American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Roosevelt had several acute questions of campaign strategy to ponder as he sailed contentedly under sunny July skies, occasionally stopping at sleepy ports for political confabs. One was how to appeal to progressive Republicans. The inheritors of the cause of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette were still active in the GOP—and still frustrated. Rejecting Hoover, they had other alternatives besides Roosevelt: form a new progressive party, support Norman Thomas’s Socialist party, or sit the election out. Some progressives, especially in the East, doubted Roosevelt’s character and convictions. Why support a tweedledum Democrat? One progressive of impeccable credentials—George W. Norris of Nebraska— announced for Roosevelt early and staunchly, however, largely because of Roosevelt’s consistent support of public electric power. Some progressives followed. A national progressive league for Roosevelt and Garner was formed under Norris. Hiram Johnson endorsed the Democratic candidate, as did Robert La Follette,Jr., despite his doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to social justice. Other progressives held back.

  An easier question was whether Roosevelt should actively campaign at all. Some urged that he conduct a front-porch campaign, as presidential candidates had done in olden times. They felt that a campaign tour was unnecessary, that he might not be up to it physically. Garner, visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park, advised that all the boss had to do was to stay alive until election day. Farley, passing on the mixed views of party leaders, favored an active campaign. Roosevelt took little urging. His Dutch was up, he told Farley. Soon he, Farley, and Howe were planning an election drive that became even more ambitious once the candidate got underway.

  The toughest question of campaign strategy was whether the candidate should offer a coherent, challenging set of ideas or tailor his views to expedient campaign needs. Not only did Tugwell and other advisers want their boss to speak out; they wanted him to present a program, comprehensive, consistent, with focus and priorities. He was “weak on relations, on the conjunctural, the joining together of forces and processes, especially in the national economy,” as Tugwell saw it. Roosevelt’s scattered approach to policy gave force to acid comments by left-wing commentators, Tugwell felt; he himself had boiled over in Chicago when he picked up a newspaper with a column by Heywood Broun calling Roosevelt “the corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention.”

  Roosevelt continued to be disappointed and even hurt by the liberal intellectual critics. The intellectuals never allowed a politician the least leeway, he said to Tugwell; they were positively fearful of being caught in an approving mood. But what he was trying to do, Roosevelt continued, was to get elected, not simply arouse agitation and argument. Let Hoover be the ideologue—and be cramped by this. The Democrats, by staying more “flexible,” could become the majority party. Leadership with such support might continue to win elections, perhaps for a generation.

  By following a wobbly line somewhere between the middle and somewhat left of middle Roosevelt made himself a difficult target for Hoover, but he also invited attacks from both right and left. The financier and industrialist Owen D. Young, after visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park in midsummer, had the feeling that the governor “was avoiding real issues” with him and perhaps had met with him only for campaign cosmetics. A few days later Roosevelt reaped a whirlwind on the left. Sitting at lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, Tugwell, and others, he took a call from Huey Long, whose angry voice carried to the others at the table. As Tugwell remembered the conversation, Long was furious because Roosevelt had seen that “stuffed shirt Owen Young” while the Kingfish sat down in Louisiana and never heard from anybody.

  “God damn it, Frank, who d’you think got you nominated?”

  “Well,” said Roosevelt, “you had a lot to do with it.”

  “You sure as hell are forgettin’ about it as fast as you can.” Long complained that there was a “regular parade” of people like Young seeing the governor.

  “Oh, I see a lot of people you don’t read about. The newspaper boys only write up the ones their editors like.”

  If Roosevelt didn’t stop listening to people like that, Long said, Roosevelt wouldn’t carry the South. “You got to turn me loose.”

  “What d’you mean, turn you loose?” Roosevelt said. “You are loose.”

  “That Farley,” said Long, “that’s what I mean, and that Louis.” They wouldn’t give him any money. He wanted to work with Roosevelt directly. Was the governor coming South?

  “No, I don’t need to; your country there is safe enough.”

  “Don’t fool yourself—it ain’t safe at all. You’ve got to give these folks what they want. They want fat-back and greens.…” Long went on and on, shouting expletives and demands. When he finally hung up, Roosevelt sat ruminating for a few moments about how Long was leading people to the promised land. “You know,” he said, “that’s the second most dangerous man in America.” Pressed as to who was the most dangerous man, he said, “Douglas MacArthur.”

  Ready to move left or right, or hover in the center, Roosevelt began his speaking campaign in Columbus, Ohio, late in August with a denunciation of Hoover’s “Alice-in-Wonderland” economics, then presented his own proposals for federal regulation of security exchanges, banks, and holding companies. In Sea Girt, New Jersey, before a monster throng mobilized by Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, he called for repeal of Prohibition, as had the Democratic platform, but coupled this with a sermon in favor of temperance. In mid-September, in Topeka, he came out for the “planned use of the land,” lower taxes for farmers, federal credit for refinancing farm mortgages, and the barest shadow of a voluntary domestic allotment plan to manage farm surpluses, at the same time pulling back from the old McNary-Haugen formula that he had indiscreetly endorsed in a book. In Salt Lake City he took a quite different tack with a call for an integrated federal transportation effort, including federal regulation and aid for the floundering railroad industry.

  Sharp disputes broke out among Roosevelt’s advisers over these speeches, with the result often a compromise. Thus the Topeka speech, shaped by perhaps twenty-five minds, produced what Roosevelt wanted: “a speech so broad in implications,” according to Frank Freidel, “that it would encompass all the aspirations of Western farmers no matter what their prejudices, and at the same time so vague in its endorsement of domestic allotment that it would not frighten conservative Easterners.”

  In the midst of this weaving and fencing Roosevelt gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that electrified progressives. It was powerful in its parts: an invitation to “consider with me in the large, some of the relationships of Government and economic life that go deeply into our daily lives, our happiness, our future and our security”; a long review of the rise of the centralized state and the struggle of the individual to assert his rights; of the rise of the machine age and of the “financial Titans” who had “pushed the railroads to the Pacific” ruthlessly and wastefully but had built the railroads; of the decline of equality of opportunity under capitalism; of the need for an “economic declaration of rights” to meet deeply human needs. The speech was studded with acute insights, memorable phrases, and evocative ideas, well suited to his California audience and especially to the venerable progressive Hiram Johnson.

  But this notable address did not hang together. It began with the proposition that “America is new” and had “the great potentialities of youth” but pages later concluded that “our industrial plant is built” and probably overbuilt, “our last frontier has long since been reached,” that the safety valve of the western frontier was gone, that “we are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty.” Hence the task was not expansion but the “soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand,” of “adjusting production to consumption,” of “distributing wealth and products more equitably.” The speech had been written by Berle and was delivered by the candidate with minimal change; Tugwell claimed Roosevelt never even saw it until
he opened it on the lectern, and Moley disagreed with key parts of it.

  The candidate’s final string of speeches continued in this vein, rich in good ideas and specific proposals but often unconnected and even inconsistent. When he was presented with a speech draft endorsed by Hull calling for a general lowering of tariffs, and with another that called for gradual, bilateral “old-fashioned Yankee horse-trades,” he left Moley speechless by instructing him to “weave the two together.” Following a series of addresses calling for social justice, for action on unemployment and social welfare, he accused Hoover late in the campaign of reckless and extravagant spending, of burdening the people with taxes, of inflating the bureaucracy, of drastically unbalancing the budget. Herbert Hoover a spendthrift! Roosevelt made a flat promise to “reduce the cost of current Federal Government operations by 25 percent.” By now critics were charging once again that no profound difference in policy separated the Democratic candidate from the Republican President.

  Herbert Hoover saw profound differences. At first he had not taken his opponent’s candidacy too seriously, telling his Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, that Roosevelt would be the easiest man to beat. But as the summer progressed and Roosevelt danced all around him on issues, Hoover’s composure gave way; visitors found him shifting between dark pessimism and blazing anger at foes and deserters. In mid-September he told Stimson that while “he was gaining in the East he would lose everything west of the Alleghenies and would lose the election.” Anger, indignation, pride, passion brought him out on the hustings in the fall. Painstakingly writing his own speeches, delivering them in a flat, hard monotone—Mencken said he could recite the Twenty-third Psalm and make it sound like a search warrant—Hoover tried to get a fix on this “chameleon on the Scotch plaid.” As he drove down city streets he encountered boos and catcalls, signs reading “In Hoover we trusted; now we are busted”; the cold hostility of rows of onlookers.

  There might have been a tragically ennobling aspect to the campaign, as the ideologue of the besieged order grimly defended his castle against the would-be usurper. But the campaign flattened out, despite frantic warnings by Hoover against fascist and socialist tendencies in the other camp, and demagogic attacks by Roosevelt on the “present Republican leadership” as the “Horsemen of Destruction, Delay, Deceit, Despair.” If Hoover could not get a grip on Roosevelt, neither could Socialist Norman Thomas or the candidates of other minor parties. It was not 1896 or 1904 or 1912. In the gravest economic crisis they had ever known, the American people seemed bewildered and benumbed, lethargic amid the tempests of the politicians.

  Polls—and especially the results of Maine’s early state election—robbed the outcome of much suspense. Assembled on election night in Democratic party headquarters on the first floor of the Biltmore, Roosevelt’s family and friends received favorable early returns and then reports of a near-sweep. Only Pennsylvania and five smaller states stayed with the President. Roosevelt won 22.8 million votes, Hoover 15.8 million, Norman Thomas 885,000, Communist William Z. Foster 103,000.

  Louis Howe uncorked a bottle of sherry he had put away twenty years before in Albany. After receiving a gracious concession telegram from Hoover, the President-elect left for his Sixty-fifth Street house, to be met by his mother, who said, “I never thought particularly about my son being President, but if he’s going to be President, I hope he’ll be a good one!” Eleanor Roosevelt seemed in a less celebratory mood. She was happy for her husband, she told people, while to a close woman friend she confided that she had not wished to be First Lady. “If I wanted to be selfish, I could wish Franklin had not been elected.” She had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and learned what it meant to be the wife of a President, and she did not like the prospect. It meant the end of her personal life.

  She would have to work out her own salvation. She could not know yet that this might have to wait out the salvation of a nation.

  The “Hundred Days” of Action

  Four long months stretched ahead before the President-elect could take office, for the Constitution of 1787 had been drafted in a world of travel by carriage, sail, and horseback, not train, auto, and plane. During those four months lame-duck members of Congress would meet, debate and denounce, answer to no one, and go home.

  Could human misery wail for constitutional processes? During the autumn the economy had fallen off even further—a result, Hoover convinced himself, of business fears of what the Democrats would do. As winter approached, business activity dropped to between a quarter and a third of “normalcy” and one worker out of five—perhaps one out of four—was jobless. The employed were hardly better off. Women lining slippers—one every forty-five seconds—in Manhattan sweatshops earned barely over one dollar for a nine-hour day. Girls sewing aprons for 2½ cents per apron could make 20 cents a day. “There is not a garbage-dump in Chicago which is not diligently haunted by the hungry,” Edmund Wilson reported.

  “Last summer in the hot weather when the smell was sickening and the flies were thick, there were a hundred people a day coming to one of the dumps, falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands. They would devour all the pulp that was left on the old slices of watermelon and canteloupe till the rinds were as thin as paper; and they would take away and wash and cook discarded onions, turnips, potatoes, cabbage or carrots. Meat is a more difficult matter, but they salvage a good deal of that too. The best is the butcher’s meat which has been frozen and hasn’t spoiled. In the case of the other meat, there are usually bad parts that have to be cut out or they scald it and sprinkle it with soda to kill the rotten taste and the smell.”

  Poverty and despair lay deep over the farmlands as well. Farmers were burning corn in their stoves in places where coal cost four dollars a ton and corn sold for a third of that. Desperate men were brandishing hangman’s nooses and shotguns to keep deputy sheriffs from foreclosing their mortgages and selling their acreage. Farmers bid in a neighbor’s foreclosed farm for a dime, amid threats to serious bidders, and then turned the land back to the neighbor. But local action, they knew, was not enough. Farm leaders in Nebraska talked about marching tens of thousands of protesters to the state capitol and tearing it down if they were denied relief. Farm leaders in Washington warned of revolution in the countryside.

  Who would take leadership during the interregnum? Not Congress. Weighted down by 158 members who had been given their walking papers in November, divided in party control, surly toward the President, unsure of the President-elect, the legislators fribbled and dawdled, squabbling over beer, deadlocking over relief, putting off action on farm mortgages and bank deposit legislation.

  Not big business. Questioned by the Senate Finance Committee, noted businessmen admitted virtual intellectual bankruptcy. He had no solution, said one New York banker, “and I do not believe anybody else has.” Myron C. Taylor of U.S. Steel and others saw only one possibility— retrenchment. Pleas to balance the budget sounded like a mindless litany in the hearing room. The business leadership of the nation had fallen from its highest level of influence, judged Walter Lippmann, to its lowest.

  Nor would Roosevelt take leadership before he took office. He was still learning and listening while he cleaned up his gubernatorial affairs in New York. Stopping off in Washington on trips to Warm Springs and back, he talked at length with congressional leaders, and found the Democrats as factionalized as ever. He tried to hold off pressure from the left. He received and listened attentively to a left-wing delegation planning a hunger march in Washington, but avoided taking a stand. “When I talk to him he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ ” grumbled Huey Long. “But Joe Robinson”— Senate Majority Leader and the Kingfish’s bête noire—“goes to see him the next day and again he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine!’ to everybody.” Roosevelt did—to almost everybody—and visitors left with the feeling he agreed with them when he had meant simply that he understood them.

  The one man wit
h the constitutional authority and responsibility to lead was politically impotent as a lame duck. Herbert Hoover, however, was by no means eager to surrender leadership. When Britain asked the President for suspension of World War I debt payments to the United States and for a review of the whole debt situation, Hoover invited Roosevelt to discuss the matter with him. The President-elect was wary. He was no expert on the foreign debt question; he knew that Democratic congressional leaders were opposed to forsaking money that Europe “had hired,” in Calvin Coolidge’s words; and he wanted to maintain his own freedom of action. There followed a long and stately minuet of suspicious co-leaders, with little action.

  The nation tried to size up its next President. “Your distant relative is an X in the equation,” editor William Allen White wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. “He may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. Responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.” Wrote Lippmann earlier: “His good-will no one questions. He has proved that he has the gift of political sagacity. If only he will sail by the stars and not where the winds of opinion will take him, he will bring the ship into port.”

  The nation seemed to hunger for leadership—but what kind of leadership? Europe provided some models. In Germany, on January 30—Roosevelt’s fifty-first birthday—a befuddled President von Hindenburg designated as Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who promptly dissolved the Reichstag, called an election, locked up opposition leaders, and terrorized the voters with an ersatz panic. Mussolini’s Italy was shipping arms to Austrian fascists. In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin was still mercilessly crushing his party opponents.