The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Read online

  The Glory and the Dream

  A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972

  William Manchester

  Copyright

  The Glory and the Dream

  Copyright © 1973, 1974, 2013 by William Manchester

  Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa

  ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795335587

  To

  Laurie Manchester

  and to

  her future

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  —Wordsworth

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Rock Bottom

  PART I

  Rendezvous with Destiny

  1932–1941

  1. The Cruelest Year

  Depression Montage

  2. Roosevelt!

  Portrait of an American: ELEANOR

  3. Stirrings

  Mid-Thirties Montage

  4. The Roosevelt Referendum

  Portrait of an American: STOCKBROKER RICHARD WHITNEY

  5. The Conservative Phoenix

  Late Thirties Montage

  6. A Shadow of a Primitive Terror

  Portrait of an American: NORMAN THOMAS

  7. Through the Night with a Light from Above

  Montage: The Last of Prewar America

  8. America on the Brink

  PART II

  Sacrifice and Transformation

  1941–1950

  9. Counterattack

  Pacific Montage

  10. The Home Front

  Home Front Montage

  11. Lilacs in the Dooryard

  ETO Montage

  12. A New World, Under a New Sun

  Portrait of an American: THE REDHEAD

  13. The Fraying Flags of Triumph

  Postwar Montage

  14. Life with Harry

  15. A Little Touch of Harry in the Night

  Late Forties Montage

  16. The Age of Suspicion

  Portrait of an American: EDWARD ROSCOE MURROW

  17. Into the Abyss

  Early Fifties Montage

  PART III

  Sowing the Wind

  1951–1960

  18. A House Divided

  19. Right Turn

  Montage: The Early Eisenhower Years

  20. What Was Good for General Motors

  Portrait of an American: NORMA JEAN BAKER

  21. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman

  Montage: The Mid-Fifties

  22. With All Deliberate Speed

  23. The Pursuit of Happiness

  Montage: Eisenhower at Flood Tide

  24. Beep Beep

  Portrait of an American: THE EDSEL

  25. The Crusade Falters

  Late Fifties Montage

  26. Tattoo for the General

  PART IV

  Reaping the Whirlwind

  1961–1968

  27. A New Generation of Americans

  Montage: The Early Sixties

  28. Now the Trumpet Summoned Us Again

  Portrait of an American: PETER CARL GOLDMARK

  29. Don’t Let It Be Forgot

  Montage: JFK/LBJ

  30. The Long Arm

  31. A Dream of Greatness—and Disenchantment

  Montage: The Johnson Years

  32. Up Against the Wall

  Portrait of an American: KARL HESS III

  33. The Year Everything Went Wrong

  Montage: The Late Sixties

  PART V

  Nixon, After All

  1969–1972

  34. The Rise of the Silent Majority

  Portrait of an American: BENJAMIN MCLANE SPOCK, M.D.

  35. Nattering Nabobs

  Early Seventies Montage

  36. The Divided States of America

  Portrait of an American: RALPH NADER

  37. Pride Goeth

  EPILOGUE: Echoes

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Rock Bottom

  In the desperate summer of 1932, Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state. Since May some twenty-five thousand penniless World War veterans had been encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses, and empty stores. The men drilled, sang war songs, and once, led by a Medal of Honor winner and watched by a hundred thousand silent Washingtonians, they marched up Pennsylvania Avenue bearing American flags of faded cotton. Most of the time, however, they waited and brooded. The vets had come to ask their government for relief from the Great Depression, then approaching the end of its third year; specifically, they wanted immediate payment of the soldiers’ “bonus” authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 but not due until 1945. If they could get cash now, the men would receive about $500 each. Headline writers had christened them “the Bonus Army,” “the bonus marchers.” They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force.

  BEF members had hoped in vain for congressional action. Now they appealed to President Hoover, begging him to receive a delegation of their leaders. Instead he sent word that he was too busy and then proceeded to isolate himself from the city. Presidential plans to visit the Senate were canceled; policemen patrolled the White House grounds day and night. For the first time since the Armistice, the Executive Mansion gates were chained shut. HOOVER LOCKS SELF IN WHITE HOUSE, read a New York Daily News headline. He went even further. Barricades were erected; traffic was shut down for a distance of one block on all sides of the Mansion. A one-armed veteran, bent upon picketing, tried to penetrate the screen of guards. He was soundly beaten and carried off to jail.

  In retrospect this panoply appears to have been the overreaction of a frightened, frustrated administration. The bonus marchers were unarmed, had expelled radicals from their ranks, and—despite their evident hunger—weren’t even panhandling openly. They seemed too weak to be a menace. Drew Pearson, a thirty-four-year-old Baltimore Sun reporter, described them as “ragged, weary, and apathetic,” with “no hope on their faces.” Increasingly, the BEF vigil had become an exercise in endurance. A health department inspector described the camps’ sanitary conditions as “extremely bad.” Makeshift commissaries depended largely upon charity. Truckloads of food arrived from friends in Des Moines and Camden, New Jersey; a hundred loaves of bread were being shipped each day from one sympathetic baker; a thousand pies came from another; the Veterans of Foreign Wars sent $500, and the bonus marchers raised another $2,500 by staging boxing bouts among themselves in Griffith Stadium. It was all very haphazard. The administration was doing virtually nothing—Washington police had aroused Hoover’s wrath by feeding the District’s uninvited guests bread, coffee, and stew at six cents a day—and by mid-August brutal temperatures were approaching their annual height, diminishing water reserves and multiplying misery.

  In those years Washington was officially classified by the British Foreign Office as a “sub-tropical climate.” Diplomats loathed its wilting heat and dense humidity; with the exception of a few downtown theaters which advertised themselves as “refrigerated,”
there was no air-conditioning. In summer the capital was a city of awnings, screened porches, ice wagons, summer furniture and summer rugs, and in the words of an official guidebook it was also “a peculiarly interesting place for the study of insects.” Lacking shade or screens, the BEF was exposed to the full fury of the season. When the vets’ vanguard had entered the District, gardens were flowering in their springtime glory. By July the blossoms of magnolia and azalea were long gone, and the cherry trees were bare. Even the earth, it seemed, was pitiless. The vets had taken on the appearance of desert creatures; downtown merchants complained that “the sight of so many down-at-the-heel men has a depressing effect on business.” That, really, was the true extent of their threat to the country.

  ***

  But if the BEF danger was illusion, Washington’s obscurity on the international scene in that era, and its dependency upon Europe, were more substantive. Among the sixty-five independent countries then in the world, there was but one superpower: Great Britain. The Union Jack flew serenely over one-fourth of the earth’s arable surface—in Europe, Asia, and Africa; North, Central, and South America; Australia, Oceania, and the West Indies. The sun literally never sank upon it. Britain’s Empire commanded the allegiance of 485 million people, and if you wanted to suggest stability you said “solid as the Rock of Gibraltar,” or “safe as the Bank of England,” which with the pound sterling at $4.86 seemed the ultimate in fiscal security. Air power was the dream of a few little-known pilots and a cashiered American general named Mitchell; what counted then were ships, and virtually no significant world waterway was free of London’s dominion. Gibraltar, Suez, the Gulf of Aden, the Strait of Singapore, and the Cape of Good Hope were controlled directly by the Admiralty. The Strait of Magellan was at the mercy of the British naval station in the Falkland Islands, and even the Panama Canal lay under the watchful eye of H.M.’s Caribbean squadron. As a consequence of all this, the United States was shielded by the Royal Navy as surely as any crown colony. Lloyd’s of London offered 500-to-1 against any invasion of the U.S. And when Fortune assured its readers that the Atlantic and Pacific were “still a protection and will forever remain so, no matter how fast ships may sail or airplanes may fly,” the magazine was assuming that the British fleet, which had ruled the waves throughout American history, would go right on ruling them.

  Washington made the same assumption; the country lacked the status, the pretensions, and most of the apparatus of a great power. The capital was a slumbering village in summer, largely forgotten the rest of the year. In size it ranked fourteenth among American cities. Most big national problems were decided in New York, where the money was; when federal action was required, Manhattan’s big corporation lawyers—men like Charles Evans Hughes, Henry L. Stimson, and Elihu Root—came down to guide their Republican protégés. President Coolidge had usually finished his official day by lunchtime. Hoover created a stir by becoming the first chief executive to have a telephone on his desk. He also employed five secretaries—no previous President had required more than one—and summoned them by an elaborate buzzer system.

  Foggy Bottom, the site of the present State Department Building, was a Negro slum. The land now occupied by the Pentagon was an agricultural experimental station and thus typical of Washington’s outskirts; “large areas close to the very heart of the nation’s lawmaking,” the Saturday Evening Post observed, “are still in farm hands.” The government employed fewer than two thousand foreign service officers. It is an astonishing fact that the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy were all under one mansard roof, across the street from the White House in that ugly, smug mass of balusters, cupolas, and pillared porticoes known today as the Executive Office Building. Indeed, after a fire gutted the President’s oval office in 1929, he and his staff had moved in with them and no one had felt crowded. There was little pomp. The East Wing of the White House, which would later house military attaches and social secretaries, hadn’t been built. The Secret Service had not yet closed West Executive Avenue to the public; it was just another city street, and on a normal day you could park there within an easy stone’s throw of the oval office. If you called on the Secretary of State, he sometimes met you at the door. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, on the same floor of the Executive Office Building, was separated from his sole aide by a single slatted door. When the general wanted help he called “Major Eisenhower,” and Ike came scurrying.

  It was a Fortune writer, fortunately anonymous, who described the general as “shy and genuinely unsympathetic to publicity.” That was nonsense. MacArthur, even then, spoke of himself in the third person, flourished a long cigarette holder as he talked, and had heightened his image by installing a fifteen-foot-high mahogany mirror behind him. As Eisenhower later recalled, when MacArthur felt slighted he was capable of expressing himself in “an explosive denunciation of politics, bad manners, bad judgment, broken promises, arrogance, unconstitutionality, insensitivity, and the way the world had gone to hell.” He can hardly be blamed. Those were dog days for professional soldiers. Up through the rank of colonel, promotion was by seniority only, and by the early Thirties it took twenty-two years to climb from captain to major. There wasn’t much to do except watch the calendar. Sheer boredom nearly drove Eisenhower to the point of resigning his commission, and it was in these years that he developed the habit of reading Street & Smith pulps: Two-Gun Western, Western Story, Thrilling Western, and Cowboy Short Stories. Across the Potomac at Fort Myer, George S. Patton Jr.—who had been a major since 1919—could be observed playing polo Wednesdays and Saturdays at 4 P.M. Riding his own horses he had collected four hundred ribbons and two hundred cups; already known for his ivory-handled revolvers, he also pursued steeplechasing, fox hunting, skeet shooting, and flying. But Major Patton, unlike Major Eisenhower, was rich.

  Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of American provincialism four decades ago than a brief glance at the military establishment; it requires no more. The U.S. had the sixteenth largest army in the world, putting it behind, among others, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Romania, and Poland. When every $17.85-a-month private had suited up, there were 132,069 Americans in uniform. On paper they could have put up a stiff fight against Yugoslavia (138,934), but in reality they would have been torn to pieces, because most of MacArthur’s men were committed to desk work, patrolling the Mexican border, and protecting U.S. possessions overseas. The chief of staff was left with 30,000 troops—fewer than the force King George sent to tame his rebellious American colonies in 1776.

  Moreover, the quality of the Army was appalling. It cost roughly a quarter of one percent of today’s military juggernaut, and looked it. Fortune called it the “worst equipped” of the world’s armed forces; no one disputed the judgment. In a crisis MacArthur could have fielded 1,000 tanks, all obsolete; 1,509 aircraft, the fastest of which could fly 234 mph; and a single mechanized regiment, which had been organized at Fort Knox that spring, and which was led by cavalrymen on horses which wore mustard-gas-proof boots. The United States Army, one writer reported, “forever walks the wide land in the image of a gaping-mouthed private with an ill-fitting uniform carrying an obsolete rifle at an ungraceful angle.”

  MacArthur was the only four-star general in the country—and there were no three-star generals. As chief of staff he received $10,400 a year, a home at Fort Myer, and the exclusive use of the Army’s only limousine. To his aide he seemed to occupy a distant pinnacle. Major Eisenhower’s annual salary was $3,000. Because he doubled as the military’s congressional lobbyist, he frequently went up to Capitol Hill. But his employer never loaned him the limousine. Nor was the major given taxi fare; in all of official Washington, there was no such thing as a petty cash fund. Instead, as he liked to recall in later life, Eisenhower would walk down the hall and fill out a form, in exchange for which he received two streetcar tokens. Then he would stand outside on Pennsylvania Avenue and wait for a Mt. Pleasant trolley car.

  ***

  It wasn’t a long wait.
Washington was laced with trolley tracks; there were nearly seven hundred streetcars in service. Except in winter, when they were vulnerable to short-circuits, the cars were efficient, and traffic jams lay a generation away. If you drove to work (observing the 22 mph speed limit), you parked in front of your office. There was almost always room at the curb. There was also an extraordinary variety among the square-shouldered Packards, Studebakers, Grahams, Pierce Arrows, Terraplanes, and Stutzes, for the automobile business, by later corporate standards, was practically a cottage industry.

  Men of all classes, including civil servants, worked Saturday mornings. In summer they wore a seasonal wardrobe: white linen, “Palm Beach,” or cotton suits; straw boaters or Panama hats; shirts with “soft” collars; and light underwear, which was restricted to the warm months because central heating was recent and far from universal. The District’s five daily papers were crowded with news of social unrest in 1932, but none of it was about Negroes. Although 26 percent of Washington was black (the highest ratio in any American city), Negroes accepted their appalling lot with remarkable unanimity. “Dark-skinned children of the South,” a government guide explained, were confined to domestic service and “manual work.” Department stores, movies, and government cafeterias were closed to them. Black workmen digging the foundations of the new Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue either brought their lunches or went hungry; even if they wanted a glass of water they had to walk two miles out Seventh Street to find a restaurant which would serve them. The president of Howard University, the Negro college, was a white man. When President Hoover sent Gold Star mothers to France, black mothers were assigned to a second (and second-class) ship. And the most popular radio program in the country, Amos ’n’ Andy, was a nightly racial slur, with its Negro parts played by two white men affecting minstrel show accents (“I’se regusted”; “Dat’s de propolition”).

  Blacks occupied Foggy Bottom, southwest Washington, and all of Georgetown, which had not yet been discovered by lovers of the quaint, possibly because the rest of the city was so picturesque. The District was greener then; there were six shade trees for every inhabitant. The most exotic neighborhoods were Kalorama Heights and upper Massachusetts Avenue. As every Jew knew, the lovely mansions there were “restricted,” but anti-Semitism was no more unfashionable than white racism; it didn’t even trouble the diplomatic community, since there was no such nation as Israel. Embassy Row, now on Massachusetts Avenue, was then on Sixteenth Street, within walking distance of the White House, and the ambassadors wore striped pants and frock coats. They had to step carefully if they roamed the downtown area, for much of it was cobblestone. Supermarkets were still a California phenomenon; District food shopping was done in small groceries, in red-fronted outlets of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, in open markets, or on pavements. Organ grinders and pushcart peddlers could be heard in the streets, together with the shouts of men wheeling grindstones and inviting housewives to bring them scissors and knives for sharpening. Downtown, flower and fruit stands provided vivid splashes of color on street corners. Oyster markets flourished down by the wharves. The Washington District Market was on Pennsylvania Avenue where the National Archives now stands. The Farmers Market was on K Street—a swarming spectacular celebrated for the cries of its fish hawkers and racks of dead rabbits. There was even a saddlery with a life-size wooden horse in front; there were still several thousand workhorses in the District in 1932. The K Street cobbles were dotted with their mementos, the scent of which, mingled with fragrances from the great markets and the corner stands, would soon vanish in deference to the great god macadam.