The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  Chapter Nine

  Winter of Our Discontent

  “I wish for you a most successful administration,” outgoing President Hoover wrote to Roosevelt the morning after the election. “In the common purpose of all of us I shall dedicate myself to every possible helpful effort.” Whether Hoover’s expressed sentiment was genuine or de rigueur, the two men feigned cooperation for a few weeks during the bleak winter of 1932. Given Hoover’s ingrained belief that Roosevelt’s election signaled the downfall of America, his congratulatory note was seen by Roosevelt’s forces as disingenuous at best, calculating at worst, although Hoover allies vouched for his sincerity. Roosevelt’s response to Hoover—revised and reworked numerous times with an eye toward ambiguity and legacy—indicated the delicate position in which the president-elect found himself. “On the subjects to which you refer, as in all matters relating to the welfare of the country, I am glad to cooperate in every appropriate way, subject, of course, to the requirements of my present duties as Governor.”

  Then, within a week of Roosevelt’s election, Hoover sent a long telegram to the governor’s mansion in Albany imploring—actually challenging—Roosevelt to embrace Hoover’s economic recovery program for the good of the country. The unprecedented overture by a defeated president to his rival “rang alarm bells” in Roosevelt’s instinctive mind. Hoover would forever claim that he was courteously and graciously including Roosevelt in the continuum of government. But Roosevelt saw the gesture as a cunning attempt, masked in altruism, to ensnare him in Hoover’s failed policies, which, in Roosevelt’s mind, went to the very heart of their political differences on economic relations. Hoover had consistently blamed the financial crisis on European developments and foreign instability, which Roosevelt had roundly mocked as utter nonsense during the campaign, calling it “the boldest alibi in history.” In contrast, Roosevelt placed full responsibility on the American system. “The bubble burst first in the land of its origin—the United States,” he contended. Roosevelt saw the domestic economic condition as the single gravest issue confronting the nation and saw the thrust of the recovery as putting America back to work—not to focus on events in foreign countries.

  The core of Hoover’s entreaties centered on the question of war debts—“the tar-baby of American politics,” as historian David M. Kennedy described the money that the United States had loaned to Great Britain, France, and Italy during World War I. “To touch it was to glue oneself to a messy, intractable problem that had defied the genius of statesmen for a decade,” Kennedy wrote. These notes were coming due, and Europe, never having fully recovered from the war, had fallen into a deep economic depression. The Allies were in varying stages of default on their loans, and Great Britain was threatening to suspend payment of its ninety-five-million-dollar installment, due December 15, 1932. While Congress and most Americans predictably favored holding the Europeans liable for their financial obligations, many intellectuals, financiers, and economists advocated forgiving the war debts in order to stimulate the international economy. Integrally tied to the debt issue was the question of whether every nation should return to the gold standard—in simplistic terms, a method requiring each monetary unit throughout the world to be backed by a fixed quantity of gold bullion, thereby stabilizing international currency exchange rates. Indeed, the system had worked for the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, but Great Britain had abandoned it in 1914 to finance World War I with treasury notes, which then forced several other countries off the standard.

  Hoover strongly opposed cancellation of the debts and was so emotionally attached to gold that he once described it as a sacred substance “enshrined in human instincts for over 10,000 years.” For his part, Roosevelt had not yet formulated a policy on the war debt issue. As for the gold standard, Roosevelt repeatedly joked that he didn’t even know what it was—a remark that unhinged the humorless Hoover, whose biggest fear was that Roosevelt would abandon the gold standard and thereby destroy America.

  If Hoover’s gambit “had all the appearance of a magnificent gesture of statesmanship,” as David M. Kennedy said in his magisterial Freedom from Fear, it “also contained sinister political implications.” Ultimately, Roosevelt came to see Hoover’s overture as a presumptuous power play and an effort to deflect blame away from himself, who, as president for four years and secretary of commerce for eight years before that, bore personal responsibility for the current disaster.

  In any event, the pressure from Hoover had the unintended effect of prodding Roosevelt into deep analysis of the domestic and foreign policy issues that had only received perfunctory examination during the campaign. Ironically, Hoover’s not-so-subtle scheming sparked Roosevelt’s musings on what would become the New Deal. On December 22, 1932, Roosevelt diplomatically dismissed Hoover’s advances—though not without implying that he did not appreciate the lame-duck president’s “attempt to mousetrap him into agreement with the policies of a discredited and defeated administration”—and began in earnest his preparations for governing.

  Cloistered with his advisers, Roosevelt began designing his program for recovery. “By March 4 next we may have anything on our hands from recovery to revolution,” Adolph Berle told him. “The chance is about even either way. My impression is that the country wants and would gladly support a rather daring program.” Even the habitually confident Eleanor wondered whether anyone could “do anything to save America now.”

  As the nation slipped deeper into distress, Roosevelt was powerless to act until he was sworn in on March 4, 1933. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified two months earlier, moving the presidential inauguration from March to January 20 of the year following the election. But since that amendment would not take effect until 1937, the old rules currently applied.

  Some observers—contemporaneous journalists and later historians—found it cruel and calculating for Roosevelt to sit on the sidelines as the economy sank and the misery widened. Roosevelt “used Hoover as a foil,” wrote author Jonathan Alter, seeing the situation in the most Machiavellian terms. “He let the outgoing president hang himself—and the American economy—so that he could enter stage left as a hero … He understood that the lower Hoover and the country slid, the better he would look upon assuming office.” Even Moley, one of his closest advisers, ultimately took a similarly cynical view, later commenting that Roosevelt “either did not realize how serious the situation was or … preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation.”

  But most of Roosevelt’s supporters thought his position unavoidable. Aside from that during the run-up to the Civil War, it was the most dangerous interregnum in the history of America. Roosevelt was convinced that Hoover was setting a trap for him—a suspicion confirmed when he learned that a Hoover cabinet member had said of Roosevelt, “We now have the fellow in a hole that he is not going to be able to get out of.” It seemed that Hoover, like Al Smith before, had grossly underestimated his adversary. As it was, Roosevelt decided to keep his own counsel and wait until he could grab the helm of a country rocking dangerously on turbulent seas.

  In the short span of 150 years—from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the twentieth century—the democracy envisioned by the founding fathers was an evolving work-in-progress. As in the “Jeffersonian Era” and the “Age of Jackson,” the stakes were astronomical, the threats were both internal and external, and the perils were potentially fatal. The nation’s financial order had collapsed. Powerless, Roosevelt was relegated to the dugout while Hoover presided over the nation’s wallowing. Roosevelt could do nothing but watch as unemployment rose to seventeen million and thousands of banks and businesses failed. And that was just on the home front.

  The global economy was disintegrating. Events in Europe and Asia signaled the inevitability of another world war. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was at the peak of his civil disobedience against the British occupation. Bloo
d was flowing in the streets of Havana, where a dictator had suspended the Cuban constitution. People throughout the world, it seemed, were in varying states of unrest.

  The impulse that had swept America to overwhelmingly elect Franklin Roosevelt, the upheaval that was shuffling the world order, and the global reassessment of philosophies and ideologies were all colliding as 1933 began. The year was a gateway to the modern half of the twentieth century, a turning point in America’s direction—in the powers of the presidency, in the relationship between the government and the people, and in the expansion of a new mass media.

  It was a decisive moment in American history, one when the country, born fifteen decades earlier out of hope and idealism might have toppled.

  Chapter Ten

  Year of Fear

  “The situation is critical, Franklin,” Walter Lippmann told the president-elect in early 1933. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”

  The columnist was not alone in his anxiety that the revolutionary climate could spawn a demagogue. Many had a deep premonition that American democracy as it had existed was coming to an end. For his part, Lippmann—a “reluctant convert” to Roosevelt—now believed that the state of emergency demanded measures that transcended the routine methods of government. Congress should not be allowed “to obstruct, to delay, to mutilate, and to confuse,” he wrote, recommending that it suspend debate for a year, giving Roosevelt free rein to rescue the country from its deathbed. “The danger we have to fear is not that Congress will give Franklin D. Roosevelt too much power, but that it will deny him the powers he needs. A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.”

  The fears were not unfounded. In New York City, thirty-five thousand men and women crowded into Union Square to listen to Communist Party agitators. A mass march on the Columbus statehouse by the Ohio Unemployed League threatened to “take control of the government.” Five thousand teachers in Chicago stormed the city’s banks. Dozens of American cities and towns were broke, their streets filling with garbage and protesters, their coffers empty of funds for sanitation or law enforcement. Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, where six hundred thousand men were out of work, told the Illinois State Legislature: “Call out the troops before you close the relief stations.” Leading citizens of Dayton, Ohio, organized a committee to plan the city’s survival if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running. Governors and mayors throughout the land worried about the spark that might ignite mob violence among the have-nots, while the haves became increasingly nervous and began to arm themselves. The wealthy—and even the simply comfortable—began stockpiling guns, ammunition, and canned goods and hoarding their money in case of a nationwide revolt. Farmers in Iowa, armed with clubs and pitchforks, were engaged in an “organized refusal” to market products for which they were being underpaid. Iowa dairy farmers went on strike, refusing to deliver milk to national distributors.

  The War Department concentrated its armed units near the country’s larger cities in case of a takeover by the “Reds,” as the Communists were called. The very “glue that holds societies together”—to use Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of institutions and authority—was disintegrating. “Capitalism is on trial,” the dean of the Harvard Business School pronounced, in what would have been a remarkably radical statement at any other time in American history. “And on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.”

  “The farmers will rise up. So will labor,” a Los Angeles banker predicted. “The Reds will run the country—or maybe the Fascists. Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.” Leaders of both major parties watched helplessly as the situation worsened, prompting Democrats and Republicans alike to call for Hoover to step down and let Roosevelt assume command.

  “They weren’t paranoid,” William Manchester wrote years later of the vociferous alarmists who had cropped up. “The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.”

  On January 30, 1933, Roosevelt’s fifty-first birthday, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. “I want,” Hitler said upon his ascendance, “precisely the same power as Mussolini exercised after the March on Rome.” The sudden explosion of the Nazi revolution frightened the other European nations, which heard horror stories of gangs of young Nazis terrorizing Jewish-owned businesses, beating the merchants and raiding the stores. With alarming swiftness, Hitler added sixty thousand storm troopers to the hundred-thousand-man German army, suspended civil liberties, and removed non-Nazis from official posts.

  In contrast to Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been in power since 1922 and who was considered the most prestigious political figure in the world, Hitler seemed a belligerent and unpredictable leader. Indeed, many thought a Mussolini-like leader a perfect counterweight to a dangerous radical like Hitler. “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I saw that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” proclaimed one of President Hoover’s closest Republican allies in the U.S. Senate. Mussolini had revived the Italian economy, and his Black Shirts—the military arm of his organization, made up of two hundred thousand disgruntled soldiers, and analogous to America’s Bonus Army—were highly regarded. Even the term Fascism implied a strength and unity desperately needed in America: “The word itself derived from the Latin for a bundle of sticks bound together and thus unbreakable.”

  Indeed, Italy in the time of Mussolini, who had legendarily made the trains run on time, seemed a viable model for what America could and should become, and talk of dictatorship was rampant during the interregnum of despair. The nation’s scholarly and trade journals analyzed the political atmosphere, some predicting revolution and others espousing new forms of government. There was no consensus of opinion, as authors, politicians, journalists, academics, and laymen explored the gamut, from Communism to Fascism to Socialism. If any uniformity existed, it was the conclusion that capitalism was dead in its present iteration. Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, and an arbiter of the academic establishment, encouraged college students to embrace totalitarianism, which produced “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”

  Renowned writers such as John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair were champions of Communism. “Those rascals in Russia … have got mighty good ideas … Just think of everybody in a country going to work,” Will Rogers opined about Joseph Stalin’s regime. It was a fertile and confusing intellectual environment. “Communist Party members were venomous to socialists, old-guard socialists were battling new-guard socialists, mutant strains of Marxists were battling one another,” wrote political journalist Myra MacPherson in her biography of I. F. Stone. “Working-class ideologues were joined by middle- and upper-class Ivy League graduates who played at being radically chic Marxists.”

  While Communism was much feared in America, Fascism was not only venerated but also avant-garde. Mussolini was wildly popular among the country’s intellectual elite, who believed that democracy, and its belief in the common man, had run its course. Italy’s thriving economy and corporatist discipline held great sway with those seeking a solution to the fiscal, social, cultural, and political crisis facing the country. “Even the iron hand of a national dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke,” declared Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Al Smith, Roosevelt’s mentor turned vicious critic, proposed—only somewhat facetiously—taking the Constitution and putting it “on the shelf” until the crisis had passed. “What does a democracy do in a war?” Smith asked. “It becomes a tyrant, a despot, a real monarch.”

  As dictators “swag
gered across Europe and Asia,” and countries reneged on their war debt, Roosevelt decided he needed to find out for himself what “people like Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek, and Hirohito” were up to. He decided to send newspaperman Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., his friend and adviser, as a secret presidential envoy. Under the auspices of Liberty magazine, Vanderbilt would interview Hitler and Mussolini. Meeting with Roosevelt at Hyde Park before embarking on the cruise liner Empress of Britain, Vanderbilt got his instructions. Roosevelt “told me that what he wanted me to do in Germany was find out if the German people were really behind Hitler and, if so, why,” Vanderbilt said. “Facing the reality of Hitler’s accession, he also wanted to know whether there was anything within reason we could do to make for a better relationship with Germany.”

  The obsessive anti-Semitism of Hitler stunned Vanderbilt. After interviewing the führer twice, Vanderbilt became convinced that an improved relationship with Germany would be impossible. “He told me that the only thing he wanted from us was to end all trade with the Jews! He said I should be grateful for his anti-Semitic campaign, as the Jews were ‘selling out the world to the Communists.’ ”

  His meeting with Mussolini was underwhelming, almost banal. Il Duce’s great pearl of wisdom was that “you seize power with one group and govern with another.”

  Ultimately, Roosevelt and his advisers would conclude that the potential for a homegrown demagogue posed a far larger threat to their political agenda, and the country’s stability, than the current martinets of foreign lands.

  Chapter Eleven

  American Mussolini and the Radio Priest

  “Who is that awful man sitting on my son’s right?” Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, exclaimed sotto voce, directing her attention to the preposterously flamboyant governor of Louisiana. Huey Long, the “pudgy pixie” whose shock of auburn hair fell messily onto his forehead, was wearing a purple shirt and loud pink necktie—a sartorial statement intended to shock the aristocracy. The occasion, a formal luncheon at Hyde Park, was Roosevelt’s overture to the man most threatening to him from the Left. Dubbed the “Incredible Kingfish” by Time magazine, the populist Long was widely considered a rising political star who might challenge Roosevelt in the 1936 election. Indeed, Roosevelt considered Long “one of the two most dangerous men in the United States today.” (The second, in Roosevelt’s opinion, was General MacArthur.)