American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

[“I may go out by submarine”]: quoted in Time, vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10,

  [“One person in politics”]: quoted in New York Times, July 2, 1932, p. 4.

  4 [“A good sailor”]: quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph (Little, Brown, 1956), p. 313.

  [“Put it right there”]: quoted in New York Times, July 3, 1932, p. 9.

  [“It ’s all right, Franklin”]: quoted in Rosenman, p. 76; see also Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (Knopf, 1962), pp. 346-47; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 1928-1933 (Random House, 1985), pp. 333-34.

  4-5 [At Chicago Stadium]: New York Times, July 3, 1932, p. 9; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, pp. 1-3.

  5 [Acceptance address]: The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 1, pp. 647-59, quoted at pp. 648, 649, 659.

  [Roosevelt in 1932-33]: Adolf Berle Papers, esp. containers 15-17, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Raymond Moley Papers, Roosevelt Library; Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Library; Moley Papers, esp. boxes 1, 8, 63, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

  The Divided Legacy

  6 [“In an airplane”]: Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, p. 1.

  [FDR’s early years]: Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet (Harper, 1985); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928 (Putnam, 1971), books 1, 2; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship (Little, Brown, 1952); Miller; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin, 1957), ch. 29; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), chs. 1-2; I have used occasional phrases or passages from this earlier work in my treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the present volume.

  [“People one knows”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 5.

  7 [Sources of political ambition]: Harold D. Lasswell, Power and Personality (Norton, 1948); Joseph A. Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Rand McNally, 1966); Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper, 1954); Stanley Renshon, Psychological Needs and Political Behavior (Free Press, 1974); Gordon Black, “A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives,” American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1972), pp. 144-59.

  [FDR and the “nouveaux riches”]: see Freidel, Apprenticeship, pp. 12-14; William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R., 1942-1945 (Rutgers University Press, 1958), pp. 13-15, 88-89, 124-25.

  7-8 [FDR’s maturation during Progressive era]: see Davis, Beckoning, chs. 8-12; Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Economic Thought of Franklin D Roosevelt and the Economic Origins of the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1956), ch. 3.

  8 [Eleanor Roosevelt’s early years]: Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story (Harper, 1937), chs. 1-4; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (Norton, 1971), book 1; Burns, Eton, pp. 26-27,

  [“Honneur oblige”]: letter of Sara Roosevelt to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, October 14, 1917, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. *(Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 2, pp. 274-75, quoted at p. 274.

  [“Lived like that!”]: quoted in Lash, p. 135.

  [FDR’s rising ambition]: see Joseph Schlesinger, esp. pp. 8-10.

  [FDR as “farm-labor” legislator]: Freidel, Apprenticeship, ch. 7; Burns, Lion, pp. 41-46.

  9 [“Listened to all his plans”]: Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 166.

  [“Making ten servants”]: quoted in New York Times, July 17, 1917, p. 3,

  [“Proud to be the husband”]: letter, July 18, 1917, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, p. 349.

  [Lucy Mercer]: Lash, pp. 220-27, quoted at p. 220.

  [“I faced myself”]: quoted in ibid., p. 220.

  [Polio]: Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954), ch. 6; Lash, chs. 26-27; Davis, Beckoning, chs. 21-22.

  10 [Eleanor’s issues in the 1920s]: see Lash, chs. 25, 27-28, 30; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Training for Public Life: ER and Women’s Political Networks in the 1920s,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, eds., Without Precedent (Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 28-45; Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (University of Illinois Press, 1987), chs. 1-2 passim.

  [Franklin the politician, Eleanor the agitator]: Lash, p. 348.

  [Governor Roosevelt]: Davis, New York Years, chs. 1-6, 8, passim; Bernard Bellush, Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York (Columbia University Press, 1955); Freidel, Ordeal, chs. 15-16; Freidel, Triumph.

  [Hearst and the League]: Freidel, Triumph, pp. 250-54.

  [“Hasn’t spoken to me!’ ”]: quoted in Lash, p. 347.

  11 [Schlesinger on FDR’s assets]: Crisis, p. 279.

  [Democratic primaries, 1932]: Freidel, Triumph, chs. 17-19; Burns, Lion, pp. 123-34; James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots (Harcourt, 1938), pp. 58-112.

  [Democratic convention, 1932]: Freidel, Triumph, ch. 20; Burns, Lion, pp. 134-38; Farley, pp. 112-54.

  [“California came here”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 137.

  12 [“Good old McAdoo”]: ibid.

  [“The same cops”]: Dos Passos, “Out of the Red with Roosevelt,” New Republic, vol. 71, no. 919 (July 13, 1932), pp. 230-32, quoted at p. 232.

  [1932 campaign]: Freidel, Triumph, chs. 22-24; Davis, New York Years, ch. 11; Burns, Lion, pp. 140-45; Farley, pp. 155-91; Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly, The 1932 Campaign: An Analysis (Farrar & Rinehart, 1935); Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (Macmillan, 1952), chs. 19-31; Rexford C. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (Viking, 1968); Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday, 1957), ch. 12; Tugwell, In Search of Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1972), ch. 6; Schlesinger, Crisis, ch. 33.

  [Press on FDR]: see Literary Digest, vol. 114, no. 2 (July 9, 1932), pp. 2-3; Oswald Garrison Villard, “An Open Letter to Governor Roosevelt,” Nation, vol. 134, no. 3488 (May 11, 1932), pp. 532-33.

  [New Republic on FDR]: “Is Roosevelt a Hero?,” New Republic, vol. 66, no. 852 (April 1, 1931), pp. 165-66, quoted at p. 166.

  [Post on FDR]: Freidel, Triumph, p. 328.

  [Mencken on FDR]: “Where are we at?,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 5, 1932, reprinted in Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe, Malcolm Moos, ed. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 256-60, esp. p. 259.

  [Lippmann on FDR]: “Governor Roosevelt’s Candidacy,” New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1932, reprinted in Lippmann, Interpretations, 1931-1932, Allan Nevins, ed. (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 259-63, quoted at p. 261.

  [Outlook on FDR]: Outlook, vol. 160, no. 7 (April 1932), p. 208.

  12 [“Can’t you see”]: letter to Robert Woolley, February 25, 1932, quoted in Freidel, Triumph, p. 253n.

  13 [Brain trust]: Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (Harper, 1939); Tugwell, Brains Trust; Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (Harcourt, 1973), esp. part 2; Fusfeld, ch. 15; Davis, New York Years, ch. 9; Bernard Sternsher, Rexford G. Tugwell and the New Deal (Rutgers University Press, 1964), part 2; Elliot A. Rosen, “Roosevelt and the Brains Trust: An Historiographical Overview,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 4 (December 1972), pp. 53-57.

  [“Anarchy of concentrated economic power”]: Moley, p. 24.

  [Wells on Berle]: quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 400.

  14 [“Issues aren’t my business”]: quoted in Moley, p. 36,

  [Progressive Republicans]: Alfred Lief, Democracy’s Norris (Stackpole, 1939), ch. 16; Richard Lowitt, George W. Norris: The Persistence of a Progressive, 1913-1933 (University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 549-59; Ronald L. Feinman, “The Progressive Republican Senate Bloc and the Presidential Election of 1932,” Mid-America, vol. 59, no. 2 (April-July 1977), pp. 73-91; Harold L. Ickes, Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), pp. 253, 260-65.

  [Garner on staying alive]: Bascom N. Timmons, Gamer of Texas (Harper, 1948
), p. 168.

  [Farley on active campaign]: Farley, pp. 163-64.

  [Brain trust’s desire for program]: see Tugwell, Brains Trust, pp. 421-24, ch. 39; Tugwell, In Search, ch. 5.

  [Tugwell on FDR]: In Search, p. 128,

  15 [Broun on FDR]: quoted in Tugwell, Brains Trust, p. 283.

  [FDR on intellectuals and flexibility]: see ibid., pp. 286-87, 409-11, 422-24, 441-47, 467-70, 488-96.

  [Young on FDR]: quoted in Josephine Young and Everett Needham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (David R. Godine, 1982), p. 601.

  [FDR-Long telephone exchange]: quoted in Tugwell, Brain Trust, pp. 430-33, I have condensed, slightly rearranged, and supplied quotation marks for Tugwell’s dialogue, part of a wider luncheon-table discussion that remained so vivid a recollection, wrote Tugwell, “that I am willing to stand on its accuracy” (p. 434n.).

  16 [Most dangerous man]: ibid., p. 434,

  [FDR’s speaking campaign]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, ch. 24, part 2; see also Fusfeld, ch. 16.

  [“Alice-in-Wonderland” economics]: August 20, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 669-84, esp. pp. 674-75.

  [“Planned use of the land”]: September 14, 1932, in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 693-711, quoted at p. 699.

  [Freidel on Topeka address]: Triumph, p. 347.

  [Commonwealth Club address]: September 23, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 742-56, quoted at pp. 743, 747, 752, 743, 750, 751-52, respectively.

  17 [Tugwell and Moley on Commonwealth Club address]: Tugwell, Democratic Roosevelt, p. 246; Freidel, Triumph, p. 353n.; see also Tugwell, In Search, ch. 7.

  [“Yankee horse-trades”]: Moley, p. 48, [“Weave the two together”]: quoted in ibid.

  [“Reduce the cost”]: address at Pittsburgh, Pa., October 19, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 795-811, quoted at p. 808.

  [Hoover on FDR as easiest man to beat]: entry of June 27, 1932, Henry L. Stimson Diary, quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, pp. 430-31.

  [Hoover’s September prediction]: entry of September 19, 1932, Stimson Diary, quoted in Freidel, Triumph, p. 365.

  [Hoover’s composition of own addresses]: see Harris G. Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 256; Hoover, Memoirs, p. 234.

  [Mencken on Hoover’s oratorical style]: “The Hoover Bust,” Baltimore Evening Sun, October 10, 1932, reprinted in Mencken, Carnival, pp. 260-65, esp. pp. 262.

  [“Chameleon on the Scotch plaid”]: address in Indianapolis, Ind., October 28, 1932, in Public Papers of Herbert Hoover (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974-77), vol. 4, pp. 609-32, quoted at p. 619.

  17 [“In Hoover we trusted”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 432.

  18 [“Horsemen of Destruction”]: address at Baltimore, Md., October 25, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 831-42, quoted at p. 832.

  [Election night]: Farley, pp. 185-89.

  [Election results]: Svend Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (Frederick Ungar, 1963), p. 91.

  [“I never thought particularly”]: quoted in Time, vol. 20, no. 20 (November 14, 1932), p. 26.

  [Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to election]: quoted in Lorena Hickok, Reluctant First Lady (Dodd, Mead, 1962), p. 92; see also Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (Harper, l949), pp. 74-75.

  The “Hundred Days” of Action

  [Hoover on business fears]: Hoover, Memoirs, p. 269.

  18-19 [Economic conditions, fall-winter, 1932-33]: Time, vol. 21, no. 11 (March 13, 1933), p. 14; Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 319-21; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 11-12.

  19 [Wilson on garbage dump]: Wilson, “Hull-House in 1932: III,” New Republic, vol. 73, no. 948 (February 1, 1933), pp. 317-22, quoted at p. 320.

  [Farm stirrings]: John L. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (University of Illinois Press, 1965), chs. 4-5; Schlesinger, Crisis, pp. 459-61; Literary Digest, vol. 115, no. 3 (January 21, 1933), pp. 32-33, and vol. 115, no. 5 (February 4, 1933), p. 10; Freidel, Launching, pp. 12, 83-85.

  [Congressional inaction]: Burns, Lion, p. 146; E. P. Herring, “Second Session of the Seventy-Second Congress,” American Political Science Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (June 1933), pp. 404-22; Laurin L. Henry, Presidential Transitions (Brookings Institution, i960), ch. 23.

  [Banker on absence of solutions]: Jackson Reynolds, quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 458.

  [Taylor on retrenchment]: ibid. [Lippmann on business leadership]: ibid., p. 459.

  20 [Hunger-march delegation]: Time, vol. 20, no. 22 (November 28, 1932), p. 12, [“Fine! Fine! Fine! ”]: quoted in T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (Knopf, 1970), p. 619. [FDR-Hoover interregnum minuet]: Herbert Feis, 1933: Characters in Crisis (Little, Brown, 1966), chs. 3-10; Frank Freidel, “The Interregnum Struggle Between Hoover and Roosevelt,” in Martin L. Fausold and George T. Mazuzan, eds., The Hoover Presidency: A Reappraisal (State University of New York Press, 1974), pp. 134-49; Davis, New York Years, chs. 42-13 passim; Tugwell, In Search, ch. 9; Henry, ch. 22; Hoover Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 1013-88.

  [White on FDR]: quoted in Freidel, Launching, p. 16.

  [Lippmann on FDR]: ibid., p. 17.

  [“Situation is critical”]: quoted in Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Little, Brown, 1980), p. 300.

  21 [Lippmann on a free hand for FDR]: ibid.

  [“I hate all Presidents”]: quoted in New York Times, February 16, 1933, p. 2; see also Freidel, Launching, pp. 169-74; Davis, New York Years, pp. 427-37.

  [Ford and Michigan banks]: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933-1962 (Scribner, 1962), pp. 11-15.

  [Bank crisis]: Henry, pp. 343-55, Hoover quoted at p. 346; Freidel, Launching, ch. 11; Susan E. Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933 (University Press of Kentucky, 1973).

  [Hoover’s two late calls to FDR]: see Kennedy, pp. 148-49; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (Random House, 1986), p. 25.

  [“End of our string”]: quoted in Freidel, Launching, p. 193.

  [“Plodding feet”]: Robert E. Sherwood, “Inaugural Parade,” in Saturday Review of Literature, vol. 9, no. 33 (March 4, 1933), pp. 461-62.

  22 [March 4, 1933]: “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, vol. 59 (March 7, 1983), pp. 37-38, lady in rags quoted at p. 37; Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Nation Renews Its Faith,” New York Times Magazine, March 19, 1933, pp. 1-2, 19; New York Times, March 5, 1933, pp. 1-3; Edmund Wilson, “Inaugural Parade,” New Republic, vol. 74, no. 955 (March 22, 1933), pp. 154-56.

  22-3 [Inaugural address]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 11-16; on the drafting of the inaugural address, see Raymond Moley, The First New Deal (Harcourt, 1966), ch. 7.

  [“Very, very solemn”]: quoted in New York Times, March 5, 1933, p. 7.

  [FDR’s cabinet]: see Freidel, Launching, ch. 9.

  [FDR’s diary]: Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 333-35.

  [“Nothing to be seen”]: Tugwell, Democratic Roosevelt, pp. 270-71.

  [Bank holiday]: Burns, Lion, p. 166; Freidel, Launching, pp. 214-36; Kennedy, ch. 7.

  [Freidel on FDR and banking crisis]: Launching, p. 218.

  25 [Left-wing press on money changers]: see ibid., p. 219; see also “Morgan’s Friends Must Go,” Nation, vol. 136, no. 3544 (June 7, 1933), pp. 628-29.

  [Economy bill]: Freidel, Launching, ch. 14; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 49-51, quoted at p. 50.

  [Beer!]: William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal (Harper, 1963), pp. 46-47.

  [AAA]: Arthur M. Schlesinger. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), chs. 4-5; Rexford G. Tugwell, Roosevelt’s Revolution: The First Year—A Personal Perspective (Macmillan, 1977), chs. 9, 11; Sternsher, chs. 14-16; John L. Shover, “Populism in the Nineteen-Thirties; The Battle for the AAA,” Agricultural History, vol.
39, no. 1 (January 1965), pp. 17-24; Gilbert C. Fite, “Farm Opinion and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1933,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol.48, no. 4 (March 1962), pp. 656-73; Irvin May, Jr., “Marvin Jones: Agrarian and Politician,” Agricultural History, vol. 51, no. 2 (April 1977), pp. 421-40; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, quoted at p. 74.

  [“Foreclosing judge”]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 43-43, Judge Charles C. Bradley quoted at p. 43.

  [CCC]: ibid., pp. 335-41; John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1931-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Duke University Press, 1967), ch. 1 and passim: press conference, March 15, 1933, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 67-72, quoted at p. 67.

  25-6 [Securities supervision]: Ralph F. de Bedts, The New Deal’s SEC: The Formative Years (Columbia University Press, 1964), ch. 2; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 93-94, quoted at p. 93.

  26 [Executive order on gold hoarding]: see Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 111-16, quoted at pp. 111, 115.

  [TVA]: Paul K. Conkin, “Intellectual and Political Roots,” in Conkin and Erwin C. Hargrove, eds., TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 1-32; Gordon R. Clapp, “The Meaning of TVA,” in Roscoe Martin, ed., TVA: The First Twenty Years (University of Alabama Press/University of Tennessee Press, 1956), pp. 1-15, esp. p. 3; Joseph C. Swidler, “Legal Foundations,” in ibid., pp. 16-34, esp. pp. 24-25; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 19; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 122-23, quoted at p. 122.

  [Norris-FDR exchange]: quoted in Lief, p. 406; see also Lowitt, pp. 567-69. [Mortgage act]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 297-98.

  26-7 [Railroad legislation]: Freidel, Launching, pp. 410-16.

  27 [NIRA] Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 6; Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth (Doubleday, Doran, 1935), chs. 17-18; Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton University Press, 1966), part 1; Kim McQuaid, “Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920-1940,” Business History Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 342-68, esp. pp. 354-56; James MacGregor Burns, “Congress and the Formation of Economic Policies” (doctoral dissertation; Harvard University, 1947), ch. 1; A. Cash Koeniger, “Carter Glass and the National Recovery Administration,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 3 (Summer 1975), pp. 349-64, esp. pp. 351-53; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 202-4, quoted at p. 202.