Will Morrisey Reviews

Nancy Beck Young: Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013.

H. G. Nicholas, ed.: Washington Dispatches 1941-1945: Weekly Reports from the British Embassy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

 

The military, geopolitical, and diplomatic history of the Second World War may be described as familiar. But the war years also saw an important shift in American domestic government, whereby the New Dealers’ administrative state, envisioned by President Wilson and established by President Roosevelt, was firmly cinched in. Nancy Beck Young provides a scholarly overview of this task. The eminent Oxford philosopher and political observer Isaiah Berlin, who wrote the Dispatches for British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, offers a week-by-week account of these goings-on, along with any other “attitudes and movements of opinion in the USA considered to be of importance to Anglo-American relations.” Young’s account affirms Berlin’s preliminary assessment, that “the war transformed normal life in the United States far less than in the United Kingdom”; that whereas in Great Britain “everything was centralized and totally subordinated to the war effort…in the USA this was not so; that political and economic life to a considerable degree continued as before, and that this fact, in particular some of the pressures and internecine feuds between individuals and power blocs, inherited from the New Deal and even earlier times, continued to characterize it, and themselves affected the war effort”; this was especially so respecting “the attitude of Congress, which in this respect was very different from that of Parliament.” It could hardly have been otherwise, given the separation of executive and legislative powers in the United States Constitution. This notwithstanding, as Young, with the advantage of hindsight, can see much more clearly than Berlin, under the contentious surface of Washington politics at this time the delegation of power from Congress to administrative agencies was being prepared; the Supreme Court, evidently chastened by FDR’s landslide election victories, would draw back from its forthright defense of the Locke-Madison nondelegation doctrine in the years after the war. In doing so, it would attempt to ‘constitutionalize’ a fourth branch of government, now called ‘the administrative state.’

During these years, Young writes, “members of Congress fought two wars, the well-known war against the Axis powers and the less well-known war about the New Deal.” In the latter conflict, “moderates and conservatives” in Congress “use[d] World War II to revise the New Deal” in a struggle “about the nature of the state,” a struggle that limited the New Deal regime but also preserved it. Young forthrightly describes the New Deal as “a revolution,” one that “the legislative branch redefined in the decade following its creation,” a redefinition issuing in “the vital center warfare state liberalism of the 1950s.” The scaling back of the New Deal was essential “to institutionalize the New Deal economic order.” This became possible because Congress saw a regime-based factional disputes between “hardcore conservatives and liberals (New Dealers),” a circumstance in which moderates could position themselves to serve as a balance-wheel between the two sides, thereby establishing “the dominant patterns for postwar politics: the solidification but never complete acceptance of New Deal statism” wherein debate continued “about the scale, scope, and purpose of the federal government.” 

Although Keynesian economics and economic regulation thereby survived, such “social issues” as refugee policy, racial discrimination, and “hunting Communist spies” persisted unresolved, as they “were not important enough for moderates [in Congress] to waste their political capital on, especially when struggles about the economy were intense, and, from their perspective, more relevant to the war effort.” The regnant Democratic Party itself factionalized on the non-economic issues, with Southern Democrats (for example) successfully resisting attempts to end legal segregation in their region. And even on economics, while Southern and Western Democrats supported the New Deal generally, they resented the use of “their regions as colonial economies for the northeast,” as mere sources of raw materials for industrial capitalists and workers there. Meanwhile, among conservative Republicans and Democrats, the efforts of some at “overcoming isolationism, a key component of conservatism since the end of World War I, proved to be the biggest obstacle” to unity. The Pearl Harbor attack weakened isolationism for the remainder of the war, and the threat of Soviet communism kept it in abeyance for the duration of the Cold War that followed. Conservatives were thus freed to concentrate their minds on preventing “the federal government leviathan from becoming permanent and eliminating individual economic liberty,” a threat they saw in President Roosevelt’s use of executive orders not as means of enforcing Congressional legislation but as “a device for unilateral policymaking initiatives”—a tactic Senator Robert Taft of Ohio saw as an attempt to make Congress “the mere shell of a legislative body.” Indeed, during the war Congress increasingly turned less to legislating and more to overseeing executive branch activities, with committees investigating the conduct of the war and the presence of Communists in the federal government. 

The economic dimension of the New Deal regime centered on what Young calls “resource management, especially taxation and price control.” In their opposition to this, “conservative congressmen learned, much to their chagrin, that the New Deal was too powerful to be erased, while liberal congressmen lamented it was not powerful enough to be expanded.” This “New Deal ethos”—meaning reliance on an activist regulatory government—became “a permanent part of the American polity, but in an altered form skewed away from welfare and toward warfare,” at least during the war years themselves. The struggle was nothing less than “a contest over the meaning of the Constitution in the twentieth century.” While “lawmakers compelled President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the mushrooming federal bureaucracy to scale back some of the more grandiose plans for empowering nonelected experts,” it “constructed a resource management policy regarding taxation and price control that made permanent a circumscribed but still activist state.” By the 1940s, a substantial number of Congressmen had grown “weary of the president,” but with “the coming of the war” they could scarcely enjoy “the luxury of divorcing themselves from the White House” and its resident Commander-in-Chief. “The war necessitated the political deference to the White House, but this short-term solution constituted an institutional mistake from a long-range perspective” by “further entrench[ing] a presidency-centered orientation to the federal government.” At the same time, the need to fight the common enemies overseas diluted the “ideological underpinnings” of the political struggles of the 1930s, bringing instead a “liberalism” that “was more pragmatic” and thus more palatable to moderates. Conservatives, who would have liked to use wartime Congressional committee investigations as means “to destroy the New Deal,” couldn’t go too far without being seen as hindrances to the war effort. Neither liberals nor conservatives could press the advantages they enjoyed as forcefully as they would have liked. 

This notwithstanding, liberals had the edge. Although the Price Control Bill of 1941 and the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 provoked “increasing hostility to the administration” in Congress, serious opposition proved impossible in the face of accusations that anyone who opposed these measures—which effectively transferred substantial lawmaking powers from Congress to federal agencies, substituting regulations for actual laws—was ‘objectively’ pro-fascist, obstructing the orderly conduct of the war by enabling war profiteers to rip off their fellow Americans. The New Dealers could continue “to operate over the separation of powers”; “Congressional Democratic success on resource management early in the war defined what was and was not possible in the highly charged partisan war over New Deal liberalism.” 

The test came in the 1942 Congressional elections “The Republican Party ran against the domestic war effort,” with its “command economy” of rationing, price control, limits to commerce and trade. With full employment suddenly restored thanks to the war industries, the Democrats lost in their domestic saliency what they gained from patriotic sentiment. “Wage and price controls angered both workers and farmers, two key constituencies for the Democrats.” And even wartime patriotism proved a mixed blessing for New Dealers early in the war, since the United States and its allies met frightening battlefield reverses. As a result, conservative Republicans made substantial electoral gains, although Democrats maintained majorities in both houses. With New Deal liberals weakened, “moderates and conservatives forced a redefinition and constriction of liberalism away from the experimental approaches of the 1930s, previewing what would dominate domestic politics in the postwar years.” Whereas “FDR had originally planned for his 1943 State of the Union address to be a forceful brief for postwar domestic reform,” his allies in Congress and on the Supreme Court persuaded him that such an appeal “would be read as a declaration of war on Congress,” ruining his relations with it “for the duration of his tenure.” Hence FDR’s prudent rhetoric about how “Dr. New Deal” would now stand aside for “Dr. Win the War”—a change of physicians not even conservatives could protest. 

Sharp disagreement on tax policies continued, however. Senator Sam Rayburn complained that “the president paid too much attention to ‘bad advice from some smart alecks he has around him,” meaning his well-educated, liberal minded advisors who had “no appreciation for how Congress functioned.” From then on, Young observes, “all of Congress’s efforts to assert its coequal role with the president the burgeoning imperial presidency presented a major, ongoing challenge to lawmakers interested in following the edicts of the Constitution regarding governance.” 

Although “labor politics proved the most contentious of the wartime resource management issues before Congress,” the exigencies brought on by the war forced both liberals and conservatives, union leaders and businessmen, to strengthen the underlying structure of the New Deal regime, “prevent[ing] a return to the pre-New Deal ethos.” Could the United States government “compel work in a total war”? Could “and should” that state “compel employers to disregard gender and race”?

These questions were paramount because “the production of war material as the leading U.S. contribution to the war effort,” with some 10.5 million new workers taking jobs during the war, a number that “far outstripped civilian workers among the other Allied and Axis nations.” When FDR coined the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy,” he stamped it on real metal. Even the notorious internment of Japanese American citizens served the domestic side of the war effort; the Works Progress Administration built and oversaw most of the internment camps, where the internees were put to farm work.

Objections to compulsory labor centered on the meaning of such a policy for the American regime. Young quotes a Democrat Oklahoma congressman, Wesley E. Disney, who explained that both democratic self-government and the federalism which supported it were threatened: “I think that the States and the legislatures and the courthouses are where democracy is. This thing up here”—the federal government—is “the superstructure of democracy,” but it’s “down here” in the states and municipalities “where you and I, the humblest citizens, has a right to assert himself.” Federally mandated and regulated work “turns the individual over to an administrative system where he has no legal right to assert himself and no recourse to the ballot.” Ohio Republican Senator Robert A. Taft argued similarly: since “we are fighting for a democratic system of government,” we shouldn’t “suspend any more of our own freedom than necessary” to win that fight.

Seeing what they supposed to be an opportunity, several union leaders called strikes, demanding higher wages for their members. This backfired in the short term, as Americans had no patience with workers attempting to use a national crisis for their own material benefit, especially since other Americans were being pushed into working without the benefit of union membership. In the long run, however, the political economy of the war accustomed Americans to bureaucratic rule by a centralized state; also, seeing that the unions were not allowed to exploit their organized power in wartime, Americans saw that their sway could be limited in peacetime. There would be no proletarian takeover of the United States, although union members did win wider powers to file grievances against employers. Such compromises more fully instantiated the New Deal to a degree that might have proved impossible had the Depression ended without American entry into a world war.

Refugee policy proved unresolvable. After the surge in immigration prior to the First World War, sentiment against Europeans increased during the war itself, and Congress shut the door in the 1920s. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the debate over Roosevelt Administration policies strengthening military preparedness became entwined with some extraordinarily nasty rhetoric about the alleged menace of “Jewish bankers”—to the extent that Nevada Democrat M. Michael Epstein was compelled to remind his colleagues that “we live in a democracy” founded on the principle that “all men are created equal regardless of race, creed or color; and whether a man be a Jew or Gentile he may think what he deems fit.” Unfortunately, when it came to admitting Jewish refugees from the Nazi-ruled nations, “race and racial prejudice not governmental theory dominated,” and FDR “was unwilling to do much to alleviate the problem.” In this, compromise was no option, and the “restrictionist anti-Semites” in Congress shrewdly avoided any “anti-New Deal rhetoric” in the debates. As for those House of Representatives members who supported sending Jewish refugees to Palestine, in Young’s estimation they displayed “self-promotion more than commitment to mitigating the refugee crisis.” Almost all were from New York State, playing to the substantial number of Jewish constituents there. The senators who supported political Zionism, including Missouri’s Harry Truman, were more principled, “motivated more by political ideology than state voter demographics.” In this, they courageously opposed constituent sentiment, as 75% of Americans opposed refugee immigration and nearly half held European Jews “partially responsible for the actions Hitler had taken against them.” Even after the enormity of those actions began to be understood and publicized, many blamed the messengers, with more than 50% of the respondents in one poll complaining that “Jewish Americans had too much influence in the country.” Such attitudes made it “all but impossible for Congress to act on the most significant wartime humanitarian challenge before it.” In this, democracy acted as it often had done in ancient Greece: against justice. Although American republicanism or representative government was designed, in Madison’s famous words, “to refine and enlarge the public views,” it proved unable to do so, despite Congressional hearings in which members discussed the possibility of Hitlerian genocide as early as mid-1939. As early as 1933, Republican New York Congressman Hamilton Fish had submitted a resolution condemning “economic persecution and repression of Jews” in newly-established Nazi Germany; during the war, he sponsored numerous temporary tourist visa applications for European Jews and he even undertook “secret, unauthorized diplomatic relations with the British and the French to try to have space opened for a million refugees in Africa”—all to the indignation of Roosevelt, who regarded foreign policy as his exclusive domain and evinced little sympathy for the victims. Fish simply lacked the political standing to take meaningful charge of the matter. “Because there was no dominant voice in the war era about this matter, the restrictionists carried the day, at least until the war ended” and “the discovery of the death camps proved that the brutal facts” served “as a better leader than any president of member of Congress.” Neither the democratic republicanism left over from the old regime nor the administrative statism advanced by the new regime vindicated the natural rights of foreigners.

What about the natural and civil rights of American citizens? In the third and last domain Young chooses to consider in detail, the New Dealers’ stated esteem for civil liberties (and especially civil liberties for African Americans) within the framework of an administrative state that might threaten those liberties were also subordinated to the war effort.

Putting the matter plainly, Young writes, “The fulmination of racist southern demagogues dominated the political discourse and prevented an expansion of New Deal economic liberalism to include civil rights liberalism.” This is clearly but not adequately stated, inasmuch as civil rights liberalism would have been consistent with the principles if not the practice of the old regime, grounded as it was on equal natural rights. In fact, the pre-New Deal progressivist liberalism endorsed so-called ‘race science’ as one dimension of progress; some Americans had done so before Progressivism existed, as seen in the writings of John C. Calhoun and many others. Lynchings of innocent black Southerners continued, albeit more discreetly than before. This notwithstanding, Northern blacks continued to align themselves with the New Deal, encouraged by the favorable stand taken on civil rights by northern Democrats and frustrated by the failures of latter-day Republicans to act vigorously in their defense. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1944 case, Smith v. Allright, reversing a 1935 ruling, backed up civil rights advocates by judging the Texas practice of all-white political primaries unconstitutional. But this, Young insists, only “emboldened” the Southerners, who used it as a talking point for continued assertion of ‘states’ rights.’ In the untender words of South Carolina Democrat Ellison D. Smith, “I’m still for white supremacy and those who don’t like it can lump it. Those who vote for me I’ll be much obliged. Those who don’t can go to hell.” 

While standing on solid ground respecting civil rights, Young much more dubiously classifies the investigation of Communist penetration of the U.S. government as another civil liberties issue. “The earliest anti-Communist activists targeted the New Deal in the continuing congressional assault on liberalism and the statist policies developed in the period” beginning with the establishment of the New Deal itself. Young dismisses these efforts as attempts “to halt the New Deal, not to root out communism,” but she fails to consider the New Dealers’ endorsement of a ‘popular front’ strategy in the mid-thirties, whereby New Dealers welcomed socialists and communists in a coalition conceived as ‘one big Left.’ Given the malignant character of the existing communist regime in the Soviet Union, why might this intention not reflect poorly on New Deal liberalism, and surely on the judgment of New Dealers? In his capacity as chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Texas Representative Martin Dies (himself a New Dealer, during the first Roosevelt term) proceeded to “damage the New Deal coalition and narrow the options for reformers in the postwar era.” 

The core of Young’s error may be seen in her claim that “circulation of rumors conflating a legitimate political ideology—liberalism—within the mainstream of the American political tradition with communism—a political ideology that for better or worse terrified many Americans”—did the aforementioned damage. Congressional conservatives “implied [that] New Deal liberalism was actually foreign and antithetical to the nation’s political tradition.” But was it? The New Dealers’ immediate ideological predecessors, the Progressives, surely did not regard their enterprise as integral to the American political tradition. They rejected natural rights for historical rights and dismissed the U.S. Constitution as the product of an outmoded ‘Newtonian’ understanding of nature, to be rightly replaced by the more accurate ‘Darwinian’ understanding of nature as evolutionary or ‘historicist.’ The New Dealers made Progressivism more practical, less ‘idealistic,’ but they never backed away from historicism and from the rejection of the Constitutional separation of the separation of powers. They continued to regard the Constitutional as an ‘elastic’ or ‘living’ document—that is, one properly to be ‘reinterpreted’ in ways unrelated and indeed opposed to the plain meaning of the words on its pages. Obviously, this is not to say that New Deal liberalism was ‘as bad as’ or ‘the same as’ communism or fascism. The historicism of Hegel is not the historicism of Marx, the historicism of Marx not the same as that of Woodrow Wilson or of John Dewey (themselves not identical). But the New Deal coalition in its broadest form blurred these distinctions, easily lost during a war in which the Soviet Union fought on our side—sort of—until the end of the war when Stalin decided to hold on to his territorial gains and to install communist regimes on the nations his troops had conquered.

“Dies willed to postwar anti-Communists a method and a language through which liberalism could be discredited. His work to that end far surpassed any of the economic conservatives during the 1940s or the social conservatives who fought against refugee and civil rights reforms.” This “crusade against statist political solutions” to social and economic problems “slowly expanded and threatened the center left warfare state iteration of the New Deal order made permanent in the 1940s.” She cannot simply mean the tactics of Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, which failed to derail that moderate New Dealism; she must mean the critique of New Dealism, and of the anti-anticommunism of many Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, enunciated by Governor and then President Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, who had been a Democrat (albeit one who supported the anti-communist Harry Truman not the Popular Frontist Henry Wallace in the late ‘Forties) scarcely qualifies as a ‘McCarthyite.’ 

These flaws aside, Young does provide a serviceable overview of American politics during the war. The collection of dispatches authored by Isaiah Berlin sent from the British embassy where he was posted, necessarily provides a more detailed account of these struggles, one in many ways sharper-eyed than that of Young but nonetheless oddly consonant with her latitudinarian views of communism. To his credit, Berlin seems to have sobered up about the communists after the war, perhaps as a result of his 1945 conversation with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who had been cruelly persecuted by Soviet operatives for decades.

Berlin understands that as a democratic republic the United States is largely ruled by public opinion; his task was to provide British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Churchill with “information about changing attitudes and movements of opinion in the USA on issues considered to be of importance to Anglo-American relations.” The “rapturous unity” that followed the Pearl Harbor attack quickly gave way “to an atmosphere of criticism”—not of America’s involvement in the war but of inefficiencies attendant to fighting it, particularly in the Office of Civilian Defense, where James Landis was quickly brought in to assist the stumbling Director, Fiorella La Guardia, who had retained his office as mayor of New York City while signing on the the federal post. “It is typical of Mr. Roosevelt’s administrative methods, when one of his officials is criticized, not to displace him but to appoint somebody else to do the same job.” 

When it came to the American public’s opinion of Great Britain, Berlin saw that much work needed to be done. “I am concerned by the indications that the innate inclination to think and hear ill of our country and of us so readily comes to the surface,” although “the heads of the Administration are wholeheartedly convinced that our two countries must work in the closest harmony during the war and after.” And even some senior administrative officials prefer to “deal with international problems…untrammeled by consideration of the views of other governments.” He can only recommend “unremitting effort, patience and much wisdom to remedy” the difficulties, “clearly stand[ing] or fall[ing] by what we are,” understanding “that Americans are foreigners to us and we to them.”

The year 1942 sees little in American military activity, although “the news of the landing of United States forces in Africa” in late fall “was like cool water to a parched throat,” counteracting as it did “the feeling of frustration and meaninglessness which has been a depressing feature in recent months.” Berlin understands that no troops would arrive in Europe until the following year. In the meantime, he keeps track of American domestic politics, including the Congressional elections.

Given the entrance into the war of the Soviet Union on the side of the Allies, Berlin reports frequently on the investigations of Congressman Martin Dies into the presence of Communists in the Roosevelt Administration, beginning with the Board of Economic Warfare, chaired by the Communist sympathizing Vice President, Henry Wallace. Berlin disparages Dies’ efforts, wishing that he would pay more attention to America’s native fascists, who “are still uncurbed and very vocal in their advocacy of the new form of ‘America First,’ which consists of concentrating on the defense of the American mainland and Hawaii to the exclusion of all else.” By contrast, the American Communists, “following the strict Party line” dictated by the Kremlin, “are for all-out war effort with no discussion of wages.” This has caused a split between the thoroughly anti-Communist American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, as fourteen of the forty-four unions in the latter consortium “are reported to be under Communist domination,” and not just by Dies. Similarly, the Catholic Church, with its many Irish-American (and therefore anti-English) members, finds itself split between isolationists, led by the “Radio Priest” Father Charles Edward Coughlin, and such supporters of the war effort as New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, a Roosevelt confidant who served as FDR’s emissary to Pope Pius XII. Berlin finds “a considerable fear of Communism” in both official and business circles, “while in the country generally there is no enthusiasm for Russia comparable to that felt in the United Kingdom.”

Berlin classifies “the anti-Administration forces” in the election campaign into seven main groups: “virulent subversive bodies” that adhere to some form of fascism; the former members of the disbanded America First Committee (“timid businessmen and all those who fear and distrust the central government”); first- and second-generation German- and Italian-Americans, mostly anti-Fascist but “connected by ties of sentiment with their European kinsmen or anxious not to be reminded of the Europe from which they have escaped”; “Anglophobes or Russophobes,” such as “the Irish and Roman Catholics”; those Republicans who “think it important to maintain active political opposition in order to achieve a more effective prosecution of the war”; “groups with special grudges against the administration,” such as the small businessmen without defense contracts; and “Wall Street, fearing State Socialism.” Taken together, this amounts to thirty percent of the population “willing to discuss peace terms with the German Army if Hitler were disposed of” and ten percent who “would make peace with Hitler on the status quo.” “For a “far too wide a section of the American people this is not even yet a really popular war,” nor will it become so “until a great body of American troops begins to take part in actual fighting.” In response to Stalin’s impatience with Americans for failing to open a second front against the Axis in Europe, “a few newspapers…have “ask[ed] what Russia did to open a Second Front when the democracies were at bay in the West.”

On domestic matters, “numerous speakers in Congress have been publicly and privately exclaiming against usurpation of their legislative powers by growing power of bureaucracy,” sentiments Berlin attributes to corporate interests who regard the New Deal as an effort to “bind them more and more closely to central government by systematic economic subventions for which they and their representatives in Congress pay price of political independence.” Business interests point to the fact that “business enterprise is winning the war by its efforts” in manufacturing war supplies and that “the end of the war will provide unprecedented opportunities for business expansion,” which private enterprise must seize in order to “sav[e] the country from a permanent bureaucratic totalitarianism.” However, “political observers [have] agreed that past interpretations of [the U.S.] Constitution, particularly under wartime presidents, gave [the] President immense undefined powers” on the basis that the safety of the state is the supreme law. 

Some corporate interests, fronted by the potential presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and the publisher Henry Luce, envision a postwar American “economic imperialism.” Willkie “has failed to make any substantial inroads into [a] Republican machine which remains essentially nationalistic,” a fact that, Berlin worries, “does not augur too well for an enlightened post-war policy on [the] part of [the Republican Party.” Both Republican factions are opposed by Vice President Wallace and others who “are dreaming of a kind of world New Deal,” having prepared “blueprints to reorganize the world in order to secure the best distribution of persons and things with a bold programme, which ignores racial and political differences” and aims at “spending the vast natural resources of the United States upon world reconstruction.” Berlin deprecates this one-worldism as “the New Deal as the New Islam, divinely inspired to save the world.” “The clash between those who plan world social and economic arrangements and the dynamic militant technocrats [of capitalism] is perhaps the most important political manifestation at the moment.” While “the isolationist tradition must be expected to reassert itself” after the war “to a degree that cannot now be measured,” “against it may be set perhaps a growing recognition that for [the] United States to get into one war may have been bad luck but to have got into two looks like something wrong with the system.” Berlin himself evidently favors “a United Nations outlook,” but sees clearly enough that such a thing will run into American opposition to the Soviet Union, which “the new Congress is very far” from esteeming.

In the Congressional elections, the Democrats suffered “much heavier losses than anyone expected both in House and in Senate,” retaining only “nominal control” of the House and similarly unsure control of the Senate, given the Southern Democrats’ tendency to ally with the Republicans against the Administration on “domestic and economic issues.” The Democrats will lose experienced committee chairmen. They now control only half of the state governorships, with Republicans winning in “most important states, such as New York and California.” “For the first time since New Deal came into power Republicans are within striking distance of control in both House and Senate.” Although Berlin cautions that many elections were decided on local interests, not the “big vital and topical national issues which have provided Democrats with big majorities of [the] last few years,” he sees that of the “three great political forces” supporting the New Deal—the labor unions, the farmers, and the average American who had been thrown out of work by the Depression—only labor now supports the Roosevelt Administration. The farmers have lost manpower to conscription and resent this; the Forgotten Man has found employment in the war industries. While “isolationism was not an issue in [the] election,” neither has pre-war isolationism been judged an electorally punishable crime by the voters. The “New Deal must therefore lean for its power not on Congress but on [the] patronage and power of an Administration in office”—much enhanced by the construction of a centralized administrative state. Thus, “despite congressional losses the leaders of [the] New Deal are in no mood to compromise.” 

In sum, by the end of 1942 Berlin judged that “dislike for the New Deal is, I think, now directed mainly against theoretical ‘intellectual’ planning and its exponents,” with “a large part of American sentiment” evidently “unwilling to be committed to endorsement for this country of [the] degree of social planning which is apparently winning favor with British and European thought.” This has discouraged some of the New Dealers themselves—for example, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who has been quoted as having said “The New Deal was beat.” 

The beginning of 1943 features discussion of Vice President Wallace’s most recent effusion, calling an international air force and an “international authority for world projects.” His “enthusiastic praise for Wilson whom,” he judges, “the people of the United States had failed,” prefaced a warning that Germany was already planning World War III, a horror that “only economic justice and international cooperation could prevent.” Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce dismissed Wallace’s “global thinking” as “globaloney,” much to the delight of the conservative press, and “it is clear that Mrs. Luce expresses popular sentiment prevailing at this moment on [this] subject more accurately than do her opponents,” which include Mrs. Roosevelt. For himself, Berlin prefers the more sober Cordell Hull; the Secretary of State has won the respect of conservative Republicans while “genuinely abhor[ring] isolationism as a species of sin.” The shift in Republican opinion reflects a sense that pre-war isolationism has begun to fade, replaced by “varying degrees of nationalism” in opposition to “liberal internationalists whether of [the] Wallace or [the] Hull variety.” Berlin continues to worry about American “dreams of world domination” after the war; “while they may yield to Mr. Hull’s or the President’s wiser counsels, their strength must not be discounted.” Americans worry more about “Russian post-war purposes” than Berlin evidently does; the felt “need to prevent spread of Russia and Communism over Europe after the war” prevails not only “among churches and the Republican Party” but in the State Department, the military, and “sections of [the] Office of Strategic Services.” Later in the year, Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge would give a speech in which he reasoned that “since the other great powers conceived their vital interests clearly—Britain with her desire to preserve her Empire, Russia with her territorial aims in Eastern Europe—it was high time for the United States to do likewise if they are not to be left without the strategic imports which at the present rate of expenditure they will have need of after the war”; he went on “to pour a practical man’s scorn on the notion of world or regional reorganization unsupported by a previous attempt to harmonize their national purposes by the major allies.”

Speculation and preparation for the 1944 presidential campaign has seized Washington by March. Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen appears as a rising star on the Republican side, mixing internationalism (a world police force, supervision of airways and seaways by a United Nations organization, lowering of trade barriers, a declaration of universally recognized human rights) with “a strong anti-New Deal bias in internal affairs.” Some Democrats are rumored ready themselves against a Roosevelt fourth term, too, including Postmaster General and Democratic Party National Chairman James Farley, who hopes to draw Catholic voters away from FDR toward James F. Byrnes. Berlin considers this unlikely; Byrnes is a loyalist (FDR had appointed him first to the Supreme Court and then to two major posts in his wartime administration); further, “persons close to [the] White House say that the President is fully resolved to stand again.” 

Foreign Secretary Eden’s arrival in Washington sparks suspicions in some quarters that the Brits harbor “a desire to mediate between Russia and the United States,” an “attempt by Britain to recover her traditional position as the manipulator of balance of power between Russia and [the] United States as formerly between France and Germany,” a game Americans do “not wish to see…started again.” In April, the president sent his Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs and ‘Brain-Truster’ Adolf Berle out to assure Americans that Russia will be too busy after the war with the “vast task of internal reconstruction” to undertake a project of expansion into Europe and that, even it it does, the “notion of a cordon sanitaire of buffer states on Russia’s western border was an outworn concept of bad old diplomacy and stultified by modern air power.” Such talk was embarrassed in the following month, when news of the Soviet massacre of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest reached the United States, but Berlin is reassured that “strong pro-Polish sentiments in [the] United States outside [the] Catholic Church has been rare.” Indeed, pro-Soviet sentiments had been bolstered by Stalin’s conciliatory May Day speech, wherein he announced the dissolution of the Comintern, which “all sides consider…as a deliberate step on the part of Stalin towards [an] understanding with the West,” with “Russophile liberals acclaim[ing] it without reservation as confirming their brightest hopes.” Berle thinks that “Stalin had decided to make clear to the Russian public that [the] era of revolutionary adventures and international conspiracies was over.” Roosevelt knew differently, but didn’t much care. Near the end of the year he told the Greek ambassador that “no fuss would be made by the United States Government about the incorporation of the Baltic States by Soviet Russia, and that after much trouble an appropriate formula to cover this had at last been found”; moreover, FDR confessed that “he was thoroughly tired of the Polish problem, and had told the Polish Ambassador so in clear language.”

At mid-year, the New Deal shifts a bit to the ‘Right,’ spurred by FDR’s concern that the Southern Democrats might break with the party altogether if the likes of Wallace are not reigned in. FDR had lost patience with Wallace as an administrator; his chairmanship of the Board of Economic Warfare had “failed to do what was expected of it, to resolve inter-departmental disputes in external economic affairs without requiring perpetual reference to [the] President”; the Board’s chief of staff, Wallace ally Milo Perkins, had “maladroitly administered” his underlings “and was a principal source of both confusion and delay in many fields.” “Only old Jacobins of [the] New Deal who follow Wallace and Perkins feel betrayed and they must support [the] President in any case.” Although Berlin could not know it at the time, this prepared the way for the replacement of Wallace with Harry Truman on the Democratic Party ticket as the vice-presidential candidate in 1944. “The New Deal once again has been sacrificed to [the] war effort.” Moderate public opinion in the country “seems profoundly bored with Wallace and New Deal ideals,” issuing a collective yawn in response to his July speech, in which he signaled his intention “to continue as principal champion of New Deal liberalism.” “The present policy of the left wing of the New Deal is to continue to support the President with remorseless fidelity despite his deviations, while fiercely attacking interests which they conceive to be hostile to him, whether or not this suits the President’s actual purposes.” Dr. New Deal had indeed given place to Dr. Win the War.

1944 begins with the embarrassment of the risible Willkie. The Soviets by now are driving the German army back across Eastern and Central Europe, reigniting the Polish question. Willkie published an article “warning the minorities”—i.e., Europeans now occupied, or about to be occupied, by the Red Army—against “undue agitation but advocating the need for an equitable arrangement, to be found in consultation with Russia, to adjust the status of the border states.” Even such a mild hint has proven a target for Pravda, “which suddenly pitched into him as a political gambler, meddler and opportunist of the first water”—this, after frequently praising him in the past as “a true friend of the USSR.” “As there are few persons in this country familiar with the sardonic pleasure which the USSR is liable to take in tripping up its over-zealous bourgeois suitors when these are guilty of tactless behavior, there is very general surprise” at this move, felt most acutely by the “completely dazed” Willkie. (This minor tempest didn’t prevent Willkie from defeating Dewey in the Republican Party primary election in Wisconsin, a few months later.) As for American Poles, some “are trying to pin their hopes on Churchill inasmuch as they do not expect any further genuine aid from the President.” In Washington, Berlin observes, “there is no great love for Russia but there is great respect and admiration, and general sentiment, discernible in the press and in conversation of young ‘tough-minded’ Washington and other executives whose temper is likely to shape American policy in future years, is that Russia is doing [the] only sensible thing for a rising great continental power”; such American ‘realists’ expect that they may well come to a “direct understanding with Russia,” without the British as an intermediary.

Berlin is pleased to report that the leading Republican presidential ‘hopeful,’ New York governor Thomas Dewey, opposes any such move, being suspicious of “Russian secretiveness” and sympathetic toward Churchill, “who, he felt, was being blackmailed into a European invasion which would be bloody though doubtless inevitable.” Dewey is firmly allied with the firm anti-Communist, John Foster Dulles, who entertains such globalist illusions as “international control of military establishments” and “protection of religious and intellectual liberty,” despite the existence of the Soviet Union, which might be expected to have a say in postwar arrangements. Berlin is nonetheless encouraged that both men are “genuinely favorable to American participation in world affairs” and to “an Anglo-American alliance.” 

D-Day brings on “a general tone of opinion” that is “sensible and not over-enthusiastic,” as Americans expect “large casualties.” “There is no observable change in [the] normal life of the country.” Given the “almost automatic tendency of [the] United States press and public to attribute all good things to American authorship there has been relatively little emphasis on primacy of American troops” in the invasion, although perhaps not enough credit given do “justice to our part in [the] enterprise.” 

The July party conventions yield no surprises. Dewey wins the Republican Party nomination, though he is no one’s real favorite and distrusted by GOP ‘machine’ politicians; “he looked to them a disturbingly cold, tight-lipped, uncommitted and, from their point of view, tricky personality, who might easily not prove wholly amenable” to them “and was, above all, very much not one of themselves.” As it happened, the hapless Willkie would die less than a month before the election. The Democrats—an “unstable amalgamation of interests (conservative Southerners, northern Negroes, labor unions, left-wing radicals, Catholics, foreign-born groups and large city machines) brought together by fortuitous, historical and geographical circumstances and held together more by a common interest in retaining political power than by any single political or economic philosophy,” but “happily for us…not generally divided over [the] President’s foreign policy”—have “finally acquiesced in [the] fact that Mr. Roosevelt was their only possible leader for [the] coming election.” The drama thus centered on the selection of his running-mate. FDR smartly let the Wallaceites and anti-Wallaceites “fight it out” within limits he imposed by circulating a list of acceptable candidates while protesting his preference for Wallace. “In so doing he deftly transferred bad feeling which was inevitable in [the] selection of a Vice-President whatever happened, from his own shoulders to those of party bosses.” The bosses, “who held [the] balance of power” between the liberals and the Southern conservatives, chose Senator Harry Truman, whom Berlin judges as “something of a lightweight,” albeit a likeable, honest, affable, and modest one. He has won accolades during the war for his fair-minded chairmanship of a special Senate committee charged with investigating waste, scandal, and inefficiency in the war effort. “He has never been one of the closest intimates of [the] White House,” and “his capacity to fill [the] presidential chair in an emergency raises obvious questions.” From an electoral standpoint, however, he is an improvement over the silly and controversial Wallace, and that is likely what won the favor of Party bosses. “No one can say with any assurance what will happen to the Democratic Party in [the] next four years, though, depending on post-war conditions, extensive realignments [are] seen quite on the cards.” 

Unsurprisingly, FDR wins reelection, albeit with a smaller popular majority than in his three previous presidential campaigns. When it came right down to it, “To Roosevelt’s Gladstone there was no discernible potential Disraeli.” “Almost as significant as [the] President’s own re-election was [the] defeat both in primaries and in [the] elections themselves of leading isolationists in [the] Senate and also [the] House.” “For the first time since Woodrow Wilson it is not wholly certain whether the isolationists can on paper muster [the] fatal one-third of Senators required to block a treaty”—namely, the treaty proposing a postwar ‘United Nations.’ Such opposition clearly come to the surface in the Senate debate following the Dumbarton Oaks conference in August; concerns about American sovereignty and involvement in future foreign wars win little sympathy from Professor Berlin, a firm advocate of Anglo-American alliance. The main cloud on the Democrats’ political horizon remains the Southern part of their coalition, consisting of men who “are uneasily wondering whether they are not traveling in the company of a Frankenstein’s monster,” namely, the liberal groups who will, they anticipate, toss them aside at some opportune moment. Berlin correctly predicts that “the combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats…will one day burst through” the existing party framework and radically transform the present party system to allow for the new political and economic realities,” although “this seems unlikely during Mr. Roosevelt’s regime.” 

The Yalta Conference of February 1945 settled the borders of the Central and Eastern European states, in effect insuring that the Communists would rule them. This was not understood by many at the time. Berlin concerns himself primarily with the ‘optics,’ remarking that “to have the American public believe that Yalta was an American success would be a cheap price to pay for acceptance of American participation in settlement of European problems.” By June, “the myth of Mr. Roosevelt as a great and wise mediator between the powerful figures of Mr. Churchill and Marshal Stalin, whose policies might otherwise have come into open collision,” had become “deeply embedded in the popular consciousness of the American people.” Berlin correctly reports that the “Polish settlement will be [the] main center of controversy,” with “Congressmen from Polish areas of Illinois and Michigan” condemning Yalta “as another Munich.” He regards such protests as manageable, as Americans generally “sympathize with the Poles but accept the inevitable,” namely, Communist rule over a nation now occupied by the Red Army. 

Roosevelt’s death follows in April. “There is everywhere a recognition that his abiding place in history is secure if only because he brought into existence a full-fledged new policy in domestic and in foreign affairs alike…. Moreover, he has altered, perhaps in perpetuity, the concept of the duties and function of the United States Government in general and of the Presidency in particular. It is so far a cry from the days when President Coolidge could say ‘The business of the Government of the United States is business’ that most Americans scarcely realize that the tradition of positive action towards social welfare with which the automatically identify the duties of any United States President…and which now seems so permanent, was established so recently and by the efforts of relatively so few men and women.” “If there is strong, and probably justified, expectation of the relaxation of centralized Washington control and of profoundly personal government,” in the eyes of most Americans, FDR’s policies, foreign and domestic, “will and should be carried on in the manner for which he had, in the end, secured the positive approval of the vast majority of the nation.”

In the event, the Communists begin to overplay their strong hand, in America and internationally. In New York City, the Communist Party has allied with the Democratic machine pols of Tammany Hall, “combin[ing] some of the dirtiest and most effective politicians in New York City.” “New Dealers seem to have realized too late what they had let themselves in for,” as this sort of thing diminishes the likelihood of “a straight New Deal victory in 1948, say under Mr. Wallace”—as it indeed would prove. In foreign policy, President Truman, eventually the beneficiary of such Popular Front-like dealings, has sent FDR’s trusted advisor Harry Hopkins to Moscow in an attempt “to convey to the Kremlin the dangerous effect of present Soviet policies [in Europe] upon American public opinion and the United States Government and to collect sufficient information about the present Soviet position to enable the American Government to determine its course of action whilst reassuring public opinion that it has an ‘independent policy’ of its own.” 

The defeat of the British Conservative Party and the consequent removal of Churchill as Prime Minister causes an initial “a shock of astonishment” among Americans “that was almost reminiscent of the reactions to the Pearl Harbor bombing.” They cannot understand what they took to be “a strange ingratitude on the part of the British electorate.” Berlin calculates the effects: first, British foreign policy “in the coming weeks” will be watched carefully, “and this in itself will have the salutary effect of arresting the recent trend to ignore our role and concentrate on the purposes of the Big Two”; American support for Great Britain will shift, as “liberals and left-wingers,” highly critical of Churchill’s firm opposition to the Communist in Greece, “will once against tend to rally to our side,” now that the Labour Party controls the government; finally, American conservatives and business interests now “feel very much alone on a choppy collectivist sea,” whereas “the pressures on the Truman Administration from ‘left of center’ seem likely to increase.” 

The final major events Berlin assesses are the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the consequent surrender of Japan before the Soviets could intervene in the Pacific. “The psychological impact of these events upon the public, especially of the atomic bomb, was greater than anything America had experienced in the war, even Pearl Harbor, and profound changes in the currents of thought seem inevitable.” Initially, “stories of the atomic bomb appealed to everything most typical in the American nature,” as “the lurid fantasies of the comic strips seemed suddenly to have come true” while at the same time fantasizing that the Bomb “will end all war” and nuclear power “will revolutionize human life.” Almost immediately, “along with a thrill of power and the instinctive pleasure at the thought of Japan in abject surrender, America’s deep-rooted humanitarianism has begun to assert itself and this secondary revulsion has been very marked in private conversation although it has not yet appeared in the press,” as “there is a good deal of heart-searching about the morality of using such a weapon, especially against an enemy already known to be on his last legs.” Berlin seems most interested in the Bomb’s political effect: that it “is doing more than Pearl Harbor or the war to obliterate the last vestiges of the isolationist dream, and in this sense it is a new weapon in the hands of the internationalists.” Almost as satisfyingly, “the fact that the bomb is a British-American-Canadian invention has been recognized,” giving “a fillip” to the notion of “Anglo-American teamwork.” 

As for the Soviets, Americans expect them to be developing a nuclear weapon of their own. By August, it has become “daily more evident that the United States of America sees Soviet Russia as its only rival for world supremacy and at the same time has no desire to become unnecessarily embroiled with her.” News of a treaty between the Kremlin and the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-Shek regime in China proves an “immense relief,” since “the possibility of America becoming involved in a Far Eastern dispute on China’s side has hung like a cloud over all those who hold that peace primarily depends on the cultivation of harmonious relations between the two great world powers.” The Communist Chinese would soon have a say in that, but Berlin returns to London well before Mao’s victory.

Taken together, Berlin and Young show how the regime change effected by the New Deal was consolidated during the Second World War, and in many ways thanks to the exigencies imposed on Americans by that war. As a member of the British Embassy staff in Washington, Berlin understandably concentrates his mind on President Roosevelt and his operatives; with the advantage of hindsight, Young can offer a more balanced account that delves into the actions of Congressmen. Both recognize the importance of public opinion in consolidating the regime change, as such earlier Progressives as Woodrow Wilson had emphasized, a generation earlier. If a democratic republic would now become a mixed-regime republic with a powerful ‘aristocratic’ element seen in an empowered permanent bureaucracy, popular voices would still continue to be heard and to be attended to, albeit in more problem-ridden ways. Confident that it could assuage the worries of ‘the democracy’ by a combination of presidential rhetoric or ‘leadership’ and bureaucratic regulation of largesse, the new elites looked to the future confidently. For a long time, they were right to be confident.