The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  But only for an instant did he lose his composure. A moment later, when the curtain was parted, there stood the President—calm, erect, smiling. The crowd burst into frenzied, ecstatic cheering.

  Roosevelt opened serenely on a note of national unity. “I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He thanked members both of his own party and of other parties for their unselfish and nonpartisan effort to overcome depression.

  “America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived. In those days we feared fear.… We have conquered fear.”

  The President’s voice sounded clearly in the soft summer air. “But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places.” Even in America, the rush of modern civilization had raised new problems that must be faced if Americans were to preserve the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson had fought. Political tyranny had been wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. But economic tyranny had risen to threaten Americans.

  A hundred spotlights set the President off brilliantly from the dark masses around him. “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.…

  “The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

  Roosevelt’s voice was rising in crescendo after crescendo. “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” The crowd roared its approval. “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution.” Roosevelt’s phrases cut through the cheering—“democracy, not tyranny … freedom, not subjection … dictatorship by mob rule and the overprivileged alike … the resolute enemy within our gates …”

  Roosevelt lowered his voice. “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

  “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…”

  Roosevelt looked up at the crowd.

  “I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—”

  A clamorous roar swept through the stadium, drowning out the last words “—with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.” Like a prize fighter, Roosevelt held his clasped hands over his head, then seized John Garner’s. Slowly the President made his way back to his car. As the ecstatic crowd cheered, he circled the field twice; then his car disappeared into the night.

  From the center of the stage Roosevelt moved back into the wings. He gave two or three “nonpolitical” dedicatory speeches, and then he entered the fullest blackout a President can enjoy, by cruising for two weeks off the New England coast. The President’s vacation was carefully timed. He was perfectly willing to let the Republicans take over the stage; his time would come later. “The Republican high command,” he wrote Garner, “is doing altogether too much talking at this stage of the game.”

  Others were not so serene. Watching the Landon build-up in the press, Ickes grumbled that the Democratic campaign was drifting and the President was defeating himself. Eleanor Roosevelt warned that the Landon headquarters was moving quickly into action. Without Roosevelt’s direct control things fell into disorder; even Early and High were disturbed. “The President smiles and sails and fishes,” Ickes complained, “and the rest of us worry and fume.”

  Roosevelt could afford to smile and sail. In a broad sense he had been campaigning for re-election ever since taking office, and he had begun setting his campaign machine in action months before his nomination. He had asked many of his ambassadors abroad to come back for the campaign; he had assigned propaganda jobs, including the preparation of a “Life of Governor Landon” that would picture the Kansan as a pleader for federal relief; he had directed the setting up of special campaign groups like the Good Neighbor League, reviewed campaign tracts, helped draft Lehman for renomination as governor to strengthen the whole ticket in New York, instructed his campaign aides not to mention any Republican candidate. When Farley forgot this last precept and referred to the Republican candidate as the governor of a “typical prairie state,” the President chided him none too gently. It would have been all right if Farley had said “one of those splendid prairie states,” the President wrote him, but the word “typical” coming from a New Yorker was meat for the opposition.

  Within a few weeks after the Philadelphia convention Farley had campaign headquarters actively functioning in New York. The national chairman wrote 2,500 local Democratic leaders for their appraisal of the situation in their area. “I want the true picture,” Farley warned, and it was on the basis of these and succeeding estimates that he later made his remarkably accurate prediction of the election results.

  Farley set up the usual campaign divisions, including business, veterans, foreign language, and the like. The Democrats paid special attention to labor. Lewis and other CIO chiefs organized Labor’s Nonpartisan League, a wholly partisan agency for mobilizing Roosevelt votes in the industrial centers. Perhaps its most important contribution to the campaign was a gift of half a million dollars. In the face of the widening labor schism between Lewis’s CIO and the American Federation of Labor, the Democrats were careful not to jeopardize their good relations with the AFL. Administration officials lobbied among Federation chiefs to hold labor’s ranks together at least until November. Roosevelt kept in close touch with Green, and the AFL chief publicly promised after a visit to Hyde Park that 90 per cent of labor’s vote would go to the President.

  While Farley framed a party campaign during midsummer, while Landon and his hard-driving running mate, Frank Knox, stumped the country, the President serenely kept his posture of nonpartisanship. Actually he was closely directing aspects of the campaign, even to the extent of specifying the kind of paper and color process to be used in pamphlets. Publicly, however, the President seemed occupied with his presidential duties. Of course, as President he could continue to exploit the politics of the deed. He deflated Republican criticism of the Democratic spoils system by putting postmasters under civil service regulations. He anticipated a Landon pronouncement on farm problems by creating a crop insurance committee for protection against farm surpluses.

  As President, too, Roosevelt could make pronouncements of nonpartisan character but with wide popular appeal. Such an occasion was his Chautauqua address. “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. … I hate war.” Carefully skirting dangero
us political shoals, the President fell back on his old formula of shunning political commitments, such as those involved in the League, but warning that peaceful nations could be involved as long as war existed anywhere in the world. “I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.…”

  Nature, too, aided the President’s guise of nonpartisanship. By the summer of 1936 a belt of land running from Canada to Texas had been seared and baked by drought. With the sun remorselessly drying up streams and killing off crops, the President decided on one of his “look-sees.” Any politics on the drought trip? reporters asked. “It is a great disservice to the proper administration of any government,” the President said piously, “to link up human misery with partisan politics.”

  The trip was a political master stroke. The President made a score of back-platform speeches in nine states; he saw, and was seen by, tens of thousands of voters. Never did he mention the campaign, except in an offhand, humorous way, and never did he mention the Republican opposition. But he often pointed out the contrast between the conditions he had seen in 1932 and the conditions he saw now, even in the drought areas. As the politician joked and politicked with local officials, the inspection train took on the aura of a campaign train. Roosevelt himself seemed to take on magical qualities as his trips through the parched country time and again brought rain.

  But the tour was a work trip, too, and the President had a chance to talk with scores of federal and local officials. The climax came in Des Moines when Roosevelt conferred with state governors—including the governor of Kansas. The meeting was called in part to put Landon “on the spot” in regard to farm relief, but the Kansan held his own. Roosevelt took care to be thoroughly briefed for the encounter. “You will not remember,” Landon said at one point, “but the first talk with me when you invited me to Washington in 1933—”

  Roosevelt cut in: “About the water?”

  “I am amazed you remember,” Landon said.

  The President’s main difficulties came at the hands not of Landon but of blunt-talking Governor Ernest Marland of Oklahoma, where drought conditions were at their harshest. At the end the Oklahoman demanded: “Mr. President, what are we going to tell the 100,000 hungry farmers in Oklahoma tomorrow when we go home?”

  “You are going to tell them that the Federal agencies are getting busy on it just as fast as the Lord will let them.… You can accomplish something in one week, but you cannot accomplish the impossible.”

  “That is small consolation for a hungry farmer,” the governor persisted.

  “What more can you say to the hungry farmer, Governor? The machinery will be put in gear just as fast as the Lord will let you.”

  “WE HAVE ONLY JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT”

  The grand strategy in this battle, Herbert Bayard Swope wrote Roosevelt in August, “is to be firm without being ferocious; to be kindly rather than cold; to be hopeful instead of pessimistic; to be human rather than to be economic; to be insistent upon every man having a chance, and above all, to make yourself appear to be the President of all the people.…”

  “I agree with all you say,” Roosevelt replied. And during September, while the people and the politicos waited for the old campaigner to open up, Roosevelt doggedly kept his nonpartisan pose. He spoke to the nation on conservation, to a world power conference on “human engineering,” to the Conference on the Mobilization for Human Needs, to a national convention of philatelists, to the tercentenary celebration of Harvard, where he was booed by the undergraduates and where he brought smiles even to the faces of stiff-necked Republican alumni by saying: “At that time [one hundred years ago] many of the alumni of Harvard were sorely troubled by the state of the Nation. Andrew Jackson was President. On the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, alumni again were sorely troubled. Grover Cleveland was President.” A pause. “Now, on the 300th anniversary, I am President.”

  But still the President took no notice of the campaign, of the Republicans and their charges. “Say, Steve,” a reporter asked Early jocularly, “is this going to be a nonpolitical campaign?”

  Farley could take no such lofty stand. As the rallier of party forces, he was fair game for Republican thrusts. Day after day he was charged with using relief jobs and public funds to bribe millions of voters, with operating a colossal spoils machine, with neglecting the post office. The Republicans hoped their shots would glance off Farley and demolish Roosevelt; more likely, their drumfire against the Postmaster General simply helped Roosevelt in his tactic of staying above the battle.

  Farley’s worst troubles came from Democrats rather than Republicans. Roosevelt’s bipartisanship of 1934 had left Democrats disorganized and disgruntled in half a dozen states. The Wisconsin Democracy had warned Farley against any further administration flirting with the Progressives, and they had put up another candidate to fight Philip La Follette for the governorship. The EPIC groups, still in control of the Democratic party organization in California, had toyed with third party ideas but were now grudgingly supporting Roosevelt. Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota had been openly critical of the New Deal but were now lining up behind Roosevelt, to the discomfiture of the Democratic factions. And it was to Farley, the party leader, that the angry Democrats turned to demand help from the national administration.

  The kind of problem Farley faced was typified by the situation in Idaho. Mutual friends of Senator Borah and Roosevelt had tried to induce Farley to withdraw administration support from Borah’s Democratic foe in exchange for the Idaho senator’s support for Roosevelt against Landon. The proposed deal was backed also by a Democratic faction in Idaho opposed to the Democratic nominee, and Borah was willing to play along with the idea. But Farley reported to the go-betweens that the Democratic candidate was in the fight to stay. Borah never took a stand between Roosevelt and Landon.

  Another pro-Roosevelt but non-Democratic senator was Norris of Nebraska—and Norris was a man Roosevelt especially esteemed. Late in 1935 the President had urged Norris to run for re-election in 1936, but the old white-haired Nebraskan allowed the party primaries to go by without filing. He cut off his ties with organization Republicans by denouncing the 1936 platform, and he continued to attack organization Democrats, including Farley, for their spoils activities. But he came out for the President; “Roosevelt is the Democratic platform,” the Senator announced. Nominated on petitions as an independent by thousands of his followers late in the summer of 1936, Norris confronted the regular nominees of the two parties. The Democratic nominee, Terry M. Carpenter, appealed for support to his national party leaders, but in vain. To make matters worse for Carpenter, key Democratic leaders in the state came out for Norris against their own party nominee. Carpenter could merely hope that Roosevelt would remain silent.

  In planning his mid-October campaign, the President handled state situations such as these with his usual versatility. He kept entirely clear of California, Wisconsin, and Idaho, and thus avoided hostile factions in those states. He planned to go to Minnesota, but before he arrived the local Democrats had been induced to withdraw their state ticket in favor of the Farmer-Laborites, so that the President’s main task in this state was to soothe the injured feelings of the ticketless Democratic leaders. As for Nebraska—here he intended to be as direct and outspoken as elsewhere he had been evasive.

  Roosevelt opened his formal campaign with a speech at the end of September to the New York Democratic convention in Syracuse. He used the occasion to answer charges of Coughlin, Hearst, and others that the Communists were supporting the New Deal. The President had been urged to answer these charges by denouncing Soviet violations of treaty agreements, but he believed that a flat statement would be enough. “I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien ‘ism’ which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy,” he asserted. The New Deal, he said, had saved the country from the threat of com
munism posed by the social and economic wreckage of 1932. Liberalism was the protection of the farsighted conservative. “Reform if you would preserve.”

  With biting sarcasm Roosevelt struck out at the “me-too” speeches of the Republicans. “Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says,”—and here Roosevelt arched his eyebrows and raised his voice to a near falsetto—“Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them—we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

  As Roosevelt’s campaign train rolled slowly through the Midwest during October, the patterns of his attack became clear. Over and over again, in rear-platform talks and formal speeches, he stressed three simple themes: the contrast between conditions in March 1933 and conditions in October 1936; the role of the New Deal in getting the country out of depression; and the interdependence of the American people—of workers and businessmen, of farmers and consumers, of state governments and the national government. With homely examples he drove these points home.

  Although the President said on one occasion, “We are here to proclaim the New Deal, not to defend it,” to a surprising degree he devoted his talks to a point-by-point answer to Republican charges. Again and again he answered Landon’s charges of waste and wild spending with the simple question, “If someone came to you and said, ‘If you will borrow $800 and by borrowing that $800 increase your annual income by $2,200,’ would you borrow it or not?” When some Republican orator accused him of bringing out a new farm program every year, like new automobile models, he accepted the simile and said the nation had passed beyond Model-T farming. “While his speeches did not resound with Webster’s sonorous roll, or shimmer with the polished hardness of Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric,” Charles and Mary Beard wrote not long afterward, “his prose, although sometimes dull and repetitious, often glowed with poetic warmth and was enlivened by the flight of speeding words.”