American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Hoover, as an engineer, had very definite views on specific policies. He had strong moral beliefs about such things as wastefulness, indolence, governmental paternalism. But he possessed no general philosophy—no moral code—that linked broad principles to operating strategies, and these in turn to social and economic programs and specific policies. Hence he often seemed lost, even bewildered, desperate over the failure of his policies to turn the tide, yet too frozen in his pieties to be able to execute a major shift in strategy. Hence, too, he kept searching for the origins or causes of the depression—a search economists would be conducting for another half century at least—and changing his mind as to whether the main source was irresponsible financial policies at home, or faulty economic actions in Europe, or big business, or some failure in the American people.

  Nothing tested Herbert Hoover’s policy consistency and economic principle more sharply than the tariff issue, and here he simply failed. Having pledged in the 1928 campaign that he would aid farmers by seeking higher duties on agricultural imports, he called a special session of Congress a few weeks after his Inaugural for the “selective” revision of the tariff. He might have predicted that he could not control a Congress that opened the Pandora’s box of tariff revision, and, sure enough, he lost his legislative leadership as senators and representatives went in for an orgy of tariff-raising. The resulting Smoot-Hawley bill was the highest tariff rise in history.

  Would the President sign it? He had long preached economic internationalism. He was angered by some of the high schedules in the measure. Internationalist business and political leaders in both parties urged him to veto it. More than 1,000 economists denounced the bill. Hoover signed it because he liked some of its provisions, because it was politically expedient, because other nations were adopting nationalistic policies. In doing so, Herbert Hoover aligned himself with the Republican Old Guard more clearly and controversially than by any other act of his Administration.

  As he reached his midterm, the President did begin to change some of his positions. In particular, he concluded that a greater federal recovery effort was necessary. In December 1930 he asked Congress for an additional $100 to $150 million for public works. In January 1932 he obtained from Congress a bill to establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, empowered to provide emergency financing to banks, railroads, life insurance companies, and other institutions, to the maximum extent of $2 billion. But Hoover’s position on the tariff, along with his opposition to direct federal relief to persons, sharpened the popular image of a rigid, doctrinaire President.

  Hoover and the Republican leadership had a powerful political and moral argument for sticking to their convictions—they had won a mandate in 1928, they were carrying out that mandate, and they needed four years to make it work. They could boast, moreover, that they had won a renewed vote of confidence in the 1930 midterm election, gaining over 54 percent of the popular major-party vote for House seats—down only 3.3 percent from that of 1928—and retaining control of the Senate, if only by a paper-thin majority. It was not, after all, the job of the party in power to attack its own program. Let the opposition do that.

  But where was the opposition? The most striking political fact of the depression era was not the failure of the Republican government—the GOP was simply going down in the face of the economic storm, its doctrinal pennant still waving bravely—but the feebleness, the cowardice, indeed the near-invisibility of the opposition.

  Labor was the main case in point. The days of the militant Knights of Labor and IWW appeared to be over. The dominant national organization of trade unionists, the American Federation of Labor, entered the depression clinging strongly to its old doctrine of “voluntarism”—the concept of organized labor as a private enterprise to be promoted through bread-and-butter unionism, limited government, and opportunistic political tactics of “aiding labor’s friends and opposing labor’s enemies.” With the depression, though, “massive unemployment, declining wage rates, falling membership, and hopeless strikes demonstrated that history had outsped Gompers,” in Irving Bernstein’s summary. How long could the AFL stick to Gompersism? The answer came in a series of annual AFL conventions as the delegates discussed the issue of unemployment insurance, which was becoming the litmus test for voluntarism.

  Gompers had denounced unemployment insurance as “socialism.” To craft unions with their own insurance programs, the proposal did seem like unfair competition from government. Voluntarism won overwhelmingly at the 1930 AFL convention. Opponents of unemployment insurance called it a “dole.” Should workers’ liberty be sacrificed, demanded one delegate, to afford workers a little “unemployment relief under government supervision and control”? The next year, in the face of rising joblessness, the convention again debated the issue. More individual unions were sending delegates to the national convention endorsing unemployment insurance, but voluntarism still won the voice vote. The time had not yet arrived for it, said AFL president William Green. Finally, in the 1932 session—a few weeks after the presidential election—the AFL came out for insurance, both state and federal.

  Over toward the left, the Socialist Party made its first gains in almost a decade, doubling its membership in just three years, raising money on a national scale, and organizing a speaker’s bureau to spread the message of radical reform. Still, the movement remained puny; there were scarcely more than 16,000 members in 1932. Moreover, the party had changed drastically since the days of Eugene Debs, loosening its ties with labor and becoming largely an organization of college-educated, middle-class reformers. The old leadership of the Socialists faced repeated challenges from the new recruits, who tended to be younger, more radical, and impatient with a doctrinaire approach to reform. Socialist successes in electing a few local officials, and Norman Thomas’s impressive showing in his two New York mayoralty races, stemmed more from the individual reputations of the candidates than from any ground swell of support for socialism in itself.

  The most impatient reformers abandoned socialism altogether. Joining the Socialist Party, John Dos Passos said, “would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer.” The moment of the Communist Party would seem to have come. Yet the American communists failed altogether to engage—either intellectually or politically—with the crisis gripping the United States. Instead, William Z. Foster and his followers set their party line by the dictates of factional fights in Moscow, paying more attention to purging their ranks of “Trotskyites” and “Bukharinites” than to organizing the unemployed millions in the United States. Although Dos Passos urged the Communist Party to “Marxianize the American tradition” or else “Americanize Marx,” no home-grown Lenin arose with a program equivalent to the “Peace, Land, and Bread” of the Russian Revolution. The American workers were interested in immediate solutions, not in eventual revolutions, and here the communists, like the socialists, failed them.

  In a two-party democracy, the burden of opposing the “ins” lies ultimately on the main opposition party. Shut out from the White House for more than a decade, the Democratic party in the early 1930s seemed to have an unparalleled opportunity to put the depression squarely on the backs of the Republicans. But thoughtful Americans expected more from the Democracy than blind opposition, and here the Democrats ran into trouble. They were too fundamentally divided to offer a coherent and credible opposition to the GOP.

  The hand of the past rested heavily on the Democratic party. Al Smith, the 1928 candidate, appeared to be moving to the right as Franklin D. Roosevelt, his dynamic successor in the governor’s chair in Albany, came up with liberal, or at least fresh, ideas and policies. John W. Davis, the Democrats’ 1924 candidate, attacked Hoover in 1931 for “following the road to socialism at a rate never before equaled in time of peace.” Even James Cox, the Wilsonian 1920 candidate, demanded a balanced budget and a sales tax, in a speech at the Democracy’s Jackson and Jefferson Day dinners of 1932. These were the Northern Democrats; much of
the Southern leadership of the Democratic party lay to the right of the Republicans on economic policy and far to the right of it on racial issues.

  In Congress the Democracy claimed some conspicuous liberals, such as Senators Robert Wagner of New York, Thomas Walsh of Montana, and Burton Wheeler of Montana, but the party as a whole, in Otis Graham’s summary, “had no ideological center. Every four years its national nominating convention briefly encompassed diverse elements—Jeffersonian states’ righters, liberal intellectuals and planners, urban bosses, Wilsonian idealists, midwestern soft money men, conservative labor leaders, Wall Street bankers. Party structure was appropriate to this doctrinal babel of tongues.” The party had an impoverished headquarters in New York, shared its “fund-raising duties and its powerlessness” with the Senate and House campaign committees, and tried to preside over forty-eight state parties, countless city and county organizations, and a few thousand party “leaders” going their separate ways.

  Could a party like this put up an effective opposition? A battle over taxes left the issue in doubt. Desperately seeking a balanced budget in a time of shrinking revenue, Hoover proposed a sales tax as part of the 1932 revenue legislation. It was a classic issue on which the Democrats could pose as the “party of the people,” except that most of the Democratic leadership in Congress, as well as Smith, Cox, Davis, Raskob, and Bernard Baruch, backed the bill. Opposition fell into the hands of Fiorello La Guardia, a fiery maverick Republican from Manhattan, and rank-and-file Democratic leaders. Castigating the bill as “grinding the face of the poor,” La Guardia and his Democratic allies aroused a House coalition that defeated the measure. But the fractured Democracy had denied itself a party victory.

  If the party could not oppose, could it govern? Could it indeed even choose a winning candidate for the presidency? The two-thirds requirement for nomination encouraged candidates to appeal to factions and ideas across the whole spectrum of the party from left to right. In January 1932, Roosevelt threw his hat into the ring; a few days later, Al Smith announced his availability. Several favorite sons eyed the race, hoping for a deadlock between the current and former New York governors. For a time it seemed they might have their wish. With the help of the astute James A. Farley, New York Democratic party chairman, and the prestige of his own record-breaking majority in winning reelection two years before, Roosevelt had become the Democratic front-runner. But he met a series of setbacks in the spring of 1932 when Smith won a big bloc of Tammany-ites, every delegate from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and a sizable chunk of the California delegation. Smith had become the candidate of the Democratic right. After FDR charged Hoover with neglecting the “little fellow” in favor of big business, Smith declared that he would “take my coat off’ and enter the ring against any candidate for the presidency who persisted “in any demagogic appeal to the masses of the working people.” At the same time, some liberal Democrats attacked FDR for embracing conservative policies.

  Battered from left and right, Roosevelt straddled as many issues as he could, and this in turn strengthened attacks on him as a cynical opportunist. No one pursued this line more assiduously than Walter Lippmann, who prided himself on being a connoisseur of leadership. Charging Roosevelt with failure to offer true national leadership, Lippmann remarked, as the campaign year opened, that the “art of carrying water on both shoulders is highly developed in American politics, and Mr. Roosevelt has learned it.” Roosevelt, he concluded, “is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Lippmann much preferred former Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to Roosevelt, but Baker too—and with Lippmann’s help—had softened his old fervor for the League of Nations in order to disarm his isolationist foes.

  If FDR was really just a political broker, as others besides Lippmann believed, brokerage paid off handsomely at the Democratic national convention in Chicago late in June. Apparently stalled after leading on the first three ballots, the Roosevelt forces strove desperately to keep their delegates in line while they sought the additional votes needed to reach the magical two-thirds. Joseph P. Kennedy reached William Randolph Hearst and warned him that Baker, whom Hearst detested, would gain the nomination if FDR went down. Hearst was the key to shifting the California delegation. When California was reached on the fourth roll call, William G. McAdoo stepped to the podium and announced: “California came here to nominate a President of the United States; she did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating contest like that of 1924.” Thus the ghosts of the past hovered over the Democratic conclave as delegation after delegation broke toward Roosevelt and gave him the nomination with enthusiasm—but not with unanimity, for the embittered Smith refused to release his delegates. Then the Democrats, still divided, prepared to attack the Republican redoubt.

  “Once I Built a Railroad, Made It Run”

  The imperious locomotives still thundered through town. If the express slowed down a bit coming round the bend, you could stand at the depot and look into brightly lit interiors as the Broadway Limited or the Twentieth Century Limited flashed by—actually see people reclining in their palatial diners, luxurious club cars, ornate drawing rooms, A century earlier Ralph Waldo Emerson had seen in the rails a magician’s rod with the power “to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” Railroads had become the nation’s first big industry, a sinew of war, a spearhead of urban change, a transformer of the environment. Through it all, Americans had never forsaken their romance with the rails, even when gouging and monopolistic railroads had forsaken them.

  Now the railroads seemed forsaken. American Locomotive had been selling six hundred of its great steam engines a year during the 1920s; in 1932 it sold one. Between 1929 and 1932, rail employees had dropped from 1.7 million to less than 1 million, freight tons carried from 1.419 billion to 679 million, dividends from $500 million to one-fifth of that. You could stand for hours at the depot and not see a train come through.

  1932 was the worst year yet by far. The gross national product fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $58 billion in 1932. Automobile production dropped from 411,000 cars a month in the same period to 89,000; oil production sagged from a billion barrels to less than 800 million; contracts for new residential buildings shrank 86 percent; farm income fell from $6.2 billion to $2 billion. U.S. Steel was operating at 19 percent capacity. Retail sales declined, but the number of retail stores increased—a measure of inflated hopes and frustrated expectations.

  There was no human misery index as accurate as the economic. Psychologically, middle-class people probably were hit hardest. They made up a good part of the 273,000 families evicted during 1932. Some fought back as best they could. They opened small businesses at home—beauty parlors, laundries, grocery stores, ice cream booths, antique shops often filled with items from forced sales of farms. People resharpened safety razors, bought day-old bread, rolled their own cigarettes, renewed the shoulder straps of bras, perused chapters in cookbooks called New Dishes from Leftovers. The wife of a middle-aged broker, living with her husband in a posh New Jersey residential hotel, was within a few months of the crash working in the hotel laundry.

  Workers in heavy industry were especially hard up, except where they had some union protection. Wages of unorganized laborers fell far more rapidly than union workers’ pay during 1931–32 and by 1933 a wage differential of 30 percent separated the two groups. A Kentucky miner wrote that “we have been eating wild greens” such as violet tops, wild onions, and “forget-me-not wild lettuce.” Strikes and demonstrations were rarely very effective when so many men were competing for jobs. In the late winter of 1932, several thousand Detroit workers, under militant leaders, marched toward the employment office of Henry Ford’s Rouge works, crown of the Ford industrial empire. Pushing past the Dearborn police, the marchers, waving placards and banners, encountered contingents
of Detroit security forces. The nature of the wild melee that followed was never clear, but the upshot was twenty-four demonstrators killed or wounded, a good number of police injured by bricks, stones, and clubs.

  A large new class had come into being—a class of the unemployed, the reliefers, the transients, the homeless, the vagabonds, the hoboes. Many of the jobless, according to Caroline Bird, “simply could not bear going home and headed for a freight train instead.” They followed rumors of jobs, often false ones. “Once footloose, it did not much matter where they went. Hope of warm weather, word of a friend, memory of relatives perhaps never actually known, was excuse for a jaunt across the continent.” Many headed home after a spell of wandering. Home, Robert Frost had written, was “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” It was estimated that only 10 percent of the transients were “professional bums.”

  How could local communities cope with armies of transients? Many could not. Queried by a Senate subcommittee, some mayors reported that they variously pushed the transients on, “[got] them out of town as soon as possible,” “flatly refused to help,” helped “a little.” Others responded: “one good meal and more if they work” … “bunked in barracks—fed at jail” … “merchants taking care of ”… “work them in the wood yard” … “let them sleep in flop houses; give a bowl of soup in the morning and order them out of town.” Tucson posted a sign on its outskirts: “Warning to Transients. Relief funds for local residents only. Transients, do not apply.”

  Three score and nine years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had asked whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality could long endure. He had consecrated the nation to a continuing experiment in freedom and justice. Was the experiment over? In a new crisis, when the leadership in neither party appeared to have achieved the Emancipator’s courage and resolution, many were answering, “Yes!”