by Sally Denton
To Roosevelt, Hoover’s overreaction underscored his own evolving mindfulness of how deeply divided America had become, how wide the swath was between the “haves” and the “have-nots”—as Depression-era novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described America’s divisions along lines of money and class. Hoover’s actions highlighted to Roosevelt “the deep social cleavage in the nation and the possible difficulties posed by alarmists” such as MacArthur, whom he considered “a potential Mussolini.”
In any case, Roosevelt knew better than anyone that the episode had sealed the president’s fate, predicting, rightly, that Americans would be outraged by the events.
“Well, Felix,” he said to his adviser Felix Frankfurter, “this will elect me.”
Chapter Seven
Happy Days Are Here Again
The Bonus Army fiasco was the final blow to an ill-fated president. The 1929 stock market crash monopolized Hoover’s first year in office; the spiraling American economy plagued his next three years. While the Depression obliterated Hoover’s standing as a forceful American leader, his antisocial personality further undermined him. “But the rout of the bonus marchers shattered the remaining credibility of his administration,” concluded one historian. “His personal reputation might have weathered some of the discontent engendered by the depression if federal troops had not attacked unarmed, hungry petitioners—victims of that depression.”
Roosevelt was quick to capitalize on his rival’s floundering, referring to him as “Humpty Dumpty” and never missing an opportunity to highlight his failures. In what would go down in history as a particularly bitter campaign, the Republicans’ ad hominem attacks included spreading rumors that Roosevelt’s paralysis was caused by a venereal disease, which had gone to his brain and was driving him “crazy.” The Democrats held no punches either, accusing Hoover of colluding in the export of fifty thousand coolies as cheap labor to South African gold mines while he was a Chinese mining company executive.
In any case, Americans were uninterested in political squabbles and impatient for solutions to rescue them from the hardship that was growing harder. As the campaign headed into the general election, a journalist asked British economist John Maynard Keynes whether there was a historical comparison to the Great Depression. “Yes,” Keynes replied. “It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.” Earlier, Keynes had warned a Chicago audience of the impending collapse. “We are today in the middle of the greatest catastrophe—the greatest catastrophe due almost to entirely [sic] economic causes—of the modern world. I am told that the view is held in Moscow that this is the last, the culminating crisis of capitalism, and that our existing order of society will not survive it.”
It was this sense of fear and hopelessness that sent citizens in search of a messiah. Nearly fifty years old, the broad-shouldered and spirited Roosevelt had matured into a seasoned politician with governing experience and an eloquent speaker with an apparent grasp of the problems facing the nation. Still, the populace was fed up with Washington, with government, and with both parties, and while Roosevelt’s charismatic personality enchanted many, others remained skeptical. “The way most people feel, they would like to vote against all of them if possible,” social commentator and comedian Will Rogers quipped, though he would later become a friend of Roosevelt’s. Third parties and “crank candidates” cropped up, spawned by the collective anxiety. Considered progressive, Roosevelt predictably aroused opposition from the Right, which alternately called him a Socialist, Fascist, or Communist—with no apparent comprehension of the contradictions. The fact that he was a die-hard capitalist and far more centrist than liberal was not lost on the Left, which saw him as an unreconstructed scion of America’s elite. Walter Lippmann—“although subjected to massive doses of FDR’s celebrated charm”—had not modified his assessment of the man, writing that “his mind is not very clear, his purposes are not simple, and his methods are not direct.” Time magazine dismissed him as “a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding” who “lacked crusading convictions.”
In the early stages of the 1932 presidential campaign, both the Right and Left were disaffected and disenchanted with the choice, seeing little difference between either Hoover and Roosevelt or the Republicans and the Democrats. Both candidates pledged to balance the budget and cut tariffs. Both promised to revitalize the economy. Both believed in the gold standard and unregulated corporate competition. Beyond platitudes, however, it was difficult to get a fix on Roosevelt’s platform for the presidency. Though his speeches were generally ambiguous and noncontroversial, an outbreak of infectious optimism began to surround him. By early fall, audiences seemed less interested in shallow bromides than in the character of the man. Roosevelt’s persistent smile and sparkling eyes, his indefatigable optimism and genteel manner, and his easygoing confidence and friendly nature implied that he could be the hero that all Americans subconsciously sought. “What they saw was a magnificent leader,” William Manchester wrote. “His leonine head thrown back, his eyes flashing, his cigarette holder tilted at the sky, his navy boat cloak falling gracefully from his great shoulders. He was the image of zest, warmth, and dignity.” Suddenly, the differences between the two candidates could not have been starker.
Roosevelt’s speeches began to foreshadow the New Deal as he lashed out at Hoover’s failed economic policy. He began to advocate for regulating banks and security firms and for reforming agriculture and private utilities—“to prevent extortion against the public.” At the heart of his emerging ideology was the forging of a new partnership between the government and the citizenry—for “the development of an economic declaration of rights,” as he told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 23, 1932. In one of his most powerful and revealing campaign speeches, Roosevelt spoke movingly of the birth of American democracy and its evolution to the modern day:
A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt. Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land. More than half of our people do not live on their own property. There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start. We are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people … The independent business man is running a losing race … If the process of concentration goes on at the same rate, at the end of another century we shall have all American industry controlled by a dozen corporations, and run by perhaps a hundred men. But plainly, we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.
Roosevelt made clear that it was time for a revolutionary reassessment of what democracy in America should look like in the twentieth century. “Every man has a right to live, and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may … decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him.” Hinting darkly of speculators, manipulators, and financiers, his words—written by Adolph Berle—left little doubt that he favored some kind of wealth redistribution. This concept of the sanctity of individualism, this championing of personal rights over property rights, this plea for relief to the masses, was a shot heard throughout the nation. That an American aristocrat had sounded the clarion call made it all the more poignant and uplifting—and, to members of Roosevelt’s class, terrifying. “It was a real shocker for those who simply assumed that free competition was no more to be questioned than home and mother,” recalled Rexford Guy Tugwell, who saw the speech as the turning point that launched Franklin Roosevelt into the realm of legend, which he would occupy into the next century.
Early returns on November 8, 1932, confirmed that the Roosevelt forces had accurately gauged the mood of the nation. No other Democrat had ever wo
n such a large margin of the popular vote. Roosevelt had carried forty-two states, winning by 7 million popular votes and 472 electoral votes, compared with Hoover’s 59. Democrats took over the Senate and the House as well, guaranteeing an opportunity for Roosevelt to manifest his vision for a New Deal. Listening to the results in a suite at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel, surrounded by family and friends, the candidate was strangely somber.
Louis Howe refused to leave his own headquarters across the street, until victory was certain so as not to jinx the good luck. One of the guests described him as a “well of pessimism, overflowing now and then with dire predictions.” Not until Hoover conceded shortly after midnight did Howe break out a twenty-year-old bottle of sherry he had been saving for the day his protégé was elected president.
Sitting in a corner of the suite, Eleanor broke into tears, lamenting her new role as First Lady. “Now I will have no identity,” she said quietly to a cousin, unable to mask what she later described as the “turmoil” in her heart.
The couple returned to their town house at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street, where an exuberant Sara Delano Roosevelt was waiting. “This is the greatest moment of my life,” she said, embracing her son.
For his part, Roosevelt was suddenly and uncharacteristically overcome with doubt and trepidation about the burden he was facing—a challenge equal to that of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln as the Great Depression entered its fourth year. Despite the Roosevelt theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was struck up throughout the country, “there was no excitement … no petty sense of impending personal triumph,” Raymond Moley wrote years later of the election victory. The “gathering economic storm clouds—the tumbling prices, the mounting unemployment,” he said, could not be shaken, even for a moment.
When his twenty-five-year-old son lifted him into his bed that night, Roosevelt uttered a heartfelt admission. “You know, Jimmy, all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight, I think I’m afraid of something else.”
“Afraid of what?” Jimmy asked, surprised.
“I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job,” he said. “After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I’m going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that He will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope you will pray for me too, Jimmy.”
Chapter Eight
Brain Trust
One of Roosevelt’s greatest gifts was the ability to recognize his own deficiencies and embrace the complementary genius in others. He harbored no delusions about his grasp of classical economics and knew that what he’d learned in a smattering of Harvard classes thirty years earlier was immaterial to the crisis at hand. Even before he had received the Democratic nomination, he had gathered a group of scholars and theorists—what he first called “my Privy Council”—to advise him on the entire range of issues confronting the nation. The economic emergency had reached such a magnitude that the stability of the country was at stake.
It was Samuel I. Rosenman, Roosevelt’s chief counsel and speechwriter, who was credited with first suggesting that Roosevelt bring together a team of experts, to become the architects of his New Deal. Rosenman insisted that they “steer clear” of businessmen and politicians, who, after all, had coxswained the country into its present morass. Recommending that they seek some of the best academic minds in New York, he compiled a list of recruits from the departments of political science, law, and economics at prestigious Columbia University. Despite Rosenman’s assertion that he “was the originator of this happy idea,” as the prickly Raymond Moley put it, Moley claimed that he had first had the notion months earlier. But in fact, Roosevelt had been working closely with a small group of intellectuals—Moley, Tugwell, Frankfurter, and Berle—long before the group of advisers was formalized. While the provenance of the concept is disputed, it was Louis Howe who first used the phrase “Brains Trust,” which he had seen in a dime store detective novel, and it was James Kieran of the New York Times who first published the term, which was later shortened to “Brain Trust.”
By the time Roosevelt had been elected president, the group was solidified. Moley was a political scientist, Tugwell an agricultural economist, and Berle a specialist on public finance and credit. Basil “Doc” O’Connor, Roosevelt’s law partner, was a legal expert with a singular knowledge of corporate structures. These young men, with often contradictory ideas—and called “notoriously impractical” by historian Elliot Rosen—shared a vision of economic recovery and industrial restructuring based on innovations that had never been tried before.
Other, nonacademic, creative thinkers were admitted into the circle. Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson—on loan to Roosevelt from financier and supporter Bernard Baruch—brought extensive War Department experience, as well as a passion for fiscal stability and an aptitude for budget balancing. Honorary members included James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Key Pittman of Nevada, who, as veteran Democratic senators, would be able to skillfully maneuver the Roosevelt program through Congress and keep other party leaders in line. Charles Taussig, a molasses tycoon, was another honorary member, though considered “an amusing hanger-on” by the others. James A. Farley, another adviser, was a political kingmaker who, as head of the Democratic Party in New York, had helped orchestrate Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency.
While Roosevelt was magnanimous with them all, and each had his ear, rivalries and conflicts predictably erupted. Howe, who generally distrusted academics and “considered all policy an adjunct to electioneering,” despised “Sammy the Rose” Rosenman, the Texas-born Jew who, Howe thought, monopolized Roosevelt’s attention. O’Connor—“a shrewd salty Irishman” who had represented some of the most notorious of the utility holding companies—was seen as too sharp and pragmatic by the idealists. Tugwell, with his movie-star good looks and clear brilliance to match his blue eyes, was thought dangerously liberal by the realists, even if they couldn’t help admiring his mind. “Rex was like a cocktail,” Moley observed. “His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along.” Though more intellectually pedestrian than the others, the stout, black-eyed, chain-smoking, ideology-averse Moley was the de facto leader of the group. Covetous and insecure, he relished his role as the cynical, unofficial quasher of his colleagues’ pie-in-the-sky ideas. “I have not the slightest urge to be a reformer,” Moley would say. “Social workers make me very weary … I am essentially a conservative fellow. I tilt at no windmills.” The supercilious and aggressive Berle—a onetime prodigy who, at thirty-seven, remained the eternal man-child, according to those around him—managed to annoy or offend all the “president’s men,” even as he impressed them with his credentials. Berle had entered Harvard at fourteen, graduated with highest honors at eighteen, and in 1916, at the age of twenty-one, received his law degree from Harvard. He was soon attracting national attention for his research and writing on the modern corporation.
In his good-natured and amiable way, Roosevelt delighted in having thrown together such a disparate lot; he found that their varied passions and opinions fertilized his own mind. An inveterate optimist, his Pollyannaish outlook made him seem like “a grown-up Boy Scout” who believed that a happy ending could be found for every story, a solution for every crisis. Roosevelt’s sanguinity annoyed his more hard-boiled advisers, but none doubted its genuineness. “He was a progressive vessel yet to be filled with content,” Tugwell said of Roosevelt during those last days of 1932. Though his own philosophy and ideology may have seemed not yet formed, as many around him feared, and his intellectual processes too glib and shallow for the office he was about to assume, Roosevelt was, in fact, a far more intuitive and penetrating thinker than early appearances suggested.
Howe, Roosevelt’s alter ego, who for two decades had been accustomed to having the candidate all to himself, now bristled at the encroaching influence of his upstart rivals—“men who rushed forward, all undeserving, to pluck fruits of triumph
from a tree he himself had planted.” The consummate insider now an outsider, Howe found an ally in Eleanor, who likewise felt shunned by her husband’s new circle of intimates. Each knew that the other was Roosevelt’s loyal ally and protector. So it was with a heavy dose of patience and restraint that the two took a backseat to the Brain Trust boys. Howe and Eleanor watched from the sidelines as Moley, Berle, Tugwell, and the others vied for Roosevelt’s attention, for the president-elect to shine his favor on their individual policy proposals. The “new political landscape,” according to one account of the tense situation, was “marked by intrigue and jealousy, stealth and duplicity.”
The power plays occurred behind closed doors and not for public scrutiny. As far as the American populace was concerned, Roosevelt remained an unknown quantity—an opportunistic politician whose rhetoric and bearing inspired confidence. His ability to lead would remain a mystery until he assumed office four months later. The country continued its economic decline while he awaited his inauguration, scheduled for March 4, 1933—the date decreed by the U.S. Constitution. The 117-day interval between his election and inauguration was the most desperate stretch of the Depression, with two of every four heads-of-household out of work. All that Americans had left was hope: hope that the new president would be able to navigate the nation out of its darkness. The renowned Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White poignantly expressed such raw faith and expectation in Roosevelt’s capacity to turn his weaknesses into strengths, his shortcomings into triumphs. “Your distant cousin is an X in the equation,” White wrote to Theodore Roosevelt Jr. “He may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. Responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.”