The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur Read Online Free PDF Page B

civic club in conservative Charleston, South Carolina. That wasn’t exactly what Roosevelt, let alone MacArthur, had in mind.
    Yet, in all of this, there was only one misstep. For just as MacArthur recommended that army officers be replaced as CCC trainers by officers of the Organized Reserve, he also suggested that the nation would benefit if the program’s recruits be introduced to a military course of instruction. Nothing would be “finer,” he told a congressional committee, “than to take the CCC men who have had six months in camp and give them, perhaps, two months more, in which they would receive military training.” MacArthur’s suggestion was met with a firestorm of protest. Eminent historian Charles Beard led the phalanx of critics, telling Roosevelt that “it is your bounden duty to yourself and your administration to wash your hand of this fascist doctrine.” Roosevelt refused to condemn MacArthur, but quietly let it be known that while the CCC program had been organized by the military, it remained a civilian agency. MacArthur did not need to read his mind and dropped the idea.
    Strangely, in the years ahead, MacArthur would never mention his role in making the CCC a success. Nor did he extol the budget victory he won by tying his service to Roosevelt’s progressive domestic program. Perhaps he understood the irony of his position: Having establishedhimself as an outspoken conservative—the derided “General Goober of Anacostia”—he had become an accomplice in a program promoted by an administration that included his harshest critics. It is for this reason, perhaps, that he never mentioned the CCC in his memoirs or referred to it in his public speeches—it was as if it never existed. And yet, he found an odd fulfillment in running the program, as he made clear in a letter to CCC Director Robert Fechner: “It is the type of human reconstruction that has appealed to me more than I sometimes admit.”
     
    W hile Franklin Roosevelt owed a debt of gratitude to MacArthur for his work on the CCC, the president wasn’t going to let this interfere with the budget cuts he planned to force on the army chief. While the army’s work on the CCC had saved its officer corps from evisceration, the victory was temporary, with planned cuts to the army’s budget in place for the coming years. Roosevelt believed he had sound economic reasons for doing so: He remained an outspoken advocate for a balanced federal budget (making a distinction between the “regular” budget and the “emergency budget” that funded his New Deal programs) and knew it would be relatively easy to persuade the Democrat-dominated Congress to cut War Department spending. Then too, given the public’s dark memories of World War One, Roosevelt could credibly argue that money spent on preparing for war was money wasted and that the economy’s downward spiral was far more worrisome than the military’s lack of readiness. Finally, in the midst of the whirlwind of Roosevelt’s first hundred days—when legislation was passed regulating banks, markets, railroads, and putting young men to work in the nation’s forests—cutting the army budget could serve as evidence of the administration’s commitment to fiscal austerity. The president was in a strong position.
    MacArthur, on the other hand, was not. Under Roosevelt’s proposed Economy Act, federal employees had had their pay cut by some 15 percent, while veterans’ pensions were also reduced. When Congress passed the army appropriations bill for fiscal 1933, it set aside some $277.1 million for the military, which was $600,000 less than what had been proposed by Hoover. Three weeks later, the White House budget director said that that amount needed to be cut again,by another $80 million. MacArthur railed privately against the cuts, but he was hesitant to confront Roosevelt on them: Everyone was being asked to make sacrifices—why not the army? Yet, there were some cuts that MacArthur