Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (153 page)

Roosevelt responded with a blistering telegram to Lewis, which he read to reporters at a news conference. “These are not mere strikes against employers of this industry to enforce collective bargaining demands,” he said of the walkouts. “They are strikes against the United States Government itself.” The work stoppage directly threatened the war effort. “The continuance and spread of these strikes would have the same effect on the course of the war as a crippling defeat in the field…. Without coal our war industries cannot produce tanks, guns, and ammunition for our armed forces. Without these weapons our sailors on the high seas, and our armies in the field, will be helpless against our enemies.”

Roosevelt’s telegram was addressed to Lewis, but his message was for the miners themselves. “I am sure that the men who work in the coal mines, whose sons and brothers are in the armed forces, do not want to retard the war effort…. Not as President, not as Commander in Chief, but as the friend of the men who work in the coal mines, I appeal to them to resume work immediately, and submit their case to the National War Labor Board for final determination.” In the event his friendly appeal didn’t suffice, Roosevelt was prepared to take stronger action. “If work at the mines is not resumed by ten o’clock Saturday morning”—May 1, 1943—“I shall use all the power vested in me as President and as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy to protect the national interest and to prevent further interference with the successful prosecution of the war.”

The warning worked, and the strikers returned to the mines. But when the NWLB refused Lewis the two-dollar-a-day wage boost he was demanding, they walked out again. Roosevelt again lambasted Lewis. “The action of the leaders of the United Mine Workers coal miners has been intolerable,” he said, “and has rightly stirred up the anger and disapproval of the overwhelming mass of the American people.” Roosevelt’s verdict on Lewis was widely shared. A poll put Lewis’s unpopularity rating at 87 percent; the U.S. Army’s journal
Stars and Stripes
cursed, “John L. Lewis, damn your coal-black soul!”

Congress registered its disapproval by passing the Smith-Connally bill, a measure that reversed a decade of pro-labor laws by sharply curtailing the right to strike. The bill went much farther than Roosevelt intended. He had nothing against unions generally, only against Lewis and the UMW leadership. The great majority of workers had patriotically accepted a no-strike policy. “For the entire year of 1942, the time lost by strikes averaged only 5/100 of 1 percent of the total man-hours worked,” Roosevelt said. “That record has never before been equaled in this country. It is as good or better than the record of any of our allies in wartime.” For this reason, he said, he was vetoing the Smith-Connally bill.

But Congress overrode the veto, sending a message to other labor leaders not to follow Lewis’s lead—and to Roosevelt that he no longer controlled American labor policy.

Railroad workers resisted their lesson. In the autumn of 1943 they locked horns with federal officials who refused the wage increase they thought they deserved. Roosevelt interceded, conferring with the labor leaders, with railroad management, and with the board overseeing the dispute. But his jawboning failed, and the unions prepared to strike.

Roosevelt preempted them. “Railroad strikes by three brotherhoods have been ordered for next Thursday,” he told the public on Monday, December 27. “I cannot wait until the last moment to take action to see that the supplies to our fighting men are not interrupted. I am accordingly obliged to take over at once temporary possession and control of the railroads to insure their continued operation…. If any employees of the railroads now strike, they will be striking against the Government of the United States.”

Roosevelt’s seizure of the railroads got him what he wanted in the short term. Hours before his deadline, the unions canceled their strike order. The president had the War Department announce the cancellation; its message explained that the leaders of the three brotherhoods had given assurances that “they and the organizations they represent will take no action which might imperil the successful prosecution of the war.”

But the episode infuriated labor. AFL president William Green particularly resented the aspersions cast on the patriotism of the rail workers. George Marshall had declared, albeit not for attribution, that the railroad disputes were lengthening the war and costing thousands of lives. Green learned of Marshall’s statement and angrily hurled the allegation back at the government. “I hereby charge that the responsibility for the prolongation of these disputes rests entirely upon bungling, fumbling, and incompetent handling by government officials and agencies,” he said.

53.

I
N
J
ANUARY
1944 H
ENRY
M
ORGENTHAU SCHEDULED AN UNUSUAL
Sunday meeting with Roosevelt. Morgenthau came not only as Treasury secretary but as Roosevelt’s oldest friend in the administration and as a pleader of a special cause. Morgenthau’s ancestors were German Jews who had assimilated into mainstream American society. Morgenthau himself had rarely attended synagogue and, by all evidence, never observed Passover. “We Jews of America have found America to be our Zion,” Morgenthau’s father once said. “I am an American.” But during the war the son discovered his Jewish roots when Jewish leaders came to him with evidence that Hitler was systematically trying to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Morgenthau initially hesitated to raise the matter with Roosevelt. He didn’t want to presume on their personal friendship, and the plight of Europe’s Jews was hardly the responsibility of the American Treasury Department. If any office in the administration was to deal with the issue, it ought to be the State Department. But Cordell Hull wasn’t interested, and Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary to whom Hull referred refugee and related issues, was downright hostile. The State Department had a long history of anti-Semitism that reflected the old-stock Protestant values of the nineteenth-century founders of the American foreign service. Morgenthau concluded that if the fate of the Jews was left to the professional diplomats, there was little hope.

He began looking for an excuse to bring the Jewish question into the Treasury’s bailiwick. At the end of 1943 he found one, when the administration received a request to expedite money transfers to refugees from Hitler’s war machine. The State Department balked, but Morgenthau, reasoning that anything touching money involved the Treasury, determined to take the matter to Roosevelt. He scheduled a White House meeting.

Roosevelt may have guessed the purpose of the meeting, for others had raised the Jewish question with him. During the summer of 1942 Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote saying that Hitler was trying to annihilate the Jews, as he had threatened to do for years. Wise asked Roosevelt to issue a statement bringing the matter to American and world attention. He said he wanted to read the statement to a Madison Square Garden rally on behalf of the Jews, and he offered language for the president to use. Roosevelt wrote his own words. “Citizens, regardless of religious allegiance, will share in the sorrow of our Jewish fellow-citizens over the savagery of the Nazis against their helpless victims,” the president declared. “The Nazis will not succeed in exterminating their victims any more than they will succeed in enslaving mankind. The American people not only sympathize with all victims of Nazi crimes but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”

Roosevelt issued similar statements on subsequent occasions, sometimes singling out the Jews as victims of Nazi violence, sometimes not. A month after the Madison Square Garden rally he asserted that new intelligence from Europe revealed that the Nazi occupation of various countries had “taken proportions and forms giving rise to the fear that as the defeat of the enemy countries approaches, the barbaric and unrelenting character of the occupational regime will become more marked and may even lead to the extermination of certain populations.” Those persons involved in such crimes would not escape. “The time will come when they shall have to stand in courts of law in the very countries which they are now oppressing and answer for their acts.”

In December 1942 Roosevelt brought Stephen Wise back to the White House. The rabbi and several other Jewish leaders delivered a detailed memorandum describing the Nazi extermination program. “Unless action is taken immediately,” Wise said, “the Jews of Hitler Europe are doomed.” Wise and the others asked for a new statement on behalf of the victims. Roosevelt replied, “Gentlemen, you can prepare the statement. I am sure that you will put the words into it that express my thoughts.” He added, “We shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment.”

Wise acted at once on the president’s offer. The rabbi emerged from the White House meeting to tell reporters that “the President said that he was profoundly shocked to learn that two million Jews had in one way or another perished as a result of Nazi rule and crimes.”

Roosevelt followed up with a message of his own—and of America’s allies. The president approved a statement by the United Nations condemning the Nazi campaign against the Jews. “From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe,” the statement declared. “The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.” The statement went on to vow that “those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”

Roosevelt kept his door open to the representatives of the Jewish cause. In the summer of 1943 a member of the Polish underground, Jan Karski, who at great personal risk had observed the extermination program in action, carried his eyewitness account to the West. Roosevelt invited him to the White House. Just what Karski told the president is unclear. Karski relayed a message from the Jews of Poland that if the Allies didn’t do something to stop the killing, the Jewish community there would “cease to exist.” But, according to his later recollection of the meeting, he kept to himself what he had seen with his own eyes. Whatever Karski’s words to Roosevelt, the president’s reply was succinct: “Tell your nation we shall win the war.”

These words didn’t satisfy Henry Morgenthau, and when he entered Roosevelt’s second-floor study on January 16, 1944, he came armed with a new report detailing the massacres. “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated,” the report began. Roosevelt listened to Morgenthau’s summary and scanned the report. He waved aside Morgenthau’s assertion that anti-Semitism at the State Department accounted for the lack of interest there in the Jewish troubles, but he accepted Morgenthau’s suggestion that responsibility for refugee affairs be moved from State to a special board answerable to the president. The War Refugee Board was assigned to take “all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”

Following an order by Hitler to round up the Jews of Hungary, Roosevelt issued his most detailed and scathing condemnation of the Nazi policies:

In one of the blackest crimes of all history—begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war—the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days, hundreds of thousands of Jews, who while living under persecution have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes, would be a major tragedy.

Roosevelt had already declared that Hitler and his henchmen would be made to answer for their crimes. Now he promised that the reach of Allied justice would extend to those who collaborated with the Nazis. “All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.” Roosevelt urged Germans and others to sabotage Hitler’s plan. “I ask every German and every man everywhere under Nazi domination to show the world by his action that in his heart he does not share these insane criminal desires. Let him hide these pursued victims, help them to get over their borders, and do what he can to save them from the Nazi hangman. I ask him also to keep watch, and to record the evidence that will one day be used to convict the guilty.” Roosevelt pledged that the United States would employ “all means at its command” to assist the escape of Hitler’s intended victims, “insofar as the necessity of military operations permits.”

This last clause was crucial. Roosevelt remained convinced that the surest way to save the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible. As it became apparent that a concentration camp at Auschwitz was a centerpiece of the German death machine, some Jewish spokesmen advocated bombing the camp or the rail lines feeding it. The bombing, the advocates argued, would slow the destruction of the Jews and thereby save lives. It would also make a political and moral statement that the Allies knew what was happening at Auschwitz and were trying to stop it.