Читать книгу The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941 - Paul Dickson - Страница 14

CHAPTER 4

FOR THE WANT OF A NAIL

The degree to which America did not want to go to war again was exemplified by the attitude of college students who had come of age as the nation dealt with the plight of the veterans of the Great War. With the Selective Service System in mothballs and no great push for volunteers, these young Americans had little concern for military service, yet they sensed the inevitability of war and conceived of such service as a future folly.

They dealt with their fear of future war through satirical action. One such initiative was inspired by impending payment of the bonus owed to the veterans of World War I. While it would not come until June 15, 1936, three months earlier, Lewis J. Gorin Jr. and seven friends at Princeton University’s Terrace Club founded the Veterans of Future Wars and issued an anticipatory call to arms in the Daily Princetonian on March 14, 1936, under the headline: FUTURE VETERANS, UNITE!

I. War is imminent.

It is high time that we openly, in the face of the world, admit that America shall be engaged in it.

To this end the Veterans of Future Wars have united to force upon the government and people of the United States the realization that common justice demands that all of us who will be engaged in the coming war deserve, as is customary, an adjusted service compensation, sometimes called a bonus. We demand that this bonus be one thousand dollars, payable June 1, 1965. Because it is customary to pay bonuses before they are due we demand immediate cash payment, plus three per cent compounded annually for thirty years back from June 1, 1965, to June 1, 1935. All those of military age, that is, from 18 to 36, are eligible to receive this bonus. It is but common right that this bonus be paid now, for many will be killed or wounded in the next war, and hence they, the most deserving, will not get the full benefit of their country’s gratitude. For the realization of these just demands, we mutually pledge our undivided and supreme efforts.

Soldiers of America, Unite! You have nothing to lose.¹

At the same moment at all-female Vassar College, the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars was chartered to gain support for sending young women to Europe to view the future graves of their sons—a spin on the practice of sending boatloads of real Gold Star mothers to Europe to visit the burial grounds of their fallen sons. The name was so offensive to many, including the Gold Star mothers of World War I, that the collegians almost immediately changed it to the Home Fire Division—a play on the notion that women would remain behind to keep the “home fires” going.

The groups at Princeton and Vassar formed an immediate alliance and began working in concert to establish eight regional commanders for both groups and to set up chapters on all American campuses. The idea spread swiftly, thanks to the well-connected Princeton students, who among them harbored stringers for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. Within ten days after the release of the Princeton group’s manifesto, the movement had swelled across the country. By the end of March, 120 college chapters had been established from coast to coast, as well as many non-collegiate units, and the group had a paying membership of more than 6,000 that included a number of faculty members and a small number of politicians, including a former U.S. senator.²

In New Jersey, Drew University’s chapter created a fabricated cemetery displaying the names of students who would fall in future conflicts and called for a Tomb for the Future Unknown Soldier. B. H. Berman, a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., penned an anthem for the future warriors, sung to the tune of “Over There.”

Fall in line—fall in line,

Now’s the time—now’s the time.

To collect our bonus

That Franklin D. will loan us

So we won’t fight him over here,

So raise your glasses and give three cheers

For the war that’s comin’ to take us hummin’

And we won’t be there ’til it’s over, over here.

Satellite groups—such as the Chaplains of Future Wars, organized among divinity students, and the Correspondents of Future Wars, among aspiring journalists—were soon collecting dues and giving the official salute of the Veterans of Future Wars: the right arm held out, palm up, beggar style. The Correspondents of Future Wars, founded at City College of New York, demanded training in “the writing of atrocity stories and garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” The group offered honorary membership to anyone who could come up with a motto for the next war as misleading as “Make the World Safe for Democracy,” President Woodrow Wilson’s exhortation to Congress in 1917, when he sought a declaration of war against Germany.³

A major force spurring the movement’s growth was the ire it invoked in its first days. A Texas Democrat, Representative William D. McFarlane, said the Princeton group “ought to be investigated,” and the real VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) put out a statement in which it “wonder[ed] what Hobey Baker and Johnny Poe, as well as other alumni of Princeton who died in France, might say to this apparent insult to their service.”⁴ James E. Van Zandt, head of the VFW, said the students were “a bunch of monkeys . . . too yellow to go to war,” who deserved a good spanking. Representative Claude Fuller of Arkansas said the group was “saturated with communism, foreign influence and a total disregard for American patriotism.” The Red-baiters and sputtering patriots had a field day, and the college students responded: Gorin insisted that Van Zandt was himself a Red and offered to debate him on national radio.⁵

One of the few voices of assent was that of Representative Maury Maverick of Texas, a wounded and decorated veteran who thought the scheme was “swell” and asserted that if the United States paid for wars in advance, it wouldn’t have any more wars. Maverick had spent a year in hospitals after sustaining a spine injury from a German bullet and, having lost parts of five vertebrae, was rarely free from pain. He had recently introduced legislation that would take the adoration of war (he called it “martial sex”) out of ROTC by mandating the reading of antiwar material.⁶

Eleanor Roosevelt also came down on the side of the students: “I think it’s just as funny as it can be! And—taken lightly, as it should be—a grand pricking of lots of bubbles.” She thought the name Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars had been ill advised but found the idea of a women’s auxiliary in itself “very amusing.”⁷

A reporter working for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers was sent to Princeton to “expose” the latest maneuver from Moscow. There was a growing tendency among many American leaders to take such movements as a serious threat, as the mood among students became increasingly antiwar, a category into which the Veterans of Future Wars fit. A poll of Columbia University seniors, published when the Veterans of Future Wars was only a few weeks old, revealed that a majority would refuse to fight in a war conducted outside the United States.⁸

Spring break occurred at the beginning of April for the Princetonians, and one of the founders, Thomas Riggs Jr., son of the former governor of Alaska, returned to his home in Washington, D.C. On April Fool’s Day, he announced that he was going to register as a lobbyist and ask for $2.5 billion for his “pre-vets.” Informed that he did not have to register, he met with a number of members of Congress and walked away with support from eight of them, including Maury Maverick, who said he was willing to give them $10 billion “any old day.”⁹

Suddenly the movement, now 20,000 strong, was big enough to prompt a counter-movement of sorts. In late April, the American Legion opened up a “first aid station and supply depot” in Washington, staffed by World War I vets pretending to be members of the Gimme Bita Pi fraternity, who offered diapers and rubber pants to the students, whose behavior it regarded as infantile. The legion met its match in the students, who responded to an invitation to an open house at the mock first aid station by telegram: “Appreciate kind invitation STOP . . . Unfortunately pressure of real business prevents acceptance of any purely social engagements STOP When we get our bonus we can play too.”¹⁰

Members of the Princeton group appeared on the radio, wrote articles, and were interviewed by reporters. Their pictures ran, according to one account, in thousands of newspapers. When a March of Time newsreel crew arrived on the Princeton campus to document the movement, more than 400 students (hired by the newsreel company) made the movement look larger than it actually was.¹¹

Less than a week after the American Legion held its annual convention that September, Lewis Gorin’s book, Patriotism Prepaid, was published.* It was billed as the basis for “one of the most powerful youth movements America had ever witnessed!” Reviewers seemed split on whether the book, written in academic style, was satire or serious social criticism.¹² The New York Times thought it was satire, but the Wall Street Journal thought Gorin was arguing that the next war would be so colossally expensive that after adding the money being demanded for future wars to the amount necessary to pay veterans of past wars, nothing would be left in the national till. This, said the Journal, was nothing less than “superb financial idealism.”¹³

The Veterans of Future Wars had one more arrow in its quiver: the fact that the actual World War I bonuses would be paid on June 15. In late May, the Princeton group sent out invitations to a “Treasury Raid,” which would feature dancing in the street on the day the bonuses would be paid. President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, among other politicians and celebrities, were invited.

On May 31, with a membership of close to 50,000, the Veterans of Future Wars issued a “peace without pacifism plan” that called for no declaration of war by the United States without a popular referendum and a plurality akin to that needed to attaching a new amendment to the Constitution: “The United States shall not enter into a state of war with any nation except in self-defense, unless by the will of two-thirds of those voting in three-fourths of the States.”¹⁴

Although press interest in the Princeton organization eventually dissipated, the generation that came of age in the late 1930s expressed true misgivings about fighting another overseas war. The fact that the movement’s strongest outward manifestation took the form of parody did not diminish its message. Those who wrote it off as a joke or a prank were missing the point.

By the time of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the government increasingly feared that members of the Veterans of Future Wars would balk at voluntary or conscripted service in what the group’s founders had called the “folly of war.” Reinforcing the Veterans of Future Wars position, in October 1939 a new organization was formed at Princeton called the American Independence League, whose purpose was to keep the United States out of the European war. This new group caught on in the same manner as the Veterans of Future Wars: within a month, some 50 eastern colleges had or were in the process of establishing chapters.

In early November, America, a well-known Jesuit weekly magazine, completed a nationwide poll of 54,000 Roman Catholic college students at 182 educational institutions on the subject of the war. The results were stunning and consistent with the June Gallup poll: more than one-third of the students said they would become conscientious objectors in the event the United States government elected to send an army to fight in Europe, and an astonishing 97 percent of the students opposed U.S. involvement in the European war. These and other findings pointed the magazine to its conclusion: “The collegians are against war and most of them choose not to fight.”¹⁵

Some people felt that the invasion of Poland had made educated young people even more likely to choose pacifism, arguing that this generation of collegians had been unduly influenced by writers who generally detested war and felt that it could be avoided by negotiation. This view was given its loudest voice by the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, who felt that post–World War I writers “had done more to weaken democracy in the face of fascism than any other group.” MacLeish named several writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Erich Maria Remarque.*

As a man of letters, MacLeish had nothing but praise for these writers, but as an anti-fascist, he saw them corrupting a generation unable to see the moral issue at hand. This moral blindness afflicting the young and well-read was, in his opinion, more concerning than even the lack of planes and antiaircraft guns, “for if the young generation is distrustful of all words and distrustful of all moral judgments of better and worse, then it is incapable of using the only weapon with which fascism can be fought—the moral conviction that fascism is evil and that a free society of free men is good and worth fighting for.”

Stated forcefully in a speech on May 23, 1940, to an educational group at a convention in New York City, MacLeish’s remarks were carried over network radio. The headlines reporting on the event went right to the point: MACLEISH ASSAILS THE CYNICS (Baltimore Sun); M’LEISH FINDS U.S. MORALLY UNREADY (New York Times).¹⁶

As if to underscore MacLeish’s point, a petition signed by 1,486 Yale University students was sent to President Roosevelt, asserting that the United States should stay out of the European war and should give no credit, supplies, or manpower to Britain or any other nation fighting Hitler. Members of the group said that the idea for the petition was spontaneous and that with a little more time they could have gathered 2,000 signatures.¹⁷ Increasingly, American observers and editorialists questioned whether an effective opposition to the peace-at-any-price mentality of American youth could be mounted. Millicent Taylor, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in an editorial in early June 1940 suggested that older Americans needed to work hard to convince their sons and daughters that the danger ahead was real and not subject to a negotiated settlement. Taylor agreed with MacLeish that the writers of the Lost Generation were to blame. Others—including public intellectual Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago—suggested the fault lay with a generation of young, cynical professors: “Whether they go to war or not, irreparable harm has been done to the young men of this generation.”

Those in 1940 who understood that an army had to be raised realized the initiative had to come from outside the White House and Congress. New York attorney Grenville Clark, age 58, a wealthy and dynamic patriotic gadfly and advocate of a strong America, seized that initiative.

Before and during World War I, Clark had established a program to train business and professional men to be Army officers. Already successful in his own right and heir to banking and railroad fortunes, Clark had joined other businessmen to pay for these Civilian Military Training Camps, which produced some 40,000 officers for the American Expeditionary Force. Because the first and most famous camp was located near the town of Plattsburg, in Upstate New York, the effort became known as the Plattsburg Plan.

Clark, who never sought office himself, was interested in change through influence. To this end, he maintained strong friendships with both Republicans and Democrats, and his wealth and a powerful circle of friends made his bipartisan appeal all the stronger.

Like many others, Clark was convinced that the United States was ill prepared to fight a war in which its involvement was becoming increasingly likely. A former classmate of Roosevelt’s at Harvard and a lieutenant colonel in the Army in World War I, Clark was a Republican, an interventionist, and a civil libertarian, who believed that fascism was the greatest single threat to America’s freedoms.

On May 8, 1940, 24 hours before Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, several members of the Civilian Military Training Camps Association met at a dinner in New York to plan a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the first Plattsburg camp. A pedestrian discussion soon gave way to a momentous recommendation from Clark, who urged that the “best observance of the anniversary” would be a powerful civilian-led campaign of preparedness in 1940, against “an emergency already as threatening as the one in 1915.” He advocated for “a peacetime conscription act so that the U.S. could do its share promptly when inevitably drawn into the big war.”¹⁸

This initial meeting led to an even larger dinner on May 22, to which leaders of the training camp initiative from all over the country were invited. In advance of the meeting, Clark wrote to Roosevelt to let him know what he was planning and asked for the president’s comments. Roosevelt encouraged Clark’s group to meet, noting: “I am inclined to think there is very strong public opinion for universal service so that every able-bodied man and woman would fit into his or her place. The difficulty of proposing a concrete set of measures ‘short of war’ is largely a political one—what one can get from Congress.”¹⁹

The second dinner included several presidents of Ivy League universities, two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, and Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the New York Times. The group drew up a selective service plan that outlined who would control the draft, the size and scope of the new army to be created, and the need for specific deferments. The plan gave power to local draft boards staffed by volunteers, recognizing from the outset that the more decentralized the draft, the more easily Americans would accept it.²⁰

Clark and colleagues argued that the nation would be the next one Germany attacked after France and Britain fell and that given America’s military weakness, Nazi troopships could sail up the Potomac River, take Washington, D.C., and then move north into Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.²¹

Still lacking the public backing of Marshall or Roosevelt, Clark and other advocates for conscription met in Julius Adler’s office on June 3 to formally create an organization and plan a campaign. By the end of the day, the National Emergency Committee, with Clark as its chairman, had 200 members; by the end of the week it had more than 1,000 across the country.

Using $250,000 raised from Clark and other wealthy members, the committee promoted the need for the draft, taking its message directly to newspapers, radio stations, American Legion posts, universities, and chambers of commerce. The committee hired Perley Boone, a former New York Times journalist and publicity director for the recently closed 1939 New York World’s Fair, who developed a staff of writers and photographers to churn out press releases and other material supporting the draft.²²

Roosevelt insisted that Clark and his ad hoc committee not use the words draft or conscription; he preferred the term muster, which implied something less than compulsory service. Unable to get Roosevelt to publicly support an actual draft, the Clark committee worked on Congress. A bill written by Clark,* which he had been working on since late May, was soon shown to members of both houses.²³

Even on June 14, 1940, the day German soldiers entered Paris, and with his mail running 2–1 in favor of the draft, FDR insisted that it was not yet time for conscription. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall also believed that a draft instituted too quickly could create more problems than it solved. According to Clark’s biographer, Marshall came close to losing his temper in an early meeting over Clark’s brashness in demanding support for a draft. To Marshall, a civilian, even one with Clark’s credentials, trying to instruct the chief of staff how to run the Army and properly prepare for war was out of place. Others have described Marshall’s reaction in even more dramatic terms. According to FDR biographer Kenneth S. Davis, after Clark told Marshall that he would be derelict in not pressing the president to accept conscription: “Marshall’s face reddened. It was only through a terrific effort of self-control that he managed to end the interview politely, abruptly, and coldly, very coldly, instead of in a hot flare of wrath.”²⁴

While he gradually concluded that conscription was the only way to build the Armed Forces, Marshall was unwilling to speak out on the issue until he thought the time was right and would not do so unless he had Roosevelt’s approval. Realizing that the political consequences of a draft could undermine FDR’s re-election bid, Marshall felt that the Army was not yet prepared for a draft. He wanted an orderly increase in manpower and needed more time to create such a system, because, as he explained, “The training of young men in large training camps on the basis of compulsory training is something that we cannot manage at the present time. We do not have the trained officers and the instructors to spare.”²⁵

Having decided to support the Clark initiative, Marshall wanted to see the bill introduced as an initiative led by civilians while he stood quietly in the wings. He reasoned that if he was to lend public support to the bill before it was formally proposed, the public could regard it as his legislation, creating a potential backlash in Congress that could disrupt future mobilization efforts. Years later, he recalled, “I was much criticized because I didn’t take the lead in the selective service legislation. I very pointedly did not take the lead. I wanted it to come from others . . . Then I could take the floor and do all the urging that was required.”²⁶

With FDR’s blessing, Marshall privately sent key staff members to help draft the legislation, which at this point looked as if it lacked the proper support. The Democratic Senate majority leader, James Byrnes, told Clark that there was not “a Chinaman’s chance” that compulsory military training would pass in Congress.²⁷

Roosevelt and War Secretary Woodring were increasingly at odds, especially regarding aid to Britain. On June 17, Roosevelt ordered his treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., to send the British a dozen B-17 bombers. Rather than comply, Woodring fired off a memo to Roosevelt, stating that he strongly opposed the proposed action. The president had no choice but to request Woodring’s resignation, which he did by letter. On leaving the government, Woodring immediately became an active member of the America First Committee, an organization devoted to preventing the United States’ entry into the war. Over time, Woodring had become a liability to Roosevelt, and now it was clear he would become an active force working against him.²⁸

The War Department, led by acting secretary Louis A. Johnson, chose to abstain from supporting the draft as the debate heated up in June. As late as June 25, Johnson was urging Roosevelt to approve a plan that would encourage enlistments rather than rely on conscription. Under what was known as the Civilian Volunteer Effort (CVE), local patriotic service clubs such as the Kiwanis and Lions, as well as chambers of commerce and other organizations, would become active and aggressive in recruiting men for the Army.²⁹

On June 19, with Woodring out of the way, Roosevelt asked Henry Stimson to be his new secretary of war. The selection of Stimson had been engineered by Grenville Clark, who saw Stimson as Roosevelt’s best choice. Having previously served as governor general of the Philippines, secretary of state under President Herbert Hoover, and secretary of war under President William Howard Taft, Stimson was well qualified for the job. Roosevelt urged Stimson, a Republican, to accept the position, thinking he would become a stabilizing force in whom both the public and the Army would have confidence.

Pointing out that he was approaching his 73rd birthday, Stimson asked for time to consult with a few friends. He also wanted to make sure the president understood that he favored compulsory military service. In Washington, Stimson was a known quantity who had nothing but contempt for the isolationists, who he felt were playing into the hands of the Axis powers.³⁰

Stimson had given two major speeches—the first at Yale University, the second broadcast on NBC Radio—about the need for compulsory military training. In the latter speech, entitled “America’s Interest in Britain’s Fleet,” Stimson underscored his belief that the United States could not afford to let Britain follow France into defeat—not for sentimental or cultural reasons but because America would be the next to fall.

At the same time Roosevelt asked Stimson to join his cabinet, he asked Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News, to become his secretary of the Navy, replacing Charles Edison, the son of inventor Thomas Edison, who had resigned earlier in the year to run for governor of New Jersey. Knox was also a Republican and had previously run as the vice presidential candidate on Alf Landon’s ticket, against Roosevelt, in 1936. Knox had served with Teddy Roosevelt’s now-legendary Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War and had performed as an artillery officer in 1917. Clark felt that Knox was the perfect complement to Stimson.

Stimson’s acceptance was conditional on two important points: that he retain the power to appoint his own subordinates in the War Department and that Knox accept FDR’s nomination as secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt agreed to the first condition, and Knox took the job, so the stage was set for a rare era of bipartisanship on the issue of conscription. Both Stimson and Knox had been members of the Clark committee, and both had been brought to Roosevelt’s attention by Clark, who saw them as key supporters of the draft and Republicans who would create the bipartisan alliance the nation needed to prepare for war. Historian and Marshall biographer David L. Roll termed this development “Clark’s plan,” adding that it enabled FDR to “pull off a shrewd political masterstroke—the appointment to his cabinet of two of the most prominent Republican foreign policy voices in the nation.”³¹

On June 20, before the appointments of Stimson and Knox were made public, Senator Edward R. Burke, an anti–New Deal Democrat from Nebraska, and Representative James Wolcott Wadsworth, a Republican from New York, introduced Clark’s bill for peacetime selective service in their respective houses of Congress. Formally titled the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 (Public Law 76–783, 54 Stat. 885), it became known as the Burke-Wadsworth bill. Neither man had much to lose if the bill failed—Burke had already lost renomination in the Nebraska primary elections, and Wadsworth was from a Republican district considered safe regardless of his position on conscription.

This odd marriage had been brokered by Clark, who moved quickly to get the bill into the public arena. Publicist Perley Boone sent advance copies to major newspapers, and the moment the bill was introduced, the wire services sent it to thousands more. The White House deliberately withheld visible support for the bill, not wanting to be linked directly to a potential defeat in Congress, which Roosevelt felt would please Hitler, dishearten the British, and damage his own chances in an election year.

The major arguments for conscription were that the Army as constituted had not adequately prepared the United States against the possibility of invasion and that in the years since the enactment of the National Defense Act of 1920, the Army had been forced to work below the levels the legislation permitted. The isolationist counter-argument was that a volunteer army would suffice and that a draft would drag the United States into war.

On June 21, Roosevelt announced the appointments of Stimson and Knox. MASTERSTROKE BY ROOSEVELT STUNS THE GOP was the headline in the Atlanta Constitution. Roosevelt had not only moved, in his words, “to encourage national solidarity in a time of world crisis,” but he had also driven a wedge between the Republican isolationists and the Republican interventionists in the days before the Republican National Convention. Choosing these two men was, as one historian would later describe it, “a masterful political move on the part of a masterful politician.”³²

When congressional hearings began on July 3, Perley Boone was on hand to distribute a letter to members of both houses from General John Pershing asserting that enforced military training was not un-American but rather would promote democracy by throwing different classes of people into close contact with the goal of preserving the American way of life. Pershing also pointed out that if the United States had adopted compulsory military training in 1914, it would not have been necessary in 1917 “to send partially trained boys into battle against the veteran troops of our adversary.” Pershing then concluded: “Certainly we could have ended the conflict much sooner, with the saving of many thousands of lives and billions of treasure.”³³

The effect of the letter, widely distributed to the press, was felt the next day in many Fourth of July editorials across the country. Under the headline CONSCRIPTION IS AMERICAN, Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star used Pershing’s letter to support peacetime military conscription as a way of ultimately avoiding war rather than fostering it. But the press was split along isolationist/interventionist lines and reacted to the Pershing letter accordingly.³⁴

After its introduction, the Burke-Wadsworth bill made little headway in Congress, as many still worried about the public reaction to a peacetime draft. It clearly needed a push from the outside, which prompted Clark, Boone, and the others supporting the legislation to redouble their efforts and seek new allies. Corporations were solicited for support. Allen L. Lindley, vice president of the New York Stock Exchange and a member of Clark’s committee, wrote to every member company listed on the exchange, asking for endorsements to help enact the bill. Clark himself set up temporary headquarters in the Carlton Hotel in Washington, where he managed the lobbying effort.³⁵

The debate was carried out publicly in letters to the editors of newspapers, which at their most extreme had an apocalyptic tone. When one writer to the Sacramento Bee insisted the draft was in God’s plan, another responded: “I do not think God wants any nation to toss its offspring onto the fiery altars of Moloch,” referring to a Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice.³⁶

A leading Republican and likely presidential candidate, Senator Robert A. Taft, led the opposition and argued that a compulsory draft was more typical of totalitarian nations than of democracies. “The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism,” Taft argued. “It is absolutely opposed to the principles of individual liberty which have always been considered a part of American democracy.”

The loudest opponent of Clark, his committee, and the legislation under consideration was Senator Rush Dew Holt, a fiercely antiwar firebrand Democrat from West Virginia, who attacked those who backed the bill as “Wall Street lawyers, international bankers and directors in munitions enterprises,” the very forces he claimed led America into the First World War. Holt stated that Clark and his allies had treasonous intent as they plotted to lead the nation into war to preserve its and their overseas investments. His attack on the floor of the Senate on August 6 made it seem as if the meetings in the Harvard Club were shady affairs held in secret. He termed the money that had been raised to promote conscription a “slush fund,” which then as now referred to monies set aside for illicit purposes. New York Times General Manager Julius Ochs Adler, “a man who holds stock in corporations in countries now at war, was there.” Holt then added: “Mr. Adler wants the American boy to protect his investments.”

But as Holt was winding up his attack, he was openly challenged by Senator Sherman Minton of Indiana, the majority whip and a strong ally of the administration, who alleged that during World War I, Holt’s father had opposed the war effort to the extent that he had advocated not raising food to be sent to the American troops in France, a group that had included Minton.

“A malicious lie,” was Holt’s response. “If the administration wants filth and gutter mud to be thrown they get the Senator from Indiana to throw it.” Minton responded: “And when Hitler wants it thrown you throw it.” Then Minton added that Holt’s father had sent his eldest son to South America to hide from the draft. Minton then added: “I get a little impatient at being lectured to from a slacker family.” Holt came back asserting that Minton’s claims were untrue and these lies “like lice, continued to be carried by rats”—a line that occasioned what the Chicago Tribune reported as “uproarious laughter” from the Senate gallery packed with foes of the draft.³⁷

The back-and-forth continued into the following day, when after a further round of insults and accusations the “debate” lost its steam with Minton getting the last word by stating that the rules of the Senate would not allow him to express the contempt he held for the senator from West Virginia.³⁸

It was what the Chicago Tribune characterized as “one of the most vitriolic exchanges in recent history” and what the San Francisco Chronicle called a “barroom brawl.” Although the isolationists and the newspapers that supported them saw justification in the attack, it was quickly rebutted. Adler, for example, pointed out that the only companies he held stock in were the New York Times itself and its printing company.³⁹

As the draft bill was debated and discussed, the growing fear in the United States in the early summer of 1940 was that Great Britain would fall to Nazi Germany just as France, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, and Norway had fallen already. Beginning in July 1940, the fear intensified as Hitler’s Luftwaffe relentlessly bombed England, and the German navy blockaded it in preparation for a planned Nazi invasion.

Fear was also growing that Imperial Japan was on its own path of conquest. During the summer of 1940, Japan’s war in China was entering its fourth year with no end in sight. Some Americans feared Japan might actually attack North America by way of Hawaii or the Aleutians. Senator Rufus Holman of Oregon went a step further and claimed that he had learned from “authoritative military sources of imminent peril of an invasion” threatening the entire Pacific coast including Alaska.⁴⁰

Finally, Roosevelt saw his opportunity to support the Clark plan when the Republicans nominated former Democrat Wendell Willkie as their candidate on June 28, whose support for the draft was expressed a month later and amplified in his formal acceptance speech. In a press conference on August 2, FDR felt he could now unequivocally endorse draft legislation and declare it essential to national defense, during which he also declared that the effort to create a new army with volunteers had failed.⁴¹

On August 7, in a letter to Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, former secretary of war Harry Hines Woodring argued, “I cannot see the need of compulsory military training at this time, and I should like to see the bill amended so that it does not become effective until, and after, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army has first advised the Senate in writing that the voluntary system has completely broken down.” Woodring believed that voluntary service had not been given a chance by the Roosevelt administration, which had earlier refused his plan to raise Army pay to $30 a month for volunteers. Woodring also criticized conscription as smacking of “totalitarianism.”⁴²

Roosevelt stuck to his guns, insisting that the volunteer system had indeed failed just as Willkie’s position became firmer. On August 17, in a campaign speech in front of a crowd of 20,000 in Indiana, Willkie said, “I cannot ask the American people to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way to secure the trained and competent manpower we need for defense.” Some isolationists claimed that Willkie was simply in favor of a future, not immediate, conscription—an interpretation Willkie scotched on August 26, when he told reporters that he was “unequivocally in favor of immediate conscription.”⁴³

When a group of isolationists led by Representative Hamilton Fish Jr.,* a Republican of New York and FDR’s old Dutchess County antagonist, attempted to delay the implementation of the draft by 60 days in the final version of the bill, Willkie urged that the provision be eliminated. Fish and other Republicans, including Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts, chairman of the Republican National Committee, hoped to delay the draft until after the election when, they hoped, Roosevelt would have been defeated and the chance to stop the draft would again present itself.⁴⁴

It was a hot summer, rendered hotter by the ongoing sideshow on Capitol Hill. A group of black-veiled women dressed in mourning clothes and calling themselves the Congress of American Mothers staged a death march against FDR’s plan for conscription in peacetime. They constructed a papier-mâché dummy with a coconut for a head of proconscription senator Claude Pepper of Florida, which they strung from a tree on the Capitol grounds. “We’re hanging Claude Pepper to a sour apple tree,” the women chanted, “so our sons and husbands can live on and be free.” Pepper, well known for his good sense of humor, took time to admire the mock lynching and declared it a splendid demonstration of free speech and the American way. The Capitol Police demanded that the women cut the effigy down, and it was delivered to Pepper’s office by police escort.⁴⁵

The protests then moved inside, as the women in black entered the Senate gallery and later shifted to the House when the debate over the draft bill moved there. On September 3, one of a 600-member delegation from a Communist group called the Peace Mobilization Society, which was vehemently opposed to the U.S. entry into the war, stood up in the House gallery and shouted, “American conscription is American fascism.” As the protester was being ejected by Capitol Police, Representative Edward E. Cox of Georgia poked back by calling the protesters “lousy bums and bohunks” for trying to break in and influence Congress. Bohunk was a slur directed against eastern Europeans, especially Czechs, and was one more example that any hint of civility was melting in the late summer heat.⁴⁶

The Peace Mobilization Society was a clear and immediate result of the German–Soviet Union non-aggression pact made earlier in the year, at which time the Communist Party USA became officially opposed to war with Germany. Its protest underscored the point that two factions—at opposing ends of the political spectrum and for different reasons—wanted to keep the nation out of the war and the draft.*

Late on September 4, the debate boiled over as House majority leader Sam Rayburn urged representatives to reject the Fish amendment, saying: “It is bad psychology, it is bad business. To wait means more war.” Tensions escalated during the night’s debate, in which Representative Beverly M. Vincent (Democrat of Kentucky) called Representative Martin L. Sweeney (Democrat of Ohio) a traitor for opposing the selective service bill. The exchange culminated in what the Associated Press called “a free-swinging, hard-hitting fist fight on the House floor,” in which several “vigorous blows landed on the face of each man.” The doorkeeper of the House noted that he had not seen anything like it in his 50 years in the House.⁴⁷

Not only did Willkie demand that the Fish amendment be eliminated, but he also insisted that the draft was not a party issue separating Republicans and Democrats. On hearing Willkie’s statement, Fish accused him of having fallen for the propaganda of the interventionists and the eastern press and columnists.⁴⁸

When the Senate and House held a conference committee to reconcile their versions of the bill, the Fish amendment was excluded, while the bill the Clark group originally submitted remained largely intact. Marshall had informed legislators that it would take two years for the draft to bear measurable results and that the Army would not be prepared to fight a war until then. He pushed lawmakers to conscript men for an 18-month tour of duty, but in his eagerness to get the bill passed, he settled for a year’s service, unless a national emergency was declared by Congress after the 12-month term. In such a situation, the draftees could be retained. The compromise would come back to haunt Marshall the following year.

Since the Louisiana Maneuvers in May, other maneuvers had taken place in five locales—Upstate New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the state of Washington, and Louisiana again—in August. Almost 300,000 Regular, National Guard, and Reserve troops had been involved, from units representing all 48 states.

The largest of these August exercises involved 105,000 men in Plattsburg between August 5 and 25, once again under the command of General Hugh Drum. Because they were billed as an attempt to mimic the stress of a real national emergency, the 1940 Plattsburg exercises seemed important enough for President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Stimson, and Army Secretary Patterson to show up in the presidential railroad car and tour the maneuver area before the finale to the mock war got underway.⁴⁹

But these maneuvers quickly proved to be an exercise in futility rather than a show of preparedness as the paucity of real weapons and the most basic equipment seemed to highlight all reports and observations. “The soldier trudging through the dust with a length of gutter pipe on his shoulder in lieu of a trench mortar got precious little training except for his legs,” commented Marshall Andrews, who was covering the exercises for the Washington Post. But this was just the beginning, as Andrews noted that men lacked blankets, tents, mess gear, and even proper uniforms. Some men who had made the trip to Plattsburg were not allowed to participate because they did not have uniforms or as Andrews phrased it: “guns stayed silent . . . because their crews could not be uniformed.”⁵⁰

Unlike the spring maneuvers in Louisiana, Plattsburg and the other August exercises received little newspaper coverage while they were taking place but a great deal when the results from these exercises were evaluated in early September. The conclusion was reached that no single division of the National Guard was ready for combat. The most critical summary appeared on the front page of the New York Times on September 9: “Inadequate equipment, a high percentage of ‘green’ officers, and raw recruits in all units of the Regular Army and National Guard and serious deficiencies in staff and command work even in the elementary fundamentals of ‘soldiering’ were revealed by the unprecedented series of army maneuvers which were held last month.” The article ended with all observers agreeing that the draft was needed to build up the Army’s strength.⁵¹

The final official reports from these exercises were even worse. One of the most damning recounted the alarming frequency with which men, ill prepared for marching and living in the outdoors, collapsed in the field. Units wandered aimlessly, communications failed, and supply lines failed, often leaving Guardsmen without food. Few of these deficiencies were the fault of the National Guard; the blame for most, rather, lay with the War Department, which had neglected the service for years and had outfitted it with little more than materiel left over from the previous war. Ancient Springfield rifles were labeled “50 CALIBRE,” and stovepipes standing in for guns were mounted on trucks masquerading as tanks.

“The 1940 summer encampments demonstrated beyond dispute, that in terms of ground forces the nation was virtually defenseless,” Army historian Christopher R. Gabel later concluded. “The National Guard’s make-believe guns spoke louder in Congress than they did on the maneuver field.”⁵²

While Clark and his band of civilians had taken charge of the draft movement, Marshall was allowed to distance himself from that battle. He was free to adopt a new strategy, based on his fear that the Regular Army lacked the manpower to train conscripted men while keeping intact for emergency duty on this side of the Atlantic—such as putting down a Nazi-backed revolution in Brazil. He concluded that the solution to this problem would be to activate the whole National Guard, which could absorb thousands of draftees and give them basic training. Roosevelt agreed and encouraged Marshall to go to Congress and testify in favor of the draft and calling up the National Guard. Marshall made these points and on August 27 was given congressional authority to bring men of the National Guard into the Regular Army for one year. On August 31, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8530, calling up 60,000 men in units of the National Guard in 27 states to report on September 16. This first call amounted to about one-quarter of the National Guard. Guard officers below the rank of captain who had dependents were given 20 days to resign if they chose to, and all men under 18 were discharged.⁵³

On September 16, a week after the New York Times critique was published, the Burke-Wadsworth bill establishing a military draft passed the Senate 47–25 and was subsequently approved in the House by a vote of 232–124 on the same morning.^54,55 Clark and his band of unpaid lobbyists “practically wore out shoe leather tracking down and buttonholing Senators and Representatives,” recalled General Lewis Hershey, who became the director of the Selective Service System after the bill was passed.

Thus ended what was later termed the most tumultuous summer in Congress in living memory. Under the final version of the act, all American males between 21 and 45 years of age were required to register for the draft. The government would select men through a lottery system under which “all drafted soldiers had to remain in the Western Hemisphere or in United States possessions or territories located in other parts of the world.”

A group of about 1,000 opponents of the draft who had camped outside the Capitol during the final debates now moved to a position in front of the White House. Their anthem, “Down by the Riverside,” contained the line: “Ain’t gonna study war no more.”

The same day the bill passed, the first 60,000 of 270,000 National Guardsmen who would be called between that moment and June 30, 1941, when the Army would be authorized to grow to 1.4 million, reported for active duty. The first divisions to arrive—the 30th from the South, the 41st from the West, the 44th from the Northeast, and the 45th from the Southwest—were distributed geographically to create minimal industrial disturbance to any one region of the country since the vast majority of Guardsmen held jobs.⁵⁶

That evening, George Marshall delivered a special address on CBS Radio: “The next six months include the possibility of being the most critical period in the history of the nation . . . We must be prepared to stand alone,” he warned. Marshall also went out of his way to express his faith in the American citizen-soldier:

I fear that we expect too much of machines. We fail to realize two things: First, that the finest plane or tank or gun in the world is literally worthless without technicians trained as soldiers—hardened, seasoned, and highly disciplined to maintain and operate it; and second, that success in combat depends primarily upon the development of the trained combat team composed of all arms. This battle team is the most difficult, the most complicated of all teams to create, because it must operate on unknown ground, in darkness, as well as in daylight, amid incredible confusion, danger, hardship, and discouragements. It is a team of many parts, the decisive element of which remains the same little-advertised, hard-bitten foot soldier with his artillery support.⁵⁷

Marshall could celebrate, but the timing of this victory was far from ideal for Roosevelt. Samuel Rosenman, one of FDR’s closest advisers, told the president: “From a political point of view, there couldn’t have been a worse time for them to have passed this bill. The actual drawing of numbers will probably take place right smack in the middle of the campaign, and of course you are going to be blamed for it in a great many homes.”⁵⁸

However, a shift in attitude among young Americans of draft age strongly suggested that the draft would not bring the resistance many had predicted. The Gallup Poll had never done opinion sampling among those under 21, but when the draft issue surfaced in 1940, the editors of the Reader’s Digest, then the most popular magazine in the world, commissioned a poll of Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. Some questions were directed at both sexes and others were asked only of males. The results, published in the October 1940 issue, were a pleasant surprise to those who worried about the state of American youth, which the magazine termed “tough-fibered, loyal and hopeful.” It added: “They have faith in the future. They are not radical—in fact they are surprisingly conservative in their views.”

The pollsters asked young men whether they objected personally to a year of military service, and 76 percent said they did not. Many of them requested proper training: “If I’m likely to fight, I’d rather know how.” The fundamental acceptance of compulsory military service by this “slice” of the nation’s manhood (some 10 million men) closely approximated acceptance by the general population, which Gallup polled several times on the issue.

In the commentary accompanying the poll results, Gallup pointed out that commentators and editors who had been telling America that its young were a flabby, pacifistic, yellow, cynical, and discouraged lot had now been handed a stinging rebuke from the very young people they were criticizing. Gallup named Walter Lippmann of the New York Times, Dorothy Thompson of the New York Tribune, and the president himself for advancing this negative point of view. Thompson was a woman of great influence; in 1939 she had been named the second-most influential woman in the country after Eleanor Roosevelt. Gallup suspected that many of those pushing the negative portrayal of American youth had been swayed by the “fulminations of such noisy groups as the American Youth Congress,” a Far Left group with strong ties to the Communist Party that had demonstrated against the Burke-Wadsworth bill.⁵⁹

As if to underscore the Gallup conclusion, on October 10, a poll taken at the University of Maryland by the student newspaper found that Maryland students favored compulsory military training by a 5–1 ratio. News like this was welcome, as the draft system was about to face its first test less than a week later.⁶⁰

Section 4(a) of the new law stated that no discrimination be shown against any person on account of race or color. However, section 3(a) of the same act gave Army and Navy authorities unlimited discretion in deciding whom to accept into their ranks and how to employ those they accepted. In other words, discrimination was banned, but segregation was not. Jim Crow still ruled.

Because the military was segregated, race-specific draft calls more often than not limited the number of black recruits. In 1940, there were six black units in the Army. African American draftees could be assigned only to these units or to new ones being planned. Attempts to send African American draftees to the Army were rejected before segregated barracks and mess facilities could be put in place. In 1940 it was unthinkable that blacks and whites could eat or sleep under the same roof.⁶¹

With draft registration in mind, civil rights leaders went to the White House on September 27, 1940. A. Philip Randolph, head of the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was accompanied by Walter White, the head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill, an administrator for the Urban League. They demanded the racial integration of the Armed Forces as well as changes in the hiring practices of the burgeoning defense industry. The president told the men that progress was actually being made: African Americans were going to be assigned to combat services in numbers proportional to their percentage of the overall population, “which is something,” he added. The black leaders then pushed on the issue of integration. According to White’s account of what happened next, Roosevelt at first thought about the formation of integrated divisions in the Army but after some additional thought seemed to accept the idea that the Army could place black combat units alongside white ones and over time “back into” desegregated units. Roosevelt made it clear that this idea would have to begin in the North. Progress it seemed had been made—that is, only if and when these first steps were taken.⁶²

When the group of civil rights leaders then raised the question of desegregating the Navy, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox quickly responded that such a move would be all but impossible. He explained: “We can’t do a thing about it because men live in such intimacy aboard ship that we simply can’t enlist Negroes above the rank of messman.” Roosevelt jumped in at this point to say that the Navy “was organizing musical entertainments and new bands for ships” and putting “Negro bands” on ships could allow white sailors to come to accept sharing space with black sailors. As the meeting ended, FDR thanked the black leaders for their time and promised that he would talk with his cabinet and other top officials about the issue of racial integration in both military services.⁶³

But the nation’s military leaders—including Stimson, Marshall, and Knox, and almost all of FDR’s cabinet—were totally opposed to any of the changes proposed by the president, especially as so many other pressing military issues were up for discussion. Marshall made the key argument: “There is no time for critical experiments which could have a highly destructive effect on morale.”⁶⁴

Unaware of debates taking place without their knowledge, Randolph and the other leaders had been encouraged by their meeting and were waiting anxiously to hear from the president. They did not hear from FDR himself, but on October 9, Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, issued a press release endorsed by the president saying that black troops would be used in combat roles, but the status quo would be maintained, and black and white enlistees would serve apart from each other in their own units. Early promised that African American units would be created in virtually every branch, including aviation, and endorsed a long-standing policy “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.” As if he had not been understood he added that “no experiments should be tried . . . at this critical time.”

Unfortunately, the wording of the press release gave the firm impression that the policy of continued segregation had been endorsed by White and the other black leaders who immediately demanded that the president retract the “damaging impression” that they had endorsed Jim Crow policies. Press Secretary Early then issued a formal retraction, but the damage had been done.⁶⁵

The impact of the press release, with an endorsement from the president in the form of the initials “OK, FDR” effectively turned it into a statement of racial policy that would remain in effect for years to come. Morris J. MacGregor, an official Army historian of racial integration of the military, observed that the press release was “immediately elevated in importance by War Department spokesmen, who made constant reference to it as a presidential directive” and that it was actually cited by “some Army officials as a presidential sanction for introducing segregation in new situations, as, for example, in the pilot training of black officers in the Army Air Corps.”⁶⁶

The reaction from the black press was loud and clear. As Time magazine framed the story in its October 28 issue: “From Memphis’ Beale Street to Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, the U.S. Negro press last week suddenly took fire. It blazed up over the Army’s No. 1 social problem: what to do with Negro officers and Negro enlisted men.” Time then noted: “Even Harlem’s pro-Roosevelt Amsterdam News joined in the outraged hubbub. JIM CROW ARMY HIT, ran its page one banner over a story denouncing the Army’s policy.”⁶⁷

The outraged black press immediately began a crusade to integrate the Armed Forces, which would continue throughout the war and beyond. Individual black Americans also took note. Leon Hardwick’s impassioned letter, published in the Washington Post, argued that the segregation of the Armed Forces worked against “ironclad national unity” and as such was “a threat to the security of the nation.”⁶⁸

Such criticism came at a particularly awkward time for Roosevelt, whose opponent in the upcoming election was a vocal advocate of civil rights and was becoming more and more popular among black voters. Willkie had a citizens’ committee composed of a group of prominent black leaders, including the head of the Associated Negro Press, who backed him because they believed he offered the promise of “better conditions for the Negro people.”⁶⁹

In the weeks prior to the election, Roosevelt tried to offset the negative effect of the Army’s announcement and appeal to black voters by promoting Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to the rank of brigadier general, making him the first person of color to hold that rank in the Regular Army. He also appointed Colonel Campbell C. Johnson, the commander of Reserve officers’ training at Howard University, as a special aide to the director of the Selective Service System. Finally, he appointed Judge William H. Hastie, dean of the Howard University Law School, as a civilian aide to the secretary of war.⁷⁰

In and of themselves, these appointments were welcomed, but they dodged the problem and were also seen as a clumsy attempt to appease the demands of those demanding full racial equality. As Walter White later wrote of the appointments: “Had they been twenty men each, the problem faced could be ameliorated only to a slight degree as long as the basic evil of segregation was not ended.”⁷¹

* The full text of Gorin’s book is online at: https://archive.org/details/patriotismprepai031233mbp.

* The books mentioned by name were John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Andreas Latzko’s Men in War, and Walter Millis’s Road to War, which was published in 1935 and by 1940 was being called the isolationists’ bible.

* An essential line in the bill: “Congress declares that in a free society the obligation and privilege of military service should be shared generally in accordance with the fair and just system of compulsory military training and service.”

* Fish himself had been compromised: he and a handful of fellow members of Congress had used their franking privileges to distribute tens of thousands of pro-Nazi documents from fraudulent front groups postage-free. This was not known at the time but would become known before the war was over. Fish claimed to be unaware of the Nazi tie to these groups. Other members of Congress who knowingly or unknowingly lent their franks to the Nazis were Clare E. Hoffman, Henry C. Dworshak, Bartel J. Jonkman, Harold Knutson, John G. Alexander, James C. Oliver, Gerald P. Nye, and D. Worth Clark.

* One of the most famous members of the organization was African American writer Richard Wright, who made his views clear in “Not My People’s War,” published in the June 1940 issue of the New Masses. He argued that black Americans should not support the war effort and should work hard to keep the United States neutral. Jerry W. Ward and Robert J. Butler, The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2008), 418.