American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (52 page)

10. BREATHING SPACE

A
fter Labor Day 1940, Colonel Harrington had gone to Connecticut to visit his brother-in-law, William Rayburn, at his summer home. His wife, Rayburn’s sister, had died in February 1938, but the two men had stayed in touch. Harrington badly needed a break from the demanding WPA work schedule, and he lacked Hopkins’s network of wealthy friends who were able to offer their homes for convalescence. But he had taken ill during his visit and was admitted to a hospital in New London. He underwent an operation for what his doctors called an “intestinal ailment” and was apparently recovering, but his condition worsened at the end of September.

Hopkins learned the news at his suite at the Essex House hotel in New York City. He had resigned as commerce secretary in August because of several factors. As the man with the hot line to the White House at the Democratic convention, he had been identified, erroneously but insistently, as prompting the “voice from the sewers” that had triggered the “draft” of Roosevelt, and though he had had nothing to do with it or the contentious nomination of Wallace as the vice presidential candidate, party regulars aimed their fury at him. Moreover, he had never fully recovered from his own health problems; in fact, in his twenty months as commerce secretary he had not been able to spend more than two months in the office. Hated within the Democratic Party, with no cabinet record to defend, and with poverty—heretofore his strong suit—receding as an issue with the rise of war, he recognized that he was a political liability to the administration. Responding to his August 22 resignation letter, Roosevelt wrote, “You may resign the office—only the office—and nothing else. Our friendship will and must go on as always.” Hopkins had left the White House to return to New York, where he thought he would write and perhaps work at the presidential library Roosevelt was establishing at Hyde Park. As it happened, his absence would be short; he would return to Washington and the White House before the end of the year and emerge as the president’s closest confidant and emissary to Winston Churchill and the British government. But now, hearing Harrington was ill, he drove to New London and joined Howard Hunter, and Harrington’s son and daughter, at his bedside. Harrington died on September 30. He was only fifty-three.

The WPA was far different from the organization it had been when Harrington was named to replace Hopkins less than two years earlier. The non-political West Pointer had resisted controversy almost as strongly as Hopkins had attracted it. He had steered the WPA off the front pages for the most part. Even the reorganization and wildcat strikes of a year earlier, and the continuing accusations of the Dies Committee that Communists lurked within the WPA, lacked the resonance they might have had with a lightning rod such as Hopkins at the helm. By not playing the political card, Harrington had brought attention back to the WPA’s building accomplishments and its job of furnishing employment, and these were difficult to assail on any grounds. It was a very valuable contribution, and now, with the country’s defense needs taking on new urgency and the WPA drafted as part of the defense effort, the swirl of controversy was largely in the past. Howard Hunter became the acting commissioner, and his permanent appointment some months later was noted with very little comment of any kind. Controversy had moved on to find new targets.

One of these was the new Selective Service System. The Congress had approved the first peacetime draft in the nation’s history on September 16. Roosevelt had signed the executive order putting it into effect on September 23, calling it “an orderly, just, and democratic method” of obtaining men for military service. Wendell Willkie also supported the draft; the tousled, rumpled, folksy Indianan, who had already campaigned his way into a state of perpetual hoarseness, was considerably removed from the anti–New Deal Republican orthodoxy that had sent Alf Landon to his epic defeat in 1936. Nor was Willkie an isolationist. He based his early campaign not on criticizing the New Deal itself but on its ineffectiveness in reducing unemployment and on Roosevelt’s failure to move earlier to rebuild the nation’s defenses. But these positions failed to gain the Republican ticket any traction; if the president had been slow to throw money at the makers of airplanes, battleships, and tanks, he was certainly doing so now, as duly reported in the newspapers and on the radio. And unemployment was dropping; the weekly number of WPA workers leaving for private jobs had doubled by the end of October, and while the rolls rose as expected in response to seasonal employment patterns, the increase was less than the authorized number and below that of a year before. So as the days dwindled before the November election, Willkie shifted his tactics and painted Roosevelt as a provocateur who, despite his promises to the contrary, was likely to send America to war.

The draft system was on prominent display in this attack on Roosevelt as a warmonger who could not be trusted to keep his word. Under the law, all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five were required to register with local draft boards by October 16, and drawing lots for what was then a compulsory year’s service was scheduled for October 29. Millions of young men stood in line outside hastily established registration sites—Seattle, Washington, used the sprawling car barn at Fourteenth Avenue and East Jefferson Street that housed its trackless trolley cars—to place their names in the hopper for possible conscription. During the registration period, said Willkie in a Chicago campaign speech, “if his promise to keep our boys out of foreign wars is no better than his promise to balance the budget, they’re already almost on the transports.” He was more specific in a Baltimore campaign speech: “On the basis of his past performance with pledges to the people, if you re-elect him you may expect war in April 1941.”

Roosevelt finally took up the challenge late in October, when the polls showed Willkie narrowing the president’s comfortable early lead. His campaign staff worried that he was vulnerable on several fronts, primarily among German and Italian immigrants and the families of draft-age men. Nevertheless, the president himself oversaw the October 29 draft lottery drawing in an auditorium at the War Department building in Washington. He looked on from the onstage podium as Secretary of War Stimson, blindfolded for the occasion with a piece of linen that had covered the chair on which the Founding Fathers sat to sign the Declaration of Independence, reached into a large cylindrical glass jar containing 9,000 cobalt blue capsules and withdrew one. Stimson handed the capsule to Roosevelt, who opened it and read off the number on the slip that was inside: 158.

The men who held the number were thoroughly American in the variety of their origins. In New York, they included the names Cody and Chan, Tsatsaronis and Stazzone, O’Reilly and McDonald, Gonzales and Gerkowski, Wolf and Weisblum. By now the election was a week away, and Willkie kept saying the boys were almost at the boats, but Roosevelt had regained the initiative. He attacked the isolationists as foolish and unrealistic, and assembled three of them—Republican representatives Joe Martin, Bruce Barton, and Hamilton Fish—into a rhythmic catchphrase, “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” that delighted his partisan audiences when he tied them to Willkie. On October 31, he announced orders for 12,000 fighters and bombers, and artillery, machine guns, rifles, and tanks for England, orders that would continue to reenergize the nation’s once-moribund production lines. But those weapons, he insisted, would not be used in fighting by Americans—and each time he said it, his campaign aides insisted that he repeat it.

“But how often do they expect me to say that? It’s in the Democratic platform and I’ve repeated it a hundred times,” he protested to speechwriter Robert Sherwood.

“I know it, Mr. President, but they don’t seem to have heard you the first time,” Sherwood answered. “Evidently you’ve got to say it again—and again—and again.”

Sherwood put the insistent repetition into a speech that Roosevelt gave in Boston the night that Willkie, earlier in the day in Baltimore, had charged that if “the third-term candidate” was returned to office, Americans would be at war by April. “I have said this before,” said the president, speaking to the “mothers and fathers of America,” “but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Normally he had added a qualifier at the end: “except in case of attack.” But this time he dropped it, reasoning that if America was attacked, it was no longer a foreign war. How much difference the redaction made was something the pundits of the time were left to speculate about and future isolationists to ridicule. But on election day, November 5, with an unprecedented turnout of 49,815,312 voters, Roosevelt compiled 55 percent of the popular vote, 27,243,466, to Willkie’s 22,304,755, and a much larger electoral majority, 449 to 82. The third term was a reality, and the hand at the helm in the storm of approaching war was one Americans had learned to trust.

The wars across the oceans continued without letup. Japan had signed the Tripartite Treaty with Germany and Italy in September, pledging with them to fight any American attempts to block their expansion. It now controlled a great swath of northeast China from Shanghai to the Soviet border, and after the surrender of France to Germany had taken positions along the coast of French Indochina. Although Hitler had postponed his plans to invade England in order to concentrate on building up his forces to the east for the invasion of Soviet Russia he now planned, in violation of their non-aggression pact, his Luftwaffe continued to rain bombs down on London and British military targets. German submarines stalked supply and arms convoys crossing the North Atlantic from Canada. (The danger from German U-boats off the coast of North America would eventually force Roosevelt to give up his seaborne vacations aboard the presidential yacht, the USS
Potomac,
in favor of a WPA-built cabin camp in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains; converted to Roosevelt’s specifications into a presidential getaway, it is now famously known as Camp David.) The losses to submarine attacks reinforced Britain’s dependence on an unstemmed flow of American arms, but by now it had exhausted both its credits and its gold reserves.

On December 29, Roosevelt once again sat before the microphones and spoke to the American people. Freed by his election mandate, by Italy’s invasion of Greece that fall, and by a ranting speech by Hitler three weeks earlier in which the Führer declared that fascism and Western democracy stood at odds—“I can beat any other power in the world,” he proclaimed—the president spoke more frankly than he had during the campaign. He attacked both Nazi ruthlessness and American isolationists who are “doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done.” With that, he said America’s best defense against the world domination intended by the Axis lay in helping Britain and the Allies with “more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything.”

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he said, producing yet another memorable phrase and launching the debate on a new stage of American involvement in the war in Europe—which now, with Italy and England fighting in North Africa, had expanded beyond the boundaries of the continent. The debate continued in his State of the Union address in January 1941, in which he again proved a master of persuasive rhetoric, calling for “a world founded upon four essential freedoms.” These were freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship, and together they neatly dovetailed his commitment to the principles of the New Deal with what was at stake in the conflicts threatening to engulf the world. Most important, even before they were turned into icons of Americanism in four paintings by Norman Rockwell, citizens embraced these freedoms as matters worth defending. And when the debate finally concluded in March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act was law.

What this history-changing piece of legislation did, as Roosevelt initially described it, was to “get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign” in discussing how to meet Great Britain’s war needs. He compared it to lending a neighbor his garden hose to put out a fire. When it was out, the neighbor returned the hose or, if it was damaged, replaced it. In passing Lend-Lease, Congress authorized $7 billion in initial aid to Great Britain, Greece, and China, fulfilling the promise Roosevelt had made to Churchill that England did not stand alone. As soon as it passed, British merchant ships warped up to American docks and took on planes and aircraft parts, artillery and shells, rifles and machine guns, vehicles, food, fuel, industrial equipment, and other supplies to carry back across the ocean. Appropriate to Roosevelt’s original analogy, aboard one of the first cargo vessels to brave the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic on its way to England was 900,000 feet of fire hose. And as the president had done in the economic emergency of the depression, when he needed to get relief to his own people, in the military emergency that now faced England he turned to Hopkins to manage the lifeline as his advisor and assistant on Lend-Lease.

11. A FEVER OF PREPARATION

T
he factories filling England’s orders were taking on new workers and pushing unemployment steadily lower; 300,000 new jobs were being created every month. Still, 8 million people remained out of work at the end of 1940, a rate of 14.6 percent, and Roosevelt had rejected calls from his army and navy chiefs to crank up arms factory work schedules to seven days a week with heavy overtime. Holding to the five-day week would continue to spread the work around, even as the arms orders were adding private sector jobs at a fast pace.

The rolls of the WPA had bumped up from the previous summer’s usual dip, even though from July 1940 through March 1941, 855,000 workers had left the jobs program. One was Jimmy Bonanno, the Brooklyn carpenter. From his work at La Guardia Field, after the fire that damaged Hangar Four, the WPA assigned him to Fort Hamilton, the historic army garrison on the Brooklyn waterfront that once guarded New York against attack from the sea; it was also where Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and baseball inventor Abner Doubleday had served. He was there only briefly, working as part of a crew that did general repairs, before he received a call from the union. A private contractor was hiring carpenters to build housing for defense workers in East Hartford, Connecticut. Bonanno gave his notice to the WPA, packed his clothes and the tools he had replaced since losing his old ones in the hangar fire, and said goodbye to Teresa and little Frank, now five years old. It would be several years before he lived full-time with them again. By the fall, he was one of 11,000 carpenters among a workforce of 20,000 men on upper Cape Cod, tasked to build a huge army training camp. Crews working three shifts around the clock built Camp Edwards using production line methods, finishing 1,200 buildings in 125 days. The first of 25,000 trainees began arriving in January 1941.

But as men such as Bonanno left the WPA for private work, others from the million-strong waiting list were taken on, so the total enrollment remained around 1,900,000. The flow of WPA workers into private defense jobs was complicated, Commissioner Hunter told the House Appropriations Committee in February, by the fact that most of those jobs were in areas where the rolls were thinnest. Meanwhile, 400,000 workers were employed at the WPA’s multifarious defense projects, and more were moving into defense-related training, including 50,000 who would be trained to work in hospitals as ward attendants, orderlies, and aides.

By that April, the WPA was working on a large array of new construction projects sponsored by the War and Navy Departments. These included bases and cantonments, airports, hospitals, arsenals and arms depots, and ship repair yards, a majority of them clustered on the northeastern and western coasts, along the Mexican border, and in Florida. The agency was building new civil airports in every state in the nation and military access roads and strategic highways in most of them. It had built or reconstructed 9,241 buildings for the army and navy and 576 armories for state national guards. White-collar workers, meanwhile, were compiling statistics, performing research, and doing clerical jobs for the defense agencies.

The WPA was doing so much defense-related work that Hunter, in an April 15 letter to the president, requested he designate the WPA as a national defense agency. It would strengthen the “patriotic morale among the unemployed,” he wrote. Roosevelt declined, since the defense agency designation was used to keep civil service employees from being shuffled among agencies, and WPA workers, who were not permanent government employees, did not fall under civil service rules.

In May, Hunter recommended in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee that the eighteen-month rule and the ban against aliens be dropped. “In the past we have been glad to utilize their skill and special training,” he said, referring to non-naturalized immigrants. Since they had to obey the law and pay taxes and were subject to the draft and military service, Hunter said, it seemed unfair to bar them from WPA jobs, especially since they were denied private sector jobs by employers who maintained citizens-only hiring policies. He also suggested the Theatre Project be revived under state sponsorship, in line with the other arts programs, as a means of entertaining military trainees. The committee ignored all three suggestions.

On May 27, 1941, Roosevelt declared an unlimited national emergency. “Common prudence,” he said, required instant readiness “to repel any and all acts or threats of aggression.” The declaration lent even more urgency to the war preparations, as the president called upon “all loyal workmen as well as employers to…'insure the survival of the only kind of government which recognizes the rights of labor and of capital.”

On June 19, Howard Hunter called a news conference in Washington to tell reporters that the WPA rolls would be pared to around 1 million workers as of July 1. They currently stood at 1,413,000. Until now, in the six-year history of the WPA, there had never been fewer than a million and a half workers on the rolls, and that figure had come in the fall of 1937 before shooting up again during the Roosevelt recession. The availability of private jobs was causing more turnover than the WPA had ever seen, Hunter said, but the defense program would keep the sheer numbers steady at close to 1 million through the end of the year. Even so, the once ubiquitous program was receding; 1,500 of the nation’s 3,100 counties would see their WPA projects disappear.

Construction work, much of it on airports and access roads to military installations, continued to provide the biggest share of jobs, but 27 percent of them remained in the white-collar and service areas. These included the arts projects. The Writers’ Program still had much of its original work to complete: thirteen of the state guides in the American Guide series remained unpublished at the beginning of 1941. Where writers were not scrambling to finish the guides, they were assigned to produce introductions to the environs of the new military camps springing up around the country, as well as cautionary pamphlets on the dangers of malaria, unsafe drinking water, and unprotected sex. The Music Project’s orchestras and bands were in demand as morale boosters for draftees undergoing military training. The Art Project’s graphic artists were producing civil defense and other informational posters. The rest of the white-collar projects would focus on nutrition, health, recreation, and adult education.

Hunter also said that the number of WPA workers training for arms factory work, which had dropped below 50,000, would rise again. This training had now shifted from state vocational schools to the manufacturing facilities themselves. Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, New York, was training 300 WPA workers. In New Haven, Connecticut, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company had committed to training 1,000 of them.

Three days later, Hitler launched his long-rumored invasion of Soviet Russia, deploying troops and tanks across a 930-mile front from the Arctic to the Black Sea, bombing military airfields, and destroying a thousand planes in twelve hours—one-quarter of the Soviet air force. The invasion forced a reassessment of ideological allegiances in the United States. As long as the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact had been in force, it was possible to conflate the two vastly different dictatorships as enemies of America and Western democracies. With the invasion came the prospect that the United States, under the policy inscribed in the Lend-Lease Act of furnishing all necessary aid to enemies of the Axis as a means of ensuring its own defense, would now be sending military weapons and supplies to Communist Russia. The perception was that this surely would be a waste, since military estimates reckoned it would take the German army no more than three months to defeat its Soviet counterpart and occupy its territory as far east as Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine. Hitler aimed to feed his troops from the Soviet breadbasket and add its industrial production to his war machine. But he never anticipated that Russian civilians by the many thousands, including women volunteers, would take up shovels (albeit at gunpoint) to help dig anti-tank defenses on the fringes of Leningrad and Moscow, or that the Red Army would prove tenacious and resilient in defending its territory until the winter turned the tide against the invaders, just as it had against Napoleon in 1812.

Hitler’s turn to the east added a new leaf to Harry Hopkins’s portfolio as Roosevelt’s unofficial ambassador to the Allies. By the end of July, after returning to England for new discussions with Churchill, he was on his way by flying boat and transport plane to Moscow to meet with Soviet premier Josef Stalin on the president’s behalf. He returned with requests for aluminum, rifles, and anti-aircraft guns. The “arsenal of democracy” was now arming not only itself and the British Commonwealth but its new ally the Soviet Union.

The increasing demands of war production drove unemployment down still further. It would drop below 10 percent for 1941, the first time since 1929 that it had reached single digits. The number of jobless was 5.3 million, down from 13 to 15 million when Roosevelt took office. Hunter spoke to the press again on September 26. He said in opening, “The WPA is really getting out of the news these days.”

“Yes. Too much war,” said one of the reporters.

The commissioner announced that WPA enrollment now stood at its lowest level ever, 1,034,629 workers in the United States and Puerto Rico. He was operating under a budget of $875 million for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 1942, a drop of $500 million from the year before and the first time the emergency relief appropriation had fallen below $1 billion. Still, there were more than a million eligible people for whom there were no WPA jobs, and he expected the need to spike again after the first of the year, as it usually did when seasonal employment dropped.

Of the million-plus remaining on the WPA rolls, about one-third—334,000—were working on defense projects. Some 90 percent of these were construction workers on the still-to-be-completed roads and airports. The white-collar component included teachers called on by the Selective Service System to teach draftees to read and write at the fourth-grade level after the army discovered that some 90,000 of its draftees, primarily from southern states, were illiterate. As Hunter pointed out, WPA-paid teachers had already taught the basics of literacy to 1 million people in its adult education classes, so “90,000 more wouldn’t be much of a bite to take.” He also noted that a full quota of 50,000 WPA-paid workers were now training in 266 defense-related factories, and while they were eligible for government pay for a training period of up to eight weeks, most were moving off the WPA payroll and onto the plants’ payrolls in two and a half weeks.

It was time to give WPA workers a raise, Hunter said. Their pay had not changed since the 1939 reorganization, ranging from $31 to $94 a week depending on the region of the country and the job, while hourly pay for industrial workers had increased 15 percent and weekly pay, factoring in overtime, had increased 32 percent over the same period. This was pushing prices up—7.5 percent in the general cost of living and 15 percent in food costs—and he said he would increase wages 10 percent in the next thirty days.

He made a further point, one that anticipated a sea change in the face of American manufacturing. Paul McNutt, who headed the Federal Security Agency that included the U.S. Employment Service, had pointed out that many of the parts assembly and other jobs at arms plants could be done by women as well as men, but that manufacturers were reluctant to hire them. Hunter concurred. “There are not many manufacturers willing to accept women in defense industries,” he said, adding that he wanted to do more to train women and move them into defense jobs. He was not asked about, and did not address, anti-black discrimination by defense contractors, which persisted despite Roosevelt’s executive order of June 25, 1941, barring discrimination in the defense industry and the federal government on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Six weeks later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched their sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. It was a day, Roosevelt said famously, “that will live in infamy.” It was also a day that swept aside many of the assumptions that had existed until then, the resistance to women (though not to African Americans) in defense plants being one. It erased the idea that America could hide behind its oceans; the America First Committee, the last bastion of isolationism, would dissolve within a single week. And with the United States at war, in swift succession, against Japan and then Germany and Italy, it was a day that foretold the end of the WPA.