Book Reviews

The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, by Thomas Fleming. Published by Basic Books, listed price is $35.

Thank God for Harry Truman! The Second World War is surrounded by a popular mythology: that of The Last Good War, fought by The Greatest Generation, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as its avuncular leader, who assured the American people in upbeat fireside chats that all they had to fear was fear itself. Trusted and beloved because his New Deal had pulled the country out of the Great Depression, his only critics were “economic royalists” and “isolationists” of implicitly crypto-Nazi sympathy.

Thomas Fleming, in The New Dealers’ War, explodes one after another of these clichés. The New Deal failed to bring America back to prosperity. Our economy lagged behind recovery in the rest of the industrialized world. Roosevelt was elected on the Democratic ticket by a ramshackle coalition of southerners (who remembered that Lincoln and Grant were Republicans), big-city machine politicians (largely Irish-Catholic), labor unions (ranging from rather conservative trades unions to the Communist-tinged CIO), and left-wing intelligentsia types (many of whom looked to the Soviet Union as a moral model). These disparate constituencies were at war with each other almost from the start. Roosevelt mastered them because he was a consummate trimmer, and had instinctual charm and an ability to sense who could be useful to him. As Fleming amply documents, he ruthlessly disposed of subordinates and supporters when expediency demanded, despite their often touchingly naïve loyalty to him.

These tactics began to wear thin as Roosevelt’s second term drew to a close. Some New Deal measures had proven oppressive and unpopular, not just to big-business “economic royalists” that Roosevelt (himself a scion of inherited wealth) loved to disparage, but amongst farmers and shopkeepers. Southern Democrats grew restive and often allied themselves with Republican conservatives. As Roosevelt sought to take a more active role in the brewing European war, “isolationist” sentiment brewed not only among Republicans, but among liberals like Sen. Burton. After Pearl Harbor, war policy became a battlefield contested between those who focused purely on military goals, and liberal New Dealers who saw it as a means to extend the New Deal, with its aims of “economic democracy,” to the entire world in a coming “Century of the Common Man.” Principal among them was the teetotalling vegetarian Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Antagonists to the New Dealers included Jesse Jones, the Secretary of Commerce, numerous members of Congress, “dollar-a-year” men from big business corporations, and Democratic party leaders outside Washington. Roosevelt rode herd on the lot of them using his usual techniques, and was able to maintain what he most desired-his personal dominance.

Roosevelt’s usual methods of trimming and playing both ends against the middle were not as successful with foreign politicians like Churchill and Stalin. Roosevelt frustrated the former and was bamboozled by the latter. As the Venona decrypts show, the Soviets were successful in infiltrating the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt was oblivious to this and willfully turned a blind eye to Soviet treachery, deceit, and inhumanity-sending to Samoa, for example, the Navy liaison officer who brought him the news that the Polish army officer corps had been massacred at Katyn by the Russians. In this rosy view of the Soviets, Roosevelt was encouraged by Wallace and left-wing aides like Harold Ickes.

Those who believe World War II was a moralistic crusade against Nazi inhumanity will be startled to read of Roosevelt’s role in suppressing news of Nazi genocide for fear of feeding suspicion that the Allies were fighting “the Jews’ war.” Roosevelt also ignored considerable resistance to Hitler at the highest levels of the German military. Encouraged by his leftist New Dealer advisors, he believed that aristocratic militarists and “Prussian Junkers” were responsible for the ongoing war, just as Allied propaganda placed them behind World War I. In fact, the German nobility loathed Hitler. The regular officer corps, largely drawn from this class, regarded him as a disastrous commander who wasted the lives of their troops. Many had seen at first hand the atrocities committed by the SS in the rear guard of the eastern front. Honorable men and devout Christians amongst them-officers like Canaris, Witzleben, Stülpnagel, and Rommel-were sickened, and plotted constantly to depose or assassinate Hitler. Roosevelt rejected all efforts on the part of these decent Germans to communicate with the Allies. The policy of “unconditional surrender” and the publicity given the vindictive Morgenthau plan in the war’s last months were highly counterproductive and served only to prolong fighting.

On the home front, Harry Truman, who had obtained re-election to the Senate without assistance from Roosevelt, was making a reputation for himself as a watchdog over the war effort, exposing waste and boodling by corrupt bureaucrats, contractors, and labor unionists. The machinations leading up to the dumping of Wallace and the nomination of Truman for Vice President in 1944 are fascinating to read. Roosevelt’s usually successful trimming seems in this case to have spilt over into painful vacillation. He probably sympathized at his deepest level with the rhapsodic leftism of Wallace, but was shrewd enough to realize Wallace would have been a liability to the ticket. He did not so much select Truman as his running mate, as he allowed him to be selected. Truman’s success at the convention was a very near thing. Fleming’s account is a worthwhile record of the days when nominating conventions had a substantial function instead of being publicity events as they are today.

This book is not a reactionary Roosevelt-hater’s polemic. The clear hero in it is no right-wing Republican, but Harry Truman-a pragmatic liberal and a canny politician who was at the same time a man of integrity and sound judgment. Most importantly, Truman harbored no illusions about Communism. The nation-and the world-should be undyingly grateful.

- Michael S. Swisher