The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  A bust it was. During the next weeks Roosevelt’s political fortunes reached the lowest point of his presidency.

  Smith won decisively in South Carolina. Tydings won by a huge vote in Maryland. Maverick and other Roosevelt men lost in Texas. George came out far in front in Georgia. Talmadge was second, and Camp an ignominious third. Semi- or anti-New Dealers Alva Adams of Colorado, Pat McCarran of Nevada, Augustine Lonergan of Connecticut, all won. “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present,” Roosevelt remarked after Smith’s victory.

  Only one bright spot relieved the dark picture. Earlier in the year Hopkins and Corcoran had induced James H. Fay to enter the primary in Manhattan against the hated John O’Connor, who had used his chairmanship of the Rules Committee to thwart the President. Fay was a good choice: he had impeccable Irish antecedents, a war record, and close ties with a number of Tammany chiefs. Hopkins lined up Labor party support for Fay through La Guardia, and Roosevelt agreed to ask Patterson of the Daily News to back the New Deal candidate. Corcoran spent a month in New York running the campaign at the ward and precinct level. When O’Connor began to fight back hard to save his political life, Roosevelt got a reluctant Boss Flynn to help run Fay’s campaign. These combined efforts defeated O’Connor by a close vote in mid-September.

  By now Democrats and Republicans were locked in battle in hundreds of congressional and a score or two senatorial races. Wracked by internal splits, the Democrats had to face the somber likelihood that they would suffer a drop after the sweep of ‘36. The Republicans, knowing they had seen the worst and enjoying the brawls in the enemy camp, were jubilant. Some of them, indeed, were cocky to the point of insolence. Backers of a Republican candidate in Wisconsin wired Roosevelt urging him to come to Wisconsin and oppose their man. The President’s opposition, they added, would guarantee his election.

  Roosevelt ignored such antics, but he could not ignore the strange directions the campaigns were taking. A shift had taken place in the spirit and temper of the people. In many races the issues were not the standard old reliables like prosperity, security, reform, and peace, but vague and fearsome things such as state rights, the “rubber-stamp” Congress, presidential power, the purge itself. In other races candidates for Congress got embroiled in local issues. In South Carolina, for example, Cotton Ed raised the banner of white supremacy, and Johnston, not to be outdone, accused Smith himself of once “voting to let a big buck nigger sit next to your wife or daughter on a train.” In Pennsylvania the main issue was not the New Deal but corruption; in Michigan, the sit-down strikes; in California, a state pension plan.

  As party leader Roosevelt presumably had some power of campaign direction. But unlike his own presidential campaigns, where he could exploit his unmatched skill at focusing issues and at timing the attack, he lacked control over the situation. Instead of his running the campaigns, the campaigns ran away with him.

  He had to spend a good deal of time simply making his position clear. In the last weeks of the campaign he found it necessary to defend Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan against charges that he had treasonably mishandled the sit-down strikes; he had to rebuke Pennsylvania Republicans for charging that he had kept hands off that state because of distaste for the Democrats there; he had to make clear that his silence about Governor Elmer Benson of Minnesota did not mean he was not in favor of Benson; he had to declare his support in California for Downey, victor over McAdoo, as a real liberal, despite Downey’s “$30 every Thursday” plank, which Roosevelt opposed; he had to make clear his support of Senator F. Ryan Duffy in Wisconsin; and he had to declare for Governor Lehman and Senator Wagner of New York, candidates for re-election. Putting out campaign brush fires all over the country was no way to leave the President in a commanding position.

  On election eve Roosevelt tried to pull the confused situation into focus. He reasserted that the supreme issue was the continuation of the New Deal. After a homely reference to the “dream house” he was building in Hyde Park, he said that a social gain, unlike a house, was not necessarily permanent. The great gains of Theodore Roosevelt and of Wilson, he warned, had evaporated during the subsequent administrations. The President thrust a barbed lance at the opposition. “As of today, Fascism and Communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force … then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.” But political exigencies forced Roosevelt even on a national hookup to devote much of his speech to New York candidates.

  The election returns dealt the Democrats a worse blow than Roosevelt had expected. Republican strength in the House almost doubled, rising from 88 to 170, and increased in the Senate by eight. The Republicans lost not a single seat. The liberal bloc in the House was halved. Wagner and Lehman both won in New York, but a brilliant and personable young district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey, came so close to upsetting Lehman that the challenger became a prospect for his party’s presidential nomination in 1940. Winning over a dozen governorships, the Republicans offered new faces to the nation—Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota. Taft beat Bulkley in Ohio and took over a Senate seat that he would soon convert into a national rostrum. Philip La Follette lost in Wisconsin, Murphy in Michigan, Earle in Pennsylvania.

  Roosevelt tried to make the best of the situation. The New Deal had not been repudiated, he told friends. The trouble lay in party factionalism and local conditions. He pointed to corruption in Massachusetts, a race-track scandal in Rhode Island, a parkway squabble in Connecticut, Boss Frank Hague’s dictatorial ways in Jersey City, strikes in the Midwest, poor Democratic candidates elsewhere. The President could point to the fact that, after all, his party still held big majorities in both Houses of Congress. But could he blink the fact that Republicans combined with anti-New Deal Democrats could control the legislature?

  “Will you not encounter coalition opposition?” a reporter asked him at the first press conference after the election.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the President answered.

  “I do!” his questioner came back pertly, amid laughter.

  “The trees are too close to the forest,” Roosevelt went on enigmatically.

  THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

  The reporter was right, and Roosevelt knew that he was right. The Republicans were making no secret of their plans to besiege the New Deal through the conservative Democrats in Congress. But the President had an eye on the forest too. The critical situation in Europe would force a political reordering at home. And he knew he would have strong cards to play against the conservatives in 1940. Meantime he showed his cheerful visage to the world. He even jested about the visage that some newspapers had given him.

  “You undergraduates who see me for the first time,” he told a delighted student audience at Chapel Hill in December, “have read your newspapers and heard on the air that I am, at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions. Some of you think of me perhaps as the inventor of the economic royalist, of the wicked utilities, of the money changers of the Temple. You have heard for six years that I was about to plunge the Nation into war; that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe; that I was driving the Nation into bankruptcy; and that I breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’ ” The crowd guffawed.

  “Actually I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.”

  Against the advice of Garner and other of his “antediluvian friends” in Congress, as he called them, Roosevelt stood firm on his New Deal policies. Before the legislators in January 1939, he defended his program of social
and economic reform. To be sure, he justified that program partly as an aid to national defense, and he stated that the country had “passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform.” But he went on to call for the releasing of the nation’s full energies “to invigorate the processes of recovery in order to preserve our reforms, and to give every man and woman who wants to work a real job at a living wage.” And he called again for the measures Congress had denied him the year before, including reorganization.

  Another Myth Exploded

  Dec. 6, 1938, Quincy Scott, Portland Oregonian.

  Nor did Roosevelt indicate any compromise in a fighting party speech he gave to a Jackson Day dinner a few days later. He welcomed the return of the Republicans to a position where they could no longer excuse themselves for not having a program on the ground they had too few votes. He charged that during recent years “Republican impotence has caused powerful interests, opposed to genuine democracy, to push their way into the Democratic party, hoping to paralyze it by dividing its councils.” He called on Democrats to stick together and to line up with those from other parties and with independents in a firm alliance. He prophesied that the Republican leadership, conservative at heart, would “still seek to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, talking of balanced budgets out of one side of its mouth and in favor of opportunist raids on the Treasury out of the other.” And he appealed to the memory of Andrew Jackson to keep the party a liberal party, not a Democratic Tweedledum to a Republican Tweedledee.

  The President’s major appointments reflected his tenacity of purpose. To the consternation of the business community Hopkins succeeded Roper as Secretary of Commerce. The priestlike Murphy of Michigan took Cummings’ place as Attorney General. Felix Frankfurter, after serving six years as a recruiting sergeant for the New Deal, was appointed to Holmes’s old and Cardozo’s recent seat on the Supreme Court. And William O. Douglas took Brandeis’ place on the high bench. So in the New Deal’s sixth year there were secure liberal majorities in both cabinet and court.

  But not in Congress. As the 1939 session got under way, the congressional threat to New Deal programs became more and more apparent.

  The conservative coalition on the Hill would not, of course, abolish the New Deal, even if it wished to, for it could not command two-thirds majorities to override Roosevelt’s vetoes. But it could stop the extension of the New Deal into new and controversial fields. To be sure, Congress passed a cut-down reorganization bill, a revised and liberalized social security measure, and several other administration measures. When it came, however, to spending programs aimed at fulfilling the President’s promises of recovery, the legislators balked. Bills to finance self-liquidation projects and to lend eight hundred million dollars on housing projects passed the Senate but failed in the House amidst a general denunciation of the relief program. Relief appropriations, too, were pared sharply.

  The inevitable consequence of this political stalemate was economic stalemate. With New Deal reforms secured now by a liberalized court and by determined presidential backing, investors were still immobilized largely by their fears of the government. But Congress would not tolerate a large-scale spending program, even if Roosevelt proposed it. The recovery policy was caught in dead center. Although business conditions had improved markedly since the year before, dead center still meant eight to ten million unemployed.

  Some congressmen, however, were not satisfied even with stalemating the New Deal. They sought to dismantle it. And in their attempt they turned to the three classic weapons of congressional usurpation of executive power.

  Perhaps the most potent of these weapons was the power to investigate. During Roosevelt’s first term friendly legislators like Senator Black had used this power to arouse public opinion behind New Deal measures. The President was strong enough almost single-handed to balk hostile probes, as in the case of Tydings. But now, in his second term, the situation was reversed. At the start of the 1939 session Garner in a cabinet meeting told Roosevelt bluntly that the opposition was planning to investigate the WPA and other agencies. Something should be done about it, he said. “Jack,” the President answered, “you are talking to eleven people who can’t do anything about it.” It was up to the congressional leaders, including Garner, he said. It was a clear indication of the extent to which Roosevelt’s resources of personal influence had been drained off midway through the second term.

  Even in the case of Martin Dies, the square-faced, hulking young Texan who ran the House Un-American Activities Committee, Roosevelt had to act cautiously. He detested Dies’s fishing expeditions and he knew the political dangers in Dies’s jabs at Ickes, Hopkins, Miss Perkins, and other New Dealers as being soft toward Communists. But the President, aside from one indignant press statement, did not risk an open counterattack against his foes. Asked by reporters to comment on the Texan’s charge that Roosevelt was not co-operating with him, the President answered only with an elaborate “Ho hum.” Incensed over Dies’s treatment of witnesses, he protested indirectly to another committee member. When Ickes was ready to cannonade Dies with a speech entitled, “Playing with Loaded Dies,” Early telephoned that the President said, “For God’s sake don’t do it!” Roosevelt hoped he could head Dies off by maneuvering through his leaders on Capitol Hill. But this indirection, which had worked so well during the first term, no longer seemed to turn the trick. Dies got a huge appropriation in 1939 and kept on playing ducks and drakes with the issue of Communism.

  A second classic instrument of congressional attack was control over hiring administrative personnel, and here again Congress lived up to tradition. The most obvious of these controls over hiring was the old practice of senatorial courtesy, by which senators agree, in a kind of unwritten mutual defense pact, to hold up any presidential nomination when the nominee is “personally obnoxious”—i.e., a member of a hostile political faction—to one of their colleagues. In January 1939 Roosevelt deliberately flouted the rule by nominating as federal judge a Virginian who was friendly to the governor of that state but not to Senators Glass and Byrd. The President’s nominee was rejected. Angry and public exchanges between Roosevelt and Glass followed, but when the dust settled, senatorial courtesy stood intact.

  A third means of congressional control was the legislative power to appropriate funds annually for the bureaucracy. To the extent it dared, the coalition cut down on general funds for agency programs, but it did not dare go too far because even Republicans and anti-New Deal Democrats were sensitive to the reaction of groups benefiting from the programs. What the coalition could and did do was to cut funds for those functions behind which no congressional bloc would rally, but which in the long run might critically influence the durability and impact of the programs— namely, planning, research, statistical and economic analysis, scientific investigation, administrative management, information, staffing.

  The heart of the situation was this: By 1939 coalition leaders in Congress had left their defensive posture of ’37 and ’38 and had moved openly to the attack. Where once they had been content to stop the New Deal from expanding, now they were trying to disrupt major federal programs or to divert them to their own purposes. Where once they had fought against presidential control over the legislative branch, now they were extending their own controls over the executive branch.

  A chief executive’s power to control his own establishment is always in jeopardy. At best, certain parts of the disheveled and straggling bureaucracy will escape his control if only because of its vast size. Many bureaucrats are holdovers from previous regimes and respond to ideologies and programs of the past. Such officials the President usually can remove if he knows about them; but some of them may be beyond his reach. Early in his first term Roosevelt sacked a holdover commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission mainly because the man was utterly out of sympathy with the New Deal, but the Supreme Court later ruled that his power to remove independent commissioners simply on the grounds tha
t they differed with him over policy depended on Congress. So, too, many officials were less responsive to the change in presidential leadership than they were to the narrow professionalism and traditions of bureaucratic cliques.

  Friction within government is inevitable when men are ambitious for themselves and passionately consecrated to their programs, and this was especially true of Roosevelt’s jostling, bickering lieutenants. From the start fierce conflicts swept his top officialdom. The peppery, cantankerous Ickes was a ceaseless generator of friction; he jousted with Hugh Johnson, Morgenthau, Miss Perkins, Hopkins, and others, and his battle with Wallace culminated in a blazing face-to-face quarrel where charges of lying and disloyalty to the President were tossed about. Personal and administrative differences among the three TVA board members became so acute that Roosevelt had to hold long hearings in the White House and, in the end, ousted the chairman. Other rivalries that smoldered under the surface were fair game for newspaper columnists and cocktail party gossips.

  Roosevelt’s personality and administrative methods encouraged this turbulence. He delegated power so loosely that bureaucrats found themselves entangled in lines of authority and stepping on one another’s toes. Despite his public disapproval of open brawls, Roosevelt actually tolerated them and sometimes even seemed to enjoy them. He saw some virtues in pitting bureaucrat against bureaucrat in a competitive struggle. The very nature of the New Deal programs with their improvised, experimental, and often contradictory qualities was another source of discord.