The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Presumably the President was hoping to minimize traditional party politics, for he carefully avoided Wilson’s call for a Democratic Congress, and he dismissed as “perfectly silly” a New Republic claim that the fall elections would be the most important since the Civil War. Obviously, in wartime the President needed the backing of the two liberal, internationalist parties, the presidential Democrats and the presidential Republicans, for his coalition strategy and war policies. Did he, then, favor a party realignment with all liberals and internationalists in one party, all conservatives and isolationists in the other? Some liberals so concluded and looked eagerly toward an ideological party split. Others were not so sure. Anti-Roosevelt newspapers took advantage of the confusion to hint darkly that the President would cancel the fall congressional elections.

  Adjournment of party politics would require the co-operation of the other party. And the Republicans in election year 1942 had no intention of surrendering their monopoly of the opposition. Nor did their leader, Wendell Willkie, whose party position now was even more anomalous than Roosevelt’s.

  In the weeks after Pearl Harbor the two men had conducted a political minuet. The President offered Willkie a war job as arbitrator under the War Labor Board, and considered him for director of manpower; he did not offer the one job that Willkie doubtless would have accepted—production chief. Willkie suspected that the President had finally appointed a production boss mainly because of his own proddings. The White House announced the offer of the arbitration job before Willkie had had a chance to answer. As for Willkie’s demand that MacArthur be brought back to unify the defense effort, Roosevelt told his aides that that was downright silly. Even Winston Churchill stumbled into the strained situation when during his stay in Palm Beach he telephoned Willkie to arrange to see him—only to discover after some conversation that he was talking to Roosevelt. Still, despite all the troubles, Roosevelt and Willkie had a sneaking affection for each other. They met at the White House occasionally and kept in touch through intermediaries.

  Whatever the climate at the White House, however, Willkie stuck to his main job as he saw it—constructive criticism. Again and again he demanded that America face up to its postwar obligations, especially the keeping of the peace through international organization. He attacked isolationism, colonialism, race hatred; he joined with Eleanor Roosevelt, La Guardia, Dorothy Thompson, and other notables in founding Freedom House; he denounced the persecution of minorities, though stopping just short of opposing the Japanese relocation program; he took advanced positions on civil rights, civil liberties, colonial peoples, a second front in Europe in 1942. In the four-party battle that survived Pearl Harbor he was lambasting congressional Republicans for their isolationism and conservatism and congressional Democrats for their racism and conservatism.

  The absence of a strong, institutionalized opposition party shortened Willkie’s reach; it also gave him far greater leeway. Indeed, in the endless Virginia reel of political couplings and cleavings, Roosevelt and Willkie were brought into slightly embarrassing embraces. They met in April to talk, among other things about getting Ham Fish out of Congress. “I did enjoy that little party the other night a lot,” Roosevelt wrote to Willkie later, but he admitted that they had not got far on the Fish matter. Willkie later openly opposed the conservative Congressman’s renomination. That effort failed, but he also battled and overcame Taft and other congressional Republicans in persuading the Republican National Committee to take a moderately internationalist position at its spring meeting in Chicago, under the very nose of Colonel McCormick. He tried to conduct a “shadow purge” by intervening in Republican primaries against extreme isolationists and reactionaries. He tolerated for a while a short boom for himself as Republican candidate for governor of New York, then firmly stepped on it. Thomas E. Dewey, far more restrained than Willkie, more cautious, was out front for the choice as Republican standard-bearer for the seat Herbert Lehman was vacating.

  By summertime hope was rising among some Republican and Democratic liberals that Roosevelt and Willkie might join hands to found a new party, or at least a party coalition, to win the war and organize the peace. The two men seemed agreed on policy; Willkie simply enjoyed a freedom to speak out that was denied the President. Then, on the heels of the 1942 New York Republican convention, Willkie suddenly announced that he was planning to leave the country—and the campaign—to travel around the world. His purposes, he said, were to demonstrate American unity, to “accomplish certain things for the President,” and to find out “about the war and how it can be won.”

  The trip had been Willkie’s idea, but the President had seized on it eagerly and fully co-operated. Since Willkie would not be back until shortly before the election, any hope of real collaboration between the presidential parties was gone for 1942 at least. It was easy to see why Willkie wanted to make the trip, but what were Roosevelt’s motives? Earlier in the year Eleanor Roosevelt had remarked to her husband that the Democratic party was beginning to creak from disuse. The Republicans creaked more, Roosevelt had said, and would creak even more when he took Willkie into the government. Now the titular Republican leader would be away during the height of the campaign. He was deserting a host of political comrades—men who had fought by his side in 1940 and were running for office two years later—in their hour of need. For weeks he would be the President’s personal representative. Did the President want a loyal opposition? Did he hope that the Grand Old Party would creak and creak—and then crumble into the dust?

  Certainly the Democracy was creaking. National Chairman Edward J. Flynn, accustomed to good, simple party fights back home in the Bronx, had never fought an election like this one. When he merely tuned up for the fray by suggesting gently that a Republican House would be a disaster, the President repudiated him. The National Chairman was supposed to define issues for the campaign—but what were the issues? Flynn did not even hold the party reins in an off-year election, for oversight of the congressional campaigns was vested in Democratic campaign committees in the Senate and the House. These committees were tied in with the congressional party leadership, however, and had limited funds, few issues on which congressional Democrats agreed, and virtually no control over Democratic candidates for Congress. The only force that might influence such elections from outside was the White House, the only party leader, Roosevelt—but he had adjourned politics for the duration and stressed that winning the war was the only issue. And how could a campaign be fought on that?

  Republicans raged at this adjournment by the party enjoying power, and quite understandably. They knew that Roosevelt was too political an animal to rise above partisanship. The White House, indeed, was no place to escape politics. Judges, postmasters, federal attorneys had to be appointed, and around each of these prizes, however small, a fierce little battle was waged, usually under cover but sometimes erupting in charges, countercharges, and headlines. Two of Roosevelt’s appointments aroused special wrath—one was Robert E. Hannegan, a St. Louis Democratic organization leader, to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue; the other was a “henchman” of Boss Frank Hague, of Jersey City, to be a federal judge in New Jersey. Even George Norris, Senator from Nebraska, deserted his friend in the White House on the judgeship nomination, crying out in the Senate that the question was whether “one of the most disreputable and demagogic organizations that ever existed will go beyond New Jersey and take in the whole Federal Government.” Roosevelt seemed unmoved by this flare-up of old, peacetime politics. When Congresswoman Mary Norton called New Jersey’s Governor Charles Edison an arrant hypocrite for opposing Hague on the judgeship matter after seeking Hague’s aid earlier—so she claimed—in his own election campaign, Roosevelt sent her a note that was abbreviated even for him: “Dear Mary: You are a grand girl!”

  Nor could Roosevelt stay out of politics in his own state and district. The Empire State Democracy prospered under the leadership of Alfred E. Smith, Roosevelt, and Lehman; now it boiled with discord. Jim
Farley, still strong with the county leaders, was backing a Democratic party stalwart, Attorney General John J. Bennett, for the gubernatorial nomination. It was clear to the New Dealers in Washington that a Bennett victory in 1942 could mean Farley’s dominance over the New York delegation to the national Democratic convention in 1944. A Farley pilgrimage to the White House won from Roosevelt only a grudging promise to announce that he would vote for Bennett, if nominated over Dewey—but “not one word more.” Later Roosevelt gave encouragement to New York’s junior Senator, Democrat James M. Mead, on the grounds that Bennett would lose and only Mead could get the support of the fusionist American Labor party in New York City as well as a strong vote from upstate. A few days before the convention, however, the President switched again, now telling party leaders that the Mead and Bennett camps had got into such a mess that both had been irrevocably hurt; he now suggested a third candidate, to whom he would be willing to give wholehearted support. This maneuver failed, too, and finally, at the last moment, Roosevelt sent the state convention a letter, via Lehman, stating his first preference for Mead, his second preference for a compromise candidate, and implying his willingness to accept Bennett if he had to.

  As usual, Farley had things well in hand and Bennett’s nomination went through. The American Labor party, itself sorely divided between garment-union leaders and a militant left wing, repudiated Bennett and nominated its own candidate. Dewey won the Republican nomination easily and faced the happy prospect of a fragmented opposition.

  Roosevelt seemed less concerned with these setbacks than with charges that he was spending too much time on politics. When the New York Herald Tribune ran a cartoon so implying, he wrote an indignant letter to Mrs. Ogden Reid, a personal friend and wife of the president of the paper. He had acquired over the years the hide of a rhinoceros, he wrote, but there were times when he had to speak to real friends. Actually, the amount of time he had taken from war-work hours to devote to New York politics was exactly zero, he said. He listed the two appointments, one telephone call, and one letter that constituted the totality of his political effort back home. “The total amount of it was not much longer than the very nice visit I had with you the other day—which, by the way, was in ‘war’ time!”

  But time—presidential time—was precisely the resource that had to be invested in politics if the President was to have influence on the election. His old adversary Hamilton Fish was the main case in point. Fish was still one of the few American public men Roosevelt cordially and thoroughly hated. But both the friends and the foes of the Congressman agreed on one thing: Ham put time into his district, which sprawled from the Connecticut line across Dutchess County and the Hudson River into Orange County and over to the New Jersey border. He took time to cover the straw-hat and clambake circuits, to keep in touch with veterans’ organizations and Gold Star mothers, to deliver on the gut staples of politics—jobs, favors, recognition. Now in his eleventh term in Congress, he had risen by the seniority ladder to become senior Republican on both the House Rules and the Foreign Affairs Committees—and would become chairman of one or both if the Republicans carried the lower house in November.

  June 10, 1942, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star

  So Fish was a shining target, but Roosevelt hardly took direct aim. He talked with Willkie and with a few Dutchess County Democratic leaders and showed his library to a Poughkeepsie publisher who had promised that all three of his papers in that city would come out against Fish’s renomination. The President had little confidence in the Democratic organization; he felt, indeed, that when the Democrats lacked good men of their own they should combine with enlightened Republicans to choose a Republican. But he took no steps in his own congressional district to carry out this idea. Fish’s Republican foes failed to dislodge him in the primary; the Democrats nominated a lackluster candidate, and by fall Roosevelt had lost hope of beating Fish.

  In only one state besides New York did Roosevelt openly intervene in 1942, a sharp contrast with his “purge” efforts of four years before. This was the “magnificently justified exception” of Nebraska, where old George Norris, a very special Senator, friend, and progressive, was in the battle of his life against a conservative Republican. Norris’s long support of Roosevelt in peace and war—except on patronage—was bringing him abuse as well as support. The President told reporters that he would not change one word of the ringing endorsement he had given Norris six years before, in the Aksarben Coliseum in Omaha: “…his candidacy transcends State and party lines …one of the major prophets of America…a man who has had no boss but his conscience.” Roosevelt sent Norris a copy of his re-endorsement, adding, “If this be treason, let every citizen of Nebraska hear about it.”

  But such eloquence and conviction were in short supply in the congressional elections of 1942. It was a strange contest. During September, at the height of a nationwide election, the heads of the two major parties were cut off from battle—Roosevelt because he was on his blacked-out inspection tour, Willkie because he was still girdling the world. Separation did not make their hearts grow fonder. Willkie talked with Allied and neutral leaders with his usual enthusiasm and expansiveness; he privately advised the President to send wheat to Turkey and publicly urged a second front to help Russia. Willkie was annoyed when he heard in Chungking that Roosevelt had belittled his call for a second front, and annoyed again when the President talked scornfully of “typewriter strategists.” Roosevelt tried to make clear that he supported Willkie’s mission, was referring only to speculation about the second front, and was simply attacking columnists, but still there was a sharper edge of mutual distrust in their relationship when Willkie returned in mid-October—a feeling that was not wholly dissipated by an amiable meeting at the White House.

  All through summer and early fall Hadley Cantril, in Princeton, continued to sample political attitudes for the President. He did not like much of what he found. During the forging of a grand coalition against the Axis, Americans had become a bit less interventionist than before Pearl Harbor. In the midst of a war against Nazism, anti-Semitism seemed more widespread than before the war. Under an administration sympathetic to the Negro, blacks were shifting toward the Republican party in the coming election. Margaret Mead was right—the people wanted their President to be tougher, more demanding of them; they wanted to be told; they wanted it laid on the line.

  All this spelled trouble in the fall elections, Cantril warned the President. But he could not be sure he was getting through to Roosevelt, who was still maintaining his nonpolitical posture.

  So the campaign, lacking in either dramatic national antagonists or clear-cut issues, meandered on toward the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Virtually every candidate in every party backed an all-out war effort, planning for the postwar period, and often even Franklin Roosevelt, at least in his role as war leader. Behind the big consensual symbols politicians stressed little issues, catered to local biases, played up personalities. Political lethargy, reporters found, was rampant. Some Willkie supporters of 1940 crossed party lines to back liberal Democrats, and some New Dealers preferred interventionist Republicans to mediocre Democrats, but the once-heralded party realignment was stalled to the point of nonexistence. There was little suspense about the election outcome. Pundits generally agreed that the Republicans would make gains but not take control of either Senate or House.

  “Hope you have a nice election!” a schoolgirl called out to the President after he had voted at Hyde Park Town Hall. It was not to be. In his eve-of-election statement Roosevelt had said nothing about Democrats or Republicans or even about the importance of supporting win-the-war candidates. He merely expressed the hope that people would vote. People would not even do that. The turnout was far below expectations, so the Republican vote was relatively much higher. The GOP picked up forty-four congressional seats and came within a handful of seats, 209 to the Democrats’ 222, of winning control of the House. Republicans won nin
e Senate seats and, more important for the future, several governorships in the biggest states. A sizable band of loyal New Dealers lost their seats without a word of support from the President, for whom they felt they had gone down the line. Ham Fish and most of the other conservative isolationists won easily. The two congressional parties strengthened their hold on Capitol Hill; the presidential Republicans won a couple of potential national leaders in the victories of Earl Warren in California, who beat the once-formidable Culbert Olson, and Dewey in New York, who outpolled the Democrats and the American Labor party combined. Of the four parties, only the presidential Democrats—Roosevelt’s party—lost.

  The usual off-year explanations were trotted out and combined with the effect of war conditions: the low vote; the young people, predominantly Democratic, who were off in the war or in war industry; administration toleration of labor excesses; inflation; local problems; gripes. The President was criticized for his hands-off policy. One commentator noted acidly that Wilson had called for a Democratic Congress in 1918 and lost seats in the House and Senate; Roosevelt had not called for anything and lost twice as many.