The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The Chief Executive was Chief Legislator. It was only at the level of the presidential office that party interests, the crisscrossing legislative blocs, and the bustling bureaucrats were given some measure of integration in meeting national problems. The fact that Roosevelt’s leadership provided the unifying force did not mean, however, that Congress lacked effect on policy. The price of congressional support was that Roosevelt often yielded unduly to congressional pressures. And a striking feature of Congress in 1933 was the sentiment for more of a New Deal than Roosevelt was willing to give. Most of the congressmen wanted more inflation than Roosevelt, less economy in government, a more open hand with veterans and farmers, larger public works, tougher policies toward finance. Divided as it was, Congress had the effect of pushing Roosevelt a bit further toward the left.

  If Roosevelt could ride the whirlwind, it was because he himself was always in motion. Throughout the Hundred Days he rarely lost the initiative. He had promised a leadership of vigor, and he was the living incarnation of the phrase. Gay, laughing, confident, he dominated the life of the White House. While still in bed in the morning, his large torso looming over the shrunken legs that hardly ribbed the sheets, he spouted ideas, questions, instructions to his aides. Wheeling rapidly through the White House corridors, he easily swung into his office chair for long hours of visitors, letters, telephone calls, emergency conferences. He did not spare himself. Where Coolidge had disposed of visitors by his formula “Don’t talk back to ‘em,” Roosevelt outtalked his advisers, outtalked the cabinet, and even outtalked visiting senators.

  A leadership of vigor—and a leadership of frankness too. Appealing features of the Rooseveltian personality were his candor and his humility. Such was the image projected to the people in his second fireside chat. “I do not deny that we may make mistakes of procedure,” he said. “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat.” He quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s remark that he would be happy to be right 75 per cent of the time. Economic conditions looked a little better, but “we cannot ballyhoo ourselves back to prosperity.” In his press conferences Roosevelt talked much the same way. “Oh, I am learning a lot about banking,” he exclaimed early in March, amid laughter. The administration had made some ten-yard gains, he said late in April.

  “But it is a long field.”

  AMERICA FIRST

  Even the rush and roar of breath-taking events at home could not drown out offstage sounds of crisis abroad. The international situation had taken ominous turns. Once installed as chancellor, Hitler had, in a few weeks by terror and by decree, crushed all organized opposition, suppressed trade unions, outlawed other parties, and proceeded to erect a totalitarian regime. Japanese troops were swarming toward the Great Wall of China. So serious was the situation in the East that at the second cabinet meeting Roosevelt gravely discussed the ultimate possibility of war with Japan.

  Foreign affairs did not seem serious enough to Roosevelt, however, to warrant any departure from old ways of choosing men to represent the United States abroad. Loyal Democrats were waiting for their reward, and the President did not disappoint them. To Mexico City was dispatched Josephus Daniels; to the Court of St. James’s, Robert W. Bingham, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a longtime friend of the President; to Paris, Jesse I. Straus, who had helped finance the campaign. Roosevelt offered Berlin to his old running mate of 1930, James Cox, who declined. In the State Department, however, was a group of career men including Under Secretary William Phillips, a close friend of the President since Wilson days, Herbert Feis, an economist, and Stanley K. Hornbeck, a Far Eastern expert. Urged by Hull to divide his diplomatic appointments about fifty-fifty between career men and politicos, the President kept some Republican appointees on in the lesser capitals.

  European economic problems were pressing when the President entered office, and these he handled with a politician’s wariness and a Rooseveltian bent for personal diplomacy. High on the agenda were the intertwined problems of war debts and monetary stabilization. These matters could not be held off long, for a World Economic Conference had long been scheduled for spring or summer 1933. During April and May 1933 Roosevelt discussed economic problems with a succession of visiting foreign leaders, including Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Premier Edouard Herriot. Stressing the “exploratory” nature of their talks, the President and his visitors issued bland statements filled with pious nothings.

  Roosevelt had good reason for his caution. On foreign policy the Democratic party platform was vague and platitudinous, and Roosevelt had almost ignored foreign affairs during the campaign. He had few foreign policy pegs on which to hang his hat. More important, he was shaping domestic policies in order to raise farm and industrial prices somewhat. Such a moderate inflation, he feared, might be washed out by an inundation of cheap goods from abroad. To prevent this the President got power from Congress to raise the tariff even higher than Smoot-Hawley levels. Clearly Roosevelt still believed, as he had said on March 4, that international trade relations, though important, were secondary to recovery at home.

  But pressures from the opposite direction were strong too. Despite Roosevelt’s own shift to a more nationalist policy in the 1920’s, many leaders in his party still prized the internationalist tradition of Wilson. If the Democratic party had stood for any traditional policy, they pointed out, it was lower tariff walls. Nor could the President ignore the strong sentiment, especially along the Eastern seaboard, for a positive attack on the jumble and chaos of economic affairs among nations.

  These conflicting pressures played on the President through his close associates. Hull was making no secret of his expectation that the secretaryship would crown his life work for expanded trade and economic co-operation among nations. Roper and Swanson in the cabinet were old Wilson men, as were some influential congressmen. On the other hand, Moley, Ickes, Hopkins, Tugwell, and others in the presidential entourage favored priority for the domestic front. Some business friends of the President took the same position, and Baruch wrote him early in July that “there can possibly be no ground for criticism either here or abroad upon the position you take that internal matters come first.” Privately Roosevelt struck out at international financiers—“the fellows in Amsterdam and Antwerp, etc.”—whose speculations, he felt, were undermining the dollar.

  Given these crossed purposes and mixed councils, it was inevitable that matters would come to an unhappy climax. This they did, in the painfully public arena of the World Economic Conference in London. Despite early worries about the gathering, Roosevelt had thrown himself into the role of world leader in his reception of foreign representatives and his preparations for the conference. But his preparations were sadly amiss. He chose for the American delegation a group of men, headed by Hull, who had divergent economic ideas and varying expertness in the field. Made up of some of the most eminent political leaders and economists of the time, the conference had aroused high hopes that it could point the way toward better economic relations among nations. Much depended, it was generally agreed, on the attitude of the United States delegation. But in London the Americans wandered in a fog of confusion, and Moley’s arrival with fresh instructions from the President only sharpened the tension within the delegation and aroused the foreign representatives’ hopes.

  Suddenly on July 3 came a sharp message from Roosevelt in effect rapping the conference for trifling with efforts for an artificial and temporary monetary stability “on the part of a few large countries only,” and for ignoring fundamental economic ills. The message threw the conference into confusion. It went on twitching for a few days, as an observer remarked, before it rolled over and died, amid savage recriminations and general hopelessness.

  Roosevelt had torpedoed the conference. Why? The answer lay largely in the turn of events at home while the conferees were debating in London. The measures of the Hundred Days seemed to be achieving more monetary stability in the United States, and Roosevelt, at the height of his po
pularity at home, was not ready to jeopardize this happy condition by trying prematurely to tie the dollar to foreign currencies. Economists divided over his position; some denounced his “nationalistic” path, while in Britain John Maynard Keynes, an advocate of managed currencies, wrote that Roosevelt was “magnificently right.” Politically the President was caught in a cross-fire. Those who favored “putting our own house in order” applauded his action; but the internationalists were surprised and disappointed. Hull returned home indignant over his treatment and furious at Moley’s intervention.

  Equally abortive was America’s participation in the disarmament conference that had been dragging along for over a year at Geneva. In mid-May 1933 Roosevelt sent an eloquent direct appeal to heads of states proposing a “solemn and definite pact of non-aggression” among all the nations of the world. But the conference could not break out of the deadlock of hate and fear, and Roosevelt, his hands tied by his repudiation of the League in 1932, was able to offer no more than passive co-operation in any program of collective security. The conference finally collapsed in the face of Hitler’s withdrawal from both the conference and the League.

  On war debts, another gnawing problem of the year, Roosevelt was equally cautious. He refused to treat them as part of a general international economic problem; he refused even to give the delegates in London authority to discuss debts. “That stays with Pop—right here,” he said.

  If, then, the war for economic recovery was to be waged mainly at home, what was the over-all strategy for the prosecution of that war? The President was a magnificent leader—but along what paths were Americans to be led? As the Hundred Days came to an end, people searched for a pattern in the rapid-fire actions of the preceding weeks.

  That there were orderly continuities with the past could not be doubted. The President had grasped the standard of Wilsonian reform in his measures for federal supervision of securities, friendliness to labor, business regulation. He had trod Cousin Theodore’s old path in conservation and in the elements of planning in the AAA. He had filched a plank from American socialism in the public ownership features of TVA. Most strangely, he had taken over— indeed sharpened—such precepts of the Hoover administration as budget-balancing and government economy. And his foreign policies were remarkably like the economic and political nationalism of the 1920’s.

  Continuities—but what of the present? Try as he might, the most resourceful political philosopher could not extract consistency from the jumble. The Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Nationalism, the associational activities of the 1920’s, all elbowed one another in uneasy intimacy. There was nothing but contradiction between the spending for public works and the economy act, between the humanitarianism of direct relief and the miserliness of veterans’ cuts, between the tariff-raising provisions of the AAA and the new internationalism of the State Department, between Roosevelt’s emphasis on the strengthening of government as a tool for social betterment and his reducing the cost of government, including the salaries of government workers.

  But Roosevelt was now cast as the man of action, as the experimenter, as the quarterback, and consistency was a small virtue. “What are you going to say when they ask you the political philosophy behind TVA?” Senator Norris asked him shortly before the bill went to Congress. “I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl,” the President answered gaily, “but, whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”

  Nothing better exemplified this pragmatism—both in the manner it was drawn up and in its major provisions—than the National Industrial Recovery Act, described by Roosevelt as probably the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress. As the mainspring of the early New Deal, this measure for two years embodied its hopes and its liabilities.

  Faintly foreshadowed in Roosevelt’s Commonwealth Club speech, the NRA had its immediate origin with a number of persons working separately in Washington during the interregnum. Several congressmen introduced bills to modify antitrust laws in order to prevent “unfair and excessive” competition. Business representatives in Washington wanted to bring some order out of anarchy by establishing stronger associations or councils in the main sectors of industry, trade, and finance, with some power of self-government. Others favored more stringent economic planning, with a governmental board in charge. Labor leaders were pressing for protection of collective bargaining and labor standards. Some persons favored huge governmental loans to industry; others wanted to step up public works and direct relief.

  At first the President moved slowly. Aware of the ferment of radical thinking on over-all economic policy, he preferred to push through his crisis bills before turning to reconstruction measures. Moreover, he felt that recovery ideas had not crystallized enough. It was the Senate that forced the President’s hand. On April 16 the upper chamber passed, 53-30, a bill introduced by Senator Hugo L. Black of Alabama that would forbid interstate commerce in commodities produced by persons working more than five days a week or six hours a day. This drastic, rigid thirty-hour bill worried the President, especially since it had the backing in Congress of liberal and prolabor groups. As the Black bill gained momentum on the Hill, Roosevelt began to pay more attention to the possibility of an industrial recovery program. He had commissioned several persons to explore such a program, doing this quietly so that he would not jeopardize his friendly relations with Black and his group. On May 10 he convened a White House meeting of the leaders of groups working on recovery programs.

  For two hours the discussion ranged through a score of proposals. Finally the President remarked that the group seemed basically divided between a large public works program and government-industry codes. Why not do both? someone spoke up. “I think you’re right,” the President said quickly, and he designated several present to “lock themselves into a room” until they reached agreement.

  The resulting bill did not have easy going in Congress. It was beset on all sides by groups asserting that antitrust laws must not be relaxed, or that the bill was a “sellout” to industry, or that it regimented industry too much, or that it failed to provide for currency inflation. Would Roosevelt’s strategy of combining many disparate proposals, thereby gaining support from various elements in Congress, offset the voting strength of the opposition should the dissident groups combine against the bill? His strategy worked, but only because the great bulk of congressmen had an almost blind faith in him—one representative called him a “Moses” leading the people out of the wilderness—and because ticklish political issues were left to the President to decide by delegation of power. The Black bill was sidetracked.

  The final act was a compromise among many groups and theories. Industrial councils could draw up codes of fair competition, but these had to be approved by the President. These codes were exempted from antitrust laws, but monopolistic practices were still barred. The essence of the measure was voluntary self-government by industry, but the government had a rigid licensing power to force businessmen in line. In Section 7a labor received a vague guarantee of the right to bargain collectively with employers through their own representatives, and equally vague provisions for wage and hour standards in the new codes. In an entirely different title of the bill, over three billion dollars were authorized for a huge spending effort through public works.

  With this measure signed and Congress adjourned in mid-June, the President left for Groton, where he watched Franklin, Jr., graduate, then boarded an auxiliary schooner with son James and a small crew. He sailed contentedly along the New England coast to Maine, even sandwiching in political conferences at stops en route. The bright June skies above the little schooner seemed to be smiling on the American people too. A production index had shot up from 56 in March to 93 in June. The nation was already feeling the effects of stepped-up relief spending, AAA and CCC checks, heightened business confidence. One leader, manning the tiller off the rocky New England coast, was still the center of public appro
bation.

  March 10, 1933, H. M. Talburt, New York World-Telegram, Scripps-Howard Newspapers

  “How do you account for him?” William Allen White wrote to Ickes that spring. “Was I just fooled in him before the election, or has he developed? As Governor of New York, I thought he was a good two-legged Governor of a type that used to flourish in the first decade of the century under the influence of La Follette and Roosevelt. We had a lot of them but they weren’t presidential size.…

  “I thought your President was one of those. Instead of which he developed magnitude and poise, more than all, power! I have been a voracious feeder in the course of a long and happy life and have eaten many things, but I have never had to eat my words before. I shall wait six months and … if they are still on the plate, down they go with a gusto. And I shall smack my lips as my Adams apple bobs.”

  TEN

  President of All the People?

  DURING THE FIRST half of his first term Roosevelt tried a Grand Experiment in government. He took the role of national father, of bipartisan leader, of President of all the people. Playing this role with consummate skill, he extracted from it the last morsel of political power and government action. Eventually his biparty leadership was to falter, and he would turn in new directions. But during these first two years, 1933 and 1934, he savored the heady feeling of rising above parties and groups and acting almost as a constitutional monarch armed with political power.

  The New Deal, the President told a Wisconsin crowd in August 1934, “seeks to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Such government would not hurt honest business, he said; in seeking social justice it would not rob Peter to pay Paul. Government, he told a convention of bankers two months later, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and leadership of all groups.” His own role as president? It was “to find among many discordant elements that unity of purpose that is best for the Nation as a whole.” Throughout Roosevelt’s speeches of 1934 ran this theme of government as conciliator, harmonizer, unifier of all major interests. He was the master broker among the many interests of a great and diverse people.