The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  “Who does Roosevelt think he is?” Wheeler once demanded scornfully of a White House aide. “He used to be just one of the barons. I was baron of the Northwest. Huey Long was baron of the South.” He mentioned other sectional leaders. But the President had turned against Long and now against the Senator from Montana. “He’s like a king trying to reduce the barons.”

  This Congress of 1938 had little wish to repeal the New Deal. But neither did it wish to extend the New Deal in order to meet the Roosevelt challenge of the one-third ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

  Because the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 had been a hurried measure to fill the gap left by the Supreme Court’s voiding of the original AAA, Congress moved quickly in its 1938 session to pass a new Agricultural Adjustment Act. Embracing cotton, rice, and tobacco as well as wheat and corn, this measure assigned production quotas to producers of these crops and gave money to those who planted within certain acreage allotments and who followed prescribed soil conservation methods. The government could also make loans on various farm commodities both to prevent farm prices from collapsing in the face of huge surpluses and to establish an ever-normal granary. If two-thirds of the farmers approved, artificial market control of surplus crops could be established. Providing also for freight rate studies, research in new uses for farm products, purchase of surplus farm products for persons on relief, the act set the pattern for federal regulation of agriculture for years to come.

  This much for the farmer. What about the worker? Passage of a weak wages and hours bill in mid-1938 seemed to drain the cup of congressional willingness to extend the New Deal. And when it came to giving Roosevelt power to control his own executive branch, the men on Capitol Hill broke into open revolt.

  By early 1938 some New Dealers had given up hope that any wage-hour bill could pass through Congress. In the regular and special sessions of 1937 the original bill had been ground to pieces between the Southern Democrats and the labor bloc. But the President was determined to press for the bill. Angry though he was about Southern desertions from the measure, he reluctantly ceded a North-South wage differential in the bill to gain Southern votes. He sounded out the AFL on the price of its support. But Roosevelt would not go too far. When Representative Martin Dies asked for further concessions for the South, the President’s patience was exhausted.

  “Call up Martin Dies,” he instructed McIntyre, “and tell him that any idea of having an individual State vary a national Wages and Hours bill is not only unsound, but would destroy the effectiveness of building up a purchasing power in those sections most needing it, and the President regards it as the weakest, most dangerous proposition he has ever heard. Tell him further that if we start to legislate for the oil industry, we’ll be aiding and abetting those people who want to exempt the canners, the cheese factories, and the lumber mills, and that is completely unsound.”

  But could any bill pass without “unsound” concessions? For weeks the White House and Labor Department searched for a formula. No single approach satisfied all factions. By mid-April the House Labor Committee was facing a harsh choice between an AFL bill that lacked a North-South differential and a draft backed by Southerners that empowered a five-man board to grant such a differential. Whipsawed between two blocs, members of the Labor Committee tried to stall off a decision. Roosevelt would not let them. After the Labor Committee voted down the Southerners’ draft, Chairman Mary Norton managed to hold the protesting committeemen in session until they reported out the AFL version.

  Stripped of the North-South differential, the bill now ran into the hardened opposition of the Southerners dominating the Rules Committee. A discharge petition was necessary to pry the bill out of committee. But would enough congressmen sign the petition? One such effort had succeeded, but another one had failed. In this extremity the administration resorted to a crafty political maneuver.

  Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch Roosevelt man, was engaged in a slam-bang race for renomination in Florida. To many observers Pepper’s chances did not seem too good, but the White House had reliable information that Pepper would win. It was reasoned that if Pepper could be induced to speak vigorously for the wage-hour bill during the campaign, his later victory would be interpreted as a test of sentiment on the bill in the South. At least $10,000 was turned over to Pepper’s campaign managers by Roosevelt’s assistants, who had got the money from a radio corporation executive on the basis of another deal.

  The stratagem worked. On May 3 Pepper won a decisive victory. Three days later the discharge petition was opened for signatures. So many representatives swarmed around the “honor roll” that House proceedings were drowned out, and in less than three hours the list of signatures reached the necessary 218. On May 24, after a tumultuous session lasting twelve hours, the House passed the bill by a heavy vote. Since the House version now differed radically from the Senate draft of the previous year, the bill was in danger until the end. Southerners talked about filibuster, and Green threatened to oppose the bill if differentials were reinserted. But a conference committee skillfully worked out a set of compromises, and the bill finally became law in June.

  “That’s that,” said Roosevelt with a sigh of relief as he signed the measure. His sigh was one of disappointment too. The bill had been so watered down in its long journey through Congress that it could have little impact on the national economy. And perhaps it was a sigh of prophecy. The wage-hour bill was the last of Roosevelt’s basic New Deal measures to pass Congress. During the final stages of its passage, the President had suffered a staggering defeat in Congress that was a gauge of his loss of legislative control.

  The measure that occasioned this defeat was, on its face, one of the least controversial Roosevelt had ever proposed. Even more, it was designed to meet the insistent demands from business quarters that executive management be improved in the name of efficiency and economy. Previous chief executives, including Taft and Hoover, had proposed reorganization measures hardly less radical than Roosevelt’s. Formulated by a group of political scientists and public administration experts headed by Louis Brownlow, the President’s recommendations called for expanding the White House staff; strengthening his management agencies, including the substitution of a personnel director for the three-member Civil Service Commission; extending the merit system “upward, outward, and downward to cover practically all non-policy-determining posts”; setting up two new cabinet departments, Social Welfare and Public Works, and putting independent agencies under line departments; placing responsibility for accounts and transactions under the President while strengthening independent control of post-auditing under an auditor-general.

  When Roosevelt first urged these changes in January 1937 they met apathy and quiet hostility in Congress. For months the proposals marked time while the Supreme Court bill held the center of the stage. Not until late in February 1938 did reorganization come before the Senate.

  The times were not auspicious. Roosevelt was still floundering in the face of depression. The wage-hour bill was still splintering Congress into factions. Alarmed by the opposition’s strength, Roosevelt and a dozen of his lieutenants—Ickes, Farley, Hopkins, Corcoran, Jesse Jones, and others—threw themselves into the fray. Urgent telephone calls went to state politicos asking them to put pressure on irresolute senators; enticing patronage plums were held out; favors were bargained off. Even so, the measure barely survived a series of test votes in the Senate.

  By late March a hurricane of opposition was rising from the country. Reorganization was dubbed the “dictator bill.” It was a question, proclaimed Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, “of plunging a dagger into the very heart of democracy.” It was a fight against possible Hitlerism, a columnist declared. Committees to “uphold constitutional government” showered the country with letters and advertisements. Orators at New England town meetings thundered and protested. Over a hundred Paul Reveres, mounted on horses carrying banners reading NO ONE MAN RULE, converged on Washing
ton and clattered along Pennsylvania Avenue. Father Coughlin fulminated over the radio. It was the Supreme Court fight all over again—but perhaps even more sharp and passionate.

  One day during the fight the object of all this wrath and fear sat with his usual smile as the reporters trooped in. On the President’s desk was a yataghan, a Turkish saber someone had presented him. “I can put it in the wall at thirty paces,” Roosevelt said gleefully.

  “How far down Pennsylvania Avenue can you throw it?” asked a reporter. The President laughed but did not answer. Even yataghans could not help now. When the measure finally emerged from the Senate and moved to the House, the hurricane roared to a climax. Hundreds of thousands of telegrams denouncing the plan poured in on the legislators. Because O’Connor and his Rules Committee opposed the plan, the leaders could not get a special rule governing debate. They lost control of the bill at the start, and soon it was caught in parliamentary tangles. Obstructionists delayed consideration by endless points of order, quorum calls, questions of personal privilege. As debate raged day after day, powerful interest groups pressed their claims for exempting their pet bureaus from reorganization.

  Forced back on the defensive, Roosevelt took steps both to counteract the group pressures and to quiet the popular fear of presidential power that had been whipped up. Remembering the charges that he had lost the Supreme Court fight because he made compromises too little and too late, he began to negotiate concessions. The Office of Education was exempted in the face of a wave of fear among religious groups that its relocation in the bureaucratic structure would mean more federal control. So was the Veterans Bureau in the wake of protests by ex-servicemen’s groups. Other key agencies got immunity. The most important concession involved a crucial question of presidential power. In the original bill Congress had had power to veto presidential reorganization proposals only by a two-thirds vote in both Houses; by a compromise, only a majority vote was required, with the effect that presidential reorganization plans would be far easier to defeat.

  Roosevelt’s move to calm popular fear was sudden and dramatic. Reporters at Warm Springs were summoned late at night to receive a presidential announcement. It read:

  “A: I have no inclination to be a dictator.

  “B: I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator.

  “C: I have too much historical background and too much knowledge of existing dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship for a democracy like the United States of America.”

  The President went on to denounce a “carefully manufactured partisan and political opposition.” He promised that in almost every case he would go along with congressional opinion on specific reorganization. He mentioned examples of “silly nightmares conjured up at the instigation either of those who would restore the government to those who owned it between 1921 and 1933, or of those who for one reason or another seek deliberately to wreck the present administration.” The harshness of Roosevelt’s words betrayed the hurt and vexation he felt.

  All to no avail. On April 8, by a razor-thin margin of 204 to 196, the House returned the measure to committee. As the vote was announced wild cheering broke out among representatives in the chamber. Congress was in open revolt. The White House was in a quandary. Farley and Early wanted the President to conciliate Congress. Ickes, heartsick over losing his chance to annex the Forest Service, implored Roosevelt to carry on the fight. It was up to the President, Corcoran declared, to show whether he was going out like Herbert Hoover or like Andrew Jackson. But Roosevelt would not press the fight. Already he was turning to another urgent matter: his spending program. He dispatched a letter to Majority Leader Rayburn. “Thanks for the good fight …” He added that there should be no personal recrimination.

  No retaliation—yet.

  THE BROKEN SPELL

  “The old Roosevelt magic has lost its kick,” Hugh Johnson crowed happily in the spring of 1938. “The diverse elements in his Falstaffian army can no longer be kept together and led by a melodious whinny and a winning smile.” Pundits of press and radio across the nation sagely nodded agreement. The spell was broken. But why? On this there were a host of theories.

  Some argued that the old politician was losing his touch, but the reporters who watched Roosevelt closely scoffed at the notion. The President’s fireside chats were as warm and stirring as ever; he was perhaps even more charming and persuasive with visitors; he appeared to have lost none of his cocky self-assurance. His mental reflexes had, if anything, been sharpened during the presidential years. In the semiweekly jousting of the press conferences, the President usually came out on top. Asked one day what he thought of a Senator’s proposal to make it a felony for a newspaper knowingly to publish a falsehood, he answered, quick as a flash, “I’m trying to pare expenses and I don’t want any more prisons!” Trying to outsmart him, some reporters at a Press Club dinner wrote on the back of a menu, “I hereby nominate Herbert [a fellow reporter] as Ambassador to the North Pole,” folded the words over to conceal them, and sent the menu to the guest of honor for his “autograph.” When the nomination paper came back they discovered that Roosevelt had changed “North” to “South” and had innocently added “North Pole already occupied.”

  No, nothing had happened to Roosevelt’s political skill or acuteness. Another theory was that Roosevelt’s election triumph of 1936 had left him with a bad case of overconfidence, that this overconfidence had led to the bungling tactics of the court reform defeat, and this defeat had brought down Roosevelt’s political house of cards. This interpretation made some sense as long as it could be argued that a better presentation of the court bill or greater willingness to accept a compromise might have saved the proposal. It was clearer in retrospect that no court reform bill of significance nor, indeed, any administrative reform bill of any significance could have won passage in the 1937-38 Congress. In short, the reasons for Roosevelt’s defeats on Capitol Hill lay deeper than such simple explanations assumed.

  Searching for these deeper reasons, students of politics noted the historical fact that even the stronger presidents—men like Jefferson and Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt—had met formidable difficulties in their second terms. With a president’s power due to evaporate at a set date, the focus of power shifts from the White House to cabinet members and senators jockeying for the throne. Was not Roosevelt simply encountering the centrifugal forces inherent in this historic situation? To some extent he was. But as a resourceful politician, Roosevelt could also exploit a great countervailing force—namely, his control of the 1940 nomination. Roosevelt insisted to intimates—and the word got out fast enough—that the nomination would go to a Democrat who met the tests of a New Dealer by the President’s standards. He planned, in short, to choose his successor. And there was always the possibility that Roosevelt himself would run—a possibility that Roosevelt had skillfully played up, even while ostensibly dismissing it, only six weeks after his second term began, when he spoke laughingly at the Democratic victory dinner of his plans for January 20, 1941.

  Another explanation of Roosevelt’s loss of leadership over Congress was quite simple. The President’s popularity with the voters, it was pointed out, had slipped considerably during the Roosevelt recession, and congressmen were jumping off the presidential bandwagon as soon as they found this drop in their own constituencies. That explanation, too, had some merit; on the other hand, Roosevelt had lost the court fight before the recession and at a time when his personal popularity was still high. Moreover, his standing with the people had slipped badly during the first term—only to rise again in 1936. No congressman could dare count on continued unpopularity for the resilient politician in the White House.

  What, then, could explain the revolt in Congress? It was not surprising that the real explanation eluded the observers of the day. Only as Roosevelt’s first term fell into fuller perspective and as the precise nature of his relations with Congress during that period was revealed did the bas
ic situation become clear. The essence of the situation was this: Roosevelt had led Congress during his first term by his adroit and highly personal handling of congressional leaders and by exploiting the sense of crisis; but, intent on immediate tactical gains on Capitol Hill, he had neglected to build up a position of strength with the rank and file of Congress.

  With his usual pragmatism, Roosevelt at the outset had faced up to the hard facts of the distribution of power in Congress. Since committee chiefs had power, he would deal with committee chiefs. And he did so with such charm, such tact, such flexibility, such brilliant timing, such sensitivity to the leaders’ own political problems that the President’s personal generalship often meant the difference between passage and defeat of key bills. Time and time again he won the support of men like Glass and Harrison and Tydings and Sumners and Doughton not because they liked the New Deal in general or the measure in particular but because they liked and were willing to defer to the man who was President. Roosevelt’s leadership talents lay in his ability to shift quickly and gracefully from persuasion to cajolery to flattery to intrigue to diplomacy to promises to horse-trading—or to concoct just that formula which his superb instincts for personal relations told him would bring around the most reluctant congressman.