No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Arrayed against the draft was a potent combination of isolationists, pacifists, liberals, gold-star mothers, educators, and youth groups. Day after day, black-veiled matrons who called themselves the Mothers of the USA marched in front of the Capitol, vowing to hold a “death watch” against conscription. By the end of July, the opposition had grown so vocal, reporter Mark Sullivan wrote, that “it was said the whole idea of conscription might die, unless Mr. Roosevelt comes to the rescue.” War Secretary Stimson agreed: “The President has taken no very striking lead,” he recorded in his diary, “and that is reflected in Congress.” Indeed, so nervous was Stimson about the military weakness of his country that he found himself waking up at night in a cold sweat.

  Finally, on the first Friday of August, Mark Sullivan reported, Mr. Roosevelt the president took precedence over Mr. Roosevelt the candidate. At his weekly press conference, the president endorsed selective service publicly for the first time. Typically, he began the conference by saying he had nothing important to announce. He talked good-humoredly about going to Hyde Park that weekend, then paused, as if this were all he had to say. Instantly the questions began, with a planted inquiry from Fred Essary of the Baltimore Sun. “Mr. President,” he said, “there is a very definite feeling in Congressional circles that you are not very hot about this conscription legislation and as a result, it really is languishing.”

  In reply, Roosevelt unequivocally endorsed selective service and urged adoption of the legislation as “essential to national defense.” Endorsement of the draft seemed on the surface a risky move for Roosevelt in an election year. “It may very easily defeat the Democratic national ticket—Wallace and myself,” Roosevelt predicted in a private letter to a Democratic editor in Illinois. But Roosevelt could sense that public opinion was shifting and that the country was ready to be moved.

  While Roosevelt backed the draft, Eleanor continued to argue for a wider form of national service available to both men and women through an expanded National Youth Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. “To tie it up with military training alone,” she wrote in her column in midsummer, “[is to miss] the point of the situation we face today. Democracy requires service from each and every one of us.” In Eleanor’s view, real national defense meant the mobilization of the country as a whole, so that every individual could receive training to help end poverty and make the community a better place in which to live. When Eleanor told Franklin’s friend Harry Hooker this, he said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing; that she was a dreamer to believe that either war or poverty could ever be eliminated. Undaunted, Eleanor took the subject up again in a column a few days later, trying to explain why so many young people were in opposition to the draft.

  “The way it was written,” columnist May Craig warned Eleanor, “it looked as though you shared their views against the draft. Reporters commented you were bucking the old man.”

  “I am not bucking the President,” Eleanor replied, “but would like to see a wider service.” Nonetheless, after receiving a memo from her husband telling her in no uncertain terms why the draft was essential, Eleanor made it clear in her next column that her desire for wider service did not mean she was against the draft. The question of selective service, she wrote, “is simply a question of whether or not we are going to get adequate defense against overseas attack . . . . We won’t get it if we don’t get selective service.”

  Once she understood how important the draft legislation was to her husband, Eleanor never wavered in her public support for his position. When her pet organization, the American Youth Congress, came out with a sweeping statement against the draft, she characterized it as “stupid beyond belief,” and told The New York Times it would play “into the hands of the people who would like to see us as unprepared as possible.” In reply, AYC head Joseph Cadden, who had spent many evenings at the White House talking with Eleanor, said, “We are all sorry to see Mrs. Roosevelt use angry invective instead of reasoned arguments . . . . We do not feel as Mrs. Roosevelt evidently does, that the supporters of conscription have a monopoly on wisdom when the fate of our democratic insititutions are concerned.”

  With White House backing, the draft legislation slowly began to move forward in the Congress in early August. But victory was by no means assured. Most observers agreed that the ultimate fate of the bill rested on the stance Republican nominee Wendell Willkie took toward it in his formal acceptance speech, which was scheduled to be delivered in Elwood, Indiana, on August 17. (Though the Republican convention had nominated Willkie in June, he had deliberately waited until August to deliver his acceptance speech, so that it could mark the official beginning of his campaign.) If Willkie came out in opposition to selective service and decided to lead the charge against it, there was little hope for passage. If he endorsed the bill, Senator Hiram Johnson of California predicted, “a dozen timid Democratic Senators and 50 election-conscious Congressmen will be free to support it, since it will no longer be a campaign issue.”

  “What Wendell Willkie thinks of conscription,” the Scripps-Howard Washington correspondent reported in mid-August, “is becoming as much a Washington puzzle as was . . . Mr. Roosevelt’s third term intentions.”

  The man whose views on the draft were so eagerly sought in Washington that summer was one of the most unconventional presidential candidates in the nation’s history. A successful businessman, Willkie had no political experience. He had no organization. He had never been a candidate for public office before. He had been a Democrat for most of his life. And his internationalist views were in direct opposition to the powerful isolationist wing of the Republican Party. He had come into the convention with the support of only 3 percent of Republican voters, compared with 67 percent for the odds-on favorite, New York’s District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. But once the delegates came together in Philadelphia, his candidacy took on a life of its own, developing an unstoppable momentum, the Washington Post observed, “like nothing a Republican gathering has seen before.” From an initial vote of 105 out of 999, Willkie climbed to a stunning victory on the sixth ballot.

  Described by journalists as a “shaggy bear,” Willkie stood over six feet tall and weighed 220 pounds. After graduating from Elwood High and Indiana University, he had developed an outstanding reputation as a courtroom lawyer for General Tire in Akron, Ohio, and then moved on to New York to become president of a billion-dollar utilities corporation, Commonwealth and Southern. Although in his early years he had been a progressive Democrat, a spirited supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, as president of a giant utility company he found himself at fundamental odds with the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority. Possessed of charm, wit, and intelligence, he gradually emerged as a supersalesman for business in its fight against governmental interference.

  “Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics,” a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. “Here was a man—a Democrat until a couple of years ago—who, without any organization went into a Republican National Convention and ran away with the nomination for President . . . . No one doubts Willkie’s ability. He is an attractive, colorful character, bold and resourceful . . . . He will be no easy candidate to defeat.” The president agreed with Ickes’ assessment, believing that the liberal Willkie was “the most formidable candidate for himself that the Republicans could have named.”

  • • •

  It must have been frustrating for Roosevelt, who was accustomed to being the center of the country’s attention, to realize that all action on the draft was stalled until Willkie delivered his speech. But with one door closed, Roosevelt managed to open another. On August 13, he convened what Stimson later called “a momentous conference” in the Oval Office with Stimson, Knox, Morgenthau, and Undersecretary of State Welles at which he announced that he had decided to go ahead with the destroyer deal without congressional approval. Though he knew he was opening himself to powerful criticism, he felt he had no other choice. His attempts to reach the Republica
n minority had failed, and Senator Claude Pepper, who had agreed to sponsor the destroyer bill, had told him the day before that the legislation had “no chance of passing.” No one spoke against the president’s decision, Stimson recorded in his diary, though “everyone felt it was a desperate situation and a very serious step to take.”

  In making this extraordinary decision to bypass Congress with an executive agreement, Roosevelt was fortified by a lengthy legal brief which attorney Dean Acheson had published in The New York Times on August 11. Acheson argued that the commander-in-chief had the authority to exchange destroyers for bases without congressional approval as long as the net result of the deal produced an increase in America’s national security. And the president was the one who kept the accounts. Attorney General Robert Jackson confirmed Acheson’s opinion. Referring to the president’s twin powers as commander-in-chief of the army and the navy and head of state in relations with foreign countries, Jackson advised Roosevelt that the sweep of these combined powers provided adequate constitutional authority for the president to negotiate the destroyer deal without Congress.

  On the basis of this advice, which was what Roosevelt wanted to hear, he decided to complete the deal, and then and only then tell Congress. Later that day, he cabled Churchill the good news that he was ready to transfer the destroyers provided Britain agreed to lease its island bases for ninety-nine years. Churchill accepted the proposal immediately. While the agreement was being negotiated, Roosevelt arranged a hasty summit meeting for August 17 with Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Roosevelt liked King and knew the Canadian leader would be helpful in working out the details of the transfer. Arrangements were made to hold the meeting in upstate New York so that Roosevelt could inspect the First Army maneuvers in Ogdensburg on the same trip.

  But Roosevelt also had a little mischief in mind. By scheduling the summit for the same day as Willkie’s acceptance speech, he hoped, he later joked, that he would “steal half the show.” He did.

  The president arrived in Ogdensburg at noon, accompanied by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Immediately upon their arrival, a motorcade was formed, consisting of the president’s car, five cars for guests, six buses for journalists, and nine trucks for photographers. Wearing a seersucker suit and a Panama hat, the president rode for five hours over a distance of seventy miles to inspect ninety-four thousand soldiers assembled in six divisions. At every crossroad in every hamlet, reporters observed, the presidential motorcade was met by scores of cheering residents, “girls in their prettiest dresses and men in their Sunday suits.”

  As the motorcade halted before the first of the six divisions massed to greet their commander-in-chief, ten thousand officers and men stood at attention in perfectly formed lines and squares, their field guns slanting skyward under brightly colored regimental banners that had once flown at such historic places as Gettysburg, Big Horn, and Meuse-Argonne. Twenty-one guns sounded a tremendous salute, and the division band played the presidential ruffles and flourishes. “The weather was beautiful, bright and clear and it made a fine sight,” the seventy-two-year-old Stimson recorded in his diary. “I wished very much that I was . . . working with the troops instead of sitting in a motor car all day and watching them.”

  Beneath the impressive show, however, the situation remained desperate. During these exercises, as in the maneuvers the previous May, the troops were so handicapped by lack of equipment that they were drilling with broomsticks instead of machine guns, and driving trucks instead of tanks. More alarming was the condition of the men. Five of the six divisions assembled for these August maneuvers were undertrained, overweight National Guard units from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. “They haven’t got the bodies soldiers must have,” one military observer reported. “They haven’t got the psychology of the soldier . . . . Just because mechanized divisions race into battle with soldiers jammed into trucks, it doesn’t mean that the soldiers are any good if they get out of the trucks with fat under their belts, short-winded and with legs that won’t stand up for a hard march.”

  These troops were volunteers, Lieutenant General Hugh Drum explained to the president during a picnic lunch in the shade of the woods. Many of them had never fired a gun. During the daily marches, they were falling to the ground in great numbers from heat and exhaustion. During a maneuver the previous day, an inexperienced road-construction crew had inadvertently left fifteen dynamite sticks under a roadbed over which the president’s train was scheduled to pass a few hours later. Fortunately, the mistake was quickly discovered.

  The only answer, General Drum stressed, was conscription. “The voluntary system must be replaced by a national conscription system if we are to succeed. We are wasting our time and ignoring basic lessons of history by discussing volunteers vs. conscription systems. Let us not be blind to the realities . . . . The day when we could put guns into the hands of citizen soldiers, teach the manual of arms and send them to match their spirit and brawn against that of an enemy has passed.”

  The president could not have asked for better evidence of the need for conscription than the sight of these paunchy National Guardsmen, unaccustomed to life in the open, inexperienced at firing a gun. “The men themselves were soft—fifteen miles a day was about all they could stand and many dropped out,” Roosevelt admitted to his newspaper friend L. B. Sheley. “Anybody who knows anything about the German methods of warfare would know that the army would have been licked by thoroughly trained and organized forces of a similar size within a day or two.”

  As the hour of Willkie’s speech approached, an air of anticipation surrounded the presidential party. But in spite of the importance of the speech for the future of the draft, the president stubbornly made a point of being too busy to listen. At 3 p.m., as the broadcast began, one reporter observed, “the radio in the President’s car was silent” and Roosevelt listened intently to a lecture by first army officers on the goals of the maneuvers. By not listening to the broadcast, the president was able to tell reporters searching for a reaction that he would have to read the speech first before commenting.

  Willkie’s speech, delivered under a broiling sun which had sent the mercury well above the hundred-degree mark before noon, was heard by a vast crowd of over two hundred thousand, assembled at Callaway Park, about two miles from the center of Elwood. From all over the Midwest these people had come, in sixty-three special trains, three hundred Pullmans, twelve hundred buses, and sixty thousand cars. By 5 a.m. the day of the speech, the surrounding cornfields looked like a refugee camp, with tens of thousands of men and women camped out on blankets or sleeping in their cars. A majority of the homes of Elwood had been turned into boarding houses, and the one hotel in town was long since filled. Along the main street of the town, storefronts were converted into hot-dog stands and souvenir shops hawking Willkie stamps, license plates, playing cards, bats, pillow cases, and glass tumblers.

  As Willkie stepped to the front of the platform, facing a grove of trees under which thirty-five thousand people were sitting, with four times that number standing behind the seats, he received a tremendous ovation. Smiling broadly, sweat dripping from his forehead, he waited for the applause to subside. Then he began. “Today we meet in a typical American town. The quiet streets, the pleasant fields that lie outside, the people going casually about their business, seem far removed from the shattered cities, the gutted buildings and the stricken people of Europe. Instinctively we turn aside from the recurring conflicts over there . . . . Yet . . . instinctively also . . . we know that we are not isolated from those suffering people. We live in the same world as they and we are created in the same image . . . . Try as we will, we cannot brush the pitiless picture of their destruction from our eyes or escape the profound effects of it upon the world in which we live.”

  With these opening words, Willkie cast his lot against the isolationist sentiment so prevalent in the Midwest. He then went on to say he could not ask the American people to put their faith in him “with
out recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense.”

  This was exactly what the Roosevelt administration wanted to hear. “Willkie for Draft Training,” the headlines would read. But Willkie went even further down the line with the administration, stating that he was in full agreement with the president’s policy enunciated at Charlottesville of extending the full material resources of America to the opponents of force.

  Even in the domestic section of his speech, where he criticized the New Deal’s attack on business, Willkie emphasized that he agreed with the New Deal’s minimum wages and maximum hours, with federal regulation of banks and the securities market, and with unemployment insurance and old-age benefits. It was only at the end, when he challenged Roosevelt to a series of debates, that the speech took on a partisan tone.

  Listening with May Craig on a car radio, driving back to Hyde Park from New York City, Eleanor was impressed. “He has a good voice and speaks well over the radio,” Eleanor observed. “It was a brave speech,” Craig agreed. “Willkie is a strong man and he spoke strongly. One thing is certain. We have two unusual men from whom to choose our next leader.”

  By late afternoon, Roosevelt and Stimson were heading back to the president’s train for the summit meeting with Canada’s prime minister. The original plan called for the conference to take place in the two small vestibules in Roosevelt’s car (one equipped for dining, the other for sitting) while the train remained in the yards at Ogdensburg. But at the last minute Ed Starling, chief of the White House Secret Service detail, noticed two huge gas tanks between the train and the river. Uncomfortable with the situation, Starling had the train moved to the quiet village of Heuvelton, where the president and the prime minister could talk undisturbed late into the night. Along the tracks, fifty National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets patrolled the area, while an army patrol boat stood watch on the St. Lawrence River. Outside the train, as the sun beat down, dozens of laborers worked round the clock, stuffing huge chunks of ice into the train’s air-conditioning system.