Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (142 page)

Stalin rejected Roosevelt’s explanation and a similar message from Churchill. His anger seethed from between the lines as he lectured the president on what the Americans and British had promised and repeatedly failed to deliver. “You will recall that you and Mr. Churchill thought it possible to open a second front as early as 1942 or this spring at the latest.” No second front had appeared, leaving the burden on the Red Army. “The Soviet troops have fought strenuously all winter and are continuing to do so, while Hitler is taking important measures to rehabilitate and reinforce his army for the spring and summer operations against the U.S.S.R. It is therefore particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer.” Stalin concluded ominously: “I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught.”

50.

W
AS IT A WARNING, OR A THREAT?
W
AS
S
TALIN SUGGESTING THAT
the Red Army might break under unrelieved pressure? Or that the Soviet government might reverse course once more and seek accommodation with Germany? Or was it a political tactic? Was Stalin simply compiling a case to use against the Americans and British at a postwar peace conference? Would Stalin claim the moral high ground for having fought longer and harder than the Anglo-Americans?

While Roosevelt pondered the possibilities, certain matters of domestic governance required his attention—except that nothing after Pearl Harbor was exclusively domestic. For sixty years the United States had closed its borders to nearly all immigration from China. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 reflected the racism and xenophobia of its time, and though the government of China had protested the unfavorable treatment accorded its nationals—in a period when America’s borders were open to almost everyone else—its weakness allowed Washington to ignore the complaints. The singularity of Chinese exclusion diminished in the 1920s with the adoption of quotas on immigration generally. China continued to complain during the 1930s, but amid the economic depression and the isolationism of the decade, few in America listened. The onset of the Pacific war changed things. China became an ally and a fellow member of the United Nations. Meanwhile, however, Japan used the issue of Chinese exclusion—which had been broadened to encompass other Asians and extended to a ban preventing Asians resident in the United States from becoming citizens—as a propaganda tool against America. The Atlantic Charter was a sham, Tokyo asserted, in the face of America’s ongoing discrimination against Asians.

Roosevelt recognized the damage the hoary policy did to the war effort. As a first step toward rectifying the situation, he directed the drafting of a treaty relinquishing America’s extraterritoriality rights in China. Extraterritoriality—the principle that Americans in China were subject to American laws, not Chinese laws—was a vestige of the nineteenth century, when the United States joined Britain and other imperial powers in the system of “unequal treaties” that exploited China’s weakness to the advantage of the West. “The abolition of the extraterritorial system in China is a step in line with the expressed desires of the government and the people of the United States,” Roosevelt declared in forwarding the new treaty to the Senate. “The spirit reflected by the treaty will, I am sure, be gratifying to the governments and the peoples of all the United Nations.” The Senate took the president at his word and approved the pact.

Roosevelt followed up by asking Congress to repeal the Chinese exclusion laws. “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes,” the president said. “We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and to correct them. By the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, we can correct a historic mistake and silence the distorted Japanese propaganda.” Repeal would remove the stigma China labored under in American law, and it would allow Chinese nationals their rightful place in the American immigration system. This wasn’t saying much, given the pro-European bias of the immigration quotas. Roosevelt himself admitted—in fact boasted, albeit quietly—that the Chinese quota would be “only about 100 immigrants a year.” Organized labor needn’t worry. “There can be no reasonable apprehension that any such number of immigrants will cause unemployment or provide competition in the search for jobs.”

Roosevelt went on to urge the repeal of the law against citizenship for persons of Chinese descent. “It would be additional proof not only that we regard China as a partner in waging war but that we shall regard her as a partner in days of peace.” He did not propose to change the citizenship laws as they applied to other Asians, and he acknowledged that the discrepancy would favor China. But China deserved it. “Their great contribution to the cause of decency and freedom entitles them to such preference.” Roosevelt didn’t detail his big plans for China after the war. Some of the legislators knew what he had in mind; others did not. But again Congress followed the president’s lead and repealed the offensive statute.

R
ACE AROSE IN
another context during this same period. Eighty years, almost to the week, after race riots convulsed New York City during the Civil War, race riots erupted in Detroit and Los Angeles. The Detroit riots reflected the strains the wartime economy had placed on the fabric of American social relations and the ambivalent response of Roosevelt and the federal government to those strains. Even before Pearl Harbor, the effects of the approach of war—in the form of the economic revival and the inception of the draft—inspired African American leaders to press for equal treatment for blacks in the military and in the workplace. A. Philip Randolph, the longtime director of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, headed the effort. Randolph shrewdly invited Eleanor Roosevelt to the union’s annual convention, in Harlem, in 1940. The First Lady was welcomed and granted the opportunity to address the delegates; she reciprocated by arranging a meeting between Randolph and the president.

Roosevelt greeted Randolph, Walter White of the NAACP, and a small group of other black leaders and thanked them for coming. He listened intently as they presented a petition entreating the government to end segregation in the armed services and in defense work. They left, as so many visitors to the White House left, thinking Roosevelt had agreed with them. A short while later, however, even as the president personally asserted that, in federal defense contracts, “workers should not be discriminated against because of age, sex, race or color,” a White House spokesman declared that “the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”

Randolph felt betrayed. At least he acted that way. He declared that if the president would not respond to reasoned argument, other forms of persuasion might be necessary. He called for a protest march on Washington by African Americans, to shame the president and the government into doing what was right. Randolph laid the groundwork for the protest during the spring of 1941 and scheduled the march for July 1.

Roosevelt was an egalitarian at heart, if a sometimes paternalistic one, and he might have desegregated the armed forces had politics and the war not constrained him. But he knew that desegregation would antagonize the South and incite those same southern senators and congressmen who had prevented him from taking a stand for civil rights until now. In addition, amid his careful cultivation of popular support for war readiness and ultimate intervention, he opposed anything that distracted the public from the overriding issue of national security. A march by Negroes on Washington, with its white, essentially southern police force, might well result in bloodshed, which was the last thing Roosevelt needed. Finally, he resented anything that smacked of political extortion.

The president talked the matter over with Eleanor. She was in sympathy with Randolph’s goals even more than Roosevelt was, but she agreed with her husband that a march would be counterproductive. “I feel very strongly that your group is making a grave mistake at the present time to allow this march to take place,” she wrote Randolph. “I feel that if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.” When Randolph refused to call off the march, Roosevelt dispatched Eleanor to New York to talk to Randolph and Walter White personally. “Get it stopped,” he said.

Eleanor met Randolph and White at New York’s City Hall. She repeated her argument that the march could get out of control and provoke a backlash. Randolph threw the responsibility for violence back at her—and her husband. “I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads,” Randolph recalled. He and White stood firm. Eleanor, with Roosevelt’s permission, arranged another meeting of the black leaders with the president.

This session took place two weeks before the scheduled march. Roosevelt asked how many people Randolph and White would bring to Washington. Randolph said one hundred thousand.

Roosevelt looked at Randolph skeptically, then turned to White. “Walter, how many people will
really
march?”

“One hundred thousand, Mr. President,” White said.

“You can’t bring one hundred thousand Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt responded. “Somebody might get killed.”

Not if the president came out and addressed the marchers, Randolph said.

Roosevelt ignored the suggestion. “Call it off,” he said, “and we’ll talk.”

Without explicitly canceling the march, Randolph and White accepted Roosevelt’s offer to let them help draft an executive order along the lines they desired. The writing began that day in the Cabinet Room, and it continued for several days thereafter as the various parties likely to be affected registered their objections and support.

A week before the scheduled march, Roosevelt issued the executive order. “I do hereby reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin,” the president said. To enforce the policy he established a Committee on Fair Employment Practice.

The formula worked—for Roosevelt and, to a lesser degree, for Randolph and White. The march was canceled, and the principle of nondiscrimination began to be implemented. The executive order was silent on segregation in the military; as part of the bargain Roosevelt persuaded Randolph and White to leave the soldiers alone.

Roosevelt could compel defense employers not to discriminate, but he couldn’t compel white workers and black workers to fraternize in the workplace. Nor could he convince white workers that blacks didn’t erode their bargaining power. During the Second World War a second great migration from the South to the North occurred, and the tensions it induced in cities like Detroit mirrored the tensions of the First World War and the first migration. During the summer of 1943 the tension passed the snapping point. On June 20 a large crowd of blacks and whites gathered at Belle Isle, a public park in the Detroit River. The hot weather and the consumption of alcohol by many of the picnickers contributed to a series of scuffles that escalated into concerted violence. Mistaken reports circulated that whites had killed three blacks; blacks responded with random attacks against whites. By late evening the city was out of control, and before federal troops brought order the next day, thirty-four people—twenty-five blacks and nine whites—had been killed.

The riots in Los Angeles revealed a different set of strains. The Immigration Act of 1924 had exempted Mexicans from the quota system because immigration from Mexico had never been large and because employers of Mexican workers—typically commercial farmers in California, Arizona, and Texas—resisted the effort to restrict their work force. As both a cause and a consequence of the open border between the United States and Mexico, the most common pattern of movement was not immigration but migration—a back-and-forth flow of workers from Mexico to the United States during the growing season and from the United States to Mexico during the winter.

Gradually, though, communities of Mexican Americans emerged in Los Angeles and other cities, producing and experiencing the same kinds of stresses that characterized ethnic communities elsewhere. In the barrio of East Los Angeles, many young Mexican Americans distinguished themselves by wearing oversized, elaborately styled “zoot suits,” which were an emblem of both ethnic and second-generational identity. The zoot suits also made their wearers easy targets when racial and ethnic tensions emerged during the summer of 1943. In this case the participants were the young Mexican Americans and the mostly white sailors and soldiers from the military facilities in Los Angeles. A series of murders and assaults triggered broader violence, and lurid reporting in the local press kept it going.