May 15, 2017 5 min read

Early in 1945, officials in the Roosevelt administration were busy making plans for the world emerging from the ruins of World War II.

The role of global leader was new to the United States. In the four years since Pearl Harbor, the country had made a remarkable journey: it went from being a military power of negligible significance to a titan of battle. Politically and economically, it stood unequaled.

At the same time, the world’s former number one, Great Britain, had been exhausted not by four years of war but by six. Germany and Japan, of course, were devastated in defeat. Russia had lost millions in the fighting.

As a result, the mantle of leadership rested squarely on American shoulders. Buoyed by victory, the United States soberly yet confidently strode onto center stage.

The problems of peace in 1945 were no less vexing than those of war. The world needed remade. From the very beginning, it had been clear to President Roosevelt that the age of colonialism — epitomized by the vast British empire — could not, and would not, survive in this new world. The Middle East and Africa were due a makeover.

Europe, pulverized almost beyond belief, also required urgent care.

As a result, many of the problems were new and novel for the officials preparing plans for a president who would be dead in a matter of weeks.

Despite the complexities, these officials were clear-eyed about a large number of tasks. One was the need to stimulate world trade while maintaining a robust American economy. The two went hand in hand, they felt.

As Secretary of State Frances Perkins wrote Franklin Roosevelt just two weeks before the four-term president’s death in the spring of 1945, “The success of our economic foreign policy will depend upon our success in the domestic field of organizing our economy to maintain continuously high levels of employment.”

Perkins, Secretary of Commerce Harold Ickes and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had been evangelizing about free trade for decades, were members of a panel known as the Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy. The committee’s report was ready for the president to read. Perkins suggested she and Ickes, long-time friends and associates of the president, drop by soon to go over the details.

They never got the chance. FDR died in the middle of April 1945. The guns in Europe fell silent in early May. The war in the Pacific would rage on another couple of months, until the U.S. obliterated two Japanese cities with a terrifying new weapon, the atom bomb.

In her letter to the president dated March 31, Perkins emphasized the committee’s overarching conclusion: “… recognition of the fact that unless there is a domestic program to maintain a high level of productive employment it (will) be almost impossible to achieve our goal of more liberal conditions for international trade.”

For our purposes, the key phrase here is “productive employment,” and even though it was never defined in the report readied for President Roosevelt, we might take it to mean employment that affords individuals and families the opportunity to participate as consumers in the world economy.

In other words, what was needed were jobs that generate income sufficient to take advantage not only of goods produced in the United State but those that would, eventually, be manufactured around the world.

We’re talking here about automobiles, kitchen appliances, radios and the newfangled television. Later on, these items would run the gamut from shirts, pants and toys to big screen TVs, home sound systems and alarms, hand-held electronic devises and computers.

I’m not sure what happened: did later policymakers forget the markers set down in the later stages of the Roosevelt administration; were they even aware of the admonition to take care of the home folks first and foremost; or did things spin out of control on their own?

Whatever the answer, we now have a country in which whole segments of the population have been left behind in a world fashioned, at least in part, by barrier-free trade.

Small towns devastated by the flight of blue collar manufacturing jobs overseas is not just an aspect of western Pennsylvania. Hollowed out communities and wasted lives extend north, south, east and west.

“Productive employment” never envisioned part-time employment at the local Wal-Mart. How could it? In 1945, the retail behemoth was but a gleam in the eye of a young Sam Walton, visionary that he was: if ever there was a corporation that took advantage of the world economy, it is Wal-Mart — from its third-world imports to the wages it pays its unorganized workforce.

Wartime America was a true phenomenon. Thanks to war on an unprecedented scale, the U.S. economy produced 17 million new civilian jobs. Industrial production shot up 96 percent. Corporate profits doubled. And by 1945, manufacturing wages were on average 50 percent higher than they had been in 1939.

According to a study by The American Prospect, war “brought full employment and a fairer distribution of income.”

No one expects history to repeat itself. Besides, World War II was mostly an unmitigated disaster. Millions died. And the fighting bankrupted much of the rest of the world.

Still, it would be comforting to think that Washington policymakers are once again taking renewed interest in the imperative of the Roosevelt-era’s “full employment” report touted by Secretary Perkins — namely, that “foreign as well as domestic economic policy should seek to raise the national standard of living.”

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.