These splits even among his liberal advisers reflected to some extent the haphazard fashion in which Roosevelt had assembled his brain trust. Even so, there were few out-and-out Keynesians in the government, and most of these were in the lower echelons and lacked access to the President. And Keynesian theory was so new that certain statistical and analytical tools were lacking.
The main reason for Roosevelt’s failure in the economic sphere, however, lay neither in the political situation nor in his divided advisers. With his immense political resourcefulness and volatility Roosevelt could always have broken out of the party and congressional web, at least in 1936 and early 1937. He could always have changed his advisers. His main trouble was intellectual. Roosevelt was simply unable as a thinker to seize the opportunity that Keynesian economics gave him. His failure as an economist was part of a broader intellectual failure.
What was the nature of this failure? Roosevelt’s mind was an eminently operative one, quick, keen, fast, flexible. It showed in his intellectual habits. He disdained elaborate, fine-spun theories; he paid little attention to the long and abstract briefs that academic people were always sending him on ways of improving administration, on strengthening the cabinet as an institution, on dealing with Congress. He hated abstractions. His mind yearned for the detail, the particular, the specific. Invariably he answered general questions in terms of examples—in terms of an individual business, of a farmer in Kansas, of a problem in Hyde Park, of a situation during the Wilson administration. He had a passion for the concrete.
His working habits bespoke his mind. From the start of his day to the end, from his skimming through a half-dozen newspapers at breakfast through a schedule of quick conferences on a score of different subjects to his playing with his stamps before bedtime, his mind sped from topic to topic, picking them up, toying with them, and dropping them. His intellectual habits were not disorderly; they were staccato.
Roosevelt’s mental way of life was nourished by its own successes. He liked to outwit the reporters in fast repartee. He liked to show off the incredible knowledge of a wide variety of specific matters that he carried in his head. Sometimes there was a touch of fakery in this, for the President could steer a conversation toward a subject on which he was newly briefed. But to an extraordinary extent he grasped an immediate, specific situation in all its particulars and complexity. He knew, for example, the tangled political situations and multitude of personalities in each of the states; he could talk for hours about the housing, roads, people, and history of Hyde Park; he could describe knowledgeably the activities and problems of a host of businesses and industries; he could pull out of his head hundreds of specific prices, rents, wages; he could identify countless varieties of fish, birds, trees; he could not be stumped on geography.
His self-esteem as a practical man must have been fed, too, by the ignorance of so many of his critics. Many men of affairs were slaves to the theories of defunct economists, and Roosevelt could puncture their pretensions with his knowledge of their own business and its relation to the rest of the world. His indignant complaints to his friends about the businessmen’s failure to advance specific constructive suggestions was the lament of the practitioner against the theorist. Undoubtedly Roosevelt’s emphasis on his own practicality had an element of overcompensation too. Cartoonists in 1938 were still picturing him as a fuzzy theorist surrounded by bemused brain trusters; and a friend who had romped with him as a child in the Hyde Park nursery, and who had evidently learned little since those days, rebuked him with the words: “You are not an essentially practical person.”
And now, by a supreme irony, fate placed before this man of practicality an economic theory that seemed to embody only uncommon sense. The idea of boosting spending and holding down taxes and of doing this year after year as a deliberate policy, the idea of gaining prosperity by the deliberate creation of huge debts—this idea in its full dimensions seemed but another fanciful academic theory, and Roosevelt by 1938 had had a bellyful of such theories. Pump priming as a temporary emergency measure he could understand—but not deficit spending as the central, long-term approach to full-scale economic recovery.
Deficit spending posed a special intellectual problem for the President. If there had been consistency in his handling of economic affairs, it was his habit of trying to make economic decisions by combining opposites. “Lock yourselves in a room and don’t come out until you agree,” he would say blithely to people who differed hopelessly in their economic premises—to free traders and nationalists, to deflationists and inflationists, to trust busters and collectivists, to spenders and economizers. The trouble with deficit spending was that halfway application did not work. It had utility only through full and determined use; otherwise it served only to antagonize and worry business by increasing the public debt without sufficiently raising spending and investment.
A Keynesian solution, in short, involved an almost absolute commitment, and Roosevelt was not one to commit himself absolutely to any political or economic method. His mind was a barometric reflection of the personal and policy pressures around him. “We are at one of those uncommon junctures of human affairs,” Keynes said in the 1930’s, “when we can be saved by the solution of intellectual problems and in no other way.” But Roosevelt’s mind was attuned to the handling of a great variety of operational and tactical matters, not to the solving of intellectual problems.
Roosevelt’s deficiencies as an economist were as striking as his triumphs as a politician. It was a major failure of American democracy that it was not able in the late 1930’s to show that a great nation could provide jobs for its workers and food, clothes, and houses for its people. What Roosevelt could not achieve World War II would achieve as a by-product enabling Republicans to charge later that the New Deal could end depression only through war. It was a personal failure for Roosevelt too. Halfway through his second term the man who had ousted Hoover on the depression issue knew that eight or nine million people were walking the streets. He knew that millions were still living in shanties and tenements, and that some were not far from starvation. Would the great promise of January 1937 become a mockery?
SEVENTEEN
Deadlock on the Potomac
IN MOST SOCIETIES, PEOPLE’S love for their leaders is strongly mixed with hatred and fear. Certain tribes set off a time each year for the throwing of dung at their chiefs. In America, as Mr. Dooley once remarked, people build their triumphal arches out of brick so that they will have something handy to throw at the hero when he comes through. As economic conditions deteriorated during early 1938, so did Roosevelt’s popularity. By the summer months of that year barely half the people questioned in a nationwide survey said that they would vote for Roosevelt if they were going to the polls at that time.
The rancor among sections of the rich was sharper and uglier than ever. The President seemed to be hated more bitterly in conservative quarters than any American progressive since Bryan. A corporation lawyer openly solicited pledges in Wall Street for a large fund to be presented to Roosevelt on condition he resign within five months.
Any trouble in the Roosevelt family was fair game for the Roosevelt haters. During his early presidential years his sons got into the usual scrapes at school—especially traffic offenses—and these were duly inflated in the press. A highly publicized article in the Saturday Evening Post accused James of exploiting his family connection in writing insurance. Several actual or impending divorces in the family got full attention, especially in the gossip columns. While the father did what he could to bring about reconciliations, he did not expect his children to subordinate their private lives to his public life. He said little about these problems except in the immediate family circle, but the attacks on his offspring—and through them on him—hurt. They must have hurt all the more because he knew that for the last ten years he had had little time to devote to family affairs and problems.
Roosevelt stories made their rounds of country club and dinner party;
one of the more ingenious was about the philatelist who took some of his most prized stamps to the White House to show them to the President, how Roosevelt filched several of the choicest when his guest was not looking, how Mrs. Roosevelt summoned the collector to a New York hotel a week later and quietly paid him off. Fashionable men and women, fastidious about everything except their obsession with the man in the White House, talked on and on about his mind, his legs, his morals, and the morals of his family.
All this Roosevelt could write off—indeed, had long before written off. But the drop in his popularity among other classes was a different matter. With his acute sensitivity to shifts in attitudes, he could not ignore the fateful parallel between 1938 and the Hoover years. Roosevelt in 1938 was losing popular support not only among the prosperous but to an even greater extent among the middle- and lower-income groups. The Supreme Court fight and the Black appointment had turned people against the New Deal—but not nearly so much as had the Roosevelt recession.
But how far had this desertion gone? The decisive fact of 1938 was that most people thought Roosevelt had lost popular favor to a greater extent than he really had. His actual drop between early 1936 and late 1938 in the public polls was a matter of a few percentage points. Even at the lowest point of his popularity in 1938 he commanded the support of a bare majority of the people—and a majority that was probably a trifle larger than during certain periods of the first term. The difference was that during the first term Roosevelt always gave the impression of popularity, while in 1938 that impression no longer existed.
The popular attitude toward Roosevelt was marked by a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, almost everyone liked him as a person. Asked, “On the whole, do you like or dislike his personality?” eight out of ten Americans in the spring of 1938 answered “like” to only one who answered “dislike.” Negroes, the poor generally, labor, the unemployed were enthusiastically for Roosevelt the person. The Southwest as a section delivered a resounding 98 per cent for him, and other sections were not far behind. Most remarkable of all, not a single occupation group—not executives, nor professional people, nor proprietors—“voted” for the presidential personality by less than three-quarters of that group.
Reports from journalists squared with the findings of the pollsters. “They love Roosevelt,” reported liberal journalist Richard Neuberger from the Northwest after talking with Idaho ranchers, Seattle streetcar motormen, a lumberjack in Coeur d’Alene, a Union Pacific brakeman, a Portland electrician, and others. Whatever the objections to the New Deal, Neuberger found, people liked Roosevelt because they believed that he was doing things for them. Many referred to him as “our President,” and as long as he remained “our President,” concluded Neuberger, Roosevelt would continue to be the dominant influence in the nation’s politics.
But Roosevelt’s general economic objectives, his methods of achieving these objectives, his advisers, many of his policies—these were different matters. Fewer than half of those polled in the spring of 1938 favored Roosevelt’s economic goals; more than half were opposed, doubtful, or uninformed. More people disliked his “methods” than liked them. Of five major economic groups—Negroes, poor, lower middle, upper middle, and prosperous—all but the first two registered majorities against the President’s methods.
Running through this opposition was a streak of fear of Roosevelt’s apparent political power. As an abstract matter a large section of the people believed that the President of the United States should have less authority. About half of those with opinions said that Roosevelt himself had too much power, and about one-quarter of those who approved his economic objectives shared this alarm. The worry over presidential power extended to all economic classes; although tending to parallel general class attitudes toward Roosevelt and his policies, it was somewhat marked among the lower middle class.
The state of public opinion in the spring of 1938 posed a dilemma for the President. His great strength lay in his own political personality, in the magic spell that he could still cast over the voters. His weakness lay in the anxiety of millions over his seemingly great political power—an anxiety like that of a wife who adores a gay and vibrant husband without wholly trusting his judgment or his self-control. Could he convert his personal popularity into political strength and leadership? Could he convert the majority popular support he still retained into congressional majorities necessary to consolidate and extend the New Deal? Could he maintain and even strengthen his own power without frightening further those who already feared the extent of presidential power?
By the spring of 1938 events on Capitol Hill were bringing these questions into sharp focus.
SQUALLS ON CAPITOL HILL
“For God’s sake,” a congressional spokesman telephoned the White House in April 1938, “don’t send us any more controversial legislation!”
Here spoke the authentic voice of Congress. Now in the sixth year of the New Deal, senators and representatives were balking at Roosevelt’s leadership as they never had before. They were tired of “must” bills, tired of crises, tired of charges of rubber-stamp Congress, tired of bustling, pushing young zealots from the White House. Most congressmen were no less fond of Roosevelt as a person in 1938 than they had been four or five years before. But like the people as a whole, they were more jealous and distrustful of his ambitions and his powers.
Despite the personal ties between Roosevelt and many congressmen, there had always been a political and psychological breach between the New Deal President and Capitol Hill. Only during the crisis days of the early New Deal had President and legislators suspended their historic conflict—a conflict artfully contrived and institutionalized by the framers of the Constitution. So, too, Congress embraced a way of life that was alien to the brisk pace, the electric atmosphere of the White House. Things moved more sedately in the soft, casual life of cloakroom and committee chamber. Signing their mail and genially chatting with one another while forensic gales lashed the air, the senators in particular embodied old ways of politics amid the marble columns and statuary of their nineteenth-century chamber.
Presiding over this legislative way of life were men who felt supremely secure in their positions of power. Still holding seats in 1938 on Capitol Hill were two senators and two representatives who had entered Congress thirty years before, when Roosevelt was still a law clerk. These four men had seen six presidents come and five presidents go, and they doubtless expected to be in Congress after Roosevelt had gone too. Perhaps two hundred members of Congress had entered the Senate or House before Roosevelt’s first inaugural. Men who had won election after election, decade after decade, had no undue fear of a president who was limited by tradition to two terms. Many congressional leaders had almost unshakeable grips on their states or districts. Perhaps they served city machines, or had ties with dominant economic interests, or had won the hearts of their constituents by indefatigable errand-running, or had built powerful political organizations of their own.
Buttressing the power of the congressional leaders were certain arrangements on the Hill. By far the most important was the seniority rule, which inexorably elevated to chairmen those in the majority party with the longest continuous service on committees. And chairmanships meant the right to call committee meetings or not to call them, the right to speed bills on their way or to pocket them, the right to a dominant voice over policy within the committee jurisdiction. These lord-proprietors, as Woodrow Wilson once called them, had built close ties with bureaucrats who catered to their constituents, and with agents for the great national organizations that maintained their headquarters in Washington. Steeped in the lore and mores of Capitol Hill, they were artistic parliamentarians who knew the shades and nuances of quorum calls, points of order, filibusters, and a score of other weapons in the arsenal of obstruction and delay.
Because of the one-party system and sluggish politics of the South it was inevitable that Southerners would accumulate seniority and hence capture important chairmans
hips during periods of Democratic rule. Chairing the two great fiscal committees of the Senate in 1938 were anti-New Deal Democrats: the pert, white-haired lord of Virginia politics, Carter Glass, of Appropriations, and Mississippi’s droll, plump Pat Harrison, of Commerce. Chief of Agriculture and Forestry was crusty old Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina who, when a Negro rose to preach in the 1936 convention, had stalked out, muttering “the man is black—black as melted ink.” Southerners ran many committees of the lower chamber too. Agriculture was chaired by a Texan, Banking and Currency by an Alabaman, Judiciary by a Texan, Public Lands by a Louisianian, Ways and Means by a North Carolinian.
Another reason for Southern influence in Congress lay perhaps in commitments Roosevelt seems to have made to gain his nomination in 1932. Garner’s willingness to accept the vice-presidential nomination was due in part to Roosevelt’s willingness to recognize Southern, and especially Texan, power in Congress. The most important understanding was that Rayburn would be in line for the majority leadership and later the speakership of the House. It was the President’s recognition of Rayburn’s claim that accounted in part for the desertion of the New Deal by a rival aspirant, Representative John O’Connor of New York. Roosevelt also had 1932 debts to pay to other Southerners.
To be sure, a number of key committees in both Houses were under the chairmanship of Northerners. Some of these chieftains, like Roosevelt’s old friends Wagner of Banking and Currency in the Senate, and Mary T. Norton of Labor in the House, had consistently voted for New Deal measures. But happenstance, the prides and jealousies of office, and the factionalism and sectionalism of American party politics had brought to chairmanships a number of Northerners who had turned against much of the Roosevelt New Deal: in addition to O’Connor, that bellicose New Yorker who bossed the most powerful single committee on Capitol Hill, the House Rules Committee, there were Senator Royal S. Copeland of New York, whose relations with Roosevelt had been cool for many years, and Wheeler of Montana, who had clashed with Roosevelt over the Supreme Court and by now was off the reservation.
The Definitive FDR Page 46