During the first half of the twentieth century, few politicians possessed a more diverse résumé than that of Paul V. McNutt. In the 1920s, McNutt served as state and national commander of the American Legion. As governor of Indiana from 1933 to 1937, he backed the New Deal and went on to become one of the nation’s strongest governors. He later served Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as federal security administrator (1939–45), high commissioner to the Philippines (1937–39 and 1945–46), chair of the War Manpower Commission (1942–45), and ambassador to the Philippines (1946–47). McNutt hoped to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1940, but FDR’s decision to run for a third term ended that prospect. He next sought the nomination for vice president, until Roosevelt indicated his preference for Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. A possible candidate for president and a viable candidate for vice president in 1940, McNutt showed what was and what might have been in American politics in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ¹ According to the historian Lewis Gould, he was a “substantial political figure in the Roosevelt Era.”Footnote ²

In one respect, McNutt’s significance extended beyond the age of FDR. He may have been one of the first, if not the first, of the Cold War liberals. To be sure, it is hard to pinpoint the first of anything, let alone in an expansive and evolving tradition as American liberalism. Yet it is not hard to see McNutt as an early proponent of what postwar conservatives would chide as the Welfare/Warfare State, for he advocated economic security for Americans at home as well as national security for America abroad.Footnote ³ Although liberals emphasized different issues after 1945—such as civil rights for racial minorities—the idea of security lay at the heart of their thinking.Footnote ⁴ “Job security, life-cycle security, financial security, market security,” the historian David M. Kennedy has stressed, “however it might be defined, achieving security was the leitmotif of virtually everything the New Deal attempted.”Footnote ⁵ According to the historian Alonzo L. Hamby, FDR set the parameters, “emphasizing welfare statism and government management of the economy” and “the concept that American liberal values should be defended and extended in the larger world.”Footnote ⁶ From the New Deal’s economic security state, one sees a logical progression to the national security state of the late 1940s. To contain communism, the Truman administration, the historian Michael J. Hogan noted, “unified the armed forces, expanded the defense budget, harnessed science to military purpose, and forged new institutions . . . like the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.”Footnote ⁷ This legacy, in both domestic and foreign policy, would be accepted by Republican moderates such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, who McNutt knew and befriended during his first stint as high commissioner to the Philippines.Footnote ⁸ In the shadow of depression, world war, and cold war, then, the federal government evolved into an instrument to protect Americans from economic insecurity, subversives, and predatory dictators.

McNutt’s reputation as an early Cold War liberal rests on three components. The first was a set of experiences that allowed McNutt to form a holistic perspective on security. Service in the American Legion had inured him to hate Communists, to champion a realistic foreign policy, and to trumpet military preparedness to protect the United States from external foes. Then, as governor, McNutt secured greater relief for Indiana’s unemployed as well as pensions for aged Hoosiers. As federal security administrator in the late 1930s, he oversaw much of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was able to refine his thoughts on the responsibility of the state to its citizens. Moreover, as high commissioner to the Philippines, he demonstrated a strong interest in geopolitics, stressing that the United States must maintain a defense perimeter in Asia and retain the Philippines as an outpost of American power. On top of that, by the late 1930s he openly abhorred totalitarianism and sought to check its spread. So, with a background in social welfare, foreign affairs, internal security, and military matters, it is not surprising that McNutt came to see security—a word he used often in his speeches—in both domestic and international terms.

Second, McNutt’s career in the 1920s and 1930s set him apart from other political (and policy) figures of the Roosevelt-Truman era. In comparison to such New Dealers as Henry Wallace, Harold L. Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Harry P. Hopkins, McNutt enjoyed a wider range of experiences, from elected politics and state-level reform, to New Deal administration, to foreign and defense-related matters. The only New Deal liberal who approached such a record was Frank Murphy—a onetime mayor of Detroit, high commissioner to the Philippines, governor of Michigan, and attorney general of the United States. (James F. Byrnes, it should be noted, also had a varied career, which, like McNutt’s, extended into wartime mobilization. But Byrnes was not especially liberal on labor and civil rights issues.)Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, none of these New Dealers molded the policy of containment that emerged following World War II. Hopkins, who played a large role in wartime diplomacy, died in 1946; Wallace criticized Truman’s get-tough policy toward the Soviet Union; Murphy served on the U.S. Supreme Court; and Byrnes, secretary of state between 1945 and 1947, clashed with Truman and was forced to resign.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, the civilian officials who fashioned containment—Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, W. Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, and Robert P. Patterson—had almost no background in the politics of the New Deal. “Many of them,” the historian Melvin Leffler observed, “enjoyed lucrative careers in investment banking and law” and they did not go into public service until 1940 or 1941.Footnote ¹¹ By then, McNutt had held several government offices.

Finally, undergirding McNutt’s thoughts about security was an unblinking realism about politics, whether foreign or domestic. Here, McNutt was not unlike Truman—another former Legionnaire, a solid New Dealer, and a staunch anti-Communist. Hamby summarized Truman’s philosophy: “‘The people,’” it held, “were fundamentally good; evil rested in individuals and the systems of power they created for their own aggrandizement. But it was equally the case that the existence of evil in the world was an inescapable fact and that the realities of life often required an accommodation with it.”Footnote ¹² McNutt shared such a perspective, which soon became the norm within his party. By 1952, a new generation of Democrats—John F. Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson—had won election to the U.S. Senate by stressing an “anti-communist foreign policy” without repudiating the New Deal.Footnote ¹³ In that year’s campaign, Adlai E. Stevenson, the party’s standard-bearer, likewise emphasized that President Truman’s policy of containment had to be “filled out” and “clarified” and that the domestic issue most favorable to Democrats—“prosperity”—should be credited to “New Deal reforms.”Footnote ¹⁴

McNutt’s relationship to policymaking on security-related issues proved bifurcated. At one level, his impact was direct but sporadic. McNutt fashioned Indiana’s welfare state, helped bring Jewish refugees to the Philippines in the late 1930s, and oversaw the transformation of the newly independent Philippines into a U.S. ally during the onset of the Cold War. He also presented policy alternatives to FDR on expanding Social Security and retaining the Philippines (here he was more a policy actor than a policymaker). At another level, however, his connection to national policymaking was indirect. McNutt’s conception of security offered a window into the mind-set that underlay such policies as Social Security, U.S. intervention in World War II, and Cold War–era containment, which other, larger figures would implement. Through McNutt, then, one gains an off-center perspective on what the historian Elizabeth Borgwardt has called the “core idea” to emerge, for U.S. policymakers, during World War II: an “integrated vision of ‘security.’” As Borgwardt has observed, “Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms elegantly expressed the assumption that economic security supported political stability, in an international projection of the ideology and values that underpinned the domestic New Deal.” Put another way, Americans, after securing a more “decent” society at home, would fight to protect and then to extend that society abroad.Footnote ¹⁵ McNutt, too, came to link the domestic and international aspects of security.

In the end, the story of McNutt’s embrace of security proved both ironic and intriguing. McNutt might have become the leader of the younger generation of postwar liberals. By the late 1930s, he had the ideological credentials to do so, and he exuded, for the postwar setting, an appropriate mixture of realism and idealism. He had been a national figure since the late 1920s, and he was older than both Stevenson and Kennedy but younger than Truman. Unfortunately for McNutt, Roosevelt’s decision to accept a third term in 1940, among other factors, prevented him from occupying the office to which Truman ascended in 1945. And, so, his political career ended just as the Cold War commenced. Nevertheless, McNutt provides an interesting link between two phases of American liberalism: the New Deal and the early Cold War.

THE 1920S: SERVICE, SACRIFICE, AND NATIONAL SECURITY

The liberalism that emerged by the 1940s was “tough-minded”—a “fighting faith” in the view of the historian Kevin Mattson—and Paul V. McNutt, as early as the 1920s, fit within that milieu.Footnote ¹⁶ McNutt’s political philosophy developed from his own experiences, in a practical and acquisitive fashion. As the historian Alan Brinkley noted: “Without fully realizing it, liberals in the 1930s were reshaping their convictions in response to the realities of the world they knew.”Footnote ¹⁷ McNutt was neither a deep nor original thinker, and ambition, more than ideals, was his guiding star. But there was enough consistency in what he wrote and said to take his thoughts seriously.

McNutt began his life as a striving Midwesterner. He lived from 1891 to 1955, the only child of John C. McNutt, a lawyer and minor state official in Indiana, and Ruth Neely McNutt. As a young man, Paul grew up in Indianapolis and in Martinsville, a county-seat town about twenty-five miles south of the Indiana capital. His parents, both former teachers, taught him the importance of books and learning. Paul was an academic standout in high school, where he excelled in a range of fields from art and theater to journalism and school politics. He repeated those feats at Indiana University (IU), from which he graduated with a B.A. in 1913. In these early years, Paul showed more interest in his own advancement (and campus-related issues) than in the reforms of the Progressive Era.Footnote ¹⁸ Politically, he was reflexively a partisan—a Democrat, like his father—rather than a cause-driven idealist.Footnote ¹⁹ Mostly, he was ambitious. In 1913, Paul enrolled in Harvard Law School and earned his L.L.B. He returned to Martinsville to become a partner in his father’s law firm. But he tired of life in his hometown, and he neither practiced much law nor developed a field of specialization. The chance to become an instructor of law at IU, during the spring of 1917, offered Paul a temporary means of escape.Footnote ²⁰

World War I gave McNutt something larger to fight for. He saw the IU campus mobilize for war, and he volunteered for the army, becoming an officer and rising to the rank of major.Footnote ²¹ During the war, McNutt trained men for the field artillery, serving at three camps in Texas before moving on to Camp Jackson in South Carolina. He exuded pride in his contribution even though, much to his disappointment, the war ended before he saw combat. Not surprisingly, during this period, military matters were more important to him than diplomatic occurrences—there is no evidence that McNutt, in 1919, 1920, and 1921, thought deeply about the details of the Versailles Treaty. Yet he never questioned the principles, of democracy and security for all nations, for which Americans fought. Referring to the Great War, McNutt in 1923 told one audience that “a war to overcome false principles,” that is, selfish, national ambitions, was “a war of eternal glory.” He praised his comrades in that war for their “heroic” sacrifice and “unselfish devotion to the common cause” of defending and extending American ideals.Footnote ²² Why he embraced that cause so wholeheartedly remains uncertain. He no doubt succumbed, in part, to America’s wartime propaganda against the Germans.Footnote ²³ Also, McNutt loved the U.S. Army unconditionally, despite (or perhaps because of) his never having fought on the battlefield. World War I brought him into the service, trained him, and gave him the chance to mold others while circumstances had shielded him from witnessing firsthand the horror of mechanized warfare. For McNutt, then, there was no searing specter of death to challenge the idea of war as “glorious, adventurous” sacrifice.Footnote ²⁴

Whatever McNutt’s motivation, he tried to keep a sense of service and soldierly sacrifice alive after World War I. It proved an arduous task. “Whenever the U.S. Army had concluded a successful war,” one scholar observed, “the public quickly turned away, as if to say that citizens might at times make good soldiers, but soldiers could never make good citizens.”Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, America in the 1920s was, in McNutt’s view, descending into frivolity and crass materialism.Footnote ²⁶ Here he blamed people—and their “selfishness”—rather than the nation’s political institutions. Like other veterans, McNutt was nostalgic for the “great wave of patriotic fervor” that had swept the United States during World War I.Footnote ²⁷ Now Americans were uninterested in sacrifice. “In the world of business,” McNutt lamented, “we find men haggling over the price to be paid. No mention is made of the quality of service to be rendered.”Footnote ²⁸ Such criticism was in sync with liberal thought during the 1920s. Influenced by advancements in psychology (and confirmed by the rise of such racist and nativist movements as the Ku Klux Klan), liberal intellectuals believed that “ordinary people were often gripped by emotions, prejudices, and feelings that they did not understand and could not control.”Footnote ²⁹ McNutt, who later developed ties to Catholics and Jews and who despised the Klan as “pernicious,” may have been trying to channel the irrationality (or selfishness) of the masses into an outlet—patriotic service—that was safe, sound, and in accordance with his own values.Footnote ³⁰ McNutt, for his part, maintained his soldierly ties by joining the Reserve Officers Corps. “I believe in the reserve corps,” he wrote. “I want to see it live and prosper.”Footnote ³¹ In 1919, he joined the American Legion, and he later became commander of the Legion’s Indiana Department in 1926 and national commander of the organization in 1928.Footnote ³²

More than any other experience, McNutt’s years in the American Legion confirmed and deepened his early thoughts about service, selflessness, and national security. He and the organization made a natural fit. The Legion, formed by veterans of the Great War, embodied McNutt’s ideals, honored his past as a soldier, and pointed toward a future beyond academe. McNutt, in turn, promoted the Legion’s agenda; he expounded on the duties of citizens, the need for a strong defense, and the importance of protection from enemies via patriotic service. He extolled the citizen soldiers, observed that the burden of war fell on them, and backed a policy of preparedness to give America’s fighting men proper training and weapons. Such a program, he said, would reduce casualties in wartime and signal U.S. strength during peacetime. McNutt also promoted the Legion’s campaign of civic education and military training on school campuses.Footnote ³³

McNutt’s oratorical skill abetted his emergence as a leader within the Legion. He was gifted with words—a product of studying English in college, his training as a lawyer, and his bookish persona (he served as dean of IU’s law school from 1925 to 1933).Footnote ³⁴ McNutt’s speeches provide a window into his ideas. His early addresses, as suggested above, exhibited a negative take on human nature and a positive view of larger causes. McNutt’s pessimism had roots in his childhood and his psychological makeup. This man, who would use the term “security” often in his speeches, was shy and somewhat insecure.Footnote ³⁵ As a boy, he was bullied by his schoolmates, and such harassment taught him a lesson about the darker impulses that animated human nature. Throughout his public life, McNutt saw opponents, be they Republicans, Communists, or Nazis, as bullies to be mastered only through steely resolution.Footnote ³⁶

At the same time, McNutt had an idealistic side, for he sought to offset selfishness via service to something larger than one’s self.Footnote ³⁷ Patriotic service became a reoccurring theme in McNutt’s speeches. He tried to inspire one graduating class à la JFK: “Your question is what can I do, not what is to be done for me.”Footnote ³⁸ He denied that military training led to a “war-like spirit” and insisted that it instilled discipline and patriotism in young men.Footnote ³⁹ And McNutt, over time, articulated an inclusive vision of “Americanism” different from that preached by the Klan.Footnote ⁴⁰ He insisted that all residents of the United States, regardless of background, must become citizens, enjoy the same rights, and then shoulder the same responsibilities during wartime. Establishing “domicile” as the prerequisite for citizenship, he argued, would enlarge the pool of potential soldiers from which America bolsters its defenses. But his “Americanism” also derived from principle. McNutt had absorbed the nation’s founding creed that all men are “equal in rights, privileges, and immunities.”Footnote ⁴¹

McNutt feared that pacifists and Communists would lead Americans astray. Following the armistice, the word “peace,” the historian Robert H. Ferrell noted, “echoed through so many sermons, speeches, and state papers that it drove itself into the consciousness of everyone.”Footnote ⁴² The peace movement was strong and quite diverse. It consisted of such organizations as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the World Peace Foundation, both of which backed U.S. entrance into the League of Nations, and the Federal Council of Churches, which “came to see in disarmament the hope of the world.”Footnote ⁴³ Prominent individuals also became involved; the Chicago attorney Salmon Levinson pushed the idea of outlawing war. At the grassroots, women remained at the forefront of the peace movement—Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National Conference for the Cause and the Cure of War, which advocated peace in a very general manner, while Jane Addams led the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which grew strident in its rhetoric, attacking imperialism as well as militarism. “The 1920s,” the historian Robert David Johnson has insisted, “witnessed the transformation of the American peace movement into a bloc more radical, more unified, antimilitarist, anti-imperialist than during the years before American entry into the European war.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The National Council for the Prevention of War acted as clearing house and “played an important role in sustaining the decade’s peace movement” by agitating for American entrance into the League of Nations and World Court and against adding more cruisers to the U.S. Navy.Footnote ⁴⁵ The National Council earned a reputation for radicalism, as did its executive secretary, Frederick J. Libby, a Quaker, who denounced “all aspects of militarism,” including the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) on college campuses.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Daughters of the American Revolution deemed Libby’s advocacy to be “unpatriotic,” while the American Legion assailed him as the “arch slacker.”Footnote ⁴⁷

McNutt reacted strongly against pacifists. When Libby spoke at IU in 1926, McNutt did not attend the speech.Footnote ⁴⁸ In a rebuke to pacifism, Libby-style, McNutt stressed that every American had a duty “to serve this nation in time of war” and that ROTC was an essential part “of an adequate national defense.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He went even further, charging Libby with peddling subversive propaganda.Footnote ⁵⁰ He later accused leaders of “so-called peace organizations” with being Communists—“Reds”—who “work for the abolition of all means of defense in order to make way for the revolution.”Footnote ⁵¹ McNutt relished these attacks. “I am thoroughly aroused,” he told a friend, “and intend to wield the cudgel whenever the opportunity presents itself.”Footnote ⁵² He described the task of “fighting subversive movements” as a “labor of love.”Footnote ⁵³ Such enthusiasm would have helped him advance within the American Legion, which was also anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, and anti-radical, but it did not necessarily inspire non-Legion audiences. One Indiana newspaper attacked McNutt’s alarmism, suggesting that he “might find more wicked foes” than those “he pleases to brand as pacifists” and mocking him for seeing Communists hiding in cornfields.Footnote ⁵⁴ McNutt’s rhetoric would have found more attentive listeners during the first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, or the second one, which emerged after World War II, rather than during an era when pacifism and isolationism animated large numbers of Americans.

McNutt was no isolationist, for he also was thinking about his country’s place in the world—in a predictably unsentimental manner. He disdained pacifists in part because he thought them naive. The reality was that “hate, fear, lust, greed, and envy” in individuals filtered up to governments and their foreign policies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wary of European nations beset by the turmoil that followed World War I, McNutt, early on, foresaw the rise of aggressive dictatorships and urged the necessary preparations.Footnote ⁵⁶ He pointedly asked: “Would you clean up a gang of thugs and murderers by sending peaceful citizens, unarmed, into their midst?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Although McNutt rarely identified specific foes, Benito Mussolini was on his mind; in 1929, he attacked the Italian leader as posing a threat to America.Footnote ⁵⁸ As national commander of the Legion, McNutt continued to insist on making “adequate provision for our national security.”Footnote ⁵⁹ He was not opposed to all international commitments and collective security arrangements; he had backed U.S. entrance into the League of Nations and the World Court.Footnote ⁶⁰ But by the late 1920s, he did not campaign for such causes, to which the public was, at best, indifferent.Footnote ⁶¹ Regarding the League and the World Court, McNutt, in 1929, sounded much like a budding politician when he said that the U.S. government needed to respect the “expressed will of the majority” on these issues.Footnote ⁶² He placed even less trust in the toothless Kellogg-Briand Pact, under which the United States and fourteen other nations renounced war as an instrument of national policy.Footnote ⁶³ “As long as individuals break promises, so will nations,” McNutt insisted. “It is a sad commentary on human nature.”Footnote ⁶⁴

According to McNutt, the strength of any treaty rested on the nation having adequate stockpiles of weapons to enforce it. “We must provide a national defense equal to the nation’s position and responsibilities,” he insisted. “There are enemies without and within. There can be no armistice with those who would destroy our government.”Footnote ⁶⁵ McNutt, along with other proponents of a big navy, prodded Congress to fund a set of new cruisers as a way of “giving substance” to the Kellogg-Briand Pact.Footnote ⁶⁶ He went further, in 1929, by attacking past disarmament efforts such as the Five Power Pact of 1922, which limited the tonnage of capital ships for the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. And when President Herbert Hoover suspended construction of three cruisers authorized by Congress, McNutt wrote him to protest.Footnote ⁶⁷ In response, Hoover, a small-government Republican and a Quaker, argued that more arms would lead to “burdensome expenditure” at home and “misunderstanding” abroad.Footnote ⁶⁸ “He disliked military men and solutions,” the historian Richard W. Fanning observed, “and looked kindly on limiting arms.”Footnote ⁶⁹

McNutt, in his exchange with Hoover, was offering a policy option to the president. It was a role he later would play at times with FDR, although as a member of the administration and its party. In the debate over the cruisers, of course, McNutt was an outsider to the Hoover administration and a critic of its defense policy. Not surprisingly, Hoover ignored McNutt’s prodding and went ahead with his plans for disarmament—he met with British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and agreed to send a delegation to a naval conference in London in 1930.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this instance, public opinion resided with the president. “The idea of disarmament,” Ferrell has noted, “was much in vogue in the 1920’s.”Footnote ⁷¹ McNutt was one notable dissenter, and he understood as much. “It is amazing and distressing,” he complained, “to discover how little the people generally know or think about matters of national defense.” Too many Americans, McNutt lamented, view military policy only “in terms of the tax dollar.”Footnote ⁷²

The debate over national defense showed that McNutt was becoming an advocate of bigger and bigger government. He certainly was willing to use federal dollars to fund projects he deemed worthwhile, such as the rehabilitation of veterans and provisioning of their orphans and dependents. This proved a major cause of the Legion, and it became McNutt’s as well.Footnote ⁷³ The Legion’s commander pressed Congress to build more hospitals for veterans.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, the plight of disabled veterans touched McNutt in a most personal way.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1928, he scribbled a Christmas message to former soldiers at hospitals, praising their “courage” and pledging to work for them “every day of the year.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The note might have sounded trite, but McNutt repeatedly emphasized the needs of those who had been wounded and vowed not to rest until “every veteran disabled in the World War receives the care and award to which he is entitled.”Footnote ⁷⁷ One veteran who had heard McNutt speak came away impressed that he was “on the right side” of this issue.Footnote ⁷⁸

After leaving the post of national commander, McNutt still thought about veterans, especially with respect to the issue of the World War I bonus. Passed in 1924 over the veto of President Calvin Coolidge, the bonus was a life insurance policy to be paid to the heirs of each veteran upon his death or to the veteran directly after twenty years.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1932, veterans descended upon Washington, D.C., to demand payment of the bonus at once—a position both Hoover and Roosevelt rejected.Footnote ⁸⁰ In making his case against the bonus (and for a more extensive welfare state), FDR maintained, in 1933, that “no person, because he wore a uniform, must thereafter be placed in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all other citizens.”Footnote ⁸¹ McNutt, however, sided with the veterans and favored, for “moral and economic” reasons, “immediate payment” of the bonus. The money, according to the Hoosier, was due them for their service, and its swift dispersal would provide relief and pump badly needed dollars into the depression-era economy.Footnote ⁸²

Veterans’ benefits in general and the bonus in particular exemplified a liberal—or, more accurately, statist—aspect of the American Legion. From 1919 to 1924, the Legion successfully lobbied Congress to fund allowances and hospital care for veterans and to establish a Veterans’ Bureau in the executive branch.Footnote ⁸³ Enactment of the bonus did not foreshadow the social concern and federal activism of the New Deal; veterans’ pensions, as the sociologist Theda Skocpol has pointed out, cannot be called a welfare state “in any objective or subjective sense” because they provide federal dollars and assistance only to a small subset of the population “who by their own choices and efforts as young men had earned aid.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the bonus passed by Congress in 1924 signaled a major financial commitment to a specific group during an era of conservative governance.Footnote ⁸⁵ And Congress, during the late 1930s, would expand and liberalize pensions for World War I–era veterans, establishing a system that was both national in scope and comparable to the benefits available to Union veterans of the Civil War. This shift stemmed in part from the need to boost purchasing power—as McNutt, among others, had advocated.Footnote ⁸⁶

In McNutt’s speeches on behalf of veterans’ issues, one can see the beginning of his embrace of the welfare state.Footnote ⁸⁷ In a way, McNutt’s concern for disabled veterans led him to back what he termed “welfare measures” to provide “protection and care” for those who were “the unfortunate products of modern civilization.” In 1929, for example, he praised Massachusetts for adopting policies that had gone “a long way” toward providing some security for its poorer citizens. “The answer to the question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” McNutt averred, “Is ‘Yes.’”Footnote ⁸⁸ He never forgot the contributions of the American Legion. In the 1930s, McNutt lauded the Legion for its “outstanding welfare accomplishments” on behalf of “war orphans and underprivileged children.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Clearly, McNutt’s vision was steadily widening to encompass social and economic, as well foreign and military, issues.

THE 1930S: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SECURITY

The 1930s proved the pivotal decade in the development of McNutt’s philosophy; during the Great Depression and the onset of the global crisis, his support for active government grew. The change began, on the domestic side, in 1932, when McNutt entered elected politics and won the Democratic nomination as governor of Indiana. In his first radio address of the campaign, he sounded conservative as he endorsed “frugality in government”—a long-standing Democratic principle. But McNutt also promised to make government a “useful instrument rather than a burden” to citizens, expand relief for farmers and wage-earners, and provide “proper care of the aged and infirm.” To knit together his agenda, McNutt adopted the mantle of change, à la FDR: “I pledge myself to a new deal for the people of Indiana.”Footnote ⁹⁰ During a campaign in which voters repudiated the Republican Party, McNutt and Roosevelt won election by landslide margins.Footnote ⁹¹

The manner in which McNutt conducted himself as governor of Indiana was in tune with that of the nation’s leading proponent of security, Franklin Roosevelt. Realistic about his ends but flexible in his means, McNutt proved a practical liberal. In his inaugural address, the governor, like any traditional-minded Democrat, pledged “to lower the cost of government and simplify its operation” and “to remove special privilege from the seats of power.” He also compared the economic crisis to a war and called on the “unselfish service, energy, intelligence and solidarity” of Hoosiers to meet the challenges ahead. Yet McNutt doubted that the people would sacrifice as needed. He warned of “those among us who are afraid, who listen to the prophets of evil” predicting the demise of democracy. McNutt shrugged aside such doubts as he pledged to pursue “the high course of action” and to prove that “government may be a great instrument of human progress.” He promised to restore “economic equilibrium” and “to provide food, clothing, and shelter, for the destitute, aged, and infirm.” Here McNutt was as much pragmatic as humanitarian. “Hungry people,” he noted, “have been in the vanguard of every revolt against the established order.”Footnote ⁹² By invoking the analog of war, warning against fear, attacking selfishness, and voicing optimism about the capabilities of government, McNutt’s speech presaged the inaugural address delivered by the leader of his party two months later.

McNutt was a reformer in the mold of the new president.Footnote ⁹³ The governor, not unlike Roosevelt, drove his agenda through a compliant legislature. His administration reorganized the state government, revamped the tax system, strengthened regulation of banking, legalized the sale of beer, passed state-level pensions for older people, centralized the state’s control over poor relief, and worked with the federal government on such issues as unemployment relief and Social Security.Footnote ⁹⁴ McNutt’s program to help the unemployed began in a manner that was pragmatic and respectful of local authority—not unlike Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which promoted a federal-state partnership. McNutt at first chose to improve the “coordination” of the existing system of poor relief in Indiana, which was run by the trustees of each township.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1933, the Indiana legislature passed, with McNutt’s blessing, a bill to form the Governor’s Commission on Unemployment Relief (GCUR), which probed charges of misconduct by township trustees in the dispersal of relief.Footnote ⁹⁶

As time went on, McNutt’s solution to the problem of unemployment relief expanded. He funneled tax dollars to the state highway commission to finance a work-relief program under which unemployed people built or improved roads. Mostly he cooperated with the relief programs inaugurated by the Roosevelt administration.Footnote ⁹⁷ Especially important was the FERA, led by Harry Hopkins, which gave $500 million to state and county relief agencies.Footnote ⁹⁸ As a result of federal dollars, the power of townships over relief slipped, while that of the GCUR rose, as it became a virtual branch of the FERA.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1934, Howard O. Hunter, an assistant to Hopkins, reported that Indiana was dispensing its relief dollars “about as smoothly as any State.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ McNutt was similarly supportive of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), also run by Hopkins, which provided unemployed people with jobs on light construction projects.Footnote ¹⁰¹ McNutt worked “wholeheartedly” with the CWA by diverting money, earmarked for the state highway fund, to underwrite wages and materials on the agency’s road construction projects.Footnote ¹⁰² With such a record, Hunter saluted the governor as an “exceptionally cooperative” partner.Footnote ¹⁰³

McNutt’s commitment to unemployment relief had grown by 1935. At the start of his governorship, he felt constrained by his state’s budget deficit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But as McNutt grasped the depth of the crisis facing the poor, the drain on local resources, and the benefits of federal dollars, his support for active government in the area of public welfare strengthened. Federal dollars surely helped. After the CWA had ended its operations in 1934, McNutt, working alongside the FERA, recommitted himself to a program of work relief for the unemployed in cities; direct payments (livestock and seed) for those in rural areas; and the appointment of county-level relief officers who would report back to the GCUR. The governor’s policy was conservative in that it subjected the poor to stringent tests but liberal in that it pumped money into the economy, through work relief, as the CWA had.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Several things stand out about McNutt’s developing liberalism. The first is an elemental Keynesianism, an understanding that government spending can help curtail economic downturns. This philosophy had found a following among New Deal liberals by the late 1930s, and it won a “large audience in the United States” after World War II.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ McNutt grasped this concept by the early 1930s, as his argument in favor of the soldier’s bonus suggested and his embrace of work relief confirmed. At the same time, he proved less committed to trust-busting, a program that liberals only briefly flirted with in the late 1930s, though he could denounce big business with the fervor of either Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For example, in 1936, he, like FDR, cast that year’s campaign as a “crusade” for “protection against entrenched greed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The idea of “protection” lay at the heart of McNutt’s thoughts about the obligations of the state. “The federal and state governments,” Indiana’s governor asserted in 1934, “are determined that needy people shall not suffer.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By the end of that year, he had decided that state and local authorities should care for the permanently disadvantaged “unemployables” while the federal government gave relief to those who were out of work temporarily.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was, from McNutt, an early expression of the concept of the social safety net. Moreover, the word “security” began to enter McNutt’s speeches. In 1935, he championed three aims: “The security of livelihood through better use of the natural resources”; “The security of better homes”; and “Security against major hazards and vicissitudes of life.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The last phrase parroted FDR’s remarks on behalf of the program that would become Social Security.Footnote ¹¹² But McNutt was no copycat. As a thoughtful person—and a Democrat leading a state that had been dominated by the Grand Old Party (GOP) in the 1920s—he felt the need to justify the expansion of his state’s government and no doubt saw the theme of “security” as politically safe and intellectually sensible.

McNutt’s commitment to “security,” welfare state–style, became crystal clear during his final year as governor. Social Security was a case in point. The Social Security Act of 1935 set up a system of old-age pensions financed by taxes on payrolls and employers; provided federal grants to states to assist elderly people in need; and encouraged a federal-state partnership to insure the unemployed, assist the blind and the handicapped, and support dependent children. Just seven months after Congress enacted Social Security, McNutt called his legislature into special session and secured passage of three measures to bring Indiana into compliance with the new law.Footnote ¹¹³ The first, a public health bill, enabled Indiana to claim $120,000 under the Social Security Act in exchange for the state accepting federal oversight of its public health services. The second inaugurated, in accordance with Social Security, unemployment compensation for workers at firms having eight or more employees.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The final law established a department of public welfare that would, among other things, oversee poor relief in Indiana.Footnote ¹¹⁵

McNutt’s actions highlighted his commitment to New Deal–style security.Footnote ¹¹⁶ To be certain, he did not have to forge ahead; Social Security encouraged—did not require—states to participate in such programs as unemployment insurance. But McNutt insisted that Indiana do so since state resources alone had proven “tragically” inadequate to “safeguard” Hoosiers against “the hazards and vicissitudes of life.” Social Security, in contrast, represented a “sane and practical” strike against the “destitution” that ignited “destructive political and social changes.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ It was an outlook consistent with his inaugural address, when McNutt had warned of “hungry people” revolting against the “established order.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ It also coincided with his relief policy, whereby Indiana cooperated closely with the administration in Washington, D.C.Footnote ¹¹⁹

McNutt hailed the passage of the three acts for bringing “considerable security” to “thousands” of Hoosiers.Footnote ¹²⁰ His thoughts on how to provide “security” were evolving, away from trusting local authority. During the debate over the Public Welfare Act, McNutt fought against such advocates of “home rule” who wanted to retain township control over poor relief.Footnote ¹²¹ He also became more explicit in justifying the law’s larger objective: “We actually have made, for the first time in our national history, the welfare of the workingman, the farmer, the aged, the home, and the child a real concern of the Government.” Federal oversight and dollars were, McNutt asserted, in tune with Abraham Lincoln’s argument that it was “the purpose of government” to “better accomplish those things for the people [that] they could not do so well for themselves.”Footnote ¹²² Liberals in Lincoln’s party later would voice such ideas in defense of New Deal-like policies.Footnote ¹²³

McNutt was more than a mere backer of the New Deal; he was a part of a generation, an era, and an outlook, about the role of the state and the nature of humans, which made the New Deal possible. The men and women of Roosevelt’s administration differed from Progressive Era reformers in that they exuded less optimism about the perfectibility of man (Prohibition, a cause of many Progressives, was an early casualty of the New Deal and of McNutt’s administration in Indiana) and had greater faith in the ability of the state to manage the economy and check human impulses.Footnote ¹²⁴ New Dealers placed less emphasis on expanding opportunity, which in the hands of unrestrained individuals had helped cause the Great Depression, and more on affording people a larger sense of safety. Late in 1936, Roosevelt summarized the aim of his first term as removing some of the “chances” from American life and substituting in their place “security for people so that they would not individually worry, security for their families, security for their homes, a greater security for their jobs, and, incidentally, a greater security for people who employ them.”Footnote ¹²⁵ McNutt’s experience as governor, having charge over a specific geographic area and a sizable population, no doubt helped him to see security as central to liberal thought and practice as early as Roosevelt and, perhaps, earlier than many of those in FDR’s inner circle.

At the same time, McNutt, it must be emphasized, was one of only a few governors to back, with gusto, New Deal–style security. “Some cooperated enthusiastically with Roosevelt,” the historian James T. Patterson has noted, “others tolerated him, [and] others were stubbornly independent.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Such variety reflected many factors, such as the alignment of political parties in each state; the degree of factionalism within the local Democratic Party; the ideology, persona, aims, and political skills of the governor; and the state’s resources and finances. Some states, like Wisconsin and Minnesota in the early 1930s, pressed ahead with reforms of their own. Others, such as Michigan and Georgia, adopted New Deal–like measures later in the decade, at a time when a backlash against liberalism limited their reach. A number of conservative states in the South and West resisted the New Deal while wealthy, urban states with strong reform traditions, such as New York, remained at the vanguard of depression-era liberalism. Still others, such as Pennsylvania and Indiana, developed liberal reputations, at least until the GOP resurgence of the late 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote ¹²⁷ Governor George Earle of Pennsylvania pushed a Little New Deal because, as he explained, “life must be made more secure” for those “at the mercy of economic forces.”Footnote ¹²⁸ McNutt’s successor, M. Clifford Townsend, continued his agenda. “The issue of the campaign,” Townsend stated in 1938, “shall be security.” He emphasized: “The people shall be fed. The unemployed must have work. The farmer and the laborer and the businessman must have a fair share of the wealth they produce. The old must have security.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Such aims did not meet universal approval; regarding Social Security, “state cooperation was often reluctantly given.”Footnote ¹³⁰ McNutt was one exception. When he was governor, McNutt met with representatives of the Social Security Board (SSB) before Indiana lawmakers voted on participation in Social Security and urged them “to sell the legislature the most liberal bill [they] could devise.”Footnote ¹³¹

Why was McNutt such strong supporter of the New Deal? Ambition was the obvious, and most simplistic, answer; in order to advance politically, he adapted to the times. But there were other reasons. On a practical level, he saw a state in need of reforming and a population in need of government-run assistance. And, unlike many of his fellow governors, McNutt possessed a military background and global perspective, stemming from his years leading the American Legion, which no doubt influenced his emphasis on security. McNutt saw the world in the midst of a “long crisis” that included the Great War, the emergence of dictatorships, and the Great Depression. According to him, the “heart of the crisis” lay not in “laws” or “institutions of government” but in “the will and the purpose of men.” People in Russia, Italy, and Germany had become insecure—“frightened” and “demoralized”—and such fear had overturned the existing “social order” in those lands. Under Roosevelt, however, the United States pursued a different path; a government engaged in a “bold experiment” had marshaled the nation’s resources and had restored its “spirit” and “vitality.” With the New Deal, McNutt continued, “We were again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for own security.”Footnote ¹³² This realism, about human nature, and idealism, about the promise and the possibilities of a skillfully led democratic state, placed McNutt within the mainstream mind-set of the New Deal and Cold War eras.

McNutt’s realism was of such an intense sort that it separated him from Roosevelt’s more idealistic associates. In Indiana, McNutt constructed a political machine around a patronage system under which state employees were urged to donate two percent of their incomes to an organization, the Hoosier Democratic Club, run by the governor’s advisers. (McNutt defended his “Two Percent Club” as a necessary evil to thwart the well-heeled GOP.)Footnote ¹³³ With cash in hand, the ambitious McNutt cast his eye on the vice presidency as early as 1936 and then on the White House as the election of 1940 neared. But he was not universally loved within his own party. In 1935, McNutt offended liberals and organized labor by sending National Guard troops to restore order in strike-torn Terre Haute—an action that earned him the moniker “Hoosier Hitler.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The crisis began at a local enameling plant, where workers had organized a union under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor, and evolved into a general strike. McNutt’s response separated him from other Democratic governors of the 1930s who were more sympathetic to labor—Herbert Lehman of New York and Michigan’s Frank Murphy—as well as from FDR’s administration, which was perceived as favoring unionization (though not from Truman, who, following World War II, often took a tough stand against strikers). McNutt’s use of the militia to stem labor unrest in 1930s aroused suspicion among New Dealers that he was not one of them.Footnote ¹³⁵

When, in 1939, FDR named McNutt to head the newly formed Federal Security Agency (FSA), which oversaw much of the New Deal including the Social Security Board, the biggest hue and cry came from administration liberals. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes reacted to the appointment by privately denouncing McNutt as “intensely ambitious and hard”; the architect of a “ruthless” machine; someone “with no social point of view” who suppressed strikes “at the drop of a hat”; and a “fascist at heart.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Following announcement of McNutt’s appointment, Murphy, who was now U.S. attorney general, visited with Ickes and together they “bemoaned at length” the president’s choice as presaging “difficult, if not evil, days” for the “liberal cause.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Not unlike Ickes and Murphy, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins believed that McNutt had been guilty of promoting “illiberal” government in Indiana, a reference to his handling of the Terre Haute general strike and inauguration of the Two Percent Club.Footnote ¹³⁸

The loudest voice on the appointment was FDR’s, and the president, unlike his administration’s liberals, took a realistic position on McNutt. Roosevelt did not think McNutt’s actions at Terre Haute should be held against him; FDR observed that a decision to use troops to settle a strike was a difficult one, and he would not judge McNutt harshly.Footnote ¹³⁹ The president, a former governor, was closer in political background to McNutt than to his immediate aides. Hopkins and Perkins had been social workers; Ickes had started out as a Chicago-area reformer; and Wallace had, through his family, a background on farmers’ issues. To be sure, they were not exactly political novices—both Hopkins and Perkins had worked with politicians in New York State—but none had secured elected office themselves.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In general, this group of advisers was known more for its “competence” than its ability “to understand and sympathize with the needs and desires of professional politicians.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The president was different. FDR hoped that situating McNutt at FSA would help temper the New Deal and leave its programs slimmer and better able to withstand assaults by the GOP.Footnote ¹⁴² Roosevelt told Ickes: “McNutt made a good Governor of Indiana and he is a good administrator. I needed a man who is practical and efficient.”Footnote ¹⁴³

As federal security administrator, McNutt had to defend and sell the programs of his agency, and he did so, in part, by invoking the concept of security. In a speech delivered in 1939, McNutt traced the development of three types of security provided by the federal government. The oldest involved the Department of the Navy’s efforts to fight disease, something natural for him to stress, since the FSA oversaw the Public Health Service. After that came the security that stemmed from access to education, something with which McNutt was familiar, for the Civilian Conservation Corps, National Youth Administration, and Office of Education all reported to him. The most recent addition was “economic security” embodied in the programs of the Social Security Board—also under McNutt’s domain.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Again, it was not surprising that a federal security administrator would invoke “security” in his speeches. But McNutt had been doing so as early as the mid-1930s, when he was governor of Indiana.

McNutt’s most notable initiative at the FSA was a proposal to reform Social Security. Here, the Hoosier advocated what he believed to be a broadened, more generous system based on a uniform minimum benefit. In 1939, Roosevelt had considered adding such a benefit to the contributory pension that workers were to receive under Social Security. But the impact of the flat-rate concept was unclear. Some liberals favored the proposal because it would allow higher payments to be made immediately. Yet social insurance advocates such as Arthur J. Altmeyer, the head of the Social Security Board, and FDR believed that the flat-rate would, over time, become a cap on benefits and the result would be a less generous system of Social Security. (For that reason, some conservatives backed the idea.)Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In the end, Roosevelt rejected a flat-rate system as too costly.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Nevertheless, a few advisers within the White House continued to push for it.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ McNutt agreed with them, and he planned to say as much in a major speech in New York. The draft of his address sounded a bit lukewarm toward the current Social Security setup, calling it “about as good as we can expect at this stage.” McNutt wanted something different, a “flat-rate, universal pension” financed by a graduated income tax.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The uniform pension underscored McNutt’s pragmatism and liberalism as well as his ambition. He backed it partly for the same reason that FDR had instituted Social Security, that is, to quell demands for more generous pensions. That said, McNutt’s scheme was unapologetically redistributive; he insisted that transferring wealth would enhance purchasing power nationwide and boost the economy. Most important, McNutt, in his speech, wanted Americans to view security, for older people and otherwise, as something other than “charity.” A flat-rate pension, McNutt thought, would eliminate the means test, place everyone on an equal footing, and make security a “right” for all Americans. If his thinking on this issue was advancing into the realm of rights-consciousness, his idea of “security” remained holistic, that is, cognizant of national and international trends. McNutt thought that establishing a sound, uniform system of Social Security would decrease discontent at home and, again, solidify democracy in the United States at a time when other countries had turned to dictatorship. Politically, advocating a uniform pension helped renew McNutt’s liberal credentials and made him appear as a leader—a believer in big ideas.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

But McNutt’s plans for Social Security fell through. Altmeyer read a draft of the speech before its delivery and warned the White House that McNutt was about to contradict the policies of the president and the will of the SSB.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Roosevelt sided with the Social Security Board, and Altmeyer managed to stop McNutt before he delivered his prepared remarks.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Instead, McNutt read a speech, prepared by the Board, that advocated greater federal grants to states to assist old people in need and an expansion of Social Security to include self-employed workers. The tone of this address was far more sympathetic to the existing system than McNutt’s earlier draft; in the version he read, McNutt praised Social Security as “a splendid attack upon one of the gravest of our problems.”Footnote ¹⁵²

This episode said much about McNutt’s evolving views on security. He was bold enough to reopen debate on a seemingly settled matter, that is, passage of a flat-rate, universal pension. His draft speech was full of liberal fight, chastising the United States for being “a latecomer to the practice of social security,” praising the “evolution of charities into universal public services” as a “sound” trend, and casting access to such services as a “right” for Americans.Footnote ¹⁵³ Roosevelt, in contrast, remained committed to a system based on compulsory contributions, payroll taxes, and fiscal responsibility and thus likely to withstand the attacks of conservatives in years to come.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Both men, it should be noted, were mixing liberal principles, practical considerations, and political imperatives as they developed different visions for—and versions of—Social Security.

The debate on Social Security also showed how easily McNutt and Roosevelt could cross swords. McNutt and FDR never formed a close relationship, in part because they were so much alike. Both men were handsome, articulate, and politically adept—were “tireless campaigners” and “ruthless” in pursuing their goals.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Each man was accustomed to dominating the stage.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Frank C. Walker, who served Roosevelt in many capacities, acknowledged his boss’s “vanity” and aversion to “any person” who forced him “to share the limelight.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ McNutt, with his love of the stump, was quite a political show horse. Moreover, beneath his charm, FDR was cold, calculating, and adept at using subordinates to advance his own ends.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ McNutt, in turn, was not only used to leading—the Legion and in Indiana—but he aspired to the succeed Roosevelt. Thus he accepted offices from FDR but then tried to use them to advance his own career and ideas.

THE 1930S: DEFENDING THE PHILIPPINES, DENOUNCING TOTALITARIANISM

During the late 1930s, McNutt was also able to refine his highly realistic views on foreign policy. From 1937, when his term as governor ended (he was constitutionally ineligible for reelection), to 1939, when he assumed his duties as federal security administrator, McNutt served as high commissioner to the Philippines. Roosevelt named McNutt to this post ostensibly to satisfy a political need, that is, to reward the Hoosier for campaigning for him in 1936. But FDR also wanted to send this potential rival as far from the American mainland as possible.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As high commissioner, McNutt was the leading U.S. official in the archipelago, which had become a “commonwealth,” a middling status between that of a colony and an independent nation. As McNutt left for Manila, he spoke like an advocate of Philippine independence. He lauded the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which allowed Filipinos to elect their own president, granted them “large measure of autonomy,” and set 1946 as the date for Philippine independence.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ McNutt still believed that America had to be wary of aggressors, but he thought that its line of defense in the Pacific lay in Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands rather than in the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁶¹

After McNutt arrived in Manila his focus shifted, aided by advice from Admiral H. E. Yarnell, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic fleet. In a memorandum, Yarnell portrayed grimly the prospects for an independent Philippines. He saw the success of the archipelago, as a separate nation resting on its ability to achieve economic “stability” and military “security.” Neither condition existed in 1937. Yarnell emphasized the danger facing the Philippines: Japanese officials had said that the Islands fell within their nation’s “sphere of influence” and Filipino defenses were inadequate. Yarnell depicted Japan as a threat to both the United States and the Philippines: “Security is best maintained by policies which are just to other nations, and backed by adequate force. It is not maintained by a supine withdrawal from areas where trouble may happen.”Footnote ¹⁶² Japan’s aggressive intentions became further evident in August 1937, when its army marched into China.Footnote ¹⁶³ Months later, the sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panay by Japanese planes, coupled with a weak American response (of accepting an official apology), hardened McNutt’s resolve.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ “All of us have watched the developments in China with the greatest interest,” he wrote Yarnell as he urged “a stiffening of our backbone in dealing with foreign affairs.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵

With that in mind, McNutt, by the end of 1937, became convinced that the United States could not leave “the Orient” without losing prestige and “endangering world peace.” America, McNutt asserted, “must stay in the Philippines as the sovereign” if it were to remain a power in Asia.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In so arguing, he was challenging Roosevelt in two areas. First, the high commissioner was rebelling against an article of faith for Democrats, that is, Philippine independence. Second, he was forsaking plans, favored by FDR, to negotiate an international treaty to guarantee the neutrality of the Islands after America had departed.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ McNutt wanted instead to achieve an “understanding” among “Great Britain, America, France and Holland” to protect their colonies in Asia.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The McNutt of the 1920s—the man who had preferred an enforceable peace based on preparedness to well-meaning but toothless pacts—had resurfaced and asserted himself. Early in 1938, McNutt told FDR that the interests of America and the Philippines “would be best served by an indefinite continuation of the Commonwealth.” Roosevelt, who was averse to reopening the question of independence, replied: “If that is what the Filipinos want, let them say so.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

McNutt tried to get the United States to retain the Philippines. In 1938, he delivered a radio address that urged a “realistic reexamination” of Philippine independence and endorsed “a permanent political and economic relationship” between the United States and the Philippines resembling the one between Great Britain and Canada. McNutt cited American exceptionalism to justify a continuation of U.S. sovereignty over the Islands. He characterized his nation’s “enterprise” in the Philippines as more “altruistic” than the colonialism practiced by Europeans; unlike Spain, the United States had improved the Philippines’ health care and sanitation, educational system, and capacity for self-government. And yet, McNutt also wanted to protect America’s position in Asia. He warned that the United States had a “responsibility” to remain active and engaged in the world: Abandoning the Philippines would impair America’s security and economy, leaving a chain of islands “from Kamchatka to Borneo” in hostile hands and inhibiting trade with China. McNutt resolved that the United States must not “run away” from the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

McNutt’s speech was simultaneously backward- and forward-looking. At one level, his talk about defending American interests in Asia mirrored the imperialist rhetoric of such earlier figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Indeed, the beginning of McNutt’s address, in which he defended U.S.-style imperialism as altruistic, sounded downright stodgy—more in line with the rhetoric of William McKinley than that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.Footnote ¹⁷¹ At another level, however, McNutt’s focus remained on the present state of Asian politics and the threat of Japan. Events on the colonial periphery can circulate back to policies—and to people—in the metropole in what the historian Alfred W. McCoy has labeled the “capillaries of empire.”Footnote ¹⁷² So it was with McNutt, whose experience in the Philippines led him to reaffirm his core principles about the need to fend off aggressive dictatorships.

McNutt’s call for a reexamination of Philippine independence also foreshadowed the sort of geopolitical thinking that came into vogue among U.S. policymakers following World War II. According to this mind-set, defending American territory alone would not assure the nation’s security. As Truman noted at the end of his presidency: “If Communism is allowed to absorb free nations, then we would be isolated from our sources of supply and detached from our friends.”Footnote ¹⁷³ To be certain, McNutt was focusing on a more localized threat (from Japan) in one region (East Asia) of the globe. And yet, he was expressing a geopolitical perspective earlier than Truman (or FDR, for that matter) and relating it to the Philippines in a manner that separated him from the isolationists, some of whom were willing to abandon the Philippines to Japan if doing so averted war.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ McNutt pressed his point, warning Roosevelt that the “present” state of “world politics” precluded a U.S. withdrawal from the archipelago.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The president, for his part, reminded McNutt of their party’s “uninterrupted” support for Philippine independence and rejected any effort by the government in Washington to reassert “direct control” over the Islands.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Ultimately, the president of the Philippines, Manuel L. Quezon, proved unwilling to call for a reexamination of independence. In private, Quezon favored dominion status for the Philippines because the continuance of U.S. sovereignty would enable Filipinos to sell their agricultural goods, duty-free, in American markets and to maintain the Islands’ defenses against the Japanese.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Yet because the majority of Philippine politicians would not “tolerate anything short of complete independence,” Quezon had to repudiate publicly McNutt’s talk of dominion status.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ McNutt, in turn, remained convinced that following independence the Islands would fall victim to Japan.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ And, so, he emphasized that “America cannot leave the Orient today without serious loss of prestige and without further endangering world peace.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Along with his internationalist perspective, Paul McNutt had an aversion to dictatorship. It is true that McNutt had been a strong governor, unafraid to exercise his powers, and that led to attacks that he, like Roosevelt, was himself a dictator.Footnote ¹⁸¹ But in his inaugural address in 1933, he announced: “I believe in the destiny of democracy as a system of government, believe in it more profoundly than in anything else human.”Footnote ¹⁸² What McNutt saw in the Philippines concerned him. The Philippine Constitution of 1935 placed wide authority in the hands of the president, and Quezon had used that authority to enhance his own power.Footnote ¹⁸³ This was too much for McNutt, who had been schooled in a political system based on two competitive parties. After arriving in Manila, he lamented that “democracy” in the Philippines was more “form” than “substance.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Over time, though, as he and Quezon became acquainted, McNutt came to see the Philippine president as a political boss rather than a dictator, and he adjusted to Quezon’s leadership.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

McNutt refused to adjust to dictatorships that he regarded as aggressive and hostile to American interests. His wariness about Japan indicated as such, and his actions with respect to Germany confirmed it. The chief antagonist for the high commissioner was the German counsel in Manila, Gustav Adolf Sakowski, who was set on raising his nation’s profile in the Islands.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ McNutt, for example, reprimanded Sakowski for pressing the German Club of Manila to expel its Jewish members. He informed the consul that he must not “reorganize the German club along Nazi principles.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In reacting to such transgressions, McNutt remained true to form, defending U.S. sovereignty and ideals, especially regarding the rights of religious minorities.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

McNutt also displayed his concern by allowing Jewish refugees to settle in Manila. The high commissioner’s efforts here were compassionate, reactive to events, and reflective of U.S. immigration law. In 1938, a group of twenty-eight German Jewish families fled Shanghai, where Japanese troops were approaching, and arrived in Manila, where local Jewish leaders received them.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ After learning of their plight, McNutt waived visa requirements and admitted them to the Islands.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Partly because of his efforts, approximately 1,200 German and Austrian Jews, mainly professional people, made it to Manila between 1938 and 1939. He next considered a much more extensive venture to resettle 10,000 Jewish refugees on the island of Mindanao, but the project succumbed to practical problems, the indifference of Filipino leaders, and McNutt’s return to America in 1939.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Nevertheless, while in Manila, McNutt denounced Nazism, especially in the aftermath of Kristalnacht, the night in November 1938 when Hitler’s storm troopers attacked Jews and Jewish-owned property. He assailed the Nazis for sanctifying the use of force, for adopting the threat of war “as an instrument of national policy,” for denying men and women the right to “think their own thoughts and to worship God according to their own conscience,” and for creating a refugee crisis involving “millions of helpless wanderers.” His aversion to the villain was matched by his empathy for the victim. McNutt hailed the Jews as a resilient, “virile people” who had suffered and survived persecution for “forty centuries.”Footnote ¹⁹²

McNutt’s actions represented a notable exception to U.S. policy toward Jewish refugees. People seeking entrance to U.S. territory faced immense obstacles in the 1930s. These included a restrictive immigration policy of quotas based on national origins; anti-immigrant sentiments during the Great Depression; anti-Semitism and bureaucratic inertia at the State Department; and a president who showed only intermittent interest in the issue. Another hurdle was a provision of the Immigration Act of 1917 that forbade aliens from entering the United States if they were unable to support themselves financially and “likely to become a public charge.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Such a restrictive policy has provoked criticism from scholars who emphasize, among other things, that the annual quota for Germany “was rarely filled.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Although McNutt’s activities in Manila did not alter the contours of U.S. immigration policy, he had exercised his powers as high commissioner creatively and in accordance with the law by bringing people of skills and means to an outpost of America’s empire.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ As a result, Manila was one of the few areas to become a haven for Jewish refugees in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

The assistance McNutt gave to Jews related to his conception of security in three ways. First, he saw attacks on Jews as a form of danger or insecurity. McNutt had started to express such thoughts in March 1933, just two months after he became governor of Indiana, when he addressed a nonsectarian rally in Chicago. At that event, he characterized the Nazi assault on Jews as “outrageous.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The Indiana governor went on to proclaim: “No government can long endure that fails to guarantee to its people the right to live as normal human beings. The present government of Germany thus writes its own destruction.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ It is worth noting that in his inaugural address as governor, McNutt had used similar language in promising assistance to the needy; he declared that it was the “business” of government to assure “every man the right to live as a normal human being.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ To him, existing as a “normal human being” involved enjoying a sense of safety, from persecution as well as from privation. Second, McNutt believed that some Jews would find safety in Palestine. In 1935, he cooperated with Zionist groups in Indiana to celebrate “Palestine Day” and, for his effort, won praise from the state’s Jewish population.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Support for a Jewish state in Palestine became one of the major features of U.S. foreign policy during—and following—the Cold War, and McNutt’s early embrace of Zionism suggests that he was, in some ways, ahead of the times.

Finally, as World War II approached, McNutt saw Jews as protagonists in the struggle between democracy and fascism. “Wherever liberalism is well-established,” he asserted in 1939, “there is little or no anti-[S]emitism. Wherever liberalism weakens and an opportunity is offered to a would-be dictator, anti-[S]emitism is used to create a ‘group will’ to serve the dictator’s ambition.”Footnote ²⁰¹ McNutt later embraced Jews, and all freedom-loving peoples, as comrades-in-arms in a form of collective security. “One cannot quarantine a land against tyranny and persecution,” he told one Zionist leader. “If aggression stalks the people of the earth, no land, no person is immune.”Footnote ²⁰² In 1944, he hailed Jewish Palestine as an “arsenal of democracy in the Middle East” for furnishing men and matériel to British forces in the Mediterranean.Footnote ²⁰³ Such a stance was consistent with his earlier support for Zionism.

One of the ironies of McNutt’s life was that, intentionally or not, he had positioned himself to play a significant role as the United States entered the global crisis of the 1940s. He had a background in foreign and military matters and had come to believe in using some form of collective action to thwart aggressor nations. As a policymaker, he had been skillful enough to construct a welfare state in Indiana, resourceful enough to use his powers as high commissioner to save Jewish lives, and bold enough to offer policy alternatives to Roosevelt on Social Security and Philippine independence. Moreover, as war approached, McNutt knew the values he wished to protect. In 1939, before an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, he waxed reflective: “It is difficult to find a single word which more nearly epitomizes the longings of the human spirit than the word ‘security.’ . . . Implied here are those decencies of civilization which we regard as essential to the good life—economic security, political security, intellectual and spiritual security. It would be a happy life indeed where the individual felt himself secure against poverty and want, against the ravages of disease and ill-health, against the violent disruption of the ethical ideals incorporated in his cultural heritage.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ The outbreak of war in Europe that same year did not afford McNutt the opportunity to defend this vision in an obvious way. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, McNutt headed an office—the Federal Security Agency—that had little to do with national defense or the crisis overseas. Moreover, the national mood remained largely isolationist; Americans were willing to assist Great Britain and France only if doing so did not involve their country in war.

McNutt proved unable to find his voice on the war until November 1939, when, during a tour of Florida, he stressed the need for preparedness, which he had long pushed. “Let us keep a cool head but carry a gun because a gun is necessary in a world of thugs,” he explained.Footnote ²⁰⁵ McNutt also took aim at subversives, that is, people who sought to destroy America from within. In troubled times such as these, he warned, “Apostles of Communism and Fascism peddle their deceptive theories.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ To be sure, this seemed a politically astute ploy, for a House panel, led by Democrat Martin Dies of Texas, had, since 1938, investigated the influence of subversives—particularly “Reds”—in the U.S. government.Footnote ²⁰⁷ But it also reflected McNutt’s anti-Communist and antipacifist outlook that had dated to his years in the American Legion. In the end, though, his visit to Florida did not make national news. In fact, when a Connecticut politician was asked about McNutt’s presidential prospects, the man purportedly replied: “Who is McNutt?”Footnote ²⁰⁸

Such comments were not what an aspiring presidential candidate wished to hear. The McNutt campaign, in truth, suffered from a variety of challenges, including a cash shortfall, negative press coverage (of McNutt’s ambition, mainly), Roosevelt’s unwillingness to withdraw from the race, and the activities of the president’s backers, who rounded up convention delegates for Roosevelt. All the while McNutt repeatedly affirmed that he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination only if the president was not. On the issue of the war, the Hoosier likewise trod carefully, voicing a position that reflected his beliefs and popular opinion: America must build its defenses but avoid direct participation in the conflict if at all possible.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In private, he was firmer; three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, McNutt wrote: “A free world is locked in a death struggle with the forces of darkness. In that struggle, there can be no compromise.”Footnote ²¹⁰

Larger events soon overwhelmed McNutt’s ambition. During the spring of 1940, while on a tour of the western states, McNutt’s speeches were overshadowed by events in Europe.Footnote ²¹¹ Equally important, the Roosevelt juggernaut proved unstoppable.Footnote ²¹² Seeing the end, McNutt endorsed FDR’s renomination, arguing that the nation’s “security” and “unity” demanded that he continue in office. “The emergency which faces us,” McNutt declared, “is so critical that it requires the strong leadership and wealth of experience in world affairs that the President alone can provide.”Footnote ²¹³ The statement reflected his thoughts about what was in the nation’s best interest as well as his political calculation.Footnote ²¹⁴ Knowing that he had no chance to win his party’s nomination, McNutt cloaked his withdrawal in the rhetoric of sacrifice. At the Democratic National Convention, the Hoosier again deferred to Roosevelt when he declined to challenge the president’s choice for vice president, Henry Wallace, despite the fact that Wallace was unpopular with the delegates and that McNutt had considerable support at the convention.Footnote ²¹⁵ McNutt stated that America needed “strong, logical, liberal and able leaders in the kind of world in which we live.” “We have such a leader in Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he went on. “He is my commander-in-chief . . . and I am here to support his choice for vice president.”Footnote ²¹⁶

POSTSCRIPT: THE 1940S AND THE EARLY COLD WAR

McNutt’s departure from the vice-presidential race marked the beginning of the end of his political career and of his chances of becoming a major leader of postwar liberalism. During World War II, he continued to head the Federal Security Agency, where he spoke on the need to use America’s systems of health care, social welfare, and education to make the nation fit for war.Footnote ²¹⁷ In September 1941, Roosevelt placed McNutt—and the FSA—in charge of another new agency, the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services (ODHWS).Footnote ²¹⁸ ODHWS assisted communities with a number of tasks such as fighting prostitution and venereal disease, providing childcare for workers and recreation for servicemen (with McNutt’s backing, the United Service Organization came into existence), and improving “health, welfare, and morale.”Footnote ²¹⁹ At first, it responded to requests for assistance from local authorities. Over time, as the need for additional facilities for childcare and recreation became apparent, it pressed for more funding.Footnote ²²⁰ In the end, ODHWS and its successor, the Office of Community War Services, posted breakthroughs and setbacks.Footnote ²²¹ McNutt, in turn, allowed his staff to run the agency on a daily basis.Footnote ²²² That freed him to address in speeches the link between social welfare and national security and to peg FSA’s mission to the war effort.Footnote ²²³ The work of ODHWS reflected McNutt’s belief that “social and economic security . . . is related to national defense.”Footnote ²²⁴ But it could not have satisfied him, because ODHWS was not central to either domestic politics or fighting on the battlefield.Footnote ²²⁵

During World War II, McNutt also led the War Manpower Commission (WMC), a post more closely tied to the nation’s war effort (though not to the issue of security) and one in which “he would be frequently criticized” given the scarcity of human resources and the pressure from the civilian and military sectors for those resources.Footnote ²²⁶ Part of McNutt’s trouble at the WMC was that, unlike his record as governor, he appeared to lean over backward to accommodate labor by, among other things, including union leaders in the WMC’s decision-making and opposing a draft of workers.Footnote ²²⁷ Such decisions, interestingly, made him appear to be an archetypal New Dealer—and captive to Big Labor.Footnote ²²⁸ In a larger sense, McNutt’s difficulties at the commission stemmed from the fact that he faced a changing economy. He had entered elected office during the Depression, an era defined by limitations, state-building, and debates over security, at home and abroad. World War II, which brought together boom times, makeshift government agencies, and a cause that few Americans questioned, inaugurated a different set of challenges. By 1942, the historian Richard Polenberg has written, “With unemployment disappearing . . . the issue of economic security had lost much of its appeal.”Footnote ²²⁹ Therefore, on the home front, McNutt needed to do more than extol the promise of the welfare state and champion military preparedness; at various points he had to deflect, diminish, or deny the demands of unions, farmers, women, minorities, the public at large, and even the military. McNutt struggled, and the economist Eliot Janeway deemed him “the most harassed of the Washington czars.”Footnote ²³⁰ Overall, McNutt’s problems at the WMC, as well as his personal distance from FDR, meant that he received no consideration for the vice presidency in 1944, when Democrats replaced Wallace with Truman.Footnote ²³¹ One McNutt supporter lamented that at the 1944 national convention the Hoosier was the “forgotten man.”Footnote ²³²

McNutt was more at ease discussing security, and he had the opportunity to do so after World War II, when national security became the burning issue. To be sure, he did not ignore domestic programs, such as Social Security, which he credited with sustaining the postwar prosperity.Footnote ²³³ In fact, in one of his last acts as federal security administrator, McNutt proposed elevating the FSA to a cabinet-level “Department of Health, Education, and Security.”Footnote ²³⁴ And yet, his focus was shifting toward fighting the communist menace. Along with many Americans, he saw communism as the “twin” of fascism and the Soviet Union as an aggressor nation not unlike Nazi Germany. In 1948, McNutt warned that if “the world outside America is overrun by Communists” Americans would be in “danger.”Footnote ²³⁵ He defined the United States’ international interests expansively: “The withdrawal of our influence and strength from any quarter of the globe today would soon shake our own western world, with all its fancied security, to its very foundations.”Footnote ²³⁶ “Our country’s security,” he later affirmed, “is synonymous with the security of the whole free world.”Footnote ²³⁷ Accordingly, he backed policies, such as the Marshall Plan, to contain Soviet power in Europe and military actions, such as the United Nations intervention in Korea, to halt Communist advances in Asia.Footnote ²³⁸ McNutt’s contribution to containment and to America’s emerging defense perimeter in Asia came at the end of his public career. After the Philippines gained independence in 1946, he served as the first U.S. ambassador in Manila and negotiated a treaty by which America received military bases in its former colony.Footnote ²³⁹

Philippine policy continued to reflect McNutt’s realism as well as his idealism. As World War II came to a close, officials at the War Department were adamant that the United States gain “certain military bases” in the Philippines and that “no other nation” receive similar rights. They also insisted that America retain its economic ties to the Philippines and ensure that the Islands were not “compelled to rely primarily on other nations.”Footnote ²⁴⁰ McNutt achieved these ends, often over the resistance of Filipino leaders.Footnote ²⁴¹ Along with securing the bases, he helped to win parity rights for U.S. firms investing in the Philippines and a continuation of preferential trade between the two countries. On a more lofty note, he presided at a ceremony during which the United States recognized the independence of the Philippines—a goal he once had opposed. And he later extolled America as the model for Asia. The United States, McNutt declared, “means machines, luxuries, mass production, gadgets, a high standard of living, prosperity for all, big business and little business, power, prestige . . . but above all, America means democracy.”Footnote ²⁴² His idealism, it must be stressed, reflected the ethnocentric views that U.S. power was exceptionally benevolent and that American-style capitalism and democracy were mutually compatible. In fact, McNutt’s labors in the Philippines would be criticized by a later generation of historians as an exercise in “neocolonialism.”Footnote ²⁴³ Furthermore, one finds nowhere in McNutt’s speeches endorsement of pacifistic talk about the “brotherhood of man” and “one world”—a phrase popularized by the late Wendell Willkie, a fellow Hoosier and a former fraternity brother.Footnote ²⁴⁴ To the contrary, McNutt maintained that “the bloody ordeal of this century is not over and we have a job to do.”Footnote ²⁴⁵

McNutt favored a mobilization of American society to meet his country’s obligations in a divided world. He backed expansion of the draft, a position in tune with his advocacy of military training and sacrifice in the 1920s.Footnote ²⁴⁶ “As patriotic citizens,” McNutt proclaimed in 1950, “we must, each of us, accept our fair share of the burden.” He remained confident that “preponderant power lies within the confines of the free world”—if it were harnessed.Footnote ²⁴⁷ Such rhetoric reflected the mind-set of Truman’s State Department, which averred that “preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy.” Achieving that level of power involved, among other things, “creating a world environment hospitable to U.S. interests and values,” “developing the capabilities to overcome threats and challenges,” “mobilizing the strength to reduce Soviet influence on its own periphery,” “undermining the appeal of communism,” and “establishing a configuration of power and a military posture so that if war erupted, the United States would prevail.”Footnote ²⁴⁸ McNutt, for his part, praised the thrust of Truman’s foreign policy as “realistic, courageous and sound.”Footnote ²⁴⁹

Although McNutt was situating his views in the postwar milieu, he was not doing so for political reasons. Having spent much of his life in the public arena, McNutt entered the private sector after returning from Manila, chiefly to provide financial security for his family before he died. Talk of him running for the Senate in 1948 came to nothing, and McNutt brushed aside speculation that he might join Truman on the party’s national ticket.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Instead, he stumped for Democratic candidates in 1948, 1950, and 1952. McNutt reminded audiences that the American Legion—and by inference himself—had been, for thirty years, “a voice crying in the wilderness” about the need to confront “Communism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism in any form.” He also proclaimed that “no organization has more consistently supported and urged an adequate national defense” than the Legion.Footnote ²⁵¹ McNutt asserted that since the Legion had had no illusions about communism, it (and he) knew best how to root out subversives—by “keeping our heads” and by “using established processes of justice.” He dismissed more recent (and more reckless) foes of domestic communism as “Joe-Come-Latelys”—a jab at Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.Footnote ²⁵² And he defended liberalism—the “positive, constructive program” implemented by FDR and continued by Truman—for transforming American life at home and thus strengthening America abroad. By contrast, Republican “reactionaries,” representing an elite segment of society, would, he predicted, resist change and make the country “puppyfood for Reds.”Footnote ²⁵³ Such comments suggested that, had McNutt sought elected office in the late 1940s, he would have been unafraid to return fire on the GOP at a time when right-wing attacks were eroding the “solid advantage on national security” that the Democrats had enjoyed during and immediately after World War II.Footnote ²⁵⁴

Aside from speculation about “what might have been,” what is the larger significance of McNutt’s emphasis on security during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s? First, it shows how someone with a unique background—in the American Legion, depression-era politics, and America’s colonial empire—gained a holistic vision of security, both foreign and domestic, even before World War II. Second, it reveals something about the mentality of those who shaped the Cold War. Ronald Reagan, a cold warrior (but no liberal), once eulogized John F. Kennedy, unquestionably a cold-war liberal, for possessing a “hard, unillusioned understanding of man and his political choices,” for eschewing a diplomacy based on “soft reason and good intentions,” and for insisting that America’s defenses be “unsurpassed.”Footnote ²⁵⁵ McNutt evinced such realism as well. Finally, stressing the idea of security allows one to see continuities and changes in twentieth-century liberalism. New Dealers, led by FDR, pushed economic security during 1930s; Pearl Harbor forced attention on national security; and postwar liberals like Truman continued that focus. McNutt, who was in the shadows of both Roosevelt and Truman, had put both elements of security together by the late 1930s. In so doing, he provides a bridge—or missing link—between two eras of liberalism.