American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The President soon proved himself an artist in government—in his fine sense of timing, his adroit application of pressure, his face-to-face persuasiveness, his craft in playing not only foes but friends off against one another. Like a creative artist, Frances Perkins said, he would begin his picture “without a clear idea of what he intends to paint or how it shall be laid out upon the canvas, and then, as he paints, his plan evolves out of the material he is painting.” He could think and feel his way into political situations with imagination, intuition, insight.

  These traits dominated his policy thinking as well as his political calculating—and with less success. People close to Roosevelt were dismayed by his casual and disorderly intellectual habits. To Adolf Berle his judgments of people and ideas were “primarily instinctive and not rational,” his learning came not from books but from people. He read not books but newspapers, perhaps half a dozen before breakfast—devoured them “like a combine eating up grain,” a friend noted. He was not so much a creator of ideas as a broker of them. He did not assemble his ideas into a comprehensive and ordered program, with priorities and interconnections. Just as he lived each day for itself, as he liked to tell friends, so he appeared to flirt with each idea as it came along.

  Everything seemed to conspire to fortify these intellectual habits of the new President—his eclectic education and reading, the ideologically divided party he led, the factionalized Congress he confronted, above all the advisers he had chosen and who had chosen him. His chief brain truster during 1933 was Ray Moley. Prickly and hard-driving, the former Columbia professor—now Assistant Secretary of State—shared some of his boss’s political shrewdness and opportunism, intuitive judgment, and keenness in evaluating friend and foe. But Roosevelt also talked at length with Berle about banking, railroad, and monetary problems, and Berle’s ideas for raising business to a higher level of efficiency and responsibility; with Tugwell about conservation, agriculture, and industrial discipline, and Tugwell’s notions of democratic planning of the economy.

  These brain trusters had their differences, but they seemed three of a kind compared with Roosevelt’s other advisers, formal and informal: his old-time Hudson Valley friend and neighbor Henry Morgenthau, humanitarian by heritage and sensibility but cautiously conservative in economic policy; budget director Lewis Douglas, absolutely dedicated to governmental penny-pinching and fiscal orthodoxy; Treasury Under Secretary Dean Acheson, close to Douglas in his economics; Jesse Jones, Texas business mogul who now ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Another broad influence on Roosevelt was the lively correspondence and visitation with Felix Frankfurter, who discreetly spoke for Justice Brandeis’s bias against economic and governmental giantism even as the Harvard Law School professor helped people Washington agencies with young activists who would make their own diverse marks in coming months.

  Most remarkable of all was that one-woman brain trust, Eleanor Roosevelt—and all the more influential for not being viewed in that role. Through quick visits to her husband while he was still breakfasting in bed, little chits and memos, thick reports infiltrated into the executive offices, the visitors she invited to the White House, and her own influence on public opinion and Washington attitudes, she soon became a penetrating voice for the humanitarian liberal-left. Through a wide correspondence— she received 300,000 pieces of mail the first year—her press conferences and newspaper columns, her speeches and magazine articles, her widely advertised (and criticized) trips to CCC camps and coal mines, she began to build up a potentially powerful constituency of her own. Historian Mary Beard wrote admiringly of her ability to give “inspiration to the married, solace to the lovelorn, assistance to the homemaker, menus to the cook, and help to the educator, direction to the employer, caution to the warrior, and deeper awareness of its primordial force to the ‘weaker sex.’” The First Lady also served as a model for other women in Washington government. Her close friend Frances Perkins, with her labor and urban concerns and constituencies, had special access to both Roosevelts, and women like Molly Dewson of the Democratic National Committee learned that they could be, all at the same time, competent, caring, and controversial.

  Such was the flux and flow of advice to the President that no one really knew which advisers were influential or why or when. Who was having the President’s ear at the moment provoked jealousies worthy of the royal courts of old. The President’s mind seemed awesomely accessible—to the kitchen cabinet, to department heads like Ickes and Perkins, to experts coming through Washington. The President would be seen talking animatedly with men regarded by the orthodox—though not necessarily by history—as quacks.

  Roosevelt was following no set course, left, right, or center. He was leading by guess and by God. He not only admitted to playing by ear but boasted of it. He was a football quarterback, he told reporters, calling a new play after he saw how the last one turned out. Snap judgments had to be made. But Washington wondered what lay back of the snap judgments—some ideology or philosophy?

  Neither of these, but rather a loose collection of values—Roosevelt’s warm humanitarianism, his belief that the needy must be helped, that government must step in when private institutions could not do the job, and that now—in 1933—this meant the federal government. The President also had a fine grasp of political and governmental nuts and bolts. But between the two levels of grand philosophy and policy specifics he would be experimental, eclectic, nonprogrammatic, nondoctrinaire. He would be a broker of ideas as well as of interests and individuals.

  As a master broker Roosevelt presided over a grand concert of interests. Labor, farmers, businessmen, investors, unemployed youth, some of the poor—all got a slice of the first New Deal, at least on paper. FDR assumed the role of bipartisan leader, “president of all the people,” virtually the national father. He happily cited a Nebraska congressman’s definition of the New Deal as an effort “to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Government, he told a convention of bankers, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and the leadership of all groups.” All this seemed a long cry from the “discipline and direction under leadership” he had promised in his inaugural address.

  Congress, though more responsive to regional and special interests, quickened to the energy that radiated from the President. Even some Republicans fell over themselves to express support for the Democratic Roosevelt. In many respects the Chief Executive was Chief Legislator. Congress was by no means supine. Conservative Democratic senators like Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia usually opposed the President’s bills. Congress as a whole, however, was more positive than even Roosevelt toward the New Deal. Many congressmen wanted more inflation than Roosevelt, ampler spending for people’s needs, greater generosity to veterans and farmers, bigger public works, tougher policies toward Wall Street. The President skillfully brokered with the congressional left. For the conservative Democrats in the Senate he had growing hostility. Byrd opposed the AAA, FDR told Tugwell, because, as an apple grower, “he’s afraid you’ll force him to pay more than ten cents an hour for his apple pickers.”

  As master broker Roosevelt for a time could stay above the political and ideological battles raging around him. In the distribution of good things— whether government money or patronage jobs or social policy or his smile of approval—he could act as transactional leader within the existing system. He might give TVA to the left and economy to the right, but as a compromising broker rather than ideological leader he would not move decisively left or right. Social justice, he said, “ought not to consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

  It all seemed to work beautifully for a time. Employment, prices, income all soared in the weeks after the Hundred Days. The industrial production index nearly doubled from March to July. Unemployment fell off from around 15 million at the time of Roosevelt’s inaugural to about 11 million i
n October, a drop in the jobless rate from about 30 to about 22 percent.

  Roosevelt’s popularity floated high on this first gust of recovery. “If he burned down the capitol,” said Will Rogers, “we would cheer and say, ‘well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”

  He won praise from Bertie McCormick’s Republican Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s New York American. Daily, White House mailmen hauled in sacks of mail, most of it laudatory, some of it fulsome. An adviser found the President happily leafing through a sheaf of this mail. He was sorting letters he had received from British subjects addressing him as “Your Majesty” or “Lord Roosevelt” or in other monarchical terms. Why? He wanted to send them to King George V for his “amusement.” History has not recorded that His Majesty was amused.

  Psychology overwhelmed economics. In sad reality at least 10 million Americans remained jobless in 1933, and industrial production was still far below that of the prosperity years and even the first year of the depression. In October 3 million families—at least 12 million people—still depended on unemployment relief of about $23 a month, which covered food but left little or nothing for rent and utilities. But people felt better—and this was largely Roosevelt’s doing. He exuded cheerfulness. He raised hopes and expectations. Above all, he acted; for several months he simply dominated the front pages of the nation’s newspapers with his speeches, bill-signings, trips, executive orders, pronunciamentos.

  His fireside chats carried his buoyant presence directly into home and hearth. “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he said at the start of his first fireside chat in mid-March. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” And he proceeded to do just that, in simple, human terms. Read later in cold print, the chats seemed a bit limp and pedestrian. Read by Roosevelt over the radio, they sounded warm, intimate, homely. Watching him deliver a fireside chat, Frances Perkins sensed that he could actually see the families listening at the other end. “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” The President took care not to overuse this device, giving only four chats the first year, at two- or three-month intervals.

  Nor did he overstrain the press conference as a way of reaching people. He held these twice a week, to the joy of the White House press corps, but the sessions were often more frustrating than rewarding to the reporters. Roosevelt was a master at withholding information. He spent much of the half hour jovially fencing and parrying with the reporters, or offering them tidbits, or lecturing them. Crowding around the President’s gadget-covered desk, the correspondents pressed him hard, with mixed results. Roosevelt wanted to control the flow of information, to create his own sensations, to set his own timing. He was not the first or the last President to do all this; he was simply more effective than most.

  Nothing epitomized the New Deal in action better than the National Recovery Act and Administration—epitomized Roosevelt’s Concert of Interests, his role of broker, the psychological impact of the Hundred Days, the fundamental problems of the “broker state” at work. As boss of NRA, Roosevelt chose General Hugh Johnson, who was a mass of contradictions himself—outwardly a tough old cavalryman with a leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, inwardly an amalgam of public commitment, touchy ego, maudlin sentimentality, business savvy, and as clamorous and picturesque as a sideshow barker. The general’s first job was to persuade employers to draw up codes of fair competition, a task he attacked like a cavalry charge. Once approved by the President and given the force of law, the codes were designed to discourage wasteful, junglelike competition by setting more orderly pricing and marketing policies, and to benefit workers by establishing higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and the end of child labor. As part of the deal, antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could cooperate in setting up the codes. Code signers could affix the “Blue Eagle” label to products and shopwindows.

  With Johnson as bugler, the NRA galvanized the American people like a national call to arms. Suddenly the Blue Eagle was everywhere—on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. (But not on Ford cars; Henry Ford perversely refused to sign the automobile code, then lived up to it anyway.) Rushing from city to city in an army plane, dishing out Boy Scout-style enthusiasm, biting criticism, and wisecracks at every stop, Johnson pressured and coaxed businessmen to endorse the codes, then gathered them in Washington for the signing and orating. As the very personification of recovery, the general staged a monster Blue Eagle parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue. For hours he reviewed the parade of a quarter million persons, with another million and a half cheering from the sidewalks. Not since 1917 had Americans savored such a throbbing sense of marching unity.

  As the months passed, though, the questions became more and more urgent: Unity for what? Marching to where? Under pressure for quick results, Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most skillful in dealing with bureaucrats and politicians. Inevitably he delegated crucial pricing and production decisions to the dominant interests, which often turned out to be the biggest corporations. The NRA was becoming a breeder of monopoly, charged Senator Gerald Nye. Who would speak for unorganized consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but without adequate political muscle; its members, Tugwell said, were “spearheads without shafts.”

  Union labor, being organized, fared better under NRA. Section 7(a) of the act boldly proclaimed that employees “shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers” in choosing their representatives. No one seeking or holding a job “shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.” Union leaders greeted this as labor’s Magna Carta—comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, said John L. Lewis—and the message was clear: Organize, “THE PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO JOIN A UNION,” placards read. “Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, black lists and the fear of dismissal.” But there were complications. President William Green and the American Federation of Labor old guard wanted to organize workers into separate craft unions, even in huge auto plants, while Lewis and the rising young militants around him wanted to organize all the workers in a plant or company or industry into big, solid industrial unions.

  Employers bridled at 7(a). Many set up company unions—or “employee representation plans”—which came to be run by company stooges. Labor responded with a rash of strikes during the summer of 1933; by September nearly 300,000 workers had walked out. The “concert of interests” seemed to be emitting discordant noises. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a sign hoisted on a picket line. The President set up special boards, trimmed NRA’s power, eased Johnson out, and put in more domesticated chiefs, but to little avail; during 1934 the NRA eagle fluttered through heavy weather.

  In the end the significance of the National Recovery Administration was not its impact on economic recovery, which was mixed, but its curbing of child labor, sweatshops, and unfair trade practices, its big boost to unionization and its modest protection to consumers. Why then was the NRA finally dismissed as a failure, even privately by Roosevelt himself? Largely because it failed in its highly touted supreme aim of bringing capital, labor, and other interests into a happy concert under the “Broker State,” and by artificially raising prices and restricting production, it only marginally helped produce recovery.

  If the Concert of Interests did not work, what would? Public works, the companion piece to the NRA, was launched with little of the drama of the Blue Eagle, under the leadership of one of the most committed and stouthearted New Dealers, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.
Touchy and cantankerous, suspicious of friend and foe—and especially of government contractors—“Honest Harold” did not hesitate to use government snoopers to check on suspect PWA employees and their financial connections. Ickes was in no great hurry; his big projects needed careful planning and budgeting as well as laborious scrutiny by the secretary himself When the public works program finally got underway it built gas and electric power plants, jails and hospitals, sewage and water systems, bridges, docks, and tunnels—and aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, army and navy airplanes. But the $9 billion that PWA ultimately spent were not central to recovery during Roosevelt’s first two years.

  Much quicker to get underway was the federal relief program under a lanky young ex-director of private welfare programs named Harry Hopkins, who acted almost as fast as he talked. Appointed Federal Emergency Relief Administrator with a grant of half a billion dollars, Hopkins began authorizing millions of dollars in relief even while he was wailing in a hallway to be moved into his office. Since he could give money only to the state and local public relief agencies, which in turn administered relief programs, he could do little more than monitor the levels of compassion and competence with which programs were carried out. Behind his cynical, wisecracking façade Hopkins was deeply concerned with guarding the dignity, pride, and self-esteem of people on relief. Hence he was eager that the unemployed be given jobs and not merely handouts, but job programs cost more money. Late in 1933 Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to launch a massive crash program to employ 4 million. In its brief existence, the Civil Works Administration undertook the building or rebuilding of vast numbers of roads, parks, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other “light,” short-term projects, in contrast to the PWA’s “heavy” jobs.