American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Revisionists pointed to the critical transition days of early March 1933 as a time when Roosevelt, dealing with terrified bankers pleading for federal action, could have socialized or nationalized the banks. Still others held that, at the very least, the President and Congress could have created a national central banking system that would have given Washington comprehensive control of the banks without “expropriating” them. Such a move would have accorded with century-old attitudes in the Democratic party and would not have alarmed moderates. The conventional view had been that Roosevelt, providing strong leadership, coolly steered crisis banking policy between shoals left and right. This too was challenged by revisionist historians who demonstrated that the President during those critical days delegated banking policy to a group of conservative holdovers from the Hoover White House who, with almost equally conservative Roosevelt men, were intent on preserving the existing banking system, not fundamentally changing it.

  These revisionist historians, of whatever color, were defying members of their own historical establishment who contended that even to discuss questions of “what might have been” or of “what did not happen in history” was to be ahistorical and hence unprofessional. Nevertheless the revisionists were quite right to submit at least preliminary judgments. Historians of all varieties constantly make judgments, in the topics they choose, in the facts that they select and the facts that they ignore, in allotting praise and blame, even when they do not explicitly analyze alternatives. The issue is not whether historians discuss what might have been but how well, by what criteria, they discuss it.

  The most valid and crucial criterion of what leaders have done or not done is their success or failure in meeting their own standards—that is, fulfilling their own goals, realizing their own values—not necessarily the standards or goals or values of the historian writing in a later era with different values. Historians may apply their own standards, but this is a very different enterprise. Some historians have criticized FDR for failing to “socialize” not merely the banking system but the whole economy. But Roosevelt was no socialist, almost all his advisers were not socialists, his party never adopted a socialist program, and the electorate, judging from the Socialist party’s lack of popular appeal, had little yearning for socialism. That the New Deal included one or two socialist experiments such as TVA—and indeed brought that one off with great éclat—is no proof that the New Dealers or the American people had broader socialist aims.

  Even less did the New Deal aspire under the influence of Brandeis and his circle to a systematic decentralization of economic power, on the ideological ground that “smallness is beautiful.” Nor did it wish to “restructure” the economy in any other systematic way—it wished only to subsidize it, stimulate it, make it more productive of jobs and higher wages. Neither did it propose to reshape power relations in any fundamental sense. It sought simply to bring labor, the unemployed, youths, and to a degree blacks into a wider and fairer balance of power.

  Even judged by its own values and goals, however, the record of the New Deal was mixed. Roosevelt’s supreme immediate aim, defined by personal and party promises, was recovery; he achieved partial recovery by the mid-thirties, lost ground in the “Roosevelt Recession,” and regained partial recovery after passage of his big spending bill of 1938. He wanted to make government more humane and caring, and he achieved this for millions of the poor, by placing a floor under them, but other millions were no better off, no more secure than before. Though his tax and other proposals were intended substantially to redistribute income, they succeeded merely to a moderate degree. He wanted to make government more responsive to citizens previously underrepresented, and particularly the millions of the poor, and he helped his party rid itself of the two-thirds rule, but he had little success in either liberalizing the Court or softening the grip of conservative committee chairmen on legislation.

  Why such mixed results, by his own standards, on the part of a President who combined compassion and political skill to an extraordinary degree, had the aid of scores of the most talented men and women, enjoyed enormous support in Congress and among the people for at least four years, and had the depression crisis to give his Administration force and momentum?

  Was it a personal failure? Roosevelt, it is said, simply did not have the gut commitment to his values and goals that would have enabled him to fight his way through to complete victory. But the President’s struggles day in and day out, his ceaseless efforts to patch together ad hoc coalitions to put his measures through, his willingness to brook the opposition of the most formidable adversaries, his fervent and repeated appeals to the people, his tireless maneuvering and manipulating and horse-trading, his feverish experimenting in search of solutions, belie this notion.

  Was it an institutional failure? The New Dealers, it is said, were trying to put twentieth-century programs and policies through an eighteenth-century governmental system; inexorably the delays and the checks and the vetoes made impossible integrated and comprehensive and massive programs of recovery and reform. Rather the system either fostered slowdown and compromise or invited highly personal presidential intervention that could mass political influence at a particular point for a brief time and put something through but not launch and sustain a big and comprehensive effort. That this was a major obstacle to New Deal success, as proposed in earlier pages of this volume, has been widely accepted by political scientists and political practitioners, most notably by the Politician-in-Chief himself, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Or was it primarily an intellectual failure? The President’s reliance on his political machinery had at length failed him, Adolf Berle noted late in 1937, and he predicted that unless FDR was ready to be not a political organizer but an intellectual leader, he would be fighting a rearguard action for the next three years. Such an intellectual failure could have stemmed from the incoherence of public opinion, the disarray of the “public philosophy,” the New Dealers’ meager or faulty theorizing. Neither of the first two of these factors—neither the fragmented and ephemeral reflection of popular attitudes nor the divided and amorphous carryover of powerful ideas from the past—provided the New Dealers with adequate sets of guides and limits to governmental action. The New Deal would have to fashion an ideology of its own, and such an ideology must consist of more than Roosevelt’s magnificent enunciations of broad ends, more than the New Dealers’ versatile and eclectic employment of “practical” political and governmental means. It would need to include the political strategies and operational codes necessary to link ends and means. Such linkages doubtless would have to include ideas for long-term party and governmental reorganizations and modernizations far more sweeping than Roosevelt’s limited and mainly abortive efforts at governmental reform.

  Was there any way out for Roosevelt? Was there any idea or combination of ideas that could have generated a strategy adequate to meet New Deal goals of economic recovery and political modernization, consistent with the President’s basic values, satisfying public opinion, carrying on at least part of the progressive political heritage, and avoiding the institutional veto traps and slowdowns? There was—the twin idea of massive spending and other fiscal strategies combined with national and regional planning.

  To some of the young New Deal economists, heavy deficit spending appeared to be the ideal solution to continued economic stagnation. On the whole, Congress liked to spend, especially on public works back home. The Court would not threaten the federal government’s spending power; Justice Stone at a social affair whispered into Frances Perkins’s ear, “My dear, the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” The publication of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936 equipped the economists with the necessary technical theory and data. Above all, spending offered the President a middle way between doctrinaire economizing and doctrinaire socialism.

  Roosevelt would never have read a book as dense as The General Theory, but he had someth
ing much better—Keynes himself. During the early months of the New Deal the Cambridge economist wrote Roosevelt and his advisers long and warm letters about economic policy. But in May 1934, when the President and the economist met in the White House, both were disappointed by their exchange. “He left a whole rigamarole of figures,” Roosevelt wrote Perkins. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” The President was no economist, Keynes remarked to friends.

  Why did not the President seize on such an enticing solution, especially during the “Roosevelt Recession”? In part because his advisers were divided, as were friendly members of Congress; some were more intent on raising taxes, controlling prices, or undertaking short-run “pump priming” until business could man the pumps. But the main reason was intellectual. Roosevelt was unable as a thinker to seize the opportunity that Keynesian economics gave him. At heart he was as addicted to balancing the budget—someday—as he was to squirreling away bits of string and hanging on to old suits. Keynes called for such massive spending, such dramatic budget-unbalancing, as to stagger even Roosevelt’s imagination. It was a middle way, to be sure, but it called for such radical and unorthodox pursuit of this middle way as to give it the flavor of extremism.

  A Keynesian solution, moreover, called for an unprecedented degree of planning, not only in the fiscal areas of spending, taxing, investment, price policy, and the like, but in physical planning of public works, housing, transportation, urban rehabilitation, and much else. It seemed to be an auspicious time for comprehensive planning, which was increasingly the vogue in business, education, and even religion.

  Roosevelt was a planner, but more of the nuts-and-bolts variety. During his second term he established the National Resources Planning Board and other planning entities, but these units, partly because of hostility in Congress, lacked political muscle and adequate funds. The failure of the President’s reorganization bill had left the executive branch as Balkanized as ever, hardly the vehicle for unifying the Administration and its programs. The Soviets with their five-year plans gave the whole business a slightly sinister cast, and pundits such as Walter Lippmann attacked the proposal as bureaucratic, collectivist, and authoritarian. The outcome was unfortunate. Favoring regional as well as national planning, the President wanted to extend comprehensive programs like the TVA to other valleys, including the Missouri. These proposals died in the legislative labyrinth.

  “We are at one of those uncommon junctures of human affairs,” Keynes had said in the 1930s, “when we can be saved by the solution of intellectual problems and in no other way.” Fiscal strategy and comprehensive planning were largely intellectual problems, embracing the whole realm of thought from minute plans to supreme values.

  To what extent, then, had Roosevelt realized his own value of equality as he neared the end of his second term? Fifty years later, historians were still in disagreement. A Soviet historian came to the New Deal’s defense. “There is no reason why radical historians,” wrote Nikolai Sivachev, a Soviet specialist on the New Deal, “should not admit that Roosevelt’s services to the monopolies does not exclude the possibility of the New Deal’s bringing about a significant change in the structure of American capitalism, that the New Deal reforms bear the stamp of the struggle of the working class and of all democratic Americans for social progress.” Facing the structured inequality in American society, Roosevelt did not become a transforming leader, but the image of a compassionate, beleaguered President fighting to tame capitalism and to deal out a new hand, even if from an old deck of cards, would be fixed in the national memory for decades to come.

  On the other great value—liberty—Roosevelt’s reputation would rest more securely. Despite all the charges that big government would crush Bill of Rights liberties, these continued intact. Indeed, Roosevelt was now beginning to articulate his belief that political and religious liberties were symbiotic with social and economic freedom. Even more, he was symbolizing and inspiring self-expression and creativity among artists and writers across the nation. If, as Alfred Kazin wrote at the time, the New Deal was “weakest in philosophy,” the President was also, in H. G. Wells’s words, “a ganglion for reception, expression, transmission, combination, and realization”—and hence a leader who helped bring about at the grass roots an explosion of artistic creativity in his time.

  The People’s Art

  The floor of the House of Representatives, June 15, 1938. Amid howls of laughter, members of the House are watching the antics of Congressman Dewey Short, Republican from the Missouri Ozarks. Florid of face, squat of figure, the onetime preacher has joined the debate over a bill to set up a permanent federal agency to aid the arts. He will resign from the House, the “Sage of the Ozarks” declaims, if he can help run the division dealing with the dance. He burlesques a tap dance in the aisle, amid more merriment, then rises to his toes to mimic ballet dancers. Art should not be subsidized, he says, for the only good art comes from suffering artists. Nobody can “feel comfortable or enjoy listening to the strains of Mendelssohn with the seat of his pants out.” More hilarity. The Snopeses of Capitol Hill then help kill the measure, 195-35.

  This forensic lynching bee against the arts measure was part of the massive counterattack launched by the Republican-southern Democratic coalition against the New Deal from 1937 to 1939. The cultural projects of the Roosevelt Administration were especially enticing targets. The right-wing coalition used two old congressional weapons—investigation and financial veto. Witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities testified that art and theater and writers’ projects were infested with communists, that the leadership was communist or communist-influenced, that in New York City the Workers’ Alliance, a relief recipients’ union, ran the theater project and the Communist party ran the union. The editor of the conservative National Republic, in his testimony, denounced art “smeared upon the walls” by reds on relief. The headlines were gratifying to the right wing, despite occasional embarrassments, such as when the name of one Christopher Marlowe surfaced during testimony and a committeeman demanded to know, “Is he a Communist?” A year later a southern Democratic and Republican coalition controlling a House appropriations subcommittee crippled the arts, writers’, and music projects and in effect killed the federal theater program.

  The assault on New Deal cultural programs marked the beginning of the end of one of the most humane, imaginative, generous, and daring efforts of the federal government to meet the dire needs and enlarge the opportunities of the nation’s artists. For a man who had no great personal interest in the arts, Roosevelt had devoted an extraordinary amount of time to developing, nurturing, financing, and protecting the cultural programs, which in turn required an enormous amount of placating and conciliating the strong-minded persons involved. He did this in part because of his heritage of patrician patronage of the arts, but far more because he knew that the nation’s artists were among the most vulnerable in a depression.

  Eleanor Roosevelt supported the cultural programs at key junctures, put “federal” art in the White House, and spoke up against censorship of art, telling a group of museum directors in December 1933 that it was “unbelievable that a great nation” could fail to use “its creative talents to the fullest.” Aiding and abetting the effort were tough-minded administrators—Ickes, Morgenthau, Hopkins, and many less known—who early on glimpsed the need for a qualitative as well as a quantitative liberalism. But the true heroes of the effort were the unsung or less sung leaders of the national and local programs, along with the artists, actors, musicians, and writers who, working for a pittance, responded by producing a cornucopia of cultural productions, notable always for quantity but often too for quality.

  The New Deal art program had got off to an early start because the federal government owned thousands of post offices and other buildings whose walls were temptingly empty. Roosevelt had been in office hardly two months when muralist George Biddle, one of the Philadelphia Biddies and a Groton and Harvar
d schoolmate of Roosevelt, wrote FDR about the grand achievements of muralists of the Mexican revolution. Young American artists were eager to capture the “Roosevelt-guided social revolution” on the public walls of the nation. The President directed him to the Treasury, central custodian of federal buildings. With tentative support from such leading muralists as Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh, and Henry Varnum Poor, Biddle plunged into the field of federal subsidy of the arts, amid fears that it was a briar patch.

  A briar patch it was—not only of bureaucratic rivalries, but of ancient conflict between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between artists of competing schools. Biddle and his colleagues were soon dealing with problems that had always bedeviled subsidized art, whether sponsored by state, church, or private patrons. Any relationship between free-spirited artists and institutions dealing with art involved an “awkward embrace” that the honeyed words of politicians and bureaucrats could not ease. To what degree should established artists be favored over the mainly needy ones? To what extent should the “feds” yield to local control or even institutionalize it? How much artistic freedom should be allowed for projects subsidized by the taxpayers? To what degree should artists be supervised—for example, the time they were putting into their work? Who should decide what art should be not only subsidized but chosen for exhibit? What are the criteria for excellence in art?

  These problems rolled in on the public works art directors in the form not merely of in-basket paper but of raging conflicts in the field. In San Francisco, newspaper editors were given a “pre-vue” of new murals in the Coit Tower created under the public works art program, only to discover a miner in one panel reading a well-known local communist weekly, in another panel a hammer and sickle and a call that the “Workers of the World Unite,” and—worst blow of all—renditions of many left-wing front pages but no representation of the establishment San Francisco Chronicle. During the ensuing flap the city park commission locked the big doors to the tower, the local Artists’ and Writers’ Union picketed the closed edifice, and the lower opened again after several months, with only one “subversive” item—a Soviet emblem—missing.