Roosevelt (69 page)

“You will also remember that in the Atlantic Charter, something was said about self-determination. That is a long-range thing. You can’t get self-determination in the first week that they lay down their arms. In other words, common sense….”

The controversy raged on. Roosevelt’s political strategy in 1943 was facing two problems. One was the sheer complexity and diffusion of his information and propaganda agencies. Rather than set up a central organization, he had followed his usual policy of establishing parallel agencies with fuzzy but generally overlapping jurisdictions. The military services had psychological-war functions. Robert Sherwood ran the Foreign Information Service under William Donovan, who was Co-ordinator of Information. Roosevelt’s old friend Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish
directed the Office of Facts and Figures. Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, ran his agency, including propaganda, separately from the other offices and insisted on reporting directly to the President. These men, and the journalists, public-relations men, psychological-war experts, and assorted intellectuals they recruited, made up a sparkling array of talent, but they were prone to follow their own bent, compete for funds, and emphasize day-to-day targets of opportunity rather than long-range political warfare.

In mid-1942 Roosevelt had established the Office of War Information under the gifted journalist and radio commentator Elmer Davis, and early in the next year, after the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services disagreed on psychological-warfare policy, the President decided that except for Latin-American operations all domestic and foreign information and propaganda programs should be under OWI. Sherwood later was put in charge of the Overseas Branch of OWI. The Domestic Branch, under a succession of harried directors, ran into heavy congressional opposition. Inflamed by OWI pamphets—especially by an anti-inflation tract, a discussion of Negroes and the war, and a heroic cartoon history of the Commander in Chief—the House of Representatives abolished the Domestic Branch outright and then grudgingly allowed the Senate to save it. Under Davis’s gentle direction, the OWI gave more unity to the propaganda effort, but fissures and weaknesses remained. Davis felt that his relations with the President were personally cordial but institutionally unsatisfactory. He even contemplated resigning during the furore over Badoglio. Yet when the smoke cleared away it was evident that the cause of that incident was a lack of understanding of the President’s strategy of political warfare.

That was the second main source of trouble in the nation’s political war effort. Roosevelt, to be sure, with his gift for political communication, gave a marvelous lift and verve to the propaganda effort; a British expert, Richard Crossman, viewed his and Churchill’s speeches as by far the best directives for the propaganda operatives. The problem was the gap between the lofty principles and the day-to-day situations and opportunities. While many political warriors approved of unconditional surrender as an expression of United Nations’ determination and unity, for example, they found it unduly constricting in practice. Thus while they were hammering home the importance of complete capitulation, Allied soldiers in fact were making concessions—as in Eisenhower’s early terms for an Italian armistice—that greatly eased the stern doctrine.

To undermine and destroy the morale of the population in enemy countries; to kindle hope of liberation and spur resistance in
enemy-occupied countries; to win support from the people and thus influence the leadership in neutral countries; to counter enemy attempts to divide the United Nations; to foster understanding of American ideals and practices in Allied countries—these were the major aims of the administration’s political warfare. Its message was spread by radio, films, leaflets, posters, press, and all possible media. The enemy was equally active, and far more experienced. Hitler had won power as a master propagandist. He had understood the close link between propaganda and organization. He had concluded that most people were “feminine in nature” and motivated more by feelings than by logic; he had stressed simplicity in propaganda “because the people think primitively”; he did not believe, Z. A. B. Zeman says, “as Jefferson had, that they consisted of individuals capable of directing their own political destinies….” And in Goebbels he had a brilliant and tireless spokesman.

For the Nazi propagandists Roosevelt and his rich, bloated nation were inviting targets. Students at the Hochschule für Politik, a training school for propagandists, had been drilled in the early months of the war on Roosevelt’s skill in using the radio and press conferences, his assumption of Woodrow Wilson’s role, his moralistic prejudices, his naïve oversimplifications—and, above all, on his hostility to Germany. Americans were Jeffersonian in principle, according to the students’ textbook on Roosevelt and public opinion, but in fact he had surrendered control of the country to lobbies, professional politicians, and the press. “In the United States today they preach Jefferson but practice Hamilton: the former stands for the Bill of Rights, equality and liberty, for confidence in the simple man; the latter stands for perpetuated inequality and systematic government which curbs people in the interest of State and capital.” In foreign policy, the students were taught, Americans alternated between pacifism and messianism, moralism and economic imperialism.

The Nazi propaganda barrages in 1943 ranged from the standard line that Jewish-capitalist-Communist forces controlled the American government, to the age-old maneuver of trying to divide the Allied opposition. Thus John Bull was trying to bleed America, while the Yanks were out to grab pieces of the British Empire, and the Reds would try to communize their allies after the war. At the front, German leaflets and loud-speakers worked on the GI’s war weariness and homesickness. But through all the Nazi propaganda ran a garish anti-Semitic streak. Thus a German cartoon leaflet headed “The Girl You Left Behind” showed rich war profiteer Sam Levy pawing his private secretary, Joan Hopkins, who really loves Bob, but she doesn’t know when Bob will come back from the war—and what’s a little kiss among friends?

The job of countering such tactics Roosevelt could leave to the propagandists in the field. As propagandist in chief he was responsible for the ideas that would set the direction for the operatives. At that level the central issue between Roosevelt and Hitler by mid-1943 was the meaning and application of the old Jeffersonian issue of liberty, or, in its more modern and positive connotation,
freedom.
For the most part the two adversaries used a different rhetoric of symbols. Hitler exalted Discipline, Authority, the Fatherland, denounced Bolshevism, Internationalism, Plutocracy, and of course the Jews. Roosevelt would not contend for this ground. But the one symbol that had some intrinsic meaning of its own and that also had some universal acceptance on both sides, and hence was fought over by both sides, was Freedom.

Hitler had once interpreted Freedom as essentially lebensraum for Germans, but he steadily shifted its meaning before and during the war years to the freedom for the masses to enjoy security and the good things of life. Freedom in Britain and America he denounced as freedom for the democracies to exploit the world, and the freedom of plutocrats within the democracies to exploit the masses. “If the British declare that they are fighting for freedom, then the British might have given a wonderful example by granting their own Empire full liberty.” The symbol of freedom had become world-wide by mid-war. Churchill addressed Americans as fellow workers in the cause of freedom. Stalin in an order of the day to his soldiers stressed that the war was a war for freedom. “The irony of it is,” declared a Japanese English-language broadcast late in 1943, “that American men, American arms, American money, are being employed this very minute to rob the people of Asia of their right to live as free men….Americans, who fought the Civil War to liberate the slaves and who think they are fighting this war to free the enslaved people of the world, must find it painful to reflect upon the sad course over which their president is now taking the country.” The word was on the lips of colonial peoples, too, though with a special meaning.

Roosevelt repeatedly assailed Hitler’s freedom as not freedom to live but simply as freedom for the Nazis to dominate and enslave the human race. The President, who looked on himself as an expert on public psychology, tried to invest the term with relevance to human problems and actual social conditions. “The essence of our struggle today is that man shall be free,” he had said a month before Pearl Harbor. “There can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies. In the last analysis, they are the stakes for which democracies are today fighting.” The President developed this theme strongly during the war. But he had a double handicap in the propaganda battle. His war aims and postwar plans
were eloquent but so broadly stated that propagandists were often unable to convert them into bread-and-butter policies meaningful to people of other lands. When the President did translate his general principles into specific proposals and then into actual policies—for example, egalitarian tax proposals—he was frustrated by the congressional conservatism, entrenched lobbies, and organized wealth that the Nazis had pointed to. When he called for freedom for colonial peoples he ran hard into his Tory comrade in arms, Winston Churchill. And enemy propagandists pounced on every gap between Roosevelt’s creed and the government’s acts.

Nor did they need to look very hard. In the early summer of 1943 Los Angeles mobs spilled through Belvedere, Watts, and other American-Mexican districts searching for “zoot-suiters,” beating them, stripping them naked before roaring crowds. A week later a fist fight in a Detroit park triggered an orgy of race violence: Negro and white gangs roamed the streets smashing windows, firing Negro homes, tipping cars, looting stores, seizing guns in pawnshops. State troopers were summoned, bars closed, curfews set. Twenty-three died; over seven hundred were hurt. There were racial outbursts in Newark, Mobile, and elsewhere. A black was dragged from a Florida jail and lynched. Tension was increasing in some of the relocation camps.

Students of psychological warfare stress that propaganda is most effective when tied closely to an affirmative and effective program of action. Some enemy propagandists hoped that ultimately racial unrest and class feeling in America could be turned against Roosevelt personally. Certainly he was their favorite target. He was pictured as a dictator, a maker of false promises, a “paralytic cripple” with a warped brain, a tyrant lusting for world hegemony, a “Don Quixote of the present century living in his dreams.” His prewar pledge to keep American boys out of foreign wars was relentlessly emphasized. His lofty words against colonialism were mockingly compared with his failure to influence the Atlantic colonial powers. As 1944 approached, it appeared that Roosevelt’s promises and performance would be on trial not only at home but also throughout the world.

F
OR ROOSEVELT 1943 WAS
the year of conferences. He had met with Churchill at Casablanca in January, as well as with Giraud and de Gaulle; with Eden in Washington in March; with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington in May. During the next six months the Anglo-Americans met so often, and in so many places, that they conducted a kind of traveling strategy conference: Churchill, Marshall, and Eisenhower in Algiers in late May and early June; Stimson and Churchill in London in July; Roosevelt and Churchill at Hyde Park in mid-August; Roosevelt and Churchill and military and diplomatic staffs in Quebec in late August; Roosevelt, Churchill, and military staffs at the White House in September. Then the meetings broadened into a series of global climaxes: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo in late November; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Teheran at the end of November; Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo in early December.

No matter how wide his travels, however, Roosevelt seemed never to lose touch with home—his home at Hyde Park. He wrote to his friend Moses Smith that he was horrified at the cost of a tile or wooden silo and urged him to get a secondhand one, and he sent to his superintendent William Plog some Paraguayan gourd seeds with precise instructions for planting them. He called a vestry meeting for his church and offered to conduct the service himself, as he had done, rather unsuccessfully, he admitted, as senior officer present on board ship. He gave a watch to his grandson Buzzie, as he had years earlier to Buzzie’s four uncles, and old family books to Sistie; and he worked on family history.

He thought about broader history, too. He wrote to Archibald MacLeish that plans should be made for histories of the war. They should try, he said, “to capture or recapture the public pulse as it throbs from day to day—the effect on the lives of different types of citizens—the processes of propaganda—the parts played by the newspaper emperors, etc.…It is not dry history or the cataloging of books and papers and reports. It is trying to capture a great dream before it dies.”

When MacLeish indicated that he would like to leave the librarianship of Congress for war work the President answered that that was a coincidence, because
he
was thinking of the time when he would leave Washington and become a librarian at Hyde Park. “But I have the advantage in that, in addition to fussing over books, letters and prints, I shall have plenty of time to plant and harvest Christmas trees and to write scurrilous articles about SOME PEOPLE I KNOW—for publication, of necessity, after I am dead and gone.” The Hyde Park property was about to be designated a national historic site, and the President wrote to Ickes that he did not want it named Franklin D. Roosevelt Home, “because it sounds like a home for discarded politicians!”

Neither his home nor his family was immune to wartime politics. When a Republican committeeman from Kansas attacked the Roosevelt sons for being “coddled” and given assignments remote from combat zones, the President was bitter because Minority Leader Joe Martin failed to make any protest on the floor; but he was happy when the Congressman from his son’s Texas district read to the House a letter from Elliott stating that “we, as soldiers, don’t care whether or how much he disagrees with the President, but for God’s sake let us fight without being stabbed in the back for the sake of politics.” Hassett noted one day at Hyde Park that when he mentioned to Roosevelt a clambake at Poughkeepsie’s Christ Episcopalian Church, whose rector had voted for Ham Fish the previous November, the President mused, “I never got two votes from the crowd”—but added with a smile, “Well, the oak timbers in the roof of the church were cut on this place.”