|
|
His mother, the daughter of a well-to-do New York merchant, had grown up in circles both here and abroad that included such varied talents and spirits as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Albert Bierstadt, Lily Langtry, and George Eliot. She was intelligent and fascinating and devoted to her children. When Stimson was eight years old, she died. Thereafter, her husband gave himself over to "years of constant grinding work." He was a very able man, "a rugged militant character" who had fought in the Civil War before he took a seat on the stock exchange. Soon bored with money matters he turned to the study of medicine, spent a year with Pasteur, and took a surgical internship in Paris. At the time of his wife's death he had just begun work in the surgical service of the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. By his ceaseless endeavors he soon rose to the top of his profession in the city.
Young Henry and his sister, Candace, went, after their mother's death, to live with their grandparents, but Dr. Stimson remained for his son the greatest influence upon the ideals and purposes of his early life. Secondary influences of great force in those circumstances of broken family life were institutions--Andover (18801884), Yale (18841888), and Harvard Law School (18881890). In New Haven he found a "corporate spirit and democratic energy," and in Cambridge, an exercise in "independent thinking unlike anything I had met before." At Harvard, he said near the end of his life, he discovered how the power of the mind could be used in support of the faith in mankind he had acquired in college.
When his education ended, he entered the law firm of Root and Clarke in 1891. Elihu Root, a friend of Stimson's father, was at the time one of the great men of the New York bar. For the next eight years, Stimson worked hard in the service of clients who were prime movers in the world of American finance and corporate enterprise. From Root, he learned much in those years about how to try a case, but he also learned something else of greater interest and significance for his future: Root, by example, brought home to his young law clerk the importance of the active performance of his public duties by a citizen of New York. So Stimson started his exploration of politics in something smaller than a ward, an election district, and in time worked his way up to a seat on the powerful New York County Republican Committee. Along the way, finding himself frequently in conflict with the lieutenants of Thomas Collier Platt, he discovered a great deal about the aims and methods of political bosses.
When Root went to Washington in 1899 to become secretary of war, Stimson and another member of the firm, Bronson Winthrop, started their own partnership. They remained together for the rest of their lives. It was a remarkable combination of talents: Stimson was at home in the open conflicts of the courtroom; Winthrop had the sharp, subtle mind and temperament of a legal scholar. Neither was much interested in what Stimson called the green goods business (that is, big corporations and large fees). Amid the great firms that were being built up under forced draft around them, they established a substantial, interesting practice in which even the law clerks worked at humane tempos under civilized conditions. In such circumstances Stimson developed into an excellent trial lawyer. His principal resources were painstaking preparation, an instinct for the crucial point, a simplicity of presentation, and the power to convey the sense that he was speaking the absolute truth. When he said, "This must be so," juries tended to think so too.
These assets Stimson put in the service of the government when in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt appointed him the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Insufficiently staffed and badly managed at the time, the office was totally reconstituted by Stimson in the next two years. First, he created a staff of such able young men as Emory Buckner, Thomas Thacher, Goldthwaite Dorr, and Felix Frankfurter. With them he prepared, argued, and won a series of cases against companies that were systematically evading the terms of the Sherman Antitrust and Elkins Railroad acts. By his successful prosecutions he obtained the dissolution of a paper trust, the conviction of the American Sugar Refining Company on the charge of extracting rebates from railroads, and a judgment against the Havemeyer interests for evading duties on imported sugar. By his work in the Southern District, which ended in 1909, he gave one of the earliest demonstrations that the power of large corporations could be sensibly controlled by the action of a determined government. As time went on, he looked back upon those years as his first love.
There followed an interlude in the law firm and some interesting cases. His service as district attorney, however, stirred up his concern over the dislocations produced in the society by the excesses of corporate enterprise. He began to seek for ways to manage a more orderly and socially useful development of American industrial energy. In 1910 he was persuaded by Root and Roosevelt to run for governor, in the hope that he might be able to put some of his ideas in effect from Albany. But 1910 was not a good Republican year, and Stimson was not as good at the whistle stops as he was in court. He sounded, as Roosevelt said, too much like a professor of government. In the election, running behind most of his ticket, he was soundly defeated.
In the following year, President William Howard Taft appointed him secretary of war. For two years thereafter he struggled to make a modern army out of a force that still was preparing itself, not very well, to fight the Indian wars of the previous century. Failing, because of congressional opposition, to abolish or consolidate all the army posts that were scattered around the country in disregard of economics and strategic need, he did succeed in two very important endeavors. First, he obtained a "tactical reorganization" of the troop units that ensured more useful training for the modern art of war. He also resolved, after painful difficulties, the ancient immobilizing conflict between the staff and line. When he left office, the army had for the first time a general staff that was a source of competent military direction. He left the War Department in 1913, but he soon returned to the army to render a different kind of service. Almost from the moment the war started in Europe in 1914, he began to take an active part in the effort to prepare the country for the conflict that he had hoped could be avoided. A persistent advocate of universal military service, he applied for active duty in 1917 on the grounds that, having proposed service for others, he had, as he said, to prove his "faith by works." That same year he went to France as a lieutenant colonel in the field artillery to fight along the Chemin des Dames in Lorraine.
On his return home at the end of the war, one part of his remarkable career came to a close. He had learned from Root that public service was a citizen's duty; he had learned from Theodore Roosevelt that it was exciting and, indeed (in a word he never would have used), fun; and from his own experience he had learned that such service most completely satisfied the requirements and desires of his personality. He had found out how to exercise power in controlled situations. Using authority bounded and defined by legal systems, bureaucratic structures, and those ancestral sanctions that worked within him, he had contributed to the general welfare. Besides, he was good at it; his years in the Southern District and the War Department were models of enlightened public administration. So it was natural that he should again be sought for further public service and that he should accept the opportunities offered.
But the times had changed. Up to now the way to Progress, as Theodore Roosevelt said, had been by calculable small next steps. After the war it often seemed that such steps led in no intended direction. In 1927, for instance, Stimson was sent to Nicaragua by President Calvin Coolidge. In a month of negotiation, he arranged a peace between the liberals and conservatives, who were at civil war. It was a neat piece of business, but the day after he left the country, fighting broke out and continued for half a decade. In the next year, Coolidge sent Stimson to the Philippines as governor-general. There, amid a population that was earnestly seeking independence, he sought to stabilize the precarious economy and restore the confidence of the people--badly damaged by his predecessor, Leonard Wood--in the United States as a concerned protector of its island possessions. In the twelve months before he was called home, he took some first steps toward economic development and made himself respected and trusted by the people and their leaders. But on his departure, agitation for independence began again, and in a few more years the great aim was actually achieved.
Stimson came home in 1929 to become secretary of state in President Herbert Hoover's cabinet. In this office he was in a position to consider the state of the world. In each month of his tenure, it seemed, matters went from bad to worse. As he wrote to Ramsey MacDonald, he often felt that he was "looking at a great flood breaking through a dam and having nothing but a hand shovel with which to make repairs" (Morison, p. 373). There was first the worldwide economic depression. Some part of the general situation was attributable to the structure of international debt created by World War I. As the principal creditor, the United States had a considerable role to play. Both Stimson and Hoover realized this and strove together to find ways for the country to make some constructive contribution. On the whole, Stimson always wanted to go a little further than the president--to extend the 1931 moratorium on debt payments from one to two years; to follow the "standstill" agreements, which postponed the collection of short-term credits, with an extension of further credits; to hold our former allies to a less strict accounting in their actual debt payments. But nothing that was done by either man served to bring more than temporary relief; conditions steadily deteriorated.
Then there was the effort to reduce tensions between nations by readjusting the structure of international armaments. At the London Naval Conference of 1930, called to seek a satisfactory balance of naval forces between the United States, England, Japan, France, and Italy, Stimson was the principal negotiator for the United States and a leading figure in the discussions; as such, he can be given much credit for the resulting agreement, which seemed on paper to eliminate "further naval competition" among the chief signatories. But in fact the written terms did nothing to stay the course of naval construction.
And then there was Manchuria. The problem was how to get the Japanese out of the province, which they had entered on Sept. 18, 1931. Hoover and Stimson tried first the soft impeachment, expressions of great "regret" and "concern." To give more bite to such words, Stimson then sought to mobilize world opinion in support of such indictments. When that failed, he and the president tried to invoke the doctrine of "nonrecognition," warning the Japanese that any territorial acquisition not in accord with existing treaties would not be recognized by the United States. Again they sought the support of world opinion and again without success. For one thing the Western nations, distracted by the depression, were in no mood to take any kind of positive position against Japan, which, as the French foreign minister Tardreu said, was "a long ways off"; for another, the obvious place to express whatever world opinion existed was in the League of Nations, to which the United States did not belong.
Searching in his frustration for some more effective instrument, Stimson proposed the application of economic sanctions. This the president rejected as, in his words, sticking pins in tigers. Deprived of other means, Stimson wrote a long letter to Sen. William E. Borah (Feb. 24, 1932), summarizing American relations with the Orient from the time of the open-door policy and restating the doctrine of nonrecognition. By this procedure he hoped, once again, to bring world opinion to the support of the rule of law. The letter was described as a master stroke and a most important utterance. But nothing happened. The Japanese remained in Manchuria, unresponsive alike to Stimson's strictures and a later condemnatory finding by the League of Nations.
In 1933 Stimson returned to private life, but he continued his active interest in a world that seemed to be falling apart. From his previous experiences he had been led to conclude that in such a world the customary measures--discussion, conference, admonition, negotiated agreement, the force of moral suasion--would no longer serve. As the decade progressed, he came increasingly to believe that the developing power of the fascist states would have to be contained by other means. The great ambiguities of that time, he argued in articles, speeches, and appearances before congressional committees, would not be resolved by the wish to avoid war or by a policy of neutrality that was simply an expression of that wish. The way to keep the peace was to choose actions that would convince others that to remain at peace was to their advantage. When in 1939 the war came, he spoke out increasingly for the support by all moral and material means of those nations opposing Germany and Italy.
Such views, which set him at odds with many of his countrymen in the last years of the decade, became the compelling reasons that he was appointed the secretary of war by President Franklin Roosevelt in June 1940. For the next five years he devoted himself with single-minded determination to the discharge of the affairs of this office.
The first thing he had to do was to give order and direction to a department that was in a state of total confusion. The second thing was to secure the orderly provision of training and matériel for the new troops. In the tangled state of affairs these were not simple tasks, and nothing moved as easily and rapidly as Stimson wished. But in his first fifteen months in office he laid sound foundations for future developments. For one thing, he surrounded himself with able, energetic, purposeful men--Robert Patterson, John McCloy, Harvey Bundy, and Robert Lovett. With George C. Marshall, the chief of staff, he established in those months a harmony of civil and military interests within the War Department that is without other example in the direction of an American armed force in time of war.
One further thing he did in those times: He took an active part in the deliberations of the administration on how to deal with the other nations in that distracted world. In these discussions he maintained that the United States should give all aid possible to Great Britain short of actually entering the war and accept no further accommodations to the actions of either the Germans or the Japanese. This often publicly stated position and the fact that as secretary of war he was directly involved in framing the instructions that were subject to misinterpretation by commanders in the field in the last days and hours before Pearl Harbor have persuaded certain students of the situation that he was one of those who insinuated the country into a war that could have been avoided.
When the war began, Stimson had, as he said, to make decisions every hour, seven days a week. One of the first had to do with the evacuation of all Japanese--alien and citizen alike--from the coastal regions of California. After much anguish of spirit, reacting to the requests of many thoroughly frightened residents and of the greatly distressed commanding general of the area and recognizing that his decision would put, as he said, an awful hole in the Constitution, Stimson ordered the evacuation on the grounds of the safety of the nation and military necessity.
The decisions that interested Stimson most had to do with military matters. In the first year of the war he tried to use radar-equipped army planes to assist in the fight against the German submarines that were sinking so much of the indispensable merchant shipping in the Atlantic. In this effort he was thwarted by the resistance of the navy. Also in the first year Stimson did everything he could (and rather more than the president wished) to convince Roosevelt and Churchill of the necessity for, and possibility of, an early landing in Europe from British bases. His plan was to start with a small attack in the fall of 1942 to be followed by a massive invasion ("Sledgehammer") in the spring of 1943. His objective was postponed by the landings in North Africa but fulfilled in June 1944.
Late in the war much of his time was taken up with the activities surrounding the development and manufacture of the atom bomb. In the early months of 1945 work on the weapon had proceeded far enough to permit men to think about its use. Convinced by intelligence reports that the Japanese were determined to continue the war to the point of prostration and profoundly troubled by the predicted losses that would attend any attempt to invade the home islands, he never appeared to have any doubts about the necessity of dropping the bomb.
To ensure a careful consideration of the great question and to assist the new president, Harry S. Truman, to understand the nature of the problem--about which Truman knew nothing before assuming office--Stimson appointed the Interim Committee, made up of men of science and public life, to study alternatives and make recommendations. On June 1, 1945, the committee reported its conclusion that the bomb should be used.
In those closing months of the war he searched increasingly for postwar settlements that would give some promise of extended peace. To this end he had earlier opposed the Morgenthau plan to "pastoralize" Germany, and so in 1945 he urged that the United States, England, and Russia share the secret of the atom so that they could act with a common sense of power and responsibility to stabilize by mutual action the postwar world. Soon after the coming of the peace, on Sept. 21, 1945, his seventy-eighth birthday, he retired.
Too many people, he once said, looked on public service simply as an opportunity to make interesting speeches. For him it was a matter of what one did. That is what the ancestral voices had said; that was the implied meaning of his father's example; that was what the models of Root and Roosevelt demonstrated. So for forty years he did things. What they added up to was for others to analyze in what he called the cold light of history. But in his case such balancing off of acts and consequences will fall somewhat short of full summation.
What he was seemed often more important to those who worked with him than what he did. They put it in different ways: he was a "New England conscience on legs"; he was "a moral force in the Department"; everyone from Sam Rayburn and Felix Frankfurter to Harry Hopkins and Robert Oppenheimer trusted him. But they all meant the same thing. The conduct of the public business required an atmosphere that was above suspicion and beyond self. What he had learned from earlier examples and models he passed on to public servants like McCloy, Lovett, Bush, and Patterson as they continued their work.
The presence that produced such attitudes often seemed stern, reserved, and forbidding. But when beyond the call of duty, he had satisfactions and pleasures that he was delighted to share with others. He loved almost everything one could do outdoors--climbing, tennis, hunting, fishing, and especially horseback riding. He loved his home, Highhold, on Long Island, where he spent endless hours supervising the growing of crops and the raising of animals. He had built this house shortly after he and Mabel Wellington White were married on July 6, 1893. It became the center of their private lives, the gathering point for many young people who took the place of the children they never had. After leaving the War Department in 1945 he went to live at Highhold until his death.
text by Elting E. Morison, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4: 1946-1950. American Council of Learned Societies, 1974.
Sources:
The Stimson Papers, including his extensive diary, are in the Yale Univ. Lib. On Stimson, see Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson (1954); Robert H. Ferrell, Stimson (1963); Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition (1960); and Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (1948). On the Manchuria episode, see Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis (1936), for his own account; Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression (1957), chaps. 8-11, for a balanced description of events; and F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, XI, 472ff. (1952), for an unfavorable view of the part played by Stimson and the United States. On the internment of Japanese-Americans, see Morison; and Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed (1956; 1969).