***
On December 5 the lame-duck 72nd Congress limped back to Capitol Hill, and those of its members who were under the impression that the rout of the BEF had frightened jobless families away from Washington were in for a shock. Over 2,500 men, women, and children greeted them at the Capitol steps, chanting, “Feed the hungry, tax the rich! Feed the hungry, tax the rich!” The District’s new police commissioner had orders not to humor such wraiths, and he followed them scrupulously. Policemen with gas guns and riot guns defended the Hill, then rounded up the throng and herded it down New Jersey Avenue to Camp Meigs, a wartime cantonment on New York Avenue. The commissioner told the press he had concentrated his wards in a “detention camp.” Their guards ridiculed them and denied them water, food, medical attention or even the right to dig toilets; a Wisconsin congressman reported to his constituents that he had seen policemen deliberately provoking people. After huddling on the frozen ground for forty-eight hours, the prisoners were released. Leaving, they sang the newly learned words:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation
Arise, ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth….
Throughout the early Thirties, and especially in the months bracketing the last session of the 72nd Congress, the sound of famished men on the march was heard from coast to coast. In New York thirty-five thousand men and women packed Union Square to hear Communist party orators. Crowds in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and St. Paul broke into groceries and meat markets to rifle shelves. Feelings of desperation were still internalized in most men (the suicide rate tripled that winter) but more and more mobs were beginning to coalesce. In Lincoln, Nebraska, four thousand men occupied the statehouse, another five thousand took over Seattle’s ten-story County-City Building, and five thousand Chicago teachers, tormented beyond endurance, stormed the city’s banks. The strains of “L’Internationale” were becoming increasingly familiar to the jobless; a forty-two-year-old radical named Louis Budenz led the Ohio Unemployed League mass march on the Columbus statehouse. His slogan was: “We must take control of the government and establish a workers’ and farmers’ republic.”
The sense of institutions, authority, and private property—the intuitive discipline which Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later call “the glue that holds societies together”—was showing signs of disintegration. The tax strikes and the bootleg mining of company coal seams were ominous; so was the frequency with which empty lots were being gardened without their owners’ consent, and the scattered, aimless rioting in Detroit, where relief had simply stopped. Some communities quit. Key West, Florida, was going into bankruptcy; there was no money to pay the sanitation department, and whole streets were filling up with rubbish and garbage. Here and there the starving were muttering violence. The mayor of a Massachusetts town, watching two thousand idle men milling around his city hall, wrote that “a spark might change them into a mob.” Governor O. Max Gardner of North Carolina warned of the danger of “violent social and political revolution.” Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, faced with the state’s reluctance to appropriate funds for the city’s six hundred thousand out-of-work men, told the legislature, “Call out the troops before you close the relief stations.”
The well-fed were edgy. Company men in employment offices became curt, bank tellers nervous, elected officials quicker to call the police, policemen faster with the nightstick. Henry Ford had always been a pacifist. Now he carried a gun. In Richmond, Virginia, a delegation from the local Unemployed Council called on Mayor J. Fulmer Bright a few days after Thanksgiving; the mayor told his police chief, “Take these men by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and throw them out.” Jittery company guards killed four miners in Pennsylvania’s Fayette County. New York ordered the apple sellers off its sidewalks, and John P. O’Brien, the new occupant of Gracie Mansion, promised his city, “You’re going to have a mayor with a chin and fight in him. I’ll preserve the metropolis from the Red Army.” Plainclothesmen swinging truncheons waded into a Union Square rally; the New York Times reported “screams of women and cries of men with bloody heads and faces.” Oklahoma City police used tear gas to break up meetings. Seattle police evicted the squatters from its County-City Building with fire hoses. Chicago law enforcement officers clubbed the unpaid teachers with billies, two of them holding one middle-aged woman while a third smashed her face.
Testifying before a Senate committee about the “sporadic uprisings in a number of our industrial cities,” an AFL spokesman said that “the great bulk of those people know nothing about Communism. They wanted bread.” To the propertied classes, the distinction was irrelevant. As Robert Sherwood wrote, the way ahead seemed to be clouded by “black doubt, punctured by brief flashes of ominous light, whose revelations are not comforting.” If the government could not keep order, each man must look to his own. Businessmen in a number of cities formed committees to cope with nameless terrors should railroad and telephone lines be cut and surrounding highways blocked. Candles and canned goods were stockpiled; a Hollywood director carried with him a wardrobe of old clothes so that he could “disappear into the crowd” on a moment’s notice. In New York, hotels discovered that wealthy guests who usually leased suites for the winter were holing up in their country homes. Some had mounted machine guns on their roofs.
They weren’t paranoid. The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims. Charles M. Schwab was one of many tycoons who believed revolution was just around the corner. The dean of the Harvard Business School said, “Capitalism is on trial and on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.” Articles debating the imminence of revolt appeared in the Yale Review, Scribner’s, Harper’s, the American Mercury, and the Atlantic. Norman Thomas later said of the period “between the popular election and the inauguration” that “never before or since have I heard so much open and bitter cynicism about democracy and the American system.”
There was a great deal of disagreement about which form of government the United States should adopt. Most intellectuals had turned leftward. Socialism to them was the middle of the road; John Dos Passos scornfully compared it to drinking near beer. Those who openly espoused Communism included Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Lincoln Steffens, Granville Hicks, Clifton Fadiman, Upton Sinclair, and Edmund Wilson, who urged taking “Communism away from the Communists,” and subsequently added that Russia was “the moral top of the world where the light really never goes out.” William Allen White called the Soviet Union “the most interesting place on the planet.” New Russia’s Primer was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice; it compared American chaos with Russian order. “Those rascals in Russia,” said Will Rogers, “…have got mighty good ideas…. Just think of everybody in a country going to work.” Elmer Davis said the profit system was dead. Even Scott Fitzgerald was reading Marx and writing, “To bring on the revolution, it may be necessary to work inside the Communist Party.” Stuart Chase asked in A New Deal, “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?” More than one man in office flirted with the left. Governor Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi confessed, “I’m getting a little pink myself,” and Governor Floyd B. Olson of Minnesota, more forthright, told a Washingtonian to go back “and tell ’em Olson is taking recruits for the Minnesota National Guard, and he isn’t taking anybody who doesn’t carry a Red Card.” To be sure he wasn’t misunderstood he added, “Minnesota is a left-wing state.”
But the greater danger lay at the other end of the political spectrum. Intellectuals lacked power, and Bilbo and Olson were political eccentrics. The money, the influence, and Secretary of War Hurley were on the right. As early as 1931 the administration had resisted attempts to reduce troop levels because the cut would “lessen our means of maintaining domest
ic peace and order,” and that September the American Legion had passed a resolution asserting that the economic crisis could not be “promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods.” The “American Facist [sic] Association and Order of Black Shirts” had been founded in Atlanta, and although its name was unpopular—asked if fascism would come to America, Huey Long said, “Sure, but here it will be called anti-fascism”—the Black Shirts had been joined by Silver Shirts, White Shirts, Khaki Shirts, the Minute Men, and the American Nationalists. A secret clique of reserve army officers was reported ready to act if the new President proved ineffective. General Smedley D. Butler testified that a New York bond salesman had attempted to recruit him for the right with an offer of $18,000 in cash. Nicholas Murray Butler told his students that totalitarian regimes brought forth “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character, and far more courage than the system of elections,” and if anyone represented the American establishment then it was Dr. Butler, with his Nobel Prize, his thirty-four honorary degrees, and his thirty-year tenure as president of Columbia University.
Who else was prepared to sacrifice constitutional government for this vision of expanded intelligence, character, and virility? Apart from the president of Columbia and General Butler’s bond salesman, few came out for totalitarianism as such, but plenty advocated the principle. Governor Landon of Kansas declared, “Even the iron hand of a national dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke.” Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. of New York said in 1932, “If we don’t give it [dictatorship] under the existing system, the people will change the system.” In February 1933 he wrote the President-elect that he and his fellow Republicans were ready to “give you any power you may need.” Al Smith thought the Constitution ought to be wrapped up and laid “on the shelf” until the crisis was over. Vanity Fair, whose associate editors included Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Luce), demanded, “Appoint a dictator!” Walter Lippmann wanted to give the President full power at the expense of Congress; “the danger,” he said, “is not that we shall lose our liberties, but that we shall not be able to act with the necessary speed and comprehensiveness,” and Republican Senator David A. Reed said outright, “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.”
In a New Yorker cartoon a girl at a Greenwich Village party told a limp young man, “Oh, it’s all very simple. Our little group simply seizes the powerhouses and the radio station.” That was where the danger lay, most people thought; in the cities. Secretary Hurley was believed to be concentrating the few troops he had near metropolitan areas, but rebellious populations have a way of outfoxing authority, and the opening revolt came where it was least expected. Farmers had always been considered the most conservative of Americans, yet it was in Republican Iowa—Hoover’s home state—that sunburned men of native stock first reached for their pitchforks and shotguns. They were finally taking up arms against a system which paid them two cents a quart for milk that distributors sold for eight cents in Sioux City.
Under the leadership of Milo Reno, a sixty-four-year-old former president of the Iowa Farmers Union, they blocked all ten highways leading into the city. Spiked telegraph poles and logs were laid across the roads. Only milk for hospitals was allowed to pass. Other trucks were stopped and the milk cans emptied into ditches or taken into town and distributed free. Sympathetic telephone operators warned the insurgent farmers of approaching convoys an hour in advance; sheriffs were disarmed and their pistols and badges thrown into cornfields. Route 20 became known as Bunker Hill 20. Peering at Mary Heaton Vorse of Harper’s from under the brim of a ten-cent straw hat, an old man said, “They say blockading the highway’s illegal. I says, ‘Seems to me there was a tea party in Boston that was illegal too.’”
The movement spread until Des Moines, Council Bluffs, and Omaha were isolated. In Wisconsin, embattled farmers invaded a dairy three times in one day, dumped 34,000 pounds of milk on the ground, and poured gasoline in the vats. A congressional subcommittee heard Oscar Ameringer of Oklahoma City describe a conversation with a rancher whom he had known to be conservative. The man had said, “We’ve got to have a revolution here like they had in Russia.” Ameringer had asked him how he proposed to do it, and the man had replied, “We will have four hundred machine guns… batteries of artillery, tractors and munitions and rifles and everything else needed to supply a pretty good army…. If there are enough fellows with guts in this country to do like us, we will march eastward and we will cut the East off. We will cut the East off from the West. We have got the granaries; we have the hogs, the cattle, the corn, and the East has nothing but mortgages on our places. We will show them what we can do.” Ameringer told the House Labor Committee, “I have heard much of this talk from serious-minded prosperous men of other days.” Will Rogers said, “Paul Revere just woke up Concord. These birds woke up America.” And on Route 20 the Iowans sang:
Let’s call a farmers’ holiday
A holiday let’s hold;
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
And let them eat their gold.
The Sioux City siege was lifted shortly after a mysterious shotgun attack on the camp of some Milo Reno followers near the town of Cherokee, forty-eight miles east of the city. He quit, and farmers surrounding the other invested cities quit with him. But Reno said, “You can no more stop this movement than you could stop the revolution. I mean the revolution of 1776.” Both in their violence and their uprising they were being faithful to American tradition. And they went unpunished. At Council Bluffs sixty had been arrested, but when a thousand of their fellow insurgents marched on the jail, they were hastily released. Deciding that direct action paid, the farmers now decided to do something about mortgage foreclosures.
On the outskirts of a Kansas village police found the murdered body of a lawyer who had just foreclosed on a five-hundred-acre farm. In Cheyenne County, Nebraska, the leaders of two hundred thousand debt-ridden farmers announced that if they didn’t get help from the legislature they would converge on the statehouse and raze it, brick by brick. Throughout Hoover’s last winter as President there were foreclosure riots in Iowa at Storm Lake, at Primghar, in Van Buren County, and at Le Mars. The Le Mars incident was particularly ugly. Black-shirted vigilantes invaded the courtroom of Judge Charles C. Bradley, dragged him from the bench, blindfolded him, and drove him to a lonely crossroads. Their leader demanded, “Will you swear you won’t sign no more mortgage foreclosures?” The judge said no. Again and again the demand was repeated, and the answer was the same. He was slapped, kicked, and knocked to the ground. A rope was tied around his neck; the other end was thrown over a roadside sign. A greasy hubcap was clapped down on his head—“That’s his crown,” one of the men shouted. The judge never did give his word, but though he was stripped and beaten, he declined to press prosecution afterward.
When papers had been signed, hundreds of farmers would appear at the auction shouting, “No sale!” Prospective bidders would be shoved aside; then neighbors would buy the land for a few dollars and return it to its original owner. At one sheriff’s sale a horse brought five cents, a Holstein bull five cents, three hogs another nickel, two calves four cents, and so on, until the entire property had changed hands for $1.18. It was deeded back to the householder for ninety-nine years. Lawyers representing insurance companies in the East were kidnapped and threatened with the noose until the home office relented and agreed to a mortgage moratorium. By the end of January 1933, John A. Simpson, president of the National Farmers Union, told the Senate Committee on Agriculture, “The biggest and finest crop of revolutions you ever saw is sprouting all over this country right now.” Edward A. O’Neal III, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, added, “Unless something is done for the American farmer we’ll have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months.”
***
Here and there that troubled winter were sensitive boys now reaching the age of awareness who would, a generation later, become American leader
s. Although their reactions to the world around them varied, none would ever forget the Great Depression. American history in their lifetimes would be a succession of crises, but for them this first crisis was formative.
A glance at some names is useful. In 1932 Robert F. Kennedy became seven years old; Frank Church and James Baldwin were eight; Mark Hatfield and Norman Mailer nine; John Lindsay, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Floyd McKissick ten; Whitney Young and John Glenn eleven; James Farmer, Stewart Udall, and Charles Percy twelve; Edward Brooke, George Wallace, McGeorge Bundy, and Russell Long thirteen; Billy Graham, Orville Freeman, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. fourteen; John F. Kennedy, Robert Taft Jr., John Connally, and Lawrence F. O’Brien fifteen; Arthur Miller, Robert McNamara, Eugene McCarthy, and John Tower sixteen; David Rockefeller, Peter Dominick, Herman Wouk, Saul Bellow, Walter Heller and Theodore H. White seventeen; William Westmoreland, Tennessee Williams, Jonas Salk, and Stewart Alsop eighteen; and Gerald Ford and Richard M. Nixon nineteen.
Nixon had entered his junior year at Whittier College that autumn, majoring in history and running the fresh vegetable counter at Nixon’s Market, the family store; each morning before dawn he drove to the Los Angeles Public Market to haggle with produce growers over prices. The family had enough to eat, which put Nixon in the great silent majority of eighty million Americans who were neither starving nor on relief. His collegiate status set him apart, however; fewer than one youth in eight between eighteen and twenty-two was in college, and only half had gone to high school. For millions, formal education was still confined to the one-teacher elementary school, of which there were 143,391 in the country.
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