Fear Itself (42 page)

Even when the Fair Labor Standards Act finally was passed by the House on May 24, 1938, a year to the day of FDR’s call to action, a majority of the negative votes, 56 of the 97, were cast by Democrats; and of these, fully 52 were by southern representatives. Three weeks later, the House approved the conference report, 291–89.
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Notably, southern representatives divided their votes along geographic lines. Members elected from the seven Deep South states, those that first had seceded in 1860 and at present had the largest concentrations of African-Americans, nearly unanimously voted no, unlike their colleagues from the other ten states.
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Within two years, this division had been erased. In 1940, Graham Barden of North Carolina sponsored an effort to undermine the FLSA by drastically contracting its coverage. His bill suffered a 206–175 defeat when the House voted to recommit. Across the South, Barden was joined by a virtually unanimous southern bloc,
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thus splitting the Democratic Party in two.
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VII.

T
HERE WAS
yet one additional, even more powerful signal that not just the radical moment but also the party coalition on which it depended were being placed under enormous pressure. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935–with southern support once farmworkers and domestics had been excluded—had ushered in a period of unprecedented labor militancy and organization, what David Greenstone called “the proletarian period in class politics.”
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A wave of sit-down strikes after workers seized industrial plants produced a recognition for CIO unions by General Motors, the United States Steel Corporation, and many other firms that had previously resisted organized labor. In turn, the AFL dramatically increased its recruiting efforts by investing in a threefold increase in its organizing budget from 1937 to 1939.
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After the 1938 passage of the FLSA, southerners paid ever more attention to the impact labor organizing might have in the region, while the schism in the party became more visible as southerners began to mount a furious campaign to undermine the legal framework of the Wagner Act. Most notable in this drive to contain labor was the creation in 1939 of a House Special Committee to Investigate the National Labor Relations Board, led by Virginia’s Howard Smith.

Once constituted, the NLRB had acted forcefully to enforce the Wagner Act and facilitate union activity under the law. As it acted to check the antiunion behavior of many leading firms, including the Associated Press, Goodyear, Western Union, Standard Oil, Shell Oil, Inland and Republic Steel, Montgomery Ward, the Aluminum Company of America, Chevrolet, Ford, and United Fruit, the board seemed to be doing more than creating a level playing field for unions. By its administrative actions, it was returning to the impulses of the NRA, in which the federal government could act authoritatively to shape, limit, and direct key features of American capitalism. In dealing with the balance of power between labor and capital, the NLRB had worked to check “the widespread use of professional spies, armed guards, provocateurs, and strikebreakers.” It also sought to stem antiunion business practices, which included bribing union leaders to dampen the militancy of their members, inciting violence against labor organizers who refused to play along, and firing workers for their union activities.
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Lasting into 1940, the Smith committee probe bypassed the House Labor Committee, which was dominated by union supporters, in order “to build opposition to the labor board and to frame legislation to scale back recent union gains.”
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Working closely with an up-and-coming Republican from Indiana, Charles Halleck, Howard Smith convened sessions that deployed tropes that almost immediately came to dominate the southern orientation to labor in Congress and beyond. Their themes, which became common during and just after World War II, included accusations of a government bias favoring the CIO and its anti–Jim Crow racial agenda, subversion by Communists, and a growing class bias against business and for labor. In advocating the passage of amendments to the NLRA to sharply limit the board’s autonomy and capacity, Smith explained that the board “is definitely partial to the radical C.I.O. labor movement,” and “is honeycombed with employees who do not even believe in our system of private ownership of property, upon which our whole industry is based.”
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This truly was an opening act, not merely a prelude. House votes on Smith’s various proposals also were harbingers of how an increasingly beleaguered white South would be torn between its commitment to its traditional political party and its commitment to white supremacy. When, on June 7, 1940, the chamber voted 246–137 to replace the existing board with a new three-member panel that would operate under more constrained rules, southern representatives split with their fellow Democrats
²¹⁵
to join the move’s wholehearted Republican supporters.
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Appearing for the first time, this antiunion coalition would reappear again and again over the course of the decade.

Four weeks earlier, on May 10, having already conquered Poland and divided the spoils with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded the Low Countries and France. German victories were sudden and shocking, “so unbelievable,” as the earl of Halifax, then British foreign secretary, remembered, “as to be almost surely unreal, and if not unreal then quite immeasurably catastrophic.”
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By June 14, Nazi troops had swept into Paris. On the seventeenth, Marshal Pétain, a hero of the French western front during World War I, called for an armistice, which was signed five days later. Before long, the country was divided between a German-occupied zone and Vichy France, whose government Pétain led.

Six days after the invasion, President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. “These are ominous days,” he began, “days of swift and shocking developments.” Taking note of how “the brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror,” with “new powers of destruction, incredibly swift and deadly,” he spoke of how the United States had become vulnerable, asked Congress to confront the new danger, and appealed for an unprecedented emergency appropriation of $896 million to equip and modernize the army and navy, deepen training, quadruple the country’s capacity to build military planes, raising the number to fifty thousand a year, and “speed up to a twenty-four hour basis” all existing and future contracts for weapons.
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Here was a great new problem American democracy would have to solve despite skepticism about whether the dictatorships could be confronted successfully in a world of might. “There are some who say,” Roosevelt reported, “that democracy cannot cope with the new techniques of Government developed in recent years by some countries—by a few countries which deny the freedoms that we maintain are essential to our democratic way of life.”

Dramatically declaring, “That I reject,” FDR closed by proclaiming a relationship and a rapport that soon would be sorely tested: “The Congress and the Chief Executive,” he insisted, must “constitute a team where the defense of the land is concerned.” At precisely the moment when Democratic Party solidarity was collapsing over questions of labor and race, the president was summoning Congress to a crusade “to give our service and even our lives for the maintenance of our American liberties.” The partnership this campaign would require, we will soon see, could not have blossomed without the insistent support of the South.

8
The First Crusade

P
UTTING THEIR
O
CTOBER ISSUE
to bed on Thursday, August 31, 1939, the editors of
Fortune
were startled to learn that Hitler’s forces were moving into Poland. “All night long the teletype rattled out the unbelievable news,” they reported. “Little groups of writers and researchers stood in the editorial offices reading the long streamers of tape, stumbling for the first time over the strange Polish names.” Finishing their shift, the staff “walked out among the gray, deserted buildings of the city with the feeling that they had closed, not an issue of a magazine, but an era in human affairs.”
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A decision was soon made to add a folded supplement called “The War of 1939.” This insert was much more than a report about European events; it was an intervention in public affairs. Given the gravity of the impending war,
Fortune
would have to be more than a magazine about business. Its publisher, Henry Luce, resolved to have
Fortune
“straighten out U.S. Businessmen (and ‘Liberals’) on the great matter of appeasement.” He even toyed with changing the magazine from a publication about business to a “Magazine of America as a World Power.”
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Identifying ideological stakes, “more striking than any since the medieval crusades,” the October supplement confronted readers with a startling map: “Europe 1939.” This image underscored the geopolitical advantages now attending an engorged Germany, which was colored in red, having already swallowed Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939. With the exception of Britain, France, and Poland, the Third Reich’s only active adversaries, which were tinted in blue, the remaining countries were highlighted by a bright shade of yellow. Noting how “the outstanding feature of the present map is neutrality,” the magazine’s commentary observed that “what future historians will have to say about this war will depend almost entirely upon what the neutrals do in the fairly immediate future.” Diplomats representing each of the combatants, it reported, were “shuttling back and forth” to elicit support from the neutral governments of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Hungary, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and the USSR.

One country, however, was glaringly absent. Nowhere to be found was the United States, the globe’s most important neutral country, whose capital lay some 4,200 miles west of Berlin. But that,
Fortune
insisted, was something of an illusion. The contours of Europe’s map and the course of Europe’s war, the editors argued, would depend on policy decisions soon to be taken in Washington. “As this supplement goes to press, the American Congress is about to convene for a momentous choice between two courses in world affairs.” Noting that a robust battle for public support was under way, the insert included a snapshot survey of mass opinion about neutrality, military preparedness, and the use of force. Making the assumption that constituency views would affect how members of Congress would act, the report remarked that the battle for public opinion was “of the first importance to the whole world. For as the U.S. thinks, so will it probably do in the end. And what the U.S. does can turn the tides of history.”

Fortune
’s portrait revealed dissonant popular views. The great majority of the public, 83 percent, sided with France, Great Britain, and Poland, and just 1 percent with Germany (16 percent said “neither side” or replied “don’t know”). By contrast, the dominant policy position was “a definite though uneasy affirmation of ‘neutrality.’”
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The survey asked about four options. First was immediate involvement in the war (“enter the war at once on the side of England, France, and Poland”). Second was a provisional endorsement of American military participation should the Allies face defeat, coupled in the meantime with shipments of food and war materials. Third was neutrality that would favor the Allies, stopping well short of active warfare (“supply England, France, and Poland with materials and food, and refuse to ship anything to Germany”). Fourth was strict neutrality based either on equal trade or an across-the-board economic boycott of all the belligerents. In all, only 3 percent of Americans favored abrupt and direct engagement. Another 14 percent supported American participation if the Allies were to face defeat. A larger cohort, 20 percent, backed uneven neutrality. A clear majority, 54 percent, endorsed existing strict neutrality, while another 9 percent were unsure.

These preferences varied markedly by region. Southern respondents were especially hawkish and anti-Nazi. A full 92 percent of those who responded in the South supported the British, French, and Polish Allies. Three in ten were ready to fight immediately or endorse American military efforts to prevent a German victory.
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Another 18 percent backed active aid to the British-French-Polish alliance. No other region came close to this policy profile.
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When German forces crossed into Poland from the West in tandem with Soviet forces from the East, the democratic powers, notably including the United States, were in a far weaker condition than the dictatorships. Recalling that moment’s shocking asymmetry of force, George Kennan observed in 1951 how “the overwhelming portion of the world’s armed strength in land forces and air forces had accumulated in the hands of three political entities—Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Imperial Japan,” and how the Western democracies “had become militarily outclassed.”
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In 1938, President Roosevelt sent Bernard Baruch on a European mission to get a sense of the state of military preparedness in Germany and in Britain. In addition to confirming that Germany had made huge advances in producing synthetic oil and rubber, he found, and the Military Intelligence Division of the General Staff soon confirmed, a grim contrast:

The General Staff report credited Germany with having 3,353 medium and heavy bombers. . . . The second power in the air was Russia, whose bomber fleet was estimated at 1,300 to 1,900 planes. . . . France stood third, with 956 bombers; and Germany’s ally, Italy, was right behind it with 916. Britain had only 715 bombers, but Japan had 660. And America, with less than half of Japan’s strength, was the weakest of all the air powers.
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The United States also possessed too little ammunition for antiaircraft batteries, and all too few antitank guns.
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After the German invasion of the Low Countries and France in May 1940, the War Department informed President Roosevelt that Nazi forces in the West alone numbered more than two million, organized in some 160 divisions; in all, it had eight million under arms. The United States, by contrast, mustered fewer than 250,000 men, and could field only five divisions (each one-quarter under full complement) of its total of nine, with 80,000 soldiers, about the size of the Belgian force that Germany had quickly overwhelmed. By contrast, Germany possessed ninety field divisions, Japan fifty, and Italy forty-five. Ranked eighteenth in the world, America’s armed forces possessed fewer than 350 usable tanks.
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The country did have a large and capable navy, but it was geared almost exclusively to hemispheric defense.
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A Council on Foreign Affairs report detailed how “today in Europe all the belligerents, both totalitarian and democratic, have subjected their economies to comprehensive government control” in order to pursue the necessities of total war.
¹¹
The United States remained a conspicuous exception.

With the world balance of power so “decisively turned,” three conditions would be required to repair American weakness: active rearmament, close alliance with Britain, and, ultimately, collaboration with the USSR.
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It was a military buildup and an end to the isolationist version of neutrality that President Roosevelt sought in the run-up to American participation, neither of which could have been accomplished without legislative approval. But confronted with such divergent national views,
Fortune
expressed misgivings about whether Congress would reject isolationist positions, which were being “described by their advocates as the ways to safeguard the nation’s peace.” Noting how “the U.S. desire to remain at peace does not, however, seem to be accompanied by a firm conviction that we shall properly be able to keep out of war,” the magazine combined its wish for engagement with apprehension that legislators would resist swift action to help block further Nazi advances.
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This was not an abstract consideration. Fateful determinations about neutrality, preparedness, and conscription required congressional decision, despite inherent executive power to conduct foreign policy, command the armed forces, and exchange communications with other countries.
¹⁴
Absent congressional authorization and appropriations, Washington could not confront the Axis powers.

Fortune
’s anxiety about whether such votes could be mustered was well placed, for the outcome of the era’s vibrant foreign and military policy disputes was in doubt. The magazine’s editors understood that the shape of American foreign policy would be determined at least as much by Congress as by the executive branch.
¹⁵
When the October 1939 issue appeared, the Senate was about to consider a new Neutrality Act that would end the arms embargo on belligerents, a bill that had failed to reach the Senate floor after a more modest change had barely been passed by the House in June. As it turned out, military preparedness was widely supported by internationalists and isolationists alike (the former were worried about the fate of democratic Europe, especially Britain; the latter were concerned about securing an effective defensive perimeter to protect, in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere), but almost all the other international decisions that the House and Senate acted on from 1939 through 1941 reflected the views of a polarized country, and were sanctioned only by close votes, some razor-thin, after tumultuous argument.

In a rough-and-tumble congressional process, the leery giant successfully began to confront problems it long had sought to set aside. The intense contests that accompanied this outcome should remind us that even when war and foreign policy were most at issue, Congress never abandoned its ability, one might say responsibility, to shape national policy. In considering these issues, its members worked almost nonstop. During the third session of the Seventy-sixth Congress alone, the longest in American history, which sat nearly every day between January 3, 1940, and January 3, 1941, issues concerning the war were front and center. The Compulsory Military Training Bill alone consumed 302 pages of debate in the
Congressional Record
in the House, and 665 in the Senate.
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The South made all the difference. Ever since World War I, a curiously provincial internationalism—motivated by local concerns but looking assertively outward—had emerged in the region. When global questions grew pressing, they were considered by the section’s representatives within an “unquestionably southern . . . frame of analysis,” within which “each of the issues that arose was evaluated in a peculiarly regional way and each found its resolution in Southern terms.”
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With mass opinion and elite decisions broadly in harmony, southern Democrats led the coalition that overcame both a Republican Party that overwhelmingly wanted to avoid overseas entanglements and the lesser but still potent isolationist preferences of many nonsouthern Democrats who represented ethnic German, Italian, and Irish urban constituencies.
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At just the moment when many southern members were having second thoughts about the domestic New Deal and its impact on the racial order, the very same representatives, many of whom were courted by President Roosevelt to support his increasingly assertive foreign policy, provided the pivotal votes.
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Combined with southern control of the key foreign relations and military affairs committees, their nearly unanimous support for activist overseas policies made it possible for the House and Senate to endorse a massive buildup of warships and planes, make thousands available to America’s allies, and sponsor the swift conscription of some 900,000 Americans during the initial phase of the country’s first peacetime draft.
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Without the South, strict neutrality would have persisted, aid would not have followed so readily to U.S. allies, and no person would have been subject to conscription for longer than one year. Britain would have found it more difficult to resist a Nazi invasion, and the United States would have been far more vulnerable when Japan attacked and Germany declared war early in December 1941.
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