American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was this massive spending on work relief, supplemented by that of the PWA, the TVA, the CCC, the AAA, and other programs, that in 1933 and 1934 provided the central thrust of the early New Deal. It was not really planned that way; Roosevelt was responding not to grand ideology or to grand economics but to sheer human needs that he recognized and that Eleanor Roosevelt, Hopkins, Perkins, and the others brought to him. This was part of Roosevelt’s political strength in the face of the bewildering problems of 1933 and 1934: the ability to follow ad hoc, expedient policies; to mediate between liberals and moderates, ideologues and politicians, spenders and economizers; to move so quickly and deftly from policy to policy, posture to posture, as to keep his adversaries guessing and off balance; and hence to avoid being cornered by left or right—all the while helping millions of people in need.

  Was this oscillating middle way also the President’s weakness? Instead of standing above the contending groups in society his administration often became part of the struggle, even sundered by it. By trying to do so many different—even competing—things, he did few that were adequate to the desperate needs. In trying to be both budget-balancer and provider, he satisfied neither the economizers nor those who believed that only a truly massive spending program would produce a massive recovery. By flirting with groups and movements stretched across the political spectrum he lost an opportunity to mobilize and lead forces arrayed from a “little left of center” to the far left. Perhaps the basic problem was one of intellectual grasp. “Roosevelt had a cogent overall interpretation of presidential leadership,” in James Sargent’s judgment, but the “disorder and ambiguity of his thought and expression” intruded when he “attempted to transfer his general thinking to specific proposals and actions.” Thus, in December 1933 the President told a press conference that “somewhere” between Douglas’s efforts to economize and “those who want to spend ten billion additional on public works, we will get somewhere.…”

  In foreign policy, where Presidents usually have a freer hand, Roosevelt was equally vigorous, versatile, volatile—and opportunistic. At heart still an old Wilsonian, he had made enough concessions to Hearst and other nationalists to leave himself in an ambivalent position from the start of his administration. In choosing Cordell Hull for Secretary of State he was recognizing a man who had made no secret of his hope to crown his lifework for expanded trade and economic cooperation among nations. But in his domestic policies, with the backing of Moley, Tugwell, and others, the President was seeking a moderate rise in farm and industrial prices, which he did not want washed out by an inundation of cheap goods from abroad. Moreover, he had inherited a dubious bequest from Hoover: to take part in an International Monetary and Economic Conference set for London in the early summer, which might conflict with his early decision to go off the gold standard and his plan to free his monetary policy— especially his moderate “reflation” efforts—from entanglement with the international gold standard.

  Roosevelt’s approach to the London Conference reflected his crossed purposes and mixed counsel in foreign affairs. Despite his skepticism about the London gathering, he threw himself into the posture of world leader by receiving foreign representatives, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, at the White House in April. Rosy pieties at these meetings raised hopes for the conference. Then the President sent to London a delegation headed by Hull but including also such protectionists as Senator Key Pittman of Nevada; the President had even tried to enlist the Senate’s supreme isolationist, Hiram Johnson, who shrewdly declined. In London the American delegation wandered in a fog of confusion which was only intensified by Roosevelt’s belated dispatch of Moley as “liaison” and ultimately, apparently, as possible fall guy. Suddenly there arrived a sharp message from Roosevelt in effect scolding the delegates for trifling with efforts for an artificial and temporary monetary stability and for ignoring fundamental ills. Confounded, the conference limped on for a few weeks and then quit, amid sharp recriminations and general hopelessness.

  Roosevelt’s torpedoing of the conference did not usher in wholly nationalist policies, however; he preferred to keep dual strategies in play. In the fall he set up a committee of low-tariff men to prepare a bill for the 1934 session of Congress. On their recommendation Roosevelt asked Congress for presidential authority to make commercial agreements with foreign nations under which rates could be revised 50 percent either way. The passage of this bill was a triumph for Hull’s internationalism.

  But what about Roosevelt’s? In the fall of 1933 he was still pursuing the nationalist economic policies for which his London Conference “bombshell message” had freed him. One of these policies was to shore up domestic prices by buying gold—a device that had been sold the President by a monetary theorist. So for some weeks there occurred a most extraordinary episode in presidential history—the President of the United States meeting every morning with his new Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to set the price of gold. Since edging prices upward rather than any precise figure was the aim, Roosevelt could rather arbitrarily set the figure within a certain range. Once when he proposed to Morgenthau an increase to twenty-one cents, he twitted the solemn secretary by explaining, “It’s a lucky number, because it’s three times seven.”

  Also in the fall, however, Roosevelt brought off what in history might rank as potentially the most significantly internationalist act of all—recognition of the Soviet Union. This action followed lengthy haggling over terms, Washington holding out hopes for expanded trade and Moscow making vague promises to stop abetting revolutionary activity in the United States and to protect the right of free religious worship of Americans in Russia. Eleanor Roosevelt liked to tell of visiting a schoolroom where the Soviet Union had been blacked out—actually “whited out”—on a map of the world, leaving only a void. Roosevelt now had begun to fill that void.

  To some inside the Roosevelt administration the New Deal by summer 1934 appeared in disarray, if not chaos. “Public works” was almost at a full stop, Berle observed, and NRA rapidly disintegrating. “We have an administration in very bad shape indeed.” Key officials, especially on the right, were quitting the administration. Lewis Douglas left in August and Acheson was preparing to leave. Some projects failed or badly faltered: the gold purchase venture; an effort by Ickes to impose some order in the chaotic oil industry; an effort by the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to provide food for the needy and to stabilize the commodity markets. The last two of these fell afoul of industry pressures and fragmentation. The President’s abrupt cancellation of private carriers’ airmail contracts on the grounds of collusion and the assumption by the Air Corps of the flying of the mails led to a series of plane crashes and pilot deaths in the February 1934 storms—a much-publicized disaster that might have brought down a less popular President.

  The public as a whole had quite a different view of the administration. It saw a President who was doing his damnedest, quick to confront specific problems, brilliant at explaining his deeds and hopes, always positive, exuberant, seemingly on top of things. The public saw a leader.

  For that public the ultimate test was economic recovery, and the flush of prosperity felt strong by fall 1934, compared to the miseries of March 1933. Could “bucks” be converted to ballots? A third of the senators and all the representatives were up for reelection. Roosevelt’s tactic was to stand above the party battle, in line with his bipartisan posture of “leader of all the people.” But he helped friendly candidates indirectly, and he posed the campaign issue by asking in a fireside chat, “Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?”

  The result was a resounding verdict for the President and his New Deal. Typically Presidents lost ground in midterm congressional elections, but in 1934 Democratic strength rose from 313 to 322 in the House and— incredibly—from 59 to
69 in the Senate. A clutch of highly conservative Republican senators was sacked. “Some of our friends think the majority top-heavy,” Garner wrote the President, “but if properly handled, the House and Senate will be all right and I am sure you can arrange that.”

  Next month a late vote came in from Britain. “The courage, the power and the scale” of Roosevelt’s effort, wrote Winston Churchill, “must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age.” The British Conservative was seeking to place Roosevelt in the broadest sweep of history.

  “Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Arc of Conflict

  THE WINTER OF 1934 was the hardest time of all, the young factory worker said. At one point the family ate only potatoes and dog meat. “We sold everything we could except the piano. Mama wouldn’t let that go.… All of us had taken our music lessons on it—especially my sister, the one who died when I was little. I guess that was the real reason Mama wouldn’t let it go.”

  In Macon County, Georgia, the NRA meant to many blacks “Negro Removal Act” or “Negro Rarely Allowed,” and to some whites “Negro Relief Act” or “No Roosevelt Again.”

  In a country town outside Boston a decorous bridge party ended up in merriment and highjinks, with the ladies scissoring off their partners’ long neckties just below the knot. “I hope that wasn’t your best tie, Charles,” the hostess joked. Charles was an MIT graduate now ekeing out a living from a chicken farm. “My dear,” he said with a tight smile, “it was my only one.”

  “Close to me four children moved up and down the row with nimble fingers” picking currants, a jobless writer related. “The parents scolded or cajoled as the hot day wore on and the kids whined or sulked under the monotonous work. Their ages ranged from six to twelve or thirteen.” Two younger girls tended a baby on a blanket under a tree. “For one day’s work of nearly ten hours the father collected for himself, his wife, and four children $2.44.”

  From Florida a Du Pont in-law and vice president indignantly wrote a friend: “A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”

  An Indiana housewife wrote to the local newspaper about living on $1.50 a week. “Those in charge of relief have never known actual hunger and want.… Just what does our government expect us to do when our rent is due? When we need a doctor? …It is always the people with full stomachs who tell us poor people to keep happy.”

  J. P. Morgan’s family often warned visitors not to mention Roosevelt’s name to the old man—it might raise his blood pressure to dangerous heights. It was not safe to mention any Roosevelt. When someone had let fall the name of Theodore Roosevelt, Morgan had burst out, “God damn all Roosevelts!”

  In Garden City, Kansas, the skies blackened as whirlwinds of black dust beat on the farmhouses. “The doors and windows were all shut tightly, yet those tiny particles seemed to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair was gray and stiff and we ground dirt between our teeth.”

  A community sing in a migratory labor camp in California hymned an old sharecropper’s lament:

  Eleven Cent cotton and forty cent meat

  How in the world can a poor man eat?

  Flour up high, cotton down low,

  How in the world can you raise the dough?

  Clothes worn out, shoes run down,

  Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown.…

  These were the voices of some Americans not during the Hoover depression but a year or two after Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. Overall, the statistics looked good. New private and public construction put in place rose from $2.9 billion in 1933 to $3.7 billion in 1934 and $4.2 billion in 1935. Average weekly earnings of production workers went up from $16.65 in 1933 to $18.20 the next year and $19.91 the year after that. Unemployment fell in these same years from 12.8 million to 11.3 to 10.6. But these improvements looked almost pathetic compared with the 1929 figures—only 1.5 million jobless that year, weekly paychecks of almost $25 for factory workers, nearly $11billion in construction. As usual, women did worse than men and improved their lot more slowly. Roosevelt’s central goal and promise—recovery—had been only fractionally accomplished.

  Yet the smell and feel of a strong recovery lasted for at least a year after the Hundred Days. Roosevelt’s exuberance, experimentation, concern— above all, the sheer range and variety of his activism—symbolized a nation on the march, looking forward. And there had been so much change and progress in so many areas: NRA had begun to bring some order and equity to what had been pure jungle conflict; depositors’ savings were safe; millions of the poor were receiving relief jobs or at least relief; magnificent projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority had been launched; the government was policing—or at least monitoring—Wall Street; farm income had been boosted and stabilized; new conservation programs were underway; the sight of the dispossessed family huddling outside its ancestral home while the slick-talking auctioneer sold it off was far less common across the great agricultural regions of the nation.

  Yet millions of people were still in dire want—all the more so because promises from Washington and state capitals had sharpened their hopes and appetites. The President was now caught up in one of the most dynamic and compelling transformational situations that a free people can experience. Not only did the basic wants exist in harrowing abundance; they had been acknowledged and legitimated by the New Dealers to the point that now they had become publicly recognized needs. As political leaders made more promises, offered more assurances, aroused more hope, these needs were converted into popular expectations that were addressed back to the leaders—any leaders. And as leaders sought followers, as politicians competed for votes, popular expectations changed into feelings of entitlement and in turn into demands by followers on leaders. Who then would become the true leaders?

  Class War in America

  “In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out: but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.”

  Roosevelt was a bit disingenuous in telling this story. Having watched the counterattack of leaders of finance on both Cousin Ted’s and Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, he could hardly have been astonished that capitalists would turn against the New Deal. Still, he was genuinely perplexed as to why the right-wing counterattack came so quickly, and in such angry and often ugly form. As the master conductor of the concert of interests, had he not responded to business needs—in his stern call for economy, his refusal to support left-wing proposals such as the socialization of banking, his early insistence on self-liquidating public works, his initial coolness even to federal guarantee of bank deposits, his defiance of the American Legion on veterans’ pensions? Had he not received praise from such diverse conservatives as Henry L. Stimson, Walter Lippmann, and Hamilton Fish, such conservative newspapers as The Wall Street Journal and the Hearst chain? Had not the NRA and other measures tried to be evenhanded between capital and labor?

  Many on the right were not placated by these measures, and their fury rose in the months after the Hundred Days. In his speeches and posture, if not always in his policies, Roosevelt was challenging some of the fundamental values of the old American right—its definition of liberty as freedom from governmental regulation and control, its belief in individualism in contrast to the “collectivist” NRA and AAA, its attachment to laissez faire and limited governmen
t in contrast to the leviathan that Roosevelt seemed to be erecting, its championship of thrift in public spending, its reverence for the Constitution and the checks and balances designed to frustrate popular majorities seeking to control the presidency and Congress. Some of the more venerable spokesmen for American conservatism in the 1930s had sat in Yale and other classrooms when Spencerian Social Darwinism—above all, the belief that progress emerges out of competition and the struggle for survival—had been relayed by the likes of William Graham Sumner and other eminent teachers.

  It was inevitable that these powerful men would come into conflict with the President unless he hewed to a conservative line—and Roosevelt the improviser and experimenter would hew to no ideology during the early New Deal. Rumblings on the right began to be heard by late 1933. An organized counterattack on the New Deal was developing strongly by mid-1934, at a time when protest on the left—aside from socialists and communists who had been against the Administration from the start as a matter of course—was still mixed and unfocused. And leadership of the right was taken initially not by conservative Republicans or big businessmen but by Democrats.

  The most notable of these Democrats was the party’s hero of the 1920s, Al Smith, who had now become the unhappiest warrior of them all. His desertion of the “collectivist” New Deal signaled a poignant effort of the old business leadership of the Bourbon Democracy, now aided by disaffected urbanites, to hold the Democratic party to its earlier “Jeffersonian” ways. John J. Raskob, a close friend of Smith’s, had retired from active directorship of General Motors in 1928 to head up both the Democratic-National Committee and the Smith campaign. After Smith’s defeat Raskob and Jouett Shouse, a Kansas newspaper editor and politico, ran the party. Roosevelt’s vanquishing of Smith at the 1932 Democratic convention left both Raskob and Shouse in political eclipse. By early 1934 a Du Pont vice president was corresponding with Raskob about Roosevelt’s seeking to set labor against capital, buying votes from the poor, attacking corporate wealth, and other transgressions. Why not, Raskob asked the Du Pont man, set up an organization to combat the idea that businessmen were crooks and similar iniquitous notions?