The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Roosevelt from the start had favored the Loyalist cause. He understood the international character of the war; he looked on the Madrid government as the constitutional authority, under the control of a popular-front coalition that included the Communists. Publicly, however, the President was adamantly neutral. His first decisive step—taken significantly during the 1936 campaign—was to put a moral embargo on the export of arms to both sides. When several American exporters readied shiploads of war material, the President asked Congress to extend the arms embargo of the Neutrality Act to Spain. In all Congress only one person—a Farmer-Laborite—voted against the measure. One load of planes cleared the three-mile limit just in time, only to fall later into Franco’s hands.

  As the months passed Roosevelt felt increasingly distressed over the course of events in Spain. Noninterference became in effect “non-noninterference,” for Franco benefited from the policy. A savage bombing of the Basque shrine city of Guernica by German and Italian planes aroused American opinion. From Spain Ambassador Bowers warned the administration that the embargo was playing into the hands of Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Ickes was outspokenly indignant about what he called America’s shameful role in Spain. In the State Department, Welles was gravely troubled; he saw that a Franco victory would mean a decisive strategic advance for Italy in the Mediterranean. Even some ardent noninterventionists—men like Norman Thomas and Senator Borah—opposed Roosevelt’s policy as unjust and, indeed, unneutral.

  There were arguments and forces on the other side. Great Britain, France, and a score of other nations were following a policy ostensibly of strict nonintervention, designed to localize the conflict in Spain. Roosevelt feared to undertake action that cut across these efforts. Any inclination he had to shift policy ran into the stubborn opposition of Hull, backed by a group of career officials who were eager to follow the British lead on the question. Roosevelt’s hands were tied also by the sweeping endorsement that administration and Congress had given to neutrality at almost any cost.

  Beset by these pressures, Roosevelt wavered. At one point in the spring of 1938 he considered raising the embargo on arms to Madrid. Senator Nye himself had introduced a resolution to raise the embargo, and the New York Times reported that Roosevelt was on the verge of acting.

  But nothing happened. “A black page in American history,” Ickes told the President. Roosevelt argued that lifting the ban would be pointless, for munitions could not go across the Spanish frontier. When Ickes showed how these difficulties could be overcome, the President shifted his ground. He had discussed the matter with congressional leaders that morning, he told Ickes. To raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote in the coming fall election, Roosevelt said, and Democratic congressmen opposed it.

  So the cat was out of the bag—the “mangiest, scabbiest cat ever,” Ickes barked into his diary a few days later. “This proves up to the hilt,” Ickes went on, “what so many people have been saying, namely, that the Catholic minorities in Great Britain and America have been dictating the international policy with respect to Spain.”

  Ickes was only partly right. Not merely the caution of congressmen but Roosevelt’s own indecision was involved in policy toward Spain. Indeed, the President wavered again later in 1938 as the rebel forces pressed on to Madrid, and once again Hull had to dissuade his chief from acting. Still, Ickes had put his finger on the heart of the problem. The men on Capitol Hill and the minority groups behind them had their grip on levers of action or obstruction that touched directly the balance of power and the flow of events far outside the country’s borders. Unredeemed by decisiveness in the White House, the congressional deadlock on the Potomac cast its shadow across the world.

  EIGHTEEN

  Fissures in the Party

  THE SCENE WAS THE livestock pavilion of the University of Wisconsin. The time was late April 1938. Under a huge banner emblazoned with a circle around a cross, a slim, gray-haired man with a boyish face was orating before a rapt audience of several thousand. Football players sporting huge W’s patrolled the aisles. The speaker was Governor Philip La Follette of Wisconsin, scion of the great Fighting Bob, brother of young Senator Bob. The occasion was the launching of a new party, National Progressives of America.

  By the time La Follette finished, hair tousled and coat awry, reporters were sure that history had been made—perhaps even to the degree it had been at Ripon, Wisconsin, eighty-four years before, when the Republican party was founded. The young Progressive, they said to one another, had hit Roosevelt where it hurt. He had scored New Deal economics and New Deal politics at their weakest points. For ten years, according to La Follette, “the Republicans and the Democrats have been fumbling the ball.” The people had had enough of relief and spoon feeding and scarcity economics. They wanted jobs and security. The new party would be no popular front, “no conglomeration of conflicting, opposing forces huddled together for temporary expediency.” It was an obvious fling at Roosevelt and his personal coalition. How would the New Deal’s chief respond?

  The President, it seemed, was inclined to scoff. While the crowd was carried away with the enthusiasm of the moment, he wrote Ambassador William Phillips in Rome, most people seemed to think La Follette’s new emblem was just a feeble imitation of the swastika. “All that remains is for some major party to adopt a new form of arm salute. I have suggested the raising of both arms above the head, followed by a bow from the waist. At least this will be good for people’s figures!”

  Actually Roosevelt had mixed feelings toward the new party. He knew that La Follette had planned his move carefully, with assiduous cultivation of farm and labor leaders. The movement could not be dismissed. Roosevelt hoped, though, that it might serve as a useful warning to conservative Democrats that their party was in danger of losing liberal support. Everything depended on Phil and Bob not going too far. To keep them from going too far, Roosevelt told Ickes, he would invite Bob on a Potomac cruise; he would suggest to the Senator that after 1940 he could have the secretaryship of state, and Phil could take his place in the Senate.

  It was a typical Rooseveltian stratagem, but it seemed too late for stratagems. Phil went serenely ahead, courting progressive groups and third-party leaders throughout the northern Central states. Nor did his efforts have any discernible influence as a warning to conservative Democrats. In Congress, which adjourned in mid-June, they kept on jabbing and thundering against the New Deal. Aside from the spending bill, the chief accomplishments of the Seventy-fifth Congress had been the revived agricultural program for farmers and the weak wage-hour bill for workers. A new housing program had been authorized, but one that would hardly touch the mass of the “ill-housed.” The New Deal, as a program for the general welfare, had been little advanced—certainly not when compared with the glowing promises of January 1937.

  Slowly Roosevelt came to his decision—the time had come for a party showdown.

  The idea of purging the party of conservative congressmen was not a new one. For months at the White House there had been talk of a purge, especially on the part of Corcoran, Ickes, and Hopkins. But the fact that Roosevelt could embrace this ultimate weapon was a measure of his true feelings in the spring of 1938. Not only was a purge directly contrary to the President’s general first-term policy of noninterference in local elections, but even more, it forced him into the posture he hated most—the posture of direct, open hostilities against men who were in his party and some of whom were his friends, of almost complete commitment to a specific method and a definite conception of party.

  Only resentment and exasperation of the greatest intensity could have moved Roosevelt to such action, and that was his state of mind in the spring of 1938. Despite his usual surface geniality, for months he had simmered and stewed over the obstructionists who were gutting his program. Again and again in the presence of intimates and even of visitors he struck out at his foes—at the lobbyists who tried to exempt special interests from regulation, at the “yes but fell
ows” who piously agreed with the need for reform but never agreed with Roosevelt’s way of doing it, at the millionaires who found legal devices to avoid taxes, at the columnists and commentators who told lies to scare the people, at the “fat cat” newspaper publishers who ganged up on the administration, and, above all, at the congressmen who had ridden into power on his coattails and now were sabotaging his program.

  In a free society, only the last of these were within reach of presidential retaliation. As La Follette fished in troubled political waters and threatened to split the Grand Coalition in June 1938, Roosevelt decided to act.

  THE DONKEY AND THE STICK

  On a hot night late in June the President fired the opening salvo. In a fireside chat he stated that the Seventy-fifth Congress, elected on a “platform uncompromisingly liberal,” had left many things undone. On the other hand, he said, it had done more for the country than any Congress during the 1920’s, and he listed a number of its achievements. People had urged him to coast along, enjoy an easy presidency for four years, and not take the party platform too seriously.

  “Never in our lifetime has such a concerted campaign of defeatism been thrown at the heads of the President and Senators and Congressmen” as in the case of this Congress. “Never before have we had so many Copperheads” who, as in the War between the States, wanted peace at any price. The President dwelt for a moment on the economic situation. Leaders of business, of labor, and of government had all made mistakes, he asserted. Government’s mistake, however, was in failing to pass the farm and wage-hour bills earlier, and in assuming that labor and capital would not make mistakes.

  Then Roosevelt got down to the business at hand. The issue in the congressional primaries and elections, he said, was between liberals who saw that new conditions called for new remedies, including government action, and conservatives, who believed that individual initiative and private philanthropy would solve the country’s problems and who wanted to return to the kind of government America had had in the 1920’s.

  “As President of the United States, I am not asking the voters of the country to vote for Democrats next November as opposed to Republicans or members of any other party. Nor am I, as President, taking part in Democratic primaries.

  “As the head of the Democratic Party, however, charged with the responsibility of the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my own name.

  “Do not misunderstand me. I certainly would not indicate a preference in a State primary merely because a candidate, otherwise liberal in outlook, had conscientiously differed with me on any single issue. I should be far more concerned with the general attitude of a candidate toward present day problems and his own inward desire to get practical needs attended to in a practical way.” And again the President struck out at “yes but fellows.”

  ROOSEVELT DECLARES WAR ON PARTY REBELS, read the next day’s headlines. Yet the declaration of war was an ambiguous one. Politicians anxiously questioned one another. What was the President’s test of a conservative? Was it only a vote against the court plan? Would Roosevelt limit himself to speaking out? And what did he mean by his statement that he was acting as party leader rather than as President?

  Confusion deepened after Roosevelt left Washington in his air-cooled, ten-car train that would take him on a zigzag route across the nation. Roosevelt seemed to have a different tactic in each state. In Ohio he gave a mild nod of approval to a mild New Dealer, Senator Robert J. Bulkley, who had a primary fight on his hands. In Kentucky the President pulled no punches. Alben Barkley, his stalwart Senate leader, was hard pressed by Governor “Happy” Chandler, who had a big grin, a rousing platform manner, and a firm grip on his political machine. Roosevelt was so eager for Barkley to win and so worried that a defeat would mean Senator Pat Harrison’s capture of the Senate leadership that he had even welcomed John L. Lewis’s proffer of aid in the race.

  Greeting Roosevelt’s train, Happy deftly slid into a place next to the President in the parade car and took more than his share of the bows, while Barkley smoldered and Roosevelt showed his usual sang-froid. Happy soon got his comeuppance. In a speech showering Barkley with praise the President dismissed Chandler as a young man who would take many years to achieve the experience and knowledge of Alben Barkley. “Any time the President can’t knock you out, you’re all right,” said the irrepressible Happy, who was determined to keep at least a thumb hooked into the President’s coattails. But a few hours later Roosevelt shook even the thumb loose by hinting that Chandler had proposed to the White House a deal in judicial appointments in order to get to the Senate.

  Having spoken like a lion, the President moved as stealthily as a fox during his next stops. In Oklahoma he mentioned his “old friend” Senator Elmer Thomas but he did not snub Thomas’ primary opponent. In Texas he smiled on several liberal congressmen, including Lyndon Johnson and Maury Maverick, and he threw Senator Connally, a foe of the court bill, into an icy rage by announcing from the back platform the appointment to a federal judgeship of a Texan whom Connally had not recommended. In Colorado another court bill opponent, Senator Alva Adams, shifted uneasily from foot to foot while the President elaborately ignored him. But Adams’ opponent, who had seemingly launched his campaign with White House blessing, was also ignored. So was Senator Pat McCarran in Nevada, though the agile Pat managed to thrust himself into the Rooseveltian limelight. In California the President mentioned his “old friend” Senator McAdoo, but the situation was topsy-turvy there, for McAdoo’s opponent was no tory but a leader of the “$30 every Thursday” movement named Sheridan Downey.

  By the time the President had been piped aboard the Houston, had made a long sea cruise down through the Panama Canal to Pensacola, and had started back to Washington, some of the primary results were in. Roosevelt could feel well satisfied. Barkley won decisively in Kentucky, as did Thomas in Oklahoma. To be sure, Adams won in Colorado and McCarran was running strong in Nevada, but Roosevelt had not deeply committed himself in these races.

  Moreover, the trip across the country had been one more parade of triumph for the President. In Marietta, Ohio, a little old woman symbolized much of the popular feeling when she knelt down and reverently patted the dust where he had left a footprint. The enthusiasm of the crowds bore out the comment of Republican Congressman Bruce Barton that the feeling of the masses toward Roosevelt was the controlling political influence of the time. And Roosevelt’s triumph had been a wholly personal one. Farley, who had publicly supported the President after the fireside chat while secretly deploring the purge, was in Alaska. Garner had not met the President in Texas. Editorials deplored the President’s meddling in local elections. Cartoonists pictured him as a donkey rider, a club wielder, a pants kicker, a big-game hunter.

  Emboldened by his successes, Roosevelt on his way north turned his attention to his number-one target, the doughty and influential Senator Walter George of Georgia. The scene was so dramatic it seemed almost staged. Sitting on the platform with Roosevelt in the little country town of Barnesville was George himself, Lawrence Camp, a diffident young attorney whom the administration had induced to run against the Senator, and a host of nervous Georgia politicians. From the moment he started talking Roosevelt’s heavy deliberateness of tone and manner seemed a portent. After dwelling on his many years at Warm Springs, the problems facing the South, and the need for political leadership along liberal lines, Roosevelt turned to the business at hand. He said of George:

  “Let me make it clear that he is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.…” But he and George simply did not speak the same political language. The test was in the answer to two questions: “First, has the record of the candidate shown, while differi
ng perhaps in details, a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the Government as they are constituted today; and secondly, does the candidate really, in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in those objectives?

  “I regret that in the case of my friend, Senator George, I cannot honestly answer either of these questions in the affirmative.” A faint chorus of mixed cheers and boos rose from the crowd. George stirred uneasily; Camp sat motionless.

  There was more in the speech, as Roosevelt dismissed another candidate, red-gallused, hard-faced, ex-Governor Eugene Talmadge, as a man of panaceas and promises, and roundly praised Camp. But the climax for the crowd came as Roosevelt turned to George and shook hands.

  “Mr. President,” said the Senator, “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”

  “Let’s always be friends,” Roosevelt replied cheerily.

  Next state up was South Carolina, the domain of Cotton Ed Smith. Again Roosevelt displayed his versatility. Smith’s opponent, Governor Olin D. Johnston, had launched his campaign in Washington directly after a talk with the President, but now Roosevelt took a subtle approach. Without mentioning Smith by name, he ended a talk in Greenville with the remark, “I don’t believe any family or man can live on fifty cents a day—” a fling at Cotton Ed, who was reputed to have said that in South Carolina a man could.

  Back in Washington, the President struck the hardest blow of all against his old adversary, the urbane Millard Tydings of Maryland. At a press conference he accused Tydings—and he told reporters to put this in direct quotes—of wanting to run “with the Roosevelt prestige and the money of his conservative Republican friends both on his side.” He lined up Maryland politicians behind Tydings’ primary opponent, Representative David J. Lewis. He asked former Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long, a political leader in the state, to help out financially and personally. And he stumped intensively in Maryland for two days against Tydings during the first week of September. To give his campaign a semblance of party backing, the President got Farley to go with him. The Democratic chairman glumly watched the proceedings. “It’s a bust,” he told reporters.