Political Notes
ROOSEVELT'S
CONSERVATIVE
WAR
Dwight Macdonald
I have seen little comment on an increasingly obvious
phenomenon in this war: the de-politicalization of
President Roosevelt's conduct of the war. He has
not made any inspirational speeches about world
democracy for a long time, leaving the field to Wallace and Willkie; his
silence on India has been profound. On the home front, he also seems to be
in retirement as a political leader. On the three major domestic issues of
the last few months-the poll-tax fight in Congress; the successful raid by
the farm bloc, with business backing, on the Administration's price-control
legislation; and the reactionary new tax bill, which rejects the Treasury's
proposals all down the line-Roosevelt had nothing to say publicly. The
manpower muddle is steadily growing worse, with Administration leaders
contradicting each other (and themselves) daily.* The light vote in the
Congressional elections is an index to the apathy of the electorate, and the
unexpectedly large gains scored by the Republicans show the dissatisfaction
with Roosevelt of those who did vote. A Republican vote was largely a
protest vote, since there were no real issues, the Republicans being unable
and the Administration unwilling to create any.
The man in the street may be coming to realize what is apparently
still a mystery to the liberal weeklies: that the New Deal has been dead
for a long time. The Roosevelt Administration is not fascistic, or even
developing with any speed in that direction: like the Churchill govern·
ment, it finds its chief mass base in the labor movement; civil liberties
have been preserved to a remarkable degree. Nor is it progressive or
liberal or reformist, as it was between 1933 and 1936. It is not fighting
the totalitarian war many radicals and isolationists expected it. to before
Pearl Harbor, and it is not fighting the "people's war" Wallace and the
liberals are still trying to believe in. It is fighting a
conservative
war,
which means (1) an inefficient war (relative to either a fascist or a
socialist war regime), and thus a bloody, lengthy and exhausting struggle;
and (2) a lack of inspiriting, or even sensible, war aims (from the view–
point of the common man, that is; monopoly capitalism finds the Roose–
velt-Churchill war aims sensible enough). By "conservative" I mean
that Roosevelt's policy since 1937 has been to maintain the status quo
as much as possible by mediating between existing class and group
interests, rather than taking any "line" of his own. Since big business
is much the strongest group in our society, and growing stronger as a
result of the production demands of the war, this means letting big
• For a detailed and unsparing critique of faulty planning in manpower and war
production, see the newly issued
Sixth Interim Report of the Select Committee
Investigating National Defense Migration
(House Report No. 2589). Obtainable free
from J!epresentative John H. Tolan, chairman of the Committee.
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