Won't You Let Me Take You On a Sea Cruise?

Frank Bruni wrote a piece in the New York Times the other day, urging politicians to seek more solitude:

Take more time away. Spend more time alone. Trade the speechifying for solitude, which no longer gets anything close to the veneration it’s due, not just in politics but across many walks of life.
It’s in solitude that much of the sharpest thinking is done and many of the best ideas are hatched.

Coincidentally, I was reading about how FDR came up with the Lend-Lease program to aid Britain before the United States entered World War II, which makes Bruni's point perfectly.

Film title from an earlier FDR cruise,
from an FDR Library archival film

After winning his unprecedented third term the previous month, on December 2, 1940, FDR set off aboard the cruiser USS Tuscaloosa for a two-week cruise in the Caribbean.

Now, try to imagine the indignation today if Barack Obama slipped away from Washington (without any notice, no less!) for a two-week sea cruise.

FDR's cruise was not hidden, but rather
filmed for use in Navy recruiting

Not only did FDR not hesitate to take a vacation, he also did pretend it was a "working" vacation. He took a few close friends and advisors, and according to David Kaiser in his fine new book, No End Save Victory, they "spent the two weeks fishing, playing poker, sunning themselves and watching movies in the evening." Though the White House tried to portray it as a base-inspection tour, FDR "boasted proudly after his return that he did not read any of the working papers he had brought with him."

FDR fishing during a February 1940 southern cruise

That did not mean, however, that this was unproductive time.

FDR did read at least one item of business, what Winston Churchill called one of the most important letters he ever wrote--an appeal for the United States to drop its "cash and carry" requirement on aid to Britain because Britain no longer had the cash to pay.

Churchill later wrote:

Harry Hopkins [one of FDR's companions on the trip] told me later that Mr Roosevelt read and re-read this letter as he sat alone on his deck chair, and that for two days he did not seem to have reached any clear conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently.

Hopkins said:

I didn't know for quite awhile what he was thinking about, but then--I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and care-free. So I didn't ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it--the whole program.

Two things are key here--FDR's own understanding that he needed to occasionally "refuel" in order to do his job well, and the understanding of his close friend and advisor Hopkins that FDR needed to be left alone to think. He allowed his boss the time to brood silently.

Could there be a better riposte to today's obsession with being busy for the sake of being busy, meeting for the sake of meeting? None of us bear the tremendous burdens that FDR had at the time--a world war to navigate the nation through--yet we are so prone to exaggerate our own importance and pose as too busy to "waste" time.

FDR was wiser. There was nothing wasteful about his sea cruise vacation. It was an investment, and one that paid off for the entire world.

Santorum's History Lesson: "It's not OK."

Rick Santorum certainly is not squandering his moment in the spotlight.

Over the last week or so, he seems almost to be going out of his way to say things that make many voters ask incredulously: "He said what?!" There are a lot of them to choose from, but I'll stick to the "today is much like when we ignored Hitler" story.

Recently, Santorum told a crowd in Georgia that Republican voters need to wake up to the dangers of our times:

Your country needs you. It's not as clear a challenge. Obviously World War II was pretty obvious. At some point, they knew. But remember, the greatest generation for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness. America sat from 1940 when France fell to December of '41 and did almost nothing... We’re a hopeful people. We think, well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he's a nice guy, it won't be near as bad as what we think. This will be OK. Maybe he's not the best guy, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what, why do we need to be involved? We'll just take care of our own problems. We'll just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we'll be OK. That's sort of the optimistic spirit of America. But sometimes, sometimes it’s not OK. 

Leave aside the reckless and outrageous suggestion that there is any way in which President Obama represents a threat to the United States, much less one commensurate to what Hitler did in Europe.

Santorum clearly does not understand the period of American history he's talking about. I happen to be in the midst of writing a book about precisely this period, and it bears little relation to his simple-minded account.

I suppose one could reasonably say that, since the United States did not become an active belligerent until December 1941, it technically "sat on the sidelines." But the assertion that the U.S. "did almost nothing" between June 1940 and December 1941 is just laughable.

As soon as the war in Europe began, FDR stated what seemed to him to be obvious: "every battle that is fought does affect the American future." He immediately asked Congress to amend the neutrality laws to allow the sale of arms and other goods to Britain and France on a "cash and carry" basis, which it did.

In his next State of the Union address in January 1940, he proposed that Congress increase defense spending, which it did.

After the fall of France, FDR accelerated aid to Great Britain, including giving Churchill 50 old destroyers that he had requested.

When the British could no longer pay cash for the goods they ordered, FDR asked Congress to approve the Lend-Lease Act to allow the United States to provide whatever military aid it could spare for Britain's defense, which it did.

In the fall of 1941, the United States occupied Iceland, patrolled the entire western Atlantic, and convoyed British ships--all to relieve the British Navy so it could better confront Nazi Germany.

One can say--as many have since--that that was not enough. But it wasn't "almost nothing."

Santorum is certainly right when he says Americans are "a hopeful people" with an "optimistic spirit." But who were these Americans who were saying Hitler was "a nice guy" or even just "not so good"?

There were virtually none. Even those opposed to American entry into the war rarely had anything good to say about Hitler. When former president Herbert Hoover, on the very day the war began, called for the U.S. to "keep out of this war," he also made a point of saying: "The whole Nazi system is repugnant to the American people."

The vast majority of Americans, whether they supported all-out aid to Britain or opposed it, were under no illusions about Hitler. They were honestly debating the best way to deal with that threat.

Yes, they were also optimistic. Right up until Pearl Harbor, most Americans--about 70%--still hoped to avoid direct involvement in the war. But roughly the same percentage was determined to insure that Hitler did not win, even if that meant going to war eventually.

There were a few Americans with good things to say about Hitler. They were on the far right fringes of American life, people who praised Hitler as a Christian, as a bulwark against atheistic communism.

One was a woman named Elizabeth Dilling. Raised an Episcopalian, she attended Catholic schools as a girl, and considered becoming an evangelist. She called herself a "super patriot, 100 per center" who believed women should stick to "feminine pursuits." She defended the fascist Francisco Franco in Spain because he was "fighting with Spain's decent element for Christianity" against the Loyalists who destroyed churches "with the same satanic Jewish glee shown in Russia."

According to author Glen Jeansonne, she also had kind words for Hitler, because he too "had done a great deal of good ... and helped Christianity flourish." She said those urging the U.S. to fight Hitler in the war were trying to get Americans to "fight the Jews' battles all over again." Most horrifically she made this prediction, which is practically a paraphrase of Hitler's pre-war threat:

If the Jews succeed in hollering America into war, what happened to Jews in Germany might seem like a kindergarten compared to what they might get in America when the dead bodies start coming home, as Americans are a hotter-tempered people.

One of the more notorious Hitler defenders in the U.S., Gerald L. K. Smith, claimed that the "Jews hated Hitler ... because he was a Christian who believed in the Bible." Smith reprinted one of Hitler's speeches which used Biblical passages to justify his policies toward the Jews, and commented:

What good Christian American can find any fault with the above quotations? Could it be that the same Jew-controlled newspapers that lied to us about Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith failed to tell us the truth about Hitler?

This was a man Republican isolationists called to testify before Congress.

The Americans who said Hitler was "a nice guy" were the same ones who called FDR a "dictator" and called his administration the "Jew Deal." They denied Hitler was any threat to the U.S., but were quite certain that FDR was one--a mortal one. They attacked FDR as "the first Communist president," and said that he was deliberately trying to destroy Christian America.

Martin Dies, a Congressman from Texas, who created the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, noted in 1939 that the "Fascist-Nazi movements in the United States masquerade as Christian patriots."

Yes, these Americans existed. They were not, however, typical. The vast majority of Americans knew Hitler was the real threat, not Franklin Roosevelt. They knew their president--even if they disagreed with him politically--was not trying to ruin the United States. They knew the debate they were having was not an apocalyptic battle between those who were trying to save America and those who wanted to destroy it, but an honest disagreement about how best to defend the country.

But it seems there will always be people who masquerade as Christian patriots, who tear down the president personally, call him a communist, say he believes in a "false theology," and claim he's trying to destroy the country.

You're right, Rick. Sometimes, sometimes, it's not OK.

The Archie Bunker "Wisdom" is Running High

You might think that the fact that one of my first year students two weeks ago said the exact same thing that the dean of Washington pundits wrote Sunday in his column would cause me to swell with pride.  Problem is, they're both wrong.

In my class, we were discussing Milo Minderbinder, Joseph Heller's satirical stand-in for the unrestrained business ethos in his brilliant novel, Catch-22.  We were talking about why Heller included this character, and my student said: "World War II ended the depression."  David Broder on Sunday wrote the same thing.  In a bizarre article, Broder suggests that President Obama’s political fortunes in 2012 could be enhanced by a war with Iran: “Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.”

While it is stunning to hear Broder (someone who should know better) do so, I was not surprised that my student echoed this mistaken conventional wisdom.  I've been fighting this fundamental misunderstanding for as long as I've been teaching.  I think the first time I heard it was from the lips of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's classic sitcom, "All in the Family."  In every class in which I've dealt with the Great Depression, I've heard this refrain repeated.

It's a classic case of mistaking historical causation.  It is indeed true that the U.S. fully emerged from the depression after the war began.  Despite Broder's implication, there's nothing magical about wars that ends depressions.  What ended the Great Depression was that the war removed all restraint on federal government spending.

A quick look at the numbers makes this clear.  While the same ill-informed conventional wisdom has it that the New Deal led to massive government spending, that is not true. In 1933, total federal spending was about $4.6 billion. It reached a New Deal height of $8.3 billion in 1936, much of that due to spending on the WPA, a jobs program that employed millions of Americans and built infrastructure (the stimulus bill of its day).  The economy improved, but spending was cut in 1937 to $7.6 billion and in 1938 to $6.9 billion, leading to what was called the “Roosevelt recession,” which wiped out many of the economic gains of the previous four years.

The huge increase in government spending came NOT from jobs programs like the WPA, or other New Deal social welfare programs, but from military spending.  In 1939, the federal budget jumped to $9.1 billion, in 1941 it was up to 13.6 billion, with almost all of that increase due to defense preparedness spending.  Once the U.S. entered the war, spending exploded.  By 1944 it was $91.3 billion—more than ten times the New Deal height.  The deficit that year was $47.5 billion, more than ten times the $4.3 billion deficit of 1936.  That is what ended the depression.

How?  The U.S. had tremendous underused industrial capacity during the depression.  What was lacking was demand.  Orders for military goods created demand.  When events in Europe and Asia made the prospect of American involvement in war more likely, FDR announced what were ridiculed as unreachable military production goals.  Not only did American industry meet his goals, it generally exceeded them.  In 1942, for example, the U.S. produced more planes than the three Axis powers combined.

The reason for this production success was fairly simple.  The federal government met its defense needs by granting cost-plus contracts: all of industry's costs (including labor) were met by the federal government, and a profit was guaranteed to contractors (talk about a bailout).  Millions of blue-collar workers were suddenly not only employed, but making good wages (often including overtime pay).  Business had profits to reinvest.  That meant that workers found themselves flush with disposable income.  They both spent and saved.  The increased consumer spending led to wartime prosperity and unprecedented economic growth, and after the war consumers spent their savings on goods (like cars) not available during the war due to wartime rationing, continuing the economic boom into the postwar years.

In short, war did not produce prosperity, massive government spending did.  The relevance of this truth about World War II prosperity is not Broder's mistaken belief that war ends depression, but that it helps explain why the American economy today is still struggling to revive.

As much most American voters seem convinced that we are today spending too much, that the stimulus bill was an abject failure, the reality is that, like the WPA spending in 1935-36, the stimulus was helpful but was not enough.  And the likely cost of this historical and economic ignorance is that Americans are poised to elect tomorrow a Congress that will make the same mistake that FDR made in 1937 and cut spending, and may send the fragile American economy into a new recession.

When Archie and Edith Bunker sang “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again” in the 1970s, it was funny.  When today Americans from David Broder to a typical college student think the same, and worse yet vote accordingly, it is potentially tragic.