American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Nor could the President fall back on concerted advice from his staff. Raymond Moley, frustrated by FDR’s improvisations, was drifting back to private life; Tugwell saw the New Deal as incomplete; Berle feared that the Administration was disintegrating. Louis Howe, who had kept his boss close to the great constituencies of need that made up the foundation of the Democratic party, lay dying of emphysema during the early months of 1935; he slipped away in mid-April. Even before Howe’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt felt that her husband was seeing a narrower range of advisers. Molly Dewson, on the firing line at Democratic party headquarters, was concerned about the President’s faltering leadership. To worriers the First Lady gave the President’s response: “Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership” that he was working closely with Congress, “but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship.…

  “The ups and downs in people’s feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately.…

  “Franklin says for Heaven’s sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.”

  Western and southern farmers were especially impatient with FDR by 1935. For two years agricultural politics, policy, and administration had epitomized the character of the first New Deal: improvised, experimental, controversial but neither radical nor conservative, basically humane. The Agricultural Adjustment Act had been hammered out during early 1933 amid heavy pressures from farm interests and desperate farmers. These pressures had continued to affect its administration, and the fearsome drought of 1934 had intensified the desperation. Supporters of diverse policies—higher farm prices and inflation in general, the old McNary-Haugen scheme for stimulating farm sales abroad and stabilizing farm prices at home, refinancing of farm debts, raising farm prices by cutting down production—continued to fight for their particular road to agricultural salvation.

  Roosevelt’s farm effort embraced elements of these and other policies, but the heart of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration program lay in the Domestic Allotment plan. This meant “plowing every third row under” and slaughtering little pigs (so they would not become big hogs and inflate supply). Nothing could have been more shocking to a world with a half-billion or more hungry people, to a nation that measured progress by productivity, to millions of Americans long undernourished, and to the farmers themselves. In Georgia, a cotton planter carefully marked off twenty-five acres to be plowed up and told several tenants that someday soon he would tell them to go to it. A field investigator overheard the tenants’ murmured conversation.

  “You know,” said one, “I ain’t never pulled up no cotton stalks befo’, and somehow I don’t like the idea.”

  “I been feelin’ sorter funeral-like all afternoon,” said another. But a third had a happier thought.

  “Let’s swap work that day; you plow up mine, and I’ll plow up yours.”

  Henry Wallace and his Agriculture Department appeared to face almost insuperable problems. They had to cope with a hundred or so zealots in the farm bloc in Congress who watched their every move. In the Senate they confronted some of the most powerful and prestigious lawmakers, many of them prima donnas. From the old, northern-based Grange on the right to the National Farmers’ Holiday Association on the left they were lobbied by some of the most potent farm and commodity groups in the nation, including the well-entrenched American Farm Bureau Federation and the militant Tenant Farmers’ Union. Processors, railroad and other transportation interests, farm equipment makers, rural banks, and others stood guard over their turfs. These groups were as quick to unite against a minor perceived threat as they were slow to unite behind a program for farmers as a whole.

  Bolstered by Roosevelt’s backing and popularity, funds from processing taxes, and inspirited leadership by talented federal administrators, the AAA promulgated its rules, set up its field staffs, issued its millions of checks, and pumped money into the nation’s fiscal bloodstream. Yet the AAA paid a price. To get quick results it often had to make peace with legislators, state officials, county farm agents, with the whole panoply of state and regional interests and institutions. Some states had wanted the AAA to be administered through their own departments of agriculture. In Georgia—the President’s “adopted state”—the right-wing populist governor, Eugene Talmadge, followed policies almost opposite to those of the New Deal.

  Like an old wooden plow worn and splintered by rocky soil, the Agriculture Department, and especially the AAA, was itself cleft by the economic and political ground it worked in. Offices and bureaus dependent on client groups jousted with one another. Old department hands fought with young New Deal activists. Interests inside and outside the department competed for funds. Centralizers debated with Brandeisian decentralizers. Quick-action enthusiasts pleaded with due-process literalists. A major result of these internal conflicts was that the AAA did reasonably well the work that everyone wanted—getting money into the hands of “constituents”—but did not have the grass-roots clout to bring about fundamental change.

  One of these conflicts seemed relatively unimportant in itself but triggered a major crisis in the department. Virtually all the New Dealers in Agriculture were intent on getting AAA money into the hands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well as planters and landlords. But some feared “unnecessarily” provoking local resistance, especially of dominant white groups in the South. The question of whether the 1934-35 cotton contract required the landlord to keep the same tenants or the same number of tenants brought matters to a head. Militant New Dealers feared that the latter interpretation would enable landlords to “hire and fire” tenants at will within their set number. When the AAA’s general counsel, Jerome Frank, interpreted the contract to require the retention of tenants, AAA chief Chester Davis sacked him and several of his associates.

  This much-publicized “purge” of February 1935 exposed Roosevelt’s plight at midterm. His farm laws, improvisations, and experiments had opened a hornet’s nest of controversial policies, programs, and personalities that were failing to bring a genuine new deal to hundreds of thousands of tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers. Along with the financial and psychological relief he had given millions of people, he had aroused consciousness of the need for change without bringing about fundamental or enduring transformation. Hence he confronted farm groups and constituencies more aroused and hopeful than ever. Poor farmers, however, still lacked the catalytic leadership that could jolt them into effective political action; the question by 1935 was whether they would turn to Franklin Roosevelt or some other leadership between “Lenin and Christ.”

  The power of leadership at this point was being demonstrated by a most unlikely man and a most unlikely group of dispossessed—the elderly poor and insecure. Dr. Francis Townsend hardly looked the part of the charismatic leader—he was old and ailing and plain and bespectacled, resembling a bit the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”; he had a monotonous speaking voice, he had little money left over from his medical practice, and now he was jobless. The people he mobilized appeared to be about the least combustible in the nation: elderly, largely nonpolitical, living on farms or in small towns or cities, heavily Protestant, retired on small incomes if any. Hardly materials for a political explosion, certainly, and yet Townsend and his elderly followers became a political phenomenon during Roosevelt’s first term. The Townsend cause enrolled at least two million people in some seven thousand clubs across the nation. Reporters groped to understand the movement, but they had only to look at its causes.

  Dr. Townsend was addressing a dire need—not only the financial poverty of so many of the elderly but their social and psychological predicament. Part of the human price of industrialization and urbanization, many of the
se men and women had lost their homes and their savings, or barely held on to them; they had left their children back on the old farm, or lost their jobs through a swift-changing technology. They had become isolated, in Talcott Parsons’s view, from “kinship, occupational, and community ties” and hence were ripe for political agitation. They needed help, and Dr. Townsend had a plan, a most wonderful plan: give everyone over sixty federal pensions of $200 a month, with the delectable requirement that the money be spent within the month and thereby bolster the whole economy. A federal sales tax would pay for the scheme. It seemed like the economic equivalent of perpetual motion.

  Then there was the doctor himself, who proved to be a master of hype. He liked to tell how he had looked out of his bathroom window one day in Long Beach, California, to see three haggard old women rummaging through garbage cans, how he had burst out into a string of epithets that he wanted God Himself to hear, how he said he would shout “until the whole country hears,” and invented the movement on the spot. In fact, it was no sudden revelation. Townsend himself had come to the end of a long road—born in a log cabin in northern Illinois, he had led something of a Horatio Alger life without the Algerian reward. After picking up jobs as ranch hand, farm laborer, mine-mucker, and teacher in the West, he worked his way through medical college and then endured a hard life as a country doctor in South Dakota. Later, as a medical officer treating the Long Beach indigent during the depression, he had ample reason and time to ponder the plight of the elderly and to concoct his plan.

  Not especially religious himself, Townsend invested his venture with a powerful evangelical appeal. He proclaimed that his movement would have as mighty an impact as Christianity. At their club meetings Townsendites sang hymns (including a “new” one, “Onward, Townsend soldiers / Marching as to war”), idolized the doctor as a Christ-like, God-given leader, and discussed how best to budget and spend the anticipated $200. Townsend and his top organizers installed ministers as key regional and state directors. Yet he kept the movement centralized, and he adroitly made it seem safe and respectable, as well as transformative, by such devices as labeling his proposed sales tax a “transaction tax.”

  By January 1935 the Townsend movement towered on the political horizon. The Townsend leadership was not above inflating the number of its clubs and members, and a credulous press often exaggerated the Townsendites’ strength; Time overstated the number of clubs by at least fivefold. Stanley High, a minister and friend of the Administration, wrote in to the White House that the more he saw of the movement, the more its power impressed him. “It is doing for a certain class of people what—a few years ago—was done by the prohibition movement: giving them a sublimation outlet.” And had not the drys actually altered the Constitution of the United States?

  In what had long ago been part of the “old Northwest”—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and neighboring areas—other storm clouds were rising, where the hopes and expectations of progressives in all their colorations, independent, liberal, radical, socialistic, had glowed anew with the coming of the New Deal. In Wisconsin, “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s dissimilar sons—the cool, thoughtful “young Senator Bob” and the often tempestuous and passionate “Governor Phil”—were united in carrying on their father’s radical mission. They had also carried on the progressive tradition of political independence when, in 1934, they trounced both major parties at the Wisconsin polls. Roosevelt at a press conference had opportunistically expressed a preference for Bob La Follette over possible Democratic candidates for senator. What now would be the relationship between the rejuvenated Progressive party of Wisconsin and the New Deal? There was talk of party realignment—but of which party, in what direction? Much would turn on the future direction of FDR’s currently faltering New Deal.

  The La Follettes worked closely with Minnesota governor Floyd Olson, an even more radical leader. While Phil talked vaguely of a cooperative, nonsocialistic society, Olson on the hustings denounced liberalism, fascism, capitalism, communism with equal gusto. What was he for? As governor he had called for public power, insurance for the jobless, a state income tax, and of course mortgage relief. For the nation he preached the gospel of “collective ownership of the means of production and distribution,” though he was no Marxist. If his proposals were somewhat fuzzy, the political power he wielded as head of his militant, well-organized Farmer-Labor party was clear and commanding. Olson too talked about a third party for 1936, headed perhaps by Bob La Follette. What about 1940? he was asked. Said Olson: “Maybe by then I won’t be radical enough.”

  It was from the Far West, however, and especially California, that Roosevelt and the nation learned how tumultuous, arousing, colorful, and nutty the politics of protest could be. No one could remember a political leader like Upton Sinclair, winner of the Golden State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1934. A talkative, ebullient man then in his mid-fifties, Upton Sinclair had never stopped writing, protesting, and politicking since the kindling days of The Jungle and The Brass Check, his famous muckraking works. Indignant over the idle land, factories, and people he saw all about him in the early thirties, he concocted a plan that, he proclaimed categorically, would end poverty in California. And it was called just that: End Poverty in California. Under his plan the state would acquire farmland and factories, turn them over to the jobless to grow food and make their own clothes and furniture and shoes, and issue scrip that could be used for the exchange of produce and goods. Always the Utopian, Sinclair dreamed of the establishment ultimately of networks of workers’ and farmers’ villages. It would be the Cooperative Commonwealth.

  The killing of Upton Sinclair’s dream was testament to the novelist’s long avowal of unpopular causes, the ingenuity of California’s power elites, and the Machiavellianism of Franklin Roosevelt.

  Like other communitarian plans that had been advanced in America for over a century, EPIC was no real threat to corporate property or profit; nevertheless, the business interests of California—backed up by Republican party leaders, Hollywood moguls and movie stars, and a new type of hatchet job by professional public relations experts—portrayed the one-time muckraker as an atheistic, anarchist communist and a believer in free love, telepathy, and vegetarianism to boot. Fake photographs and newsreels showed California being invaded by bums and tramps seeking an end to their own poverty at the expense of the state’s taxpayers. All this worked in the mercurial, personality-dominated political environment of the Golden State.

  Sinclair had fairly beaten the old Wilsonian politico George Creel in the Democratic primary, but the usual White House endorsement of a Democratic candidate was not forthcoming. He appealed to Roosevelt and had no answer. He appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt, who ordinarily supported the EPIC type of local initiative. Instructed by her husband to “(1) Say nothing and (2) Do nothing,” she wrote Sinclair a guarded reply. But FDR was not content to do nothing. He allowed Administration operatives to make a deal with the conservative Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, under which Merriam would proclaim, if he won, that his victory could not have happened without Democratic support and hence was no repudiation of the New Deal. And that was how the Democratic candidate was ditched, to the benefit of a Republican candidate who had come out for “Roosevelt’s policies,” the Townsend plan, and funny-money schemes.

  Upton Sinclair the writer had the last word. Having authored I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty before his campaign, he now produced I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, in which he told all. Soon he would be writing his Lanny Budd novels, which apotheosize FDR, the man who had deserted him.

  In the half-century since the fateful year of 1935, historians of the New Deal have puzzled over Roosevelt’s alleged “turn to the left.” Did he indeed turn to the left—and what was the “left” to which he turned? Was it from the centrist, bipartisan essence of the “First” New Deal to the radical, populist thrust of the “Second”? Was it from government as regulator and atomizer of concentrated
economic power to government as planner and coordinator of it? Was it from government as broker and unifier of major interests to government as a vehicle for more social justice and equality? Was the “Second” New Deal, in short, fundamentally more radical than the “First”? And if it was, why did FDR shift, and at the time that he did—the summer of 1935? Was it a result mainly of external forces, political and economic, working on him, or of intellectual and psychological influences working within him, or of some baffling combination of the two?

  Surely a shift to the left seemed logical politically. The Democratic gains in the 1934 midterm elections had confirmed the popularity of FDR and his program. The 1934 ferment in farm and factory, the increasingly strident and persuasive voices of Long, Coughlin, and the others, the pressures from New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress—all these appeared to set the stage for a White House call for action as the new year opened and a new Congress got underway. But that was not how the President behaved. He was obviously cool to a measure that would have seemed ideal for both policy and political reasons—New York Senator Robert Wagner’s bill to guarantee labor’s right to organize. His January State of the Union message, moderate in tone and policy recommendation, was hardly a foretaste of the stormy days to come, calling as it did for a “genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.”