Somehow he did it without condescension, translating the complexities of an industrial economy into phrases and metaphors almost anyone could comprehend. His language was plain and functional—and so was the decor he was introducing into the White House. The elegant trappings of the previous administration were being chucked out. There were no footmen, no buglers, no trooping of the colors, no changing of the guard, and above all, no seven-course meals. Roosevelt’s cuisine was perhaps the least distinguished in official Washington. He couldn’t become a gourmet; he hadn’t the time. Guests who spent any amount of time in the mansion compared the monotonous fare to that of a boardinghouse. One woman was served the same dessert three evenings in a row: a single slice of pineapple with two cherries and a walnut lying in a pool of watery whipped cream. Even so, she was getting something of a treat; the President’s lunches—hash with one poached egg—cost nineteen cents.
In a sense all this was deceptive. He didn’t need the accouterments of power because he had the real thing. In Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s felicitous phrase, FDR was a “natural President.” Few men in history have dominated their times as he did. He ran his administration as a one-man show, and loved to exercise authority. “Wouldn’t you be President if you could?” he jovially asked one visitor. “Wouldn’t anybody?” After meeting him, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung said, “Make no mistake, he is a force—a man of superior but impenetrable mind, but perfectly ruthless, a highly versatile mind which you cannot foresee.” W. M. Kiplinger had never known any President “as omnipotent as this Roosevelt.” Ed Flynn observed that FDR’s aides and cabinet members were little more than messenger boys, that “he really made his own decisions.” Arthur Krock reported that he was “the boss, the dynamo, the works.” At no time, wrote Henry Morgenthau, was Roosevelt “anything else but a ruler.” Morgenthau liked to argue with FDR. FDR enjoyed it, too—up to a point. Then the big freckled fist would bang down on the desk, then he would stop saying “I think” and start saying “The President thinks.” The argument was over, and there was no doubt about who had won it.
The President opened a typical fourteen-hour day by breakfasting in bed while skimming through diplomatic cables and clouds of newspaper. The bedroom walls were decorated with pictures of ships, the mantel with family photographs and Victorian bric-a-brac. During the Hundred Days favored advisers would come in for bedside conferences, but usually he had this time to himself. Sometime after nine o’clock he would shave and then dress with the help of his valet, Irvin McDuffie, who would push him to his office in the small, armless presidential wheelchair. The day’s appointments would begin at ten o’clock. If Congress was in session he would spend a full quarter of his time on the telephone. He always used first names. In the first week of his administration, before Washington had become accustomed to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’s brown tricorne hat or she to Washington, one of her assistants picked up a phone and heard a voice say, “This is Frank. May I talk to Miss Perkins?” The assistant relayed the message. The secretary said, “Frank? I don’t know any Frank. Ask him whom he’s with.” Questioned, the caller chuckled and said, “With the United States. This is the President.”
He would accept calls at almost any time, even in the middle of a cabinet meeting. His availability was astonishing; about one hundred people could get through to him without first stating their business to a secretary.1 It was hard to remember he was crippled; his sources of information seemed unlimited. In cabinet meetings he would quote people from all over the country, including Mrs. Roosevelt—“My Missus,” he would remark, “says there’s typhoid fever in that district.” One of his first orders as President was that people in distress who telephoned the White House for help should never be shut off; someone in the administration must be found to talk to them. This brought him the most remarkable correspondence in presidential history. One note ran:
Dear Mr. President:
This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer. You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us. I never heard of a President like you.
Nor had anyone else. His daily mail was running between 5,000 and 8,000 letters, ten times Hoover’s. One congressman compared him to Jesus Christ, and in a poll among New York schoolchildren God ran a poor second to FDR. Americans really felt that they were his friends. Forty-one popular songs were written about him. And when he locked his braces and appeared in public, people literally reached out to touch the hem of his cape. In New York, the cast for Strike Me Pink responded to curtain calls by singing, to the tune of “Wintergreen for President,” Roosevelt is President!”—and never failed to bring the crowd to its feet in a roaring ovation. Anne O’Hare McCormick observed in the New York Times that “no President in so short a time has inspired so much hope.” Even Pierre Du Pont and William Randolph Hearst were delighted; a tycoon told John T. Flynn that he considered Roosevelt the greatest leader since Jesus Christ, and he just hoped God would forgive him his vote for Hoover. Walter Lippmann, revising his earlier estimate, wrote, “In one week, the nation, which had lost confidence in everything and everybody, has regained confidence in the government and in itself.”
Roosevelt’s magnetism lured swarms of bright young men from campuses and offices. Suddenly the most flourishing business in the capital was the boardinghouse industry; the huge old brownstone mansions lining G Street, R Street, New Hampshire Avenue, and Twenty-first Street were converted to housing for New Deal bachelors. Traditionalists in the capital were appalled; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later talked to one who said, “A plague of young lawyers settled on Washington…. They floated airily into offices, took desks, asked for papers and found no end of things to be busy about. I never found out why they came, what they did or why they left.”
Some never left, or left to come back in other roles. Among those rallying to the New Deal banner were Dean Acheson, Undersecretary of the Treasury; J. W. Fulbright, a young lawyer in the Department of Justice; Hubert H. Humphrey, who quit studying pharmacy to become a relief administrator; and Henry Fowler, a TVA lawyer. One of the most efficient newcomers was Lyndon B. Johnson, administrative assistant to Congressman Richard Kleberg of Texas. Johnson contrived to step briefly into the public eye by persuading the White House that the first farmer to plow under a part of his cotton crop as part of the AAA war on agricultural surpluses should be one of Kleberg’s constituents.
Minor deities in the New Deal constellation were Sam Rosenman, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle, “Ironpants” Johnson; Harold Ickes, who secretly liked his public nickname, “the old curmudgeon” (and was unaware that Roosevelt privately called him “Donald Duck”), and Ray Moley, the lordly occupant of a Washington hotel suite and the brightest of the lot, of whom more obscure men sang:
Moley! Moley! Moley!
Lord God Almighty!
Morale was particularly high in the Department of Agriculture. The new general counsel there, Jerome N. Frank, had recruited a dazzling group of young attorneys: Thurmond Arnold, Abe Fortas, Adlai Stevenson, Nathaniel Weyl, John Abt, Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, and Pressman’s Harvard Law School classmate Alger Hiss. Admirers in other departments agreed that one day fame would come to most of them, especially Hiss.
***
Hiss, Pressman, Witt, Abt, and Weyl were members of a Communist party cell which met secretly in a Connecticut Avenue music studio. They were studying the new administration, and they were confused, which is not surprising; Moley was then regarded as a passionate liberal, while Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace was vehemently opposed to the diplomatic recognition of Russia. Communism set class against class, he argued, sounding like Al Smith. Most puzzling of all was the President. On inauguration day Roosevelt was empirical but still conservative, and his early measures strengthened his right-of-center support. It is curious to note that his first measure, once h
e had rescued the banks, was a bill cutting veterans’ pensions and government salaries, including those of congressmen.
His Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which put slum youths to work on conservation projects, was also popular with conservatives. A Communist spokesman called it “forced labor” and William Green of the AFL said it smacked “of fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of Sovietism.” But the CCC was Roosevelt’s pet project, and thanks to Army help it was an instant success. Organized by MacArthur, it brought to the President’s attention a colonel named George C. Marshall, who made his reputation by his efficient administration of seventeen CCC camps in the South. (Major Eisenhower ran into trouble in Pennsylvania by appointing Republicans to all key posts; it hadn’t occurred to him to consider their politics.) Eventually over two and a half million boys wore the forest-green CCC uniform, planting two hundred million trees in a shelterbelt conceived by FDR and stretching from Texas to Canada.
The President’s departure from the gold standard on April 19 was less popular with the right, for reasons which now seem rooted in superstition. For centuries Europeans and Americans had clung to gold in the belief that it was the hallmark of Western culture; during the Victorian age gold had become identified with great powers, silver with backward countries. Some Republicans called devaluation a “rubber dollar program,” Al Smith said that he was “for gold dollars as against baloney dollars,” and Roosevelt’s own budget director said the executive action meant “the end of Western civilization.” However, an 88.5-cent dollar—by summer it had leveled off at 83 cents—meant America could once more compete in world markets with European nations which had already turned to inflation. If Main Street didn’t understand this, Wall Street did. Charles G. Dawes applauded; so did the Republican leadership. Russell Leffingwell, a Morgan partner, wrote Roosevelt, “Your action in going off gold saved the country from complete collapse,” and J. P. Morgan himself stifled criticism by declaring in a rare public statement that “I welcome the reported action of the President…. It seems to be clear that the way out of the Depression is to combat and overcome the deflationary forces.”
Any move welcomed at 23 Wall Street could scarcely be called revolutionary or even liberal. Roosevelt’s turn to the left didn’t come until late March, when he asked Congress for the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Federal Emergency Relief Act, and he signed both on May 12, the sixty-fifth of the Hundred Days. Triple-A was a direct response to the Iowa insurrectionists; it raised prices by creating scarcity. The idea of paying a farmer not to farm was a flagrant violation of the conventional wisdom. Henry Wallace spoke for millions when he said, “I hope we shall never have to resort to it again. To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature.” Four months later he had to authorize the slaughter of six million little pigs. He hated to do it, and blamed Coolidge-Hoover policies for making it necessary. (FDR casually suggested birth control for hogs.)
Federal relief was more controversial in the long run, but as Harry Hopkins tartly observed at a congressional hearing, “People don’t eat in the long run, Senator, they eat every day.” Lanky, tousled, sardonic Hopkins, whose relationship with the President was to outlast the New Deal, had been fighting the Depression as a New York social worker. He had entered the administration underneath a staircase. He couldn’t reach the President, so he buttonholed Frances Perkins at a crowded New York function, led her to a nook under the stairs—in the hubbub it was the only place he could make himself heard—and explained the urgent need for national relief. Miss Perkins recommended him to FDR, and FDR recommended his program to Congress. Republicans were shocked. Representative Robert Luce of Massachusetts called it “socialism”; Representative Carroll L. Beedy of Maine cried, “God save the people of the United States!”
But their God had failed; it was Roosevelt’s turn, and on May 22 he brought Hopkins to Washington. Under changing leadership (Hopkins, Ickes, and back to Hopkins) and various titles—Civil Works Administration (CWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), Public Works Administration (PWA)—federal relief was to continue until 1942. “I’m here to see that people don’t starve,” Hopkins said bluntly. Fiorello La Guardia said, “I can go down to the market here and buy a parrot for two dollars, and in one day I can teach it to say, ‘Dole, dole, dole.’ But that parrot would never understand an economic problem.” Opponents of relief were unimpressed, and the words they used were far less polite than dole. Sweatshop owners in the North and southern planters were furious because their sources of cheap labor were depleted. To upper-middle-class critics, the symbol of the reliefer would forever be a man leaning on a shovel or a rake, and their greatest triumph was the distortion of an obscure word. Testifying before a New York aldermanic inquiry, a handicraft teacher named Robert Marshall explained that he taught unemployed men how to make boondoggles—a word coined in 1925 by an upstate scoutmaster to describe such useful pioneer handiwork as weaving belts from rope. Presently newspaper editorials all over the country were ridiculing “boondoggling,” and they were so successful that millions of subscribers believed (and still believe) that make-work was all Hopkins and Ickes achieved.
In point of fact, both administrators despised idleness. Hopkins in particular felt that relief without jobs would destroy individual pride. He liked to hear women say, “We’re not on relief any more. My husband works for the government.” And for the most part it was work, and hard work at that. CWA, WPA, and PWA funds went into over thirty thousand New Deal projects, paying teachers and building waterworks, post offices, bridges, jails, airports, sewers, culverts, public swimming pools, athletic fields, playgrounds, power plants, and railroad stations. During Hopkins’s years in Washington he was responsible for 10 percent of all new roads in America, 35 percent of all new hospitals, 65 percent of new city halls, courthouses, and health facilities, and 70 percent of new schools. Denver was given a water supply system; Ohio’s Muskingum Valley a flood control system; Brownsville, Texas, a port; and Key West roads and bridges connecting it with the Florida mainland.
Investing in projects beyond the scope of private enterprise, the WPA, with its forerunners and derivatives, transformed America. It built the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting New York and New Jersey under the Hudson, and the Triborough Bridge, linking Manhattan and Long Island. It electrified the Pennsylvania Railroad. It underwrote the first diesel engines. The District of Columbia owes its zoo, its mall, and the Federal Trade Commission its building to the WPA. Without WPA workers California would lack the Camarillo Mental Hospital, Kentucky the Fort Knox gold depository, San Francisco its fairgrounds. Dallas its Dealey Plaza, St. Louis its floral conservatory, the Columbia River its Bonneville Dam, and the Colorado its Boulder Dam. Nearly two hundred WPA men lost their lives building Boulder Dam, which the Republicans liked so much that when they regained control of Congress in 1946 they renamed it Hoover Dam. And all the relief projects combined cost less than twenty billion dollars—one-fourth of the Pentagon’s annual budget in the first Nixon administration.
The Army and Navy Register later reported that in these years, “when the regular appropriations for the armed services were so meager, it was the WPA worker who saved many army posts and naval stations from literal obsolescence.” Without WPA undertakings the wartime and postwar expansion of American business would have been impossible, and without TVA, another inspiration of the Hundred Days, the two atomic bombs which ended World War II could never have been constructed—a mixed blessing, to be sure, but one which must be set against the dead certainty that the Soviet Union would have mastered the challenges of nuclear weapon production by the mid-1950s anyhow. Of course, that was not TVA’s primary goal. It began with a series of Tennessee River dams, providing and selling electrical power to the people that lived in the valley. In the end it saved three million acres from erosion, multiplied the average income in the valley tenfold, and repaid its original investment in federal taxes. TVA had long been the dream of Senator George Norris; it cam
e true because Franklin Roosevelt, while still unpacking in the White House, sent Norris a note saying that “as soon as this rush of emergency legislation is over” he hoped Norris would come and talk to him about “the Tennessee Basin development.” Under such a President, people began to feel that anything was possible.
***
Some things were impossible. Banks could be saved, farmers rescued, the hungry fed, and the mighty Tennessee tamed, but the United States was an industrial nation, and no law could solve industry’s problems. Roosevelt tried. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was the New Deal’s greatest effort. It cannot be dismissed as a total failure. The NRA lifted men’s hearts, and it is arguable that by strengthening organized labor it contributed enormously to eventual recovery. If it did not fulfill Roosevelt’s hopes for it—and clearly it did not—it did give the country a kind of temporary wartime unity. The NRA was like a spectacularly successful football rally followed by a lost game, or, as General Hugh Johnson predicted at the outset in a splendid mix of metaphors, “It will be red fire at first and dead cats afterwards. This is just like mounting the guillotine on the infinitesimal gamble that the ax won’t work.”
Johnson, the most colorful of the New Dealers, was chosen to administer the NRA. Possibly his everybody’s-a-rink-stink-but-Hughie attitude injured its chances. He denounced people who obstructed him as men “in whose veins there must flow something more than a trace of rodent blood,” or “perfumed guys from the State Department,” or “merchants of bunk, guff, and hooey,” and he hurt Herbert Hoover’s feelings by comparing offices in the Commerce Building to pay toilets in Union Station. But NRA’s problems were visible when the idea first surfaced in FDR’s second fireside chat, on May 7. The President said he wanted “a partnership in planning” between business and government, with the government having the right to “prevent, with the assistance of the overwhelming majority in that industry, unfair practices and to enforce this agreement by the authority of government.”
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