The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  By early April when the relief bill passed, Roosevelt had only this victory in three months. He had appealed to the Senate to ratify United States adherence to the World Court, but the effort had failed amid a deluge of hostile telegrams, many of them stirred up by Coughlin. His social security bill, which would commit the nation to a program of assisting the jobless and the poor through federal and state action, was floundering between the same forces that had almost ground the relief bill to death: the liberals were sorely disappointed by its limited coverage and by the reliance it put on state participation; the conservatives thought it went too far. A veterans’ bonus bill had passed the House with more than enough votes to override the expected presidential veto.

  Never had Roosevelt been so squeezed among opposing political forces as during the spring of 1935. Spokesmen of the United States Chamber of Commerce sharply attacked the administration. Meeting with the President in mid-May, progressive senators La Follette, Wheeler, Norris, and Johnson, backed up by Ickes and Wallace, urged him to assert the leadership that the country, they said, was demanding. Roosevelt’s old adviser Felix Frankfurter reported that Justice Louis Brandeis had sent word that it was the eleventh hour. La Follette reminded the President that Theodore Roosevelt had taken open issue with members of his own party.

  Roosevelt indicated to the progressives that he would take a firmer stand. But despite the pressure from left and right, and from the agitators of discontent, he was not yet ready to jettison the middle way. He was still pinning his hopes on an extension of NRA for two years. The NRA was not Little Orphan Annie, he told reporters, but “a very live young lady” and he expected the two-year extension to go through.

  Then, late in May, came the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court invalidating the NRA, mainly on the grounds that Congress had exercised power beyond the scope of the interstate commerce clause and had delegated too much of this power outside its own reach. It was a jolting blow to the heart of Roosevelt’s middle way.

  For four days the President was silent, while the country waited expectantly. Then, on May 31, he gave his answer in a carefully staged performance. As the reporters trooped up to his desk, they saw an open copy of the high court’s opinion on one side, and on the other a dozen or more telegrams. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, knitting on a blue sock. The President leaned back in his chair, lighted a cigarette, jestingly asked, as he so often did, whether the reporters had any news. Did he care to comment on the NRA? a reporter asked.

  “Well, Steve, if you insist. That’s an awful thing to put up to a fellow at this hour of the morning just out of bed.” But the President was eager to talk. And talk he did, for almost an hour and a half.

  His monologue was not that of a liberal outraged by a tory court. It was a long dissenting opinion by a man who had been following a moderate course helping and mediating among businessmen, workers, and farmers alike, and now to his surprise finds the props knocked from under him. One by one he quoted from the pile of telegrams. These “pathetic appeals,” as he called them, came not from unemployed workers or from desperate farmers but from businessmen—drugstore proprietors in Indiana, a candy seller in Massachusetts, a Georgia businessman, a large department store owner, a cigar store operator. Pushing the telegrams aside, the President paused dramatically. What were the implications of the decision? It simply made impossible national action, collective action, the great partnership. Clearly he was attacking the decision not because it was conservative or antilabor but because it thwarted action by the national government to help all groups, including business.

  Again and again the President insisted it was not a partisan issue. Where to go next? “Don’t call it right or left; that is just first-year high school language, just about. It is not right or left.…” Then he slashed at the Court again. A “horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” And he let the reporters quote that phrase. FDR—‘HORSE-AND-BUGGY DECISION’ shouted next day from front pages across the nation. Most people took this remark figuratively as a New Dealer’s attack on conservative judges. Actually Roosevelt was speaking literally—he was dissenting with judges who thought that national problems could be solved by forty-eight separate states. Pressed by reporters as to how he would cope with the effect of the decision, the President said, “We haven’t got to that, yet.”

  Then began the second Hundred Days.

  Congress, which had been idling for weeks and had come to a standstill after the court decision, was galvanized into action. Roosevelt threw himself into the legislative battle. No longer was he squeamish about putting the lash to congressional flanks. Now he was bluntly telling congressional leaders that certain bills must be passed. Administration contact men ranged amid the legislative rank and file, applying pressure. Late in the afternoon they would report back to the President. When they mentioned a balking congressman, the big hand would move instantly to the telephone; in a few moments the President would have the congressman on the wire, coaxing him, commanding him, negotiating with him. To scores of others Roosevelt dictated one- or two-sentence chits asking for action. He and his lieutenants, working late into the night, acting in close concert with friendly leaders on Capitol Hill, stayed one or two jumps ahead of the divided opposition. Congressmen complained, balked, dragged their heels, but in the end they acted.

  The Wagner Labor Relations Act went through with a rush before the end of June, and the President signed it enthusiastically. The Social Security Act was passed, also by heavy majorities. Banking and Tennessee Valley legislation were strengthened. The AAA was modified in an attempt to protect it against judicial veto. The holding company bill, which was designed to curb the power of giant utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries, and which Roosevelt had been urging since January, went through under intensified administration pressure. And a controversial tax bill became law despite intense opposition from business and grumbling among congressmen that the President was pushing them too hard.

  Nothing better showed Roosevelt’s sudden change of direction than the tax bill. He had said nothing about such a measure in his January message; his budget message had suggested that no new taxes would be needed. He had toyed with a “share-the-wealth” scheme of the Treasury’s in February, but as late as May 22 he seemed to be sticking to his January position. Unexpectedly on June 19 the President asked Congress for an inheritance tax as well as the estate tax, gift taxes to balk evasion of the inheritance tax, stepped-up income taxes on “very great individual incomes,” and a corporation income tax graduated according to the size of corporations, with a dividend tax to prevent evasion. Leaving Congress “tired, sick, and sore, and in confusion,” as one Senator said, the President then departed for the Yale-Harvard boat races.

  What had happened? Had the President turned left?

  Viewed in retrospect, Roosevelt’s course seemed to many a sudden and massive shift leftward, away from the via media of the first two years to a commanding position on the left. From such a view it was an easy step to the further assumption that Roosevelt had shifted left to meet the rising hurricanes among labor, farmers, Long, Coughlin, Townsend & Co. The trouble with this theory is that it does not fit the way Roosevelt actually behaved. His reaction to the hurricanes set off by agitators of discontent was to outmaneuver the leaders and to give way a bit to the blast, not to steal the ideological thunder of the left. He did not exploit the potentialities of encouraging and allying himself with the new millions of labor.

  What did happen was the convergence of a number of trends and episodes at a crucial point—June 1935—that left Roosevelt in the posture of a radical. The Supreme Court demolished the main institutional apparatus of the middle way by invalidating NRA. In filling this void, Roosevelt salvaged 7a (in the form of the Wagner Act) and other NRA provisions that had been concessions to the left. The Court’s decision made impossible the resurrection of the code features that had been the NRA’s attraction for certain business and industrial groups. The resu
lt of this situation was that merely carrying on prolabor elements of the NRA meant a leftward shift.

  This was one reason for Roosevelt’s new posture; another was the practical effect of dealing with Congress. Following a middle way between the progressive and conservative factions had not been as easy in 1935 as it had been earlier. For one thing, Congress had shifted leftward in interest and ideology after the November 1934 election. In the early months of 1935 Roosevelt’s program had been bombarded from right and left, and narrowly escaped destruction. The exigencies of congressional politics pulled him to a more liberal program, and it was significant that his new position, harmonizing more smoothly with the majority in Congress on the left, resulted in an even more important array of measures than those of the first Hundred Days.

  APPLYING THE PRESSURE, May 1, 1935, C. H. Sykes, Philadelphia Public Ledger

  But the main reason for the new posture was the cumulative impact of the attacks from the right. He had been following a middle way; “as he looked back on it all,” recalled Moley, who was watching him closely during this period, “he was, like Clive, amazed at his own moderation.” The undercover attacks of business, the criticism that filled most of the press, the open desertion of big businessmen as symbolized in the Liberty League and smaller businessmen as represented in the Chamber of Commerce, the drifting away of conservative advisers like Moley—all these played their part. The desertion of the right, especially in the NRA decision, automatically helped shift Roosevelt to the left.

  The theory that Roosevelt executed a swing left for ideological reasons as a result only of the NRA decision runs hard up against other strands of Roosevelt’s development. His program had always embraced liberal measures as well as orthodox ones. Social security had long been in the works—Roosevelt in 1930 had been the first leading politician to advocate unemployment insurance—and it was put off to 1935 mainly because of administrative and drafting difficulties. The President urged the holding company bill throughout the session. He lined up for the Wagner Act before the NRA decision was announced. The speech he planned to give if the Supreme Court ruled against the abrogation of the Gold Clause would, except for the Court’s 5-4 majority for the government, have precipitated a grave constitutional crisis in February 1935.

  Roosevelt, in short, made no consciously planned, grandly executed deployment to the left. He was like the general of a guerrilla army whose columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.

  That Roosevelt had made no final ideological commitment to the left was made clear in an exchange of letters between the President and newspaper publisher Roy Howard shortly after Congress adjourned. Certain elements of business, Howard warned, had been growing more hostile to the administration, and considered the tax bill an attempt at revenge on business. They hoped for a breathing spell for industry, a recess from further experimentation. In a cordial response Roosevelt defended the tax measure and spoke for a “wise balance” in the economy. But, he added, the administration’s basic program had now reached substantial completion. The “breathing-spell” was here—“very decidedly so.” The zig had been followed by another zag.

  Possibly Roosevelt really meant what he wrote to Howard. But events have ways of committing leaders to new positions. The great legislative victories of 1935 had unloosed forces that were to carry Roosevelt further from the middle way toward partisanship and party leadership. The second Hundred Days pointed the way toward the triumph of 1936—and toward the defeats that lay beyond.

  TWELVE

  Thunder on the Right

  THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF SEEMED to take a breathing spell during the latter weeks of 1935. Exulting over the “grand and glorious” congressional session, he left Washington in September for a train trip across the country, with a stop for the politician’s happy task of dedicating Boulder Dam. A “million eager people” had received him in Los Angeles, he wrote his mother. At San Diego he gave an address on the menacing clouds of “malice domestic and fierce foreign war,” and again he sounded the theme of social co-operation and concord. Then, with Ickes and Hopkins in tow, he boarded the cruiser Houston for a leisurely cruise south through the Panama Canal, and north to Charleston.

  Telling long anecdotes, playing poker until late at night, making fun of Hopkins and Ickes, jubilantly landing huge sailfish, the President was in high spirits. He had time after his return for trips to Hyde Park and Warm Springs, and for some of the horseplay that he loved to indulge in with subordinates. When told that his genial military aide, “Pa” Watson, and Admiral Grayson were arguing jocularly over their exploits in a turkey shoot, Commander in Chief Roosevelt solemnly compiled formal charges and ruled that after being tied to trees one hundred paces apart, “each be armed with a bow and arrow, that each be blindfolded, that each be required to emit turkey calls, and that thereafter firing shall begin.…”

  It was a pleasant lull, but it could be no more than that. Events were marching on. In October 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, and in December Britain and France agreed to the dismemberment of Haile Selassie’s beleaguered country. At home, lines were forming for the election year that lay ahead. Late in December Roosevelt told Moley he wanted a “fighting speech” for his annual message—a keynote speech for 1936. Once again the President set the stage carefully. Over Republican protests he insisted on a joint session in the evening, when he could reach the widest radio audience.

  The atmosphere was heavy with partisan feeling on the night of January 3, 1936, when the President slowly made his way up the ramp to the House rostrum, carefully placed his pince-nez beside his manuscript, took a firm grip on the sides of the desk, and launched into his speech.

  He recalled, as usual, the dire days at home of March 1933, when he took office. But the world picture of that day had been an image of substantial peace. This image had lasted in the Americas. In the rest of the world—“Ah, there is the rub.” Were he to give an inaugural speech now, he could not limit his comments on world affairs to one paragraph. In Europe and Asia were growing ill will, aggressive tendencies, increasing armaments, shortening tempers. And what was the policy of the United States?

  “As a consistent part of a clear policy, the United States is following a twofold neutrality toward any and all Nations which engage in wars that are not of immediate concern to the Americas. First, we decline to encourage the prosecution of war by permitting belligerents to obtain arms, ammunition or implements of war from the United States. Second, we seek to discourage the use by belligerent Nations of any and all American products calculated to facilitate the prosecution of a war in quantities over and above our normal exports of them in time of peace.”

  Suddenly Roosevelt’s voice seemed to take on a more vibrant, sonorous tone. His bipartisan state paper completed, he was now giving a campaign speech. Within our own borders, as in the world at large, he said, popular opinion was at war with a power-seeking minority. “In these latter years we have witnessed the domination of government by financial and industrial groups, numerically small but politically dominant.…” These groups, happily, did not speak the true sentiments of the “less articulate but more important elements that constitute real American business.” Since 1933 he and Congress had contended for and established a new relationship between government and people. They had appealed from “the clamor of many private and selfish interests, yes, an appeal from the clamor of partisan interest, to the ideal of the public interest.” Control of the federal government had been returned to Washington.

  Lowering his voice confidentially, rocking back and forth behind the rostrum, Roosevelt was now drawing blood. Cheers and rebel yells burst from the Democrats, while the little band of Republicans looked on sourly.

  “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed.” After abdicating in 1933, these groups were seeking “the restoration of their selfish power.” Inexorably Roosevelt went on. “Th
ey steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics. They seek—this minority in business and industry—to control and often do control and use for their own purposes legitimate and highly honored business associations; they engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people—they would ‘gang up’ against the people’s liberties.

  “The principle that they would instill into government if they succeed in seizing power is well shown by the principles which many of them have instilled into their own affairs: autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment.…”

  Spiked with searing phrases, the speech was a far cry from the mellow, philosophical discourse of the year before. Partisan Democrats greeted it joyously as the kickoff for the presidential campaign. Republican congressmen, who had burst into derisive laughter when Roosevelt in closing referred to his speech as a message on the state of the union, called it a great stump speech but a dismal address for a chief of state. The Liberty League and other conservative groups feverishly prepared replies. Radicals had a mixed reaction. They liked the bristling words, but where was Roosevelt’s program? The President had proposed no new legislation. With millions out of jobs, with farmers still desperate, was he going to coast on the New Deal record?

  The answer came four days later.

  THUNDERBOLTS FROM THE BENCH

  For months now, a heavy judicial hand had been smothering vital parts of the New Deal. Federal district judges had issued over one thousand injunctions restraining the government from carrying out acts of Congress. Corporation lawyers went shopping for the most helpful courts, and often they were rewarded both with the requested injunction and with a stump speech from the bench. “Usurpation,” one judge had snorted about the NRA. By the beginning of 1936 appeals were piled up, awaiting action by the Supreme Court.