Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (138 page)

Here was the President of the United States making an important public appearance in front of twenty thousand people, yet the newspapers and radio stations had to play like they knew nothing about it. Although three reporters whose normal duty was to send news to thousands of outlets around the world were standing only a few feet from him, the President went on with his joke:

“You are the possessors of a secret which even the newspapers of the United States don’t know,” he told the shipworkers. “I hope you will keep the secret because I am under military and naval orders, and like the ship that we have just seen go overboard, my motions and movements are supposed to be secret.”

Roosevelt knew his actions irked the press. But amid the other demands the war made of him, he was willing to let the reporters fend for themselves. “Quite frankly I regard freedom of the press as one of the world’s microscopic problems,” he told Steve Early at a moment of particular strain.

T
HERE WAS MORE
to the campaign than speeches and inspections of defense plants. The headlong pace of war production was overheating the economy following a decade of chill, and, after two terms of trying to raise prices, Roosevelt found himself having to hold them down. Or perhaps it was Congress that had to do the restraining—the responsibility for prices was a matter of dispute. In April the president had put forward a seven-point program designed, as he stated seven times in the accompanying message to the legislators, “to keep the cost of living from spiraling upward.” By September much of the program had been implemented by executive order. The president and the agencies reporting to him had set ceilings on many prices; they had controlled rents; they had established a system of rationing consumer goods; they had issued regulations curbing consumer debt; and they had facilitated the purchase of war bonds. But two points remained: limits on farm prices and higher taxes on incomes. The president was forbidden by existing law from capping farm prices till they reached 110 percent of “parity,” the benchmark from the era of the First World War. As for taxes, Congress still wrote the codes.

In a special message to the legislature on September 7, Roosevelt urged the lawmakers to push ahead on these two remaining fronts. He asked for authority to “stabilize the cost of living”—that is, to set maximum prices on farm goods and other as yet uncontrolled items. For the moment he merely asked. But if the legislature refused to grant him authority—the deadline he set was October 1—he would do on his own authority what needed to be done. “Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable responsibility to the people of this country to see to it that the war effort is no longer imperiled by threat of economic chaos…. I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.”

As for taxes, Roosevelt characterized a tax increase as “one of the most powerful weapons in our fight to stabilize living costs.” Raising taxes would reduce Americans’ discretionary income and thereby diminish the upward pressure on prices. It would also redistribute the burden of the war. The wealthy were having a wonderful war: profits and dividends were higher than in more than a decade. Roosevelt proposed to eliminate loopholes that let the rich off easily and to boost tax rates sharply at the upper end. “In the higher income brackets, the tax rate should be such as to give the practical equivalent of a top limit on an individual’s net income after taxes, approximating $25,000.” This was strong stuff, amounting to a confiscatory marginal rate on the highest incomes. But it was no more than what he proposed for corporations. “We must recapture through taxation all wartime profits that are not necessary to maintain efficient all-out war production.”

Before the war, Roosevelt had defended similar, albeit less ambitious, measures as promoting economic and social equality. He still emphasized equality, but with a wartime twist. “Such provisions will give assurance that the sacrifices required by war are being equitably shared.” Redressing inequality was crucial, now and for the future. “Next to military and naval victory, a victory along this economic front is of paramount importance. Without it our war production program will be hindered. Without it we would be allowing our young men, now risking their lives in the air, on land, and on the sea, to return to an economic mess of our own making.”

Roosevelt’s ultimatum to Congress won him the price authority he wanted, although the legislators saved a bit of their self-respect by making him wait till just after his deadline had passed. On October 2 he signed the price bill and the next day created the Office of Economic Stabilization, charged with developing and enforcing “a comprehensive national economic policy relating to the control of civilian purchasing power, prices, rents, wages, salaries, profits, rationing, subsidies, and all related matters.” It wasn’t lost on conservatives that the administration now had greater control of the economy than during the headiest period of the NRA, but under the duress of the war their complaints sounded unpatriotic.

Roosevelt’s victory on taxes was even more galling. The president didn’t quite get the confiscatory rates he wanted on incomes over $25,000, but he came very close. The Revenue Act of 1942 pushed personal tax rates to a marginal maximum of 88 percent even as it reduced exemptions and nearly tripled the number of people subject to income taxes. A special “Victory Tax” took 5 percent of all incomes over $624, with a portion to be remitted after the war was won.

Roosevelt signed the tax bill without comment, preferring not to remind voters two weeks before the election how deeply the government was dipping into their wallets. But in a Fireside Chat he emphasized that the burden of war was widely shared. “This whole nation of 130,000,000 free men, women, and children is becoming one great fighting force,” he said.

Some of us are fighting the war in airplanes five miles above the continent of Europe or the islands of the Pacific, and some of us are fighting it in mines deep down in the earth of Pennsylvania or Montana. A few of us are decorated with medals for heroic achievement, but all of us can have that deep and permanent inner satisfaction that comes from doing the best we know how, each of us playing an honorable part in the great struggle to save our democratic civilization.

T
HE SURPRISING THING
about the 1942 elections wasn’t that the Democrats lost ground but that they lost as little as they did. Americans had never before been asked to weigh in on a ten-year-old presidency. Given their tendency to tire of incumbents, voters could have been expected to remove members of Roosevelt’s party in large numbers. The removals, in fact, were modest. The Democrats lost eight seats in the Senate (the Republicans gained nine, knocking off Nebraska independent George Norris too). But they still controlled the upper house by nineteen seats. The Democratic losses were predictably larger in the House, where Roosevelt’s party dropped forty-seven and the Republicans gained forty-five. But here, also, the Democrats still led, by thirteen seats—a slim margin by the standards of the Roosevelt years yet more than enough to control the leadership positions and the agenda.

The Democrats doubtless would have done better had the North African invasion been launched on schedule. But the final preparations lagged, and General Eisenhower refused to be rushed. Roosevelt, to his credit, did nothing to force things along. “When I went in to see Roosevelt and told him about Torch,” George Marshall recalled of the prelanding briefings, “he held up his hands in an attitude of prayer and said, ‘Please make it before Election Day.’ However, when I found we had to have more time and it came afterward, he never said a word. He was very courageous.”

Roosevelt awaited reports of the landings at Shangri-La, the new presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains north of Washington. The Secret Service had vetoed the pleasure cruises Roosevelt habitually took aboard the
Potomac
as liable to wartime sabotage or assault. The president himself vetoed the air-conditioning system in the White House, which aggravated his sinus condition. And so he took to the hills during hot weather—and decided he liked them during cooler weather as well. He, Harry Hopkins, Grace Tully, and a few others were amusing themselves on the Saturday evening after election day. Hopkins knew what was afoot; Tully knew
something
was afoot, but not what. “F.D.R. was on edge,” she remembered. The others gradually sensed the tension. Roosevelt explained that he was expecting an important call.

Finally the telephone rang. Tully answered it. It was from the War Department. “The Boss’s hand shook as he took the telephone from me,” she recalled. “He listened intently, said nothing as he heard the full message, then burst out: ‘Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.’”

He put down the phone and turned to the group. “We have landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”

Roosevelt complemented the military operation with messages to the various parties involved. The company commanders distributed a note from the president to the troops. “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives, the freedom of the lives of those you love,” Roosevelt declared.

To the people of France, Roosevelt delivered a message in French, broadcast by the BBC. “I speak to you as one who was with your army and navy in France in 1918,” he said. “No two nations exist which are more united by historic and mutually friendly ties than the people of France and the United States.” American troops had invaded French territory for the sole purpose of defeating France’s oppressors. “Do not obstruct, I beg of you, this great purpose. Help us where you are able, my friends, and we shall see again the glorious day when liberty and peace shall reign again on earth. Vive la France éternelle!”

To Marshal Pétain, the Vichy leader, Roosevelt sent a letter. An early draft commenced, “My dear old friend,” and described the marshal as the “venerated hero of Verdun.” But Churchill, to whom the draft was referred, complained that it was “much too kind,” and the phrases were dropped and the tone hardened. Roosevelt justified the Anglo-American invasion on grounds of preemptive self-defense, claiming that Germany and Italy were planning to occupy North and West Africa, to the jeopardy of the United States and the United Kingdom. Roosevelt told Pétain that the invading forces were equipped with “massive and adequate weapons of modern warfare” that would be available “for your compatriots in North Africa in our mutual fight against the common enemy.” The marshal should join the fight, or at least not hinder it. The United States had only the best intentions toward France. “My clear purpose is to support and aid the French authorities and their administrations. That is the immediate aim of these American armies. I need not tell you that the ultimate and greater aim is the liberation of France and its Empire from the Axis yoke.”

Pétain was unpersuaded. “You invoke pretexts which nothing justifies,” he replied to Roosevelt. “We are attacked; we shall defend ourselves; this is the order I am giving.”

Pétain’s position was hardly unreasonable. France remained at Germany’s mercy, and the American invasion of North Africa would certainly provoke a German response that would make life more miserable for ordinary French men and women. France as a whole was not ready to throw off the Nazis. Until it was, patience and caution would guide the Vichy government.