But for Roosevelt, Harry’s departure was distressing. For nearly three and a half years, ever since May 10, 1940, when the phony war was brought to an abrupt end by Germany’s invasion of Western Europe, Hopkins had been his constant companion. Night after night, hearing steps by his study door, Roosevelt had looked up to find Hopkins, an intelligent, amused expression on his face. With Missy gone, no one knew better than Hopkins when Roosevelt needed to relax and when he needed to work. Ever ready with a joke, he knew how to hit the exact line between playfulness and seriousness. Now, though he would still occupy a critical position in the administration, the relationship would not be the same.
As when Missy got sick, Roosevelt no doubt tried to tell himself that everything would be all right, that other friends would take Harry’s place. And it was true, to a degree. Coincident with Harry’s departure, Margaret Suckley appeared more frequently at the White House, joining the president almost daily for tea or dinner. But, as much as Roosevelt enjoyed talking with her about his papers and his plans for his library, she never grew as close to him as Missy or Harry had been. That space, left open for a while, was only filled when Anna came to live in the White House the following month.
Christmas found the president at Hyde Park with Eleanor, Anna, FDR, Jr., and Johnny. It was the first Christmas the Roosevelts had spent at Hyde Park since 1932, and the first time the children had been back to the old house since Sara died. “I am sure it will seem very strange to them, as it does to practically everyone,” Eleanor wrote. “My mother-in-law lived for so many years in the house, that she really seemed a part of it. Her personality seems to go right on living there.”
For Anna, it was a wonderful week. Despite the galaxy of MPs and Secret Service men, she still “loved the old place,” the thick woods she had wandered through as a girl, “the gently rolling countryside,” the traditional reading of Dickens, and the warmth of the carolers. “There’s been no snow,” she told John, “but it’s been cold, clear and dry with all ponds, waterfalls and streams frozen over.” Relaxing with her father, she shared breakfast with him in the mornings, sat beside him in his study in the afternoons, and joined him for cocktails at night. It was the beginning of a new intimacy in their relationship.
Indeed, so comfortable did Anna feel with her father at Christmas that she broached the sensitive subject of accompanying him the next time he took an overseas trip. He readily agreed that if she secured a Red Cross uniform and then flew to meet his navy ship it would work. What is more, he said, the “no women on ships” was merely one of many navy rules, “all of which he was responsible for and which he could break if he so wished.” This was just what Anna wanted to hear.
• • •
Roosevelt returned to Washington two days after Christmas, and held a casual press conference on December 28. At the end, he let it be known that he wished the press would no longer use the term “New Deal” to describe his administration, for the times had changed and there was no longer a need for the New Deal.
When asked why the slogan was no longer appropriate, he presented a long allegory. “How did the New Deal come into existence?” he asked. “It was because in 1932 there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America. He was suffering from a grave internal disorder—he was awfully sick—he had all kinds of internal troubles. And they sent for a doctor.”
Old Dr. New Deal prescribed a number of remedies—the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to guarantee bank deposits; the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to save homes from foreclosures; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to provide truth in the sale of securities; minimum wages and maximum Hours; abolition of child labor; unemployment insurance, social security, and the Wagner Act to protect labor; and the work-relief programs, the PWA, the WPA, the CCC, and the NYA. It was a long, slow process, Roosevelt admitted; “it took several years before those ills, that illness of ten years ago, were remedied.
“But two years ago,” the president continued, after [the sick patient] had become pretty well, he had a very bad accident . . . . Two years ago on the 7th of December, he got into a pretty bad smash-up—broke his hip, broke his leg in two or three places, broke a wrist and an arm. Some people didn’t even think he would live, for a while.
“‘Old Doc New Deal’ didn’t know anything about broken legs and arms,” the president said. “He knew a great deal about internal medicine but nothing about this new kind of trouble. So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, ‘Dr. Win the War,’ to take care of this fellow. And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He has begun to strike back—on the offensive.”
In substituting Dr. Win the War for Dr. New Deal, Roosevelt did not intend to diminish the past accomplishments of the New Deal. Indeed, it was of great historic significance that, despite all the changes the war had brought, it had not called into question the basic institutional reforms identified with the New Deal—such as minimum wage, social security, labor protection, market regulation. He was simply saying that, when the times change and the problems change, the slogans should also change.
Reporters agreed. “The New Deal slogan has outlived its vote-getting usefulness at home, “U.S. News pointed out. “The things it stood for in the depression-ridden 30s do not attract votes in the war boom 40s. [Today] there are far more jobs than workers. Farm controls have been thrown away. The urge is to grow more food, not less. The effort is to hold wages down, not raise them; to check rising prices, not spur them on. Many of the Government controls now are called irksome . . . . As a vote-catcher, [the New Deal] has no more allure than a 1932 glamour girl who did not watch her diet.”
With full employment, the work programs of the old New Deal were no longer needed. The CCC was the first to go, felled by the hands of Congress. The end of the CCC was followed by the demise of the WPA, which was given “an honorable discharge” by the president himself. The NYA, already reduced to a skeletal training program for young people about to enter war industries, was next.
“The war has finally accomplished most of what the New Deal set out to do,” columnist Raymond Clapper wrote in 1943. “The war has given every workman a job at high wages, removed him from dependence on charity, and through rationing has leveled off the upper crust until the rich man cannot buy any more of many things than the poor man. The common man, in other words, is getting a better break through the war than the New Deal was able to give them.”
For Eleanor and her liberal friends; the demolition of the old agencies was difficult to watch. Though she realized that much of their work had become unnecessary under changed conditions, she believed that many of the old activities were even more useful in wartime than they had been during the Depression—housing, recreational facilities, maternity care, day care, public health. To Eleanor’s mind, the New Deal was more than a description of old programs; it was a rhapsodic label for a way of life representing a national commitment to social justice and to the bettering of life for the underprivileged. And that commitment, Eleanor argued, was every bit as important in 1943 as it had been a decade before.
No one, Eleanor insisted in reply to a question at her own press conference, has laid the New Deal “away in lavender.” On the contrary, “the future is going to require not only interest in the needs of our citizens but the needs of the world.”
CHAPTER 19
“I WANT TO SLEEP AND SLEEP”
Old Doc New Deal was not dead and buried after all. Confounding critics and supporters alike, the president brought the old doctor back for a triumphant encore in the State of the Union message on January 11, 1944.
Roosevelt began the speech as Dr. Win the War, warning his countrymen against over confidence, reminding them of the distance that still separated American troops from their objectives in Berlin and Tokyo. “If ever there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now,” he said, looking ahead to the cross-
Channel invasion certain to produce casualty lists in America that dwarfed every engagement that had gone before.
“The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding. They have accepted inconveniences; they have accepted hardships; they have accepted tragic sacrifices. However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the nation as a whole. They have come to look at the war principally as a chance to make profits for themselves.”
To counter these special interests and to concentrate the country’s energies and resources on winning the war, the president recommended a series of stringent measures: a tax increase, both to produce revenue and keep inflation down; a renegotiation of war contracts to prevent exorbitant profits; a cost-of-food law; a stabilization statute; and a national-service law. Though he had resisted the pressure to conscript civilians for three years, he had now come to believe that a national-service law would assure that the right number of workers went to the right places at the right times. It would alleviate current labor shortages in copper mines, in ball-bearing plants, in the forge industry, and in factories making B-29s. He understood the burden civilian conscription placed on labor and would not recommend a national-service law, he said, unless the other laws were also passed to keep down the cost of living, share the burdens of taxation, and prevent undue profits.
As Roosevelt reached the climax of his speech, he cast aside Dr. Win the War and became Dr. New Deal once more. “It is our duty now to begin to lay plans . . . for the winning of a lasting peace . . . . We cannot be content, no matter how high the general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-half or one-third or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-housed and insecure. This Republic had its beginning under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them rights of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
“As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
In the modern era, Roosevelt argued, a second Bill of Rights was needed to provide a new basis of security and prosperity for every American regardless of race, color, or creed. That economic Bill of Rights must include: the right to a useful and remunerative job; to earnings sufficient for adequate food and clothing and recreation; to decent housing; to adequate medical care; to protection from the economic fears of old age and unemployment; to a good education.
All these rights were implicit in the programs of the New Deal. But never before had Roosevelt stated them in so comprehensive a manner. Nor had he ever been so explicit in linking together the negative liberty from government achieved in the old Bill of Rights to the positive liberty through government to be achieved in the new Bill of Rights. “For decades,” political scientist James MacGregor Burns has written, “the fatal and false dichotomy—liberty against security, freedom against equality—had deranged American social thought and crippled the nation’s capacity to subdue depression and poverty. Now Roosevelt was asserting that individual political liberty and collective welfare were not only compatible, but they were mutually fortifying.”
Roosevelt’s speech thrilled liberals—including Eleanor, who listened to it on a small barracks radio as she visited with a group of WAVES at American University. Still excited the following morning, she reread the message in its entirety, certain that her husband would now turn his vital energies to the building of the new America that would make all the sacrifices of war worthwhile.
It was not to be that simple, of course. By insisting that all his proposals were linked, that national service would not work without a tax increase or reduction of excess profits, Roosevelt left himself hostage to the conservative coalition in the Congress, which was in no mood to hear his plea for higher taxes. Convinced that the administration was using the war to legitimize a redistribution of income, the Congress substituted its own revenue bill, which reduced the administration’s proposal to a fleshless skeleton. It canceled the automatic 1-percent increase in the social-security tax, which was to be levied on both wage and salary earners and on employer payrolls; it granted relief from existing taxes; it exempted the lumber industry and natural-gas pipelines from the excess-profits tax. Indeed, so replete was the bill with loopholes for special interests that it raised only $2 billion in revenue, in contrast to the president’s call for $10.5 billion.
After much thought, Roosevelt decided to veto the bill, even though he realized he was jeopardizing his program, including national service. “It has been suggested by some,” he explained in his veto message on February 22, “that I should give approval to this bill on the ground that having asked Congress for a loaf of bread to take care of this war for the sake of this and succeeding generations, I should be content with a small piece of crust.” But this bill, Roosevelt charged, in an uncharacteristic display of bitterness, provides “relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” His decision made, Roosevelt set off that evening for Hyde Park. He was “in the best of spirits,” William Hassett recorded. To have said exactly what he felt seemed to afford him unfeigned pleasure.
The next afternoon, Hassett chronicled, “hell broke out in the Senate.” Majority Leader Alben Barkley, who had faithfully carried the president’s banner on Capitol Hill for seven years, stood before his colleagues and formally broke with the president, announcing that he would resign as leader. Speaking before a hushed audience, Barkley accused the president of delivering “a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress. Other members of Congress may do as they please; but, as for me, I do not propose to take this unjustifiable assault lying down . . . . If the Congress of the United States has any self-respect yet left, it will override the veto of the President and enact this bill into law, his objections to the contrary notwithstanding.” When Barkley finished, he received a thunderous ovation; “practically every senator stood on his feet and clapped,” Vice-President Wallace recorded, making it clear that the president’s veto would not be sustained.
Word of Barkley’s angry speech reached the president in his study at Hyde Park, where he was examining old family papers with Margaret Suckley. He appeared at first to be unconcerned, predicting that the storm would blow over in a few days. “Alben must be suffering from shell shock,” he suggested, attributing the outburst to the fact that Barkley was tired and Mrs. Barkley was ill. When Eleanor spoke to the president from Washington later that afternoon, she found him “quite calm over it.” For her part, Eleanor questioned the use of the phrase “not for the needy but for the greedy.” Such phrases are “tempting,” she told a friend, “but I’m not sure of their wisdom.”
Later that night, however, in response to an impassioned call from Jimmy Byrnes, Roosevelt agreed to send a conciliatory note to Barkley, saying that he had never intended to attack the integrity of the Congress, that their differences on the tax issue did not in any way affect his confidence in Barkley’s leadership, and that he hoped, if Barkley did resign, he would immediately be re-elected. The president’s letter set the stage for the events that followed. On February 25, 1944, amid sustained applause, Barkley resigned and was unanimously re-elected. Then, by large margins in both houses, the Congress overrode the president’s veto.
At Hyde Park, where he was joined by Eleanor and Anna for the weekend, the president rem
ained serene. “Still no word of bitterness or recrimination,” Hassett noted. On Saturday afternoon, in the midst of a snowstorm, he inspected his tree plantings, observing wryly that the passage of the flawed tax bill over his veto had saved him $3,000 in taxes on his income from his lumbering operations. The next morning, he took great delight at the sight of his grandchildren sledding down the big hill behind the house.
The president’s equanimity in the face of his congressional defeat can be traced to his awareness that, despite the loopholes in the present bill, the administration’s wartime taxation had generally assumed a just and redistributive character. Year after year, against the wishes of the conservative coalition to substitute a regressive sales tax for stepped increases in the personal and corporate income tax, the administration had prevailed both in securing rising rates and in adding millions of new taxpayers to the rolls. The Treasury was able to finance about 44 percent of the total war expenditures of $304 billion through taxation. The rest was secured through war bonds and borrowing. The debt rose from 43 percent of the GNP in 1940 to 127 percent in 1946.
A transformation had also been effected in the method of collecting taxes. Before the war, individuals were always a year behind in their tax payments, since they were called upon to pay taxes in quarterly installments on the income they had earned the previous year. The system had functioned well enough when rates were low and few people paid taxes, but when millions of people, unfamiliar with preparing tax forms, became taxpayers for the first time, change was inevitable. It took the form of “Pay as You Go,” a system that withheld taxes from paychecks before the employee even saw the money, allowing everyone to start the new year free from debt. This was “a revolution in American public finance,” journalist David Brinkley has written. Since people were paying taxes with money they had never seen, their resistance to the idea of taxation lessened.
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