FDR - Jean Edward Smith [269]
Q: Do you understand that you may at the end of the first six months, extend for another period of six months?
FDR: Yes.
Q: And on and on?
FDR: I think so.… I have no doubt Congress will not compel us to send these people back to Germany.57
Roosevelt believed that Hitler could be contained through airpower. It was a presidential idée fixe that would bedevil military planners for the next three years. Air supremacy was vital. But without supporting ground and naval forces, without the thousands of ancillary items that modern war entailed, airplanes alone could not ensure victory. On November 14, 1938, four days after Kristallnacht, FDR convened a high-level meeting in the Oval Office to launch his plan for a massive expansion of American airpower.58 “Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did … if the United States had five thousand warplanes and the capacity to produce ten thousand more within the next few months,” said the president.59 According to Roosevelt, the Western Hemisphere was in grave danger. To defend it, America needed an air force of 20,000 planes. Since it was unlikely that Congress would appropriate the money, FDR said he would settle for half that number together with a substantial expansion of production capacity. “Hopkins could build these plants without cost to the Treasury because it would be work relief.”60 Roosevelt was jawboning to impart a sense of urgency. He did not intend for his figures to be taken literally. When the military followed through with a supplemental budget request for $1.8 billion, FDR slashed it to $525 million.61
Roosevelt became consumed with defense and foreign policy. The economy was perking along, on five cylinders if not six, and the social revolution had receded in importance. As the president’s attention shifted, a new coalition formed on Capitol Hill. Southern Democrats and Wall Street Republicans rallied to FDR’s side. Isolationist progressives and western populists—men like Hiram Johnson, Burton K. Wheeler, and Robert La Follette—fell away. After almost two years of uninterrupted reverses, Roosevelt was back on his game. At Chapel Hill on December 5 he moved adroitly to soothe domestic critics, the avuncular Dutch uncle once again taking the nation into his confidence:
You undergraduates who see me for the first time have read and heard that I am at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.… You have heard for six years that I was about to plunge the nation into war; that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe; that I was driving the nation into bankruptcy; and that I breakfasted every morning on ‘grilled millionaire.’
Actually, I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalist system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.62
In late December, after six years in office, FDR undertook a cabinet shake-up. Homer Cummings was the first to walk the plank. At Roosevelt’s request, Cummings submitted his resignation so that he might “return to private practice.” He was replaced as attorney general by Michigan governor Frank Murphy, a longtime New Deal favorite who had been narrowly defeated in his bid for reelection. The second casualty