American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  78 [Long’s opposition to Social Security bill]: Williams, Long, pp. 835-36.

  [Long’s reaction to tax message]: ibid., pp. 836-37; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 327-28.

  [“Lay over, Huey”]: quoted in Williams, p. 836.

  Appeal to the People

  [1936 State of the Union address]: January 3, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 8-18, quoted at pp. 13-14, 10, 14, 17, respectively; New York Times, January 4, 1936, pp. 1, 8.

  79 [Condition of ideological left, early 1936]: see Johnpoll, pp. 167-70; Brinkley, pp. 190-92; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 404-9; Holtzman, p. 171.

  [Democrats against FDR]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 28; Patterson, pp. 250-57.

  80 [Long’s plans for 1936 and 1940]: Williams, Long, pp. 843-47; Kane, pp. 124-25.

  [Long in 1931 poll]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 249-50, quoted at p. 250; Brinkley, pp. 207-8.

  [Long’s assassination]: Williams, pp. 859-76; see also Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (Harcourt, 1946), pp. 418-25.

  [Smith and Long’s legacy]: see Bennett, ch. 9; see also Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith, Minister of Hate (Yale University Press, 1988).

  [FDR’s roll call]: Annual Message, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 15-16.

  [FDR’s instructions to Farley and political aides]: see James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story (McGraw-Hill, 1948), p. 59; Lester G. Seligman and Elmer K. Cornwell, Jr., eds., New Deal Mosaic: Roosevelt Confers with His National Emergency Council, 1933-1936 (University of Oregon Books, 1965), pp. 481-501 (meeting of December 17, 1935).

  81 [FDR in polls and public esteem]: see the results of a January 1936 Fortune poll, as given in Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, eds., Public Opinion, 1931-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 754-55 (Item 1).

  [Economic conditions, 1936]: Historical Statistics, part 1, p. 126 (Series D 1-10) and p. 235 (Series F 163-85).

  [Poor people on the land and the New Deal]: Mitchell, chs. 7-8; Raper, part 5; Saloutos, American Farmer, ch. 7; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

  [Southern blacks and the New Deal]: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Greenwood Publishing, 1970), part 1; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 2.

  [Women and the New Deal]: Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Twayne, 1982), esp. ch. 2; Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Harvard University Press, 1981); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present (Free Press, 1980), chs. 14-17; Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 290-92.

  [“What I won’t stand for”]: O’Connor, pp. 282-84, quoted at p. 283; William E. Leuchtenburg, “Election of 1936,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, p. 2826.

  82 [Hearst’s opposition to FDR]: see John K. Winkler, William Randolph Hearst: A New Appraisal (Hastings House, 1955), pp. 259-68.

  [“You and your fellow Communists”]: quoted in Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 95.

  [“A Red New Deal”]: quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, p. 193.

  [AAA decision]: United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), Stone’s dissent quoted at 87; Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (Viking, 1956), pp. 405-18.

  [Minimum-wage law decision]: Morehead v. New York, 298 U.S. 587 (1936), Stone’s dissent quoted at 632; Mason, pp. 421-26.

  [Roosevelt’s coalition building]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 32; Lash, pp. 439-42; Farley, Ballots, pp. 301-2; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 248-52; FDR memorandum to Farley, July 6, 1935, in Personal Letters, vol. 3, p. 492; Eleanor Roosevelt memorandum to FDR and others, July 16, 1936, in ibid., pp. 598-600; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 449-50.

  83 [“One issue”]: quoted in Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (Harper, 1939), p. 342.

  [Landon’s nomination]: Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (University of Nebraska Press, 1966), chs. 9-10; Leuchtenburg, pp. 2812-16.

  83 [Hoover’s hopes for nomination]: Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Postpresidential Years, 1933-1964 (Hoover Institution Press, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 39-65; McCoy, p. 255.

  [Landon]: McCoy; Burns, Lion, p. 270.

  [1936 Democratic convention]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 306-8; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 579-85.

  [Democratic platform]: reprinted in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 3, pp. 2851-56; see also Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), pp. 101-3.

  [FDR’s acceptance address]: June 27, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 230-36, quoted at pp. 234, 235, 236.

  84 [Coughlin-Townsend-Smith coalition]: Bennett, Prologue and ch. 14.

  [Lemke]: ibid., part 2; Edward C. Blackorby, Prairie Rebel: The Public Life of William Lemke (University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

  [Lemke on FDR and Landon]: quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, p. 252.

  [Union party boast]: see Bennett, p. 191.

  [Socialist convention and fractures]: Swanberg, ch. 10; see, generally, Laslett and Lipsett, ch. 8.

  84-5 [Communist popular front strategy]: Klehr, chs. 9-10; Howe and Coser, pp. 327-32; Kenneth Waltzer, “The Party and the Polling Place: American Communism and an American Labor Party in the 1930s,” Radical History Review, no. 23 (Spring 1980), pp. 104-29; Max Gordon, “The Communist Party of the Nineteen-Thirties and the New Left,” Socialist Revolution, vol. 6, no. 1 (January-March 1976), pp. 11-48; James Weinstein, “Response to Gordon,” ibid., pp. 48-59; Gordon, “Reply,” ibid., pp. 59-65.

  85 [Klehr on Socialist and Communist shifts]: Klehr, p. 194.

  [“TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM”]: Howe and Coser, p. 333. [Landon’s campaign]: McCoy, chs. 11-13; Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 33 and pp. 635-38; Leuchtenburg, pp. 2816-21;Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” Nation, vol. 123, no. 10 (September 5, 1936), pp. 266-67.

  [Hoover in 1936 campaign]: Best, vol. 1, pp. 65-73; Herbert Hoover, Addresses upon the American Road, 1933-1938 (Scribner, 1938), pp. 159-227; McCoy, pp. 279-81, 309.

  [Literary Digest polls]: see Literary Digest, vol. 122,no. 18 (October 31, 1936), pp. 4-5, and no. 20 (November 14, 1936), pp. 7-8.

  [Union party campaign]: Blackorby, pp. 222-31; Bennett, part 6; Tull, ch. 5.

  [“Anti-God”]: quoted in Bennett, p. 230.

  [“Broken down Colossus”]: ibid.

  [Church hierarchy rebuke of Coughlin]: ibid., pp. 254-57; see also George Q. Flynn, American Catholics & the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932-1936 (Universitv of Kentucky Press, 1968), ch. 9.

  [“As I was instrumental”]: quoted in Bennett, p. 228.

  [“If I don’t deliver”]: quoted in Tull, p. 141.

  [Coolness among Union party leaders]: see Bennett, ch. 19; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 626-28.

  86 [FDR’s campaign]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 308-27; Rosenman, pp. 107-39; Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 32 and pp. 630-35.

  [Madison Square Garden address]: October 31, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 566-73, quoted at pp. 568-69, 571-72, as modified by comparison with a recording of the address; New York Times, November 1, 1936, pp. 1, 36.

  3. The Crisis of Majority Rule

  87 [Press on FDR’s victory]: see James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956), p. 284.

  [Presidential election results, 1936]: Robert A. Diamond, ed., Congressional (Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections (Congressional Quarterly, 1975), pp. 251, 290; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 642.

  [Congressional results]: Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, 2nd ed. (Congressional Quarterly, 1985), p. 1116.

  88 [Framers and majority rule]: see Edwin Mims, Jr., The Majority of the People (Modern Age Books, 1941), esp. ch. 2; Henry Steele Commager, Majority Rule and Minority Rights (Oxford University Press, 1958); James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party
Politics in America (Prentice-Hall, 1963), ch. 1; Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Knopf, 1982), chs. 1-2.

  [Jefferson on majority rule]: inaugural address, March 4, 1801, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Putnam, 1892-99), vol. 8, pp. 1-6, quoted at p. 2.

  [McReynolds on FDR]: Paul A. Freund, “Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1 (Autumn 1967), pp. 4-43, quoted at p. 12; see also William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (Random House, 1980), p. 13.

  [“Where was Ben Cardozo?”]: quoted in Eugene C. Gerhart, America’s Advocate: Robert H. Jackson (Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 99.

  Court-Packing: The Switch in Time

  [FDR on possible defiance of Court]: William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Origins of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Court-Packing’ Plan,” in Philip B. Kurland, ed., The Supreme Court Review (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 347-400, quoted at p. 353; see also John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 125-31.

  [“How fortunate it is”]: letter of February 19, 1935, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 3, p. 455.

  [“Shame and humiliation”]: quoted in Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” p. 355.

  [Search for solution to Court problem]: ibid., passim; see also Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon and Schuster, 1953-54), vol. 1, pp. 494-96 and passim.

  90 [Labor’s attack on Court]: James C. Duram, “The Labor Union Journals and the Constitutional Issues of the New Deal: The Case for Court Restriction,” Labor History, vol. 15, no. 2 (Spring 1974), pp. 216-30.

  [Letters to FDR from public]: quoted in Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 368, 366, respectively.

  [FDR on “marching” farmers and workers]: ibid., p. 365.

  [Long’s diary on possible amendments]: ibid., p. 361.

  [FDR on Prime Minister’s threat]: Ickes Diary, vol. 1, pp. 467-68, 494-95.

  90-1 [FDR on difficulties of passing an amendment]: letter to Charles C. Burlingham, February 23, 1937, in Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 661-62; letter to Felix Frankfurter, February 9, 1937, in Max Freedman, annot., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1929-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 381-82.

  91 [Morris on need for unanimous decision]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” p. 374. [Cummings on “packing the Court”]: ibid., p. 390.

  [Option of doing nothing]: ibid., p. 382; Rodney Morrison, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court: An Example of the Use of Probability Theory in Political History,” History and Theory, vol. 16, no. 2 (1977), pp. 137-46.

  [Court in 1936 election]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 379-80.

  [Democratic platform on Court]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 2854-55; see also Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 378-79.

  [FDR’s post-election planning]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” parts 5 and 6.

  92 [Corwin’s proposal]: quoted in ibid., p. 389.

  [McReynolds’s recommendations on retirement]: ibid., p. 391.

  [“Constitution as I understand it”]: quoted in Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), p. 144.

  [1937 inaugural address]: January 20, 1937, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 6, pp. 1-6, quoted at pp. 4-5; see also Rosenman, Working, pp. 142-44.

  93 [FDR’s meeting with cabinet and congressional leaders]: Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days (Doubleday, Doran, 1938), pp. 64-66; Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 64-66.

  [Text of Court plan message]: in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 51-59.

  [FDR at press conference]: press conference 342, February 5, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 35-50.

  [“I cash in”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 294.

  93 [Reaction to plan at Court]: ibid., pp. 294-95.

  [Thompson on plan]: quoted in James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 87.

  [Herald Tribune on plan]: editorial of February 6, 1937, quoted in Alfred Haines Cope and Fred Krinsky, eds., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court (D. C. Heath, 1969), p. 28; see also ibid., pp. 29-34; “Speak Frankly, Mr. President!,” Business Week, no. 392 (March 6, 1937), p. 68.

  [Mencken on plan]: quoted in Patterson, p. 87.

  [Hoover on plan]: Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (Macmillan, 1952), p. 373.

  [New York bishop on plan]: William T. Manning, quoted in Newsweek, vol. 9, no. 8 (February 20, 1937), p. 17.

  [“A grand fight!”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 298.

  94 [Congressional divisions over plan]: Patterson, pp. 88-117.

  [Bailey on plan and “Negro vote”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 98-99; see also Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 115.

  [“I meant it”]: address of March 4, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 113-21, quoted at pp. 114, 121.

  95 [Hughes’s letter]: David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 304-7 and p. 306, n. 50; Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (Viking, 1956), pp. 450-53; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 179-82; Freedman, p. 396; Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 388.

  [“Smoke ’em out”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 303.

  [Wagner Act decisions]: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937); NLRB v. Freuhauf Trailer Co., 301 U.S. 49 (1937); NLRB v. Friedman-Harry Marks Clothing Co., 301 U.S. 58 (1937); see also Robert L. Stern, “The Commerce Clause and the National Economy, 1933-1946,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 59, nos. 5 and 6 (May and July, 1946), pp. 645-93, 883-947.

  [State minimum-wage decision]: West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 391 (1937).

  [Frankfurter on Roberts switch and Hughes’s letter]: letter of March 30, 1937, in Freedman, p. 392; see also ibid., pp. 392-95; Felix Frankfurter, “Justice Roberts and the ‘Switch in Time,’ ” in Allen F. Westin, ed., An Autobiography of the Supreme Court (Macmillan, 1963), pp. 241-48.

  [Roberts’s switch and 1936 election]: John W. Chambers, “The Big Switch: Justice Roberts and the Minimum-Wage Cases,” Labor History, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1969), pp. 44-73; Michael E. Parrish, “The Hughes Court, the Great Depression, and the Historians,” Historian, vol. 40, no. 2 (February 1978), pp. 286-308; see also Frank V. Cantwell, “Public Opinion and the Legislative Process,” American Political Science Review, vol. 40, no. 5 (October 1946), pp. 924-35; Charles L. Black, Jr., The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy (Macmillan, 1960), esp. ch. 3. [Hughes’s new stance]: Danelski and Tulchin, pp. 311-13; Freund; Mason, pp. 455-60; Parrish.

  96 [Labor and Court reform after Wagner decisions]: Duram, pp. 232-34.

  [“Chortling all morning”]: press conference of April 13, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 53-56, quoted at pp. 153, 154.

  [Court plan after switch]: William E. Leuchtenburg, “FDR’s Court-Packing Plan: A Second Life, a Second Death,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1985, nos. 3 and 4 (June-September 1985), pp. 673-89; Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 162-64; Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 319.

  [Garner-FDR exchange]: quoted in Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas (Harper, 1948), p. 223.

  [“Organized and calculated”]: quoted in J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (Atheneum, 1968), p. 233.

  97 [Number of sit-downs, 1937]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941(Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 500.

  [Sit-downs in practice]: ibid., pp. 499-501; Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), pp. 258-59; Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The Ge
neral Motors Strike of 1937 (University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 121-32 and ch. 6.

  97 [“Sit down! Sit down. ”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 501.

  97-8 [Lewis’s plans for Big Steel]: Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 103-5; J. Raymond Walsh, C.I.O.: Industrial Unionism in Action (Norton, 1937), p. 112.

  98 [Unionist’s dash for toilet]: Bernstein, p. 523.

  [Structure of auto work]: see Nelson Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955, ” Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2 (September 1980), pp. 335-53, esp. pp. 336-40; see also Herbert Harris, “Working in the Detroit Auto Plants,” in Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 477-86; Fine, pp. 54-63.

  [GM in 1937]: Fine, ch. 2; Dubofsky and Van Tine, p. 256; Bernstein, pp. 509-19.

  [Fortune on GM]: “General Motors,” Fortune, vol. 18, no. 6 (December 1938), quoted at p. 41.

  [“Most critical labor conflict”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 525.

  [GM strike]: ibid., pp. 519-30; Fine, chs. 5-9.

  99 [Murphy and GM strike]: Fine, pp. 148-55 and passim: Bernstein, pp. 530-51; J. Woodford Howard, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 123-44.

  [FDR and Perkins in GM strike]: George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 400-4; Fine, ch. 10; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp.

  255-70; Bernstein, pp. 534-51; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), pp. 320-24.

  [GM’s capitulation]: quoted in Howard, p. 140; Fine, pp. 298-312; see also General Motors Labor Policies and Procedures (General Motors Corporation, 1937).

  [Chrysler and Ford after GM capitulation]: Bernstein, pp. 551-54, 569-71; Howard, pp. 150-56.

  [Murray and Big Steel]: Bernstein, pp. 441-57; see also Morris Llewellyn Cooke and Philip Murray, Organized Labor and Production (Harper, 1940); Daniel Nelson, “The Company Union Movement, 1900-1937: A Reexamination,” Business History Review, vol. 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1982), pp. 335-57.