***
The most distinguished guest to call at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that May was John Maynard Keynes. Bearing a letter of introduction from Felix Frankfurter, the economist came to recommend deficit spending: “Nothing else counts in comparison with this.” Afterward Roosevelt wrote that he and Keynes had had “a grand talk.” In fact it had been rather chilly. The Keynesian manner was reserved, even arrogant, and FDR still had difficulty accepting the idea that a country could spend its way to prosperity. Still, he permitted Tugwell to introduce Keynes to key figures in his administration. Despite New Deal pyrotechnics, more than eighteen million Americans were reliefers. Some states—for example, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina—received 90 percent of their relief money from the federal government. Beyond doubt Roosevelt had saved the country from anarchy, but the Depression continued to be intractable, and Keynes’s contention that complete recovery could be achieved only by annual deficits of 300 million dollars would be remembered in the capital long after he had left.
These were hard days for the New Deal. The NRA was collapsing under its own weight. In despair, General Johnson turned to the bottle and his secretary; he justified her salary to the press by saying she was “more than a stenographer,” and when they printed that, he protested, “Boys, you’re hitting below the belt”—an unhappy metaphor. The business community had begun to turn against Roosevelt two months earlier when he proposed legislation to regulate the stock market. George M. Humphrey, Sewell Avery, and Tom Girdler had led the fight against a Securities and Exchange Commission. A Republican congressman charged that it was part of a plot to “Russianize everything worthwhile.” President Richard Whitney said of his New York Stock Exchange that it was “a perfect institution”; it was after Whitney’s testimony that Will Rogers drawled, “Those Wall Street boys are putting up an awful fight to keep the government from putting a cop on their corner.” They lost the fight, and their disappointment turned to fury when FDR appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, a notorious speculator, to head the commission. The President had acted on Moley’s advice; since Kennedy knew all the loopholes, Moley argued, he could plug them. Wall Street was unappeased. When Whitney took Kennedy on a formal tour of the exchange floor, he surrounded him with bodyguards; otherwise, he explained coldly, the brokers might attack the new SEC chairman. Some tycoons were calling Kennedy “a traitor to his class.” They weren’t saying that about FDR yet, but that time was approaching, for the President had coupled insult to injury by firing Dean Acheson because he refused to sign the devaluation order. Already Acheson was toying with the idea of becoming a charter member of the nascent Liberty League.
A much greater storm lay over the horizon. Over a thousand cases involving New Deal legislation were in litigation. Individual judges could issue injunctions against federal laws in 1934, and as Attorney General Homer Cummings had warned Roosevelt, only 28 percent of the federal judiciary was Democratic. Eventually all cases would reach the Supreme Court, but that was small comfort. The high court judges were on the average seventy-eight years old and conservative. Eventually almost every strong President had come into conflict with the Court. Roosevelt was the strongest since Lincoln, and the battle, if it came, could be shattering.
One cabinet member, at least, had good news for the country. Secretary of State Cordell Hull pored over cables from Berlin and announced that “Mistreatment of Jews in Germany may be considered virtually terminated.”
***
In a Pennsylvania Avenue cafeteria that same spring, Alger Hiss met Whittaker Chambers for the first time, though not under that name. The introductions were made by J. Peters, a Soviet agent, and Harold Ware of the American Communist party. They merely told Hiss that this was “Carl,” to whom he would be answerable in party matters. The cafeteria was just a few doors away from the Washington Post, yet even if the city desk had known of the meeting, it seems highly unlikely that an account of it would have been published. Communists were not yet regarded as horrid. John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, chairman of the eight-week-old House Un-American Activities Committee, was preoccupied with the American right. It would be three years before J. Edgar Hoover would receive presidential instructions to put Communist organizations under surveillance, and even then the sole concern was espionage.
The United States had extended formal recognition to the Soviet Union the previous Thanksgiving. Russia’s new ambassador had just been the guest of honor at a Waldorf-Astoria banquet; among the younger guests was an ex-president of the National Student Federation, Edward R. Murrow, who angrily wrote his future wife about America’s economic system, which “damns some of us before we are born.” (Murrow was indignant about the price of the banquet tickets, an unheard-of six dollars a plate.) In May 1934 the Popular Front was only six months away. Earl Browder would soon stand under banners proclaiming Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism. Westbrook Pegler would call him “more Kansan than Landon,” and Browder became the author of an unemployment insurance bill introduced by Congressman Lundeen of Minnesota. Before the decade was out he would achieve the acme of acceptability, an invitation to share a Cleveland platform with Robert A. Taft, who wanted all the votes from the left he could get.
***
On May 14, 1934, a Missouri relief administrator named Harry S. Truman filed for the Democratic statewide primary. He wrote a note to himself early that morning:
It is 4 a.m. I am about to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age… now I am a candidate for the United States Senate. If the Almighty God decides that I go there I am going to pray as King Solomon did, for wisdom to do the job.
The event went unnoticed in Washington. The only man in high office even to have met Truman was Harry Hopkins, and their acquaintance was confined to a single conference, in Hopkins’s Pullman drawing room between Chicago and Kansas City the previous October. Had the New Dealers known more, they would have been unimpressed. The candidate wasn’t even solvent; since the failure of his haberdashery he had been saddled with an unsatisfied judgment of $8,944.
The capital was intrigued by the formation of La Follette’s Wisconsin Progressive party and Upton Sinclair’s stunning primary triumph in California; Sinclair had received more votes than all eight of his Democratic opponents combined. But most of Washington was taking a political breather. The spectacles of the past year had exhausted them, and on the eve of the off-year elections they talked of other things. Hervey Allen’s 1,224-page Anthony Adverse was leading all best-seller lists, though it was being challenged by James Joyce’s Ulysses, which had just been cleared by a Manhattan judge. Ernest Hemingway had caught a record 468-pound Marlin without harness, Max Baer had outpunched Max Schmeling, Glenn Cunningham had run a 4:06.7 mile; Sir Malcolm Campbell had driven his Blue Bird 272.1 mph—faster than airliners. St. Louis was afflicted by sleeping sickness, New England elms by the Dutch elm disease. Moviegoers marveled at the eclipsing of Dolores Del Rio and Gene Raymond, the stars of Flying Down to Rio, by two “feature players,” Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The brightest comedian on adult radio was Jack Benny. During the past two years he had failed to catch the public ear with three sponsors, Canada Dry, Chevrolet, and General Tires. Now he was finally making it for Jell-O. Children preferred The Lone Ranger, who with his horse Silver had been thundering past microphones since New Year’s Day.
In short, there was time for trivia. The despair of 1932 had fled. There was a feeling that almost anything could happen. In Canada, on May 28, Mr. and Mrs. Oliva Dionne had become the parents of quintuplets. Last fall the Washington Senators had actually been in the World Series. It might happen again sometime.1 Most Washingtonians were enjoying the dry, pleasant spring and the flowering cherry blossoms, though Henry Wallace wished to God the country would get some rain.
***
Among the most unpleasant aspects of the mid-1930s, once the fear of chaos had subsided, was the weather. At one time or another
the Mississippi, Ohio, Potomac, Tennessee, Delaware, Connecticut, Missouri, Susquehanna, Columbia, Allegheny, and Merrimack rivers—streams draining virtually every major basin in America—rose over their banks and roared through the streets of cities. One flood, that of the Ohio River in 1937, was the worst in the nation’s history; it destroyed the homes of a half-million people. Flood and windstorms in these years took 3,678 lives. Winters were uncommonly bitter, and in a single summer, 1936, while one of her inhabitants was trying to win the Presidency, Kansas recorded almost sixty days of 100 degree heat, but in the early Roosevelt years the most urgent problem was a combination of drought and high gales, bringing what were known as “black blizzards.” That was Henry Wallace’s nightmare. Before his Triple-A and CCC conservation could alter the country’s agriculture, the topsoil of the Middle West was blowing away.
For years conservationists had warned that ecological catastrophe hovered over the Great Plains. The so-called short-grass country west of the hundredth meridian was favored by fewer than twenty inches of rain a year. Early explorers had labeled the frontier beyond the Missouri “the great American desert,” and then it was relatively stable, hammered flat by millions of bison and unfilled by the Indians. Then the settlers arrived with their John Deere plows. Before the Depression they were blessed by extraordinarily heavy rains, but as they pushed their luck by overgrazing and overplowing, the includible drew nearer. Even in the 1920s a hundred counties in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma had been called the “dust bowl.” Now in 1934 the National Resources Board estimated that 35 million acres of arable land had been completely destroyed, the soil of another 125 million acres had been nearly or entirely removed, and another 100 million acres were doomed. Abruptly the bowl grew to 756 counties in nineteen states. Like Ireland and the Ukraine in the nineteenth century, the Plains were threatened with famine.
The first of the great storms had blustered out of the sky on Armistice Day 1933, in the ninth month of the new administration. In South Dakota the farms began blowing away that morning. By noon the sky was darker than night. Men were literally vomiting dirt, and when the sun reappeared, fields had been replaced by sand, while roads, trees, sheds, fences, and machinery had disappeared beneath great hanging dunes of soil. By then the wind was headed for Texas. A towering pall darkened Chicago, and was visible as far east as Albany.
That was only the beginning. The drought continued through 1934 and 1935, accompanied by fantastic windstorms howling down from such remote Dakota towns as Chugwater, Niobe, Wounded Knee, and Spotted Horse. “In 1934,” wrote Tugwell, then Undersecretary of Agriculture, “rainfall had been so short that severe damage had been done.” Actually that year’s farm calamity could be traced back to the previous winter; light snows had left the land too hard to absorb what rain there was. The earth could be seen through the thin grass, and the wheat was so thin that Tugwell compared it to the stubble on an old man’s chin. In the same month that Keynes visited Roosevelt and Truman filed for the Missouri primary, the first storms of 1934 struck the Texas Panhandle. Whole counties were transformed into shifting Saharas. Wives packed every windowsill, door frame, and keyhole with oiled cloth and gummed paper, yet the fine silt found its way in and lay in beachlike ripples on their floors.
A Texas schoolboy described the storms as “rolling black smoke.” In Oklahoma Nathan Asch found that even food tasted gritty. He wrote that the dust “blew into the eyes, underneath the collar; undressing, there were specks of dust inside the buttonholes; in the morning it had gathered like fine snow along the window ledge; it penetrated even more; it seeped along the wiring of the house; and along the edges of the door… there was a rusty brown stain.” For three weeks Oklahoma streetlights were on day and night. People wore dust masks, and to compound misery, the temperature seemed stuck at 108 degrees.
Lorena Hickok, on a field trip for Hopkins, reported from Huron, South Dakota:
We started out about 8:30 in the morning intending to drive into the northern part of the county to see some farmers. We had gone less than ten miles when we had to turn back. It kept getting worse. You couldn’t see a foot ahead of the car. It was truly a terrifying experience. Like driving in a fog, only worse because of the wind that seemed as if it would blow the car right off the road. It was as though we were picked up in a vast, impenetrable black cloud which was hurling us right off the earth.
“Speaking nationally,” Tugwell wrote, “that drought had been an ironic blessing—it had helped reduce embarrassing surpluses of wheat—but for the individuals and families involved it was disastrous.” In fact, the Department of Agriculture inadvertently increased the human disaster; under the AAA acreage reduction programs, wealthy farmers were discovering that they needed less help. Their tenants, turned out, took to the road in rattletrap 1925 Dodges, 1927 La Salles, and 1923 Model Ts, looking for a greener land. They were joined by small farmers whose “For Sale” signs marked the start of the dust-bowlers’ migrations. Drought had destroyed the wheatlands of Eric Sevareid’s father and broken his bank; he moved on. In Hall County, Texas, the population abruptly dropped from 40,000 to less than 1,000. Most picturesque of all were Oklahoma’s ragtag “Okies,” to be immortalized five years later in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In the interim Steinbeck would conduct a dog census in California’s Monterey County—one of the few idiotic Hopkins projects—and he was destined to see the migrants because California was their destination. It beckoned as a land of milk and honey: “I like to think how nice it’s gonna be, maybe, in California,” Ma Joad said. “Never cold. An’ fruit ever’ place, and people just bein’ in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees.” In reality it would bring the Joads the drudgery and want which were the fruit pickers’ lot. Simultaneously, the Okies’ pilgrimage would help ruin the promising gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair.
***
Those people in little white houses among the orange trees were appalled by the advancing army of dust-blown, indigent farmers who, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote, seemed to represent “the threat of social revolution by a rabble of crazed bankrupts and paupers—a horrid upheaval from below, led by a Peter the Hermit, which could only end in driving all wealth and respectability from the State.” It was Louis B. Mayer, the motion picture tycoon, who cast Sinclair in the role of Peter the Hermit, thus sowing a seed in media manipulation which would bear weird fruit a generation later.
Sinclair was vulnerable. In a state celebrated for its eccentrics, the fifty-four-year-old author had emerged as one of the oddest. His candidacy had been launched in a pamphlet entitled J, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. He proposed to set up a statewide net of socialist communes toiling under the symbol of a wide-winged honeybee and the slogan “I Produce, I Defend.” Roosevelt liked Sinclair, and the writer’s program was endorsed by Theodore Dreiser, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Stuart Case, Morris Ernst, Clarence Darrow, and, curiously, Father Charles E. Coughlin of Royal Oak, Michigan. But Norman Thomas said it was “economically and politically absurd.” Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the shopworn Los Angeles evangelist, called Sinclair “a red devil.” The California Boy Scouts were mobilized against the accused, who was then repudiated by the regular Democratic organization.
The Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, came out for the Townsend Plan—$200 a month for everyone over sixty—which had been launched in Long Beach on January 1, 1934, and presently legions of white-haired Californians were marching for the GOP, singing:
Onward, Townsend soldiers,
Marching as to war,
With the Townsend banner
Going on before.
Sinclair’s slogan, “End Poverty in California” (EPIC), was twisted to mean “Empty Promises in California.” The three big Los Angeles newspapers, Time noted, “simply quit reporting news of EPIC and its sponsor.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer taxed its employees to underwrite the anti-Sinclair
campaign, and though some stars revolted (Cagney and Jean Harlow among others), most not only went along but permitted their talents to be exploited in fake newsreels. Mayer, the state Republican chairman, had hired the big advertising firm of Lord & Thomas and put MGM studios at its disposal. Gangs of extras dressed as hoodlums and hookers tumbled off freight trains while MGM cameras ground and commentators explained that their audiences were witnessing actual Okie invasions. One elderly bit actress, dressed as a kindly grandmother, declared that she could never vote for Sinclair because he believed in free love, while elderly male actors appeared with fake beards and stage accents shouting aggressively that they were supporting the author (“Vell, his system vorked vell in Russia, vy can’t it vork here?”). In October FDR thought Sinclair would win, but nothing could withstand the MGM offensive. California went Republican by a quarter-million votes, and the defeated writer returned to his typewriter to hammer out a new book, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked.2
***
Not everyone on the left was licked. In the state of Washington radicals rallying under an almost identical banner (“End Poverty in Washington”) elected a senator, half the legislature, and, as prosecutor of King County, young Warren Magnuson. The La Follettes were triumphant in Wisconsin, winning the senatorial and gubernatorial races and taking seven of the ten congressional seats. Strapping Floyd B. Olson sat in the Minnesota statehouse, growling at interviewers, “You bet your life I’m a radical. You might say I’m radical as hell!” And the incomparable Fiorello La Guardia was now mayor of New York City.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 15