American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The acid test for Roosevelt’s liberalism—and that of all Presidents—was tax policy. Here again the President was left with a sharpened progressive image, and deservedly so, for his original bill had strong redistributionist elements. Yet these were much weakened in the legislative labyrinth. On close analysis, indeed, the Second New Deal appeared a creature less of ideological or policy consistency than of legislative and electoral necessity. Roosevelt had made no philosophically based or motivated grand strategic deployment to the left. He was more like the commander of a guerrilla army whose scattered columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.

  And if the Politician-in-Chief should ever forget the centrality of politics, there were those who would remind him. In particular there was one boisterous, pudgy-faced senator who by early 1935 was in open revolt against the White House. Huey Long attacked the Social Security bill for the payroll tax, the stinginess of its pensions for the aged, and other inadequacies. But the Kingfish’s great moment came when FDR’s tax message was read to the Senate. As the President’s specific proposals were spelled out, Huey pranced around the chamber grinning broadly, rolling his eyes in mock amazement, pointing to himself, and letting it be known that the President was stealing his thunder.

  A few days later, the Kingfish was at it again. He was glad that the President had joined him at last, he proclaimed. He had some questions for FDR, he said, and if the President answered them satisfactorily, he—the Kingfish—would retire from politics, his work done. Delightedly he quoted Will Rogers’s comment:

  “I would sure liked to have seen Huey’s face when he was woke up in the middle of the night by the President, who said, ‘Lay over, Huey, I want to get in bed with you.’”

  Appeal to the People

  “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others.” The “unscrupulous money-changers” stood indicted in the court of public opinion. They had admitted their failure and abdicated. “Abdicated! Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.”

  It was the evening of January 3, 1936. From the rostrum of the House of Representatives, Franklin D. Roosevelt looked out at the crowded and boisterous chamber. This was his annual message on the state of the union, and it had started out as a state paper, as he described the growing world crisis. In October, Mussolini’s forces had invaded Ethiopia, and two months later France and Britain had agreed to the conquest of Haile Selassie’s hapless country. “Nations seeking expansion, seeking the rectification of injustices springing from former wars, or seeking outlets for trade, for population or even for their own peaceful contributions to the progress of civilization, fail to demonstrate that patience necessary to attain reasonable and legitimate objectives by peaceful negotiation or by an appeal to the finer instincts of world justice.” But the President hurried on to what was obviously a campaign speech. Indeed, he had insisted on departing from precedent and speaking in the evening in order to reach millions of radio listeners in their homes.

  “The rulers of the exchanges of mankind’s goods” now “seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.” Lowering his voice confidentially, rocking back and forth behind the rostrum, FDR was drawing blood. Cheers and rebel yells burst from the Democrats, while the little band of Republicans looked on in bitter silence.

  “They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests.” They would “gang up” against the people’s liberties. They would extend to government the principles many of them had instilled into their own affairs: “autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment.” Any doubt that this was the campaign kickoff for 1936 evaporated when the President concluded by anticipating “a balance of the national budget” and seeing no need for new taxes.

  But where were the battle lines? Like the Napoleonic general of the armies who surveys the terrain, sizes up the enemy, mobilizes and measures his own troops, and makes sense of it all, the President by attacking early sought to control the theater of combat. As he reconnoitered the political terrain, however, with his sharp eye for divisions on both sides he could see little but factionalism and confusion. The ideological left was divided as usual between communists and socialists, and both these movements were deeply cleft between moderate and militant elements. Father Coughlin was reorganizing his National Union for Social Justice while keeping some distance from rival organizations. The AFL and the new CIO were still busy at fratricide. Dr. Townsend had become increasingly hostile to FDR and was considering a third-party effort. As for the President’s own party, Al Smith and the rest of the old guard were attacking the President at every opportunity and were now aided and abetted by young ideologues of fiscal orthodoxy such as Dean Acheson and Lewis Douglas and by a host of conservative Southerners.

  One figure no longer dominated the politics of protest. Two months after his waggish response to FDR’s tax bill on the Senate floor, Huey Long had conducted a final one-man filibuster in the upper chamber and returned home. He was flirting with the notion of seeking to deny Roosevelt a second term by uniting the followers of Townsend, Coughlin, Sinclair, and others against him, thus electing a Republican, who would make such a mess of things that a true believer in sharing the wealth—and who else but the Kingfish himself?—would win the presidency in 1940. And the results of a poll commissioned in spring 1935 by the Democratic National Committee indicated that this was no idle threat. As a third-party candidate, Long might receive three to four million votes, enough, James Farley feared, to give him “the balance of power in the 1936 election.”

  Early in September in the Louisiana state capitol, after sauntering around the House chamber telling jokes and barking out orders, Long had swept into one of the marble corridors, followed by his bodyguards. A slight bespectacled man stepped out from behind a pillar, brushed through the guards, and shot one bullet into Huey Long’s stomach. The guards then shot down the assailant and poured bullets into his prone body. He was a young and brilliant Baton Rouge physician who hated Long and his dictatorship and was ready to die in an act of tyrannicide.

  After a bungled operation the Kingfish died a day and a half later, murmuring, it was said, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” Quickly a Long lieutenant, Gerald L. K. Smith, stepped forth to convert the third-party movement into his personal political base. Driven out of Louisiana politics by the inheritors of Long’s organization, Smith by early 1936 was seeking to build a nationwide coalition against the President.

  Roosevelt was now building his own electoral coalition—far broader than the Democratic party. Indeed, there already existed a coalition of groups that New Deal laws and money had aided. The President had called the roll in his address to Congress—farmers reaping higher prices, homeowners enjoying lower interest rates, workers now able to join in unions of their own choosing, the aged cherishing the prospect of pensions, young people in the CCC, the jobless, investors now protected against speculators. Roosevelt already was instructing Farley and his own political aides to establish campaign organizations that would make direct appeals to such groups.

  To the President’s critics this was special-interest politics of the most sordid type. Perhaps they were unduly concerned. The critical presidential reelection campaigns in American history had turned not merely on group allegiances but on presidential qualities that far transcended narrow interest—qualities of trust, commitment, leadership, vision—as well as on widely felt popular benefit and improvement. Although Roosevelt’s popularity as measured by polls had dropped, he still ranked high in public esteem. And he appeared to be fulfilling the supreme promise he had made in 19
32—recovery. Unemployment was down by more than one-third from its height of at least 13 million and national income had increased almost two-thirds from the $40 billion level of 1933.

  Yet the half-filled glass was also half empty. There were still over 9 million jobless in early 1936. Reemployment during the first term was a result less of careful planning than of direct spending to meet human needs, especially following the big work-relief and public works programs of 1935. Huge sections of the population, moreover, were beyond even the long reach of the New Deal. Millions of poor people on the land—tenants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, migrant workers—had hardly felt the impact of New Deal agricultural programs. Nor had millions of southern blacks, imprisoned in local racist cultures and discriminatory state economic and political structures, and the last to reap benefits from the New Deal because reactionary lawmakers in Washington stood guard over white privilege back home.

  Nor had millions of women. Although the New Deal brought unprecedented numbers of women into the government bureaucracy, working women continued to face oppressive job and wage discrimination, and, in a tight labor market, they had little leverage and few options. Married women in particular suffered from the popular notion that unemployment could be reduced by simply denying them jobs. And women were practically excluded from the heavy construction projects at the core of the relief efforts of the PWA and other agencies.

  The plight of poor farmers, blacks, and women, however, hardly seemed to preoccupy Roosevelt’s conservative opposition. The President’s heightened militancy quickly aroused an oratorical counteroffensive. Triumphantly the Liberty League presented Al Smith in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to a great throng that numbered Du Ponts, disaffected Democrats such as Raskob and Davis, and two thousand others. Decked out in white tie and tails, Al had never been more sulphurous. “It’s all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas, or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch,” he shouted, “but what I won’t stand for is allowing them to march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.” There could be only one capital, he warned, Washington or Moscow—“the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of Communistic Russia.” He warned further that come election day he might take a walk—and he did so.

  If the key issue against the New Deal was to be its alleged secret Red sympathies, the leader of the opposition must be William Randolph Hearst. In the happy days of 1932, the publisher had helped tilt the nomination toward FDR. Now his papers addressed the President as “you and your fellow Communists” and ran little ditties like:

  A Red New Deal with a Soviet Seal

  Endorsed by a Moscow hand,

  The strange result of an alien cult

  In a liberty-loving land.

  Almost comical was Hearst’s détente with Smith, whom he had once excoriated. But for Roosevelt the message was clear: with the great bulk of the press against him, he must rely all the more on radio.

  FDR’s most menacing foes were still the conservatives with teeth—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the federal judges across the land who were tying up Administration programs with injunctions, occasionally adorned with anti-New Deal stump speeches from the bench. When in early 1936 the High Court had struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act by a 6-3 vote—on the ground that the processing tax was not a genuine tax but a vehicle for regulating agriculture—Stone, dissenting, had called the decision a tortured construction of the Constitution and warned that the judiciary was “not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have the capacity to govern.” His brethren little heeded his admonition, as the beheading of other New Deal measures followed. Then came the most lethal decision of all, a voiding of a New York measure setting a minimum wage for women. The High Court was now thwarting state power as well as national.

  “There is grim irony,” Stone wrote in his dissent, “in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.” As for Roosevelt, he was no longer offering dissenting opinions. Indeed, he was curiously mute. Like the Tar Baby, he “ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”

  By late spring both parties were mobilizing for battle. From the start Generalissimo Roosevelt directed operations from his own command post, bypassing Farley as needed. He dealt directly with Lewis and other labor leaders. He mollified businessmen by giving a long White House luncheon for business friends of Commerce Secretary Daniel C. Roper. He set up a new “nonpartisan” organization, with the imposing title of the Good Neighbor League, to appeal to religious, black, civic, and related groups across the nation. Above all he sought to attract support from women. With his backing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Molly Dewson organized election cadres of women across the nation. Once again the First Lady demonstrated her capacity to shift almost overnight from her posture of gracious serenity to that of a hardheaded machine politician—who nonetheless viewed campaigns as essentially vehicles for educating the public.

  But Roosevelt would hold the spotlight. “There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley in one of their last meetings, according to the former brain truster. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”

  In June the Republicans, torn between their heart and their head— between their feeling for their old stalwart, Herbert Hoover, and their practical need for a new face—chose Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas to head their ticket and Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, as his running mate. Both men were proud old Bull Moosers. Hoover, who had been castigating the New Deal in speeches around the country for years, hoped forlornly that one big speech at the convention might win him the nomination. A smashing speech it was, but the GOP rank and file knew that a ticket headed by Hoover would buy a journey to defeat. In Landon they found a decent, moderate man, with just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, and rocklike “soundness” that the party hoped to contrast with the nutty theorist in the White House, and yet with a progressive past and reputation. His square, guileless face, rimless glasses, and slightly graying hair made the Kansas governor look like a million other middle-aged, middle-class Americans.

  The Democratic convention later in June was a one-man show—even though the man was not present until the end. FDR supervised the writing of an exuberantly New Deal platform, planned the schedule, and hand-picked the members of crucial delegations, such as California’s. He also forced through the convention a vital change—substitution of a simple majority for the Democracy’s historic two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations, a rule that had tied up countless conclaves and almost dished Roosevelt’s hopes in 1932. The President had astutely asked Bennett Champ Clark, son of a victim of the requirement in 1912, to move the adoption of majority rule.

  The convention came fully to life only when the President arrived at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field stadium to accept the nomination. Before a wildly enthusiastic throng of 100,000, he accused the opposition of seeking to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. “Today,” he said, “we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.” Then the climactic sentences:

  “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

  “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…

  “I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—” A roar burst across the stadium and drowned out the final words: “with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.”

  By midsummer both parties confronted a third force that suddenly seemed to be threatening. Bot
h Coughlin and Townsend had been mustering their troops for action. They hated and feared Roosevelt, held the Republican old guard in utter contempt, and viewed each other with suspicion. The Kingfish was gone, but now two new leaders emerged. Gerald Smith proved to be not only a rousing tub-thumper but a coalition-builder. Befriending Townsend, he brought the doctor into contact with Coughlin and won the priest’s support for an alliance. Since all three men were prima donnas, a compromise candidate was needed. Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota, a longtime agrarian radical whose seamed, leathery face and rustic clothes belied his years at Georgetown University and Yale Law School, would serve. Soon he was denouncing the President as the “bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government” and Landon as “the dying shadow of a past civilization.” His hastily organized Union party boasted that it could command 25 million votes or more and at the least throw the election to Landon, thus paving the way to Huey Long’s great goal for 1940.

  It was clear also by midsummer that Roosevelt had little to fear from the parties of the old left, even as balance-of-power forces. The age-old failure of the broad American labor-liberal-left to unite seemed almost caricatured in the Socialists’ internal divisions. At their convention in May they had renominated Norman Thomas but split over another issue; a large number of old-liners walked out and formed the Social Democratic Federation, leaving the Socialist party with a strong leftward tilt. Caught in the middle, Thomas saw some of his supporters move further to the left while others—including Hillman and Dubinsky—joined the New Deal camp.