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  We are going into this war lightly, but I have a feeling that it will weigh heavily upon us all before we are through. The vast theater on which the struggle between this country and Japan opens makes the last war seem a parochial conflict confined to the Atlantic and the western cape of the Eurasian continent. This is really world war, and in my humble opinion it was unavoidable and is better fought now when we still have allies left. It is hoped here that the actual coming of war may serve to speed up the pace of production and shake both capital and labor out of a business-as-usual mood far too prevalent. There has been a general feeling that the production problem could not be solved until war was declared. We shall see. It is possible that a whipped-up hysteria against labor and progressives will serve to stifle the very forces that could be used to bring about an “all-out” effort. It is also possible that the coming of war will open the way to greater cooperation in the defense program, to a broader role for labor in the mobilization of industry, to a lessening of attacks on labor in Congress, and to improved morale.

  My own confidence springs from a deep confidence in the President. For all his mistakes—and perhaps some of them have only seemed mistakes—he can be counted on to turn up in the end on the democratic and progressive side. I hate to think of what we should do without him, and when I drive down to work early in the morning past the White House I cannot help thinking with sympathy of the burdens that weigh him down. On the threshold of war, and perhaps ultimately social earthquake, we may be grateful that our country has his leadership.

  The Shake-up We Need

  I. F. Stone was always immersed in the practical details of policy. In this column written within three weeks of Pearl Harbor, he discusses the kinds of personnel and administrative changes that he regards as essential to a effective war effort. Many of the specific details are now familiar only to historians of the period. (For example, in the second paragraph, “Knudsen” is William S. Knudsen, advisor for industrial production on the Advisory Commission of the Council for National Defense, which Roosevelt had established in 1940 to launch preparations for the inevitable war, while Jesse Jones was Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce. Historians credit both men for their efforts at mobilizing American war production.) But Stone’s larger theme—the need to remake domestic policies and reconsider long-standing assumptions about the sanctity of laissez-faire in support of the battle for national survival—remains relevant and fascinating today.

  . . .

  December 27, 1941

  I AM RELIABLY INFORMED that recent events abroad have led our War College to the reluctant conclusion that the cavalry charge is no longer likely to be decisive. It is at least as important to overhaul our social as our military thinking. No official here will admit it in public, and few in private, but what this country needs is more interference with private enterprise. The military-naval revolution which has enabled a coalition of smaller, poorer, and hungrier powers to attack the British, French, Dutch, and American empires with such success is also the reflection of a social revolution, and requires the reexamination of the bromides which ordinarily pass among us for profound truths. When wars are fought with tanks and planes, defeat or victory is decided on the assembly line. We see the relationship between technology and military power, but we have only begun to recognize that technology is more than the fabrication of new weapons. It also includes the way in which we organize our society to produce those weapons, for on that organization may depend the volume of our output, the speed of our production.

  In all the talk here of impending shake-ups in defense, too little is heard of the need for a shake-up in fundamental ideas. Without it the effect of substituting Willkie for Knudsen or Wallace for Jesse Jones is likely to be less than miraculous. The war now unfolding marks the end of laissez faire, long honored more in the speech than in the observance, and the fate of free government depends on riding this tide, not bucking it. The root of our troubles, the basic defect of our war effort, the reason for our idle facilities lie in a system of ideas which leads us to regard the proposal to draft machines with horror while we look on the draft of men with equanimity. This is but the war-time reflection of the double standard which normally determines our attitude toward the rights of property on the one hand and the rights of human beings on the other. A society which regards it as proper in an economic crisis to throw men out of work at once but shameful to default on a bond until absolutely necessary is handicapped by its mores in mobilizing itself for war. The people who live in it are willing to order a man to risk his life for his country but reluctant to tell a factory owner that he must turn out parts for tanks—or else. Yet in a modern war we can no more depend on the profit motive to gear our economy for an all-out effort that we can depend on the profit motive to fill our army with enlistments at $21 a month and board. Until this is recognized, said publicly, and acted upon, we are headed for one unpleasant military surprise after another.

  Just one year ago, in The Nation of December 21, 1940, I broke the story of the Reuther plan. Today’s papers carry the news that 206,000 workers in Michigan will lose their jobs in the next seven days because no steps have yet been taken to convert automobile factories to defense production. This inability of a great and rich country to gather up sufficient will to mobilize its full energies for war is characteristic of empires in their senility. We are again the victim of want amid plenty, though this time it is a want of armament amid plenty of potential productive capacity. Solution of the problem has been hampered by a succession of complacencies in the capital. The first was the easy assumption that we were unbeatable because we had the greatest productive system in the world. When it began to be realized that this productive system was being largely devoted to a boom in consumer goods, it was assumed that it would transform itself automatically into a vast arsenal if we curtailed the output of automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, and new houses.

  A few months ago, however, officials and others began to see that curtailment alone was no guaranty that facilities made idle by scarcity of materials would be converted to defense production. Smaller industries found it hard to obtain orders from the big business men running the OPM [Office of Production Management] and hard to interest the conventionally thinking army-navy procurement officers in the possibility of turning out armament in factories normally used to produce washing machines. Now I find officials assuming that “December 7 changed all that.” The attack on Pearl Harbor should have ended “business as usual,” but it did not. To assume that it will without any action on our part is a curious, and comfortable, kind of fatalism. It is well to remember that bombs have been falling on the capital of the British Empire for two years without completely ending business as usual.

  The truth is that while men like Stimson and Knox helped the President on the war issue by getting out in front, the top liberals and labor men in the defense setup have been more anxious to avoid fights than to exercise leadership. A fight is now brewing behind the scenes over the scuttling of the Victory Program by Knudsen and army-navy procurement, but at the SPAB [Supply Priorities Allocation Board] meeting at which the program was cut down by some 25 per cent neither Donald Nelson nor Leon Henderson nor Sidney Hillman put up an effective battle. All three have been good influences, but none of them is a fighter. Henderson is more smoke than fire. Nelson shines most by contrast with his fellow-business men. Hillman is able but not inspired or inspiring, and I was glad to see the Tolan committee take a rap at him in its excellent report on the measures needed to mobilize all our productive facilities for war. If Hillman had had the courage to go on the air last fall in support of the Reuther plan he would have looked a hero today. Unfortunately his is not the kind of leadership that will help us find our way to total effort for total war.

  It is easy for a newspaperman writing for an independent weekly to talk of the need for interfering with private enterprise. It is hard for these men and other political leaders to do or say anything about it. Our government
has political sovereignty under democratic processes, but in the sphere of our economy it is still in the position of a sovereign in feudal times and must deal with powerful economic overlords whose control over the means of public discussion make them formidable antagonists. Public officials who run afoul of these great interests take their careers in their hands, and few can be found to venture a head-on collision with them. Agencies like the Dies committee and the FBI play a valuable role here in keeping the progressives frightened and worried and thus in curbing the most useful forces in the war effort. In this connection I would like to point to Secretary Knox’s statement that the most powerful fifth column since Norway operated in Hawaii and to ask why the FBI, with all the vast sums and great power at its disposal, seems to have been so ineffective in curbing it. Maybe if it spent less time tapping wires in an effort to get Harry Bridges* and scaring minor clerks in government offices by asking them what they think of communism and what their religious affiliations are, it would have more time left for the kind of detective operations we needed on Oahu.

  * * *

  *Militant labor organizer, head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, West Coast director of the C.I.O. From 1939 to 1955 the Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to deport him to his birthplace, Australia, as a Communist subversive.

  Washington’s Forbidden Topic

  Here is I. F. Stone on the issue of the “second front,” the assault on western Europe that would not begin until D-Day in June, 1944, more than a year and a half after this column. The technique here is classic Stone, from the opening sentence (which encapsulates the journalistic method for which he is most renowned, the discovery and analysis of a public but little-known document) to the typically open-minded, even contrarian viewpoint: Though a strong supporter of Roosevelt, Stone is happy to endorse a minority opinion from the pen of George H. Bender, an obscure Republican congressman who clearly represents the sort of “Main Street” conservatism Stone often held up to scorn. Note how Stone, as usual, places the urgent immediate issue in the broadest historical context: Will the Allies mount a truly united effort to defeat the Axis, and thereby lay a solid foundation for victory and a cooperative post-war world, or will they be defeated by their own mutual suspicions and antagonisms?

  . . .

  October 31, 1942

  I WANT TO CALL ATTENTION TO an extraordinary document that seems to have been completely overlooked by the daily press. I refer to the “Additional Comments” of Representative Bender which are appended to the report on man-power issued by the Tolan committee last Tuesday. Bender is a Republican Congressman-at-large from Ohio. He was first elected to Congress in 1938 and only recently became a member of the Tolan committee. Little is known of him, and that little gives no indication that he differs much from the average Middle Western Republican. All “Who’s Who” reveals is: “Pres. George H. Bender Ins. Co.; editor and publisher the Ohio Republican and the National Republican since 1934; mem. Ohio State Senate, 1920–30; pres. Ohio Fedn. of Rep. Clubs; chmn. Rep. Central Com. of Cuyahoga County.” This certainly smacks of Main Street, and it is as a Main Streeter that Bender chooses to speak in his “Additional Comments,” which are really a separate and sharper minority report. “Since the winter of 1941,” he declares, “it has been clear to every Main Street American that what is needed is a second front in Europe to split the Axis forces. Spring, summer, and fall have come and gone without a second front.”

  Representative Bender’s advocacy of a second front is less important than his courage in being the first public figure here to speak out in plain language on the deeper issue behind the question of a second front. This is not whether we are to open an offensive in France next Tuesday or next month or next spring. The real question is whether we are to plan this as a war of the United Nations, with a Western offensive geared into the supply needs of the British, Russians, and Chinese, or whether we are to plan to fight the world alone. The truth is, as every important official here knows, that the President’s dominant military-naval advisers are already operating on this latter assumption. The corollaries of this assumption are (1) the addition of several million men to our army, (2) the curtailment of lend-lease aid to our allies in order to outfit that army, and (3) postponement of the offensive until the enlarged army is ready. All three corollaries are already reflected in official action, and informed persons here say that the plan is to stage no real large-scale offensive in 1943.

  The Bender report is a hard-hitting six-page summary of the basic manpower, military, and production problems facing us in this war. The full committee report is the ablest and most comprehensive analysis of war needs and war planning ever to appear here, and I hope to discuss it in some detail in my next article. The value of Mr. Bender’s “Additional Comments” is that they bring some of the points in the full report into sharper focus. “Our military,” Bender says, “have never decided when, where, and with what they are going to fight. For this reason they have not and cannot give to the War Production Board [WPB] and to the War Manpower Commission, respectively, schedules of their requirements for military products and man-power. Without these schedules it has been impossible to plan production, to allocate materials and man-power. And because we have not planned the elements of production, we cannot manage or control the flow of armament. Without such scheduled flow of weapons the military cannot undertake to plan its strategy.” The result of this vicious circle is that “we are always on the defensive.” And now we are really preparing to dig in on the defensive on a gigantic scale.

  Will the reader bear with me while I quote more fully from that passage in which Representative Bender touches upon the capital’s most important Forbidden Topic? “At the present time,” Bender writes, “the army is demanding a huge increase in man-power.” A fantastically high proportion of present production now goes to supply ordinary civilian items for our present army. “When the army is asked,” Bender continues, “if it expects to obtain trucks and other equipment in the same proportion to this larger army as it now obtains, no answer is forthcoming.” Why do we need an army and navy of about 10,000,000 men? “The demand by the military for a huge army,” Bender answers, “is based in part on the assumption that one or more of our allies will collapse in the coming year. Upon this assumption, it is then argued that we can rely only on ourselves.” Since the Tolan report went to press, Secretary Stimson has cut his estimate to 7,500,000 men, but a continuation of the present defensive and defeatist strategic thinking will make necessary an army much larger than that, perhaps as large as 13,000,000.

  “To equip such an army with training weapons alone,” Bender goes on, “would require practically all of our present war production. Therefore, these advocates of a huge army move logically to the next point—the reduction or stoppage of lend-lease shipments to our allies.” By assuming the defeat of our allies we are compelled vastly to enlarge the army. By mobilizing a vastly larger army we help to insure their defeat. “When it is pointed out to these advocates of a 13,000,000-man army,” Bender says, “that our allies may collapse if we stop lend-lease shipments, they have no answer”—that is, no answer that could safely be made in public.

  Behind these defeatist calculations are a complex of considerations and motives. Among them are not merely political dislike for the Soviet Union but considerable elements of anti-British feeling. As deep, if not deeper, than the more obvious anti-Soviet feeling, which wide sectors of our leadership and upper classes have overcome, is a kind of anti-British isolationist-imperialist attitude on the part of some of our foremost military men. An important man in this category is General Brehon B. Somervell, chief of the Services of Supply, the most powerful single figure in war production today and a man who has done his best to cut down lend-lease aid to Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. He feels that we have to “prepare to do this job ourselves.”

  This kind of thinking would make the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards our first lines of defense. It
would cost many millions more in lives and many billions more in money. It means that we would have to defeat the Axis with our men and boys alone instead of with the aid of British, Russians, and Chinese. It would leave them to die in vain rather than as part of a world strategy for victory. “The international implications of army demands for man-power,” Bender points out, “are seldom understood. But they are as important as the need to consider man-power requirements of industry and agriculture.” It is these broader implications which the dominant military have failed to understand or chosen to ignore. Popular pressure is needed to support the efforts of powerful forces here, including I believe the President himself, to combat this dangerous trend. The moment is approaching when it will be decided whether these are indeed to be United Nations fighting a United Nations war, or each waging its own struggle in desperate and foolhardy isolation.