Fear Itself (98 page)

189
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
pp. 152–53. On Court packing, see Jeff Shesol,
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

190
Edward Cox of Georgia, J. Bayard Clark of North Carolina, Martin Dies of Texas, William Driver of Arkansas, and Howard Smith of Virginia.

191
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat10.html.

192
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 2d sess., December 17, 1937, pp. 1786, 1812–13, 1832, 1834.

193
Chicago Daily Tribune,
December 18, 1937.

194
Democratic Party likeness, previously in the 90s when top-tier bills about the economy were voted on, dropped to 55. For a discussion, see James MacGregor Burns,
Congress on Trial: The Politics of Modern Law Making
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949).

195
Los Angeles Times,
December 18, 1937.

196
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, § 6, reproduced in Irving J. Sloan, ed.,
American Landmark Legislation: The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
(Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1984). By contrast, the original bill had mandated a level of forty cents at once.

197
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, § 7, reproduced in Sloan, ed.,
American Landmark Legislation.
Rather than actually setting maximum allowable workhours, these “maximum”-hours provisions established a threshold above which overtime wages (time and a half) had to be paid.

198
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, § 12, reproduced in Sloan, ed.,
American Landmark Legislation.

199
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
, p. 246. In light of this history, Landon Storrs has called this an “ambiguous victory.” See the instructive chapter “Ambiguous Victory: The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,” in Landon R. Y. Storrs,
Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 177–206. This book focuses on the role of the National Labor Committee in bringing pressure over a long period to curb sweatshops and raise labor standards.

200
John S. Forsythe, “Legislative History of the Fair Labor Standards Act,”
Law and Contemporary Problems
6 (1939): 19.

201
Robert F. Koretz, ed.,
Statutory History of the United States: Labor Organization
(New York: Chelsea House, 1970), p. 401.

202
Forsythe, “Legislative History of the Fair Labor Standards Act,” p. 21.

203
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, § 2 (“Findings and Declaration of Policy”), as passed, reproduced in Sloan, ed.,
American Landmark Legislation.

204
Paulsen,
A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man,
pp. 126–27.

205
An excellent systematic analysis confirming the centrality of the South to the legislative history of the FLSA is Robert K. Fleck, “Democratic Opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,”
Journal of Economic History
62 (2002): 25–54. This article was written to address a prior analysis that had minimized the role of the South, stressing the character of the political economy of constituencies irrespective of region: Andrew J. Seltzer, “The Political Economy of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,”
Journal of Political Economy
103 (1995): 1302–42. Fleck won this argument hands down, as Seltzer’s unconvincing rejoinder indicates: “Democratic Opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act: A Comment on Fleck,”
Journal of Economic History
64 (2004): 226–30.

206
That just crossed the high likeness threshold of 70.

207
Intrasouthern likeness measured only 54.

208
Voting with a likeness level across the 7–10 state divide of 98.

209
With a likeness score of 56.

210
J. David Greenstone,
Labor in American Politics
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), p. 408.

211
James A. Gross,
The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board,
pp. 5–6
.

212
Ibid., pp. 17–18. A useful overview of the Smith committee, set in the larger context of the relationship between labor unions and the Democratic Party, including its southern wing, is Gilbert J. Gall, “CIO Leaders and the Democratic Alliance: The Case of the Smith Committee and the NLRB,”
Labor Studies Journal
14 (1989): 2–27.

213
Eric Schickler, “Entrepreneurial Defenses of Congressional Power,” in
Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making
,
ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 302.

214
Congressional Record
, 76th Cong., 3d sess., June 6, 1940, p. 7715.

215
With a likeness score of just 55.

216
At the high likeness level of 80.

217
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, Earl of Halifax,
Fullness of Days
(New York: Dodd Mead, 1957), p. 215.

218
See http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/2009/June%202009/0609fullkeeper.pdf.

CHAPTER 8
THE FIRST CRUSADE

1
Fortune,
October 1939, folded insert, “The War of 1939.”

2
Cited in Alan Brinkley,
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), pp. 243, 247.

3
The survey was conducted for
Fortune
by the Roper Organization.

4
7 percent for the former, 23 for the latter.

5
Just 2 percent of nonsouthern Americans supported immediate participation in the war, and another 12 percent if such participation were needed to prevent a German victory. Nor did any other section enlist as many volunteers in the armed forces before the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1940; so much so that Alabama’s Luther Patrick, a member of the House, wryly commented that “they had to start selective service to keep our Southern boys from filling up the army.” Cited in John Temple Graves, “The Fighting South,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
18 (1942): 61.

6
George F. Kennan,
American Diplomacy, 1900–1950
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 66.

7
The United States had 301 bombers. See Eliot Janeway,
The Struggle for Survival: A Chronicle of Economic Mobilization in World War II
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 25.

8
Robert Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 222.

9
Ibid., p. 221; Ross Gregory,
America 1941: A Nation at the Crossroads
(New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 27; Robert Woito, “Between the Wars,”
Wilson Quarterly
11 (1987), p. 108; Andrew Roberts,
Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West in World War II
(London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 26, 32.

10
Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 27.

11
Harold J. Tobin and Percy W. Bidwell,
Mobilizing Civilian America
(New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1940), p. 1.

12
Kennan,
American Diplomacy,
pp. 66–67.

13
The results found by Roper for
Fortune
were consistent with the findings of many other polls at the time. “By any measure, the South was more committed to a vigorous assertion of American leadership overseas than any other part of the country. Opinion polls consistently showed southerners to be more internationalist and interventionist than nonsoutherners.” See Peter Trubowitz,
Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 126. More than citizens in other regions, from 1938 to Pearl Harbor, southerners routinely favored increasing the size of the military, the development of a plan for total mobilization, and paying higher taxes to support preparedness. They were more likely than residents of other regions to recall American participation in World War I favorably, to believe that events in Europe were vital to American national interests, more hostile to appeasement, more willing to risk war to help the Allies, more prepared to change existing neutrality laws, and more inclined to support Russia than Germany in case of a war between these two powers. These findings were consistent over tens of opinion polls. For an overview of this poll data, see Alfred D. Hero Jr.,
The Southerner and World Affairs
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), pp. 80–103.

14
A consideration stressing such powers can be found in Harry Wilmer Jones, “The President, Congress, and Foreign Relations,”
California Law Review
29 (1941): 565–85.

15
In his monograph on the 76th Congress, David Porter has observed how that Congress, which sat in 1939–1940, “determined the course of American foreign policy more than I anticipated.” This finding, he noted, supplements the usual view of historians who “picture the executive rather than the legislative branch as the significant controller of American diplomacy.” See David L. Porter,
The Seventy-sixth Congress and World War II
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), pp. 174–75.

16
Overall, debate filled 21,846 pages of the
Congressional Record.
For an overview, see Floyd M. Riddick, “American Government and Politics: Third Session of the Seventy-sixth Congress, January 3, 1940, to January 3, 1941,”
American Political Science Review
35 (1941): 284–303.

17
Charles O. Lerche Jr.,
The Uncertain South: Its Changing Patterns of Politics in Foreign Policy
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), p. 41; on the role of regionalism in congressional voting about assistance to America’s allies, see Leroy N. Rieselbach, “The Demography of the Congressional Vote on Foreign Aid, 1939–1958,”
American Political Science Review
58 (1964): 577–88. A useful companion piece, especially for its maps, which show the absence of the South from locations that produced roll-call votes for isolationist measures, is Ralph H. Smuckler, “The Region of Isolation,”
American Political Science Review
47 (1953): 386–401. There is a systematic discussion of congressional behavior during the 1940–1942 period, which includes regional data, in John W. Malsberger,
From Obstruction to Moderation: The Transformation of Senate
Conservatism, 1938–1952
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), pp. 61-99. See also George L. Grassmuck,
Sectional Biases in Congress on Foreign Policy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1951).

18
On the sometimes-competing pressures of ethnicity and party, see Leroy N. Rieselbach, “The Basis of Isolationist Behavior,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
24 (1960): 652–55.

19
For a discussion of President Roosevelt’s engagement with southern members on foreign policy questions, see James T. Patterson, “Eating Humble Pie: A Note on Roosevelt, Congress, and Neutrality Revision in 1989,”
Historian
31 (1969): 407–14.

20
It proved fitting that the new army’s first training exercises were conducted in the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. See Michael Burleigh,
The Third Reich: A New History
(London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 733.

21
The historian Alexander DeConde rightly observed that “with very little dissent in their ranks on foreign policy,” southern members of the House and Senate “gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the essential political power he needed to carry out his foreign policy. . . . It is clear that without their votes no legislation on foreign policy could have survived in either house.” See DeConde, “The South and Isolationism,”
Journal of Southern History
24 (1958): 340. In the Senate, James Byrnes of South Carolina (later secretary of state) and Claude Pepper of Florida were especially vocal in and out of Congress in mobilizing support for an active American role. See Marian D. Irish, “Foreign Policy and the South,”
Journal of Politics
10 (1948): 306; Joan E. Denman, “Senator Claude D. Pepper: Advocate of Aid to the Allies, 1939–1941,”
Florida Historical Quarterly
83 (2004): 121–48.

22
See Selig Adler,
The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction
(New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957). At Yale, the campus chapter of America First was led by Kingman Brewster, later that university’s president and ambassador to Great Britain during the Carter administration. One member was R. Sargent Shriver, then a student at Yale Law School. See Woito, “Between the Wars,” pp. 114–115.