Even a generation ago, before the internet reached everyone, “one world” was an expression of idealism, signifying easy and carefree participation in a panoply of world cultures, all accessible by way of a flight, a screen, or a just-in-time supply chain. Think, for instance, of the Western vogue for so-called “world music” with its spirit of sentimental and nebulous togetherness: “One world is enough for all of us” went the refrain in Sting’s “One World (Not Three)” on his 1986 live album, Bring on the Night.

But now that the bloom is off globalization’s rose—world connection is just as likely to spur thoughts of climate change, inequality, or the spread of COVID-19 as global fellowship—we would do well to recall the longer, lost history of “one world.” Whether we know it or not, any modern use of the phrase, in both its hopeful and fearful senses, is indebted to the Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and his 1943 bestseller, One World.

If you’ve heard of Willkie, it’s likely because of his 1940 campaign for president against Franklin Roosevelt. A relative newcomer to politics, Willkie was drafted by business-friendly Republicans because he opposed FDR’s New Deal. He is often celebrated for his decision not to side with the so-called “isolationists” in the Republican Party—some of whom claimed the badge of “America First!” to resist American involvement in another European war.

Willkie is also revered for what happened after he lost that election. Instead of remaining in opposition, Willkie stepped up to support Lend-Lease, the President’s effort to send American war supplies to Britain. Willkie, it is said, helped FDR prepare America to save the world from fascism.

These stories, while powerful, actually slight Willkie’s true significance. He should be remembered more for his particular vision of “one world.” Specifically, Willkie argued for “one world” as a global call for a world free of the racism and imperial exploitation fostered by nationalism. His ideals may appear naïve at first, but they might give us some idea of what a visionary globalism is still good for in a time of resurgent nationalism and planetary fragility.

Willkie was not the first to use the phrase “one world.” Writers and thinkers had previously used it to describe how the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the stock market, and the radio all shrank space and sped up time, bringing far-flung places and cultures into greater contact.

These forces unleashed chaos and disintegration, too, as war and conquest swept the globe. Nationalist leaders rose, offering stories of shared purpose and common destiny as balms for disruption. But nationalism marked territory with myths of blood and belonging, sparking competition for patches of soil on the map.

By contrast, internationalists countered nationalism’s primal pull with rational plans for cooperation between states. Fashioned properly, internationalism would ride the new networks of global communication and finance and transportation. It would have to, the internationalists said, or the future held only war and privation.

Willkie became an internationalist early on. Born in 1892 in Indiana, his first political inspiration was President Woodrow Wilson, hero to many internationalists for his call to “make the world safe for democracy” and his advocacy of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Much to Willkie’s dismay, however, many Americans, bitter about World War I, rejected the League, and the U.S. never joined.

As he built a career as a lawyer for the power industry and activist in the Democratic Party (he wouldn’t switch parties until just before the 1940 campaign), Willkie hoped for an American internationalist revival on more equitable terms than even Wilson, a racist and imperialist, imagined. But as the Great Depression deepened and war spread in Asia and Europe again, Willkie and other internationalists believed that nobody could now doubt that full international cooperation was necessary—and inevitable. In that spirit, Willkie supported Lend Lease in 1940. He also visited Britain in 1941, during the last days of the Blitz, and his genial, iconoclastic personality did much to lift spirits there.

By the late summer of 1942, the U.S. was in the fight, but active only in the Pacific. While the U.S. supplied aid and munitions to European Allies, the Nazis held Western Europe and occupied great swathes of Russia. Several American journalists working in Kuibyshev—the Soviets wartime capital—cabled Willkie to suggest he visit the beleaguered country to boost morale. Working with Roosevelt again, Willkie planned a much bigger undertaking: a closely watched, seven-week, 31,000-mile flying journey around the world that would take him to 13 countries on five continents.

The journey followed recently opened and occasionally un-scouted air lanes over Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China, a route that skirted Axis-held territory—well within range of enemy aircraft—and brought Willkie face to face with everyone from Soviet factory workers and Siberian peasants to Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Charles de Gaulle. Millions followed his route via the papers and newsreels, discovering a world that had become, as Willkie would later put it, “small and completely interdependent.”

FDR saw the trip as a fact-finding mission and a morale-building effort. But his former opponent made it much more than that. Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Willkie discovered, the war was not just a struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, but potentially a colossal turning point in world history. A whole generation of anti-imperial nationalists saw a war fought for democracy and freedom as a chance to persuade the great European empires to finally relinquish their hold on the globe.

This meant the U.S. was at a crossroads too. America would become the next great power—but what kind of power would it choose to become?

Here, in the midst of worldwide terror and destruction, Willkie discovered a fleeting opportunity: The United States had a chance to lead the planet to a new era of cooperation—but only if it would truly embrace its own ideals in an effort to end colonialism and colonial thinking. To win a lasting peace and a future of global cooperation, Willkie came to believe, Americans would have to accept a more cooperative relationship with the rest of the planet.

“There are no distant points in the world any longer,” Willkie announced in his book describing his journey. The volume was initially going to be called One War, One Peace, One World, but Willkie soon realized that the last third said it all. A planet shrunk by aviation and total war was unified by technology, and could be brought together politically, too, if only Americans would put in the work. The U.S., he argued, had to forego “narrow nationalism” or the “international imperialism” practiced by the European powers. Americans had to choose instead to support “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.”

Millions read One World—some called it the fastest-selling book in American history to date—even though it was critical of America and the West. In fact, one of the chief lessons of his trip, he argued was that the linked forces of racism and empire were hampering the Allied war effort. “The moral atmosphere in which the white race lives is changing,” he wrote, conveying the demands he heard across the globe. People everywhere were “no longer willing to be Eastern slaves for Western profits. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm.”

Americans were not exempt, either. The U.S., Willkie wrote, had long “practiced inside our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism.”

However, Willkie was less critical of American imperial power. In general, he saw the United States as crucial to a global solution rather than part of the problem, a perspective that suggests how Americans tended to discount the negative impact of their power abroad. The idea of “one world” would become broadly influential during the war years, but a current of resilient nationalism would eventually undermine his hopes. Willkie’s bid for the 1944 Republican nomination never got off the ground. He argued for a fully democratic structure for the United Nations—one that would give smaller nations equal power and open a clear path to freedom for colonized countries. But FDR’s preferred plan—dominance by the Great Powers in the Security Council—won the day.

Tragically, Willkie never saw the U.N. convene. He died, unexpectedly, in October 1944 at only 52.

Before long, “Willkie” began to seem like a name from another time. One World has often been recalled as an oddity of wartime life, a naïve statement of wishful global harmony, and Willkie was remembered as an almost-President who helped Roosevelt save democracy in 1940. But if Willkie’s own name has faded, the phrase he made popular lived on, inspiring a host of global visions down to our own time.

“One world or none!” declared pacifists, world government advocates, and anti-nuclear activists in the 1940s and ’50s. Anti-imperialists like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India claimed it as a slogan, too, as they harnessed the U.N. to help usher colonialism off the world stage. Later it resurfaced as an environmentalist credo, echoed by the early astronauts who first saw the Earth from space. “When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the Earth,” Apollo 8’s Frank Borman mused in 1968, “all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.”

With the precipitous globalization of the 1980s and ’90s the idea came rushing back. Global capitalism, some argued, was leveling barriers to opportunity everywhere. But this new “one world” felt like a threat to others. One World, Ready or Not, announced journalist William Greider in his 1997 expose of the borderless world of free trade and finance. Greider observed that Willkie’s idealism had been replaced by “the manic logic of global capitalism,” which would doom local industry and community and drive inequality to new heights.

Since then, of course, the perils of “one world” have swamped any lingering promise the phrase once held. Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, the resulting “war on terror,” the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic: all spring from the precarious state of a planet in which all of us are inescapably joined in a web of communications, market transactions, greenhouse gasses, possible pandemics, migration routes, and interlocking political alliances, resentments, and inequalities. Globalization, we are told, continues to lift more people out of poverty than it immiserates, but that’s statistics, not perception.

When another political outsider—like Willkie, a former Democrat from the world of business—took the presidency by storm in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock, invoking the name of his predecessor’s bête noir. “From this moment on,” Donald Trump declared at his inauguration, “it’s going to be ‘America First.’”

Trump is not alone, of course. The worldwide retreat into nationalism is spurred by both inequality and xenophobia. And it denies what Willkie—were he still with us—would surely say: We are one world made out of many creatures—human and nonhuman—living together on a single fragile earth.

The post When Americans Fell in Love With the Ideal of ‘One World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Antarctic explorer Navy Rear Admiral Richard Byrd and transatlantic pilot Amelia Earhart made thousands for their journeys by selling postmarked souvenir envelopes and stamps that commemorated their travels. They were helped along by “Stamp-Collector-in-Chief” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a devoted philatelist, who made supporting American exploration as easy as buying a stamp.

Stamp collecting began almost as soon as stamps began being printed in the 1840s. Great Britain first came up with the concept of stamps to solve a postal problem: Mail recipients generally paid postage upon delivery, but their correspondents were skirting the system by writing messages on the outside of mailed envelopes—“Arrived in London”—so that the recipients could then decline to pay the postage. Stamps flipped the script by forcing the sender to pre-pay for transporting a letter. In turn, the stamp-based system ushered in a revolution. Not only were postal authorities guaranteed payment, but the cost of sending letters fell.

With costs reduced, the number of letters circulating through the mail skyrocketed. Other nations began to adopt Britain’s postal model, too, printing stamps with unique images that represented their nation or empire. With the emergence of beautiful and innovative postage designs, increasing numbers of people naturally started collecting them. Enthusiasts purchased stamps, placed them into albums, and traded them with friends.

Thousands of stamp collectors emerged in the U.S., for instance, where early stamps featured portraits of the first president, George Washington, and the first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin. The phenomenon of stamp collecting coincided and was bolstered by an emerging network of male-only collecting clubs in the late 1880s that were similar to fraternal orders and dinner clubs. Stamp enthusiasts who did not or could not belong to the collecting clubs could still take part by reading a growing number of stamp-collecting publications. There was no shortage in stamps to marvel over; between 1864 and 1906, collectors printed and circulated more than 900 stamp papers, as they were referred to at the time, in the U.S. alone.

By the 1930s, stamp collecting was so popular that radio stations across the U.S. dedicated broadcasts to newly issued stamps and provided tips for caring for collections. Teachers gave grade school students stamps from around the globe to teach geography. Articles appeared in magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal, and large daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post, extolling the virtues of stamp collecting (or, on the flip side, framed it more negatively, as a “mania”). Meanwhile, cultural institutions—libraries, museums and the like—hosted stamp exhibitions. Even businesses got in on the trend, using stamps to attract customers. Starting in the 1880s, the tobacco company W. Duke and Sons, which already handed out baseball cards in cigarette boxes to attract customers and increase sales, began giving away international postage stamps. The company even printed its own stamp album, which was designed to hold the entire set of stamps distributed in its packages.

Postal agencies took notice and stoked the hobby further. In 1892, Postmaster General John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, oversaw the issuing of the first commemorative stamp series, a collection of 16 intricately designed stamps depicting the life of Christopher Columbus to promote the World’s Columbian Exposition. Stamp sales increased by millions of dollars. Between 1893 and 1919, alone, the post office printed 47 more sets of commemorative stamps, most of which celebrated World’s Fairs held in the U.S. From 1920 to 1940, the post office more than tripled its output, printing 150 more, available for a limited time and designed to be collected. Because federal rules restricted American stamps from carrying the image of a living person, most of these designs looked backward to celebrate contemporary events.

It’s hard to say who came up with the idea of tapping into the stamp-collecting craze to raise money for expeditions, but Amelia Earhart was almost certainly one of the first to do so. The famed aviatrix made her name in the early days of flight in the 1920s as one of America’s first pilots, and by 1932 had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart’s trips were expensive, and despite her fame, she was always short on funding.

Earhart’s husband and publicist, George Palmer Putnam, had encouraged her to write an autobiography and go on speaking tours to promote her career, and he also appears to have come up with the idea of helping her make money from the stamp-collecting craze. In 1932, Earhart carried 50 letters she had postmarked and signed on her first solo transatlantic flight. Putnam sold these letters to collectors who sought materials from notable figures. The scheme was successful, and Earhart began carrying mail on all of her international flights.

Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd followed her lead. Byrd was a naval scientist who explored the North and South Poles, and he, too, had to raise money for his expeditions. Preparing for a second voyage to Antarctica in 1933, he got the CBS radio network to feature a weekly broadcast from the “Little America” military base in Antarctica, sponsored by General Foods, which also published and sold the “Authorized Map” of the expedition. Like Earhart, Byrd benefitted from a fundraising opportunity directed at philatelists. Unlike Earhart, Byrd got government help making it happen, from none other than President Roosevelt.

This three-cent stamp, created to fund Byrd’s expedition, was inspired by President Roosevelt’s initial sketch. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum.

As a child, Roosevelt learned philately from his mother. In adulthood, he returned to the hobby while traveling the world as assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and found comfort in his collection after his polio diagnosis in 1921. Newspapers reported that Roosevelt sorted stamps in the White House during his famous first 100 days in office to help him relax while he waited for Congress to vote on legislation.

FDR used his position to encourage stamp collecting and influence stamp production. He submitted ideas for stamps that promoted federal programs, like the national parks, and New Deal initiatives, such as the National Recovery Act.

When Byrd visited Roosevelt in the White House in 1933 seeking financial assistance for his Antarctic expedition, Roosevelt had a brainstorm. Rather than offer government funds, he asked Byrd to send him a letter postmarked from “Little America”—and suggested that other collectors might want a unique souvenir cover canceled at Little America, too, or might be interested in supporting Byrd’s expedition by purchasing a limited-issue stamp. Roosevelt himself sketched out a quick design that was later adapted by artists at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing: a map of the globe with dotted lines pointing out Byrd’s major expeditions to the North and South Poles. Collectors could buy a three-cent stamp, or pay 53 cents for a stamped envelope at Gimbel’s Department Store or through the U.S. Post Office Department’s own stamp store, the Philatelic Agency.

The initiative was a success. Ultimately, more than 150,000 envelopes were sent down to the “most southerly post office” at Little America, where each piece of mail was canceled with a special seal. Because of the distance carried, the postal service imposed a 50-cent transportation fee, which helped finance the expedition’s expenses, raising approximately $75,000.

While Earhart never got to benefit from the presidential friendship and support that Byrd enjoyed, as her fame grew, so did her connections with American philatelists. She took to carrying hundreds of letters with her on each of her flights, which her husband sold on her behalf. She was also a collector herself and exhibited international stamps, postmarks and signed envelopes at an international philatelic exhibition in 1936.

Prior to Earhart’s 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, stamp collectors and fans purchased more than 5,000 souvenir envelopes at Gimbel’s, for $5 each. Earhart carried this extra cargo with her, intending to postmark the envelopes at a few stops along her global adventure.

It would be her last. After flying 22,000 miles Earhart, her navigator Fred Noonan, and her plane disappeared in the South Pacific, carrying $25,000 worth of philatelic cargo. Roosevelt allocated federal resources to a large-scale search to find them, led by Navy and Coast Guard ships.

The plane and pilots, and the thousands of stamped envelopes they carried, were never recovered.

The post The Postage Stamps That Flew Amelia Earhart Across the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But could the default scenario repeat itself—especially now that the United States is shouldering about $22 trillion of debt, plus tens of trillions more in Medicare, Social Security, and unfunded state and local pension obligations?

That unsettling prospect was the topic at a Zócalo/UCLA Anderson event titled “Could the United States Ever Go Bankrupt?” held at the RedZone at Gensler, in downtown Los Angeles. Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” fired probing questions at Sebastian Edwards, a UCLA Anderson School of Management international economist and author of American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold, as the two men examined the financial perils that nearly sank the United States in 1933, as well as those that could be lurking in 2019 or 2020.

Yet, though their subject was serious, the repartee maintained a light touch. At one point, Edwards disclosed that his publisher had wanted him to sneak the word “Bitcoin” into his book’s subtitle, to sex it up more. Edwards also offered the aside that one of Roosevelt’s celebrated “Brain Trust” of advisers, Burton K. Wheeler, a New Deal Democrat who later broke with FDR, appears as the vice president in President Charles Lindbergh’s administration in Philip Roth’s 2004 semi-fictitious novel The Plot Against America.

“An economist who reads Philip Roth,” Olney joked, “I think that’s pretty good.”

And when an audience member, during the question-and-answer period, asked Edwards what would be the fastest way for a rival world power like China to drive the United States into default and bankruptcy, Olney piped up, “Don’t tell him!”

In fact, Edwards replied, plotting an online attack would be the swiftest means of bringing Uncle Sam to his candy-striped knees. “If a hacker were to stop the payment system, that would be devastating,” he said.

“Devastating” describes the impact of the Great Depression, and the main part of Wednesday’s discussion was devoted to Edwards recounting and dissecting what caused that global financial meltdown, and how FDR mustered economic policy to deal with the resulting social calamity in 1933—a year that, Olney said, “may well have been the most active and change-worthy in the peacetime United States.”

By the time FDR was sworn into office in March of that tumultuous year, America was heading toward unemployment of greater than 30 percent. National income would eventually drop 60 percent. Auto production and agricultural prices each fell about 80 percent, as farmers watched their mortgages sink underwater. Ruined men were jumping off buildings in despair. Small, weak banks were failing by the score.

And FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was pressing the incoming Roosevelt administration to declare a bank holiday that would give the country some precious time to catch its breath while searching for ways to restore confidence in the economy. The truth was that nobody, from Wall Street to Washington, really had any idea about how to fix the mess.

Roosevelt, ever the political tactician, had declined Hoover’s proposal. But on April 5, 1933, within a month of taking the oath of office, FDR issued an executive order compelling each and every American, within three weeks, to sell all gold in their possession beyond a value of $100 to the U.S. government, at the official price of $20.67 per ounce. The order, published in newspapers and broadcast over radio, carried a non-compliance penalty of a $10,000 fine, 10 years’ imprisonment, or both.

This applied to all kinds of citizens. Grandmothers who’d stuffed gold coins in their mattresses as a hedge against the meltdown had to fork over their stashes. Kids who’d been given gold coins for a birthday or bar mitzvah were enjoined to turn over their holdings for the sake of the U.S. economy. Only dentists and coin collectors were exempted. “The Secretary of the Treasury was the number one coin collector in the country,” Edwards said, prompting chuckles from the audience.

Why was gold so badly needed by the U.S. government? Ever since Alexander Hamilton founded the U.S. Mint, the United States had operated on the gold standard, Edwards explained. For nearly a century and a half, our gold reserves had guaranteed that the full faith and credit of the United States government stood behind our economy, including our debts. When the Civil War erupted, the gold standard was suspended, and the Union started printing so-called “greenbacks,” but that had been only a temporary measure. During the first years of the Great Depression, the government badly needed to secure the estimated one-third of the gold supply that was being hoarded by the public and corporations. Adding that sum to the federal reserves, even if it required drastic action, was designed to shore up faith that the government would remain solvent.

But what FDR ordered had never happened before, and it left a bitter legacy for some Americans. Olney said that his grandmother always hated FDR because he made her surrender her gold coins. She wasn’t the only one. “That is, from today’s perspective, very un-American,” Edwards said.

Still, Roosevelt’s stratagem ultimately worked. The combination of decisive action and his “Fireside Chat” radio addresses soothed an anxious public. Before reopening the banks, he’d managed to reassure ordinary Americans that their money would be safe.” And since by that time the economy was beginning to improve, Edwards said, “they gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

“It seems to me to suggest that public confidence is more important than gold,” said Olney, in his own calming, made-for-radio timbre.

“That’s a great way to put it,” Edwards said.

But the question framing the discussion remained, and Olney raised it: Could we be due for a sequel?

Our debt is indeed huge, standing at 104 percent of national Gross Domestic Product. (A percentage of greater than 90 is considered by economists to be a red flag.) Our actual total debt is closer to $80 trillion, Edwards said, when you add in all the government’s social service funding obligations.

“I think it’s a real possibility that we will default on some of that debt,” Edwards said. And, as there was in the 1930s, there could be another massive legal battle if the government tries to reduce benefits to save money, culminating in another Supreme Court showdown. In the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, lawyers for economically strapped countries like Greece have used the so-called “excusable debt” argument to avoid paying back their creditors. It’s likely that Venezuela, which is spiraling into bankruptcy, or worse, will use similar arguments to try and fend off its debt collectors.

As the evening drew to a close, one audience member asked if we might ever return to the gold standard, as a way to keep our financial house in order. Edwards, who spends a chunk of his working life flying around the world, giving lectures, and supplying economic counsel to foreign governments, said that U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page writers would like us to return to a gold standard. But, despite its glittery allure, the precious metal that once bailed out Franklin D. Roosevelt may not be available to rescue some future administration that spends too much and saves too little.

“I think it’s good conversation,” Edwards said of a gold standard revival, “but not feasible.”

The post In the 1930s, America Defaulted on Its Debt. It Could Happen Again. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is the story of a forgotten episode in U.S. history, the story of the great debt default of 1933–1935, of the time when the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court agreed to wipe out more than 40 percent of public and private debts.

There are many ways of telling this story. But possibly, the best starting point is April 5, 1933, when President Roosevelt, who had been in office for exactly one month, issued an Executive Order requiring people and businesses to sell, within three weeks, all their gold holdings to the government at the official price of $20.67 per ounce. The Order was published in every newspaper and transmitted over thousands of radio stations. Large signs were placed in post offices around the country. The posters were printed in large block letters and informed the public that everyone had “to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them to a Federal Reserve Bank, branch or agency.”

Those who didn’t comply with the Executive Order faced “criminal penalties . . . [a] $10,000 fine or ten years of imprisonment, or both.”

The public was shocked. Throughout the history of the nation, gold had been used as a store of value, and many families owned gold coins as part of their savings. Gold was given as wedding presents and at bar mitzvahs, and newborns often received a gift of one or two coins from their godparents. The fact that all metal had to be turned in to a relatively new institution—the Federal Reserve had been created less than twenty years earlier—made things even worse.

As the May 1 deadline approached, radio announcers reminded families of what they had to do. People could still not believe what was happening. It was true that during the previous months there had been an extraordinarily high demand for the metal and that hoarding had increased sharply, but that was exactly how the system was supposed to work: from time immemorial people resorted to gold when they faced economic uncertainty, including fears of banks’ collapses.

[The default process had begun in] the early hours of March 6, when he had been barely one day in office, [and] President Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday. Its purpose was to stop massive withdrawals of currency and gold, and to put in place an emergency plan to strengthen the nation’s financial system. A week later, on March 13, banks began to reopen their doors, and people redeposited their cash and gold in massive amounts.

So, if things were improving, why was the government forcing the public to part with their gold? Coercing people to sell their hard-earned metal was not an American thing to do. This had never happened before, not even during the Civil War, when the gold standard was suspended and the Treasury issued “greenbacks.”

The weeks that followed changed America forever. Between March and June, 1933, Congress passed legislation that would fundamentally alter the way the economy functioned, and set the basis for the welfare state. Some of this legislation was later challenged in the courts system, and some was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. There is little doubt, however, that these feverish weeks of continuous debate and lawmaking planted the seeds of a new America, a country where the federal government would take an active role in economic and social affairs, a nation that would create an intricate safety net for the poor, the unemployed, and the disadvantaged.

While the foundations of the American economy were being profoundly changed by one act of Congress after another, the gold saga initiated with the April 5 Executive Order continued to unfold. On April 19, during the thirteenth press conference of his young presidency, President Roosevelt stated unequivocally that the country was now off the gold standard. He explained that the fundamental goal of abandoning the monetary system that had prevailed since Independence was to help the agricultural sector, which had been struggling for over a decade. He declared: “The whole problem before us is to raise commodity prices.”

The next step in this drama came on May 12 when Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Title III of this legislation included the “Thomas Amendment,” which authorized the president to increase the official price of gold to up to $41.34 an ounce. A devaluation of the dollar, many thought, would rapidly result in “controlled inflation” and would help farmers by raising commodity prices and by lightening their debts when expressed in relation to their incomes. A number of experts noted that Great Britain had devalued the pound in September 1931, and had slowly begun to recover.

Things, however, were not as easy as they seemed. In the United States, most debt contracts—both private and public—included a “gold clause,” stating that the debtor committed himself to paying back in “gold coin.”

These clauses were introduced into contracts during the Civil War, a time when two currencies circulated side by side—a currency backed by bullion and one unbacked, the so-called greenbacks issued by the Union’s Treasury. Debts that included the gold clause were considered to be more secure, since the amount to be received in payment at some future date was anchored to the price of gold and, thus, not affected by possible changes in the purchasing power of paper money. After the end of the Civil War there had been no need to invoke them, but with time gold clauses came to be considered a “normal” component of debt contracts; it became customary to include them in corporate and utilities bonds, and in many mortgage contracts. In 1933, however, it became evident that these clauses were a problem. If the currency was devalued with respect to gold, the dollar value of debts subject to the clauses would automatically increase by the amount of the devaluation. This would result in massive bankruptcies and in a huge increase in the public debt. For all practical purposes, then, when FDR was inaugurated as president the “gold clauses” stood in the way of a devaluation of the dollar.

Three months after Roosevelt had become president, on June 5, Congress passed Joint Resolution No. 10, annulling all gold clauses from future and past contracts. This opened the door for a possible devaluation. Republicans were dismayed and argued that the nation’s reputation was at risk. The government, on the other hand, claimed that the Joint Resolution didn’t imply “a repudiation of contracts.” The secretary of the treasury stated that since gold payments had been suspended in April, all Congress had done was clarify that “the holder of an obligation can- not specify in what type of currency [gold or paper money] the contract is payable.”

On January 31, 1934, the other shoe dropped when President Roosevelt officially devalued the dollar by fixing the new price of gold at $35 an ounce, an increase of 69 percent relative to its century-old price of $20.67 an ounce. Conservatives deplored the decision, and argued that it would inevitably lead to a steep decline in America’s power. Others, including the farm lobby, were disappointed by what they considered an insufficient adjustment in the value of the dollar. In explaining the decision, FDR said that the devaluation was necessary, since the nation had been “adversely affected by virtue of the depreciation in the value of currencies to other Governments in relation to the present standard of value.” Many considered this to be a direct reference to the devaluation of Sterling.

Not surprisingly, those who had purchased securities protected by the gold clause claimed that the Joint Resolution of June 1933 was unconstitutional. Various lawsuits made their way through the courts system. Four of them got to the Supreme Court, and were heard between January 8 and January 10, 1935. Two had to do with private debts, and two with public obligations. The most salient case involved a government bond in the series of the Fourth Liberty Loan issued on October 15, 1918. The obligation for this “4¼ % Gold Bond” expressly stipulated that “the principal and interest hereof are payable in United States gold coin of the present standard of value” (Perry v. United States). The question before the Court was whether Congress had the constitutional power to alter contracts retroactively. Could Congress annul private and public debt promises and, in the process, affect the wealth of debtors and creditors?

On February 18, 1935, the Supreme Court announced its decision. In all cases the Court voted 5 to 4 in favor of the government position. The majority’s opinions were written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a distinguished jurist who had been governor of New York, secretary of state, and presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1916.

There was a single dissent signed by the four conservative members of the Court, known as the “Four Horsemen.” When the time came to deliver the minority opinion, Justice James Clark McReynolds, a southern lawyer who favored bow ties and had served as attorney general during Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, decided to depart from protocol: instead of reading the prepared text he gave a short speech. He opened his remarks in a low tone. Slowly, he raised his voice and his southern tones quivered with anger. A minute into the speech he paused; it was a classical pregnant silence. He then said: “The Constitution as many of us understood it, the instrument that has meant so much to us, is gone.” He then talked about the sanctity of contracts, government obligations, and repudiation under the guise of law. It was clear, he stated, that Congress had the power “to adopt a monetary system. But because Congress may adopt a system, it doesn’t follow that this may be enforced in violation of existing contracts.” He ended his speech with strong words: “Shame and humiliation are upon us now. Moral and financial chaos may be confidently expected.”

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It took the Marines just 76 hours to capture the two-mile-long island. But they paid a terrible price. The vaunted Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces who helped to defend Betio were sheltered in fortified pillboxes and bunkers around the island. They prepared heavy anti-boat guns, howitzers, mortars, heavy machine guns, and rifles to deliver murderous fire on the advancing Americans. “The bullets were pouring at us like a sheet of rain,” one Marine private remembered of the initial landing. For a time, it seemed as though the Marines would be thrown back into the sea.

Correspondent Robert Sherrod, a 34-year-old Georgia native who covered the operation for Time magazine, said that it was the “only battle which I ever thought we were going to lose.”

Sherrod returned to Honolulu eight days after the initial landings on Beito. Some American media were expressing shock at the battle’s cost, with one example a December 4, 1943, front-page headline in The New York Times that read: “Grim Tarawa Defense a Surprise, Eyewitness of Battle Reveals; Marines Went in Chuckling to Find Swift Death Instead of Easy Conquest.” A distraught mother of a Marine killed on Beito sent a letter to Admiral Nimitz accusing him of “murdering my son,” and some lawmakers in Washington, D.C., threatened to start congressional investigations about the battle.

Sherrod, whose total mileage covering the Pacific war had reached 115,000 after Tarawa, had been amazed at the home-front attitude about what he called “the finest victory U.S. troops had won in this war.” Although the operation had not been perfectly planned or executed, as was the case in any military operation, by all the rules concerning amphibious warfare, the Marines should have suffered far more casualties than the Japanese. “Yet, for every Marine who was killed more than four Japs died—four of the best troops the Emperor had,” he said. “Looking at the defenses of Beito, it was no wonder our colonels could say: ‘With two battalions of Marines I could have held this island until hell froze over.’”

Sherrod was intensely aware of a major problem of World War II: the inadequate job done by America’s press in explaining war’s hard facts, which led Americans to expect an “easy war.” So Sherrod did the warning. The struggle to defeat the Japanese might well take years, he said, and American fighting men would suffer heavy losses “time and time again before we achieve the final victory.”

In his book, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle, released in 1943 and a bestseller, Sherrod recalled a conversation with a bomber pilot after returning from the Pacific who had told his mother what the war was really like and how long it would take to finish the job. The woman sat down and cried after hearing her son’s report. Sherrod also wanted to impress on the American public the cruel and inescapable facts that no amount of bombing and shelling could prevent the necessity of sending in foot soldiers to finish a job. “The corollary was this: there is no easy way to win the war; there is no panacea which will prevent men from getting killed,” Sherrod said, adding that to deprecate the Tarawa victory would “defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.”

Sherrod’s educational effort included influencing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to release photographs and film footage taken on Beito.

On December 28, 1943, Sherrod attended a press conference in Washington, D.C., where Roosevelt talked about the demise of Doctor New Deal for a new physician—Doctor Win-the-War, “to take care of this fellow [the country] who had been in this bad accident. And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war.”

At a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel before the president’s press conference, Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, had suggested to Sherrod, who had met Roosevelt after the correspondent’s return from Australia in August 1942, that he see the president after he finished talking to the press.

After some pleasantries in the Oval Office, President Roosevelt turned to a subject Sherrod knew much about—Tarawa. In addition to coverage from civilian reporters and photographers, the action on Beito had been recorded on film by combat cameramen from the Second Marine Division, including Norman T. Hatch. On the island, Hatch and his assistant, Bill “Kelly” Kelleher, laden with 200 pounds of equipment, captured gripping footage of the action with an Eyemo 35-mm camera. They also made history during an assault against a massive enemy bunker when they were the first and only cameramen during the Pacific War to film Japanese troops and Marines together in combat. The film that Hatch and others shot was developed at Pearl Harbor and flown to Washington, D.C., where it was eventually incorporated into a 19-minute-long documentary to be produced by Warner Brothers and distributed by Universal Pictures.

President Roosevelt had been inclined to release the film and images showing the grim results of the battle on Tarawa, but wanted Sherrod’s opinion, as they were “pretty gory—they show a lot of dead,” said Roosevelt. Just a few months before, in September 1943, the U.S. Office of Censorship had allowed Life magazine to give the public its first view of dead American soldiers—a shot by George Strock of three nameless infantrymen lying dead, half-buried in the sand with their faces unseen, on the beach at Buna after a Japanese ambush.

Although the reaction to publishing Strock’s image had been mixed, with some accusing Life of “morbid sensationalism,” Sherrod believed the time had come for the public to know what combat was really like. He agreed with the president that the images were gruesome, but noted, “that’s the way the war is out there, and I think the people are going to have to get used to that idea.”

Roosevelt agreed, and approved releasing the Tarawa images and film on March 2, 1944. Hatch’s footage was an essential part of the Oscar–winning documentary With the Marines at Tarawa. The New York Times praised the film, noting that its footage had “all the immediacy of personal participation in the fight, and its sense of actual combat in close quarters is overwhelmingly real.” The sale of war bonds rose after the film’s release.

As for Sherrod, he returned to the Central Pacific to report on the suffering and bravery of American fighting men on Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In his writing he kept one thought in the back of his mind: to tell “wishful-thinking Americans that war is not always the romantic, smashing adventure the afternoon newspaper headlines make it; nor is it a duel that is won by swarms of high-flying airplanes. War is a cruel, desperate necessity which calls for courage and suffering. It is too bad, but it is true.”

Although he never was quite able to bridge the immense gulf of understanding between the home front and the battlefront, Sherrod kept on trying, continuing to report on the Marines as they battled the Japanese on Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, the last great battle of the war in the Pacific. A war correspondent, he believed, could not write with the perspective that time furnished—that was best left to “the historians and their mountains of official records.” What Sherrod attempted to do was to write about what he saw, heard, and felt, reflecting, as best he could, “the mood of men in battle, as those men appear and talk and fight.” He did so as well as any reporter of his time.

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This debate is not a new one in American history. Even before the Cold War fears of nuclear warfare, back in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar debate erupted about a different set of security fears and what was then called “home defense.”

During the Roosevelt years, liberal democracies everywhere felt threatened by the rise of the twin absolutist ideologies that were gaining ground across the globe: fascism and communism. News of atrocities committed in the name of these isms—in Ethiopia, China, Spain, the Soviet Union—frightened Americans. Many Americans wanted to join the fight against fascism overseas, while plenty of others embraced isolationism. But all feared the possibility of aerial bombings, chemical and biological weapons, and a panic that could install a dictator in the White House.

Fear-drenched messages resounded nationwide. Radio dramas such as Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid” featured sounds of children screaming as bombs whizzed through the air. Americans read about new “super-bombers” that soon could fly non-stop across the Atlantic and bomb U.S. cities. Theories about how we could be attacked also seeped into the culture: What if the Nazis set up bases in Iceland or Bermuda?

In January 1939, FDR said the world “has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift [that] the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago.” By the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled across the French countryside, FDR declared that, in essence, isolation was a prescription for national suicide.

“Civilian Defense in Detroit.”

New Deal liberals, previously consumed with trying to expand the safety net to curb capitalism’s sharp edges, began to grapple with citizens’ obligations to democracy in times of crisis: How should civilians work with government to keep themselves and their communities safe from enemy attacks? Should Americans be militarized to prepare for war? Should individual liberties be abridged in the name of protecting America in its hour of need? How should “home defense” help keep civilians calm and maintain their morale? Finally, should home defense improve people’s lives by combatting malnutrition, poverty, joblessness, and despair?

In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD)—the precursor to today’s Department of Homeland Security.

There were two competing, bold, drastically distinct liberal visions for what home defense should mean in the lives of Americans. The debate set Eleanor Roosevelt’s social defense vision against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s brand of national security liberalism. Eleanor Roosevelt was the OCD’s assistant director, the first First Lady to have an official role in an administration; La Guardia was its director while also serving as mayor.

The two of them argued over the classic trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” For La Guardia, the need was to militarize society, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt endorsed “guns” but not at the cost of sacrificing a continued focus on social programs. La Guardia and his supporters were willing to trample on civil liberties, while social defense liberals like the First Lady made more of an effort to defend individual rights and even made a stab at protecting Japanese-Americans from the racist hysteria sweeping the nation after Pearl Harbor.

The First Lady adopted a broad conception of home defense. Her vision featured a government-led and citizen-powered movement to make Americans “as much interested today in seeing [citizens] well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, obtaining needed medical care and recreation” as in military security. She insisted that the country had to live its values. In wartime, she argued, “every place in this country must be made a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, center, acting as assistant director of civilian defense, at a 1941 conference on “women’s activities in civilian defense.”

To Mrs. Roosevelt, World War II was not only a struggle to defeat fascism militarily. It also required a wartime New Deal to secure a better future by mounting a national effort to attack Americans’ unmet human needs.

The First Lady was charged with overseeing volunteer participation in home defense. She helped recruit more than ten million volunteers, including an estimated three million who performed some type of social defense role. Citizens working through their government fed women and children, provided medical and child care, trained defense plant workers, led salvage campaigns, improved transit systems, planted victory gardens, and helped women learn about nutritious diets. Her campaign helped make it acceptable for liberals to champion big government both in terms of military affairs and social democratic experimentation—a government devoted to both guns and butter.

La Guardia, whose New Deal partnership with FDR had modernized and humanized the nation’s most populous city, embodied the “guns” and anti-civil liberties side of the debate. He worried about social disorder. Watching Rotterdam, Paris, and London being bombed from his perch in City Hall, La Guardia thought that American cities could eventually meet the same fate. Incensed that the administration hadn’t yet established a home defense agency, the mayor lobbied the White House until FDR signed the executive order in May 1941 and tapped La Guardia to be his home defense chief.

La Guardia brandished a new form of national security liberalism that prioritized military over social defense (and individual rights) in times of crisis. Under his vision, a government-civilian partnership would militarize civilians’ lives. He proposed requiring big city workers to volunteer as firefighters and learn how to handle a chemical weapons attack. He recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade. A fourth military branch composed of civilians would prepare cities to endure air raids.

La Guardia relied on fear to sell his message. He could come off like Orson Welles (creator of “War of the Worlds”) on steroids. If the public was fearful, he reasoned, it would be inspired to mobilize in its own self-defense.

While he did aid FDR in sowing a war mindset and alerting Americans to the Nazi peril, he also dispensed with civic niceties and civil liberties. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, La Guardia asked citizens to spy on other citizens, shuttered Japanese-American clubs and restaurants, called his media critics “Japs” and “friends of Japs,” and ordered Japanese-Americans confined to their homes until the government could determine “their status.”

America’s leading urban reformer pushed liberalism in a novel direction, as he fought to use the federal government to militarize civilians in order to maximize their safety. Ultimately, social defense took a backseat to military security during the Cold War. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy launched a range of domestic reforms aimed at strengthening the home front socially and economically, yet military security—loyalty oaths, nuclear arsenals, evacuation drills—typically took priority over social defense. The kind of far-reaching wartime New Deal envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt was never enacted during the Cold War. Even Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was cut short partly due to the demand for “guns” during the Vietnam War.

The trade-offs are evident even today. Liberals argue with conservatives and among themselves about the proper balance between individual freedom and national security. Equally controversial, social reforms to improve life at home are locked in conflict with steps to keep us physically safe. This is not just a question of resources. It boils down to how we see ourselves as citizens of our democracy. Some liberals, for example, argue that “nation-building right here at home,” as President Obama suggested in 2012, is as important as cracking down on suspected terrorist threats or planting democracy in the Middle East.

All of these debates are traceable to the struggle among liberals to alert citizens to the war on “two fronts”—at home and abroad—during the Roosevelt years. As long as America has enemies overseas and threats from within, the fight over the best balance between guns and butter and between military security and civil liberties will remain central to America’s national identity—an enduring legacy of the campaign by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia in World War II to liberate Americans from the grip of fear.

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