American Rifle - Alexander Rose [161]
As MacArthur well knew, New Dealers and most Democrats in general detested him for his role in putting down marchers in Washington and for his denunciations of pacifism. (The mammoth floor-to-ceiling mirror that he installed in his War Department office, before which he admired his bemedaled self while striking Napoleonic poses and smoking Lucky Strikes, might have raised a few eyebrows as well.)67 In early 1933 the accession of a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was an opportunity to make things right, or at least righter than they were following MacArthur’s earlier outburst to him. During a full and frank exchange of views about cutting the army budget, MacArthur later recalled, “I said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur but Roosevelt.”68 This had not gone down so well.
Nonetheless MacArthur soon found a way to the president’s heart. Roosevelt wanted, as part of the first stage of the New Deal, to create a Civilian Conservation Corps that would put 275,000 youthful enrollees to work in useful endeavors. MacArthur knew that only the army could possibly organize a scheme as quickly as Roosevelt was envisaging. Much to the president’s delight, the general offered to set up training centers for the volunteers, run them with military precision, assign fully a third of his officers to overseeing the corps, and dispatch the participants off to their designated camps across the country. By being so co-operative, MacArthur saved his job, and despite much criticism from the press about this American Caesar “militarizing” the nation’s youth, Roosevelt appointed him for a second term as chief.69
In 1934–35, as the First New Deal and its initial raft of legislation and government regulation (the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Act, the National Recovery Administration) wound down, Roosevelt and his advisers intended to stimulate the lackluster economy by encouraging consumption and demand-side growth. This proto-Keynesian fiscal policy, which came to be known as the Second New Deal, included such vast relief programs as the Works Progress Administration of 1935 (which employed roughly a third of the country’s jobless), the Emergency Relief Appropriation (which distributed $5 billion to the needy), the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Rural Electrification Act.
MacArthur, a Hoover Republican, was alarmed at the scale of Roosevelt’s social and economic interventionism, but he realized also that one had to adapt or die. Alternatively put, the army would stand a better chance of surviving if it evolved to suit Rooseveltism. To this end, the general smartly linked rifle development and procurement to New Deal virtues. Given the scale of modern industry and the need to put money in the pockets of the workers to spend on products, he said in effect, outfitting the army with a new rifle would be a massive undertaking that would employ many thousands of highly skilled mechanics and beneficially exercise a multiplier effect throughout the economy.
Hence the accelerated speed at which work on the Garand progressed. MacArthur wasn’t concerned with the details; he needed only to satisfy Roosevelt that the army would do its part to help the country regain its footing. Thus on August 3, 1933, even before the eighty models were ready on Ordnance’s rushed schedule, their experimental designation, T1E2, was changed to the more official, more positive “U.S.