The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Ironically enough, Roosevelt made the same complaint against his critics that they directed against him. He said they were doctrinaire, impractical. When his friend James P. Warburg broke with the New Deal because of its monetary policies, Roosevelt wrote Warburg that he had read the latter’s book with great interest. He then urged Warburg to get a secondhand car, put on his oldest clothes, and make a tour of the country. “When you have returned, rewrite ‘The Money Muddle’ and I will guarantee that it will run into many more editions!” The President made much of the fact that conservatives were criticizing the New Deal without offering constructive alternatives.

  It was one thing to deal with malcontents off in New York—the “speculators,” as Roosevelt called some of them disdainfully, or “that crowd.” It was something else when opposition developed among his own advisers. His anger rose to white heat when Treasury Adviser O. W. M. Sprague, who he felt had offered no constructive advice toward recovery and who had evidently tried to call protest meetings against New Deal financial policies, resigned late in 1933. Scribbling on some scrap paper, the President wrote Sprague a scorching letter, in which he told him that he would have been dismissed from the government if he had not resigned, and that Sprague’s actions had come close to the border line of disloyalty to the government. The letter was never sent, however. Other advisers resigned: Peek of the AAA, Douglas, Acheson.

  Roosevelt seemed almost relieved when the conservative opposition coalesced and organized in the broad light of day. In August 1934 the American Liberty League was chartered, dedicated to “teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property,” the duty of government to protect initiative and enterprise, the right to earn and save and acquire property. Not only were there industrialists like the Du Ponts, automobile manufacturers like William S. Knudsen, oil men like J. Howard Pew, and mail-order house magnates like Sewell L. Avery among its members or spokesmen; there were also illustrious Democratic politicians such as Al Smith, Jouett Shouse, John W. Davis, and Bainbridge Colby. At a press conference the President said amiably that Shouse had been in and had pulled out of his pocket a couple of “Commandments”—the need to protect property and to safeguard profits. What about other commandments? Roosevelt asked. What about loving your neighbor? He quoted a gentleman “with a rather ribald sense of humor” as saying that the League believed in two things—love God and then forget your neighbor.

  Aug. 11, 1934, Rollin Kirby, New York World-Telegram

  “There is no mention made here in these two things,” the President went on, “about the concern of the community, in other words the government, to try to make it possible for people who are willing to work, to find work to do. For people who want to keep themselves from starvation, keep a roof over their heads, lead decent lives, have proper educational standards, those are the concerns of Government, besides these points, and another thing which isn’t mentioned is the protection of the life and liberty of the individual against elements in the community which seek to enrich or advance themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens. They have just as much right to protection by government as anybody else. I don’t believe any further comment is necessary after this, what would you call it—a homily?”

  By the fall of 1934 Roosevelt’s break with the Liberty League conservatives seemed irreparable. His own feelings were sharpening. He told Ickes that big business was bent on a deliberate policy of sabotaging the administration. When an ugly general strike broke out in San Francisco, he blamed “hotheaded” young labor leaders, but even more the conservatives who, he said, really wanted the strike. The President’s thoughts must have been far from the grand concert of interests when, referring to his inaugural address, he told reporters, “I would now say that there is a greater thing that America needs to fear, and that is those who seek to instill fear into the American people.” His hopes must have been far from a partnership of all the people when he wrote Garner, after a visit to the Hermitage in November 1934, “The more I learn about old Andy Jackson the more I love him.”

  Such was the beginning of the rupture on the right. Much more momentous were the forces of unrest gathering on the left.

  THE SOWER, Jan. 4, 1934, Rollin Kirby, New York World-Telegram

  ELEVEN

  The Grapes of Wrath

  STUDENTS OF HISTORY HAVE long observed the tendency of social movements to overflow their channels. Moderate reformers seize power from tired regimes and alter the traditional way of things, and then extremists wrest power from the moderates; a Robespierre succeeds a Danton; a Lenin succeeds a Kerensky. Often it is not actual suffering but the taste of better things that excites people to revolt.

  Such was the danger of the early years of the New Deal. The Hoover years had been a period of social statics; the Depression seemed to have frozen people into political as well as economic inertness. Then came the golden words of a new leader, the excitement of bread and circuses, the flush of returning prosperity. Better times led to higher expectations, and higher expectations in turn to discontent as recovery faltered. America had been in a political slack water; now the tide was running strong toward new and dimly seen shores.

  Riding this swift-running tide were more radical leaders with new messages for America. They sensed that millions wanted not merely economic uplift but social salvation. They estimated correctly. In a time of vast change and ferment many Americans yearned for leaders who could bring order out of chaos, who could regulate a seemingly hostile world. The New Deal benefits had not reached all these people, nor had even Roosevelt himself. Sharecroppers, old people, hired hands, young jobless college graduates, steel puddlers working three months a year, migratory farm laborers—millions of these were hardly touched by NRA or AAA. Many of them, especially in rural areas, were beyond Roosevelt’s reach; they had no radios to hear his voice, no newspapers to see his face; they belonged to no organized groups.

  Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and in the ferment of the early 1930’s these new leaders were busy breeding and capturing discontent. Their main technique was to offer simple, concrete solutions to people bored and confused by the complexities of the New Deal, and to do so by a direct, dramatic pitch. Their appeal was personal rather than formal, mystical rather than rational. With their mass demonstrations, flags, slogans, and panaceas, they unconsciously followed Hitler’s advice to “burn into the little man’s soul the proud conviction that though a little worm he is nevertheless part of a great dragon.”

  The high point in these currents of the great tide came in 1935. It was in this year that Roosevelt came face to face with the men who were turning against the administration and who were hoping to build new citadels of power from the ashes of the New Deal.

  THE LITTLE FOXES

  On a hot June day early in Roosevelt’s first term a young man with a snub nose, dimpled chin, and wavy hair, strode into the office of the President of the United States. He was Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana, and he was in a huff. After a few pleasantries he went straight to the point. Huey P. Long, he proclaimed, had swung the nomination to Roosevelt at Chicago. And he had supported the administration’s program. But what had Roosevelt done for him? Nothing. Patronage had gone to the Senator’s enemies in Louisiana, and the President had kept on some of Huey’s old enemies in the administration.

  Perched on top of Long’s red hair was a sailor straw hat with a bright-colored band, and there it stayed during the interview, except when the Senator whipped it off and tapped it against the President’s knee to drive home his complaints. This open defiance of presidential amenities upset Farley, who was sitting by, and put McIntyre, who was lurking by the door, into a teeth-clenching rage. But Roosevelt, leaning back in his chair, did not seem to mind a bit. The big smile on his face never left. He answered Long’s arguments pleasantly but firmly. He took no blame for the past, made no promises for the future.

  After a few minutes the Senator admitted defeat. He took his hat off and kept it off; sho
rtly afterward he made his departure. Outside the White House he said to Farley: “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow? I can’t win any decision over him.” It was the last meeting between Roosevelt and Long. Within a few months the Louisianian had started total war against the administration.

  Long had emerged from a background almost the antithesis of Roosevelt’s. Winn Parish in northern Louisiana, where he had been born in a log cabin in 1893, was a land of scrawny cattle, harvests, and people, a spawning ground of political protest. Vocal and energetic from the start, Huey ran away at ten, tried his hand at auctioneering, helping in a printer’s office, peddling books, selling a cooking compound and medicines for “women’s sickness,” went through the three-year law course at Tulane in eight months, and got a special examination from a Louisiana court to enter the bar at twenty-one. He “came out of that courtroom running for office.”

  June 84, 1934, C. K. Berryman, Washington Star

  Run for office he did—and much more. Unlike most Louisiana politicians, Huey tried fresh techniques. He attacked the big corporations and seemed to mean it, he outfought the political old guard, and he came through on his promises of free schoolbooks, better roads and hospitals, more public works. He won the governorship in 1928 after a cyclonic campaign, stood off a move to impeach him, and crushed the opposition. His “theory of democracy” was simple. “A leader gets up a program and then he goes out and explains it, patiently and more patiently, until they get it,” he said. And if he wins office, “he don’t tolerate no opposition from the old-gang politicians, the legislatures, the courts, the corporations or anybody.” Huey didn’t, and in a few years he made Louisiana his fiefdom.

  With his base increasingly secure, Huey roamed into wider fields. Elected Senator in 1930, he had found the perfect national forum. In the Senate, he thumped august senatorial backs, lambasted “Prince Franklin, Knight of the Nourmahal” [a yacht owned by Vincent Astor that Roosevelt occasionally used], “Lord Corn Wallace,” “Chicago Chinch Bug” Ickes, accused Farley of profiteering, and turned the Senate Office Building into national headquarters for his Share-Our-Wealth movement. If the means were vague, the goals were definite and glowing: free homesteads and education, cheap food, veterans bonuses, a limitation of fortunes, a minimum annual income of two thousand dollars. Every man a king, and Huey the kingfish.

  Bragging that he would go to the White House in 1936, or at the latest in 1940, Long cast about for allies, and other leaders loomed as possible auxiliaries of the Louisianian. One of these was Father Coughlin, of Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb. A burly young man with a smooth face and a smoother tongue, Coughlin had had the wit late in the ‘twenties to turn to his natural instrument, the radio. He had met with phenomenal success. One of his denunciations of “Hoover prosperity” had brought a million letters; he averaged eighty thousand a week. When his 150 assistants opened the mail, money would tumble out—up to half a million dollars a year, it was said.

  For a time Coughlin strongly supported Roosevelt. “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal,” he proclaimed, and the two men had exchanged friendly letters. When Coughlin solicited a naval appointment for a priest in September 1934, the President interceded with the Navy Department. But Coughlin’s program went far beyond Roosevelt’s. He wanted currency inflation, a “living annual wage,” nationalization of banking, currency, and national resources. His relations with Roosevelt suddenly turned cold in 1934, perhaps because his leading backer was discovered by the administration to be a big operator in foreign exchange. The voice from the Shrine of the Little Flower, first low and solemn, then keening high and plaintive, was soon lumping Roosevelt with the “godless capitalists, the Jews, communists, international bankers, and plutocrats.”

  Meanwhile a third figure loomed on the western horizon—a lean, bespectacled oldster named Dr. Francis E. Townsend. A former city health officer, almost destitute himself, Townsend had absorbed some of the economic panaceas floating around California. He was brooding over the plight of himself and his generation when—so the story went—he looked out his bathroom window one morning and saw three old women rummaging in a garbage pail for scraps to eat. From that moment the old man’s crusade was on. He came up with a plan that—to old people at least—was spine-tingling in its sweep and simplicity. Everyone sixty or over would get a monthly pension of two hundred dollars provided—and what a wonderful proviso it was—that he spent his money within thirty days. Financed by a “transactions tax” the vast forced spending would invigorate the whole economy.

  The truth about Townsend soon blended inseparably with legend, but the context of the movement was clear. America’s population was aging; the old rural family sheltering aunts and uncles and grandparents was declining; the self-sufficient community was disappearing. Etched deep on the faces of the old people who crowded around the doctor was the pitiless story of a generation: complicated machines that had thrown them out of factories, new routines that had eluded them, perhaps a long trek westward to the end of the line—and finally the Great Depression, casually breaking several million old people on the economic wheel.

  The Townsend movement mushroomed with startling speed. In September 1933—seven months after Roosevelt’s New Deal started—the doctor sent his plan to a local newspaper; within a year a thousand or more Townsend clubs were organized. Another thousand or so were set up in early 1935. As the New Deal honeymoon waned the cause seemed to be gaining momentum. Striking deep roots in the subsoil of discontent, it had the indispensable material for a protest movement: a leader who symbolized the cause; a strongly religious twist to the appeal; a concrete program directly related to old people’s needs and indigenous to the “American way of life,” scorning radical and “unChristian” methods.

  Roosevelt’s friends were alarmed by the burgeoning power of the agitators. Report after report came to the White House of huge mass meetings aroused by anti-Roosevelt speeches. There was talk, Colonel House warned the President, that Long could do to him what Theodore Roosevelt had done to Taft in 1912. Even Howe got worried after Dan Tobin of the teamsters union reported that members—“decent and honest fellows” too—were asking if they should form Share-Our-Wealth clubs. Stanley High, a White House assistant, returned from the West with gloomy reports in August 1935. The Townsend movement was vital and fast-moving, he warned the White House; it was his guess that the biggest mistake in 1936 would be made by those who thought Townsend could be laughed off.

  Guesswork was one thing; factual reports something else. Alarmed by Long’s activities, Farley asked the National Democratic Committee’s statistician, Emil Hurja, to make a secret poll of Long’s national strength. Hurja’s findings were disquieting. The Kingfish had drawn from the President sizable sections of his 1932 vote. Long’s strength was not restricted to Louisiana and a few nearby states; he had surprising support across the nation—enough, possibly, to tip the balance toward Republicans in 1936 elections. To make matters worse, he was openly threatening to “get” some of his foes in the Senate. This threat had a sharp edge to it. In 1932 Long had invaded Arkansas in a whirlwind, circus-like campaign to help Hattie Caraway succeed to her late husband’s Senate seat—“one poor little widow woman against six big-bellied bullies,” he said—and Hattie had won more votes than her six opponents combined.

  How would Roosevelt respond to the little foxes? He followed closely the activities of Long & Co., but he was not unduly alarmed. He seemed more concerned that the Republicans—especially progressive Republicans like La Follette and Nye—might fish in troubled waters, resulting in both a progressive Republican ticket and a Long ticket in 1936. “There is no question that it is all a dangerous situation,” the President wrote House, “but when it comes to Show-down these fellows cannot all lie in the same bed and will fight among themselves with almost absolute certainty.”

  Roosevelt quickly discerned a critical weakness of the protest movements: their timing. It was better, he wrote House, to have the “
free side-show” in 1935 than the next year, when the main performance would start. When Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s biographer, urged him in March 1935 to keep before the country a vision of high moral purpose, Roosevelt demurred. Public psychology, he said, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” Wilson had stirred moral convictions, but he had lacked T.R.’s power to arouse people to enthusiasm over specific events.

  “There is another thought which is involved in continuous leadership,” the President went on. People “tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio. For example, if since last November I had tried to keep up the pace of 1933 and 1934, the inevitable histrionics of the new actors, Long and Coughlin and Johnson, would have turned the eyes of the audience away from the main drama itself!” But Roosevelt agreed that the time would come for a “new stimulation of united American action,” and he would be ready.

  But that time was not yet. Roosevelt’s way of dealing with rival leaders meanwhile was not to try to steal their ideological thunder, but to outmaneuver them in some close and tricky infighting.

  His attack against Long was of this order. Patronage was doled out to the enemies of the Kingfish in Louisiana, and his supporters holding non-civil service jobs were fired. Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi politician who had been given a job by the administration, was assigned the task of warding off Long’s forays against neighboring senators. In August 1935, after an administration friend had won a primary election in Mississippi, Bilbo wired Roosevelt that the first treatment had been administered “that madman Huey Long” and more would follow. “I am watching your smoke,” Roosevelt answered enthusiastically. Federal agents roamed Louisiana checking the financial affairs of Long and his gang.