Roosevelt & Hopkins: FDR's Last Words and Postscript

This is the last of a series on Roosevelt & Hopkins, a book by playwright and presidential aide Robert Sherwood about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his close aide Harry Hopkins during World War II, published in 1948. 

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the first and so far only times that atomic bombs were used on human populations, in August 1945, when American planes bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  FDR died in office several months earlier (April 12,1945) but he had approved the Manhattan Project and knew that scientists at Los Alamos were close to constructing an atomic bomb. (The first test bomb was successfully exploded on July 16, 1945.)  The Project was highly secret, and Robert Sherwood, among others who worked in the White House, did not know about it.

Robert Sherwood was among other things a speechwriter for FDR, although Roosevelt did the final drafts.  The last speech Sherwood worked on was the last speech FDR wrote, for Jefferson Day (April 13.)  He would not live to deliver his prepared remarks.

Sherwood writes (pp. 879-80):

“For the Jefferson Day speech, he asked me to look up some Jefferson quotations on the subject of science. He said, ‘There aren’t many people who realize it, but Jefferson was a scientist as well as a democrat and there were some things he said that need to be repeated now, because science is going to be more important than ever in the working out of the future world.’

The Jefferson quotation that I found, and that Roosevelt used in his undelivered speech, referred to ‘the brotherly spirit of science, which unites into one family all it votaries of whatever grade, and however widely dispersed throughout the different quarters of the globe.’

I did not know it at the time but I realized later that when Roosevelt spoke of the importance of science in the future he was undoubtedly thinking of the imminence of the atomic age.  He said in his last speech, “Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”

The immense responsibilities of World War II and a 13 year presidency during the Depression and the war very likely shortened FDR's life.  Harry Hopkins life was almost over even before the war began.  He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1939 and given weeks to live.  FDR got the best medical experts available and transfusions with blood plasma were credited with halting Hopkins deterioration.

Then the war came and Hopkins' life was dedicated to winning it.  He made numerous trips aboard and was FDR's most trusted diplomat with allies.  Both Churchill and Stalin thought highly and even affectionately of Hopkins, and his diplomacy and counsel were instrumental in the successful management of this immense undertaking.  The world had never seen anything like it before, or since.

After FDR's death, Hopkins tried to retire but the new President Truman needed him to continue diplomacy particularly with the Soviets until the end of the war.  He died about five months after the war officially ended, on January 29, 1946.  He was 55.

FDR's political enemies could be verbally vicious as well as obstructive (some Republicans were still talking that way ten or fifteen years after his death, when I was a child.)  But FDR's popularity, and his position as the leader of the free world in wartime, muted much of that expression.

Instead, Republicans (and their newspaper loyalists) turned their hatred on Hopkins, FDR's closest aide who for most of the war actually lived in the White House.  What they didn't dare say about Roosevelt, they said about Hopkins, with impunity.  Hopkins had three sons serving in the armed forces.  One of them was killed in combat in 1943, and combined with Hopkins periodic illness from overwork, caused Harry to be hospitalized.  Sherwood writes (p. 807):

“When Hopkins moved early in May [1943] from Rochester, Minnesota to the Army’s Ashford General Hospital in White Sulphur Springs, there were the usual protests from some of the press. ‘Who entitles this representative of Rooseveltian squandermania to treatment and nursing in an Army hospital?’ was one of the questions. The War Department issued a statement that Hopkins was entitled to this hospitalization as Chairman of the Munitions Assignment Board and that the Secretary of War had authorized his admission.”

In 1948, Sherwood concluded this long book with passages (on p. 932) that ought to be pretty sobering right now in 2015:

“The remarkable luck that we have had in meeting major emergencies in the past should not prevent us now from giving most serious consideration to the question: where is the guarantee that this luck will hold? 

 Presumably it lies in the genius of the American people, but one does not need to have access to any secret documents to know how difficult it is for this genius to express itself or even to realize itself. In the fateful years of 1933 and 1940 the people needed and demanded leadership which could be given to them only by the President, the one officer of government who is elected by all the people and whose duty is to represent the interests of the nation as a whole rather than the purely local or special interests which are too often the predominant concerns of the Congress.

 There is no factor in our national life more dangerous than the people’s lack of confidence in the Congress to rise above the level of picayune parochialism; the threats of Communism or Fascism are trivial as compared with this.”

Referring to the new Atomic Age, Sherwood concludes (p.933): “Our need for great men in the Presidency will continue, and our need for great men in the Congress will increase.”  Today he would add "and women" in both cases, but the point remains the same.

Roosevelt & Hopkins: An Artist of Government

This set of excerpts from Roosevelt & Hopkins is for Mike--happy birthday!

These excerpts bear upon questions of presidential leadership.  The creative aspect of FDR's presidency is emphasized.  Unlike the norm today, FDR actually thought up important policies, together with how to couch them to appeal to political allies while disarming opponents, and especially how and when to present them for public approval.

Sometimes they didn't work, like the so-called packing of the Supreme Court.  But sometimes they were acts of genius that did work, like Lend- Lease, that allowed the US to help the UK and other allies fight off Hitler, even before America entered the war.

Here's author Robert Sherwood in the early pages of Roosevelt & Hopkins (with different paragraph breaks):

While preparing this book I interviewed Harold Smith, who was Director of the Budget from 1939 to 1946. Smith was a modest, methodical, precise man, temperamentally far removed from Roosevelt and Hopkins. But I know of no one whose judgment and integrity and downright common sense the President trusted more completely. 

In the course of a long conversation, Smith said to me, ‘ A few months ago, on the first anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, a magazine asked me to write an article on Roosevelt as an administrator. I thought it over and decided I was not ready to make such an appraisal. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. 

 When I worked with Roosevelt—for six years—I thought as did many others that he was a very erratic administrator. But now, when I look back, I can really begin to see the size of his programs. They were by far the largest and most complex programs that any President ever put through. 

 People like me who had the responsibility of watching the pennies could only see the fix or six or seven per cent of the programs that went wrong, through inefficient organization or direction. But now I can see in perspective, the ninety-three or –four or –five per cent that went right—including the winning of the biggest war in history—because of unbelievably skillful organization and direction.

 And if I were to write that article now, I think I’d say that Roosevelt must have been on of the greatest geniuses as an administrator that ever lived. What we couldn’t appreciate at the time was the fact that he was a real artist in government.’

That word ‘artist’ was happily chosen, for it suggests the quality of Roosevelt’s extraordinary creative imagination. I think that he would have resented the application of the word as implying that he was an impractical dreamer; he loved to represent himself as a prestidigitator who could amaze and amuse the audience by ‘pulling another rabbit out of a hat.’ But he was an artist and no canvas was too big for him.

He was also, of course, a master politician, and most artists are certainly not that; but, by the same token, you rarely find a professional politician who would make the mistake of being caught in the act of creating an original idea. The combination of the two qualities in Roosevelt can be demonstrated by the fact that it required a soaring imaginator to conceive Lend Lease and it required the shrewdest kind of manipulation to get it passed by the Congress.

It was often said by businessmen during the Roosevelt Administration that “What we need in the White House is a good businessman.” But in the years of the Second World War there were a great many patriotic, public-spirited businessmen who went to Washington to render important service to their country and they learned that government is a weird world bearing little resemblance to anything they had previously known...

The more analytical of these businessmen came to the conclusion that it was no accident that not one of the great or even above-average Presidents in American history had been trained in business.”

Roosevelt & Hopkins: War Tourists, Congress and the President

The mythology of World War II has the United States, seeing Hitler as the evil threat he was, united to defeat him.  We've seen that wasn't true, before the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 or afterwards, until Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor meant the US declared war not only on Japan but on its ally, Germany.

The mythology also has the homefront united in the war effort.  While the homefront was crucial and most Americans felt it was their patriotic duty to obey rationing and endure other sacrifices, collect materials for armament, and work overtime if asked in war production.  But private enterprise was not always so dedicated.

For instance, Roosevelt and Hopkins records this episode:

 “The ships moving along the Atlantic Coast at night, although showing no lights themselves, passed between the waiting [German]submarines and the glare of lights from the shore and therefore presented easy targets. Morison has written, ‘Miami and its luxurious suburbs threw up six miles of neon-light glow, against which the southbound shipping that hugged the reefs to avoide the Gulf Stream were silhouetted. Ships were sunk and seamen drowned in order that the citizenry might enjoy business and pleasure as usual.’

After three months of this massacre, the military authorities ordered the lights dimmed in coastal areas—it was called ‘the brown-out’—and ‘squawks went up all the way from Atlantic City to southern Florida that the tourist season would be ruined.’”

Pressure from private enterprise was applied to Congress.  Congress approved war spending routinely, with one exception:

“However, seriously controversial political issues were created by measures which involved arbitrary interference with the civilian economy. The American people, who were so willing and proud to give whatever was required of them in blood and sweat, were loudly reluctant to cut down on their normal consumption of red meat and gasoline and their use of such essentials as electric toasters and elastic girdles. More than any other people on earth, Americans were addicted to the principle that you can eat your cake and have it; which was entirely understandable, for Americans have been assured from the cradle that 'there is always more cake where that came from.'”

When Congress couldn't take the heat, they gladly passed it on to Roosevelt, and then criticized him for acting.  That they criticized his use of executive power--though they were glad he did them the favor of taking responsibility and acting--sure sounds familiar. In taking action against inflation, FDR told Congress to act or he would--which is what President Obama did on immigration.  In both cases, Congress failed to act, but the President did.

“The President had the power to stabilize prices and wages by Executive Order without reference to Congress and some of us believed that he should do just that immediately and not run the risk of hostile action or no action at all on Capitol Hill. There were unquestionably many Congressman who fervently hoped that he would do it this way and thereby absolve them from all responsibility for decision on such a controversial issue. (It was an ironic fact that many of the Congressmen who were loudest in accusing Roosevelt of dictatorial ambitions were the most anxious to have him act like a dictator on all measures which might be unpopular with the people but obviously valuable for the winning of the war.) 

 Roosevelt himself was in favor of an arbitrary Executive Order to achieve stabilization, and his speech was at first written as a proclamation and explanation of that; but some of his advisers, notably Hopkins and Henderson, strongly recommended that he ut the issue up to Congress in the form of an ultimatum—‘you act before October 1st or I will’—and their arguments finally prevailed.”

Day of Infamy

A kind of coda to the beginning of the U.S. in World War II from Roosevelt and Hopkins.  Even in my childhood in the 1950s, the story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was powerful and unequivocal.  The surprise or "sneak" attack, the destruction and damage to the large battleships and the deaths of some 2,000 sailors could still provoke outrage and anger.  Iconic photographs and Hollywood movies kept the imagery alive.

The series of defeats to Allied forces in the Pacific immediately after the U.S. entry reinforces what seems obvious: in just 90 minutes, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was largely destroyed.

Military historians since then, both American and Japanese, suggest this attack didn't turn out to be as damaging to U.S. capabilities and the early course of the war as it appeared.  It turned out that the three most important ships in the fleet, the aircraft carriers Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga--the only carriers the US had at the time--weren't in port, but safely out at sea. Though battleships were the "prestige vessels" in public perception, they would turn out to be less important than aircraft carriers.

The Japanese hoped the attack would demoralize Americans but after FDR named December 7 "a day that will live in infamy," the opposite happened.  The attack was used to motivate American resolve for the rest of the war.

What's interesting however is that even at the time, the White House knew that apart from the deaths and injuries, the US military capability had not suffered as badly as it appeared.  The weakness that led to those early defeats had their source in the isolationist votes in Congress. Here are some relevant passages from Roosevelt and Hopkins:

“There was fortunately a minimum of crying over the milk spilled at Pearl Harbor. The swift destruction of the ultramodern Prince of Wales showed that would have happened had the antiquated battleships of the Pacific fleet attempted to operate in the enormous area controlled by Japanese air power west of the international date line and north of the equator, Roosevelt said in February [1942,} “The only way we could use those ships if we had them now would be for convoy duty in case the Japs ever started using capital ships to break the life line to Australia.” 

 This, however, never happened, because American and Australian air power was established and maintained over that life line and the Japanese were reluctant to risk their own battleships within its range. American weakness in those days could not be attributed to what happened at Pearl Harbor, where the enemy could have done far more serious damage had he attacked the vital installations of the base itself rather than the defensively huddled battleships; the weakness was the obvious result of years of puerile self-delusion which had manifested itself in such errors of calculation as the refusal to appropriate funds even for dredging the harbor at Guam.”

Historians also agree with this assessment that destroying the base itself would have hurt more, possibly extending the war by another year.  The Japanese had a plan to do so, but US resistance (including planes from the Enterprise) convinced them to call off the third wave of their attack.

The Greatest Possible Challenge

Last week there was a rather quiet commemoration of the 70th anniversary of one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century: the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War II.

Indispensable to that victory was the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  My next few excerpts from Roosevelt & Hopkins will pertain to that, especially as it is the actual subject of this long book.

The book chronicles the months and years after German invasions began the war in Europe but before US formally entered it.  That period was characterized by growing desperation, especially from England, for US help.  While western civilization and liberty arguably hung in the balance, FDR was stymied by a recalcitrant Congress, especially the Republicans who were in the main Isolationists, and viewed with extreme suspicion any attempt to increase US military readiness or aid European allies.  Some factions and celebrities (notably Charles Lindbergh and Ann Morrow Lindbergh) praised the Nazis and called them the wave of the future.

The US public was traumatized by World War I to an extent that history seems to have forgotten.  But the Republicans weren't pacifists--they were Isolationists, opposing American involvement beyond US borders or at least outside its hemisphere.  This isolationism was in part domestic politics, for it gave them a clear identity in contrast to FDR.  They used this important issue about the future to make outrageous charges and gin up their supporters.  And they took it to ridiculous extents, refusing to pass appropriations bills for anything that even sounded like supporting military overseas. Sound familiar?

But that changed on December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack on ships of the US Pacific Fleet at the US base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  When Congress voted to declare war on Japan and its allies the next day, the US was woefully underprepared.  Only the quiet build-up FDR had engineered (partly by refocusing Depression work programs) ran counter to the obsolescence of US forces, in a war that more than any in history would depend on the quantity and quality of ships, planes, weapons and technologies, and the ability to keep producing them and getting them where they were needed--not only to US forces but to allies, in huge numbers.  How all that happened is covered in great detail in this book.

But US forces in the Pacific suffered defeat after defeat in the first months of the war. In January 1942, everyone knew that the US would have to massively step up its war production or face complete defeat, with Europe lost to the Nazis as well. FDR had gathered experts who went over figures of what the US was producing, and what industry estimated they could produce.  Under FDR's influence, they set goals for the coming year--astounding goals.  Here's Sherwood:

 

“The production goals determined upon the Arcadia Conference and announced in part by Roosevelt in his Message to Congress were so astronomic that they were greeted with derision and, in some cases, despair by military and civilian authorities alike. Some officers in the War Department were passing the remark, “The President has gone in for the ‘numbers racket’! Others could see nothing humorous in these impossible figures; believing that the goals could not possibly be realized, they foresaw grave criticism and probable injury to public morale when failure became evident.”

As usual, when critics in the press or among Republicans were afraid to lambast FDR directly they went after Hopkins, the "free spender," for unduly influencing FDR.

"However, as Hopkins had once told Quentin Reynolds, he was no Svengali, and Roosevelt was in no trance when he proclaimed the Victory Program of production. It was in Roosevelt’s nature to believe that the surest way to capture the imagination of the American people was to give them the greatest possible challenge.[my emphasis]

The total cost in money bothered him not at all; he always believed it was far better to squander the taxpayers’ dollars than to squander the taxpayers. As a matter of fact—and I can state it as such because I was one of those present when it happened—Roosevelt himself arbitrarily revised some of the figures upward on the eve of his speech to Congress. When Hopkins questioned him on this, Roosevelt said, ‘Oh—the production people can do it if they really try.’

 He did the same thing years later en route to Chicago where he proclaimed a national, postwar goal of sixty million jobs. He was never afraid of big, round numbers.”

Roosevelt the master politician and now leader of the Allies turned criticism into cheers by making these production goals a patriotic statement:

“When Roosevelt announced a part of the Victory Program to Congress, he said, ‘These figures and similar figures for a multitude of other implements of war will give the Japanese and Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack on Pearl Harbor.’ The Congress cheered that vociferously and proceeded to appropriate the necessary funds with few of the quivers that assailed those who were responsible for carrying out the incredible program.”

The United States met and surpassed FDR's production goals, widely credited as a crucial element in winning the war.

Roosevelt & Hopkins: Every Day

I'm about to let go and take this book back to its home in the library.  It's a first edition of Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History.  It's not everybody's idea of a great read, not at more than 950 pages with notes.  And it basically covers only the years of World War II, though there's biographical material and material about the Depression early on.  Although a playwright, Sherwood was also a writer and adviser for FDR, and he witnessed this history in the White House.  He had access to documents, to actual notes in the hand of FDR and Churchill, etc.  So there is a lot of detail.  The book was published in 1948, but both of his subjects-FDR and Hopkins--were several years dead.  It's clear from this book that they'd given their lives for their country.

I suspect not a lot of people have read this book, let alone re-read parts of it, but some have. One of the things I love about old library books is the Date Due sticker, and this one shows that at least one or a few people have taken it out every decade, beginning in April 1948 and ending so far with me in 2014.  I do worry that the library will get rid of it, as they have so many books (all the better to give more space for computers.)  But I think I've saved it for awhile--they tend to go after books that haven't been taken out for 10 years.  There is something special about this very book being a first edition, the feel of the paper and the typeface as well as the language and punctuation all shouting 1940s.  (This photo of the spine seems to be of the first edition; the HSU library edition is red and black, and this spine title is worn to almost illegible. The cover above appears to be a later edition.)

But I'm not bidding farewell to all that just yet.  I've typed out a number of especially interesting passages, especially those that still pertain.  I'm going to reproduce them here now and again.

In my first post I'll give my favorite Harry Hopkins quote, and one of my favorite quotes of all time.  It probably came directly from this book.  But before then...a little background.

Harry Hopkins, born in Iowa (small town, lower middle class), graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa (member of the Midwest Conference with my Illinois alma mater Knox College), he had a few jobs in New York City administering programs for the poor, worked for the Red Cross in New Orleans, returned to Manhattan and caught the eye of then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt by his efficient administration of a state relief program in 1931.  FDR brought him to Washington to run New Deal programs including public works.

Though he also helped organize the American Association of Social Workers, he loved the Manhattan night life, and knew a lot of celebs.  He had a talent for friendships, which eventually included Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and even, to a degree, Joseph Stalin.

 People liked him because he was trustworthy, direct and to the point. (One of the reasons he was also vilified by political opponents.) Sherwood writes that Churchill teased him with the prospect of a royal title to be conferred after the war.  He said it had already been picked out: Lord Root of the Matter. (p.5)

Harry, Sherwood wrote, "could slip now and then into skepticism but...always returned to a state of passionate hopefulness." [15]

Now a story with that quote from Hopkins very early in the New Deal. Hopkins boss was Harold Ickes, Secretary of Interior.  But his real boss was FDR.  When public works projects weren't getting started fast enough for FDR, he made a change by establishing the Civil Works Administration.  (Now I quote directly from Sherwood, p. 52.  The only changes I'm making are dividing the text into shorter paragraphs, placing FDR's words in italic and adding my own emphases in bold.)

 “...Civil Works Administration which put four million people to work in the first thirty days of its existence and, in less than four months, inaugurated 180,000 work projects and spent over $933 million. It was the parent of W.P.A. and marked the real establishment of the princple of the right to work from which there could be no retreat.

Of the formation of C.W.A. Roosevelt wrote:

‘The Public Works Administration (P.W.A.) had not been able by that time to commence a very extensive program of large public works because of the unavoidable time consuming process of planning, design and reviewing projects, clearing up legal matters, advertising for bids and letting contracts.’

This was Roosevelt’s tactful means of explaining why he took nearly a billion dollars away from Ickes and entrusted the spending of it to Hopkins at that time (he eventually did the same with many times the sum.)

Ickes was a very careful, deliberate administrator, who took pains to examine personally every detail of every project and the disposition of every nickel that it cost, whether it be a village post office or a Triborough Bridge. This is hardly to his discredit for it was the approach to each problem of a hardheaded businessman as well as a conscientious public servant.

 Ickes was concerned about the return on the taxpayers’ investment. Hopkins did not give a damn about the return; his approach was that of a social worker who was interested only in getting relief to the miserable and getting it there quickly. His ultimate argument was “Hunger is not debatable.”

 Ickes thought primarily of the finished job—Hopkins of the numbers of unemployed who could be put on the job. As an instance of Hopkins’ impatience: someone came to him with an idea for a project which would take a lot of time to prepare in detail but which, Hopkins was assured, “will work out in the long run,” and his exasperated comment on this was, “People don’t eat in the long run—they eat every day.” [end of excerpt]

Long range planning is important, as is envisioning the future.  But we must always remember that people eat every day--the present, especially for people at the edge of need, can be more important.  Reconciling the two is the art of policy.  But the point Hopkins made is about not forgetting the most important and urgent task (Lord Root of the Matter, remember?) in the fog of planning.

The debate over spending money to meet infrastructure needs as well as for social good continues in our time along some of the same lines.  However we've even further behind that debate in acknowledging the real problems.  Jonathan Chiat today writes about a "debate" over poverty ostensibly between NY Times columnists David Brooks and Paul Krugman.  Krugman alludes to "some people" who insist people in America are poor because of moral failings and wrong values.  Krugman, sounding a little like Hopkins, writes: "The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages.”

But even this debate pales against the stark realities that Hopkins recognized by addressing them directly.  And by building the public infrastructure that is still the foundation of economic as well as public and personal life in America.  Including infrastructure now crumbing dangerously, more than 80 years later.  Which our elected representatives ignore.