The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  “It is probably safe to say,” said onetime presidential assistant Stanley High, “that during 1933, 1934, and 1935 a record-breaking number of men of some political eminence went to the President’s office in a state of incipient revolt and left it to declare to the world their subscription to things that they did not subscribe to.”

  A good method while it worked—and it did work for four years. The supreme test of that method came in the second Hundred Days. To put through a restless and bewildered Congress the enduring legislation of the New Deal at the fag end of the 1935 session was the ultimate tribute to Roosevelt’s capacity to prod and charm and reason balking legislators into acting.

  But there was a price to pay. Boiling under the surface even while the great measures thrashed their way through Congress was a deep bitterness toward the White House. Men like Glass deserted the administration as the program of 1935 revealed the shape of things to come. Even loyalists like Byrnes complained that they had had to “swallow a lot” for the White House; they were close to the breaking point. As Roosevelt in his foxlike fashion crossed and recrossed his own trail in maneuvering his bills through Congress, congressmen had to reverse positions and cover up for the White House. They had to take the rap—and they were tired of taking the rap.

  Bitterness was sharpest in the House. Administration supporters there complained to Roosevelt that party organization and discipline were nonexistent. The Democratic Steering Committee—the logical link between the President and his partisans in the House—was virtually ignored by the White House. When Hopkins held a peace conference with this committee in July 1935, member after member rose to excoriate the administration’s flouting of rank-and-filers, to complain about appointments, even to threaten reprisal against the White House.

  Roosevelt’s breathing spell of late 1935, his limited legislative program for 1936, and the closing of ranks in the campaign staved off rebellion for a time. But the President’s effort to carry out his program to help the needy one-third of the people precipitated the new and sterner battles of the second term.

  Had the New Deal, then, really been dealt? Was it all over? What about the scores of young New Dealers washed into Congress by the Roosevelt tidal wave of 1936? Were not they the makings of congressional majorities for an expanded New Deal?

  They might have served this purpose—but they never had the chance. For another price that Roosevelt had to pay for his dependence on the old ranking Democrats was the consolidation of the powers of these leaders in Congress. He had confirmed their political status, their high-priority claims on administration favors, their near monopoly of access to the White House. He had failed to encourage rank-and-file organization in Congress behind a New Deal program.

  When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, Roosevelt put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even this appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin, about seventy-five in number, as well as a number of other progressives not classed as Democrats,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President in April 1938, “and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group in consultation as to administration policies.” Roosevelt, he said, was dealing only with a small group of congressional leaders. Characteristically the President told McIntyre, “Have him come in to see me.” But things went on as before; the rank and file remained adrift. When a year later another friendly congressman urged him to establish contact with the rank and file by inviting them to the White House in small groups, the President replied that he would like to do this but his day was simply too crowded.

  The President hoped that the Democratic legislators would remain responsible to the party platform of 1936. The congressmen, however, had had little part in drawing up the platform. They felt responsible to the majorities that had elected them in their districts; in any event, it was the voters in their districts who would determine whether or not they would stay in Congress. And not only this; something of tremendous importance was happening throughout the mid-1930’s within the American electorate.

  It is often said that a coalition of labor and farm groups created the New Deal. But this can be reversed. It is just as true—and of greater significance—that the New Deal helped create a new labor movement and a new farm movement in America, along with a dozen other immensely strengthened groups. And it was this massive swelling in the size and number and strength of politically oriented groups that changed decisively the pattern of power in counties and townships and wards and precincts, where congressmen were elected and defeated.

  Labor was the most striking case in point. Sapped and crippled by depression, the unions had recruited millions of new members with the help of Section 7a and the Wagner Act. By 1937 the Committee for Industrial Organization had broken completely with the AFL and was gathering in millions of workers in steel, autos, rubber, electrical goods, and other mass-production industries. As fiery young leaders debouched from the ranks, unions took on a new militance and a new exhilaration. Contributing its funds and ordering its organizers into the precincts, the CIO had given Roosevelt’s re-election campaign a mighty boost. Then, for month after month, the country had seen turbulent labor erupting in mass demonstrations, sit-down strikes, quickie stoppages, parades, police violence.

  Striding across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers was the new army’s glowering, blustering commander, John L. Lewis. “The Huey Long of labor,” Huey himself had called him, and no one could have better personalized Roosevelt’s political predicament in his second term than the burly, pug-faced CIO chief. By 1938 Lewis was seething over Roosevelt’s “ingratitude.” For all his denunciations of businessmen, Lewis had a commercial approach to politics. The President, he felt, should pay off for favors granted. But what had Roosevelt done? He had taken a neutral stand during the period of sit-down strikes with his famous statement, “A plague on both your houses.” He had publicly rebuked Lewis for demanding White House recognition of its 1936 friends. The President, Lewis growled, was even stealing his lieutenants—especially Sidney Hillman—away from him by giving them government jobs and drawing them into the charmed White House circle. Roosevelt and Hopkins, he complained, were balking CIO efforts to organize WPA workers. Where, demanded Lewis, was the pay-off?

  Conflict between the two men was inevitable even if they both had not been prima donnas. To speak and act for his followers, Lewis had to move toward leftist politics and direct action. Roosevelt, with a different constituency and needing support in Congress, had to continue his delicate balancing act among power blocs. Lewis derided Roosevelt’s public role as a great humanitarian and forthright fighter for the underdog; Roosevelt, he said, was weak, tricky, and lacking in conviction. Distrusting the mine leader, and fearing that he would disrupt the coalition, Roosevelt struck out at him at critical moments. And Lewis, fighting for his organization’s life during the crucial organizing drives, recoiled from what he called Roosevelt’s “catlike scratches.”

  If farmers lacked such a spectacular leader to dramatize their claims, they presented an even better case than labor of the New Deal’s impact on groups. Indeed, rarely has an organization owed its power more directly to governmental action than the strongest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation. For the thousands of county farm bureaus that made up the Federation had originally been established as semigovernmental units, and their extension agents took on much of the practical administration of the New Deal farm programs at the same time that they served as unofficial recruiting officers for the Federation. As the farm programs expanded, so did the Federation’s membership, which more than doubled between 1933 and 1938.

  The Federation’s relation to the New Deal was curious: administratively it was geared in with programs, while politically it could operate as an independent force, putting pressure on Roosevelt and Wallace. Othe
r farm groups were active too. The commodity associations burgeoned as the New Deal poured benefits into the hands of woolgrowers, beet sugar raisers, pork producers, cattle raisers, peanut growers, and a host of other groups. And the bigger the association, the more pressure it could turn on Washington.

  The situation was duplicated in other sectors of American life. The WPA brought into being the Workers Alliance, whose leaders—some of them members of the Communist party—were agitating noisily for more and bigger work projects. The National Youth Administration was a focus of interest for youth groups. Lending and housing programs stimulated a host of associations linked to these activities. Government lawyers had a large part in forming the National Lawyers’ Guild, as a rival group to the conservative American Bar Association.

  “You know,” Roosevelt said to Nation editor Max Lerner in 1938, “this is really a great country. The framework of democracy is so strong and so elastic that it can get along and absorb a Huey Long and a John L. Lewis.” A perceptive remark—but an incomplete one. While powerful new forces were straining within the Grand Coalition, while these forces were acting like a centrifuge that spun locally elected congressmen into their separate orbits, forcible leadership was all the more necessary in the White House as a focus for the national interest, as a rallying point for the liberal majority, and as a unifying force for government action. This was the supreme crisis of leadership that Roosevelt faced in the spring of 1938.

  TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

  “There is no question,” Roosevelt wrote Ambassador Biddle in Warsaw late in 1937, “that the German-Italian-Japanese combination is being amazingly successful—bluff, power, accomplishment or whatever it may be.” The President could not say the same about his own foreign policy making. Stalled on the domestic front, he faced formidable congressional opposition in his efforts to awaken the country to the rising dangers abroad. Indeed, Roosevelt’s handling of foreign policy making was especially ineffective because there his program and strategy were even more opportunistic than at home.

  The President of course had definite opinions about certain aspects of the international situation. The aggressions of Italy, Japan, and Germany were to him simply “armed banditry,” and he was not reluctant to say so in private. He wished—again privately—for “more spine” in the British Foreign Office. Squarely opposing the idea of peace at any price, he wanted co-operation among the democratic nations to save the peace. But on crucial operating questions concerning the kind of international co-operation, the extent of German-Italian-Japanese participation in peace programs, and above all the commitments to be undertaken by the United States, he was uncertain. In late 1937 and 1938 he was still searching for a peace formula, with his eye always cocked on the barons of isolationism on Capitol Hill.

  Following the disappointing reaction to his “quarantine” speech in October 1937, Roosevelt tried again to take the initiative, although in a different direction. He had long toyed with the idea of sponsoring a dramatic meeting at sea of chiefs of state. Late in October he decided the time was ripe for a somewhat less spectacular move—an Armistice Day meeting of all diplomatic representatives in the White House, to hear a message from the President. Based on suggestions from Under Secretary Sumner Welles, who had been working closely with the President and somewhat independently of Hull, the message would propose a new effort to reach agreement on basic principles of peaceful international relations, on ways of giving all peoples access on equal terms to the world’s raw materials, on methods of changing international agreements peacefully, and on the rights and obligations of neutrals in the unhappy event of war. Surely a moderate program—except for the suggestion of treaty revision to remove certain inequities of Versailles.

  The plan died aborning. Hull was utterly opposed to it. He feared that a short day or two of open deliberations would arouse false hopes, unduly provoke the dictators, and produce little practical good. The very features that appealed to the President—a colorful White House assemblage suddenly convened as a world forum for a dramatic Rooseveltian pronouncement—troubled this most undramatic of men. Yet actually, since he believed strongly in the basic principles the President would espouse, the reasons for Hull’s opposition lay deeper than this. Part of the trouble was Welles’s key role in the project. More important, Hull feared that forthright presidential action would arouse Congress. An old hand at wheedling and appeasing the lawmakers, he was alarmed lest his efforts to bring Congress around to internationalism would be set back. Reluctantly Roosevelt dropped the plan for the time being.

  While democratic leaders diddled, dictators acted. In November 1937 they formally established the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Japanese troops drove even deeper into China. The Brussels Conference failed utterly to alleviate the crisis in the Far East. Everywhere the arms rush was intensifying. And on November 5 Hitler summoned his generals to the Reichstag, told them of his plans for the conquest of eastern Europe, and ordered them to prepare for inevitable war. The generals knew that Austria was first on their Fuehrer’s list.

  Shortly after New Year’s Day 1938, Roosevelt again turned to his plans for an international conference. This time, however, he followed Hull’s suggestion of sounding out Britain first. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s reply was like a douche of ice water. The President’s plan, he wrote, would cut across his own efforts at “a measure of appeasement” of Italy and Germany. He had been working for months toward this end, he protested, and the stage had been carefully set. Would the President hold up action for a time?

  The President would and did. But he was anxious over certain revelations in Chamberlain’s letter: the prime minister had indicated that to appease Mussolini he was prepared to recognize Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. Roosevelt promptly urged Chamberlain not to take this step—for it would seriously affect American public opinion. Hull told the British Ambassador bluntly that recognition would be a corrupt bargain that would rouse a feeling of disgust in America.

  Chamberlain’s rebuff of Roosevelt and the ensuing rift shocked a keen student of world affairs watching from the wings. The rejection of the President’s proffered hand, Churchill wrote ten years later, was the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war. Yet Chamberlain, unlike Roosevelt, was pursuing a calculated course of action, designed at best to turn the Axis away from attacking the democracies and at least to spar for time to rearm. And a key element in his calculations was that, owing to isolationist feeling in America, Roosevelt could not be relied on to back up his principles with action. “It is always best and safest,” Chamberlain said acidly, “to count on nothing from the Americans but words.”

  As it turned out, Chamberlain later sent a second, more cordial letter to Roosevelt welcoming the President’s proposal. The prime minister’s hand was forced by his young foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who had returned to London from a vacation trip to hint at his resignation unless Chamberlain altered his policies. But it was now too late. Hitler was already moving resolutely ahead.

  Early in February the Fuehrer consolidated his military position at home by ousting the generals who had spoken out against his war program and appointing himself commander in chief. At once Hitler turned his eye to the south where lay the glittering prize of Austria, portal to Czechoslovakia and the lands beyond. Summoning Austrian Chancellor von Schuschnigg to his retreat just over the border in Berchtesgaden, Hitler scolded and bullied him for hours. “Perhaps I shall be suddenly overnight in Vienna, like a spring storm,” he ranted. “Do you want to turn Austria into another Spain?” Schuschnigg gave in to Hitler’s demands, but he tried to strengthen his hand by holding a plebiscite on the issue of Austrian independence. This Hitler would not brook. With Mussolini acquiescent and Britain passive, he knew that he could afford to strike. On March 12 German tanks and troops swept across the border, and within a few hours Austria was his.

  The news brought a quick flare-up of public opinion in America. Newspaper editorials were ind
ignant. Roosevelt was silent, but a few days later he wrote “Grand!” on a speech of Hull’s that served as a kind of official statement. The secretary’s statement, however, was the same old litany—a bold stand against “international lawlessness,” a warning against isolationism, and a shying away from American commitments.

  Roosevelt was silent—but not passive. “I am in the midst of a long process of education—and the process seems to be working slowly but surely,” he wrote a friend. But how slow would education be? Always his thoughts returned to the isolationists and their leaders on Capitol Hill. He was amused to read a letter from an Englishman, sent on to him by a Boston schoolmaster.

  “That is a delightful letter,” he wrote back. “Is it not a funny thing that no European has the foggiest notion of our system of government or of our public thought in regard to European politics? His suggestion that the President should present 500 aeroplanes to Great Britain is particularly joyous. Almost it makes me feel like a dictator! Can you see the expression on the face of the Congress or on the face of the Editors of the Boston Transcript and the Boston Herald if I were to ask for such authority from Congress? I am not even considering what the Boston Irish or the Kansas New Englanders would do.…”

  Editors and congressmen, Irishmen and Kansans—could they be educated in time by Roosevelt, or would they be educated too late by events?

  Events were hurrying on at an ever dizzier pace. By 1938 Spain had become a cockpit of international combat. Tens of thousands of Italian “volunteers,” thousands of German officers and technicians, quantities of Axis tanks, artillery, and aircraft braced Franco’s attacks. The government, with the help of its International Brigade and later of Soviet arms, had twice staved off heavy attacks on Madrid. But the Loyalists’ Aragon offensive failed in the summer of 1937; Italian forces captured Bilbao; Santander and Gijou fell. The League Assembly announced that “veritable foreign army corps” were operating in Spain. By 1938 Loyalist chances looked dim.