The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  A final concession to the Old Democracy came in the choice for Secretary of Commerce of Daniel C. Roper, a onetime political lieutenant of Wilson’s who had later served as a leader in the McAdoo faction of the party. A bespectacled South Carolinian, Roper had views and associations that made him eminently acceptable to business. Symbol of the rising Democracy was Jim Farley, who knew of his designation as Postmaster General only when Roosevelt impishly commented on a story that “Jim’s predecessor” had bought a new government limousine to allow more room for his silk hat.

  In filling his labor, farm, and “Western” places Roosevelt moved left of center. He chose for Secretary of Labor his New York industrial commissioner, Frances Perkins, who had learned how to advance social-welfare legislation by getting along with the politicians, and who enabled Roosevelt to shatter another tradition in naming a woman to his cabinet. For Secretary of Agriculture he turned to Henry A. Wallace, a leader of the more militant farmers of the Corn Belt, son of a Republican Secretary of Agriculture, and a rustic, diffident man who had pioneered in developing new strains of corn and in breeding hogs and chickens. Roosevelt had offered Interior first to Hiram Johnson and then to Bronson Cutting, both of whom declined. After one meeting with Harold L. Ickes, Roosevelt tendered him the place; Ickes, a Chicagoan, had a reputation for independent Republicanism, honesty, and pugnacity. “I liked the cut of his jib,” Roosevelt said.

  Perhaps the historians of the future would find some underlying principle in Roosevelt’s selections, Moley (who served as a go-between in the process) wrote later, but he could not. Time makes the task no easier. To some extent the cabinet met the classical American tradition: a collection of party war horses, sprinkled with a few independents, drawn from state and national politics, somewhat representative of the nation geographically. Like almost all previous cabinets it differed sharply with the British system of choosing party leaders who had long trod the political course in close harness; indeed, several members of the new cabinet had never met one another.

  But even for America, Roosevelt’s cabinet was a strange assortment. Ideologically, it embraced Democratic conservatives and Democratic progressives, a Republican conservative and two Republican progressives, inflationists and anti-inflationists, an ex-Bull Mooser along with old Wilson men, social-welfare New Dealers along with Cleveland Democrats, mild nationalists along with internationalists, Republicans of various hues along with partisan Democrats. Politically, it catered to almost every major group: business, industry, farmers, labor; Catholics and Protestants; North, South, Midwest, Far West. Yet even this was not an organizing principle. Roosevelt did not follow slavishly the wishes of group leaders. Wallace was not liked by some farm leaders; President William Green of the AFL announced angrily that labor would never be reconciled to Miss Perkins’s appointment; and there was no Jew in the cabinet. Personally, it was an elderly group; the average age of fifty-eight suggested both experience and caution; and it was the first cabinet to include a woman.

  The only principle in the cabinet’s make-up was, in short, its lack of essential principle. Roosevelt had no rounded program; hence he could not recruit his official family along programmatic lines.

  The real significance of the cabinet lay in Roosevelt’s leadership role. He could count on loyalty from his associates: almost every one was “FRBC”—for Roosevelt before Chicago—and not a single one had been an important opponent in the 1932 convention. There was not a likely presidential possibility in the lot—no one who would try to push himself ahead of Roosevelt, at least during the first term. It was a cabinet the new President could easily dominate. By no means a “ministry of all the talents,” it was a body that would gain life and meaning through the vigorous overarching, leadership of Roosevelt himself.

  The President-elect thus made no final commitment to any person, idea, or program in his cabinet. Nor did he do so in his immediate entourage. Howe, who was to be the secretary to the President, had a hand in many policy decisions, but he tended to reflect Roosevelt’s own notions rather than to serve as a source of original thinking. Moreover, Howe’s health was beginning to fail badly. Roosevelt chose as his assistant secretaries his old lieutenants of the 1920 campaign, Stephen Early and Marvin McIntyre, the former to handle press relations, and the latter appointments with the President. Both had a journalist’s interest in personalities; both were shrewd political operators: but neither was especially concerned with policy or program. Clearly Roosevelt was not disposed to establish a powerful chief of staff or dominating idea man in the White House.

  No one stole the show from the main actor. All eyes were on Roosevelt as Inauguration Day drew near.

  ROOSEVELT ON THE EVE

  The presidency, Roosevelt said shortly after his election, “is preeminently a place of moral leadership.” From Washington, who personified the ideal of federal union, to T.R. and Wilson, who used the presidency as a pulpit, “all our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

  The presidential office is a “superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are all bogged up or lose our way.”

  While Roosevelt was extolling the great leaders of the past, Americans were wondering what kind of leader he would be. There were some who saw him as little more than a Democratic Harding. The “corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention,” snorted Heywood Broun, the pugnacious liberal columnist. An “amiable man with many philanthropic impulses,” but with neither a firm grasp on public affairs nor very strong convictions, Walter Lippmann said. Critic Edmund Wilson probed deeper. He could not find a particularly arresting personality—Roosevelt seemed essentially a boy scout with a spirit of cheerful service. There was a flatness, a hollowness, Wilson felt, in his ideas about American democracy. He was sensible, decent, diplomatic, efficient—but politically was there anything durable?

  Others saw a different man. Beneath the charm and amiability they felt a tough center—shrewdness, courage, tenacity, and conviction. His old friends found impressive growth since the war years. They remembered him as attractive, eager, and able, but somewhat impressionable, immature, and certainly lacking in greatness. The man of 1932, they felt, had gained strikingly in force and power. If he had changed so much in a dozen years, would he not grow even more in the exacting presidential job?

  The man at the center of this controversy was, in December 1932, approaching the end of his fifty-first year. He was tall, weighing about 180 pounds, a big man except for his thin, limp legs. His endless exercises had given him an exceptionally well-developed torso. His abdominal muscles had been entirely regenerated since the polio attack and his thigh muscles had come back to some extent.

  He had not conquered the effects of polio on his legs—although even in 1932 he hoped he might restore them further—but he had compensated for some of the restrictions of his crippled state. He had a specially equipped Ford that he loved to drive around the Hyde Park estate. He swam a good deal and had developed a powerful backstroke; in the Warm Springs pool he liked to give his friends a head start and then, turning over on his back and dragging his legs after him, overtake them with a few tremendous strokes. He could even ride horseback, gripping the saddle with the upper part of his legs.

  He was not a whit sensitive or embarrassed about his crippled condition. While scores of people around watched in covert embarrassment, he would be bodily lifted into or out of a car or train without losing his composure. His only worry about his legs was that some might fear he was not strong enough for a demanding job. During his second campaign for governor he ostentatiously took out over half a million dollars of life insurance through twenty-two companies and saw that the highly favorable medical report was well publicized. He instructed his staff not to send out letters that referred to his health or his crippled condition.

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bsp; His composure under stress was remarkable. He had the quality of grace under pressure that Ernest Hemingway once called the highest form of courage. When tension arose he told a joke, or turned quickly to another subject, or launched into a long anecdote. This unruffled quality was evidently more than skin deep, for a medical examination following an especially strenuous week showed that his heart and blood pressure were normal. Even so, one thing could be counted on to upset Roosevelt’s composure even in the years before the presidency: attacks by the press that he considered unfair.

  The main reason for Roosevelt’s composure was his serene and absolute assurance as to the value and importance of what he was doing. Another was his staff, which learned over the years how to operate smoothly with their chief. His secretary, Marguerite Le Hand, a handsome woman with prematurely graying hair, had a superb talent for managing his schedule, his callers, and his immediate office. Grace Tully, another secretary, took his dictation; together they could handle dozens of letters an hour as the President ordered replies written and sketched out their contents in a few short phrases. Louis Howe still acted for Roosevelt through the entire range of his affairs, fending off unwanted visitors, carrying out undercover political missions, arguing with “Franklin” to his face as few other people dared.

  Eleanor Roosevelt managed to work closely with her husband and at the same time live some of her life separately. During the first part of the week she helped run a school for girls in New York City, then caught a train for Albany and resumed her place as official hostess. On the side she made speeches to women’s organizations, saw that two or three houses were in running order, kept an eye on a furniture shop in Hyde Park, and found time to ride horseback. The children were rapidly leaving the family circle. Anna and James were both married, Franklin, Jr., was entering Harvard and John would follow. Elliott, not wanting to go to college, had deliberately failed some of his entrance examinations and was now earning his own living.

  Outside his family and personal staff were a host of advisers, political associates, and correspondents. These men provided something of a measure of the President-elect’s ideas and purposes.

  Two things were remarkable about the men around Roosevelt in 1932: the variety of their backgrounds and ideas, and the fact that not one of them dominated the channels of access to Roosevelt’s mind. It was a varied group because Roosevelt’s test of a man was not his basic philosophy, or lack of one, but the sweep of his information, his ability to communicate, and his willingness to share ideas. Without any plan, a “brain trust,” as reporters came to call it, grew up around him.

  One of the chief brain trusters at this time was Raymond Moley, a Columbia University professor. Moley’s high, domed forehead, shrewd, close-set eyes, and thin lips faithfully mirrored the complexities of the personality underneath: a cultured, widely read man of thought who had a passion for action, a subtle, sensitive man who liked to knock around with politicians high and low. His career had been wide-ranging: an Ohio boyhood, some time in local politics, then long periods of teaching and research, a decade of close study of the relation between politics and criminal justice, and a final climactic year with the Seabury investigation. Essentially a conservative despite his reputation as one of Roosevelt’s radical professors, Moley believed in a kind of benevolent partnership between government and business that would leave capitalists with power and status while achieving efficiency through national planning, and ending the aimlessness and wastefulness of free competition and rugged individualism.

  Others around Roosevelt leaned toward national planning, but with a less procapitalistic orientation. Rexford Tugwell, a curly-haired, good-looking Columbia professor of only forty-two, liked to shock friends and enemies with easy talk about “doing America over,” but his studies of agricultural economics and a visit to Soviet Russia had left him with deep concern over the chaos of atomistic competition during the Depression. Another professor, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., was an authority on corporation law and coauthor of the classic study The Modern Corporation and Private Property. A child prodigy who, his enemies said, had continued to be a child long after he had ceased being a prodigy, Berle was still a brash young man of thirty-seven, who could overwhelm banker and bureaucrat alike with his biting tongue and his vast information on financial practices.

  Newspapermen made much of the brain trust and its supposed hold on Roosevelt’s mind. They still did not know their man. If the President was excited by the young men and their sparkling notions, he was receptive, too, to many others in the host of advisers around him, among them Professor George F. Warren and his monetary theories, James Bonbright, a utilities expert, Frank A. Pearson, another monetary theorist, and Schuyler Wallace, a student of public administration.

  And professors were only part of Roosevelt’s stable of advisers. He consulted a good deal with financiers like Bernard Baruch, wise old politicos like Cox and Colonel House, labor leaders like William Green of the American Federation of Labor, with businessmen, farm politicians, state officials, newspaper editors, old friends, party leaders. Especially important were a number of senators and representatives who had helped line up delegates for Roosevelt in their states. In their ideas these legislators stretched across the political spectrum, but Roosevelt was under special obligation to a group of Southerners, most notably the men of Texas: Garner, Rayburn, and Senator Tom Connally.

  Roosevelt knew how to use these men for his own purposes; he resembled Hawthorne’s picture of Andrew Jackson as one who compelled every man who came within his reach to be his tool, and the more cunning the man, the sharper the tool. But the process worked the other way, too. Through these men Roosevelt was supplementing his own ideas gained from the Square Deal and the New Freedom, from his state and navy years, with the ideas of men who had been immersed in one or another of the great range of American political traditions. He was sinking taproots into the whole American experience.

  For in this group—sometimes in the same person—mingled and jostled ideas stretching back to a variety of thinkers and movements: back to Democratic heroes like Jefferson and Cleveland who preached against big government; back to the state laboratories of La Follette and Hughes and their testing out of social reforms; back to thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, with his sardonic examination of waste under capitalism, or like Herbert Croly and his ideas of a national concert of interests under a strong national government, or like John Dewey, with his zest for experimentation and practicality; back to the populist revolt against the Eastern money power; back to Samuel Gompers and his fight for labor’s place in the sun; back to Louis Brandeis and his passion for hard facts and statistics; back to the economic internationalism of the South and the nationalism of the Midwest; back to the idea of governmental control and development of national resources—especially water and electric power—that had flowered notably in the Northwest; back to a host of men and movements hoping for salvation through tinkering with money and credit; back to the muckrakers and their campaigns for clean government and civic virtue; back to Theodore Roosevelt and his eagerness to use government to curb economic power and special privilege; back to Wilson’s fight for the little man and for his right to compete effectively against the economic giants; back to the World War I experience of fighting a war by mobilizing and integrating the whole industrial weight of a nation; back to the idea of the American Construction Council and of many businessmen that business must curb excessive competition and draw together in larger, more harmonious units.

  Many of these ideas were mutually contradictory, and some would be squeezed out in the press of crisis. In any event, Roosevelt did not swallow them all equally. He had an order of priority which amounted to something of a political creed. He believed—most of the time—that government could be used as a means to human betterment. He preached the need to make government efficient and honest. He wanted to help the underdog, although not necessarily at the expense of the top dog. He believed that private, special interests must be su
bordinated to the general interest. He sought to conserve both the natural resources and the moral values of America.

  These made up a collection of general concepts rather than an operating program, and some of Roosevelt’s associates were amazed and even frightened by his receptivity to any notion that might fit under the broad umbrella of his mind. Usually sparing in his use of time, he could spend hours in excited and happy talk with men who seemed little more than cranks. Voracious and prehensile in his quest for information, Roosevelt had a startling capacity to soak up notions and facts like a sponge, and to keep this material ready for instant use. He could overwhelm miners with a vast array of facts about the dismal coal situation; he could impress businessmen with a detailed description of the intricacies of their enterprises. He had, observed Tugwell, a flypaper mind.

  Even with this receptivity, though, there was no final commitment. Roosevelt liked people and he liked their ideas, but just as he depended entirely on no one person, he had final trust in no single idea. Even his chief adviser, Moley, Roosevelt let it be known, was to be a clearinghouse for ideas, not a source of definite policy. His mind, Moley noticed, skipped and bounced through subject after subject, just as Roosevelt himself could run through a series of conferences with a variety of people and emerge fresh and relaxed. This lack of final commitment in the long run would have its dangerous aspects, but it had high merit in 1932, when the old dogmas had helped leave the economy prostrate.