Pivotal Tuesdays

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Pivotal Tuesdays Page 10

by Margaret O'Mara


  While still doing his due diligence in traditional party institutions to ensure good Republican turnout, Hoover used new communication technologies to appeal to voters, and matched his message to the media. He went on the radio, where his flat Midwestern accent was a huge advantage over the New York honk of Al Smith at a moment when many in Middle America were already suspicious of cities and Catholics and immigrants. At a time when 90 million movie tickets were sold per week, Hoover’s campaign not only made promotional films but also made talking pictures—a brand-new, innovative technology.39

  Figure 12. “President Herbert Hoover Posed Outdoors for a Talking Motion Picture,” c. 1929–1933. As a candidate and as president, Hoover embraced new media like talking motion pictures, and appeared in films shot on the White House lawn. As the economy worsened, he lost his smooth handling of public relations, and his relationship with the press became chilly. National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.

  After Hoover’s 1928 victory, Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The Democrats were left with the press as the only public forum where they had about as much power as the GOP, and they did something unprecedented to wrest an advantage. The national Democratic Party hired a full-time journalist, Charles Michelson, away from his newspaper job and installed him as the its first full-time publicity director. Campaigns had had press secretaries in the past, but there had not been a campaign going on. Instead, Michelson’s job was to hammer away at the Republicans in charge while they were trying to govern.40

  Michelson’s job got busier as economic indicators spiraled down over the course of 1930 and 1931. Republican fortunes started to slip in the elections of 1930, when Democrats won back control of both houses of Congress, felled not simply by the dour economic outlook but by the growing public opposition to Prohibition, which most Republicans supported. Yet by the time the Democratic House was finally seated in December 1931, House Speaker John Nance Garner sensed that Michelson’s value would be in pounding away at Hoover on the economy. “It was Michelson’s job,” Garner crowed, “to whittle Hoover down to size.” The former newspaperman, who loathed Hoover personally, jumped at the task. He wrote speeches that Congressional Democrats gave on the House and Senate floor. He wrote press releases and shot them out to hundreds of newspapers. He came up with pithy sound bites and slogans. The Republicans didn’t have a comparable spin machine. Instead, ironies of ironies, they had a president who seemed to be hopeless at spin.41

  Faced with hard times and few tools to combat them, President Hoover began to lose his footing with the press. The master sloganeer resisted becoming a president of sound bites. Instead, he became a president of lengthy explanations. He also talked in a way that seemed oblivious to the suffering of the Depression, and his firm belief in the power of positive thinking caused him to make statements that later would come back to haunt him. When the economy had a little uptick in March 1930, Hoover declared: “The depression is over.” In October 1930, he said: “The income of a large part of our people is not reduced by the depression … but is affected by unnecessary fears and pessimism.” When he started looking to the 1932 campaign ahead, he and others in the GOP thought that the election would not turn on the economy, but would once again depend on social issues, chiefly Prohibition.42

  Meanwhile, Democrats were making sure Hoover’s actions to combat the Depression came across to a suffering American public as out-of-touch and unfeeling. In remarks bearing the fingerprints of Charlie Michelson, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana declared in early 1932: “The general feeling in the North and Middle West is that the relief program of the administration has not been of benefit to the small business or laboring man. The people out there feel that President Hoover’s course has been directed at helping those on top, the railroads, the banks, and the insurance companies.”43 Wheeler’s critique was sharply partisan, but it had a core of truth. Hoover had taken a trickle-down approach, aimed at shoring up large businesses and banks on the assumption that their rehabilitation would have positive ripple effects on the broader economy. In a nation where populist sentiment was surging and citizens needed immediate, visible results, Hoover seemed to be choosing the interests of the powerful over the welfare of the ordinary people.

  Americans were upset, and Hoover was getting blamed for it. A dysfunctional Congress, the burden of European war reparations, and a passive Federal Reserve contributed to the crisis, but by 1932 the Great Depression had become Hoover’s problem. Part of the reason Hoover got so much of the blame for bad times was that he and his fellow Republicans had identified themselves so closely with prosperity in 1928. Along with sunny proclamations on the stump, on the radio, and in the newspapers, the Hoover campaign gave out bread boards reading, “Vote for Hoover, and your board will never lack a loaf.” They distributed “lucky pennies” that read “Good for four more years of prosperity.”

  Another reason Hoover got the blame was that Michelson and the Democratic spin machine made sure he would. When shantytowns began springing up in cities across the country, filled with the unemployed and homeless, it was Michelson who started calling them “Hoovervilles.” Yet looming above the rhetoric and clever spin was the basic material failure of Hoover’s policies. The efforts of his administration were doing little to alleviate the economic crisis. In fact, things got worse.

  With reporters covering all this, every day, the president started to despise the Washington press corps. The candidate-centered politics so important in 1912 had escalated in significance in the two decades since, and Hoover had previously gone along with the new rules of the game. He had held weekly press conferences, and while he held to prior White House protocol in only answering questions reporters had submitted in writing in advance, he had proved himself genial, expansive, and generous in the time he spent with the media.

  Now, he clammed up. He started to sound like a person who didn’t like his job very much. He referred to the presidency as “a repairman’s job” that lurched from one crisis to another. Hoover liked building things: legacy projects like the wartime food administration, or flood relief programs, or monumental infrastructure like the huge Nevada dam that would one day bear his name. Rather than rising through GOP ranks, he came to the Republican Party after he was already a national figure. He had run for office only twice in his life, and the first time was merely a brief foray into the 1920 California primary. He was not a party insider, and he disliked the muck of partisan politics. He particularly resented having to work with Congress, whose traditions and hierarchies he neither understood nor respected. His disdain for its political theater was so strong that he sent the written texts of his State of the Union addresses over to Capitol Hill instead of making the speeches there in person.44

  Faced with a hostile press and gridlocked Congress, the always workaholic Hoover exhausted himself physically to address the growing economic crisis. His propensity for micromanagement became a huge disadvantage in this struggle. Rather than negotiate with an ossified legislative branch, the Great Engineer tried to run recovery single-handed from the White House. Rather than delegate to staff or cabinet members, he worked around the clock, pulling late-night sessions in his office as he chewed on an unlit cigar and snapped at underlings. His vaunted organizational efficiency began to slip. H. G. Wells had a brief audience with Hoover at the White House in 1931 and found him an “overworked and overwhelmed man, a month behind in all his engagements and hopeless of ever overtaking them.”45

  By the time a Democratic Congress came into session in early 1932, Hoover had been battling the Depression alone and bitterly. He had fractured support within his own party after signing into law the now-hated tariff bill in 1930, which had alienated his old friends and allies in the party’s progressive wing. Even conservative Republicans had broken away from Hoover’s voluntaristic creed, and had begun to argue for creation of new government institutions to stabilize the banking system. Hoover’s efforts to
bypass Congress and work directly with business and labor interests had left those on Capitol Hill unwilling to do anything to cooperate with Hoover or run the risk of passing legislation that might give the president credit for economic recovery. It was better, Congressional leaders reasoned, to wait for a new president to come along altogether.

  Ironically, the man who had presided over giant government-funded aid efforts in wartime continued to fiercely resist the creation of similar agencies to fight the crisis of the Great Depression, well into the last year of his presidency. But the pressure from both right and left made it impossible to keep up such resistance. In January 1932, Hoover signed a law creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which would lend money to struggling financial institutions. At the signing ceremony, defensively countering his critics, Hoover remarked that the RFC “is not created for the aid of big industries or big banks.”46 Yet while the aid provided by the law flowed to smaller financial institutions, it remained hard for regular voters to see or understand. Hoover asked Congress to appropriate more money for farm loans as well. But it seemed like too little, too late. The Democrats stoked the populist fire, raging against Hoover as an elitist and an egotist. “The people are not so slow-thinking,” chided Arkansas Senator Hattie Caraway, “as not to see how little has been done to better conditions, nor how what has been done with good intent has been construed always for the benefit of the ‘interests.’”47

  From 1928 to 1932, the public image of Herbert Hoover had descended from one of technological wizardry to utter ineptitude. By mid-1932, historian Allan Nevins reflected the confirmed sentiment among the political class when he wrote that Hoover “is an admirable planner, organizer and administrator, but a very poor policy-maker and leader…. Leadership and organization require two different sets of qualities … and Mr. Hoover has only one.”48

  CHAPTER 4

  The Promise of Change

  While Hoover stumbled through the presidency, Roosevelt governed New York State, testing some ideas he later took to the national stage. Although resistant to Hoover’s early requests for stimulus-inducing infrastructure projects, and initially wary of big-spending government relief programs, Roosevelt shifted his position as the crisis worsened. Unlike Hoover, who doubled down on his conservative ideologies while the economy unraveled, Roosevelt, as one biographer put it, “retained a child’s openness to new experience, a child’s reactive flexibility.” Roosevelt initiated new programs for direct relief and jobs for the unemployed. He continued to be adept at connecting to his rural constituencies and building coalitions between the city and the countryside. He also had a human touch, a sense of humor, and an ability to connect with political bosses and voters alike.1

  Part of Roosevelt’s effectiveness as a leader and a candidate came from the people who surrounded him. This is another important development emerging clearly in the 1932 campaign: professional campaign advisors whose full-time job was to get a candidate elected and reelected. Of course, candidates had relied on close advisors in every presidential campaign since the era of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Traditionally, however, these men had been elected officials themselves, or had held formal positions in party organizations. The new breed of operative was different. These men often were not politicians, but professional staff with backgrounds in policy, government, or journalism. Most important, they were loyal to the candidate, not just to the party, and—like Charles Michelson—they could work as hard in the off years as during campaign season.

  In Roosevelt’s case, he had a powerful team of two at his side who could work both old and new politics, both crafting a compelling political message and candidate persona, and doing the necessary retail politics to secure key alliances and constituencies. Neither had been a major player in national Democratic politics before, and both had their chief alliance to Roosevelt. The message came from Louis McHenry Howe, the former political reporter who had been Roosevelt’s press operative since he was in the New York State Senate. Temperamental and chain-smoking, the diminutive Howe was as disheveled as his boss was debonair. The politics came from Jim Farley, whom Roosevelt recruited away from the New York State Democratic Party in early 1931 to start laying the groundwork for his campaign. Farley, a New York Irishman with deep roots in the Democratic Party, had been an Al Smith man, but quickly became a passionate FDR loyalist. Roosevelt was “one of the most alive men I had ever met,” Farley recollected. “I had an intuition that there was a touch of destiny about the man.”2

  Farley’s initial impressions of his fellow campaign manager Howe were less inspiring. He “seemed about the oddest little duck I had ever known,” he wrote, but his appreciation of Howe’s loyalty grew quickly. “Rebuffs never discouraged him, and he was grim as a little bulldog in hanging onto what he wanted.” Roosevelt needed this tenacity. Down in Washington, Democratic Party chair John Raskob had announced his intention to make repeal of Prohibition a plank in the 1932 platform. This was political dynamite for a party base sharply divided on the issue. Rural Democratic constituencies supported staying dry; the growing urban base was strongly for repeal. Roosevelt needed to appeal to both. It also was becoming clear that Raskob was strongly against the Roosevelt bandwagon and determined to prevent his nomination. The list of possible rivals started to grow. While Roosevelt returned to the business of being governor and other Democratic candidates gathered in the wings, the two operatives got to work.3

  The first step was mass mailing. Still wearing his hat as chief of the New York Democrats, Farley sent a copy of an innocuous little booklet listing the state’s elected officials to every party committee leader of any significance, in every state in the country. The mailing said nothing about Roosevelt’s candidacy, but it opened lines of correspondence between Farley and the people who held the keys to the 1932 nomination. The ground campaign began to take root.

  Yet by the summer of 1931 it was clear that Roosevelt’s competition was getting stiff, and Farley and Howe worried they needed to do more outreach—not just by mail, but also in person. A faithful member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, Farley had a long-scheduled plan to travel to Seattle that summer to attend their annual convention, building a vacation around the visit. With competition intensifying, he threw vacation plans by the wayside and instead decided to make his trip an extensive—and covert—reconnaissance mission for FDR.

  On a bright Sunday morning, Howe and Farley made their way seventy-five miles up the Hudson River to Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park. In their luggage were a Rand McNally atlas of the United States, a stack of train timetables, and a list of Democratic committeemen and state chairs. Retreating to Roosevelt’s study, the three men spread the materials on the table and plotted Farley’s trip out West, making sure his progress touched every possible party official on the way. The next day, Farley was off. His trip ended up 30,000 miles long. “My line seemed to go over pretty well, if I do say it myself,” he reflected. “People seemed to think I meant every word I said.” When he got back to New York, he dictated letters back to every person he had met on the road.4

  The team also understood that they needed to lay a good foundation in the press. Task number one was to dispel rumors that Roosevelt was too disabled to do the job. As Roosevelt’s national profile rose, the buzz about his health had increased, in both Republican and Democratic circles. With the Democrats split between “wet” and “dry” candidates, Roosevelt’s health became a rationale for those who didn’t find him a strong enough supporter of Prohibition. The militantly “dry” president of the National Women’s Democratic Law Enforcement League put it flatly: “This candidate, while mentally qualified for the presidency, is entirely unfit physically.”5

  Press man Howe stepped to the fore. Reaching out quietly to friendly journalists and physicians, he embarked on the delicate task of getting a national story placed that would quash the innuendo about the governor’s health. In July 1931 it appeared as a cover story in the popular illustrated we
ekly Liberty Magazine, titled “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to be President?” The answer, the “experts” in the article concluded, was an unqualified yes.6

  By this time, Roosevelt had become highly skilled at masking the fact that he could not walk. He made sure he was not seen in public, much less photographed, in a wheelchair. Portraits taken during his New York years showed Roosevelt standing tall, leaning on one cane. A closer examination of the image showed that he actually had a second cane strategically hidden behind his other leg.

  Figure 13. Franklin D. Roosevelt throwing out ball at baseball game, 1932. Roosevelt’s aides worked assiduously to project an image of a healthy, vigorous candidate, and Roosevelt worked hard at it as well. Whether giving a speech or throwing out the first pitch, he used a tight grip on whatever was in front of him to keep himself upright. Library of Congress.

  Such stagecraft was possible only when he wasn’t moving. When he needed to move, his son James accompanied him everywhere, giving him an arm while Roosevelt supported himself with a cane on the other side. As governor, and as a potential candidate, he kept up a punishing schedule of travel and back-to-back events, signaling with his constant activity that he was just as fit as any man—perhaps more so. With his big waves to the crowds and his hearty smile and jaunty expression, Roosevelt projected an image of vigor and health. The lengths to which he had to go to hide his disability made him acutely aware of image and perception, an awareness that served him well in the campaign to come.

  As he geared up for his run, Roosevelt was realizing that most members of his party were falling into the same trap as Hoover and the GOP. Like the Republicans, mainstream Democrats thought Prohibition would be the biggest issue of the 1932 election. The political dustups of 1931 were invariably about “wet” versus “dry” and where potential nominees stood on the issue. Like many social issues, Prohibition became a proxy for bigger divergences within the party—rural constituents and temperance groups on one side, urban blocs and technocratic modernizers on the other. The rift played out in widely different views about how to combat the Depression. Fiery populists and liberal lions called for bold measures targeted at the working class and small farmers. But their voices were in the minority. Many more mainstream Democrats took a somewhat conservative, incremental view about how government should respond. And a good number paid little attention to the economic question at all.

 

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