The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  A belief in personal property? Roosevelt, like most other leaders of property-hungry masses through American history, wanted not the suppression of property but its broader distribution. He believed in the family-sized farm—the farm that a man and his wife and his sons could live on. He believed in enabling workers to own their houses; he experimented long and hard with resettlement projects that gave people a chance to maintain their own houses and till their own plots. To Roosevelt there was a difference not in degree but in kind between this type of property owning and corporate ownership. A prudent householder himself, he handled his own property with affection and circumspection.

  Roosevelt was a gentleman in all but the prissy sense of the term. “He was decent; he was civilized; he was kind,” Gunther wrote. He disdained coarseness or vulgarity; he never used more than the milder, more conventional forms of profanity; he avoided excessive show of feeling and expected other people to; he expected people to have good manners; he hated the kind of ostentation that he had seen in fashionable centers. His consummate ability to identify his own feelings with other people’s was, of course, an essential part of his political technique. He had a continuing sense of responsibility for the health and well-being of his staff and of other people around him.

  Roosevelt’s attitude toward change cannot be so simply set forth. He had a love for innovation and experimentation in government that clashed with the conservative’s repugnance for unnecessary change; at the same time, he had a curious instinct for fixity in his personal affairs, such as the arrangements in his bedroom and office; and his tenderness for Hyde Park rested in part on his sense that here was a point of stability in a relentlessly changing world. To the extent that he thought about the implications of governmental change, moreover, Roosevelt defended change as essential to holding on to the values of lasting importance. For over a century conservatives in Britain had been demonstrating, through such reforms as factory acts and social welfare services, that minor changes in institutions and laws were necessary to conserve enduring ends. And in this sense, too, Roosevelt was a conservative.

  The argument should not, of course, be overstated. Roosevelt was too much of an opportunist and pragmatist to be catalogued neatly under any doctrinal tradition, no matter how broad it might be. Moreover, he did not believe in such conservative ideas as the need for hierarchy in society, the natural inequality of man, and the pessimistic view of man and his potentialities. His mind, open to almost any idea and absolutely committed to almost none, welcomed liberal and radical notions as well as conservative. But if any balance could be drawn, he was far closer to the conservative tradition than any other. He could say—and did say—with the great conservatives: “Reform if you would preserve.”

  The question insistently asserts itself: Why—if Roosevelt was in the broader sense a conservative, at least in his first two years in office—did American “conservatives” forsake him? The answer is that the American right was not acting in a great conservative tradition, that it had little concern with enduring conservative values. True conservatism—that of Burke, and of John Adams and some of the other Federalists—was shouldered out of the way by moneyed groups that draped narrow interests in the finery of enduring principles. But the exclusive concern with temporary self-interest was there for all to see. The fact was that by the end of the 1920’s business conservatism was showing little understanding of its “stewardship” or preserving function. It had no standards, no traditions, no coherence—only a grab bag of fetishes and stereotypes.

  The right had muffed its big chance. At a critical point in his first term—the early months of 1935—Roosevelt still was balanced precariously between right and left. He was still sticking to his idea that he could represent overriding national interests, that he could be leader of all the people. New Deal reforms had been accepted by most elements in the business community; even the continuing unemployment and the rumblings from labor and Long & Co. were not enough to push him leftward. Then business seemed to declare war on the President; the Chamber of Commerce lambasted his program, the Supreme Court vetoed parts of it. In the second Hundred Days and in January 1936 business got its answer.

  Why did business declare war? Partly because some New Deal measures were bothersome and expensive. Taxes did go up, restrictions did increase, labor did get “uppity,” forms and questionnaires did multiply. Yet business profits also mounted sharply during 1933 and 1934; as Roosevelt said, the old gentleman’s life was saved, even if not his top hat. Mounting business opposition to Roosevelt cannot be explained in terms of reasoned self-interest alone. The explanation lies also in two other areas, ideological and psychological.

  The business community had become the prisoner of its own idea-system. The key concept in this system was the belief in laissez faire, in the idea that government should not interfere in man’s social, and especially his economic, affairs. The generous liberalism of the nineteenth century was divested of its broader philosophical dimensions and squeezed into the cramped mold of a narrowed and restrictive economic orthodoxy. The individual, in reality a mysterious, many-sided figure, was distorted into the ungainly creature of Economic Man. Forgetting that actual man interacts with the world about him in a multitude of different ways, forgetting, too, that governmental restraint is only one of many restraints upon him and often the least important, forgetting that broadened governmental functions in the economic and social realm do not necessarily contract but may enlarge individual freedom, the rugged individualists preached that the way to free mankind was to remove the political controls from him. And they erected large signs around themselves, their workers, and their property, “Government, keep out.”

  Nowhere had this central idea been more augustly or authoritatively set forth than in the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States. By an astonishing feat of legerdemain the justices had taken the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been adopted ostensibly to protect the newly freed Negroes against white retaliation, and converted it into a powerful means of protecting corporations against governmental regulation. Some judicial opinions were essays on economic individualism that might have been lifted out of Adam Smith or even Herbert Spencer. It was no coincidence that the business revolt against Roosevelt coincided with the judicial revolt. The “steady four” were merely reiterating on the bench the precepts that had guided their steps from the frontier through the struggles in business and politics to the legal pulpit that was the Court. And because much of American life, as Thorstein Veblen had shown, reflected the business philosophy so superbly enunciated by the judges, the business creed of economic individualism was also the creed of organized lawyers, organized doctors, newspaper and magazine publishers, and of large sections of religion and education.

  Behind all this, however, were factors that lay far deeper in the human psyche than symbols and ideologies. The vehemence of the rightist revolt against Roosevelt can be explained only in terms of feelings of deprivation and insecurity on the part of the business community. Roosevelt had robbed them of something far more important than their clichés and their money—he had sapped their self-esteem. The men who had been the economic lords of creation found themselves in a world where political leaders were masters of headlines, of applause, and of deference. Men who felt that they had shouldered the great tasks of building the economy of the whole nation found themselves saddled with responsibility for the Depression. Men who had stood for Righteousness and Civic Virtue found themselves whipping boys for vote-cadging politicians. And government was ceaselessly becoming more and more dominant. “Business which bears the responsibility for the pay checks of private employment has little voice in government,” complained the Liberty League.

  Roosevelt had exploded one of the most popular myths in America, a perceptive Frenchman said to Joseph Kennedy. He had dissociated the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue.

  Only wounds rubbed raw by this psychological deprivation can explain the tortured protests of the
businessmen of 1934 and 1935. When Lewis Douglas wrote the President late in 1934 that he hoped “most fervently” that Roosevelt would really try to balance the budget, and that on this hung not only Roosevelt’s place in history but “conceivably the immediate fate of western civilization,” he was not merely converting a governmental income-outgo balance sheet into an Eternal Principle; he was revealing his own deep psychological commitment to a business way of doing things. When Herbert Bayard Swope wrote Farley early in 1935 of a sense of fear that was beginning at the top, growing downward, and spreading as it grew in the form of misgiving about the President, he was reporting on an essentially irrational hatred of Roosevelt that had begun long before the second Hundred Days had given the business community some kind of rational basis for that hatred.

  And because the hatred on the right seemed so bitter and illogical, Roosevelt was tempted to respond in kind. The hardening opposition of the press especially aroused him. In August 1935 the President somehow got hold of a message from a Hearst executive to Hearst editors and to its news service: “The Chief instructs that the phrase Soak the Successful be used in all references to the Administration’s tax program instead of the phrase Soak the Thrifty hitherto used, also he wants the words Raw Deal used instead of New Deal.” Roosevelt was indignant. He even had a press release prepared—“The President believes that it is only fair to the American people to apprise them of certain information which has come to him.…” But more prudent counsels prevailed, and the release was not issued. The editorial lions roared louder and louder. Early in 1936 the Chicago Tribune was already running as its “platform” the slogan “Turn the rascals out,” with the admonition “Only 201 [or 101, or 17] days in which to save your country. What are you doing to save it?”

  Conservatism is betrayed when it becomes the private property of a narrow economic or social minority. And the failure of the American right to rise above its concern with property, myth, and status and to follow a conservative creed in the great British and early American tradition powerfully influenced both the character of Roosevelt’s leadership and the attitude of the left toward the New Deal.

  ROOSEVELT AND THE RADICALS

  Violently waving his hands, twisting his mouth down into the familiar old near-snarl, Al Smith arraigned the New Deal before a cheering, guffawing crowd of Liberty Leaguers in Washington late in January 1936. Al’s hair was silvered, his face was lined and hollowed, but the wisecracks were as biting as ever. The brain trusters, he shouted, had caught the Socialists in swimming and had run away with their clothes. The New Deal had fomented class warfare. It had carried out one Socialist plank after another. While a dozen Du Ponts, John W. Davis, Shouse, and Raskob applauded, Smith concluded on a dark note of Marxist threats to the American system.

  Roosevelt, who had directly challenged the Liberty League in his message to Congress earlier in the month, was not disturbed by Smith’s threat to “take a walk.” He had already written Smith off, and he left it to his lieutenants to parry the attack. Jumping into the fray, Ickes the next evening quoted Smith’s answer to a Hoover charge of socialism in 1928; this cry, Al had said then, was always raised by powerful interests eager to stop progressive legislation. Senator Joseph Robinson, Smith’s running mate in 1928, lashed the “Unhappy Warrior” for deserting his party.

  The most agonized reply came from no New Dealer but from a tall handsome Socialist leader with long patrician features and a vibrant voice. The New Deal was socialism? cried Norman Thomas over the radio a few days later. Emphatically not. Roosevelt had not carried out the Socialist platform—except on a stretcher. One by one Thomas ticked off the New Deal reforms. The banks? Roosevelt had put them on their feet and turned them back to the bankers. Holding company legislation? True Socialists would nationalize holding companies, not try to break them up. Social security? The Roosevelt act was a weak imitation of a real program. The NRA? It was an elaborate scheme for stabilizing capitalism through associations of industries that could regulate production in order to maintain profits. The AAA? Essentially a capitalist scheme to subsidize scarcity. TVA? State capitalism. CCC? Forced labor.

  Roosevelt’s slogan was not the Socialist cry, “Workers of the world, unite,” Thomas proclaimed. Roosevelt’s cry was “Workers and small stockholders unite, clean up Wall Street.” And that cry was at least as old as Andrew Jackson.

  As a political maneuver, Thomas’s speech was transparent. He was desperately trying to keep the rank and file from falling under Roosevelt’s spell. The unions, though, were too busy with their immediate problems to pay much heed. The Wagner Act was helping them organize. The WPA and PWA were putting men to work. Even Socialist leaders were deserting to take jobs in government.

  But as ideological analysis, Thomas’s answer was beyond dispute. If socialism had any coherent meaning, it meant the vesting of the ownership and control of capital, land, and industry in the whole community. With the exception of TVA, nothing important in the New Deal was of this description. The only plausible aspect to the Liberty League’s equation of the New Deal and socialism was the Socialists’ habit of advancing a host of immediate, “practical” reforms along with their basic program of socialization.

  Roosevelt, like major party leaders before him, had no compunction about plucking popular planks from the Socialist party platform—planks such as unemployment compensation and public housing. But he spurned the central concept of socialization. Even more, his aversion had been tested in the crucible; in 1933 he probably could have won congressional assent to the socialization of both banking and railroads, but he never tried. He wanted to reform capitalism, not destroy it. And in this sense he was a conservative. It was precisely because the Socialists had a coherent economic and social doctrine rooted in a systematic philosophy that they recognized Roosevelt’s true conservatism. It was precisely because the Liberty Leaguers lacked such a philosophy that they totally miscalculated Roosevelt’s New Deal.

  And the Communists? During Roosevelt’s first two years they denounced his program as a capitalist ruse, as fascism disguised in milk-and-water liberalism. “The ‘New Deal’ of Roosevelt,” proclaimed a party resolution in 1934, “is the aggressive effort of the bankers and trusts to find a way out of the crisis at the expense of the millions of toilers. Under cover of the most shameless demagogy, Roosevelt and the capitalists carry through drastic attacks upon the living standards of the masses, increased terrorism against the Negro masses, increased political aggression and systematic denial of existing civil rights.…”

  Then came a flip-flop. Shaken by Hitler’s looming power Moscow put aside revolutionary tactics and called for a popular front of Socialists and bourgeoisie against the Fascists. Obediently the American Communists wheeled around a 180-degree turn. Roosevelt now must be supported as a leader of anti-Fascist forces. The reversal was useful to the Communists, for popular-front tactics helped them to infiltrate the burgeoning trade unions and other progressive groups. But it was an acceptance of Roosevelt on opportunistic, not doctrinal, grounds.

  The antagonism of the independent left to the New Deal was equally sharp. In the spring of 1935 Heywood Broun called Roosevelt labor’s Public Enemy No. 1. The chubby, unkempt columnist poked fun at the labor leaders who invaded the White House, were charmed by Roosevelt into a happy trance, and woke up, Broun said, with something like the automobile code. The myth of Roosevelt as a crusading radical was as empty as the masterful politician myth, wrote the Nation’s Washington correspondent. Roosevelt was a nonintellectual—a man who lived and thought on the skin of things.

  Even the more drastic legislation of the second Hundred Days seemed to make no difference to the left. The Social Security Act was weak, genuine public works had gone by the board, the Wagner Act had been forced on the President. Even Roosevelt’s fighting speech of January 1936 left them cold; it was empty of concrete proposals. Perhaps the radicals were still bemused by the picture they had created of Roosevelt as the “gay reformer,” lacking
doctrine and direction; more likely they saw the rejuvenated New Deal of 1935 as merely a stepped-up program of moderate reform. If in the end many radicals voted for the President, it was not because they loved Roosevelt more but because they loved the Republicans less.

  “Governor,” said an old friend to Roosevelt during the second Hundred Days, “did you see this morning’s Times? You don’t have a thing to worry about. The Communist Party has decided to pat you on the head.” The President roared. Nothing could have amused him more than this kind of leftist support.

  When Roosevelt expressed amazement that people could call him a radical, he was mainly play acting. As a politician, he knew perfectly well that this cry was an old, if somewhat soiled, practice in American politics. Yet there was an element of genuine incredulity in his reaction. He knew he had been taking some kind of middle road; more important, the hostility he felt toward Marxist doctrines, whether socialist or communist, made the charges seem ridiculous to him. This hostility was not merely ideological. It was psychological in the sense that Roosevelt distrusted the kind of doctrinaire and systematic thinking that was implicit in intellectual radicalism.

  Roosevelt, in fact, was an eminently “practical” man. He had no over-all plans to remake America but a host of projects to improve this or that situation. He was a creative thinker in a “gadget” sense: immediate steps to solve specific day-to-day problems. He had ideas such as the tree shelter belt in the drought areas; transcontinental through-highways with networks of feeder roads; huge dams and irrigation systems; resettlement projects for tenant farmers; civilian conservation work in the woods; a chain of small hospitals across the country; rural electrification; regional development; bridges and houses and parks. Not surprisingly, virtually all these ideas involved building tangible things. What excited Roosevelt was not grand economic or political theory but concrete achievements that people could touch and see and use.