The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  When the President wrote to agency heads in 1936 asking them for detailed lists of their achievements that could be used in his campaign, the responses underlined the central part that the New Deal had played in this upsurge. In three years federal and other relief agencies had poured over five billion dollars into work projects and related relief activities. Another four billion had gone into public works: roads, dams, sewage systems, public buildings, and the like. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was supplying a substantial chunk of farm income through its direct benefit and rental payments. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a major carry-over from the Hoover administration, had stepped up its huge lending operations.

  Most important of all—in a long-run sense—was the social security program, which began operating in 1936. Its main provisions involved unemployment and old age, although there was a small appropriation for preventive public health. The program was financed through pay-roll taxes, which began at a low rate and were to rise in the years ahead. Social security in 1936 was only a modest beginning. Benefits were small, and would not be received for some time. There were grave administrative difficulties. Since money was being collected and not distributed, the effect of the program in 1936 was deflationary. But the towering fact was that at last the national government had acted to underpin the future security of Americans.

  A remarkable aspect of the New Deal was the sweep and variety of the groups it helped. Not only the millions of farmers and industrial workers, but great numbers of people in other categories had benefited from New Deal largesse. The Home Owners Loan Corporation conducted a vast rescue job, making over a million loans to mortgage-ridden home owners. The WPA put to work not only blue-collar workers but artists, writers, actors, teachers—and in jobs that salvaged their self-respect. The National Youth Administration helped thousands of hard-pressed high-school and college students to continue their education. Old people were looking forward to their pensions. Bank depositors had a guarantee of the security of their savings. Businessmen gained from government contracts, broadened purchasing power, freer lending policies.

  Behind the cold statistics was the picture of a nation again on the march. The impact of Roosevelt and his New Deal had been to arouse the energies and aspirations of a people chilled by the bleak hand of depression. To them the New Deal was not a list of figures. It was a group of farmers stringing up electric wires in the Missouri Ozarks. It was a towering dam in California, water sluicing through an irrigation ditch in Colorado, a hospital in Jersey City, cars streaming through a tunnel under the Hudson. It was men swarming back to work in Pittsburgh, a widow keeping her home in Ohio, Negroes watching a slum-clearance project in Chicago. It was grass cover holding soil onto a hill in Georgia, a farmer buying a new tractor in Iowa, a river in Tennessee running fast and clear where once the water had been brown with topsoil.

  The New Deal had brought a new condition for man; more than this, it had brought a new condition in the relations among men. The old subserviency of worker to employer, of mortgagee to mortgage holder, of farmer to shipper and middleman, of tenant farmer to landlord, of small businessman to banker, may have remained in its essential form; but the laws and spirit of the New Deal had instilled in these relations some of the equality and dignity that marked the old American dream. “My friends,” Roosevelt said to a crowd of young Democrats in April 1936, “the period of social pioneering is only at its beginning.” And that pioneering in the readjustment of human relationships had been accomplished with zest and—on the whole—with good will, rather than in an atmosphere of bitterness and reprisal. “Once again,” Roosevelt could say on the same occasion, “the very air of America is exhilarating.”

  There were, to be sure, grave deficiencies in the transformations wrought by the New Deal. For all the talk of re-employment, eight to nine million Americans still had no jobs in 1936. The spending of the New Deal had not markedly improved the lot of millions in areas that could not be easily reached by government. Pay rolls had gone up, but so had living costs. Conditions compared favorably with early 1933—but not so favorably with 1929. Some programs, especially housing, had hardly got off the ground. Over most of the New Deal emergency agencies hung an aura of improvisation, wasted effort, and inefficiency. And despite the expansionist philosophy of the New Deal, its basic program for farmers was restrictive.

  But in 1936 such matters could be left for the Republicans to enunciate. Of his own role the President had no doubt. It was to herald the gains of the New Deal and to assert that even better days lay ahead. It was to proclaim—again and again and again— the contrast between the America he had found in March 1933 and the America of 1936. Nothing would be allowed to soften the vividness of that contrast. When the National Emergency Council early in 1936 submitted to Roosevelt some statistical tables and statements implying that recovery began in 1932, Early indicated that this would not do at all. Changes must be made in the report.

  “The President is insistent,” he wrote to the NEC, “that the low point in the depression be fixed as March, 1933, or early in the year 1933—this for obvious reasons.”

  A voice boomed out from the back of a crowd in Hyde Park as the President stood on the platform of his special train.

  “Boss man! You’re out in front now. Show ‘em your heels!”

  Roosevelt waggled his head jauntily.

  “There’s something in that,” he shot back.

  But how much was there in that? Was the President really out front? Was it enough to capitalize on the politics of the deed and to roll to re-election on the wave of rising prosperity? If so, he could assume a defensive posture and hoard his strength until Election Day. Or did the battle still have to be won? If so, a hard, militant campaign lay ahead.

  Throughout the early months of 1936 Roosevelt wrestled with this cardinal tactical problem. And, characteristically, he ended up by shifting back and forth between two tactical lines and sometimes following them simultaneously.

  Early in the year the President seemed decided on a defensive campaign. The White House passed word to Congress that its session should be a brief one, devoted to appropriating money and passing routine administrative bills. A bill regulating conditions of employment of firms receiving government contracts was passed as a final plugging of the gap left by the NRA’s demise. The Supreme Court’s AAA decision forced the passage of a new farm bill and indirectly led to a controversial proposal by the President for a corporate-surplus tax in order to make up for the lost revenue. But the President failed to make a vigorous fight either for the new tax bill or for an effective housing program. He seemed ready to rest on his record.

  Politically this tactic involved soft-pedaling the party and also some fence-mending. Democrats were grumbling that Roosevelt hardly mentioned his party, even in a Jefferson Day dinner speech. In March the President tried to soothe businessmen by giving a long White House luncheon to members of Commerce Secretary Roper’s Business Advisory Council; he talked anew about a cut in spending, and he laid plans for organizing businessmen in the campaign ahead. He asked Ickes to call in Norris, Johnson, and other Republicans to revamp the Progressive League.

  Far more ambitious was a plan for tapping the enormous reservoirs of votes contained in the huge religious, economic, and civic organizations across the nation. American politics is largely group politics; and Roosevelt characteristically approached these groups through their leaders. He set up a new organization with the innocent title of the Good Neighbor League. Stanley High solicited the use of their names from religious leaders like Rabbi Lazarus, labor leaders like George Harrison of the Railway Brotherhoods, civic leaders like George Foster Peabody, women’s leaders like Lillian Wald and Carrie Chapman Catt. This organization of the forces of piety, hope, and feminism, decked out in the demure garments of nonpartisanship, became a smooth vote-getting machine for Roosevelt, financed actually by the Democratic National Committee.

  Late in April Roosevelt seemed still undecid
ed between a “unity” crusade and a partisan campaign directed against the business groups that opposed him. Then in late spring came a tactical change in the other direction—toward a partisan campaign based on a promised expansion of the New Deal. By early May he was denouncing, in private conversation, the business and press opposition and asserting that he welcomed their hatred. He was telling Moley, in one of their last long conversations, that the country needed less talk and obstructionist criticism and more leadership.

  The main reason for the shift lay in political developments. By May the Republicans were gathering their forces and heading toward their national convention in Cleveland. More important, one candidate had clearly emerged as a front runner in the quest for the Republican nomination. This was Alf M. Landon. Governor of Kansas, a successful businessman, attached irretrievably to neither the Republican Old Guard nor the liberal wing of the party, Landon had just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, cautious liberalism, and rocklike “soundness” that the Republican leaders hoped would appeal to a people tiring, it was thought, of the antics and heroics in the White House. Middle class by every test and in every dimension, he had the shrewd, guileless face, the rimless glasses, and the slightly graying hair that made him indistinguishable from a million other middle-aged Americans. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, Landon won overwhelmingly over Borah on the first ballot.

  Later it would become fashionable to joke about Landon, but he was no joke to the Democrats in June of 1936. For one thing, Landon had made a powerful run for the nomination against strong candidates—Borah, Vandenberg, and several others. For another, the Republicans, eying the great prize of the presidency and the obvious appeal of New Deal prosperity and reform, enunciated a moderately liberal platform. Landon himself was no mossback reactionary, he had deserted the Old Guard for the Bull Moosers in 1912, and he impressed the country when he boldly stated his position on certain planks of the 1936 platform in such a way as to put him a few degrees left of the party. More imponderable than all, in the late spring of 1936, was the potential of Al Smith and of the Jeffersonian Democrats who were splitting away from the New Deal. There were rumors that the anti-New Deal Democrats might set up a third party.

  Faced by this mobilization of the conservatives, Roosevelt found himself still harried elsewhere by the forces of Coughlin, Townsend, and Long. Huey Long had been shot to death in his state capitol in September 1935, but the Louisianian’s nationwide following had not fallen apart with his assassination; one of Long’s organizers, a handsome, slick-talking Louisiana minister named Gerald L. K. Smith, had sprung forward to grab the reins and the mailing lists. By June 1936 this ill-assorted trio was joining hands and preparing to set up the Union party. The only basis for their harmony was hatred of Roosevelt and the realization that his defeat would favor their own chances in later elections.

  The attacks from left and right brought a sudden little drop in Roosevelt’s popularity in June 1936, and his sensitive political ears doubtless caught this. The Supreme Court’s extreme swing right-ward in the New York minimum wage law case at the beginning of June also probably influenced the President. In any event, the force of the opposition made it clear that he would have to wage a strong campaign. But Roosevelt evaded for a time the question of whether or not he would promise an extension of the New Deal, and whether or not he would wage a party fight. His way of delaying a decision on these tactical matters was to play up the presidential personality.

  “There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”

  “I ACCEPT THE COMMISSION”

  Like all party conventions, the Democratic national assemblage in Philadelphia had its smoke-filled room—but it was the President’s study 150 miles away in the White House. Roosevelt dominated the proceedings throughout. He drafted the platform, passed on the major speeches, made the main convention decisions, and brought the affair to a stunning climax with his acceptance speech.

  The platform was, of course, a string of hosannas to the New Deal. One plank reflected a major decision on Roosevelt’s part. The ticklish problem of the Supreme Court could be handled either by a plank boldly calling for a constitutional amendment broadening congressional power over the economy, or by silence on the matter—or by generalities, assuming, of course, that the President had not yet formulated the plan he was to present to Congress seven months later. Beset with conflicting advice, Roosevelt chose the method of generality. After asserting that national problems demanded national action, the platform went on cautiously: “If these problems cannot be effectively solved by legislation within the Constitution, we shall seek such clarifying amendment” as would allow the state and federal legislatures, within their respective spheres, to pass laws adequate to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety, and safeguard economic security. “Thus we propose to maintain the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

  Still, the platform was an unusually outspoken and eloquent document. “We hold this truth to be self-evident—that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are: (1) Protection of the family and the home; (2) Establishment of a democracy of opportunity for all the people; (3) Aid to those overtaken by disaster.” While ambiguous on foreign policy, the declaration was an emphatic pledge to continue and to expand the domestic New Deal. Most revealing, perhaps, of Roosevelt’s militance of the moment was the inclusion in the same sentence of a promise to “rid our land of kidnapers, bandits, and malefactors of great wealth.” After considerable wrangling in the resolutions committee, a period and a few words were set between the criminals and the malefactors—but they stayed in the same paragraph.

  The fight over the period was symptomatic of convention proceedings. The delegates had little to decide. Farley kept the huge assembly in session for five days, partly because he wanted to give the Philadelphia businessmen, who had donated $200,000 to have the convention in the City of Brotherly Love, their money’s worth, partly because he saw a chance to drench the air waves with Democratic propaganda day after day, and partly because Roosevelt wanted to give his acceptance speech on a Saturday, as he had four years before. Time was consumed by endless speeches and parliamentary formalities; the delegates were amused by songs, stunts, and the ousting of a group of Al Smith Democrats who had the temerity to call out their hero’s name.

  But the convention did make one decision of potential importance. The President was still determined on the abrogation of the two-thirds requirement for nomination, and Bennett Champ Clark, son of the victim of the rule in 1912, had the satisfaction of moving the adoption of the majority rule. Mollified by a promise of increased convention representation for their section, the Southerners put up only a token fight; but the governor of Texas wondered out loud about the implications of the change for 1940.

  By the time Roosevelt’s neighbor John E. Mack placed the President’s name in nomination, the convention had become a wild political jamboree. “With our decks cleared for battle,” shouted Mack, “with justice and right and progress with us, we are ready for more action under the inspired leadership of that great American whose name I give you as your candidate for President, no longer a citizen merely of one State, but a son of all the 48 States, Franklin Delano Roos—“ An hour-long political demonstration followed the climactic uttering of the magic name: delegates milled about, cheering hoarsely, waving banners, tooting horns, jabbering, whistling.

  Hardly less enthusiastic was the candidate himself. To Mack he exclaimed over the telephone: “John, you were grand! You had the jury right in the hollow of your hand—perfectly grand. I hope they will find for your client. It’s all right. You were in grand voice. It came over the air marvelously. It’s great stuff.…”

  While the seconding speeches—no less than fifty-six of them—droned on, Roosevelt was putting the last touches on his acceptance speech. This speech would set the tone
for the campaign. Once again Roosevelt faced the problem of whether to give a “sweetness and light” address appealing to all groups or a partisan talk to a partisan throng; and once again he was for a time undecided. At first he turned to Moley for a draft stressing the theme of unity and co-operation; later he got from Rosenman and High a “militant, bare-fisted statement of the necessity for economic freedom,” as Rosenman later described it. The night before he was nominated, with the embattled speeches of party militants in Philadelphia still echoing in his ears, the President hammered out a rough draft— “so rough that I didn’t like it,” he told reporters the next day, “being a peaceful man.” Sweetness and light were still in it—and something else too.

  A theatrical setting awaited the President in Philadelphia Saturday night. Masses of humanity—over one hundred thousand persons—sat in great banks in the Franklin Field stadium. Rain had been falling, but by the time Roosevelt’s long black car slid up the ramp to a curtained-off area behind the platform, stars were showing through the splotchy clouds. Behind the curtain the smiling President started his slow, stiff-legged walk toward the stage. Suddenly he spotted in the crowd around him the benign, white-bearded face of Edwin Markham. Reaching out to seize the poet’s outstretched hand, the President was thrown off balance, and down he went. Pulled back to his feet, white, shaken, and angry, he snapped, “Clean me up.”