Letter to the President

VOLUME 174

NUMBER 4

OCTOBER, 1944

87th YEAR OF CONTINU0US PUBLICATION

by LEO CHERNE

MR. PRESIDENT:-

The American people should know where you are going and how you intend to get there.

Men who are shrewd in the manipulation of votes tell us that you are one of the ablest political strategists in American history. Your appraisal of public sentiment in the remaining weeks of this campaign may suggest the tactical advantages of silence; a single-minded devotion to military victory may lead you to direct your full energies to the prosecution of the war. Such a course, Mr. President, might well win the election for you, but it would at the same time defeat the very purpose for which you seek re-election.

In few periods of our history has the need for debate and decision been so great as it is now — in this evening of war and dawning of peace. To abandon debate would be to destroy decision and erase meaning from the democratic process. Your re-election would be a mere resumption of office without any mandate from the people to move in any specific direction.

During two thirds of your twelve-year term, you were identified with a specific social and economic philosophy which came to be known as the New Deal. Both your partisans and your opponents knew the target of that social philosophy, despite its occasional ambiguities and contradictions. Your intent was clear not only from your words and acts but from the character of those who surrounded you. Today those ranks have been disbanded; it is said that you now consider that program an accomplished fact, no longer a fact in motion.

Even within your own immediate group of advisers, there have been indications of concern over the men and the directions toward which you have most recently leaned. Only you can tell the nation whether the mild liberalism of a Donald Nelson or the untouched conservatism of a Charles Wilson represents your future course. Neither a resignation nor a journey abroad supplies your answer, nor does “A plague o’ both your houses!” identify your position.

The next administration will face the most grueling responsibilities in history. You alone know whom you would summon to the tasks. Mr. President, your present cabinet members are wearing out. Who will replace them? Who will provide the fresh spirit? We are living in an age when one year is ten. Unwinding a war and launching a peace require contemporary minds, capable of understanding the nature of this age. Is Frances Perkins your fourth-term Secretary of Labor? Will Jesse Jones so use his offices as to bring about the maximum use of our war-expanded capacity? Cordell Hull’s achievements have been notable in the past, but do you believe him equipped for America’s unprecedented role in a totally unprecedented world? The future will not be rescued by men who invoke the shibboleths of the past, nor even the radical phrases of a decade ago, Yesterday’s liberalism is always today’s conservatism, yesterday’s conservatism today’s reaction. Where is the fountain of renewal?

Copyright 1944, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

History will appraise your twelve years as a period in which great leadership faced two of the most fundamental problems that dog the fate of nations — acute depression and international aggression, If you leave the White House next January, you will not have completed your solutions to either problem. Solutions are, of course, no more complete than history itself. But your decision to seek a fourth term places on you the burden of presenting convincing evidence that yours is the best available leadership toward solution.

In doing so, you must answer certain fundamental questions, with the greatest possible detail, before November 7. There are two reasons: first, because you have the duty to act as the instrument of American opinion; and second, because you have a responsibility to shape that opinion. The people seek neither a leader to obey nor a leader to reflect the distortions of uninformed mass opinion. Ours is not the choice between a monarch and a tally clerk of a public opinion poll.

2

THE nature of this moment focuses the spotlight most sharply on America’s relationship to the outer world. The conference at Dumbarton Oaks, even before it opened, helped to dispel the fear that America would once again be led down isolationist ways. It revealed that insurmountable differences among the major powers need not wreck the peace. But there were questions left unanswered. Your articulation of the Four Freedoms and your conception of the Atlantic Charter with Mr. Churchill did much to bring meaning and hope in the midst of the world’s havoc. So too did Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

Now we are waiting to hear from you how those noble objectives are to be translated into functioning machinery. “Enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world” is a bright promise of a more permanently peaceful day. But students of international problems are quick to point out the difficulties of foreign trade, the power of the undisciplined cartel, the accidents and inequities of geography, the barriers of continuing nationalisms, the economic fears reflected in tariffs, embargoes, blocked currencies, dumped goods, and hoarded strategic reserves.

It is too much to ask of any man that he completely resolve these difficulties. But the American people are confident that the job can be begun and ultimately be done. We shall expect to hear from you, as we hope to hear from your opponent, how to approach the realization of the ideal which you expressed and which Mr. Dewey must share. In this, Mr. President, your responsibility is the greater. Your failure to map the road ahead would bring greater despair, for you have been the most eloquent spokesman in urging that we make the journey.

The people wait, with eagerness made keener by recent disappointments, to hear you speak. Every advance of our military forces has revealed that we are better prepared to achieve victory than to use it. Will the deals with the peripheral fascists come to an end once American lives are no longer at stake? Victory is not the end; it is only the beginning — but of what, precisely?

It took a war to teach the American people something of the culture’of Japan—its religion, its military, its Mikado. What is to be the role of that Mikado tomorrow? We are aware that military requirements in the Pacific may not permit a preelection answer. But there are comparable questions concerning our German enemy which must be raised now. The answers merely begin with the phrase “unconditional surrender.” The questions are not settled by it, nor are they inconsistent with it.

What is to be done with the industrial hub of Europe that we know as Germany? Even the most rabid exterminationists will not eliminate the German people as a whole. What is to become of them? In what way can the dignity of their life be restored, yet a renewal of the pain they have brought the world be permanently avoided? Appraisal of the origins of Nazism will, in a calmer moment, place responsibility not only on the Germans but on the economic, social, and political environment of which they also were victims. And some of the causes lie outside the Reich. How do you propose that we begin the eradication of the economic and social forces which lead to retrogression and ultimately to war?

On such questions the future of the world depends. Failure to answer them may sacrifice us once again to the cycle which brought on the last war, led us to this one, and may carry us on to new wars. In respect to some of these, the answer of America must be halting, experimental, perhaps even groping. But as a candidate for the Presidency during these next four years, you must have an approach, an attitude, a sense of direction in the handling of these problems. That is what the American people want to hear from you, a veteran of international conferences.

3

ARDLY removed from the war itself are the home problems of the American people. So important is our internal health to all the world that it is nonsense even to speak of it as a domestic matter. Back in 1937 Winston Churchill said: “There is one way above all others in which the United States can aid the European democracies. Let her regain and maintain her normal prosperity. A prosperous United States exerts, directly and indirectly, an immense beneficent force upon world affairs. A United States thrown into financial and economic collapse spreads evil far and wide, and weakens France and England just at the time when they have most need to be strong.”

Mr. Churchill’s words are even truer today. The devastation of Europe and Asia in the course of battle underscores our own well-being. The world will depend more than before on our war-strengthened industrial muscles.

The Republican candidate for the Presidency in his acceptance address asked a basic question which both of you must answer: “Must we have a war to end unemployment?” Whoever is President must help release the dynamic forces which will produce an annual national peacetime income of at least 140 billion dollars. Without it, we cannot re-employ our returning veterans and put our workers in useful activity. By what process do you intend to make up the additional 50 billion dollars of national income, over and above the level of our best peacetime year, 1940? Doing as well as we did then is too modest a goal; with our increased population and warimproved technology, it would leave us with at least 11 million unemployed.

There is no dispute as to our domestic goal. The issues revolve around the means of achieving full employment — as Congressional debate on reconversion legislation clearly demonstrates.

As this letter is written, the shadows are closing in on Germany. But with European victory at hand, we find within our own country no readiness to approach the new challenge. On the contrary, each step towards armistice brings greater insecurity. With the global war far from won, war workers are already abandoning their posts in the scramble for permanent peacetime safety. Yet Congress falters, preparing for the end of the war but not for the beginning of an expanding peace.

No bill has come to your desk which can honestly be described as an approach, however faulty, to the question: What do we do to maintain a continuous level of high employment?

We are fortunate that we can recognize the problem in advance, that we know something of its size; we are unfortunate if we must wait for depression, unemployment, and hardship before we prepare an adequate program of action. Should the country depend on strong centralized action for full employment? Should it look to the states to carry the burden? Shall the government act in any capacity other than that of custodian or auctioneer for the plants and facilities it has acquired to prosecute the war? Is it to be a government concern that those plants be used to provide maximum employment? To prevent post-war unemployment do you intend to apply the program you used in the 1930’s — or have you another program?

The issues should not revolve around the kind of cushions that will be provided for an inevitable unemployment. They must center on how we can avert unemployment— avert the need for cushions altogether. Yet the emphasis of your present administrative family, Mr. President, just as in Congress, has been on the former. The only optimists on the national scene are apparently those who rely least on government planning or action. They insist that the industrial structure of America, allowed to ride on its own momentum, can automatically do the job. In this connection, there are two questions that only you can answer: —

First, if the conservative program is likely to be more fruitful, does it not follow, Mr. President, that, as between an unquestioned conservative and a candidate newly become conservative, the former would be more desirable?

Second, should we not be assured of greater stability in pursuing the agreed conservative course if Governor Dewey were to take office? For the Congress, controlled in any event by a combination of conservatives in both parties, would then be of one mind and one temperament with the Executive.

An expanding America, a free-enterprise America that has become conscious of social responsibilities, demands that the great industrial equipment of the nation be harnessed to provide more jobs, more little competitive businesses, more production, more consumption, more comforts for more families than we have ever had before. If ever in American history these objectives were within grasp, the moment is now. How, Mr. President, do you propose to help us reach them?

Respectfully,

LEO CHERNE