The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was a good question—but the American people in 1933 and 1934 were more concerned with “bread and circuses” than with academic anxieties.

  THE BROKER STATE AT WORK

  If the New Deal had circus-like qualities during the first years, the center ring was occupied by the National Recovery Administration, and the ringmaster presented a fresh new visage on the American scene. General Hugh S. Johnson looked like the old cavalry man that he was; he had a hard, leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, but underneath, curious qualities crowded one another: he was a sentimentalist, an old hand with businessmen and business ways, a West Pointer, and as mercurial and picturesque as a sideshow barker. Although Johnson’s long-time boss Bernard Baruch rated him as only a “good No. 2 man,” the general impressed the President enough to win the job of running the biggest experiment in peacetime governmental control of the economy that America had ever seen.

  Johnson’s main task was to induce businessmen to draw up codes of fair competition, which on the President’s approval had the full force of law. Administered under the general’s supervision by a code authority in each industry, the codes were supposed to stop wasteful competition, to bring about more orderly pricing and selling policies, and to establish higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for workers. Antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could co-operate in setting up the codes. Johnson had expected to administer the vast public works section of the bill too, but at the last minute Roosevelt put this under Ickes. So furious was the general that he threatened to quit the whole business then and there; the President asked Miss Perkins to “stick with Hugh and keep him sweet,” which she did by driving him for hours around Washington until he mastered himself and promised to go on with his part of the job.

  And a job it was. Within weeks the NRA burst on the American people like a national call to arms. The NRA eagle was suddenly in every shop window, on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. Rushing from city to city in an army plane, issuing pronunciamentos at every stop, Johnson orated, politicked, wisecracked, coaxed businessmen into signing codes drawn up by industry representatives hurriedly collected in Washington. The general became the symbol of recovery; for hours he reviewed a climactic parade up Fifth Avenue, trying desperately to greet the endless river of humanity without appearing to give the despised Mussolini salute. Not since 1917 had the whole nation savored such a throbbing sense of unity, of marching together.

  But marching where? Almost at the start the President had virtually lost control of the NRA. He told the cabinet one day how Johnson, coattails standing out behind, had rushed into his office, and handed the President three codes to sign. As Roosevelt was signing the last one, Johnson looked at his watch, said he had five minutes to catch his plane, and dashed out, the codes in his pocket. “He hasn’t been seen since,” Roosevelt added brightly. The President was hardly more than a front man in whose name an elaborate re-employment agreement was arranged and a thousand other actions taken. Johnson himself had to delegate huge policy-making powers to hastily summoned businessmen who might or might not be representative of the myriad interests in their industries. And in the first flush of enthusiasm the NRA coverage was extended so far that the machinery was nearly swamped. An extreme case was the St. Louis bootblack who signed the re-employment agreement, cut his hours to forty a week, and promptly asked the NRA to make up his pay.

  The NRA was essentially an expression of the broker state—that is, of the government acting for, and mediating among, the major interest groups. The NRA was the institutional expression of Roosevelt’s plan for a partnership of all groups, achieved through friendly co-operation between the government and group leaders. But who were the leaders? It was not surprising that in the haste and confusion Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most experienced in dealing with politicians and bureaucrats. Who could speak for that amorphous group, the consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but was eased to one side; a member quit indignantly within a few weeks of its establishment.

  By the end of 1933 the NRA eagle was fluttering through heavy weather. “N.R.A. is the worst law ever passed,” some disillusioned Cleveland grocers wired the President. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a labor placard hoisted by a Baltimore picket line. Protests rose in Congress. William Connery, chairman of the House Labor Committee, asked Roosevelt to tell Johnson to work with “true representatives” of labor. Roosevelt answered patiently that as one “a great deal older than you” he advised the Congressman not to overstate his case. “Most of us who consider ourselves liberals have the same ultimate objective in view.…” But the President could not ignore the protests. In March 1934 he appointed a review board under the old reformer and defense attorney Clarence Darrow, which soon was reporting that the codes had allowed the more powerful interests to seize control or extend their control of industries. Roosevelt trimmed NRA’s powers, limited its jurisdiction, eased Johnson out, and put a more domesticated chief, Donald Richberg, in his place. But by the time the Supreme Court administered the coup de grâce shortly before NRA’s second birthday, it was near administrative and political collapse.

  If NRA was the mainspring of the New Deal in shop and factory, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was its counterpart on the farm. The object of the measure was to restore farm prices to parity—to the relationship, that is, they bore to nonagricultural prices in the years 1909 to 1914. To reach this goal, processing taxes were to be levied equal to the difference between the actual prices and parity. The money raised was to finance restriction of production either by renting land and keeping it out of production or by paying benefits to farmers in return for their agreement to reduce production—“to kill every third pig or plow every third row under,” as the newspapers were soon putting it. But like the NRA, Triple-A was soon revealing the insuperable problems of Roosevelt’s middle way.

  The act bore telltale marks of its birth pangs. It was drawn up by spokesmen from the larger farm organizations and the farm journals, under the direction of Henry Wallace. The viewpoint of the larger commercial farmers, organized in the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Grange, had the most weight in the early, vital policy-making process, while the Farmers Union, generally embracing the smaller farmers on more marginal land, and inheriting the old Populist tradition, was scarcely represented. Millions of farmers belonged to no organization at all; they could not afford the dues, they lacked the time, they could not travel fifty miles to meetings. And no real organization even existed for countless farm laborers on vast Middle Western farms, southern sharecroppers, illiterate farm hands, and migratory workers following the crops in battered Model-T Fords. Dirt farmers, rough in speech and countenance, returned from Washington deriding the men in neckties and white shirts they had seen testifying for the AAA bill.

  Growers of “basic” crops covered by the act, such as wheat, cotton, corn, and tobacco, got quick benefits from the federal checks handed out in return for crop limitation. On other farmers the only effect of the program was to raise their hopes and expectations. By fall Roosevelt admitted that the West was seething with unrest. A letter from a Minnesota farmer named Olson to Eleanor Roosevelt poignantly illustrated the agricultural situation.

  Painfully scrawling on cheap scratch paper, Olson described his “tradgety.” “I am trying to hold my farm and get food for my children but it is hard this year. Money is scarce and hard to get.…”

  Eleanor Roosevelt showed her husband this letter. “I am glad you wrote …” the President replied to him. “You are absolutely right that many things which the farmers raise have not by any means reached a proper level.…” He mentioned his own cattle raising in Georgia, and expressed the hope that AAA coverage would be extended. “All I can ask you to do is to believe that we are honestly trying to do our best, and that we think we are slowly but surely improvi
ng conditions.”

  Roosevelt’s reassurances were partly justified. AAA benefits were extended to new crops in 1934, and farm prices and prosperity advanced. But discontent remained. The “big boys”—the large commercial farmers, farming corporations, banks and insurance companies—seemed to be getting more than their share of the take. Even worse, it was charged, AAA checks enabled recipients to buy machinery; by “tractoring” hired hands off the land and “plowing every third row under” farm managers cut down the need for farm labor. Vainly the Farmers Union denounced “scarcity economics” and insisted that the trouble with agriculture was not overproduction but underconsumption.

  “The government wouldn’t let us plant,” tenant farmers complained, “so we had to go on relief.”

  Roosevelt knew that the acid test of the New Deal was recovery. During 1933 and 1934 he watched the ups and downs of the nation’s economic temperature like a doctor following the condition of a feverish patient.

  He was delighted when employment rose sharply the first four months after he took office. He proudly showed reporters a chart from which farm prices had dropped clear off the bottom of the sheet—the line had now reappeared and was headed up. But in July came a stock market crash and, even worse, a drop in production. The President dismissed the crash as due to gamblers: “everybody got to speculating and things went too fast; that got a perfectly natural corrective,” he told reporters. Anyway, he said, employment looked good. By fall of 1933 he was worried about employment too: “There aren’t nearly enough people back at work,” but he thought things were improving. He wrote Garner about this time that business was “not nearly as badly off as the New York crowd is howling about, but unemployment is still serious.”

  It was all so strange. Things seemed better—the NRA was going strong; the breath of recovery filled the air—yet the prosaic gauges of recovery—wages, prices, spending, employment—were moving up erratically and unpredictably where they were moving up at all. The situation looked so serious that in September 1933 the President instructed Secretary of War Dern to make ready army rolling kitchens for feeding the needy where local relief was inadequate. By the end of 1933 the alarmed and disconcerted President was looking for scapegoats. Prices had dropped, he said, because some people had not approved of NRA codes and because “some of our foreign friends” were deliberately trying to increase the exchange value of the dollar. Curiously, the President was almost embracing the idea of foreign causes of depression—an idea he had lambasted when Hoover used it in 1932.

  Casting about for a solution, Roosevelt took up a notion that George F. Warren, a Cornell professor, had been pressing for some time. Drawn from the old quantity theory of money, the idea was that an increase in the value of gold would be the decisive factor in restoring higher prices. In October 1933 the President decided on this approach. In what has been called probably the “boldest attempt ever made to give the widest public a brief instruction in complicated economic doctrine and maneuver,” Roosevelt told the people in a fireside chat about his plan to buy gold. “This is a policy and not an expedient,” he said defensively. But while a government market for gold became a lasting policy, the Warren theory proved an abortive one; raising the price of gold did not boost commodity prices.

  “Our troubles will not be over tomorrow, but we are on our way and we are headed in the right direction,” the President said in his radio talk. During 1934 employment did improve somewhat. The cause lay largely in programs that Roosevelt viewed as essentially humanitarian rather than recovery-producing.

  The first of these programs was run by Hopkins, more driving and sharp-tongued than ever. Told by Roosevelt to get help to the people fast, he had sat down at his desk while it was waiting in a hallway to be moved into his office, and in a few hours authorized millions of dollars of relief. Spurring and goading his subordinates, infuriating state politicians while playing his own brand of New Deal politics, ignoring bureaucratic protocol, Hopkins spent several hundred millions through the states during the early months of the New Deal and almost a billion on “quicky” projects through the Civil Works Administration in late 1933 and the first half of 1934.

  Hopkins’ main concern was to act fast. Told of a project that would work out in the long run, he answered bitingly that people “don’t eat in the long run—they eat every day.” Operating at a much slower pace was Ickes and his Public Works Administration. Suspicious, cantankerous, stubborn, “Honest Harold,” as he was called to his discomfiture, authorized projects only after he had satisfied himself as to their legal propriety, economic value, and engineering practicality. But by 1934 money was moving out through PWA into the hands of contractors, manufacturers, engineers, laborers, truckers, carpenters, architects, and deep into the arteries of the economy.

  Other agencies added to this outpouring of money. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, continued from the Hoover days, was lending more money than ever. The TVA, beginning its vast development program in the Tennessee Valley, was converting an area that had been a drain on the economy into a source of economic stimulation. The AAA put into farmers’ hands money that quickly found its way to Sears, Roebuck and the local hardware store, and thence to manufacturers, banks, workers.

  Roosevelt used all these instruments; he put full reliance on no single one of them. As leader of all the people, as broker among major organized interests, he would take the middle way. He adopted spending policies, but only as a temporary measure until the budget was balanced. He favored tariff reduction, but not where it hurt major American interests. He wanted a “reflationary” price rise, but not an “inflationary” one. He was favorable to organized labor, but only to the point consistent with a partnership of industry, labor, and farmers with government.

  Nowhere was the President’s role as buffer among major interests, as conciliator of rival viewpoints, more sharply revealed than in a statement he made to a press conference in December 1933: “Douglas’ job is to prevent the Government from spending just as hard as he possibly can. That is his job. Somewhere between his efforts to spend nothing … and the point of view of the people who want to spend ten billions additional on public works, we will get somewhere, and we are trying to work out a program.”

  THE POLITICS OF BROKER LEADERSHIP

  Every politician tries to win elections by simple “followership”—that is, by gauging carefully group attitudes, opinion trends, party activities, and then taking that position that will reap the most votes on Election Day. A leader, by contrast, actively shapes his political context; he seeks to change the constellation of political forces about him in a direction closer to his own conception of the political good.

  The genius of great party leaders lies in their power to forge a majority combination of voters around burning issues of government, and through their personal qualities of leadership to put this combination behind some philosophy of government and program of action. Jefferson, for example, built a national following out of Southern planters, Western grain growers, Northern laborers, frontiersmen, debtors, and other sectional and group elements, and this following, roughly organized in the Republican party, put him into the White House. Jackson, too, was a broker of sections and groups, as all national leaders must be, but he was also a majority leader equipped with definite notions about government and able to win popularity with the great mass of people. Jefferson and Jackson as presidents acted for great popular majorities, and they stand in history for a conception of government by a majority working through a broadly based political party.

  Roosevelt during 1933-34 was no Jefferson, no Jackson. He did not conceive of himself as the leader of a majority on the left, as a party leader building a new alignment of political power. His job, as he saw it, was to patch up an ailing economic system, to rescue human lives, to bring about generally agreed-on reforms, and above all to promote economic recovery. These goals—especially the last—could be achieved by coaxing and conciliating leaders of major interests into a gre
at national partnership.

  Viewed as a matter of political leadership, Roosevelt’s Grand Experiment took the form of what can be called broker leadership. During his first two years in office he seemed to conceive of his presidential role as one of dealing with and mediating among the leaders of organized groups, especially labor, farmers, and businessmen. If the economics of the broker state meant improvisation, a host of energetic and ill-assorted government programs, and economic betterment without real recovery, the politics of broker leadership brought short-term political gains at the expense, perhaps, of long-term strategic advance.

  Roosevelt was no theorist. It is doubtful that he chose this course as a result of a well-defined political philosophy. It simply emerged, shaped only roughly by his underlying concept of the public good, from the day-to-day projects and improvisations of his regime. It probably never occurred to him that the NRA, with its functional representation of business and labor groups, and the AAA, dominated by the big farm groups, showed some likeness to the corporate state fashioned by Benito Mussolini, with its syndicates of workers and employers. But George Peek, AAA chief, saw that the power of special interest groups could not be separated from the state, even in a democracy. “The truth is,” he said bluntly, “that no democratic government can be very different from the country it governs. If some groups are dominant in the country, they will be dominant in any plan the government undertakes.”

  Such an approach had profound implications for Roosevelt’s political leadership. It meant that he took the more passive method of responding to major political and economic pressures, rather than the more positive one of deliberately building up some voting alignment on the left or right that would recast the basic pattern of political power. It meant that he ignored the possibilities for the future of a voting alignment of great strength—one composed of less privileged farm groups, masses of unorganized or ill-organized industrial workers, consumers, Negroes, and other minority groups. It is significant that the President allowed consumers short shrift in NRA and AAA, that he failed to put pressure behind the food and drug bill that Tugwell had drawn up for the protection of consumers, that he allowed postponement of unemployment and old-age pension measures, that he showed little interest at first in Wagner’s efforts to strengthen labor’s right to organize, that he was hazy and cool on the subject of a pending antilynching bill.