if there hadn’t been a war on. The fact of the war, of course, was what provided Roosevelt’s political cover. He knew perfectly well there wouldn’t be such a debate. At least he wouldn’t participate in one, relying on the war as his excuse not to.

The Republicans attempted to force the issue. The party organized a national “No Third Term Day,” marked by anti-Roosevelt rallies in hundreds of cities and towns across the country. Willkie, calling Roosevelt “Mr. Third-term Candidate,” raised the question at every chance. “If you elect him for a third term, there will be no limit to the imagination of what he has a mandate to do,” Willkie told an appreciative audience in Montana. In Syracuse he asserted that Roosevelt, after failing to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937, had nonetheless packed the court with justices who shared his expansive view of federal power. “Give him another four years and he will fill with his own men not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary. This is the pattern of dictatorship, the usurpation of power by manufactured emergencies, the circumvention of the legislature, the capture of the courts…. These are the last steps on the road to absolute power.” After Roosevelt still refused to be drawn, Willkie demanded, “Since he won’t discuss the principles of a third term, what does he think about a fourth term?” The president and his supporters were contending that his experience qualified him for extended tenure. If this argument held true, it presumably would be employed again after twelve years, and then after sixteen. “You can pursue that argument on into infinity. You will come to the conclusion that Louis XIV, the worst despot in history, was the best ruler because he served the longest. So I would like to have the third-term candidate enlighten the American people.”

Willkie wanted Roosevelt to enlighten the American people about his war plans as well. “Are there any international understandings to put America into the war that we citizens do not know about?” The Republican nominee recounted the Democrats’ handling of the First World War, when American boys had fought and died for a dream that bore no resemblance to reality. “We do not want to send our boys over there again. And we do not intend to send them over there again. And if you elect me president, they won’t be sent.” Willkie challenged Roosevelt to make a similar promise.

This demand got Roosevelt’s attention. Polls showed that a double-digit Roosevelt lead in late September had slipped to six points by the end of October. According to Gallup’s interpretation of the peculiar politics of the Democratic party, the race was therefore nearly even. “A lead of 53 percent for the President is actually the equivalent of a neck-and-neck race,” George Gallup explained, “because, owing to surplus Democratic majorities in the South, a Democratic President normally requires about 52 percent of the nation to win.”

Roosevelt responded with a statement that seemed necessary at the time but that would haunt him later. Speaking at Boston on October 30, he accused the Republicans of “political shenanigans” and Willkie of “unpatriotic misstatement of fact.” He praised what the New Deal had done for ordinary Americans and pledged to carry the good work forward. Then, addressing himself specifically to the “mothers and fathers” of America, he declared:

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.