On the central issue of the strike, however, Edsel stood his ground against his father. Whereas the elder Ford believed he could bring the fledgling union to its knees by simply refusing to accept its existence, Edsel argued strongly that negotiating with labor was the only path to the future. It was Edsel who convinced his father to allow Ford officials, for the first time in the history of the company, to sit across a conference table from union representatives. “Mr. Ford gave in to Edsel’s wishes,” Harry Bennett conceded. The union would never have won “if it hadn’t been for Edsel’s attitude.”
As part of the agreement, preparations were made for a company-wide election to determine whom the workers wanted to represent them. Both the CIO and its conservative rival, the AFL, were on the ballot, along with the option of remaining a nonunion shop. When the votes were counted, the CIO had won a smashing victory, taking 70 percent of the vote to 27 percent for the AFL. A mere 2.6 percent had voted to keep Ford a nonunion shop.
The results took Henry Ford totally by surprise. “It was a measure of Henry Ford’s contact with reality,” his biographer Robert Lacey observed, that he actually cherished the expectation that his men, “in a gesture of confidence and gratitude for his lifetime of laboring on their behalf,” would reject both union options and decide to keep Ford a nonunion shop. “It was perhaps the greatest disappointment he had in all his business experience,” Ford’s production chief, Charles Sorensen, recalled.
After the election, Henry Ford was never the same again. His zest seemed to vanish. When the time came to sit down with the CIO and work out a new contract, he simply caved in—granting the union virtually everything it asked, including wages equal to the highest in the industry, the abolition of the infamous spy system, and reinstatement of all employees dismissed for union activities. Union leaders pronounced the settlement the greatest of all labor victories in their generation.
• • •
Labor’s victory at Ford vindicated Roosevelt’s faith that the mobilization process would be an agent of positive change. But he also knew that every delay in the defense program was deadly, and that the public was turning against unions with a vengeance. In the House, a bill was introduced providing “treason” penalties for strikes on defense work; in Georgia, the draft board announced it would furnish no more men for the army until the government moved to stop strikes. Trying to steer a middle course, the president promised to take action against unjustified strikes in the defense industry.
Eleanor, unconstrained by her husband’s need for balancing opposing sides, became even more emphatic in her support of labor, arguing that the bill to provide the death penalty for strikers was “perfect nonsense.” “We ought not to behave as though this question were a case of patriotism,” she said. “The strike situation is not so bad. If we take all the hours of man hours lost from the defense program we find there is a loss of only one-tenth of one percent man labor hours in the year so far.”
At her press conference on April 7, Eleanor conceded that she had received a great many letters from mothers of service trainees demanding that labor be forced to produce the arms their sons were called to bear. But in the long run, Eleanor argued, maximum productivity could only be attained if the workers were satisfied that their rights and interests were fully respected. Seen in this light, the strike at Ford was not a sinister act to be feared but, rather, an affirmation of the vitality of democracy.
Eleanor’s support for labor became more difficult to maintain in the weeks ahead, when a wildcat strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, halted production on desperately needed twin-engine bombers. This time, in contrast to the situation at Ford, a small splinter group with admitted ties to the Communist Party had arrogantly defied both the federal government and the CIO by walking out in the middle of negotiations. “The infamous hand” of the Communist Party “is apparent,” UAW labor leader Richard Frankensteen warned. “This is not just a charge on the part of the company management.”
With the North American strike, Time observed, “Franklin Roosevelt reached a worm-turning point. Having tolerated strikes in defense industry for many months—until the public was fed up and Congress indignant—he either had to put up or curl up.”
In a tense mood, Roosevelt signed an executive order directing the secretary of war, with the help of twenty-five hundred federal troops, to take possession of the plant and break the strike. As the uniformed troops marched into the area, the local strike leader, Joe Freitag, issued a defiant call. “The armed forces will not break our strike. Bombers can’t be made with bayonets.” Freitag was wrong. Only two hours after the army battalions took over, the workers returned, streaming through the gates by the thousands. The strike was over.
• • •
Spring had come to Washington. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Yet the glacial mood of the capital refused to melt. Accusations filled the air as the mobilization process faltered. Production of planes was 30 percent behind schedule. “Washington rarely ever has been in such confusion as today,” Washington correspondent David Lawrence wrote. “The internal situation is becoming almost as grave as the external.” Though the president had replaced the NDAC in December with a stronger organization, the Office of Production Management (OPM), headed jointly by former NDAC members William Knudsen and Sidney Hillman, he had not yet developed an organization that could run without him. When he was indisposed or preoccupied with other matters, the wheels seemed to stop moving. “What has not yet been realized,” Lawrence continued, “is that it is impossible for the President through the normal peacetime type of organization to carry on war preparations which amount to the same thing as if America were actually at war.”
“It took Hitler more than five years to get ready for this war,” observed Leon Henderson, the rumpled chief of yet another new organization, the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply (OPACS), designed to prevent profiteering and undue price rises. “We’ve got months, not years in which to prepare.” And the battle could only be won “if this nation produces more and faster than any nation has ever produced before.”
New Dealers argued that business was intentionally holding down defense production in order to profit from the tantalizing rise in consumer demand for civilian products that was accompanying the military buildup. Business countered that it was doing all it could to expand its defense production in an atmosphere poisoned by labor strife and social-welfare concerns.
The struggle focused that spring on the automobile industry, which was producing new cars in record numbers, “gobbling an intolerable share of scarce raw materials”—80 percent of all rubber, 49 percent of strip steel, 44 percent of sheet steel, 34 percent of lead. While the War Department agonized over America’s limited supply of steel, aluminum, and rubber, auto dealers were proudly displaying their shiny new models in showrooms. The new Packard boasted a streamlined shape with fenders integral to the body and a high radiator grill; Willys announced a new price leader, the American Blue Streak Coupe; Chevrolet introduced a new “get away” gear or second speed.
As the new head of OPACS, Leon Henderson was at the center of the controversy. For months he had argued for a sharp curtailment in the production of passenger cars in order to force the industry to divert its men, management, and raw materials from civilian to defense needs. “You can’t have 500 bombers a month and business as usual,” declared Henderson. “We cannot fight a war with convertible coupes,” I. F. Stone added, “or overawe a Panzer division with a brigade of statistics on automobile sales.”
But Henderson’s call for a 50-percent cut in the production of automobiles met unrelenting resistance at the top of the administration, from William Knudsen. The OPM chief argued that a cut of 50 percent would throw the entire industry into chaos, resulting in widespread unemployment and tremendous distress. Moving quickly to outflank Henderson, Knudsen called a press conference on April 17, and announced with great fanfare that he had just concluded a
meeting with the leaders of the auto industry. “The entire industry willingly accepted an initial 20 percent reduction in the production of motor vehicles for the model year beginning August 1,” Knudsen proudly announced.
It sounded swell, I. F. Stone noted in The Nation, but it was in fact a ruse, given that production for the banner year of 1941 was already running more than 20 percent ahead of the previous year, so a cut of 20 percent would merely bring it back to normal. “The problem,” Stone continued, “is to turn existing mass-production facilities as rapidly as possible to the production of armament. We are fumbling that problem, and we have no time to fumble.” The time had come, Stone concluded, for Knudsen to turn in his resignation. Stimson agreed. “I am afraid,” the secretary of war recorded in his diary, “that Knudsen is too soft and slow because of his connection with the auto industry.”
Eleanor was in full agreement with Henderson and Stimson; she had argued all along that Knudsen was fatally biased toward industry. Entering the fray, she approached the problem from a different angle, calling on the American people “to begin thinking about doing without various commodities such as new automobiles and aluminum kitchen utensils when present stocks are exhausted.” Instead of competing for various articles now, she urged Americans to save their money for the future, for the abundant new cars and refrigerators that would become readily available after the emergency ended. Echoing Eleanor’s sentiments, Henderson predicted that Americans would “cheerfully forego the luxury of new automobiles in order to assure adequate mechanized equipment for defense.”
Henderson was wrong. In truth, just the opposite phenomenon developed that spring, whereby anxious consumers, afraid that the supply of cars would eventually be curtailed, rushed to the showrooms in greater numbers than ever before. It would take the attack on Pearl Harbor to create the patriotic mood that, along with rationing and a limited supply of civilian goods, stimulated Americans to do precisely as Eleanor suggested—to put their money in government bonds, which could be cashed in for houses and cars and washing machines as soon as the war ended. Indeed, during the war, personal savings would rise to unprecedented levels, laying the foundation for the postwar boom.
But for the time being, in the fractious mood that characterized a still-divided America in the spring of 1941, Eleanor’s pleas fell on deaf ears, and the struggle between Henderson and Knudsen continued unabated.
• • •
By the end of April, a tone of weariness and irritation had crept into the president’s voice as he tried to juggle the cries of isolationists with Britain’s struggle to survive. “The President has on his hands at the present time,” Admiral Harold Stark observed, “about as difficult a situation as ever confronted any man anywhere in public life.”
With the coming of spring, the Germans had resumed their offensive, and the results were devastating. The first week of April witnessed the invasion of Yugoslavia, heralded by the killing of seventeen thousand civilians in Belgrade within the first twenty-four hours. Eleven days later, the overwhelmed Yugoslavians signed an act of surrender. After Yugoslavia, it took the Germans less than four weeks to conquer neighboring Greece, and to drive British forces in Libya back to the Egyptian border.
While British armies were meeting disaster abroad, Britain’s home economy was on the verge of strangulation and collapse. In March and April, German submarines seemed to be roaming the North Atlantic at will; British ships were being sunk at the terrifying rate of three times their capacity to replace them. Imports into Britain had fallen to a volume less than needed to feed the British people or to keep the factories going. Unless the Battle of the Atlantic could be won, there was little hope that the country could survive.
For months, Stimson and Knox had been pressuring the president to ask the Congress for the power to convoy British ships across the Atlantic. Without American intervention “to forcibly stop the German submarines,” Stimson told Roosevelt, “the dispatch of additional supplies to Britain was like pouring water into a leaky bathtub.” The navy plans called for transferring three battleships, four cruisers, and one aircraft carrier from the Pacific fleet to the Atlantic to serve as escorts for the merchant ships.
Roosevelt knew that everyone was waiting for him to cross the line, and he knew that sooner or later he would cross it. But, for the moment, he refused to take the lead, convinced that convoys would lead to shooting, and shooting would lead to war. Believing that his broad consensus for lend-lease had been forged on the assumption that aid to Britain would prevent, rather than instigate, American entry into war, Roosevelt feared that convoys would shatter the national agreement and force him to carry a divided nation into war. A national poll on the 8th of April confirmed the president’s fears. When asked if they supported convoys, 41 percent of the American people were in favor, 50 percent opposed.
The president proposed instead a more limited action—the establishment of an extended patrol system to detect German subs and report their locations to British ships. When it was suggested by the press that these patrols, which the president likened to those used by the pioneers to scout Indians, might in effect be convoys, an aggravated Roosevelt remarked that “one could not turn a cow into a horse by calling it a horse.” Yet FDR, Jr., in a confidential letter to his sister, Anna, on April 2, did precisely that when he told her that his destroyer, the U.S.S. Mayrant, was going to be part of the new “escort patrol” squadron, “which is the cutest name I can imagine for what I think will be actual convoying before long.”
From the German perspective, there was little doubt, as Goebbels wrote in his diary in April, that “the U.S.A. is preparing to make the leap to war. If Roosevelt were not so chary of public opinion, he would have declared war on us long ago.”
On Tuesday morning, April 22, a discouraged Stimson went to see the president. Stimson warned his boss from the outset that he was going to speak very frankly and hoped Roosevelt wouldn’t question his loyalty and affection. “He reassured me on that point and then I went over the whole situation of the deterioration in the American political situation toward the war that has taken place since nothing happened immediately after the lend-lease victory. I cautioned him on the necessity of his taking the lead and that without a lead on his part it was useless to expect the people would voluntarily take the initiative.”
Though Stimson was delighted by the “intimate” nature of his conversation with the president, he remained apprehensive about Roosevelt’s lack of leadership. “I am worried,” he recorded in his diary, “because the President shows evidence of waiting for the accidental shot of some irresponsible captain on either side to be the occasion for his going to war. I think he ought to consider the deep principles which underlie the issue in the world and [have] divided the world into two camps, [of] one of which he is the leader.”
At the very moment when Stimson was talking frankly with the president, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes was baring his own disgruntled soul to Missy LeHand. Ickes was so concerned about the president’s lack of leadership that he was considering resigning from the Cabinet. “Knudsen simply is not delivering the goods,” he recorded in his diary. “Big business is having altogether too much say about our preparedness program. We are talking about asking working men to give 24 hour service in shifts, but we listen to businessmen talk about ‘business as usual.’” In every direction, Ickes believed, there was a growing discontent with the president’s leadership. “He still has the country if he will take it and lead it.” But people were starting to say, “I am tired of words; I want action.”
“I turn to Missy,” Ickes wrote in his diary on April 22, “when I feel deeply about how things are going because I not only trust her discretion but have confidence in her wisdom, even if I mistrust her on the subject of Harry Hopkins. I took my hair down and told her exactly how I felt about the situation. I found that she had the same thoughts and the same apprehensions. She knows that he is tired and she appreciates as keenly as anyone the fact that he i
s relying more and more on the people in his immediate entourage. I told her that I would be perfectly satisfied if he fired everyone else and relied solely on her. She agreed with me that no one could hope to get in from the outside as Felix Frankfurter had suggested . . . . She realizes that something ought to be done to build up public sentiment in the country and remarked caustically that, while we were doing nothing, Senator Wheeler and others were going about making speeches and creating an adverse sentiment.”
On Friday, May 2, the president journeyed to Staunton, Virginia, to dedicate the home in which Woodrow Wilson had been born. With Eleanor on the West Coast, Missy accompanied him as the official hostess. It was a rough day for Roosevelt. His stomach was in turmoil, he was running a temperature, and all the color from his face was gone. “FDR looked as bad as a man can look and still be about,” the Time reporter observed. Though he managed to get through his brief address, the accompanying pleasantries were canceled.
That evening, Dr. McIntire found the president suffering from an intestinal disturbance and severe anemia. His red-blood-cell count, which should have been at five million, had dropped suddenly to 2.8 million. The immediate therapy involved iron injections, two transfusions, and complete rest.
Unaware of her husband’s illness, Eleanor was cheerfully ensconced with Anna and John at their home in Seattle. Curiously, when Eleanor had first arrived on the West Coast the week before, she had had a premonition that something was wrong. In her mailbox at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was a message saying that Washington was calling. “My heart sank,” she admitted. “But in a few minutes my husband’s calm and reassuring voice announced that he was just calling to give me a little conversation.”