by Sally Denton
Pressing the liberal agenda, Long was considered symbol and icon for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, his radicalism descended from the William Jennings Bryan tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Long’s “Share Our Wealth Society,” with its slogan “Every Man a King” and motto “Soak the Rich,” was in its nascent phase. But his vision for the decentralization of wealth in America was already molded. He saw himself as the spokesman for the Far Right and Far Left of both national parties—an “American Mussolini” whose passionate anti-elitist rhetoric could lead to the creation of a new third party that would elevate him to the presidency. None of this was lost on the insightful and pragmatic Roosevelt. At the luncheon, as Long badgered Roosevelt about the need for enlightened economic reform in America, the president-elect listened intently.
“Frankie, you’re not going to let Huey Long tell you what to do, are you?” Sara reportedly cried out. Long appeared unfazed by Sara’s rude remarks, but they had not gone unnoticed. “I like him,” Long would later say of Roosevelt in relating the peculiar encounter. “He’s not a strong man, but he means well. But by God, I feel sorry for him. He’s got even more sonsofbitches in his family than I got in mine.”
During the interregnum, both conservative and liberal Democrats concentrated on moving the president-elect into their court. They made their way to his homes at Hyde Park, Albany, Manhattan, or Warm Springs, Georgia—the retreat he frequented for his unending physical therapy. Roosevelt listened to them all and ravenously inhaled their ideas, suggestions, observations, theories, predictions, prophesies, revelations, and concepts. It was as if he could not get enough, devouring facts and considering solutions with the exhilaration of a curious and precocious student. “The countless visitors who trooped to see FDR between election and inauguration ranged from congressional barons to local farmers, from haughty industrialists to mendicant job-seekers,” said one account of the period. Propositions ranged from government intervention to wealth distribution to laissez-faire to job creation to trust busting to budget balancing, and from them, Roosevelt drew the framework of his New Deal policies.
Meanwhile, Huey Long and his counterpart on the Right, the rabidly anti-Communist Father Charles E. Coughlin—whom one journalist called his “twin terror”—increasingly saw Roosevelt as an equivocating, bourgeois politician rather than a man with a plan. Long began to believe that Roosevelt was placating all sides, playing them off against each other without any real conviction or strategy for ending the Great Depression or redistributing the nation’s wealth. “When I talk to him, he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine! Maybe he says ‘Fine!’ to everybody,” Long complained of Roosevelt’s propensity for trying to please everyone.
Though partisan opposites—Huey Long was “secretly contemptuous of the priest”—Coughlin and Long inspired protest movements that defined the nation’s response to the Great Depression in the weeks and months leading up to Roosevelt’s inauguration. What they had in common was a great distrust of Roosevelt—a skepticism Roosevelt felt tenfold toward both of them—and an alliance to catapult Long to the presidency. Coughlin “capitulated” to Long, according to Long biographer T. Harry Williams. “Huey was a political man and was going to work toward his goal with political methods. Coughlin was a theorist, a voice, an instrument that the political man could use but would never completely trust.”
Coughlin, called the “father of hate radio” by his biographer Donald Warren, broadcast to nearly forty million people from his Church of the Little Flower, in Royal Oak, Michigan. Denouncing Wall Street financiers as “shylocks” and “money changers,” his anti-establishment populism struck a deep chord with the millions of unemployed and destitute throughout the land. Like Long, the Roman Catholic priest had been an early supporter of Roosevelt, but even before the president-elect was inaugurated, Coughlin had become disillusioned, suspecting that he was a tool of Wall Street. Long and Coughlin—mirrored extremes of the populist movement in America—both sought to break the concentration of power in the hands of the government. Both hinted at financial conspiracies. Both used rhetoric that was “laden with appeals to the idea of the traditional, rooted community and the special virtues of the common people,” as historian Alan Brinkley described it, and that “warned constantly of the dangers posed by distant, hidden forces. It emphasized with special urgency the issue of money—of unstable or scarce currency, of tyrannical bankers, of usurious interest.”
With the swagger and showmanship of a Southern evangelical preacher, Long was one of the first American politicians to master the new medium of commercial radio in the early 1920s. Broadcasting from WCAG in New Orleans to eight thousand radio sets in the city, Long grasped the significance of a system of communication in which each radio reached an approximate five listeners as families huddled together to hear the transmissions. The audience, he realized, was exponential. One broadcast speech could be heard by as many as forty thousand people in the relatively unpopulated state of Louisiana, providing historic access to his all-white voting constituency. With vitriol and ever-mounting oratory skills, he lambasted the exploitative rich and the venal corporations. Initially, the Roosevelt forces and the mainstream print media ridiculed Long, calling him the “Messiah of the Rednecks” and “Whooey the 14th.” Roosevelt, however, saw in him an aspiring demagogue and thought it no laughing matter.
For his part, Long was brazenly disrespectful of the blue-blooded Roosevelt, calling him “Frank,” refusing to remove his hat upon entering Roosevelt’s suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, and denigrating him as “all wool and a yard wide.” Long thought that Roosevelt’s refusal to distance himself from the Wall Street power brokers signaled a personal corruption and portentous disinclination to break from his class.
Like Long in Louisiana, Father Coughlin in Michigan was at the vanguard of mass politics and also recognized the power of radio. In 1926, seeing radio as a potential fundraising vehicle for the little church he had built in a Detroit suburb, Coughlin asked a local station to broadcast his Sunday sermons. Those weekly one-hour speeches—“once pleasant discourses on the life of Christ and the lessons of the Bible,” as Brinkley described them, soon evolved into political diatribes. At first his programs were relatively benign, as he responded to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan cross burnings on the grounds of his church and railed against birth control. But in 1930, in response to the stock market crash and the sudden unemployment in Detroit of nearly two hundred thousand people, Coughlin took a different tack, shifting away from religion and toward politics and the economy. His sermons became rabidly anti-Communist and highly incendiary, and were but a precursor for the right-wing venom to come.
By 1933, Coughlin was drawing crowds of thousands into auditoriums in Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, New York, and St. Louis, his invective carried over loudspeakers to thousands more in the streets who gathered to listen. He was described as “a priest who was more famous at the microphone than at the Mass,” one “who could woo more men to a convention hall than to a communion rail, and who spent more time in politics than in parish halls …” He had four personal secretaries and more than a hundred clerks to answer the eighty thousand letters he received every week, and his annual contributions reached nearly half a million dollars. As his popularity soared—and his ego swelled—his rants grew ever more angry. What had started as an outgrowth of the European Catholic social movement, and a personal attempt to minister to the recent immigrants to Michigan from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Poland, who were facing harsh anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic abuse, had evolved into an equally hate-filled response. He too had his eyes on the creation of a third party and supported the founding of the Christian Front—a pro-Fascist political movement designed to counteract Marxism and secularism. He was inspired by the teachings of Pope Leo XIII, who, in 1891, issued his Rerum Novarum warning that Socialist efforts to redistribute the wealth were pernicious to all nations as well as to the Vatican. Simply put, Cough
lin sought to be the guardian of America, uniting Christians to fight the “Christless” Communism that was threatening to destroy it. “Choose to-day!” he appealed to his audience. “It is either Christ or the Red Fog of Communism.” Wrapping himself figuratively in the Stars and Stripes, he oozed patriotism from his lips as he spoke reverentially about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
In February 1933, Coughlin’s focus changed yet again with a sudden tirade about the “spirit of gold trading in the heart of the international Jew.” Suggesting that Jewish control of international finance had wreaked havoc with the gold standard, Coughlin was entering a new phase of anti-Semitism, which would lace his future sermons. For the first time, his “money changer” enemies had a face: They were Jews, and Franklin Roosevelt was their puppet. In his mind, democracy was coming to an end, and America’s only choice was to become either Fascist or Communist—“I take the road to Fascism,” he would declare unabashedly.
The two ideologues, Long and Coughlin, along with their bitter defections from the Roosevelt camp and the movements they germinated, revealed an American-bred anti-Semitism and an anti-European isolationism that would have enduring national and global consequences. Roosevelt watched their feverish antics closely, once writing to a colleague that “in normal times the radio and other appeals by them would not be effective. However these are not normal times; people run after strange gods.” Still, he concluded a viable partnership could never exist between the two men. “There is no question that it is all a dangerous situation but when it comes to a showdown these fellows cannot all lie in the same bed and will fight among themselves with almost absolute certainty.”
Chapter Twelve
The Nourmahal Gang
By the end of January 1933, conditions in the United States and around the world were menacing. Japan was escalating its movements into China, having already invaded Shanghai. Forebodings of America’s possible embroilment in a war in the Far East were palpable, especially given Roosevelt’s strong commitment to an independent China. His sympathy with China against Japanese imperialism was borne out of familial affection for the country that had made his maternal grandfather wealthy. With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany through the brutal intrigues of the Nazi Party that so far had left hundreds dead, Europe was in political upheaval in addition to economic collapse. Roosevelt had an immediate and visceral dislike of Hitler and saw him as a dangerous threat to global stability, telling Rexford Tugwell that he anticipated a German-Japanese alliance that could conceivably lead to war with the United States. (That Roosevelt and Hitler came to office within weeks of each other—and would die in office within weeks of each other—is one of history’s great parallels, as the pair symbolized the stark distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.) At the same time, Mussolini’s Italy was arming Fascists in Austria.
The domestic situation was also in a nosedive, with the Depression hitting its lowest point. Personal incomes had dropped by more than half. National exports were essentially stalled as production and distribution came to a standstill. The country was broke and the U.S. Treasury didn’t have enough cash to meet the federal payroll. The national banking system was beginning the final stage of its collapse, with banks closed or closing in twenty-one states, unable to meet the demands of depositors trying to withdraw their money. Stock prices had dropped by 75 percent since the crash of 1929, and most Americans blamed Wall Street and crony capitalism for the entire catastrophe. “Wall Street was not merely accountable for the country’s dilemma,” historian Steve Fraser said of the widespread perception, “it was its perpetrator, the principal villain in a national saga of guilt, revenge, and redemption.” Joseph P. Kennedy, himself a businessman and Wall Street speculator, wrote of the pervasive loss of confidence in the system: “The belief that those in control of the corporate life of America were motivated by honesty and ideals of honorable conduct was completely shattered.”
Despite his landslide election just three months earlier, Roosevelt—“waiting affably but without authority in the wings”—was now perceived as yet another fat-cat politician and upper-crust playboy. America’s ruling elite was under fire, and Roosevelt seemed utterly evocative of that despised, exploiting class. This image of a gallivanting dabbler was not dispelled when movie theater newsreels showed him relaxing in the swimming pool at Warm Springs while the rest of the country was falling apart. Then, following his two-week vacation in Georgia, Roosevelt headed to the Caribbean for yet another twelve days of leisure and sportfishing.
On the evening of February 3, he boarded a special overnight train from Warm Springs to Jacksonville, Florida, to embark on a cruise to the Bahamas on one of the largest private yachts in the world. The German-built Nourmahal—flagship of the New York Yacht Club—belonged to his longtime friend, neighbor, and relative through marriage, Vincent Astor, one of America’s richest men. The 263-foot vessel was the fastest oceangoing yacht ever built and was appointed with teak paneling and mahogany furnishings. Astor, a multimillionaire philanthropist whose father had died on the Titanic, was hosting the president-elect and five other wealthy men: Theodore Roosevelt’s alcoholic son, Kermit; Justice Frederic Kernochan; William Rhinelander Stewart, a prominent New York and Florida landowner who was a major fixture on the Manhattan nightclub scene; George St. George of Tuxedo Park, New York; and Dr. Leslie Heiter of Mobile, Alabama.
Raymond Moley and another close aide, the veteran Bronx political boss Edward J. Flynn, rode with Roosevelt on the private train from Georgia to Florida. They were both appalled by the ostentation of such a holiday, and especially that Roosevelt’s host was the “scion of a family whose huge income derived in good part from Harlem slum property,” as one account put it. Still, they found Roosevelt to be mentally engaged in addressing the colossal problems of the nation, and whatever doubts they harbored about the seriousness of the man were completely allayed. He was attentive, determined, and thoughtful, and he had settled on a clear path of action to bring remedy to the nation. Roosevelt asked Moley to draft the inaugural address while he was at sea, and the two men discussed the ideas to be included, with Moley taking notes.
Moley wrote in his notebook: “1. World is sick. 2. America is sick. Because failure to recognize Eco[nomics]. Changes in time, vast development of machine age in 20 years from point of view of replacing manpower [have] moved faster than in 100 years [before] producer capacity in agri[culture]—capacity in industry outrun consumption … Time to face the facts and get away from idea we can return to conditions of 29-30 … What is needed is action along … new lines … Action … Action … [If necessary] I shall ask Cong[ress] for … broad executive powers to conduct a war against the world emergency just as great as the powers that would be given if we were invaded by a foreign foe.”
Nearly twenty-five thousand people gathered in Jacksonville to cheer Roosevelt, including the city’s mayor and the governor of Florida. The local American Legion drum and bugle corps joined a police band to play the Roosevelt theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Touched by the enthusiastic turnout, he gave an impromptu speech praising the city. If Americans were disappointed with the incoming president—as was the conventional wisdom—South Florida was an apparent exception.
In any event, both Moley and Flynn retained their qualms about the wisdom of Roosevelt’s grand cruise on the luminous white luxury liner. In addition to the logistical and security complications it posed—Roosevelt’s advisers would by necessity communicate in code by ship-to-shore radio—the excursion was a public relations nightmare. Watching them depart from the Jacksonville dock at Commodore Point, Flynn remarked sarcastically to Moley: “The Hasty Pudding Club puts out to sea,” referring to the Harvard theatrical society. Donning bright sports clothes and boyish grins, the men were more suggestive of boisterous fraternity brothers than a head of state and his councillors. Even his own son James was forever “fascinated by the mystery” of how Roosevelt could enjoy the companionship of “the Nourmahal G
ang” at a moment when “he was doing so much to change the sort of world of which the Nourmahal was a symbol.”
Indeed, both the Left and the Right made hay of the event. Liberal journalists decried Roosevelt for going on such a highbrow extravaganza at a moment of such desolation in the land, and conservatives lambasted his populist facade. The famously right-wing New York Sun lampooned the president in a poem, “At Sea with Franklin D.,” which included the lines:
On the splendid yacht in a climate hot
To tropical seas they ran
Among those behind they dismissed from mind
Was the well-known Forgotten Man.
Among those disgusted by the jaunt were Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who saw it as confirmation of Roosevelt’s hollowness. Likewise, President Hoover—stuck in Washington overseeing the demise of the nation’s banking industry—was apoplectic at Roosevelt’s seeming frivolity. In fact, he had come to believe that Roosevelt was responsible for the current emergency by refusing to cooperate with him and thereby sabotaging the recovery the Hoover administration had under way. The building crisis reached a climax on February 14, when the governor of Michigan ordered a bank moratorium, closing all 550 banks in the state for eight days. It became clear on that day that the bottom had fallen out of the economy and that the Michigan panic “could be neither stemmed nor localized,” Moley would later write. Those bank failures set off a chain reaction, as anxiety spread, and six days later the governor of Maryland followed suit, closing that state’s 200 banks. Rumors swept the land that the money held in banks was no longer safe, and depositors rushed to retrieve their savings. Ordinary Americans stashed their money under their mattresses or the floorboards of their Model T Fords, or placed it in tins and buried it in their backyards. The wealthy shipped their gold fortunes to Europe; nearly every vessel traveling across the Atlantic was carrying a treasure.