The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Inwardly the President was more puzzled than pleased. Should he press on with the court fight? He must have sensed immediately that Hughes had given the plan’s chances a punishing blow; he had hoped for a complete veto of New Deal legislation so that the issue would be sharpened for the people. He soon learned, moreover, that Robinson and others of his lieutenants were talking compromise. “This bill’s raising hell in the Senate,” Robinson reportedly told a White House representative. “Now it’s going to be worse than ever, but if the President wants to compromise, I can get him a couple of extra justices tomorrow.” On the other hand, Robinson himself posed a problem. It had long been understood that the doughty Arkansan would receive the first vacant justiceship and thus fulfill a life ambition. But the Senator’s appointment would clearly be a recognition of service to Roosevelt rather than a recognition of legal distinction or ingrained liberalism; once on the Court, moreover, Robinson might swing right. To offset this appointment there must be others.

  Roosevelt had further reasons to stand pat on his proposal. He was now in the fight to the hilt, and compromise would be interpreted as defeat for him and victory for Wheeler and the other rebels. He still hankered for six of his own appointees—liberal-minded judges with whom he could establish friendly personal relations such as he had enjoyed with the state judges when he was governor. Crucial New Deal measures were still to come before the Court, and the justices might swing right again if the pistol at their head was unloaded. Finally, the President still thought that he could win. Had he not saved many a measure during the first term, when prospects looked bleak, simply by sticking to his guns?

  So the order was full speed ahead. “We must keep up—and strengthen—the fight,” the President wrote Congressman David Lewis. As if to flaunt his confidence over the outcome he made plans to fish in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of April. Roosevelt’s manner was still buoyant.

  “I am delighted to have your rural rhapsody of April twelfth and to know that the French Government has spring fever,” he wrote on April 21 to Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris. “Spring has come to Washington also and even the Senators, who were biting each other over the Supreme Court, are saying ‘Alphonse’ and ‘Gaston’ to each other.…

  “I, too, am influenced by this beautiful spring day. I haven’t a care in the world which is going some for a President who is said by the newspapers to be a remorseless dictator driving his government into hopeless bankruptcy.”

  The Supreme Court turnabout marked a decisive shift in the character of the court fight. No longer was the issue one of Roosevelt New Deal versus Old Guard Court. Now the fight lay between the President and Congress. When the Court upheld the Social Security Act a few weeks later, it served to take the Court as an institution even further out of the struggle. But not its members. In May and June, Hughes made speeches that were hardly veiled assaults on the court proposal.

  Roosevelt returned from his fishing in mid-May. He was in a militant mood. After talking with precinct committeemen during the train trip back, he told the cabinet, he was as certain as ever that the people were still behind the bill. Democrats in Congress who opposed it, he added, might expect defeat at the polls. Roosevelt warned Garner privately that he, the President, had brought a lot of congressmen in on his coattails, and that he might openly oppose Democrats who were against the bill. He had Robinson and other leaders in, laughed off their fears, explained away the defections they gloomily reported, and sent them back to the battle.

  That battle was still going badly. Shipstead came out against the bill, as did several other senators on whom Roosevelt was relying. Party leaders were warning of a deepening split among the Democrats. Even White House assistants were losing confidence and counseling compromise. Other New Deal measures were being pulled down with the court bill. Then, on May 18, the opposition played another card. Wheeler and Borah, knowing of Van Devanter’s wish to retire, got word to the justice that a resignation timed to coincide with an expected vote by the Judiciary Committee against the court bill would help the plan’s opponents. For Wheeler knew what that vote would be. A few minutes after Roosevelt read Van Devanter’s notice of retirement on the morning of May 18 and had written in longhand a cool but polite note of acceptance, the Senate Judiciary Committee met in executive session. After brushing aside several compromise measures it voted 10-8 that the President’s bill “do not pass.” The committee line-up symbolized the split in the ranks of the Grand Coalition: six Democrats of diverse ideological hues deserted the President.

  Face to face with this deepening split, Roosevelt executed one of the rapid tactical shifts that so often threw his opponents off guard. He turned to the possibility of compromise. But his freedom of maneuver here was unhappily narrowed by a conjunction of circumstances that stemmed partly from sheer bad luck and partly from the way in which he had handled matters. Van Devanter’s retirement not only knocked one more prop from under the President’s plea for new blood on the Court; it also precipitated in acute form the old problem of rewarding Robinson with a justiceship without alienating the “true” liberals and making a mockery of Roosevelt’s arguments for the bill. Within a few hours of Van Devanter’s retirement, almost as if by plan, both opposition senators and supporters of the bill were crowding around Robinson’s front-row desk in the Senate chamber, pumping his hand, calling him “Mr. Justice.” The Senate was in effect nominating Robinson to fill the vacancy.

  In this extremity Roosevelt turned to the direct person-to-person persuasion for which he had such a flair. Against the advice of Corcoran and Jackson, who wanted him to let the bill go over to another session or even to accept defeat and take the issue to the country, the President decided on a shrewd but risky tactical move. Through Farley he let it be known to Robinson that the Senator could expect to take Van Devanter’s place. Then the President called Robinson in and agreed to accept a compromise on the bill, but he added that if there was a bride there must be bridesmaids. He asked Robinson to take full leadership of the fight for a compromise bill. The President was now seeking to turn the senatorial support for Robinson’s appointment to his own advantage. If the senators wanted to help their old colleague, they would have to provide some extra appointments as well. The danger in the plan was that everything depended on Robinson.

  And the President did not fully trust the majority leader. He complained to Ickes that Robinson had lost his punch, that there was no leadership in Congress. Speaker Bankhead was not strong in the House, he said, and Rayburn was so anxious to succeed to the speakership that he feared to offend anyone. The President was especially upset about Garner. Exclaiming that “my ears are buzzing and ringing,” the Vice-President had left on a long-planned vacation in Texas just as the fight in the Senate was coming to a head. But the President never expressed his feelings directly to Garner. Instead, after the Vice-President had been away several weeks Roosevelt urged his return in a letter that offered every bait that might lure the sulking Texan. Knowing of Garner’s fears about government spending and labor violence, and his old populist distrust of bankers, the President predicted a balanced budget for the coming year and declared that the public was “pretty sick of the extremists which exist both in the C.I.O. and some of the A.F. of L. unions and also of the extremists like Girdler and some of his associates backed by the Guarantee [sic] Trust Co., etc.” Roosevelt ended his appeal on a personal note.

  “And finally, just to clinch the argument for your return, I want to tell you again how much I miss you because of you, yourself, and also because of the great help that you have given and continue to give to the working out peacefully of a mass of problems greater than the Nation has ever had before.” But the Vice-President stayed in Texas.

  Garner’s own sit-down strike signalized the state of the Democratic party. It was not the court plan alone that was splitting apart the Grand Coalition. The attack on the plan served as a rallying cry for the conservatives who feared the rising tide of labor turbulence, fo
r the “old” liberals who disliked the President’s indirections and his personal handling of party matters, for New Deal liberals who prized orderly processes and constitutional traditions. Seeking to placate these elements Roosevelt, when asked about the deadlock between labor and management, said calculatedly, “A plague on both your houses.” Lewis’s howl of indignation and the icy silence of the party Old Guard indicated that in striving to veer between the various factions Roosevelt was keeping the warm support of none.

  At the end of June Roosevelt tried another tack—and one that again illustrated his preference for direct personal handling of affairs. A grand political picnic was arranged at Jefferson Island in Chesapeake Bay, to which Democratic congressmen were invited. The plan was to submerge intraparty bickering in three days of good fellowship. The President was at his best. Seated in an armchair under a big locust tree, he chatted congenially and drank beer with groups of shirt-sleeved legislators. He even allowed Martin Dies of Texas to induct him into the Demagogue’s Club, involving a pledge to favor all spending bills and no tax bills, to do nothing to harm his chances for a third term, never to be consistent— and not to send controversial proposals to Congress.

  In sharp contrast to this bucolic scene was the grim atmosphere of the Senate. There, day after day, Robinson was making the rounds of the Democrats, pleading with them to support his compromise plan. The new measure was mild enough, allowing the President to appoint only one coadjutor justice a year for any justice who had passed seventy-five and failed to retire. Even so, Robinson found it hard going, and often he had to resort to a personal plea to embarrassed senators for help in realizing his life ambition. When Robinson opened debate on the bill in the Senate he seemed to reporters, as he sawed the air with violent gestures and beat off his interrogators, like an aging bull tormented by the fast-moving picadors around him and stung by their banderillas. Day after day Robinson roared his arguments and threats at the opposition, meanwhile desperately counting and recounting the small majority he had lined up. But he had come to the end of his road. On the morning of July 14 he rose from his hotel bed, took one step, and fell dead, a copy of the Congressional Record in his hand.

  The stroke that ruptured Robinson’s heart ruptured as well the bonds of personal loyalty on which the majority leader had been depending for his compromise plan. There was a sudden rush away from the bill. Even as Robinson was buried in Little Rock the congressmen who had escorted the body out on the funeral train were busy sparring over the bill. On the train back to Washington, Garner, who had joined the delegation in Little Rock, went down the aisles systematically counting noses. On the morning of July 20 he reported to the President.

  “How did you find the court situation, Jack?” Roosevelt asked.

  “Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap’n?”

  “The rough way,” Roosevelt said with a laugh.

  “All right. You are beat. You haven’t got the votes.”

  NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER

  The end of the court fight was anticlimactic. Roosevelt asked Garner to arrange the best compromise that he could. Whether the Vice-President tried to salvage something out of the bill or simply surrendered is shrouded in the obscure maneuvering of the last days. By now Congress was outside anyone’s control; “everything on the Hill seems to be at sixes and sevens,” Ickes complained. Appropriately enough, the Judiciary Committee served as executioner by offering a motion to recommit the court bill. Only twenty senators voted against recommittal. A week later the Senate rushed through an emasculated bill, making minor reforms and improvements, which the President halfheartedly signed into law.

  The last episodes of the court fight were entangled with a struggle over the Democratic leadership in the Senate. Pat Harrison of Mississippi and Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky were vying for Robinson’s mantle in one of those contests that become all the more bitter because they cleave the membership of an intimate club. The court fight sharpened tempers of the opposing factions. Roosevelt was on good terms with both senators, but he had several reasons to prefer Barkley. The Kentuckian was a more reliable New Dealer and was personally more loyal to Roosevelt; he had, for example, given active support to the court bill while Harrison was passive. And if Harrison won the position, he would probably have to vacate the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee and this vital post would fall into the hands of a conservative Democrat.

  Clearly Roosevelt had his preferences—but could he act upon them? Not if he was to follow the custom that forbids presidential interference in the Senate’s internal affairs. Roosevelt’s method of resolving this problem was characteristic. Openly he took a neutral position; to be sure, he addressed a letter to “My Dear Alben” urging a continued fight for the principles of the court bill, but Barkley’s position as acting majority leader permitted this public show of friendship.

  Privately the President was not neutral at all. A check showed that Senate Democrats were split almost evenly between the two candidates. Every vote would count. An obvious weak link in Harrison’s ranks was Senator William H. Dieterich, who owed his Senate seat largely to Boss Ed Kelly of Chicago. Roosevelt asked Farley to telephone Kelly to use his influence with Dieterich. Farley refused on the grounds that he had promised the principals that he would keep hands off. The President thereupon turned to Hopkins and Corcoran, who threw White House pressure on Dieterich and others. The Harrison forces mobilized pressure too. Senator Harry Truman, who had pledged his vote to Barkley, had to ask the Kentuckian to be released of his promise. Among the shifters was Dieterich—from Harrison to Barkley. Barkley’s victory by one vote was an important victory for the President, but one that sharpened the ill temper of the Senate.

  THE ILLEGAL ACT; June 3, 1935, Ernest H. Shepard, Punch

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: “I’M SORRY, BUT THE SUPREME COURT SAYS I MUST CHUCK YOU BACK AGAIN.”

  The court fight over, Roosevelt sought to regain direction of his general legislative program. Congress, he told his cabinet, must take responsibility for what was done and what was left undone. The President was especially concerned about the farm situation. If farm prices fell next year, he said, a good many Democrats would be defeated in the next election. While Roosevelt talked, Ickes scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it to Farley: “The President seems to be indulging in a curtain lecture for the benefit of the Vice President.”

  Congress was still wallowing in confusion. Earlier in the session it had passed, under Roosevelt’s proddings, several important bills. One of these was the Guffey-Vinson bituminous coal bill providing for governmental and private co-operation in marketing, price control, and trade practices. Others were a revised Neutrality Act and renewal of the Trade Agreements Act. Congress had also enacted the Farm Tenancy bill, authorizing federal loans to farm tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers to help them buy their own farms. This was work done, but it seemed strikingly small in the light of the President’s broad challenge, in his inaugural, of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

  Could that challenge still be met? By the end of July five administration measures awaited action in Congress: wages and hours, low-cost housing, executive reorganization, comprehensive farm program, and creation of seven regional agencies patterned somewhat after the TVA. When Congress adjourned late in August, only one of these measures had been made into law. This was the Wagner Housing bill. It was significant that this lone administration victory was due far more to Wagner and an indefatigable group of public-housing enthusiasts and lobbyists than to the President. Roosevelt, to be sure, did help persuade a key chairman in the House to report the bill out of committee, but only after weeks of backing and filling in the White House.

  Equally significant was the reason that the rest of Roosevelt’s program failed. In part that failure stemmed from Roosevelt’s, original calculation that court reform would have a better chance if other major bills were postponed in its behalf. Later he appeared to swing to the opposite
view that at least one of the measures—wage-hour regulation—would be so popular that it would unify Democratic ranks split over court reform. Both calculations proved wrong.

  But there was a more important reason for Roosevelt’s legislative difficulties—a reason that reflected the strategic weakness of his political position. The trouble was that the ample coalition that he had summoned to his personal support in November—and which had responded to that summons—was already falling apart.

  The blocking of the wage-hour bill showed how extensive were the fractures in the coalition. When Senator Black introduced his proposed Fair Labor Standards Act late in May, Roosevelt vigorously urged passage. “We have promised it,” he said. “We cannot stand still.” Quickly the bill ran into snags. Southerners from low-wage states, including Harrison, deserted the President on the issue. Sharp differences developed among labor groups, not only between AFL and CIO leaders but also within the two organizations. As if all this was not enough, a fight broke out between low-tariff and high-tariff Democrats over a protectionist clause in the bill. Pressure against the bill was put on Farley and Roosevelt through Democratic leaders in the South. After a struggle the bill passed the Senate, and by calling in President Green of the AFL and acceding to his major demands Roosevelt was able to ease the bill through the House Labor Committee. Then the bill stalled in the face of a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats on the Rules Committee. In vain Democratic leaders summoned a caucus to put force behind the bill; not enough Democrats showed up to make it an official caucus.

  By mid-August the President was ready to give up the fight for the rest of his program. He decided to call Congress back in special session during the fall. Let the congressmen get back to their districts, he said, and they would return with a strengthened feeling for the New Deal.