The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The trouble was that Roosevelt could find no way to overcome the stubborn fact that the legislature shared governmental power with him but mirrored a different pattern of political power. He tried the formula of nonpartisanship, but pious gestures could not wave away the realities of politicians’ conflicting loyalties and ambitions. He tried appealing to the people over the heads of the Republican leaders, but the latter gave enough ground to take the sting out of public resentment and then took up another obstructive position. He knew that he could carry his case to the voters in the 1930 election, but the Republicans would probably still retain their grip on the legislature. And always he labored under the difficulty that even the Empire State was not strong enough to cope with problems that were national or international in character. The fight over St. Lawrence power—an issue closer to Roosevelt’s heart than any other during his governorship—illustrated the intractable nature of the political stalemate.

  After piling up in the Great Lakes water flows into the St. Lawrence River and then races down through a narrow gorge to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. “In the brief time that I have been speaking to you,” Roosevelt said midway through his inaugural address, “there has run to waste on their paths toward the sea, enough power from our rivers to have turned the wheels of a thousand factories, to have lit a million farmers’ homes.…” Much of this unused power was spilling through the St. Lawrence. Roosevelt knew the background of the situation—how the legislature years before had given and then rescinded a free grant to a private company to develop the power of the Long Saulte Rapids, how Smith had conducted a long running battle over water power with the Republican leadership, how strongly represented the utility interests had always been in the Republican legislature. By 1929 the private power interests seemed as potent in New York Republican circles as before; H. Edmund Machold, the former speaker of the assembly and soon to be chairman of the Republican state committee, was a partner of Floyd L. Carlisle, the “power baron” of northeastern New York, as his enemies called him.

  Campaigning in central New York State, Candidate Roosevelt had solemnly preached “Thou shalt not steal” and proceeded to belabor the Republican leaders as schemers and thieves. Now Governor Roosevelt told the legislature that it was intolerable that the use of the “stupendous heritage” of water power should be longer delayed by “petty squabbles and partisan dispute.” The Republicans were not impressed. The next day, in his message to the legislature, the governor reiterated that the people’s control of their water power could not be alienated by long-term leases; then he looked up at his audience and added with a smile, “This is one of those questions on which I hope we can reach agreement.”

  Skeptical laughter rippled through the assembly chamber. It was clear that agreement was impossible. But at least Roosevelt was able to define the central issue: How much should be done by the state in both developing and distributing electricity from the people’s water power, and how much by private enterprise?

  What was Roosevelt’s answer to the question? He had no detailed program when he came to office, but he learned quickly. He learned mainly from experts in the field. Leland Olds, a student of utility regulation, was one of those invited to the executive mansion. He arrived on a late afternoon in February and got a warm welcome from the governor. Olds watched Roosevelt and Rosenman splash in a heated pool built in an old hothouse behind the mansion, sat wonderingly during dinner while every subject except the business at hand was batted briskly around the table. After dinner Roosevelt reminisced about Hyde Park history and the farmers in Dutchess County who could not get electricity. Then came questions to Olds until after midnight—long, searching questions about accounting methods, the valuation theory, court decisions, a people’s counsel for rate cases. Watching these proceedings, Rosenman felt that the governor had exhausted both Olds and the subject.

  By March 1929 Roosevelt was ready with a plan for the St. Lawrence. The power should be developed by the state, he said, but transmitted and distributed by private enterprise. The rub lay in the rates charged by the companies. Rate regulation by the state Public Service Commission, Roosevelt told the legislature, had become ineffective, largely because the courts had allowed high profits based on inflated valuations. Frankly proposing the theory of contract rather than the theory of regulation, he urged that the state be authorized to make contracts with transmitting and distributing companies, “under which a fair price to the consumer will be guaranteed, this price to make allowances only for a fair return to the companies on the actual capital invested in the transmitting and distributing of this particular power energy.” This proposal was a departure from Smith’s reliance on rate regulation by the Public Service Commission.

  Roosevelt’s only specific request of the legislature was for the creation of a body to submit a specific plan for St. Lawrence development to the lawmakers. To give the bills a bipartisan character the governor asked the Republican leaders to introduce them, but they refused to do this or even to let the Democrats bring the bills on the floor. The 1929 session ended with the measures quietly stifled in committee.

  The next session saw a different outcome, largely because 1930 was an election year. Roosevelt had asked Howe to get comparative bills for New Yorkers using private power and Canadians using publicly developed electricity, and he was ready to use the findings in his fight with the utilities. The opposition was divided; W. Kingsland Macy, a rising young Republican leader in Suffolk County, demanded the resignation of the new head of the state Republican committee, an associate of former chairman Machold, on the ground that it was issues like water power that the “party is licked on.” In January 1930 the water power bill was introduced in the legislature along the lines Roosevelt had asked. “A complete triumph,” Walter Lippmann wrote the governor.

  But this was only a first step. During late 1930 the St. Lawrence Power Development Commission appointed by the governor made a study of the situation, and Roosevelt kept the issue alive in his re-election campaign. The report of the commission in January 1931 was highly favorable to the project from both the engineering and financial standpoints. The commission majority followed Roosevelt’s previous stand on state development of the power and private distribution through the contract method. Two months later a bill was introduced embodying these recommendations.

  Then another altercation flared up—and once again it was over the power of the governor and legislature. Senator John Knight, Republican leader of the senate, introduced an amendment canceling the right of the governor to appoint the members of the power authority, and specifying five individuals by name. Roosevelt was indignant. He had warned the Republican leaders in a conference that he would not accept such a provision; he was forced to the conclusion, he announced, that the Republicans were trying to insure a veto. Power development, he said, fell under the governor’s powers—“Executive responsibility must be armed with Executive authority.” Both sides knew that the right to name the new authority meant control over the actual use of the vast power of the St. Lawrence.

  Roosevelt’s tactic was a direct appeal to the people. He dramatized the Republican move as a play by the utilities to balk the people’s development of their own power. He announced his plan to go on the air a few days later, but just before the scheduled talk Knight and his followers surrendered. The governor used his radio time to sermonize that the influence of “Mr. and Mrs. Average Voter” was stronger than that of private corporations and a handful of political leaders.

  Perhaps it was. Yet even with the bill finally passed and a Roosevelt-minded power authority appointed, the whole project was to fail. For now it ran into a configuration of stubborn facts—the fact that only the national government could make a treaty with Canada involving the St. Lawrence, the fact that President Hoover was sensitive to the opposition of private power and railroad interests, the fact that by late 1931 Roosevelt was already emerging as Hoover’s likely opponent the following year. A week after Rooseve
lt accepted the Democratic nomination in July 1932 he asked for a conference with Hoover to discuss, prior to completion of negotiations with Canada, New York’s share of the cost of development. In a sullen reply Hoover said that it would not “be necessary for you to interrupt your cruise by a visit to Washington.”

  As it turned out, more than a quarter-century was to pass before the swift-running waters of the St. Lawrence would light the homes and run the separators for the farmers of northern New York.

  The flaccid hand of stalemate lay over all Roosevelt’s major programs during his governorship. The legislature’s response to his proposals wavered near a point of unstable equilibrium between the dislike of the rural-based legislators for Roosevelt’s progressive recommendations and their fear of writing a record of negation and obstruction on which the next Republican statewide ticket would ride to defeat. Since for the most part they had little fear for their own seats and their concern for the ticket was not profound, the point of equilibrium was much nearer do-nothingism than action. And if Roosevelt somehow spurred the legislature to legislate, he confronted the bleak fact that even the Empire State was still but one of forty-eight, and its legal and material powers were sharply circumscribed.

  Do-nothing government had become a far more critical problem during Roosevelt’s second year of office than ever before, for in that year the Depression began to bite deep into the flesh and bone of the state’s economy. Production dwindled, prices shrank, wages declined, farm income fell off sharply. New York City’s Bank of the United States collapsed in the largest bank failure in American history. Thousands of jobless were soon walking the streets. As income from taxes diminished, the state’s responsibility to prevent suffering increased. So did the need for drastic action—but the need ran head on into the stalemate in Albany.

  Farm policy was a case in point. Roosevelt knew the plight of the farmers, who had suffered eight years of high industrial prices and somewhat depressed agricultural markets even before the advent of the Great Depression. He knew, too, that the difficulties were deep-reaching, involving factors of supply and demand, middlemen’s costs and profits, tariffs, farm abandonments, urbanization, and others. “The ultimate goal,” he said in his annual message to the legislature in 1929, “is that the farmer and his family shall be put on the same level of earning capacity as his fellow American who lives in the city.” He understood specific aspects of agricultural economics—transportation costs, the national interrelationships of farming, the tendency of milksheds to cut across state lines, land misuse, the haphazard planlessness of much farm production and marketing.

  His speeches impressed farmers and farm politicians outside New York State as well as inside. “We thought you were acquainted only with Wall Street magnates,” wrote a Wisconsin official after Roosevelt had described vividly the gap between the prices farmers got and the prices consumers paid.

  But the actual legislation passed was almost trifling compared with the immensity of the problem. More state aid for highway construction, for snow removal, for grade crossing elimination, and for agricultural research met some of the farmers’ specific complaints but hardly changed the economic dimensions of their lives. As the Depression deepened in 1930 and 1931 more basic measures were adopted, such as a bill providing more credit facilities for crop production. The obstacle to more drastic action did not lie mainly with the legislature, which was fairly responsive to farm needs and anxious to stop the governor from capturing farm leadership. It lay in the iron fact that a single state could not cope with a national situation.

  In the case of labor legislation Roosevelt faced both a hostile legislature and a nationwide problem. During his first term he won from the legislature measures providing a half-holiday a week for women working in factories and stores, changes in the use of labor injunctions, and a slight expansion of workmen’s compensation. Only in 1931 did the legislature pass a bill limiting women and children to a six-day, forty-eight-hour week. More sweeping proposals, such as minimum-wage measures, met the inevitable—and often in some cases unanswerable—argument that the resulting higher costs might force industry to leave the state.

  Thus the limited nature of the state program was a gauge of hard political circumstances, not of Roosevelt’s own philosophy. Operating even then a “little left of center,” to use his later term, he anticipated many of the New Deal programs in his continuous search for specific ways to meet specific problems. As the severity of the problems broadened during the Depression, so did the scope of his solutions. In his thinking he was ranging somewhat ahead of most politicians in the Northeast. “Is there any possible device to be worked out along volunteer lines,” Roosevelt wrote a Nebraska bank president early in 1930, “by which the total wheat acreage of the nation could gradually be exhausted to the point of bringing it in line with the actual national consumption figure?” Long before TVA he was talking about the need of public competition with private utilities, “at least as a yardstick.”

  The outlook of his major appointees was further testament to Roosevelt’s general liberalism. His industrial commissioner was Frances Perkins, the slim, pretty, serious-minded woman who had been a social worker when she first met Roosevelt in his senate years, and who for ten years had served as a member, and then chairman, of Smith’s Industrial Board. In making her commissioner, Roosevelt put her in an administrative post with supervision over many men—at the time a move that caused some lifting of eyebrows—and he left her free rein in running the agency. His advisers on water power and utilities included men who were later to become prominent in the New Deal: Morris L. Cooke, Leland Olds, James C. Bonbright, and, unofficially, Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School. Other future New Dealers advised him on farm policy, social security problems, and relief.

  On the whole, Roosevelt made an impressive record as governor. Considering that brilliant achievements were impossible in the wake of Smith’s eight productive years in the office, considering, too, that the legislature stood ready to spike any ambitious effort at reform, Roosevelt made the most of what opportunities he had. He won no single striking victory, but he operated with telling results in a wide range of state activities, including social welfare, government efficiency, prison reform, and utility regulation, as well as in the face of more serious problems stemming from the crisis in field and factory. And as the Depression deepened and state problems multiplied, Roosevelt showed growing power and vigor in meeting them.

  Above all, the governor possessed the indispensable quality of accepting the need for change, for new departures, for experiments. He recognized that government was not a bogy but an instrument for meeting the problems of change. And he had the capacity to learn. It was these things that made his governorship truly an apprenticeship in politics and statecraft.

  THE POWER OF PARTY

  Early in his first term Roosevelt discovered that the state had a small boat for inspecting canals. Why not take it over for his own inspection trips? This was just the kind of innovation he liked. It was a comical sight—the large figure of the governor and his ample family and crew perched on the small craft as it poked slowly from lock to lock, with the official car and chauffeur and a horde of state police tagging along on the nearest highway. But it was also, politically, a shrewd move, dramatizing Roosevelt’s interest in upstate affairs.

  These excursions were genuine inspection trips for the governor, even though Mrs. Roosevelt had to serve as his eyes and ears. Carried from the barge to a car, he could do little more than drive around the grounds of hospitals, asylums, and other state institutions, but she quickly learned to find out the things her husband wanted to know: Did the inmates actually get what the menus listed? Were beds too close together, or folded up during the day, indicating congestion? How did the patients seem to feel and act toward the staff? “We have got to de-institutionalize the institutions,” Roosevelt wrote to Howe in the summer of 1929.

  Roosevelt also began his famous “fireside chats”
during his first term. Direct and pleasing in tone, these radio talks were aimed especially at upstate New Yorkers, who got most of their information through the Republican press. Radio still faced a host of technical difficulties, and Farley had to send questionnaires throughout the state asking local Democrats how good the reception was from various stations. Roosevelt, of course, began the first of his talks with the claim that they would be nonpartisan reports. Actually, most of them were highly partisan thrusts at the Republican legislators.

  Indeed, Roosevelt played politics expertly and tirelessly throughout his gubernatorial days. While he occasionally donned the cloak of nonpartisanship, he was essentially a party politician. The American governor is usually the leader of his state party, operating through lieutenants of his choice. Such was Roosevelt. But in leading the New York State Democracy he ran into the same weaknesses that he had found—and vainly tried to solve—in the national party in previous years.

  An investigation by Farley confirmed Roosevelt’s worst suspicions. “There is no such thing as a Democratic organization upstate,” Farley reported bluntly. The few militant local organizations to be found were interested only in local elections; in some cases they traded votes with the enemy, backing Republicans for state and national office in exchange for local offices. Farley found much apathy and discouragement; there was little sense of “being part of a triumphant state organization.” The state committee was moribund. Its lists of upstate workers were almost useless; its chairman, William Bray, installed by Smith, was an aged politico, lacking energy and imagination.

  Together, Roosevelt and Farley worked out a scheme to bypass Bray and the committee and to strengthen the Democracy’s roots upstate. The scheme bore the earmarks of Roosevelt’s earlier thinking. A new organization—the Union of Democratic Clubs—would be constituted, not out of committeemen, but directly out of rank-and-file Democrats with energy and enthusiasm. With the help of the Union, stagnant local leadership would be weeded out and aggressive young Democrats put in command.