Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  32. The definitive scholarly biography of Debs and his times is Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). For broader discussion of the Socialist movement as well as other leftist movements of the period, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  33. Eugene V. Debs, “This Is Our Year,” Chicago, 16 June 1912, reprinted in Chicago Daily Socialist pamphlet, 1912.

  34. Eugene V. Debs, “Capitalism and Socialism,” Fergus Falls, Minn., 27 August 1912, reprinted in Debs, Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs (St. Louis: Wagner, 1916), 167–75.

  35. Wilson to Mary Hulbert, 25 August 1912, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson, 3: 390.

  36. Labor Day Speech, Buffalo, 2 September 1912, reprinted in John Well Davidson, A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 78.

  37. Taft to Helen H. Taft, 22 July 1912, quoted in Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 818; Taft to H. W. Taft, 18 September 1912, quoted in Pringle, 835.

  38. On Bryan and modern liberalism, see Michael Kazin, “The Forgotten Forerunner,” Wilson Quarterly 23, 4 (Autumn 1999): 24–34. For discussion of World War I’s domestic impact, see David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  39. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 95.

  Chapter 3. The Road to the New Deal

  1. James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots: The Personal History of a Politician (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 59; Hoover, Speech Accepting the Republican Nomination, 11 August 1928, Palo Alto, California.

  2. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51–52.

  3. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, vol. 3, The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 3–4.

  4. Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 53, who in turn quotes from Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 16.

  5. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 53–54. For broader discussion of the emerging importance of purchasing power to the economy and to politics during this period, see Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 53–135.

  6. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 54; Roosevelt, Letter to Mrs. Caspar Whitney, 8 December 1930, reprinted in Franklin D. Roosevelt and Elliott Roosevelt, F.D.R.: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947), 1: 161.

  7. Hoover, Memoirs, 3: 29.

  8. The economic crisis and 2008 election of Barack Obama intensified interest in the Great Depression and New Deal among political pundits on both left and on right. For an example of the liberal interpretation, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). Conservative critiques sought both to rehabilitate Hoover’s reputation and argue that government intervention (as practiced by both Hoover and Roosevelt) did little to alleviate the Great Depression, and likely prolonged it. See Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007). Critics of Shlaes and others have noted that such conclusions are based on selective reading of economic data. See Eric Rauchway, “FDR’s Latest Critics: Was the New Deal Un-American?” Slate, 5 July 2007.

  9. Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).

  10. As in the earlier era, women (now newly enfranchised) were driving forces behind state and local reform movements; see Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 135–64.

  11. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On immigration restrictions, see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 18–55.

  12. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR, the New York Years, 1928–1933 (New York: Random House, 1985), 113.

  13. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, 1 (February 2003): 1–39; Gene Smiley, “A Note on New Estimates of the Distribution of Income in the 1920s,” Journal of Economic History 60, 4 (2000): 1120–28; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1936).

  14. This was of course not just a rural phenomenon; see Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  15. Deborah Kay Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); Lee J. Alston, “Farm Foreclosures in the United States During the Interwar Period,” Journal of Economic History 43, 4 (1983): 885–903.

  16. Quoted in Hoover, Memoirs, 3:6.

  17. Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8–21.

  18. Hoover, Memoirs, 3: 2–176. For discussion from an economic perspective see Brad DeLong, Reply to Alan Brinkley, Great Depression and New Deal History Forum, 4 April 2001, History Matters.

  19. For example, Jay Tolson, “Worst Presidents: A Survey of Major Polls,” U.S. News and World Report (online edition), 16 February 2007; Randy James, “Fail to the Chief: Herbert Hoover,” in “Top 10 Forgettable Presidents,” Time (online edition), 10 March 2009.

  20. Quoted in Donald A. Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 18.

  21. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 44–45; Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 18–19. As Ritchie observes (19), during his London years Hoover took to wearing the stiff, high shirt collar so in fashion at the time. He continued to sport it in his White House years and beyond, long after it was no longer fashionable and gave him a stiff and old-fashioned appearance.

  22. Hoover quoted in Will Irwin, “The Autocrat of the Dinner Table,” Saturday Evening Post, 23 June 1917, 56.

  23. Quoted in Ritchie, Electing FDR, 20, quoting Congressional Record, 65th Cong., 1st Sess., 1917, vol. 55, Pt. 5, 5157 and Pt. 8, App. 372.

  24. Ritchie, Electing FDR, 17–21. Also see Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, Years of Adventure, 1874–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1951); George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918 (New York: Norton, 1996).

  25. Quoted in Kennedy, Over Here, 119.

  26. Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Welch, “The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover,” Prologue 36, 2 (Summer 2004), http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/hoover-1.html (accessed 21 June 2013).

  27. Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1922). Also see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 46–48.

  28. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). On this and other floods and flood control, see Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 157–98. For detailed records of Red Cross aid, see American National Red Cross, The Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927: Official Report of the Relief Operations (Washington, D.C.: Red Cross, 1929).

  29. Letter to Nicholas Roosevelt, 19 May 1930, quoted in Davis, FDR, The New York Years, 163.

  30. Farley, Behind the Ballots, 61–62.

  31. Alan Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 2010), 6. For more on Roosevelt’s early life, see Joseph Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance (New York: Random House, 1985), 15–42; and Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 (New York: Putnam, 1972).

  32. Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 9.

  33. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 1: 82.

  34. Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 7–172; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 95–96. There is some debate as to how much polio shaped FDR’s outlook on the government’s role in ensuring economic security and social welfare, but it most certainly altered his life and personal relationships; see Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 19–20. His illness also had a transformative effect on his marriage, deepening and solidifying his estrangement between Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, who over the 1920s turned toward increasing public pursuits as a social activist and political strategist. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life, vol. 1, 1884–1933 (New York: Viking, 1992), 288–380.

  35. Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 27. Houck and Kiewe argue that after 1921 Roosevelt’s “unquenchable political ambition” was “everywhere informed by a disabled body” (8).

  36. Quoted in Davis, FDR, the New York Years, 37.

  37. The definitive works on these subjects are by Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Also see Alfred P. Sloan, My Years with General Motors (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), especially chap. 4, “Product Policy and Its Origins.”

  38. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), esp. chap. 10, “The Detection of Stereotypes.”

  39. Hoover quoted in William E. Leuchtenberg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 35. On Hoover’s “targeted style” and the new politics: Brian Balogh, “‘Mirrors of Desires’: Interest Groups, Elections, and the Targeted Style in Twentieth Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 222–49. Moviegoing statistics and observations on the connection between film and 1920s Republican politics can be found in Steven J. Ross, “How Hollywood Became Hollywood: Money, Politics, and Movies,” in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 255–76. Having the Irish Catholic Al Smith as his 1928 general election opponent was also a huge boon. Smith’s candidacy had drained away Democratic support in Southern and rural areas where anti-Catholic sentiment ran strong and the KKK ran stronger. Biographers of Smith note the critical role of the Klan in his defeat; see Christopher Finan, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 157–230; Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: Free Press, 2001), 299–318.

  40. Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks (New York: Putnam’s, 1944).

  41. Garner quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 62.

  42. Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 54; Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal, 31.

  43. “Aid to Farmers Urged by Senator Wheeler,” New York Times, 25 May 1932, 34.

  44. Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 52–53.

  45. Ibid., 45.

  46. Herbert Hoover, “Statement About Signing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act,” 22 January 1932. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=23210 (accessed 25 June 2014).

  47. “Mrs. Caraway Hits at Hoover Program,” New York Times, 6 September 1932, 5.

  48. “President Hoover’s Record,” Current History 36 (July 1932): 387. Nevins later became a close advisor to John F. Kennedy, helping draft his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic Convention; Gerald L. Fetner, Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

  Chapter 4. The Promise of Change

  1. Quote from Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933 (New York: Random House, 1985), 222. For discussion of Roosevelt’s New York relief efforts, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90–91.

  2. Farley, Behind the Ballots: The Personal History of a Politician (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 65.

  3. Ibid., 66, 67.

  4. Farley quoted in “Portents & Prophecies,” Time, 31 October 1932, 12. Also see Farley, Behind the Ballots, 71–72, 80–81.

  5. Mrs. Jesse W. Nicholson quoted in “N.W.D.L.E.L. v. W.O.F.N.P.R.,” Time, 27 April 1931, 20.

  6. Earle Looker, “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Physically Fit to Be President?” Liberty Magazine, 25 July 1931, 6–10. Interestingly, Liberty’s co-founder was “Colonel” Robert McCormick, publisher of the conservative-leaning Chicago Tribune and later a fierce Roosevelt critic. Author Earle Looker went on to write several books about Roosevelt and become his presidential speechwriter. For more on the rumors about FDR’s disability and the campaign’s efforts to counter them, see Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2003), chap. 5.

  7. John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic, 18 March 1931.

  8. Joel T. Boone oral history quoted in Donald A. Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 94; Theodore Joslin, diary entry of 27 April 1932, quoted in Houck and Kiewe, FDR’s Body Politics, 82.

  9. For more on the genesis of the Brains Trust, see Davis, FDR, The New York Years, chap. 10.

  10. Roosevelt, “The Forgotten Man,” 7 April 1932, Albany, reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1, 1928–32 (New York: Random House, 1938), 624; Address at Oglethorpe University, 22 May 1932, reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses, 1: 639. For more on the ideas animating the campaign, see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 98–103. As Kennedy puts it, Roosevelt’s campaign “defined an attitude, not a program” (101).

  11. P. J. O’Brien, Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom (Philadelphia: Winston, 1935), 162.

  12. Henry H. Vaughn, letter to the editor, “Wants Trust Busters,” Chicago Defender, 4 September 1932, 14.

  13. “A Catch-All Speech,” New York Times, 20 April 1932, 22.

  14. “Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California,” 23 September 1932.

  15. New Republic, 1 April 1931, 166, quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 101; Walter Lippmann, Interpretations, 1931–32 (New York: Macmillan, 1932), quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 101; Harrison, letter to the editor, “Action Wanted Now: Governor Roosevelt Held to be Dealing Too Much with the Past,” New York Times, 27 April 1932, 16.

  16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 270–71.

  17. Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 95–96.

  18. Mrs. George H. Miles, President of the New Jersey State Women’s Republican Club, quoted in “Mrs. Miles Deserts Republican Ranks,” New York Times, 19 October 1932.

  19. “The Land Stand of Days,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 15 June 1932, reprinted in H. L. Mencken, Making a President: A Footnote to the Saga of Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1932), 50.

  20. Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 3.

  21. Mencken, Making a President, 105–6. Prohibition was on the minds of the Democrats as well in Chicago, yet the growth of the urban wing of the party over the previous decade was making it clea
r the “wets” had gained the advantage over the “drys.” As Prohibition’s rural and reformist advocates reluctantly sat back, the platform fight for the Democrats came down to how quickly, and decisively, the Volstead Act should be repealed. Scott Schaeffer argues that the 18th Amendment, more than the New Deal, ushered in the age of “big government”; see Schaeffer, “Legislative Rise and Populist Fall of the Eighteenth Amendment: Chicago and the Failure of Prohibition,” Journal of Law & Politics 26 (2010): 385. For more on Prohibition, see Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

  22. L. F. Coles, letter to the editor, “Coles says G.O.P Leaders Are After Crumbs and That They Haven’t the People’s Welfare at Heart,” Afro-American, 5 November 1932, 6.

  23. Nomination Address, 2 July 1932, reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses, 1: 647.

  24. Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 3. Not only was the Bonus Expeditionary Force separate from the Communist Party, but its organizers were also determined to keep the “Communist element” from influencing susceptible veterans; see Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York: Walker, 2004), 82–85.

  25. Joseph Carl Thomson quoted in “V.F.W. Assails Hoover on Bonus Evacuation,” New York Times, 1 September 1932, 19; “Patman Assails Hoover,” New York Times, 30 July 1932, 4; Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 119.

  26. “To Spur up Interest,” New York Times, 6 August 1932, 10.

  27. Hoover, Memoirs, 3: 256, 259.

  28. Brian Balogh, “‘Mirrors of Desires’: Interest Groups, Elections, and the Targeted Style in Twentieth Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 222–49, 231.

  29. John Carlile, Production Director, Columbia System, quoted in “Personality on the Air,” New York Times, 20 March 1932, X14.