Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
some knowledge that the effort had little chance of becoming law, Roosevelt’s landslide reelection in the preceding year notwithstanding. Indeed, the bill died in the Judiciary Committee of the Senate when even the Democratic majority had little stomach for an all-out assault on the third branch of government, separate and equal to the presidency and Congress.
Barney Kilgore’s tenure as Washington bureau chief brought more of his thoughtful analysis. With regard to the New Deal’s efforts to jack up farm prices by destruction of crops and farm animals, Barney attacked the New Deal’s price-fixing efforts, writing that such efforts “invariably fix prices at uneconomic levels.”
He also applied his logical mind to Keynesian theory: “No government ever really creates purchasing power. It merely has the power to redistribute it. Hence, despite all claims that the New Deal has no intention of robbing Peter to pay Paul, the fact is slowly emerging that it must either tax Peter to pay Paul (which amounts to about the same thing) or it must tax Paul to pay Paul (which is even more patently a ring-around-the-rosey game).”
On one of Kilgore’s periodic trips to sample grassroots opinion about the New Deal in September 1934, he quoted a “shrewd observer” in Cleveland as saying, “If the administration really wants to plan a recovery all it has to do is quit planning.” But nonetheless, he reported that FDR still enjoyed widespread popularity, as would be evident in his 1936 victory.
As 1936 passed into history and the 1930s wore on and Kilgore made vigorous use of his post as Washington bureau manager, things began to turn sour for FDR. His effort to pack the court fell flat. The crash of 1937 dashed any claims he might have of economic policy success. And in the 1938 midterm elections, the Republicans made a strong comeback in Congress. On top of all this, the global outlook was beginning to look increasingly dangerous. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and soon became a proxy contest between Hitler on the side of the rebellious Francisco Franco and Stalin on the side of the Loyalists, thus providing a foretaste of the massive struggle between the two that would come later. In 1937, Japan invaded Manchuria, starting a war with China. And in 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and, after getting a pass from Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, also took over a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland.
Americans were averse to any involvement, and Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts beginning in 1935 mainly forbidding arms shipments to warring powers. The Journal was well disposed toward these laws, but they were gradually being eroded as Roosevelt sought ways to aid China, a victim of Japanese aggression, and Britain and France, who were threatened by Germany. In October 1937, Roosevelt proposed to “quarantine” countries that violated treaties, which would have the effect of allowing the United States to embargo aggressor nations, an act of war.
The Journal opposed that idea in an editorial titled “We Could Muddle Into War.” While it recognized that Americans opposed aggression, it argued that the president’s proposal was “strongly suggestive of forcible measures against nations that wage aggressive warfare, declared or undeclared. Does anyone believe that public opinion in this country can be marshaled to support the United States in measures of international force?”
During the 1940 presidential election, Kilgore was impressed by the enthusiastic public reception a fellow Hoosier, Wendell Willkie, was getting as he campaigned for the presidency on the Republican ticket against Roosevelt. Kilgore thought the election would be close. But he hadn’t accounted for the effective political machine the Democrats had created. FDR won 55% of the popular vote. Kilgore wrote a column apologizing to readers for being carried away by the noise and excitement of the Willkie campaign.
But Kilgore would soon cease to be the most prominent Journal byline writer. In early 1941, he and Grimes had a long discussion in New York during which Grimes offered to step aside and let Barney become managing editor. Grimes would become the new voice of the Journal, although an anonymous one most of the time, by taking over editorial opinion responsibilities with the title of editor. Hogate approved of the change.
It was a felicitous change. Barney could apply his creative talents to the continuing efforts to make the Journal more interesting and readable. And Grimes, while retaining some responsibility for the overall quality of the paper, would apply his sharp intellect to the task of making Journal editorials more assertive and exacting. Working as a team, they both succeeded in that endeavor, judging from the increased prominence of the Journal as a source of news and opinion.
Grimes’ editorials would continue the Journal’s long-standing opposition to involvement in foreign wars in 1941 even as Europe was being set ablaze by Hitler’s tanks and bombers. At one point, a rather defensive editorial expressed resentment over having its position described as “isolationist,” saying that “it does not help clear thinking to invent words with a sinister meaning and then proceed to hurl them at people.” But the Journal had a long antiwar tradition and, right or wrong, was adhering to that tradition.
Pearl Harbor’s ‘Stark Reality’
All the debate about going to war would end suddenly on December 7, 1941, when the war came to America. Some 360 bombers and fighter planes launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers that had stealthily slipped to within 220 miles of the U.S. territory of Hawaii came streaming through the Kolekole Pass in the northern Oahu mountains to attack the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese admirals had picked Sunday morning for the raid, correctly assuming that it would be a time when the Americans were in their lowest state of readiness.
The Journal’s coverage displayed the Journal’s new team at its editorial best. Bill Kerby, a Kilgore protégé who had been made assistant managing editor, was on duty when news service teletype bells began jangling at 3 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon alerting editors that there was big news coming. When reports of the attack started coming through, Kerby summoned Kilgore and Grimes. In short order, with a contribution from Washington bureau chief Eugene Duffield, they were remaking the Monday front page to meet the Journal’s press deadline, only three hours away. It was a superb achievement. Kerby’s lead story, written with Kilgore looking over his shoulder and offering suggestions, correctly predicted that the attack would mean a massive mobilization of American industry for the production of weapons and munitions. Duffield supplied the news that the president and Congress would put the United States on a war footing within hours.
Grimes, for his part, wrote an editorial saying that, with the Japanese attack, the war debate had ended. The Journal had been critical of FDR’s “lend-lease,” which involved, among other things, lending 50 U.S. destroyers to Britain and Canada in return for basing rights on British Caribbean islands. The Journal had feared that Roosevelt was leading America into the European war in violation of the American Neutrality Acts.
But on December 8, under the headline “We Have a Duty,” a Grimes editorial told of the “stark, horrible reality that American territory has been attacked” and that Japan had declared war on the United States. It said that everything had changed once the news of Pearl Harbor had set the teletype machines clacking on Sunday afternoon:
“In that moment, the events of last week seemed to have been removed to some remote era of antiquity. The things that business and finance discussed last week seem now to have no relation whatever to tomorrow nor to the many days to come after tomorrow . . . Every citizen has and knows his duty . . . It will be heavy for all . . . We say that the sacrifices will be made. The duty will be performed.”
Writing in short “takes” of five-by-eight copy paper sent immediately to the typesetters down below in the Journal building at 44 Broad Street, the editors totally remade the Monday edition in three hours. The new front page had three decks of banner headlines stretching across the top, something Journal readers had not seen before. The Journal was on a war footing.
With Roosevelt’s dramatic speech to Congress the next day declaring war and declaiming that December 7 was a “day that would live in infamy!” the administration became more realistic in its attitude toward