Responding enthusiastically to the president’s request, American citizens by the thousands raced to their local stores to purchase maps. “The map business is booming,” The New York Times reported. At C. S. Hammond & Co. on 43rd Street, E. O. Schmidt, the sales manager, had gone to the downtown warehouse on the Saturday morning before the speech and brought two thousand copies of their new atlas back to the store to augment their stock. By nightfall, the entire stock was completely sold. Mr. Schmidt said he had seen nothing like it in the twenty-four years he had been in the business. “Why even last night when I went home, my wife, who has never particularly cared about maps, asked me to put up on the wall a large commercial map I’ve had for years.”
When the president spoke at 10 p.m. on February 23, more than sixty-one million adults (nearly 80 percent of the total possible adult audience) were by their radios, many with their maps spread before them. Speaking in a clear, confident tone, Roosevelt likened the present stage of the struggle to the early years of the Revolutionary War, when George Washington and his Continental Army were faced with formidable odds, recurring defeats, and limited supplies. “Selfish men, jealous men, fearful men proclaimed the situation hopeless.” But Washington “held to his course” and a new country was born.
In similar fashion, Roosevelt said, the American people must be prepared to suffer more losses “before the turn of the tide.” The months ahead would not be easy. But “your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart.” This war, he explained, was “a new kind of war,” waged on “every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world. That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me the references I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of the war.”
Revealing his own vast knowledge of geography, derived to a large extent from his beloved stamps, Roosevelt patiently described the Allied situation in every part of the world. In this new war, he explained, “the broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields.” The road ahead would be difficult, but he was certain, he said, that it was only a matter of time until America’s productive genius was fully mobilized, capable of giving the Allies “the overwhelming superiority of military material necessary for ultimate triumph.”
“From Berlin, Rome and Tokyo we have been described as a nation of weakling-playboys,” he concluded. “Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men . . . Let them tell that to the boys in the flying fortresses. Let them tell that to the Marines!”
The speech was a great success, “even more effective,” Sam Rosenman observed, “than the President’s first fireside chat back in the dark days of 1933 during the banking crisis.” The New York Times agreed, hailing the address as “one of the greatest of Roosevelt’s career.” Success bred the desire for more. Russell Leffingwell, an old friend and a partner at J. P. Morgan, advised Roosevelt that the only way to rouse the people was for him to speak more frequently on the radio.
“Sometimes,” Roosevelt replied, revealing a subtle understanding of leadership, “I wish I could carry out your thought of more frequent talking on the air on my part but the one thing I dread is that my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness . . . . Every time I talk over the air it means four or five days of long, overtime work in the preparation of what I say. Actually, I cannot afford to take this time away from more vital things. I think we must avoid too much personal leadership—my good friend Winston Churchill has suffered a little from this. It must grow more slowly—remembering always that we have only been in the war for three months.”
As always, Roosevelt’s dominant instinct was to unify the nation. “No one understood better than he,” historian Eric Larrabee has written, “the inner dynamics of American strength: how to mobilize it, how to draw on it, how to gauge its limits. Once mobilized, it did not need to be driven; it needed only to be steered.”
• • •
If Roosevelt shrewdly understood the strength of America’s democracy, he failed miserably to guard against democracy’s weakness—the tyranny of an aroused public opinion. As attitudes toward Japanese Americans on the West Coast turned hostile, he made an ill-advised, brutal decision to uproot thousands of Japanese Americans from their homes, forcing them into incarceration camps located in the interior of the country.
The tortuous path to the president’s tragic decision, considered by the American Civil Liberties Union “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history,” began with a false assessment by the military that the Japanese Americans were a substantial threat to national security. Though there was never any hard evidence brought forward to confirm sabotage on the part of the Japanese Americans, the rumors of shore-to-shore signaling and fifth-column treachery were so widespread that they became accepted as fact. “Two Japs with Maps and Alien Literature Seized,” one report read. “Caps on Jap Tomato Point to Air Base,” read another. Though the Army’s West Coast commander, General John De Witt, admitted that nothing had actually been proved, he proceeded, in a tortured twist of logic, to argue that “the very fact that no sabotage has taken place is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”
Racism fueled the claim of “military necessity.” For fifty years, anti-Japanese sentiment had been embedded in the social structure of the West Coast, producing exclusionary laws and restrictions on alien citizenship. With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the humiliating defeats suffered by the Allies in the Pacific, the explosive force of this hostility was released. Day after day, newspapers headlined vilification against the Japanese, calling them “mad dogs, yellow vermin and nips.” The atmosphere of hatred gave license to extremist elements. “California was given by God to a white people,” the president of Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West proclaimed, “and with God’s strength we want to keep it as he gave it to us.”
“These people were not convicted of any crime,” Eleanor wrote years later in a draft of an unpublished article, “but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental looking people. There was no time to investigate families or to adhere strictly to the American rule that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty.”
Economic cupidity also played a significant role. “Originally,” Eleanor wrote, the Japanese immigrants “were much needed on ranches and on large truck and fruit farms but as they came in greater numbers, people began to discover that they were not only convenient workers, they were competitors in the labor field, and the people of California began to be afraid.” Though Japanese-owned farms occupied only 1 percent of the cultivated land in California, they produced nearly 40 percent of the total California crop. One pressure group, the Grower Shipper Association, blatantly admitted wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons: “We might as well be honest,” they said, openly coveting the rich farmland of the Japanese.
Had the Japanese Americans been politically organized, they might have countered these pressure groups, but since the first-generation parents, known as the Issei, were prevented by law from voting or becoming citizens, and since the great majority of American-born Nisei were still in school, they provided an easy target.
From every side, Roosevelt was exposed to pressure to act against the Japanese Americans. In California, the entire political establishment—including Governor Culbert Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren—were strongly on the side of evacuation. In the military, all the leading figures—General De Witt, Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion, Henry Stimson, and War Department official John McCloy—argued for internment. By the time the decision was made in mid-February, Francis Biddle, who had replaced Robert Jackson as attorney general in September, was the only significant hold-out, and because he was new to the Cabinet, his opinion held little weight.
In the absence
of countervailing persuasive pressures, Roosevelt accepted the “military necessity” argument at face value, directing Stimson and McCloy to do whatever they thought necessary as long as they were as reasonable and as humane as possible. The War Department came back with a blanket order—Executive Order 9066—requiring the forced removal of all people of Japanese descent from any area designated as a military zone. Since the entire state of California, the western half of Washington and Oregon, and the southern part of Arizona were all designated as military zones, the order affected more than a hundred thousand citizens and aliens of Japanese descent.
Though Roosevelt later admitted that he regretted “the burdens of evacuation and detention which military necessity had imposed upon these people,” he showed no qualms whatsoever when he signed the order on February 19. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” Francis Biddle observed. “He was never theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done.” Since everything depended, he believed, on winning the war, anything that threatened that prospect had to be dealt with boldly and harshly.
Told to bring only what they could carry, the evacuees were herded into sixteen hastily provided assembly centers at racetracks and athletic fields along the West Coast, while permanent centers further inland were being constructed by army engineers. “We are having quite a problem figuring out just what to take,” twenty-six-year-old Charles Kikuchi wrote in his diary. “There is still so much junk around and you know how the Japanese like to hang on to old things. Anyway, we will have to store a lot of it since they will not allow us to take more than the barest of necessities.”
In the assembly centers, Berkeley resident Mine Okubo has written, “there was a lack of privacy everywhere. The incomplete partitions in the stalls and the barracks made a single symphony of yours and your neighbor’s loves, hates and joys. One had to get used to snores, baby cryings, family troubles.” The older women could not bring themselves to stand in line for the communal shower; they bathed in tubs made from barrels instead; they pinned up curtains wherever they could.
“Can this be the same America we left a few weeks ago?” a young architectural draftsman named Ted Nakashima asked. “It all seems so futile, struggling to live our old lives under this useless, regimented life.” Born in Seattle, Washington, Nakashima was the third son of Japanese parents who had been in the United States since 1901. His father was an editor, his oldest brother an architect, his middle brother a doctor. Yet all three brothers and their parents were forced to leave flourishing careers behind and spend their days amid the suffocating smell of horse manure in a stall that was only eighteen feet wide by twenty-one feet long.
“The senselessness of all of the inactive manpower,” young Nakashima observed. “Electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, mechanics, carpenters, painters, farmers—every trade—men who are able and willing to do all they can to lick the Axis . . . Oddly enough I still have a bit of faith in army promises of good treatment and Mrs. Roosevelt’s pledge of a future worthy of good American citizens . . . . What really hurts is the constant reference to we evacuees as ‘Japs.’ ‘Japs’ are the guys we are fighting. We’re on this side and we want to help. Why won’t America let us?”
When the news of Franklin’s decision had reached Eleanor, she was shaken. She had witnessed the growing hysteria for weeks and had feared that something like this might happen. But so drastic was the president’s order that it took her breath away. To her mind, the guarantees of the Bill of Rights must never be surrendered, even in the face of national disaster. When she tried to speak to her husband about his decision, however, he gave her a frigid reception and said he did not want her to mention it again.
Under ordinary circumstances, Eleanor would have argued her case relentlessly, regardless of the president’s reaction, but the weeks that surrounded the evacuation decision found her in the midst of an all-consuming controversy of her own as the Office of Civilian Defense was exposed to irreparably damaging criticism.
• • •
With the coming of war, the activities of the OCD had moved to the forefront of public awareness, bringing Eleanor’s philosophical differences with LaGuardia into the open. “I could not help realizing,” Eleanor admitted, “that the mayor was more interested in the dramatic aspects of civilian defense—such as whether cities had good fire-fighting equipment—than in such things as building morale.” To Eleanor’s mind, the stresses and dislocations of war—such as migration, unemployment, housing, and health—were creating social problems as acute, if not so dramatic, as anything to be anticipated from bombing. But, try as she might, she could not turn LaGuardia’s focus from the protective side. Eleanor saw that his work as mayor of New York “prevented him from giving his full time to organizing civilian defense. The few group meetings we had left me with an impression of great hurry and a feeling that decisions were taken which were not carefully thought out.”
For the president, his desk piled high with somber reports from both the Atlantic and the Pacific, his wife’s dispute with the mayor was irritating and disconcerting. “I can’t take Eleanor and LaGuardia,” he told Anna Rosenberg in confidence. “Each one comes with a story; each one is right; each one comes to me: I cannot cope with it and I want you to try and keep them away from me and reconcile their differences.”
But there was no way that anyone could keep Eleanor away from Franklin when she had something to say. By mid-December 1941, she had become convinced that LaGuardia could not handle both the mayor’s job and the OCD post. The time had come, she told her husband, for LaGuardia to step down from the OCD in favor of a full-time administrator. The president agreed with Eleanor. “I am brought to the realization by war,” he diplomatically wrote LaGuardia, “that by acts of my own I have created for you an almost impossible situation.” In the days and weeks before the war, Roosevelt went on, it had probably been possible for LaGuardia to carry both jobs. But as the war made each job more exacting, he realized he was asking something physically impossible of his good friend. Perhaps the best solution was to name a successor at the OCD who could administer the organization full-time. When it was put on this basis, LaGuardia agreed, albeit reluctantly, to step aside in favor of Harvard Law School Dean James Landis.
Rumors spread that Eleanor, too, was about to resign, but she denied them absolutely. The fact was that, with LaGuardia gone, she believed she had a fighting chance to realize her dream for the OCD. But on February 6, 1942, in the Chamber of the House of Representatives, Eleanor’s wish was destroyed when two of her appointments to the OCD were subjected to a withering attack. “I rise today to utter a protest against ‘boondoggling’ in connection with the OCD,” Representative Faddis began. “I want the members to take into consideration today the fact that we are paying Melvyn Douglas $8000 a year—as much as we are paying that matchless and heroic soldier, General MacArthur, when he is battling in the forests of the Philippines every day . . . . I call attention to the fact that we are paying this dancer, Miss Chaney, $4600 a year—almost twice as much as the base pay of Captain Colin Kelly [first hero of the war] and he gave his life in defense of this Nation.”
When it was learned that both Melvyn Douglas and Mayris Chaney were close friends of Eleanor’s, the criticism mounted. “The work of OCD concerns the safety and welfare of the people of this nation,” columnist Raymond Clapper wrote. “Yet it has become a kind of personal parking lot for the pets and protégés of Mrs. Roosevelt . . . . How can you have any kind of morale with a subordinate employee, who happens to be the wife of the President, flitting in and out between lecture engagements to toss a few pets into nice jobs, some of them at salaries larger than a brigadier general and a rear admiral gets.”
Had the high salaries been attached to work the country deemed essential, the flap would have quickly died down. But in the wake of war, Eleanor’s noble ideas about mental health and physical fitness suddenly seemed luxuries, particularly since
the real necessities of physical defense—gas masks and helmets—were not being provided in an organized way. Still, Marquis Childs observed, “the storm that burst out,” particularly over Miss Chaney’s assignment to teach dancing to children, “was far out of proportion to the cause. It became a witch hunt, and once Miss Chaney’s status on the payroll was discovered, decency was out the window.”
For days, while the men of Bataan were caught in a hopeless siege and Singapore was falling to the Japanese, one congressman after another rose to attack Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends. From both sides of the House, bitter assertions were launched that the country needed bombers, not dancers, and that “parasites and leeches” should be stricken from the payroll. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” a woman from Kalamazoo wrote Eleanor, “you would be doing your country a great service if you would simply go home and sew for the Red Cross. Every time you open your mouth the people of this country dislike and mistrust you more.”
“I am not in the least disturbed by the latest attack,” Eleanor wrote her friend Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey magazine. “It is purely political and made by the same people who have fought NYA, CCC, WPA, Farm Security, etc.” She would only be sorry, she said, if it lessened the effectiveness of the OCD or hurt the people involved.
But so violent was the newspaper frenzy that followed the congressional outburst that Eleanor found herself, for the first time in nearly ten years as first lady, a target of merciless criticism not only from conservatives but from people who counted themselves her supporters and friends. A woman writing from the Plaza Hotel in New York told Eleanor that she had always greatly admired her energy, ability, and accomplishments, but had now come to believe that, “in these troubled times, you should spend more time with the President. To us he seems a very lonely man, with heartbreaking burdens to carry.”