FDR 23

If Americans think they know anything about the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and many, especially young people, do not, in addition to being elected president to three terms or was that four (it was four), it is that he brought the nation out of the Great Depression and with stellar leadership guided this country to the successful winning of WWII. There is much to be disputed about those assertions as will be made clear in this essay. Roosevelt called himself a “trickster” and said he did not allow his left hand to know what his right hand was doing.

Let’s address one oft made charge that Roosevelt ‘knew’ the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, but did not warn the military commanders there because he wanted a surprise attack to get the American people in the proper frame of mind for war. There is no credible evidence to support that claim. It is one thing to ‘know’ something and quite another to posit that something ‘might’ happen. The Roosevelt administration and the military thought it far more likely that, if the Japanese were going to attack, it would be in the Philippines which they did days after Pearl Harbor. That Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into war by embargoing gasoline, scrap metal, and rubber to attempt to discourage their imperialistic ambitions in the Pacific is also beyond dispute.

Despite manifest shortcomings and wrongheaded policies and even though it can not be asserted apodictically, I believe that Roosevelt was an effective war time leader. Few if any American political leaders realized the inevitability of war with the Axis powers and took action to prepare for it as did Roosevelt. Because of his blindness to the nefarious ambitions of the Soviet Union and perhaps also because of his fondness for socialism I think it not unreasonable to believe that Roosevelt would have been a disaster for America and the West as a leader during the Cold War. Remember, as storied and praised as Winston Churchill was as prime minister of Great Britain during the war, he and his conservative party were turned out of power little more than two months after the end of the war in Europe. Never one not to have the last word, Churchill said of his Labor Party successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee, “He is a very modest man…..and has much to be modest about.”

WWII is remembered as a ‘good’ war – the last good one fought by this country. Yet there are similarities with the current contentious War on Terrorism. Then, as now, many Americans did not want us to go to war and even after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (similar to the twin towers and pentagon attacks), they were not, to say the least, in dithyrambic agreement with our war with Germany and Italy (cf. Iraq). Many of the policies of the Roosevelt administration were repudiated by the public and congress. And especially the “New Deal” element of the Democrat party lost power and favor during the war. Having the idea that everyone was on board and enthusiastically supported Roosevelt’s efforts in conducting the war is to misread history. For a fuller analysis and more detail of the FDR administration in peace and war I would recommend the 2001 book The New Dealers’ War by Thomas Fleming.

When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936 he won by one of the greatest landslides in American history: 27,751,612 to 16,681,913 against Kansas Republican governor Alf Landon. The New Deal was in full flower – Democrats had majorities of 334 to 89 in the House and 75 to 17 in the Senate. Can anyone imagine such lopsided political power today? However, there is more to it than meets the eye and therein also lies a cautionary tale of hubris and overconfidence.

Roosevelt decided to use his newly enhanced popularity to exercise control over the judiciary with legislation to give him the opportunity to appoint 50 new federal judges including seven additional associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court - the infamous ‘court-packing’ plan. A funny thing happened on the way to fulfilling this disreputable démarche. There was immediate opposition to this legislative bill led by Southern conservative Democrats (remember this was still the time of the Democrat “Solid South”) and traditional Western Democrats. For once the senate Republicans played it smart by remaining mute while the Democrats tore themselves apart. The Gallop poll which had gain credibility by forecasting the Democrat landslide in the 1936 election showed that the American people were split on the issue 45% for, 45% against, and 10% undecided. The senate buried the plan 70-20.

There were more political embarrassments to come than just the overwhelming and humiliating court packing defeat. In fact Roosevelt’s travails were just beginning. In the 1938 mid-term elections Roosevelt revealed an all too common characteristic for him – his vindictiveness. He set out to defeat 13 of the mostly Southern and Western Democrats who had led the court bill fight. He went to their home states and spoke against them or made hostile statements about them in the newspapers. FDR was never one to shrink from traducing his political opponents. All but one of them were resoundingly reelected. As much as politics was Roosevelt’s métier he was not always successful in his machinations. In the mid-term election the Republicans went from 88 to 170 seats in the House and gained eight seats in the Senate.

Additionally there was an intensifying of the recession in 1937. The stock market went into a nosedive and by November 1937 unemployment had soared to 11 million with another 3 million working only part time. Statistics showed that the United States was lagging far behind other countries in recovering from the depression. American national income in 1937 was 86% of the 1929 high water mark while Great Britain’s was 124%. Japan’s employment figure was 75% above the 1929 number. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had economic growth rates in the range of 20% compared to the United States’ dismal -7%. At a cabinet meeting a seemingly traumatized and possibly paranoid Roosevelt complained that the new economic collapse was the result of “a concerted effort by big business and concentrated wealth to drive the market down just to create a situation unfavorable to me.”

There was some doubt that Roosevelt would be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 1940. The country was not doing particularly well economically and there was resistance to breaking the maximum two term rule initiated by George Washington. When Roosevelt made it known that he wanted Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to replace John Nance Garner of Texas on the ticket as vice-president he almost had a revolt on his hands. Wallace was far too liberal, not to say outright socialistic, for most Democrat politicians and operatives at that time. His nomination was saves by Eleanor Roosevelt who had a reservoir of good will not only with Democrats, but with most people in the country. She flew to Chicago to plead with the delegates to give her husband the man he wanted to help him bear the immense burden they were placing on his shoulders. Wallace received 627 votes out of 1,100 delegates present. That meant that 43% of these official spokesmen for the Democrat Party went home in an ill tempered frame of mind.

Harry Truman was up for reelection in 1940 to the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt and the people in his administration did not support him in the Democrat primary which was tantamount to the election in Missouri. Truman still won by a slim 8000 vote margin and his victory meant that he was not beholden to Roosevelt in his term in the senate. This political independence for the man from Independence, MO may be what allowed him to gain the recognition in his senate activities that propelled him to the vice-presidency and as a consequence the presidency.

In 1941 after being reelected to the Senate, Harry Truman was appointed to head a committee to investigate military preparation and contracts. What was called the Truman Committee reported that in 1942 German submarines sank 12 million tons of Allied shipping. The U.S. Navy, having stonewalled about the U-boat offensive along the East Coast, which accounted for a heavy percentage of these staggering losses, issued a furious denial. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox sneered that the report was based on “common gossip.” The perspicacious politician Truman asked one of the Republican members of the committee to warn Knox that he would be called before the committee to settle the argument. Knox hastily issued a statement saying the figures were correct. Early in 1943 an investigation by the Truman Committee revealed almost incredible carelessness and corruption in the manufacture of aircraft engines by the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Corporation. In secret committee hearings the army sent an array of generals and colonels who told lie after lie claiming they never saw or heard of a defective engine by Curtiss-Wright. Truman published a scathing report on the company’s defective inspection procedures and malfunctioning engines. The company launched an intense attack on the Truman Committee and for a time even the New York Times was convinced that Truman was wrong. Instead of going public with the dispute, Truman sent the committee’s chief counsel to the Times to tell them the truth and invited Under Secretary of War Robertson, who had declared that the Army Air Force had never received a single defective engine from Curtiss-Wright, to his office for a chat. The Under Secretary soon admitted he was wrong and the newspaper attacks on the committee stopped. If you now begin to understand why, seemingly against the odds, Harry Truman would be chosen or at least not opposed by Roosevelt to be his Vice-Presidential candidate in 1944, these examples of competency and honesty should be instructive.

The election on November 5, 1940 was a record 49+ million votes cast. Roosevelt/Wallace received 27,244,160 versus 22,305,198 for the Republican ticket headed by the liberal Wendell Willkie who had been a Democrat until 1938. This was a comfortable margin for Roosevelt, but less than half of the 11,000,000 vote difference in 1936.

In late 1940 Admiral James O. Richardson strongly recommended to President Roosevelt that the U.S. fleet be stationed at San Diego instead of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt demurred stating the fleet in Hawaii would have a “restraining influence” on Japan. This made no sense whatsoever because 1.) the fleet would still be 5600 miles away from the Philippines and even farther away from other vulnerable places such as The Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Malaya; 2.) the fleet was not ready for war because it lacked enough tankers, supply ships, and training to operate at sea for long periods of time; 3.) the fleet was diminished by the reassignment of many ships to the Atlantic. When Admiral Richardson told Roosevelt that the navy did not have trust and confidence in the administration over this policy the president was offended and replaced Richardson after the 1940 presidential election. The good admiral could have counted himself lucky because his replacement was Admiral Husband Kimmel who became the scapegoat of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In August 1941 Roosevelt met with British Prime Minster Winston Churchill in Placentia Bay, New Foundland for the Atlantic Charter conference. With Britain at war with Germany, Churchill urged Roosevelt to bring America into the war on the side of Britain. Roosevelt responded that he “planned to wage war, but not declare it” and would become more and more “provocative.” The U.S. House of Representatives just had extended the 1940 Selective Service Act by a single vote thereby keeping a million men in the army’s ranks for another 6 months. Roosevelt had reason to be cautious and devious about his intent to get the United States into the war against Germany and so he was. It came natural for Roosevelt to scheme, mislead, and to downright prevaricate.

In the opening months of 1942 the United States was being humiliated on both oceans. While the Japanese army and navy rampaged through the Far East, Germans submarines wrecked havoc along the U.S. east coast. By June 1942 German subs had sunk 397 oil tankers, cargo ships, and assorted other types. The Roosevelt administration stonewalled on this catastrophe and the American public had no idea of the magnitude of what happened even though a few swimmers occasionally saw a ship being sunk. Secretary of the Navy Knox declared that the number of German U-boats being sunk was classified for “security” reasons. In fact none was sunk. Have you heard about this before?

In a fireside chat on February 23, 1942 Roosevelt solemnly assured the American people that “your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart.” He then proceeded to minimize American losses at Pearl Harbor. Instead of admitting the Japanese had sunk six battleships, damaged two others plus three cruisers and two destroyers, he claimed only “three ships” had been permanently put out of commission. Roosevelt then proceeded to tell an even bigger whopper. He said that “to date, including Pearl Harbor we have destroyed considerably
more Japanese planes than they have destroyed ours.” At Pearl Harbor 180 American planes were completely destroyed and 128 damaged. Japanese losses were 29 planes. In the Philippines, within two weeks, General MacArthur’s 277 plane air force had been reduced to a handful of fighters and a few bombers. By the time FDR spoke these too were gone. If you are going to tell lies in war time to attempt to boost morale that is one thing (although the Bush haters would not concede that), but don’t insult the character of the American people by first saying you know they can handle the truth then not telling them the unpleasant facts.

Knowing that Democrats would have a fight on their hands in the 1942 mid-term elections, Roosevelt wanted to change the odds by launching an invasion of North Africa before the vote. To minimize causalities the military wanted a moonless night, but the next one on October 8th was too soon for proper preparation. The one after that was on November 8th, five days after the election. The GOP gained 44 seats in the House, leaving the Democrats with a slim 8 vote majority. In the Senate the Republicans gained 9 seats. Without the largely conservative Solid South, the Democrats would have been in the minority. Thomas Dewey won the governorship in New York which was the first time since 1920 for a Republican and in California Republican Earl Warren handily beat incumbent liberal Democrat governor Culbert Olson. Two even more personal bitter pills for FDR were the reelections of Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan who once called Roosevelt a “crazy conceited megalomaniac” and right-wing Republican Hamilton Fish who represented the district including Hyde Park. Roosevelt spent considerable time campaigning in his own district against Fish – all to no avail.

On January 9, (for me personally a most auspicious day) 1943 Roosevelt began a top secret train trip to Florida. There he and his entourage boarded planes for North Africa to meet Winston Churchill for the 10 day Casablanca (Morocco) Conference. At its conclusion Roosevelt declared that the two allies had reached complete agreement on the future conduct of the war. FDR was being his usual disingenuous self. The precise opposite was closer to the truth. General George Marshall was so infuriated that the British refused to agree to a cross-channel invasion in 1943 that he threatened to shift American troops and resources to an all-out effort in the Pacific. At the concluding remarks before reporters Roosevelt invoked the name of American Civil War general U.S. Grant who early in that war was known as (U)nconditional (S)urrender Grant. Likewise Roosevelt said the Allies should pursue a policy of unconditional surrender against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Churchill did not publicly disagree, but privately was dumbfounded and dismayed by a stated policy that he thought could negatively impact the war. As Roosevelt continued pursuing this policy Churchill’s worst fears would be realized.

One of the New Deal’s alphabet agencies was the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) run by Roosevelt’s uncle, Frederick Delano. In March 1943 FRD sent congress two hefty reports, the first was titled After the War – Full Employment and the second After the War – Toward Security. These reports called for creation of a nation transportation agency, the consolidation of the nation’s railroads, a government role in developing air transportation, permanent public works program, a big expansion in social security benefits, and federally funded medical care for the poor. There was no better proof of the New Dealers’ fondness for a government controlled economy. The Wall Street Journal called the package a “totalitarian plan” and denounced it as an enemy of liberty and prosperity. The Senate cut the requested funding for the NRPB from a modest $1,000,000 (think $10,000,000 in today’s dollars) to a pathetic $200,000. In conference the House insisted that the program be entirely eliminated. The Senate went alone. The president had previously issued an executive order imposing a salary cap on the rich. A majority of House Democrats joined Republicans to repeal the order by a huge veto-proof margin. The Senate piled on with a 74-3 vote to kill it. For better or worst the country would face the post-war era relying on the free enterprise system.

On July 25, 1943 the Italian Fascist General Council deposed Benito Mussolini and appointed retired 72 year old Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. Two days later before the House of Commons Churchill said, “It would be a grave mistake…to break down the whole structure and expression of the Italian state.” - another signal of his readiness to negotiate with Badoglio. That same day General Eisenhower broadcast a statement offering the Italians a chance to surrender “immediately.” If the Italians stopped supporting the Germans and returned all allied prisoners in their hands, “the ancient liberties and traditions of your country will be restored.” There was no mention of unconditional surrender. The next day FDR went on the radio and unilaterally declared that “our terms to Italy are still the same as our terms to Germany and Japan – unconditional surrender. We will have no truck with Fascism in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.” The prospect of a relatively bloodless surrender of Italy went down the drain. A dismayed Eisenhower could only obey.

When FDR took office in 1933 he had already decided to recognize the Soviet Union. He moved cautiously toward this goal as the administration argued that trade with the USSR would be large and profitable and would help revive the American economy. There was a serious economic, not to say moral, impediment to these plans. Stalin instigated famine and terror in the Ukraine that had killed an estimated 10 million farmers in 1932-33 as he tried to impose a forced collectivization on those kulaks. So intense was this pogrom that at its peak 25,000 people were dying per day (As I have mention in a previous essay read Robert Conquest’s book Harvest of Sorrow for the full story of this horrendous barbarity). Rather than trying to ascertain the truth of this horror the Roosevelt administration relied on the reporting of the New York Times’ agitprop Walter Duranty who grandly assured his readers that the famine was “mostly bunk.” Incredibly Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union in 1932. There was no excuse for the American government or the New York Times for accepting the Duranty account of what was happening in the Ukraine as there were many other reports of the induced famine. Writers such as Frederick Burchall of the New York Times and Brits Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones told what was really going on and were unmercifully attacked by Communists and liberals in the West.

At the Tehran conference in late November 1943 between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin the Soviets agreed, in principle, to give the American Air Force landing rights to six airfields in Western Russia so that the American pilots would not have to make the long dangerous flight back to England after bombing runs in Eastern Germany. The Soviets effectively reneged on that agreement despite, at the expressed command of President Roosevelt, the Soviets being given a copy of the famed Norden bombsight, as part of the agreement, even though this bombsight had not been shared with the British.

In the spring of 1944 Roosevelt’s old friend, Commander George Earle went to the Oval Office to show Roosevelt irrefutable evidence that the Soviets, not the Germans were the perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre in Poland where 10,000 Polish military officers were murdered. FDR dismissed it with a wave of his hand saying “George, this is entirely German propaganda and a German plot. I am absolutely convinced the Russians did not do this.” This was just one of many times that Roosevelt, despite the evidence, did not want to believe the worst about the Soviets. One is led to think there was much about the Soviets and their communistic system that Roosevelt admired.

At the Democrat convention in the summer of 1944 the incumbent vice-president Henry Wallace received 429 votes for the vice-presidency on the first ballot of the 589 needed to win. Harry Truman was second with 319 and the rest scattered among the favorite sons (I suppose today one would say favorite sons & daughters or perhaps favorite children). Even though the convention had been in session for 6 hours and it was nearly dinner time the Truman supporters decided to gamble and call for an immediate second ballot, risking Wallace getting enough votes to win. The gamble paid off because first Oklahoma switched from their favorite son candidate to Truman then Maryland and several other states also switched. The tally stayed close at 477 for Truman and 473 for Wallace until Senators Bankhead of Alabama, Lucas of Illinois, and Barkley of Kentucky changed their votes to Truman. As is the usual course of action at political conventions, there was a stampede towards Truman with the final vote of 1,051 for Truman and 105 for Wallace. It is interesting to speculate how much the course of history not only for the United States, but for the world would be different negatively had Wallace remained the vice-president in 1944.

Goaded by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, in the summer and fall of 1944 Roosevelt pushed on with his “unconditional surrender” policy towards Germany, ranting “Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.” This wrongheaded policy which rejected the many overtures from Germans in the military and diplomatic corps prolonged the war in Europe and caused unnecessary death and suffering. In December 1944 the Wehrmacht surprised the Americans and the British by assembling a quarter of a million men and 1000 tanks and smashed out of the perimeter of the Ardennes in a desperate attempt to recapture the port of Antwerp, Belgium and strand the Allied forces on the battlefield without food or gasoline. The fierce fighting at Bastogne in the snow and mud and at other more obscure crossroads in the ensuing Battle of the Bulge cost the Americans 80,000 casualties. Overall the Americans suffered 418,800 casualties after the breakout from Normandy and the capture of Paris. The British and Canadians had 107,000 casualties. Including German and Soviet military and German civilians from Allied bombing the total number of post D-Day casualties approaches 2,000,000. Adding in the Jews killed in the last year of the war could double the 2,000,000 figure.

How much if any of this carnage can be laid at the doorstep of the White House owing to Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” policy? Quantifying the numbers is impossible, but certainly there is amply evidence that the efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime were greatly discouraged if not actually impeded by what the Roosevelt administration promulgated. Given the information that was known about the even then millions of Holocaust victims the personal animus of Henry Morgenthau is explainable by his religion, but what about FDR? Perhaps it was his vindictiveness which was previously displayed when, by executive order, he sent an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to internment camps in the United States at the start of the war.

In the 1944 presidential campaign, Republican candidate and New York governor Thomas Dewey accused the Roosevelt administration of being heavily influenced by the communist head of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization) union Sidney Hillman and Communist Party boss Earl Browder. Roosevelt sarcastically fired back by stating that “Never before in my lifetime has a campaign been filled with such misrepresentation, distortion, and falsehood.” Any candidate for high office who claimed the American government was infiltrated by communists was revealing ”a shocking lack of trust in America.” According to the Venona decrypts which were made public in the 1990’s Roosevelt has no less than 329 communists in his administration including several at the highest levels of the White House, among them Lauchlin Currie; Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan (he was a close friend of Edward R. Morrow – see my essay on Joseph McCarthy) in the State Department; and Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. Although FDR likely did not know there were actual Soviet spies in the government, if he did not know these people were so overly friendly with the Soviet Union that they posed a security risk, then it was, like the Katyn Massacre, because he did not want to believe it.

On March 9, 1945 a squadron of American B-29’s totaling 172 aircraft took of from Guam and dropped 1165 tons of incendiary bombs from an altitude 4,900 feet on Tokyo a city of then 5,000,000 people. It was estimated that almost 88,000 Japanese died and 1,000,000 homes damaged or destroyed. There were more causalities than in any military action in the history of the world up to that time. No public protests were forthcoming in the U.S. or Britain because the War Department had released the details of the atrocities of the early 1942 Bataan Death March.

On February 3, 1945 in a joint military operation between the United States and Great Britain call Thunderclap, the city of Berlin was fire bombed resulting in an estimated 25,000 civilian deaths; in the following few days Munich and Leipzig were hit; it was Dresden’s turn next with about 60,000 deaths and much of the historic city destroyed.

On August 6, 1945 the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima with 90,000 people dead that day and perhaps as many as 200,000 dead as a result of radiation poisoning and burns within five years. On August 9th the B-29 Bock’s Car (Did you know that was the name of the second bomber or care and who comes up with those names?) dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki killing approx. 40,000 people immediately and circa 140,000 within five years. These initial killings were of the same magnitude as the conventional bombing of Tokyo were they not? Why then the subsequent hand wringing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not Tokyo, Berlin, and Dresden?

Shortly after Harry Truman was sworn in as president he had a meeting in the Oval Office with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov who was on his was to a conference in San Francisco on the formation of the United Nations. Molotov wanted to know if Truman would honor the commitments of Roosevelt regarding the Soviet Union. Truman assured him he would, but then said the United States was “getting tired” of waiting for the USSR to implement the principles of the Declaration on Liberated Europe in Poland and other countries occupied by the Red Army. Molotov blusteringly started to interrupt him when Truman said “I’m not interested in propaganda” and ordered Molotov to tell Stalin that he was concerned about the situation in Eastern Europe, reminding Molotov that friendship required both countries to live up to their obligations. It could not be maintained on the basis of a “one way street.” The translator, career diplomat Charles Bohlen, reported that Molotov turned “a little ashen” and huffed: “I have never been talked to that way in my life.” Truman responded: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.” When Molotov tried to get the conversation back on the American commitments Truman said, “That will be all Mr. Molotov.” Bohlen never forgot how much he enjoyed translating Truman’s words. “They were probably the first sharp words uttered by an American president to a high ranking Soviet official during the war.”