American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Afraid that too few representatives would sign the petition, the Administration resorted to a typical Rooseveltian stratagem. Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch FDR supporter, was involved in a slam-bang race for renomination in Florida. The White House had reason to believe that he would win big. Since Pepper was an open and stalwart backer of the wage-hour bill, White House tacticians—and especially the Tactician-in-Chief—calculated that if the Florida congressman could be induced to speak vigorously for it, his win would be interpreted as a southern endorsement of the bill. As an inducement to Pepper, the White House turned a $10,000 fund over to his campaign. The stratagem worked. After Pepper’s decisive victory so many representatives crowded around to sign the petition in the well of the House that proceedings were delayed. Liberated from Rules, the bill passed the House by a heavy vote. Senators threatened to filibuster it to death, but after further compromises the bill finally became law in June.

  “That’s that,” said Roosevelt as he signed the measure. It was a sigh of relief over the outcome, of disappointment over the weakening compromises—and perhaps of dismay over the hurdles in the legislative process. Part of the problem lay with the President himself, for the White House had failed to establish close relationships with rank-and-file Democrats in the lower chamber. When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, FDR put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even that appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President the next year, “… and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group” to consult about policy.

  As Washington returned more and more to “politics as usual” in 1937 and 1938 after the glory days of the early New Deal, organized interest groups appeared to play a more dominant role. For some bills, indeed, the imprimatur of pressure-group leaders was now as important as the sponsorship of the White House. Low-paid workers had had insufficient political strength to smooth passage of the wage-hour bill, while the leadership of the AFL retained much of its old hostility toward minimum-wage laws. The reorganization bill had had tough going because there was only thin, generalized public support for a streamlined executive branch. For spending programs, however, Congress gave many millions more to FDR than he had requested in his message of April 1938. Farm programs were continued without undue political controversy or delay. Earlier programs had helped create a huge constituency of the needy expecting and demanding such programs.

  Organized and organizing workers and farmers had helped build the New Deal, which in its turn had invigorated the labor and farm movements and organizations. Thereupon the groups ran ahead of the New Deal, pressing for recognition and rewards that the Roosevelt Administration would not or could not grant. John L. Lewis’s Committee for Industrial Organization, more hostile than ever to the AFL, was one of the most militant of these groups. Once dependent on Roosevelt’s political and psychological patronage, and on legislation such as the Wagner Act, the CIO was becoming more independent of the Administration and willing to put pressure on it. And Lewis, angry over “broken promises,” was infuriated by FDR’s statement during the sit-down strikes: “A plague on both your houses.”

  With his pug face wearing its customary scowl, the CIO leader wanted a payoff for his help to FDR in 1936. It was not forthcoming, as Roosevelt played his own brand of group politics. But Lewis could play his too. The transformation of the original CIO into the Congress of Industrial Organizations late in 1938, with Lewis as president and Murray and Hillman as vice presidents, signified not only a wider separation from the AFL but the determination of the CIO to follow its own economic and political course—with or without Roosevelt’s patronage.

  Crucial in the mix of leadership factors was FDR’s own popularity. The President in 1938 was losing public favor, as measured by polls, not only among upper-income voters but even more among middle- and lower-income groups. In fact, the decline was not as steep as it seemed, and even at the lowest point of his popularity in 1938 he commanded the support of a bare majority of the people. But in the flush days of the early New Deal he had given the impression of much greater popularity. Public attitudes were also highly ambivalent. The vast majority—even of executives and professional people—approved of him personally, or at least “liked his personality,” as the Fortune pollsters phrased it. Newspaper reports squared with the poll results. Support was much lower for his “methods,” his advisers and associates, and some of his policies. Opinion, as the polls registered it, was significantly, but not sharply, skewed by income; of five major economic groups—blacks, poor, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income—all but the first two opposed the President’s methods. Running through the opposition was a streak of fear of FDR’s power and his use of it.

  A determined and even vengeful President, a New Deal still not fully dealt, a Congress moving toward all-out resistance to the Administration, group interests fired with both hope and disillusion, congressional elections nearing in the fall of 1938—the tangle of leadership elements had become a gridlock of political forces. How unlock it? At some point in the spring of 1938 the President came to a drastic decision—it was high time for a party showdown, time for a purge of anti-New Deal Democrats in Congress. That Roosevelt could come to this decision was the true measure of both the intensity of his feeling and the urgency of his situation. He did not enjoy personal confrontations. He would rather manipulate his adversaries, or maneuver around them, than attack head-on.

  That Roosevelt would seek a solution within the Democratic party was another measure of his concern. If the Democracy appeared to be a part of the problem rather than a solution to it, the President had to share the blame for this. For some years he had variously used, not used, and abused the Democracy as it served his electoral interests—by taking little leadership in developing grass-roots organizations, by flirting with laborite third parties in New York and a few other states and with the La Follette Progressives in Wisconsin, by building up and exploiting his personal leadership and personalismo rather than shaping and utilizing collective party leadership. In suddenly assuming active generalship of the party, moreover, the President was invading political turf far better defended than he may have realized.

  Doubtless he had observed the experience of the GOP. In many ways— and often unnoticed by the national press—the Conservatives who dominated the Republican party had been trying “soft purges” of GOP liberals, just as New Dealers had been considering ways and means of overcoming conservatives in the Democracy. Right-wing Democrats and Republicans had toyed with the idea of coalition, just as New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans had done. FDR’s purge effort was not new—but it was bigger, more intensive, more dramatic.

  It was more visible and open, because the President wanted it that way. Firing the opening salvo in a fireside chat in June 1938, he lashed out at “Copperheads”—reviving the term for pro-peace Democrats of the Civil War—who in the great fight for liberalism wanted “peace at any price,” and he defined the issue in 1938 as between liberals who saw that new conditions called for new remedies and conservatives who believed that individual initiative and private philanthropy would solve the nation’s problems. As President of the United States, he said disingenuously, he was not himself taking part in primaries or asking people to vote Democratic. But—

  “As the head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform,” he had every right to speak out in clear instances when liberal and conservative Democrats were opposing each other.

  The drive for party realignment, James Patterson noted later, was at last underway. But the President was not mainly thinking in grand strategic terms. That was not his interest at the moment. He simply wanted to rid Congress of men who were obstru
cting the New Deal. And he would invade southern and other states and meet his foes on their own political ground.

  The conflict that followed in the Democratic party had all the intensity of fratricidal strife, along with a few touches of comic opera. A host of Democratic politicians had to calculate whether to stick with the President or break with him or somehow hide, whether to work with Republicans in an ad hoc coalition or rely on their own party, how to take some credit for the more popular elements of the New Deal without being labeled yes-men for the White House.

  Roosevelt too had to calculate just how he would grant recognition or withhold it and what kinds of blessings he would bestow. The President was put to the test in Kentucky, where he was strongly backing his loyal Senate Majority Leader, Alben Barkley, over the ebullient governor of the state, A. B. “Happy” Chandler. Greeting the presidential train, Happy deftly slid into the presidential limousine to take his bows too, while Barkley smoldered and Roosevelt maintained his usual sang-froid. As the “purge train” continued on its way, the President gave his apostolic benediction to good friends like Congressmen Lyndon Johnson and Maury Maverick in Texas, delicately criticized Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina for allegedly saying that a family could live on fifty cents a day, and later, in Maryland, stumped for two days against the urbane Senator Millard Tydings.

  The hardest confrontation for Roosevelt came in Georgia, his “adopted state,” where the venerable Senator Walter George was fighting off a challenge from Lawrence Camp, a young attorney hand-picked by the Administration. While George sat impassively on the platform a few feet away, the President addressed a throng of 50,000 persons at Barnesville:

  “Let me make it clear,” he said, that the senator “is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.” But a candidate had to answer two questions, FDR went on. “First, has the record of the candidate shown, while differing perhaps in details, a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the Government as they are constituted today; and secondly, does the candidate really, in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in those objectives?” George, he asserted, could not answer yes.

  “Mr. President,” said the senator when Roosevelt finished, “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”

  “Let’s always be friends,” Roosevelt replied smilingly.

  The purge had provoked the nation’s press. Editors and columnists condemned Roosevelt’s “meddling” in “local” elections. Cartoonists pictured him as a donkey rider, a pants kicker, a big-game hunter. A White House cabal was sounding the death knell of representative government, former brain truster Raymond Moley wrote in Newsweek. Liberals criticized the President for conducting the purge in an improvised, unplanned way. Feeling was most intense within the Democracy. Some party leaders evaded the issue: Farley was in Alaska part of the time, and Garner, increasingly turned off by the New Deal, would not meet the President in Texas. Southern conservatives were the most bitter; to them the purge was an assault on the southern way of life as well as on their own power in the party. The southern people, said Senator Glass, “may wake up too late to find that the negrophiles who are running the Democratic Party now will soon precipitate another Reconstruction period for us.”

  With their votes southern whites gave their verdict: the South would remain unreconstructed. George, Smith, and Tydings, FDR’s chief targets, all won decisively. Maverick and other FDR supporters—though not Lyndon Johnson—lost in Texas. While Barkley beat Chandler in Kentucky, several anti-New Dealers or semi-New Dealers won in northern states. FDR had one small but pleasing consolation prize. His friends in New York had used both American Labor party support and Democratic bosses to replace John O’Connor, FDR’s foe on the Rules Committee, with James H. Fay, a war veteran with impeccable Irish antecedents. Still, the purge had been a “bust,” as Farley had predicted. Said the President glumly, “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present.”

  But the nadir of FDR’s fortunes was yet to come. In the fall congressional elections the Republicans almost doubled their strength in the House and added eight senators to their small band in the upper chamber. While the liberal bloc in the House was halved, the Republicans lost not a single seat. Some promising Republicans with fresh appeal won in statewide elections as well: Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, Robert A. Taft in Ohio, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, while the young Tom Dewey almost overcame the redoubtable Herbert Lehman for governor of New York. A trio of progressive governors failed of reelection: Frank Murphy in Michigan, Philip La Follette in Wisconsin, Elmer Benson in Minnesota.

  The President sought to play down the results. In the time-honored way of Presidents explaining midterm election setbacks, he contended that the trouble lay in local scandals and squabbles, labor strikes, poor candidates. And after all, his party still held big majorities in the House and Senate. But one fact could not be blinked: Franklin D. Roosevelt had suffered his first major electoral defeat in eighteen years.

  FDR would willingly defy conservatives but not constituents. If it was a mark of his courage that he would press his fight for liberalism following his Court-packing and other legislative defeats and the “Roosevelt recession,” it was a mark of his caution that he took a much more moderate posture after the congressional and state election returns of 1938. He told the new Congress in January 1939 that “having passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” he and they must now “preserve our reforms.” Not that he would surrender the New Deal ship. He warned the Democracy, in a Jackson Day dinner speech, against being the “Democratic Tweedledum” to a “Republican Tweedledee.” And he made a spate of major appointments guaranteed to raise conservative hackles: Hopkins to follow Roper as Secretary of Commerce, the now unemployed Frank Murphy to take Cummings’s place as Attorney General, Frankfurter to replace Cardozo in Holmes’s old seat on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas to succeed Brandeis on the high bench.

  But if Roosevelt would not retreat, he would not advance. He reverted once again to his old economic orthodoxy, refusing to equalize old-age benefits between rich and poor states by raising the federal contribution to Social Security. “Not one nickel more,” he said. “Not one solitary nickel. Once you get off the 50-50 matching basis the sky’s the limit.” He refused to support Wagner’s proposed national health program embracing medical insurance and funds for child and maternity care, public health services, and hospital construction. He complained to Morgenthau, according to the secretary, that he was “sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health.”

  The President now seemed almost rueful about his public image. “You undergraduates who see me for the first time,” he told a delighted student audience at Chapel Hill, “have read … that I am, at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.” They had heard, he went on amid laughter, that he had invented the economic royalist, was about to plunge the nation into both war and bankruptcy, and “breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’

  “Actually I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.”

  Even if the President had wished to expand the New Deal, Congress would have stopped him. The election results had bolstered southern committee chairmen as the power elite on Capitol Hill. They not only held the balance of power between Republicans and New Deal Democrats but used the ancient weapons of congressional attack on presidential leadership. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texan Martin Dies, renewed its jabs at Ickes, Hopkins, Perkins, and other officials for their “softness on communists.” Another
committee under Howard W. Smith exposed reds and irregularities in the National Labor Relations Board. A conservative coalition of southern Democrats attacked the President’s crucial appointing power, both by enforcing “senatorial courtesy” against top appointments and by restricting the political activities of lower-echelon federal employees. Even more, Congress slashed funds for some New Deal agencies, and especially for administrative functions that in the long run might critically influence the impact of programs—planning, research, economic analysis, information, staffing.

  The New Deal lived on, however, in substance and style—and no one personified it more arrestingly than Eleanor Roosevelt. It was in these waning days of the domestic New Deal that she moved to the fore as a leader extraordinarily sensitive to needs her husband’s program had not fully met. It was not surprising that she would work for women’s rights, or concern herself with dire problems of housing, health, and poverty in field and factory, or devote an enormous amount of time to the plight of the nation’s young people, several million of whom lacked jobs.

  But the First Lady advanced as well into the nation’s most sensitive political and social battlefield—the needs and rights of black Americans. She established close working relationships with black leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White while her husband remained cautious. She strongly supported an antilynching bill, in contrast to her husband, who deplored the horrifying lynchings in the South but dared not recommend legislation for fear of alienating southern congressional leaders who could kill or mutilate his other measures.