FDR Goes to War

How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America

Burton W. Folsom, Anita Folsom

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781439183243
• eBook ISBN: 9781439183229
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

From the acclaimed author of New Deal or Raw Deal?, called "eye-opening" by the National Review, comes a fascinating exposé of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's destructive wartime legacy—and its adverse impact on America's economic and foreign policies today. Did World War II really end the Great Depression—or did President Franklin Roosevelt's poor judgment and confused management leave Congress with a devastating fiscal mess after the final bomb was dropped? In this provocative new book, historians Burton W. Folsom, Jr., and Anita Folsom make a compelling case that FDR's presidency led to evasive and self-serving wartime policies. At a time when most Americans held isolationist sentiments—a backlash against the stunning carnage of World War I—Roosevelt secretly favored an aggressive interventionist foreign policy. Yet, throughout the 1930s, he spent lavishly on his disastrous New Deal programs and slashed defense spending, leaving America vastly unprepared for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the challenge of fighting World War II. History books tell us the wartime economy was a boon, thanks to massive government spending. But the skyrocketing national debt, food rations, nonexistent luxuries, crippling taxes, labor strikes, and dangerous work of the time tell a different story—one that is hardly the stuff of recovery. Instead, the war ushered in a new era of imperialism for the executive branch. Roosevelt seized private property, conducted illegal wiretaps, tried to silence domestic opposition, and interned 110, 000 Japanese Americans. He set a dangerous precedent for entangling alliances in foreign affairs, including his remarkable courtship of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, while millions of Americans showed the courage, perseverance, and fortitude to make the weapons and fight the war. Was Roosevelt a great wartime leader, as historians almost unanimously assert? The Folsoms offer a thought-provoking revision of his controversial legacy. FDR Goes to War will make America take a second look at one of its most complicated presidents.

1

HELLO TO ARMS, FAREWELL TO NEW DEAL

Professors Rexford Tugwell and Raymond Moley left their meeting with Franklin Roosevelt and looked at each other in disbelief. They could barely absorb the ideas that FDR had just unveiled. As two of his advisors, they had signed on to Roosevelt’s “brains trust” with expectations of changing American society: Government programs, not free enterprise, would plan the economy in the future. Now, in January 1933, President-elect Roosevelt had thrown a wrench in their social planning by telling them that he favored “war with Japan now rather than later.” Those words stunned both men.1

Tugwell and Moley were discovering that Franklin Roosevelt’s mind touched on a hundred topics a day. As FDR waited for his inauguration in March, he remained in his home state of New York, where he had just served four years as governor. He used the interim to discuss policy with his advisors. But his was no orderly mind. As one cabinet official later admitted, “It literally is government on the jump.”2

Days earlier, Roosevelt’s nimble mind had been influenced by the current secretary of state, Henry Stimson. Stimson attended the funeral of former president Calvin Coolidge in Northampton, Massachusetts, and two days later joined Roosevelt for lunch at FDR’s estate at Hyde Park, New York. Roosevelt and Stimson talked privately for over five hours. Stimson disliked Japan. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Stimson refused to recognize Japan’s claims. He wanted embargoes to cut off their oil and steel, to end the atrocities in China. America must actively intervene in world affairs—that was Stimson’s position.3

And here was Roosevelt with his love for China. Since his grandfather Delano had made money in China in the opium trade, FDR felt that he had a connection with the country and its people. Stimson’s ideas on foreign policy in Asia meshed well with Roosevelt’s. The following week, FDR announced that “American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties,” which was a direct slap at Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.4

Would Roosevelt go so far as to provoke war with Japan? Moley and Tugwell spent hours trying to dissuade FDR from this interventionist foreign policy, but the president-elect rebuffed them: “I have always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese. How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?”5

Tugwell wrote in his diary:

I sympathize with the Chinese, too. But I firmly believe it is a commitment which may lead us to war with Japan. . . . [FDR] has a strong personal sympathy with the Chinese. . . . He admitted the possibility of war and said it might be better to have it now than later. This horrified me and I said so.6

Three months later, now-president FDR focused on domestic issues, especially the economy, and not on foreign policy. With unemployment over 20 percent, he launched his New Deal, a flurry of government programs that he hoped would put people back to work. But instead, the economic downturn became the Great Depression, and unemployment remained high throughout the 1930s.7

Oddly, even while considering such an aggressive foreign policy, Roosevelt slashed defense spending as a percentage of the national budget.8 Playing the role of pacifist, FDR pleased millions of American voters who wanted to avoid war. Noninterventionist leaders from the Midwest also led the Senate and the House and strongly opposed military spending. Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, a progressive Republican and New Deal supporter, stood in the Senate chamber in 1934 to denounce bankers and arms dealers for profiting from the military slaughter of the First World War.

The public responded by demanding guarantees of isolation from foreign wars. Congress then passed the Neutrality Acts, designed to prevent America from joining in another foreign war. In 1935 and 1936, the first two Neutrality Acts were meant to be temporary, but then the third act became law in May 1937 and permanently covered a wide range of activities so that the United States would not aid other nations at war.9 Roosevelt went along with this policy.

Much of the isolationist sentiment was a backlash against World War I, which had killed almost 120,000 Americans. Many U.S. citizens vowed never again to be drawn into a European conflict. With newer weapons and modern aircraft, military experts predicted even higher casualties in future wars. “No,” Americans said in vast numbers, “if we avoid any armed conflict short of an invasion of North America, that is the way for a safe future for American boys.” And at any rate, Americans believed that no foreign power was strong enough, or foolish enough, to cross the ocean to attack the United States on its home land.

“War is a vain policy, except a war fought at home to establish or preserve the freedom of a nation,” wrote Senator Robert Taft of Ohio in 1941, summing up the ideas of this movement in the United States called isolationism. Most isolationists were not pacifists; they wanted a strong defense, even as they distrusted foreign governments, which might look to the size and strength of the United States as a military reservoir to help them fight their neighbors.10

The United States was not alone in its revulsion at the horrors of World War I. During the 1920s, governments around the world decided they could limit armaments and even outlaw war itself. The disarmament movement worldwide was reinforced in 1928 by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which supposedly outlawed war. The United States and dozens of other nations signed this utopian agreement.11

At naval disarmament conferences in the 1920s, American leaders agreed to mothball much of the U.S. Navy. Then they closed factories for making weapons and military planes. War administrator Donald Nelson, an expert on the U.S. military, noted that postwar tax laws shifted production from military to civilian goods. For example, “The biggest rifle manufacturing firm in the world, the Eddystone plant of Remington [near Philadelphia], was swept away.” American corporations were also “not permitted to write off equipment that was not obsolete or worn out. The new facilities were too expensive to maintain and pay taxes on, so Bethlehem [Steel and other corporations] demolished them.”12

Adding to the antiwar mood were revelations from traumatized veterans. The facts about trench warfare had been withheld from the public during the war, when censorship was widespread. But soldiers who survived the conflict began writing plays, novels, and short stories about their experiences.

Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves, published in both America and England in 1929, gave readers a glimpse of trench warfare as described by a traumatized soldier. The stage drama Journey’s End by R. C. Sheriff played to thousands of audiences all over the world from 1928 through the 1930s, telling the story of a British infantry company in the trenches. And the success of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front also showed how interested the public had become in learning the truth about the war. Within eighteen months, the book sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages. Hollywood adapted the story to the silver screen, and it won 1930 Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director.

Throughout Europe and the United States, the public was stunned by the carnage of World War I, by the raw destruction, by the sheer numbers of dead or maimed. How could the British Army suffer sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme—without gaining a yard of territory? How could almost half the Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two perish—killed on Europe’s battlefields between 1914 and 1918?13

As isolationist sentiment in the United States increased during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt kept his ideas about containing Japan to himself and his closest advisors. Secrecy was not new to FDR. As a victim of polio, he could not stand without help and spent most of his time in a wheelchair. Yet the public had no idea of the extent of his disability. During his presidency, if a photographer captured a picture of FDR in his wheelchair or being carried by aides, his Secret Service detail confiscated the film. Roosevelt managed to conceal the degree of his paralysis from the public until the last days of his presidency.14 Likewise, during his first term, few people knew that Roosevelt wanted to push back the Japanese and place the United States in the middle of foreign crises.

Even though FDR favored an interventionist foreign policy that could lead to war, he was unwilling to rebuild the military. Roosevelt had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s administration as assistant secretary of the navy in World War I. As president, FDR continued to favor the Navy, but he wanted low numbers of sailors and ships. For the Army, he tended to think in traditional terms of cannons, cavalry, and small numbers of troops. Although Congress had authorized a fighting army of 280,000 men, it refused to vote the funds to make that happen, so the actual size of the U.S. Army remained about 140,000 soldiers in the mid-1930s, with National Guard units available to fill in during emergencies. FDR approved of this strategy and continued to keep national defense budgets low.15 He would skimp on the country’s defense to spend on his New Deal.

By the mid-1930s, the U.S. Army’s pitiful stocks of supplies had hit rock bottom. Appropriations for the War Department had dropped from $345 million under Herbert Hoover in fiscal year 1931 to $243 million under FDR in 1934. What’s more, World War I weapons and equipment were simply worn out. The entire Army owned only eighty semiautomatic rifles, with the infantry still using the 1903 bolt-action Springfield rifle. Ammunition stores were so low in 1935 that General Douglas MacArthur, Army chief of staff, proposed the “hopeful” goal of stockpiling a thirty-day supply of ammunition for all calibers of weapons.16

What Roosevelt did was to make the military the small stepchild of the New Deal. Perhaps this allowed him to hide military expenses while bolstering the amounts he could claim the New Deal had pumped into the U.S. economy. Also, the larger New Deal projects allowed FDR and his supporters to target subsidies for key election districts.17 In May 1934, the keel of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown was laid, using Public Works Administration (PWA) funds, as well as that of the USS Enterprise in July. That same year the PWA also spent $10 million for the Army’s motorized vehicles and $15 million for military aircraft. In 1935, PWA’s figure grew to $100 million for military posts and equipment. During the 1930s, the PWA built submarines, four cruisers, four destroyers, thirty-two army posts, and fifty military airports.18

Roosevelt’s use of New Deal programs for military projects upset many progressives. “We had a big PWA building program. Roosevelt took a big chunk of that money and gave it to the Navy to build ships. I was shocked. All the New Dealers were shocked,” said White House staffer James Rowe.19

Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds also benefited the military: “In the years 1935 to 1939 when regular appropriations for the armed forces were so meager, it was the WPA worker who saved many Army posts and Naval stations from literal obsolescence.”20

Roosevelt so disdained the U.S. Army that he appointed Harry Woodring, an isolationist, as secretary of war in 1936. A lackluster politician, Woodring became governor of Kansas in 1930 in a controversial three-way race with Republican Frank Haucke and write-in candidate—and goat-gland transplant specialist—Dr. John Brinkley. FDR was pleased that Woodring defeated the Republicans in Kansas and then jumped on the Roosevelt bandwagon in 1932. Woodring’s isolationist views coincided with those of most Americans when he entered FDR’s cabinet.

Woodring clung to his office for four years, despite an ongoing feud with the assistant secretary of war, Louis A. Johnson. Johnson backed universal military education and military aid to Great Britain, and he also coveted Woodring’s position. Johnson insisted that FDR had promised him the secretary’s position on at least seven occasions, as soon as Woodring was gone. From time to time, Johnson “leaked” to the press that Woodring planned to resign, but Woodring continued as secretary of war.21

The Woodring-Johnson feud was intensified by something an earlier Congress had passed in the National Defense Act of 1920. Under that law, the assistant secretary directed the nation’s industrial preparedness in case of war, and in peacetime also approved military supplies. Thus, Johnson often exercised more authority than his supposed boss Woodring. “The Woodring-Johnson fight, characterized by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes as a ‘holy show,’ grew out of Roosevelt’s unfortunate habit of sweeping embarrassing administrative problems under the rug,” observed historian Forrest Pogue.22

An early warning signal of trouble in Germany occurred when Adolf Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland along Germany’s western border in March 1936, violating the Treaty of Versailles. He cunningly denied any further territorial aims in a speech the same day. Some isolationists, hoping that war was a thing of the past, embraced Hitler’s soothing words and ignored those of Winston Churchill, who called Hitler’s speech “comfort for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be humbugged.”23

In October 1937, in response to Japan’s aggr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Back Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Hello to Arms, Farewell to New Deal
• Chapter 2: The Election of 1940: A Third Term
• Chapter 3: The Battle of the Atlantic
• Chapter 4: Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941
• Chapter 5: 1942: The War Overseas
• Chapter 6: 1942: On the Home Front
• Chapter 7: 1943: The Tide Turns
• Chapter 8: Entrepreneurs vs. the Arsenal of Bureaucracy
• Chapter 9: Taxes: “Government Can Take Everything We Have”
• Chapter 10: FDR and Civil Liberties
• Chapter 11: Courting Stalin
• Chapter 12: The 1944 Election: A Fourth Term
• Chapter 13: The War Ends on the USS Missouri
• Chapter 14: Did the War End the Great Depression?
• Conclusion
• Alphabet Agencies
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Footnote