The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [20]
Joe’s fellow Harvard men contributed as much as any group in America to what he considered “the momentum of a senseless war.” By the time war was declared the following April, America had the nucleus of a college-educated officer corps, in which Harvard men were disproportionately represented. If Joe’s friends were naive, they shared their naivete with millions of their compatriots. Joe’s three close friends all honored their ideals by serving in the war.
In all, 11,319 Harvard men served in World War I, and 371 died in the service of their country. Of Joe’s class alone, the majority of graduates either enlisted or were drafted, and 7 did not return. Some marched off to war because they were patriots; some marched off seeking fame in the cannon’s roar, and some marched off hardly knowing why. Those, like Joe’s three close friends, who set off as idealists returned as men to whom irony was often the highest political emotion. There had been several Harvards when Joe was there, but for many of the men of his generation there were now only two: those who served and those who did not.
Joe was not one of those who publicly opposed America’s entry into the war, a cause that might have subjected him to public rebuke and hurt his bank’s business. He was a man of natural cynicism after all, and it would have been futile to stand up to the folly of his fellowman. While some of Joe’s classmates had connived to get into battle, joining the French Foreign Legion or the Canadian forces, Joe connived to get out.
As soon as war was declared and his friends had donned their khakis, twenty-eight-year-old Joe wangled a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year position as the assistant manager of the Bethlehem Steel Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. In peacetime Joe would never have been considered for such a seat, but all across America executives and managers were exchanging their suits for officers’ uniforms. Joe was willing to help build warships to be used by men who might die in a war in which he did not believe.
When Joe arrived at his new office in October 1917, he knew nothing about administering a shipyard. One of the first things he learned was that the craft union had negotiated a new wage scale with his predecessor to go into effect with the next pay cycle. Instead of honoring the agreement or alerting the union that he wanted to renegotiate, he simply kept the old pay rate.
The workers, many of them immigrants, including a large number of English and Scottish skilled workers, were not that different from the kind of men who had nightly sat in his father’s home seeking advice and aid. If Joe had observed that scene with any acumen, he would have realized that you could push men like this, and you could push them some more, but if you broke their trust in you, dishonored your word, then they had a boundless fury.
When the workers got their pay envelopes and saw that they had been deceived, about five thousand of them went on strike. That was no trivial action on their part, for the District Exemption Board of Quincy immediately took away their draft exemptions. “The strikers, in refusing to work in the shipyard … become automatically eligible for the trenches,” one district board member said, the intimidation hardly veiled.
Within days of his arrival Joe had managed to create a crisis of potentially immense magnitude. The ships in the dry docks were crucial to the war effort, and if the strike spread, its costs would soon become incalculable. No one knew this as intimately as did Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The aristocratic Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, class of 1903, had never had workingmen sitting around in the evenings in the living room of his family estate in Hyde Park, New York. Yet Roosevelt had an instinctive awareness of how to deal with these workers. He sent a telegram in which he flattered the men by telling them that there was “probably no one plant in the country whose continuous operation is more important to the success