Get Things Moving!

Mordecai Lee

Description

Shortly after Hitler's armies invaded Western Europe in May of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt activated a new agency within the Executive Office of the President called the Office for Emergency Management (OEM). The OEM went on to house many prewar and wartime agencies created to manage the country's arms production buildup and economic mobilization. After World War II a consensus by historians quickly gelled that OEM was unimportant, viewing it as a mere administrative holding company and legalistic convenience for the emergency agencies. Similarly they have dismissed the importance of the Liaison Officer for Emergency Management (LOEM), viewing the position as merely a liaison channel between OEM agencies and the White House. Mordecai Lee presents a revisionist history of OEM, focusing mostly on the record of the longest serving LOEM, Wayne Coy. Drawing upon largely unexamined archival sources, including the Roosevelt and Truman Presidential Libraries and the National Archives, Lee gives a precise account of what Coy actually did and, contrary to the conventional wisdom, concludes he was an important senior leader in the Roosevelt White House, engaging in management, policy, and politics.
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. Inventing the President’s Office for Emergency Management and Its Liaison Officer, September 1939–April 1941

2. The Rise of Wayne Coy: Public Administration with Politics, 1935–Spring 1941

3. Coy Begins as LOEM: “Wayne Coy, the President, and Three Motorcycles,” April–May 1941

4. Coy as LOEM before the War: Public Policy, April–December 1941

5. Coy as LOEM before the War: Politics, April–December 1941

6. Coy as LOEM before the War: Management, April–December 1941

7. Coy as LOEM in the First Half-Year of the War: Policy and Politics, December 1941–May 1942

8. Coy as LOEM in the First Half-Year of the War: Management and Workday Routine, December 1941–May 1942

9. Wearing Two Hats: Coy as LOEM and BOB Assistant Director, May–October 1942

10. Wearing Two Hats: Coy as LOEM and BOB Assistant Director with Byrnes in the East Wing, October 1942–June 1943

11. LOEM after Coy and Coy after LOEM

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• National
• États-Unis
• The
• Central
• History of the Americas
• 20th century
• Central government
• English articles
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438471389
• Langue: English

Extrait

GET THINGS
MOVING!
Franklin Roosevelt memo to Wayne Coy, August 2, 1941. Source: Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. Accessed April 28, 2018, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/sign/fdr_32.pdf
GET THINGS
MOVING!
FDR, Wayne Coy, and the Office for Emergency Management, 1941–1943
MORDECAI LEE
Cover photo: Wayne Coy, Liaison Officer for Emergency Management and Special Assistant to the President. Source: “Trying This One for Size?” Washington Daily News , April 26, 1941, 8. Credit: Harris Ewing Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-04257
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lee, Mordecai.
Title: Get Things Moving!: FDR, Wayne Coy, and the Office for Emergency Management, 1941–1943 / Mordecai Lee.
Other titles: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Wayne Coy, and the Office for Emergency Management, 1941–1943
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053071 | ISBN 9781438471372 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471389 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Coy, Wayne, 1903–1957. | United States. Office for Emergency Management—Officials and employees—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Economic aspects—United States. | Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Friends and associates. | United States. Office for Emergency Management—History. | United States—Politics and government—1933–1945
Classification: LCC HC106.4 .L474 2018 | DDC 940.53/73092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053071
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In grateful appreciation to the Brookings Institution for the appointment as guest scholar (1972–74) and Congressman Henry S. Reuss (WI-5) for hiring me as his legislative assistant (1975–76). I held these two positions at the beginning of my professional life, but assumed academe and politics were mutually exclusive worlds and of no relevance or applicability to the other. I figured I would quickly have to pick one of the two for a longer-term career path. To my surprise, I was wrong. Academic training turned out to be quite helpful when I served in the Wisconsin State Legislature (1977–89), as was my political experience while in the academy (1997–2018). Who knew?
Contents
P REFACE
A BBREVIATIONS
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER 1
Inventing the President’s Office for Emergency Management and Its Liaison Officer, September 1939–April 1941
C HAPTER 2
The Rise of Wayne Coy: Public Administration with Politics, 1935–Spring 1941
C HAPTER 3
Coy Begins as LOEM: “Wayne Coy, the President, and Three Motorcycles,” April–May 1941
C HAPTER 4
Coy as LOEM before the War: Public Policy, April–December 1941
C HAPTER 5
Coy as LOEM before the War: Politics, April–December 1941
C HAPTER 6
Coy as LOEM before the War: Management, April–December 1941
C HAPTER 7
Coy as LOEM in the First Half-Year of the War: Policy and Politics, December 1941–May 1942
C HAPTER 8
Coy as LOEM in the First Half-Year of the War: Management and Workday Routine, December 1941–May 1942
C HAPTER 9
Wearing Two Hats: Coy as LOEM and BOB Assistant Director, May–October 1942
C HAPTER 10
Wearing Two Hats: Coy as LOEM and BOB Assistant Director with Byrnes in the East Wing, October 1942–June 1943
C HAPTER 11
LOEM after Coy and Coy after LOEM
C ONCLUSION
N OTES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
Preface
President Roosevelt was fuming. Unusual for him, this time he showed it. On June 22, 1941, Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, Germany’s ally since August 1939. Notwithstanding the many ideological, economic, governmental, and geopolitical differences between the US and the USSR, they were now suddenly on the same side: opposition to Nazi Germany. If only based on the axiom that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, FDR immediately pivoted and wanted to provide maximum military supplies and other support for Stalin’s fight against Germany. Only a few weeks after the invasion, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most trusted adviser, flew to Moscow to offer American support. Stalin accepted. Roosevelt endorsed fulfilling Stalin’s requests. (A reminder that Pearl Harbor was nearly half a year away.)
It was now six weeks after Hitler’s invasion. Russia was reeling and seeing little of the American offer of military support. Roosevelt complained about that in a cabinet meeting on Friday, August 1. Angry about the runaround he felt the Russians were getting from the bureaucracy, the president told the Cabinet, “Well, I am going to put one of the best administrators in charge … and his job will be to see that the Russians get what they need.” On Saturday, he was clearing off his desk preparing for a two-week absence. In secret, he was sailing to rendezvous with Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland to coordinate their war efforts, even though the US was technically at peace with Germany. Knowing he would be gone for several weeks, the president wanted to be sure that aid to Russia would finally start flowing despite his absence. So first he had the White House operator track down the aide he had in mind (who was in Indiana visiting his son at summer camp), told him on the phone of this urgent assignment, and that he was to return to Washington immediately. When the staffer arrived back at the White House, he would find a presidential memo with the details of what FDR wanted done posthaste. On Saturday evening, just before leaving, the president dictated an uncharacteristically sharply worded memo on the subject for the aide. It included an unambiguous order to “get things moving!” Who was this aide Roosevelt trusted so much, who had already demonstrated the ability to deliver notwithstanding bureaucratically and politically difficult obstacles, and who had a legal scope of power to get this assignment done?
Wayne Coy.
Who?!
When thinking about FDR’s most important civilian assistant in WWII, most historians would probably name James Byrnes. Byrnes had begun at the White House in October 1942, when he resigned from the Supreme Court to become the senior administration official for domestic economic policy. He headed a new agency called Office of Economic Stabilization, created by executive order. In May 1943, Roosevelt promoted Byrnes by expanding his jurisdiction, again by executive order, and gave him the title of director of the Office of War Mobilization (OWM). A month after that, FDR further added to Byrnes’s powers by appointing him to hold simultaneously another position as liaison officer of the Office for Emergency Management (LOEM). Byrnes wore these two “hats” for about half a year. In November 1943, Byrnes recommended to FDR that he did not need the LOEM role, and so the president discontinued it, though not the Office for Emergency Management (OEM) as an administrative entity. About a year after that, in October 1944, Congress insisted that Byrnes’s work be based on statutory power rather than executive orders. FDR, who preternaturally did not want Congress imposing on him legal strictures controlling how he organized the war effort, acquiesced and signed it into law. As a result, Byrnes’s legal title for the rest of the war became director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWMR).
What history often overlooks is that when Byrnes became OEM’s liaison officer in June 1943, he was replacing someone. Roosevelt had appointed Wayne Coy as LOEM in April 1941. When Byrnes first arrived at the White House in October 1942, Coy had already been leading OEM for about a year and a half, a long time considering FDR’s fluid and ad hoc management style, especially during the war. Then, during Byrnes’s first assignment focusing on economic stabilization (October 1942 to May 1943), the two worked in tandem. Coy continued focusing on civilian war production and Byrnes on economic policy. It was not until June 1943, when Coy stepped down as LOEM, that Byrnes’s powers were expanded to include the LOEM duties. (Coy stayed on, solely as assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, until January 1944.)
History is right to view Byrnes as FDR’s domestic war czar. Sometimes he was even called the assistant president, including by FDR in 1944, though in quotation marks. Yet when the president named Coy as liaison officer for emergency management in April 1941, the position was so new and likely powerful that an Iowa newspaper editor wrote a column that Coy had become “an assistant president.” 1 History has largely overlooked Coy’s work as Byrnes’s LOEM predecessor, especially during the period before Byrnes arrived at the White House and then when By