American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Eleanor Roosevelt not only had to cope with her husband’s caution, with aides close to Roosevelt who fretted over the pressure that black leaders put on their boss, with attacks on her in Congress, but had to walk a delicate line between respect for her husband’s political situation and her own right to speak and act for herself. Even more, she had to cope with herself—with her own class and cultural origins, with the influence on her of a great-aunt who had had slaves as personal servants, and with her own tendency to use words like “darky” and “pickaninny.” She learned as she led, and led as she learned.

  Her symbolic role came to a magnificent climax in the spring of 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to permit Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. The First Lady promptly resigned her membership in the DAR and set about, with the enthusiastic help of Ickes and the permission of the President, to help make arrangements for the contralto to sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people mustered at the base of the memorial and along the Mall, a setting that Ickes called “unique, majestic, and impressive.” Marian Anderson began her performance with “America,” a paean to liberty. She ended it with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” an ode to justice and a reminder of inequality.

  Deadlock at the Center

  Why did you lose? The Nation had asked the three progressive governors who failed of reelection in 1938, and the answers were revealing. They saw their defeats as part of a national reaction against the New Deal. People believed that government somehow “had muffed the ball,” said La Follette, that it “had tried to do the right thing, but that in spite of all our relief spending, pump-priming, and social legislation we were back where we started from—in the midst of depression.” Benson of Minnesota and Murphy of Michigan also saw the Roosevelt recession—though they did not call it that—as the underlying problem, especially in the farm areas of their states. La Follette quoted an agricultural economist on the big Republican gains among farmers: “I guess you can’t beat the price of cheese.”

  Some New Dealers decided by the late thirties that the Administration had not only mismanaged the economy but mismanaged the New Deal itself. FDR’s lieutenants came in for a full share of blame. The peppery, cantankerous Ickes caused endless friction as he fought with all comers— Johnson, Morgenthau, Perkins, Hopkins, and especially Wallace. Other rivalries heating up in the Administration were fair game for Washington reporters. The President frowned on these conflicts, but his administrative methods seemed to encourage them; he even appeared to enjoy pitting bureaucrat against bureaucrat. He delegated power so loosely that agency chiefs found themselves entangled in crisscrossed lines of authority. That New Deal programs were uncoordinated and improvised also made for friction. And the President was often an enigmatic boss.

  “You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known,” Ickes blurted out to FDR one day, according to his diary.

  “Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked.

  “No, you never get too hard but you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly.”

  Some have found method in FDR’s administrative madness. His technique of fuzzy delegation, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “often provided a testing of initiative, competence and imagination which produced far better results than by playing sale by the book.” By flouting the administrative rule of “making a mesh of things,” even at the risk of making a mess of them, the President avoided hardened arteries of structure and control. And as usual he was willing to take on the burden of salving the aches and lacerations that resulted from the administrative infighting.

  Yet Roosevelt himself had serious qualms about this way of running things. Since his years in the Navy Department he had maintained a strong interest in executive leadership, planning, and management. He set up an Executive Council of cabinet officers in 1933 and later a National Emergency Council of wider membership; these dwindled into mere clearinghouses of information. By 1936 the President was so troubled by the organizational confusion and policy disorder of the New Deal that he was surprised the Republicans did not make it a crucial issue in the campaign. Realizing that “the President needs help,” he established the Committee on Administrative Management, which developed many of the proposals that made up his ill-fated reorganization proposal of 1937. One of the committee’s few recommendations that survived the legislative gantlet was its proposal that the President be given six assistants with “a passion for anonymity.”

  If the President wanted better management, why did he tolerate and even encourage tangled lines of organization, duplication of effort, and administrative cross-purposes in the executive branch? Partly because he had no choice. He utterly lacked the personnel, machinery, and power for centralized supervision and management. For six years the President’s staff consisted of a press aide, an executive assistant, a bevy of devoted secretaries, one or two speech writers, a legal counsel, and a handful of advisers from outside the White House. To hold the scattered strings of administrative control in his own hands, to get his instructions carried out, to keep subordinates from ganging up on him, even to find out what was going on in the lower echelons, he had his lieutenants come to him, be dependent on him, confide in him, let him pass out rewards and penalties. Hence the Chief Executive became also Chief Disorganizer and Chief Manipulator.

  Even more, the disarray of presidential management and planning was part of the peculiar American system of checks and balances in the structure of the federal government and indeed in the whole federal-state-local pyramid of government. There was nothing FDR could do about this; the Framers of the Constitution had bequeathed it all, and the essential structure had not altered in a century and a half. Roosevelt had to work with all the blockages, slowdowns, veto traps, and compromises built into a system deliberately fashioned to thwart rapid governmental response to popular majorities and to thwart consistent and continuous follow-through on policy and program.

  The crucial test for Roosevelt was his capacity to wring from the system as much of a New Deal program as was possible, and he met this test magnificently. Day after day, he patiently, cunningly, even cynically, pulled strings, played on men’s ambitions, exploited their vanities, applied soothing syrup—inspired them, manipulated them, raised them up, put them off, and eased them away when they were no longer useful to him.

  He did all this so well, indeed, that he may never have recognized how much the system eroded the substance and impact of his New Deal programs. Even more, he never truly confronted the system that in the end would defeat him. All his personal politicking, coaxing, and manipulating could not pack the Supreme Court or purge Congress or reorganize the executive branch, but he was successful enough in his daily maneuvering and dealing to achieve at least half-victories on many policies. Indeed, these partial victories may have helped the President to misconceive the constitutional system of delay and deadlock that he faced. In calling for Court reform he had described President, Congress, and judiciary as three workhorses proceeding in harness, and he had rebuked the Supreme Court for not doing its part on the team. But the Framers had not set up the federal government to be a team—quite the opposite.

  The problem was that the President faced more than groups of legislators and judges and bureaucrats who happened to differ with him. He confronted men and women who were leaders of institutions that had different constitutional foundations, traditions, career patterns, political constituencies, and ideological or policy outlooks than the President’s. Hence to attack individuals in these institutions was not only to trigger opposition from their friends and followers but to activate the full powers of the institutions themselves. To challenge a congressional committee chairman like Senator George meant taking on the seniority system and all that went with it. To seek to add members to the Supreme Court was t
o challenge the whole judicial system. To curb the independence of an agency like the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Reserve Board was to activate a host of client interests backing such agencies. Inevitably New Deal programs were morselized in the ensuing clashes.

  In olden times a President in this predicament might have used his leadership of the governmental and party team to put through party programs over opposition in Congress, state governments, and even the judiciary. This choice was not open to FDR by the late 1930s, for he had not been a strong party leader and his party was not unified philosophically or organizationally. The Democratic party by the mid-nineteenth century had lost much of its egalitarian spirit of Jeffersonian days and had become an alliance of northern commercial and southern agrarian interests and a vehicle of compromise over slavery. For a century, beginning with Martin Van Buren and continuing through FDR, the party had honored a largely unspoken bargain: Northerners would be granted the presidential nomination, Southerners would maintain balance-of-power control in Congress. And this bargain embraced an even less spoken one: northern Democrats would not threaten white hegemony in the South in a quest for black votes. Woodrow Wilson, of southern background, had scrupulously lived up to this bargain, as had FDR less scrupulously in expressing sympathy for the plight of blacks but shunning civil rights legislation.

  The Democracy was weakened and compromised in other ways as well. The adoption of the primary system and the other middle-class, “good government,” and antiparty reforms in the early years of this century had robbed the party leadership of its most potent tool—control over nominations. Many city and other local elections had become nonpartisan, at least in form, and party patronage had been curbed. Since 1933 Jim Farley had provided skillful leadership in Washington, but the party as an organization was withering at the grass roots. It had become too spindly in most rural and small-town areas, too muscle-bound in many urban, “boss-ridden” precincts, and too conservative and conventional in general to recruit the millions of workers, youths, elderly persons, women, and others who were now turning to their own organizations. The Democracy, which had originally gathered strength as a mass movement under “radical” leadership, had lost its power to mobilize the masses.

  Nor was FDR the man to recruit and mobilize the tired and tattered battalions left in the party. Few Presidents had ignored or bypassed their party organizations more than he had. During the emergency year of 1933 he had played down his role of party leader even to the extent of shunning Jefferson Day celebrations. We are thinking, he said piously the next year, “about Government, and not merely about party.” That same year he backed Bob La Follette and other Progressive candidates over Democratic party nominees but cold-shouldered the “left-wing” Upton Sinclair, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California. In 1936 he leaned heavily on Farley and the national Democracy but bypassed the party in setting up a separate election group of laborites and the “nonpartisan” Good Neighbor League. Both these groups worked for Roosevelt in particular but not for Democratic party candidates in general.

  Then, in 1938, the “nonpartisan” leader who had brought the Democratic party great victories but also neglected and bypassed it, suddenly, with lizardlike rapidity, dubbed himself “head of the Democratic party,” held himself responsible for carrying out the party program, and began purging the party of its unfaithful. Roosevelt watchers were bewildered: what strategy was FDR following now? During his first year or two, during the emergency days, it had been a strategy of bipartisanship, as Roosevelt tried to unite both parties behind the NRA and other programs. Then he had switched to a conventional party strategy of uniting the Democracy by devoting much time and political capital to mediating between northern liberals and southern conservatives, at the risk of alienating labor, urban, and left-wing leaders. This approach helped him win his nationwide victory in 1936, but then, with his Court-packing and other ventures he had moved left in search of a different political base. The difference between an electoral victory for Roosevelt and his party in 1936 and a collective victory for his liberal program became clear as his personal coalition collapsed in 1937 and 1938 in the face of counterattacks by southern conservatives and desertions by some northern progressives and laborites.

  The Grand Strategist appeared to be more a Grand Experimenter. But Roosevelt had the fine quality of learning from his victories and defeats. He had learned from the purge something about the outer limits of his power to reshape the Democratic party in the South. His defeats at the hands of George et al. and his inability even to gain a toehold in such bastions as Senator Glass’s Virginia had suggested that a quick and improvised personal campaign was not enough; only a carefully planned, comprehensive, and long-run effort had any chance of overcoming such redoubts. At the same time his success in ousting O’Connor in Manhattan indicated that there might be more possibilities in the North than the President had realized.

  What were those possibilities? The most arresting had for some years been a dream of a number of Democrats—including at times of Roosevelt himself. This was to convert the Democratic party into the clearly liberal-left party of the nation. “We’ll have eight years in Washington,” Tugwell remembered his boss saying to some liberal friends in 1932. “By that time there may not be a Democratic party, but there will be a Progressive one.” Wallace and Ickes and other Administration leaders tended to agree. But just what did FDR intend? To make a dramatic appeal to third-party leaders and members to join the Democratic party? Or to desert his own party, set up a new progressive party as Theodore Roosevelt had done in 1912, and lead liberal Democrats into it? Or simply to try to oust southern conservatives from the Democracy and hope that progressives would join a clearly liberalized Democratic party?

  The purge had proved that the last option would not transform the Democracy; even after FDR’s honest effort to purge southern conservatives, progressives did not flock to the Democratic party banner, perhaps because the effort had failed. The option of a new party was out. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, the President was not a party-breaker. Besides, FDR was in office, while Cousin Theodore had been out of it and wanting back in. What about seeking to liberalize the Democratic party? To a considerable extent the President had already done this, in party program and policy. But it was notable that such Democratic leaders as Al Smith had not deserted the party—they had merely deserted Roosevelt. Nor were southern Democrats quitting. Even after FDR showed them the door and tried to push them through it, they refused to leave their father’s mansion— partly because it was their father’s mansion.

  So eight years after making that electrifying statement to Tugwell, Roosevelt was no nearer to creating a cleanly progressive party. The reason may have been clear to him as a practical matter if not in theory. He was not dealing with a two-party system in which liberal and conservative crossovers would be easy—conservative Democrats hungering to switch over to a right-wing GOP, or liberal Republicans panting to join the Democracy. He was coping with a four-party system in which right-wing Democrats enjoyed their power in Congress and were wary of joining a Republican party that contained hosts of liberals, while liberal Republicans enjoyed their considerable power over presidential nominations and were not eager to join a party of southern Negro-oppressors and northern city bosses.

  The four-party system, then, stretched across a spectrum in which Roosevelt Democrats stood on the moderate left, Hughes and Landon Republicans were near the center, George and Tydings and Byrd Democrats stood to the right of center, and congressional Republican leaders held well to the right of them. These four parties were not merely party wings or collections of like-minded voters. They were built into government. Presidential Democrats held the office, with a boost from the electoral college, which favored Democratic contenders from the big urban states. The presidential Republican party tended to dominate presidential nominating conventions. Over on the conservative side of the spectrum the two congressional parties were happy to stay in their places,
partly because each had a virtual stranglehold on certain party policies and partly because, sitting cheek by jowl ideologically, they had their own conservative coalition.

  Reshaping the Democracy into a liberal party that could compete with a reshaped conservative Republican party was a forbidding prospect for FDR, in short, because the parties had already been realigned into a durable four-party system. Hence it was not surprising that FDR gave up this particular battle, at least for the time being. He had good reasons to do so. His own political stock was low after the purge struggle; he faced the likelihood of losing more and more influence as he neared the end of his second and presumably last term; heightening tension abroad was beginning to affect domestic politics and might bring its own realignment of political forces. It is doubtful that the President conceptualized the problem systematically; but certainly he had a feeling in his gut that he had tried to liberalize American politics and failed.

  So he would return to the “politics of personalismo”—the politics of personal leadership, of putting together ad hoc coalitions in Congress and the country as opportunity dictated, of gaining short-run advances on a few fronts instead of making a policy or program breakthrough on a big front. Once again he would become Tactician-in-Chief, the transactional leader of the Broker State. But there was a price to pay for Roosevelt and his Administration: continued administrative cross-purposes, policy disarray, short-run planning, and political expediency, counterbalanced to some degree by advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of increasingly visible signs of new troubles abroad.