Introduction
Paul Moreno
Allen Drury was a journalist and novelist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Advise and Consent (1959), which became a Hollywood movie. He kept a diary as a UPI Senate correspondent toward the end of World War II and published it in 1963. It is a remarkable historical source.
We have just passed the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, which Americans have chosen to remember as “the good war.” This journal will help revise that view, which is already fading as the “greatest generation” that fought the war is passing away.
I grew up with this view of the war. My father (b. 1926) is about as young as you can be to be a WWII vet. Years ago I used to tell my students that those vets were passing away at the rate of one thousand per day. That number is now a lot lower, and my students will see the day when the last known veteran of the Good War passes on.
Drury’s account should give the impression that World War II was not a good war. No war can really be good, but we can say it was better than most considering our enemies. Nor was it a particularly tragic war, which early revisionists like George F. Kennan called it. It was more of a business-as-usual war. This is Drury’s “first impression”: “I am here … disillusioned like all Americans about their ruling heart, not too certain that it is taking us in any very worthwhile or consistent direction, yet possessed by some inner faith and certainty of its essential and ultimate purposes. We muddle, we blunder, we fall on our faces, and we survive; how, or by what peculiar grace, no man can say exactly.” As most GIs saw the war as a job to get done, and the business of the U.S. Senate carried on more or less as usual despite the war.
These (78th and 79th) Congresses were somewhat more gentlemanly (Hattie Carraway of Arkansas was the only woman—the first ever elected) and polite (racial billingsgate aside), and a lot more face-to-face, than today’s, but no less partisan. In fact, their partisanship was an asset—voters knew what their representatives stood for. The antagonism of Congress and President is one of the most prominent themes. These Congresses spanned Roosevelt’s 3rd and 4th terms (the latter mostly served by Harry S Truman). In FDR’s second term, his New Deal domestic program collapsed in the wake of his notorious proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court, to turn the federal bureaucracy (“downtown,” as they called it then) into a presidential phalanx, and to “purge” the Democratic party of those who resisted these schemes, as well as the sharp “Roosevelt recession” of 1937–38. A “conservative coalition” of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans came to hold the balance of power in Congress. Roosevelt then turned his attention to foreign affairs as he shed the isolationism that was required to get the nomination in 1932 and returned to the original internationalism of his days in the Wilson administration and for which he ran as Vice President in 1920. One of the most impressive takeaways from Drury’s account is that politics did not “stop at the water’s edge” during the war. It persisted as both parties used the war to advance their own agendas.
The journal is a panorama of 20th century U.S. history. There were plenty of old bulls in this Senate—Hiram Johnson and Bennett “Champ” Clark, as well as Secretary of War Henry Stimson from the Theodore Roosevelt administration. These are the equivalents of Joe Biden today, Washington fixtures for decades. The U.S. was on the verge of becoming the world’s dominant power and of becoming a permanent part of international organizations (the journal ends with the ratification of the UN charter). It was the midpoint or zenith in the power of organized labor in America—when the CIO formed the first “political action committee.” The last of the “Dixie Demagogues” (“Cotton Ed” Smith and Theodore “The Man” Bilbo) still roamed the Senate, in the last days of the acceptance of racist expression on the floor. Drury’s thumbnail sketch of the Supreme Court is an acute piece of writing.
In the midst of the journal are the 1944 elections, which were inconclusive and reflected the divided sentiments of the voting public. Drury reported mostly relief that we had elections, and that democracy was surviving the war. The country was caught between a growing reaction to wartime “regimentation” and liberal ambitions to complete the New Deal at home (the “economic bill of rights”) and to globalize it.
Drury sees the Soviet betrayal of the wartime alliance unfolding, but probably few fell for the Atlantic Charter-idealism of FDR, who tried as Wilson had to turn the necessary war into a crusade. The country was cynical after the disillusionment of 1918–19.
Most poignant is Drury’s great esteem for Congress. He calls it “the most powerful guarantor of human liberties free men have devised.” This was when calling the Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body” was not necessarily facetious. It may not have been “the good Congress” any more than it was “the good war,” but it was better than most we’ve seen.
—Paul Moreno
Paul Moreno is the William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in the American Constitution and is the Dean of the Social Science Division at Hillsdale College. He earned his doctorate under Herman Belz at the University of Maryland in 1994. He is the author of From Direct Action to Affirmative Action (1997); Black Americans and Organized Labor (2006); The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal (2013); and The Bureaucrat Kings (2017). He has taught at Hillsdale College for twenty years and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Paris School of Law.