The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Coughlin, too, felt the stiletto rather than the rapier. The last thing Roosevelt wanted was a head-on encounter with the priest; he was upset when cabinet members spoke up against Coughlin. The President preferred to work under cover against the priest through prominent Catholics such as Frank Murphy, ex-mayor of Detroit, and administration friends in the hierarchy and in Catholic laymen’s organizations. An elaborate study was submitted to Roosevelt of Coughlin’s broadcasting network, and Farley checked on postal receipts at the Royal Oak post office as a measure of the response to one of the priest’s appeals for funds. The White House had a hopeful report from Cardinal O’Connell in Boston that the Father was to be called to Rome to head the American College there, but nothing came of this.

  If much of this maneuvering was ineffective, Roosevelt did not seem to be concerned. He could wait. To many of the inner circle during the early months of 1935, however, the administration seemed to be drifting and the President losing ground politically.

  LABOR: NEW MILLIONS AND NEW LEADERS

  On the labor front, too, the New Deal unleashed surging and dynamic forces. Probably Roosevelt never fully understood these new forces or the new leaders they lifted to power. Certainly he had little conscious role in bringing about social and legislative changes that were to recast radically the structure of political power in the 1930’s.

  The Depression had sapped the morale and strength of organized labor. Union membership, which had slowly fallen off during the 1920’s, sank deep after 1930 as workers lost jobs and as a huge reservoir of unemployed made the strike a feeble and often suicidal weapon. The more cautious union leaders tried to batten down the hatches as the industrial storms blew. Sporadic strikes of desperation swept bituminous coal and textile centers, but they were poorly organized and usually ebbed away amid shootings, arrests, terrorism, aimless destruction. By early March 1933 the relative strength of organized labor was about what it had been a quarter-century before.

  Quite unwittingly the new President acted as midwife in the rebirth of labor action. The Rooseveltian militance and exuberance of the Hundred Days aroused workers just as they aroused the rest of the population. But even more decisive was a little provision in the NRA act, Section 7a, which provided that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives.…” Neither Roosevelt nor Miss Perkins had much to do with this provision. Framed mainly by congressmen and labor leaders, it was simply part of a bargain under which labor joined the NRA’s great “concert of interests.” Moreover, the provision opened up a Pandora’s box of complexity and ambiguity; lawyers argued endlessly over its interpretation.

  But labor leaders made it simple enough. “To hell with the legal talk,” they told their organizers, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WANTS YOU TO JOIN THE UNION, proclaimed posters that John L. Lewis plastered by the thousands throughout the mining area. Unionism, labor organizers shouted, was now good Americanism. As business improved during 1933, workers flocked into unions—into the United Mine Workers, into David Dubinsky’s International Ladies Garment Workers Union, into Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, into the United Textile Workers Union, tens of thousands more into embryonic rubber, steel, auto, aluminum, cement, metal-mining unions.

  There was a virtual uprising of workers for union membership, incredulous AFL leaders reported. Workers held mass meetings and sent word they wanted to be organized.

  With growing unionism came a rash of strikes. Hackies in New York City, shipyard mechanics in New Jersey, aluminum workers in Pennsylvania, Milwaukee streetcar men, Butte copper miners, California fruit pickers, grocery clerks, newspapermen, furriers, teamsters, lumberjacks left their work. More workers struck in the summer of 1933 than in the whole period of 1930 and 1931. And the strike wave surged upward during 1934 and 1935. Symptomatic of the general unrest was the longshoremen’s strike on the West Coast which spread to milk-wagon drivers, carpenters, and other workers. So alarmed were Secretaries Hull and Cummings by this situation—the President was on a cruise—that Miss Perkins found them gravely discussing whether or not this was a “general strike” as defined in an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  When the strikes inundated the NRA mediation machinery, Roosevelt established a National Labor Board under his old friend Senator Robert Wagner of New York. Successful at first, the board collapsed in the face of employer intransigence in late 1933 and early 1934. Wagner now saw the need for a permanent law outside the NRA structure, establishing legal sanction for collective bargaining through unions of workers’ own choosing. With no help from the President, who in 1934 was still keeping his chips on the NRA partnership method, the New York Senator, Secretary of Labor Perkins, and a group of administration labor experts hammered out a bill that would give Section 7a force and precision. This bill ran head on into opposition from employers and the press and vacillation in the White House. Finally, Roosevelt backed a compromise resolution that went through Congress with bipartisan support and under which the President set up a temporary National Labor Relations Board. The new law was fuzzy on major points. Roosevelt still had no collective bargaining policy; he was still floundering from crisis to crisis.

  And more crises were building up. The events of 1933 and 1934 had released labor forces that were putting the old machinery of the labor movement under severe strain. Spunky young leaders were emerging in great industrial centers—men who had left assembly lines only a few months back to form unions, lead strikes, organize picket lines, cope with bosses, scabs, cops, judges. Eager to organize the new millions, the AFL was still dominated by leaders of craft-type unions who had an old and tested way of recruiting members—put them into “federal” unions, rigidly controlled by the AFL labor chiefs, and keep them in these recruiting stations until they could be parceled out, trade by trade and craft by craft, to the Blacksmiths, the Carpenters, the Electricians, the Pipe Fitters, the Sheet Metal Workers, and a score of other craft unions.

  Confronting giant, nationwide, integrated industrial empires like General Motors, United States Steel, Goodyear, and Du Pont, the grass-roots leaders saw that this slicing-up process meant disunity and weakness. Ready to back them up was a minority group of AFL leaders: Lewis, Murray, Hillman, Dubinsky, and a dozen others. What part craft versus industrial unionism, labor statesmanship, personal ambition, and ancient grudges played in the ensuing infighting was obscured in the dust and clamor of battle, but the Federation was soon shaken to its foundations. In the fall of 1935 Lewis and his followers set up the Committee for Industrial Organization.

  “Dear Sir and Brother,” Lewis wrote Green on November 23, 1935, “Effective this date I resign as vice-president of the American Federation of Labor.” A new dimension was being added to the shape of American power.

  And where was Roosevelt in all this? His part was not much more than that of an onlooker. The fact was that internal politics of the unions did not interest him. The political implications of a vastly expanded labor movement solidly grounded in the millions of workers in the great mass-production industries seemed to escape him.

  And yet vital questions and possibilities were hidden in the complexities of government policy toward collective bargaining and in the skirmishes of union chiefs. They were questions and possibilities of economic and political power. Section 7a put the weight of government behind unions. The question now was the kind of union. Much depended on governmental policy concerning questions like the nature of the bargaining unit, the method of election, craft versus industrial representation, the definition of company unions. When, for example, Roosevelt in March 1934 threw his influence behind a kind of proportional representation for auto workers, he weakened the solidarity and power of the workers against management. When labor officials backed company-wide unions and representation based on majority-rule election
s, they were building up the power of mass industrial unions.

  Humdrum matters, but important. John L. Lewis was shrewd enough to understand the implications for the future. “Isn’t it right,” he asked the 1935 convention of the AFL in his growling, thundering way, “that we should contribute something of our own strength, our own knowledge, our own influence toward those less fortunately situated? … If we help them and they grow strong, in turn we will be the beneficiaries of their changed status and their strength.… And whereas today the craft unions may be able to stand upon their own feet, and like mighty oaks before the gale, defy the lightning, the day may come when this changed scheme of things—and things are rapidly changing now—when these organizations will not be able to withstand the lightning and the gale.” Lewis was calling for a deliberate policy of broadening the labor movement in order to deepen the economic strength of a labor coalition.

  If Roosevelt failed to see the potentialities of an enlarged labor movement for the political coalition behind the New Deal, the reason lay in part in his attitude toward labor. He looked on labor from the viewpoint of a patron and benefactor, not as a political leader building up the labor flank of future political armies. He was concerned about their wages, hours, and conditions; he saw them as people with concrete troubles. It is significant that when he talked with reporters about a visit auto workers had paid him, he said nothing about the union situation in this vital industry but quoted line by line his conversation with the men about their problem of making ten dollars a day but working only sixty-five days a year.

  The supreme test of Roosevelt’s leadership in this area was his handling of the Wagner Act. This was the most radical legislation passed during the New Deal, in the sense that it altered fundamentally the nation’s politics by vesting massive economic and political power in organized labor. Unlike much of Roosevelt’s reform and relief program, the act cut through the heart of existing labor-management relations. It had an essential part in building powerful unions that in turn would furnish votes, money, and organization to future liberal coalitions.

  Yet for months Roosevelt was cool to the Wagner bill; he threw his weight behind the measure only at the last moment, when it was due to pass anyway. He long showed a special indifference, even obtuseness, to the cardinal question of employee representation. In May 1934 he told reporters with some irritation that the workers could choose as representatives whomever they wished—including the Ahkoond of Swat, or the Royal Geographic Society, or a union, or the Crown Prince of Siam. He failed to see that the essence of the problem was whether or not workers could still be represented by company unions and by a variety of minority and craft spokesmen whose disunity would weaken the workers in dealing with employers and in forging a new political arm.

  When Wagner went ahead and introduced his National Labor Relations bill into Congress in February 1935, he not only got no help or encouragement from the President, but it was all he could do to stop Roosevelt from lining up with Senators Robinson and Harrison in the latter’s efforts to stall the bill to death. Questioned in press conferences, Roosevelt was invariably cool or evasive. Almost singlehanded Wagner shaped political strategy, won grudging acceptance of the bill from the AFL old guard, fought the bill through the Senate against a hostile press and indifferent leadership. The bill passed the Senate, 63-12, on May 16, 1935.

  Eleven days later the Supreme Court invalidated the Recovery Act, including whatever legal support the act had given unionization. It might be logically supposed that it was this action, knocking the props from under the President’s collective bargaining policy, that forced him into Wagner’s camp. But no; on May 24, three days before the court decision, Roosevelt came out for the bill. Why? The explanation lies largely in his simple, pragmatic reaction to the immediate situation. The bill’s top-heavy majority in the Senate made House passage seem certain. By coming out for the bill Roosevelt could influence some important provisions still open, and he could wangle his way out of what might be called an administration defeat. He may have been influenced, too, by the fact that Chamber of Commerce leaders, who had been generally sympathetic to his program, openly broke with him early in May. The Supreme Court decision simply reinforced a decision already made.

  With typical Rooseveltian agility, he dropped his weight heavily on the scales, once he had decided to jump. By June the Wagner measure was a “must bill.” Roosevelt helped push the bill over the hurdles in the House; he ignored the frantic entreaties of businessmen to stop the measure. After the bill passed the House without a roll call, the President congratulated Chairman Connery of the House Labor Committee, adding, “It is a tremendous step forward.”

  In this curious way Roosevelt and labor first became partners.

  LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT!

  Roosevelt’s sudden reversal on the Wagner Act was symptomatic of his policy-making during 1935. The first session of the Seventy-fourth Congress stands as one of the strangest examples of presidential leadership and congressional followership in modern times. That session had passed several mild New Deal measures and was apparently coming to an end when it suddenly showed a burst of energy and enacted, during the hot summer of 1935, some of the most significant measures of Roosevelt’s first term. But if the President’s course seemed erratic, the explanation was clear. He was picking his way, step by step, among great pressures, now forced left and now right as he faced specific problems, always moving toward a goal that was fixed only generally in his mind.

  The President’s State of the Union speech to Congress in January 1935 had given little foretaste of the stormy days ahead. Despite references to the need for more social justice, it was moderate in tone and called for a rather limited program. “We can, if we will,” said the President, “make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.” He told the receptive legislators that he was ready to submit a broad security program, embracing natural resources, unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, and better homes. He promised an extensive new program of public works and work relief. He mentioned briefly other needed measures such as extending the NRA and improving taxation “forms and methods.” The New Deal, evidently, was to be clarified, improved, and consolidated, rather than extensively broadened.

  This attempt by the President to follow a wobbling way between the left and right threatened for months to mire his program in a legislative swamp. The via media still would not work.

  The huge work relief bill sharply etched the difficulties of the middle way. “The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief,” the President told Congress. He was not willing that the vitality of the people should be further sapped by handing out cash or market baskets or by giving a few hours’ work cutting grass or raking leaves. The most exciting thing about the bill was Roosevelt’s request for $4,880,000,000—a sensational sum for peacetime—but this sum was actually about halfway between the nine billions urged by progressives in the Senate and the small “dole” favored by some conservative legislators. Roosevelt also took the precaution of having the director of procurement, rather than the controversial figures Ickes and Hopkins (who would administer it), present the bill to the House Committee.

  Steered firmly by the House leaders, the bill went through the lower chamber with relative ease. In the Senate the story was different. With unlimited debate at their disposal, groups on the right and left ripped into the bill. The goal of the conservatives was simple: to reduce the appropriation and turn the bill into poor relief. The labor bloc wished to expand the bill’s coverage, but, above all, they hoped to write in a provision that labor would be given the prevailing wage paid by private employers in the area. This provision the President flatly opposed; he preferred a “security wage” of perhaps fifty dollars a month, partly to spread relief farther, partly to appease private employers’ fears of wage competition. Lining up first with the left and then with the right were inflationists, Senators mainly concerned with converting the prog
ram into a pork barrel that they could open up back home, and adventurers like Long. Muddying the waters further were Ickes and Hopkins as they enlisted legislators to back their own favorite provisions.

  Joining in a policy of opportunism, these disparate groups pushed a prevailing wage amendment through by one vote. Roosevelt’s response was to have the resolution temporarily killed by being sent back to committee. The President was finding his course hard going. Ickes felt that he was dispirited, looking tired, and lacking his usual fighting vigor and buoyancy. In the Senate, Long was cock of the walk. While the White House tried to find a compromise on the prevailing wage, the Kingfish taunted: “I see by the newspapers that some votes are being switched on the prevailing wage amendment. I resent anyone calling on anybody for a trade without calling on me first. … I might cut the price a little bit.” He rambled on. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool party man. I do not know just what party I am in right now, but I am for the party.”

  By compromising with the liberal-labor bloc the administration was finally able to stave off crippling amendments and push the bill through. Passage was due less to Roosevelt—who was cruising on the Nourmahal during the latter stages and complaining that the Senate was a “headache” and the whole situation “too childish for grownups”—than to administration leaders on the Hill and to the legislators’ willingness to compromise on certain issues by leaving them to the President. Roosevelt had to accept some losses: most notably a provision requiring senatorial confirmation for employees under the measure who earned more than $5,000 a year.