The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  Though stung by the charge that he was a traitor to his class, Roosevelt took the denunciation in stride, telling journalists that public and private attacks against the New Deal had become routine. Undeterred, he remained focused on his domestic agenda, which received an ironic boost with the reappearance in Washington of the Bonus Army veterans.

  Nearly all the Bonus marchers had returned to their homes after the routing by General MacArthur the previous summer, vowing as they retreated that their fight was not over. On May 9, 1933, several hundred straggled into Washington prompted by elements of the right and left wings of the veterans organizations. Within a week, more than three thousand had arrived. Desperately poor, disaffected, and angry at their treatment at the hands of President Hoover, they were a pathetic lot. Roosevelt instinctively saw a political opportunity at hand and moved adroitly to use his pet project—the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—to solve the veterans’ dilemma. The ingenious CCC was Roosevelt’s own idea for putting a quarter million unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to work. The program was designed to get “the wild boys of the road,” menacing itinerant hoboes, and the unemployed and troublesome young men of the cities to work in the national forests—in what became known as Roosevelt’s “Tree Army.” He was zealous about the concept that would draft 250,000 men into public service to plant trees, blaze trails, fight fires, erect flood control devices in national parks, and improve beaches, parks, and historic battlefields. Roosevelt had impulsively rushed the legislation, which combined his love of conservation with his commitment to job creation and full employment, personally ushering it through both houses of Congress—“the way I did on beer,” he told Moley.

  The U.S. Army, under a civilian administrator, supervised the thousands of young men who were assigned to more than 1,500 camps throughout the country, while Roosevelt delegated authority for employee recruitment to the Department of Labor and for work projects to the Departments of Interior and Agriculture. The men were paid thirty dollars a month and were required to send at least twenty-two dollars back to their families, if they were on relief. The president of the American Federation of Labor, William Green, was initially appalled that the men would only be paid a dollar a day and worried that the program would undermine unions. Calling it “Fascism, Hitlerism, and Sovietism,” Green also strongly opposed the military regimentation of the labor force, likening it to that in Mussolini’s Italy. Roosevelt dismissed Green’s complaints as “utter rubbish” and won Green’s eventual support when he appointed a vice president of the Machinists’ Union to head the CCC.

  The Bonus veterans were resentful that they were too old to qualify for the work project. To add insult to injury, Roosevelt’s Economy Act would further reduce their pensions. J. Edgar Hoover brought an alarming report to the attorney general that more than 333,000 armed veterans who were members of an organization called the Oppressed People of the Nation were planning a march on Washington. As Hoover and other law enforcement officials monitored the left wing and right wing within the Bonus Army, whose rifts they feared could escalate into violence, Roosevelt sought a détente. Determined to strike a bold departure from his predecessor’s colossal bungling, he directed his personal troubleshooter, Louis Howe, the pragmatic former newspaperman, to arrange for the veterans to be sheltered comfortably at Fort Hunt. At the abandoned Army camp near Mount Vernon in Virginia, the men would be served three meals a day and serenaded by the Navy Band. “See that they have good food and shelter and above all good, hot coffee to drink. There’s nothing that makes people feel as welcome as a steaming cup of coffee,” Roosevelt told Howe. Under Howe’s direction, six hundred tents with latrines, showers, and mess halls were erected at the camp, as was a medical facility.

  It was Howe who came up with the innovative idea of sending the First Lady into the camp to greet the men and serve them coffee. Having been revolted by the tear gassing and bayonetting of the penniless veterans by MacArthur’s troops, Eleanor was eager to do whatever she could “to prevent a similar tragedy.” When Howe “played his master card” and asked her to drive him to the camp in Virginia one rainy day, she readily agreed. Howe told her to go “in there and talk to those men, get their gripes, if any, make a tour of the camp and tell them that Franklin sent you out to see about them. Don’t forget that—be sure to tell them that Franklin sent you. Inspect their quarters and get the complete story.”

  “I got out and walked over to where I saw a line-up of men waiting for food,” Eleanor later wrote. “They looked at me curiously and one of them asked my name and what I wanted. When I said I just wanted to see how they were getting on, they asked me to join them.” Her Secret Service agents were apoplectic upon learning of the outing, providing her and Howe with pistols to be carried on future excursions into the populace. But she assuaged the bodyguards’ fears. The veterans had welcomed her warmly, and soon she was leading them in wartime songs. She visited their living quarters and the makeshift hospital, and apologized to them that she bore no knowledge about their bonuses. They cheered and applauded her as she left the camp. “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife,” said one veteran who grasped the significance of the gesture.

  In a stroke of genius, Roosevelt waived the CCC age requirement to allow veterans a decade older to enroll in the program. While some of the veterans’ leaders rebuffed the proposition—“It’s like selling yourself into slavery,” said one—more than 2,600 of the 3,000 Bonus marchers chose to enter the CCC. The rest were given free rail transportation back to their homes. Eventually more than 25,000 veterans would accept the government’s offer, thus defusing a potentially volatile situation. Howe “had been anxiously heading off trouble for Franklin Roosevelt for 20 years,” his biographer wrote. “His most successful coup was his handling of the new Bonus Army.”

  Ultimately, Roosevelt would ignore the original requirements of the CCC in an effort to stave off poverty for older married men in various walks of life. He extended the benefits to 14,400 Native Americans whose farms had been ravaged by drought and who were allowed to remain at home rather than join one of the CCC camps. He also hired nearly 25,000 unemployed foresters and lumbermen, at civil service wages, to supervise the camps.

  The CCC would be one of the New Deal’s most successful triumphs, eventually employing three million men—mostly white, urban youths averaging nineteen years of age. They would thin four million acres of trees, develop eight hundred state parks, stock lakes with a billion fish, plant three billion trees, build thirty thousand wildlife shelters, lay 12,000 miles of telephone poles, and clear 125,000 miles of trails from Texas to Canada. Roosevelt was rightfully proud of his brainchild, which reduced crime in the nation’s cities by giving young impoverished men a sense of purpose while inspiring hundreds of similar state and federal community projects—“leaving no doubt that the father of national service in the United States was FDR,” as one account concluded.

  When Roosevelt visited the camps, the workers swarmed to greet him, eager to pay their respects and express their gratitude. “At each camp Roosevelt saw a neat line of army tents set up along a company street and about two hundred tanned young men who stood at attention until an army sergeant dismissed them so they could rush up to the President’s car and shake his hand,” according to one description of his tour.

  “All you have to do is to look at the boys themselves to see that the camps … are a success,” Roosevelt said with satisfaction.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A Balanced Civilization

  The White House, like the rest of America, came to life when Franklin and Eleanor took over. The somber rooms of the Hoover occupation were now bubbling with laughter, the hallways bursting with frolicking children, and the bedchambers filled with a continuous influx of guests. Not since the previous Roosevelt presidency had the White House been such a vibrant headquarters of gaiety, banter, conviviality, and entertainment. With his mischievous sense of humor and devotion to his sacrosanc
t cocktail, the president himself set the tone. The staid decorum of previous administrations gave way to an informality reminiscent of the Andrew Jackson era a hundred years earlier.

  The Roosevelts brought with them a lifestyle that had been honed at the governor’s mansion in Albany, where Eleanor, in particular, constantly strived for a balance between private and public life. It was Eleanor who struggled to maintain a semblance of family normality, while Roosevelt relished the chaos with a more-the-merrier attitude. Both thrived on the intellectual stimulation of the ceaseless socializing, though Eleanor, as the daughter of an alcoholic, eschewed the regular evening mixers. Eleanor oversaw the cuisine, planning meals based on traditional American recipes and instilling the same frugality that restrained other Depression-era housewives. She decided it would be “highly appropriate to serve purely American dishes at the White House,” she said in her first interview. “I want to work out some meals that consist entirely of American food, prepared in the American manner, from American products.” Gone were the seven-course meals, the formal dinner attire, and the pretentious trappings of footmen and butlers that had attended the Hoover presidency. One guest of the Roosevelts reported receiving a meager dessert consisting of a slice of pineapple topped with whipped cream, two maraschino cherries, and one walnut—three nights in a row.

  Roosevelt had asked his wife to cut the White House operating expenses by 25 percent, in keeping with his call for national sacrifice. She efficiently managed to fit her large family—which now included two grandchildren—into the small living quarters and to find space for other friends and employees who would be full-time residents. Marguerite “Missy” Le Hand, Roosevelt’s longtime secretary, moved into the former housekeeper’s quarters. Eleanor’s closest friend, Lorena Hickok, who had resigned from the Associated Press when she felt her personal relationship with Eleanor clouded her objectivity, took over an upstairs bedroom. Resembling a boardinghouse more than a presidential mansion, the place was a twenty-four-hour hub of activity; one Washington traditionalist derisively described the atmosphere as being like “Saturday night at a country hotel.” Roosevelt reserved the best guest suite, where Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, to host those he was courting politically.

  The president’s typical sixteen-hour day involved a firmly structured routine that necessarily revolved around his infirmity. He awakened at eight thirty every morning and took breakfast in bed. After finishing his eggs, toast, and orange juice, he would settle in with five morning newspapers and a strong cup of coffee, and light the first of his forty Camel cigarettes of the day, which he would slip into a long ivory holder. Cartoonists made great hay of the affectation, the caricatured portraits depicting an insouciant Roosevelt gripping the holder between his front teeth, flashing a wide grin with his chin lifted haughtily. Once he had read all the gazettes from Washington, New York, and Baltimore, he would receive Moley and Howe and give them instructions for the day. As his valet helped him with his toilette and into his braces, his press and appointment secretaries would drop by his bedroom to get their marching orders, often conferring with him while he was shaving. His wife and children would stop by as well and chat for a few minutes as he conducted presidential business.

  At ten thirty A.M. he would be wheeled to his office, where he would remain at his desk throughout the day and often into the evening, eating a light lunch of hash with one poached egg, which cost the taxpayers nineteen cents. At the beginning of his presidency, he would meet visitors at fifteen-minute intervals. His open-door policy would frequently result in overlapping appointments and an anteroom overflowing with people from all walks of life, which often flustered them but bothered him not at all. Between two and three P.M. he would dictate correspondence, sign official documents, review the letters and telegrams his secretary had culled from the thousands that arrived daily, and make telephone calls to members of Congress. From three until five he would hold cabinet meetings and twice-weekly press conferences. Several afternoons he would swim in the new White House pool, joined alternately by Eleanor, his secretaries, and children—a pastime so vital to his health that it carried a top priority in his scheduling. The celebrated cocktail hour was inviolable; he insisted on lighthearted banter, risqué jokes, and stiff martinis. Dinners were generally relaxed and unceremonious events with a mix of family, friends, journalists, and dignitaries, and they would often be followed by film screenings. He loved movies, especially the romances starring his favorite actress, the steamy and politically liberal Myrna Loy. He would then return to his office for several more hours of work and finally retire around midnight, propped up in bed and surrounded by diplomatic cables, magazines, and murder mysteries.

  He leaped at the opportunities for afternoon outings when they arose, summoning the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, for jaunts down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay. But even those coveted getaways usually included an entourage of staff and advisers, ensuring that his work accompanied him. He absolutely loved being president—“Wouldn’t anybody?” he asked a visitor—and ran his operation like a “one-man show.” He was surrounded by a gaggle of bright young bachelors who poured into the nation’s capital to work for the dynamic new administration and who created an air of youthful exuberance. Many, like Dean Acheson, Lyndon Johnson, Abe Fortas, J. W. Fulbright, Hubert H. Humphrey, and Adlai Stevenson, would become fixtures in Washington for decades to come.

  The president’s accessibility was unparalleled. He had a list of a staggering one hundred people who were allowed to see him without being required to declare their business to his secretary. He referred to himself as “Frank” and called everyone by his or her first name. He accepted phone calls at all hours from common Americans throughout the country and gave specific orders that anyone who telephoned the White House with a request was to receive assistance. Such responsiveness prompted an unprecedented amount of folksy mail—450,000 letters during his first week in office—from Americans thanking him for saving their lives. One recipient of his help wrote,

  Dear Mr. President: This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer. You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us. I never heard of a President like you.

  Those first, charmed one hundred days in the White House were exhilarating and buoyant, as Roosevelt sent measure after measure to Congress and each was met with swift passage. Understanding the powers and limitations of the presidency, the tenuousness of political goodwill, the impatience of the populace, and the unknown consequences of his ideas—not to mention that his rivals were champing at the bit—he wisely “opened the New Deal floodgates,” as one of his biographers put it, and pushed through every bit of legislation he could. During the Hundred Days, the specially convened Seventy-third Congress broke all previous records for enacting legislation, a whirlwind feat of governing and experimentation.

  “No president since [Roosevelt] has faced so desperate a financial situation, and none have enjoyed such mastery of the legislative process,” biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote in the New York Times seventy-five years later. What Americans saw during the first three months of the Roosevelt administration was a dynamic president, unhindered by his disability, who was using the power of his office to fight tirelessly for the common man. Perhaps, as some believed, it was his physical paralysis that impelled his dynamism. In explaining his newfound admiration for Roosevelt, a friend of Herbert Hoover’s told the New York Times, “Having overcome that [his physical disability], he is not afraid of anything. This man functions smoothly because he has learned to function in chains.” Meanwhile, those alarmed by Roosevelt’s swift and effective use of executive decree compared him to Hitler and Mussolini and wrung their hands at his dictatorial action and Congress’s rubber-stamping response.

  The onslaught had begun on March 9, when he had sent Congress t
he Emergency Banking Act, which reopened the banks. Then came the Economy Act, which slashed government salaries and department budgets, saving the government nearly a billion dollars. Those were followed by the “beer bill,” which set the stage for the repeal of Prohibition; the CCC legislation, which put youths to work; and Glass-Steagall. When Congress adjourned on June 16, 1933, it had enacted all fifteen New Deal economic policies that the White House had submitted. Roosevelt had also delivered ten major speeches, held biweekly press conferences, instituted Wall Street reform, and influenced foreign policy by taking the country off the gold standard, giving the United States greater control over its dollars. Included in the innovative, momentous, and often contradictory legislation were such diverse policies as the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Home Owners Loan Act.

  The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) introduced federal planning into yet another of the nation’s major economic sectors. The most blatantly interventionist of all of his policies, the AAA created a new agency charged with raising crop prices and controlling production. Roosevelt had been moved by the plight of the farmers, who had been especially hard-hit by the Depression, and saw them as a cornerstone for rebuilding the economy. Perhaps more significantly, he sought to forestall an Iowa insurrection and impending farmer’s strike that could set off explosive unrest throughout the country. He strong-armed the legislation through Congress in time for spring planting. His secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, would oversee the production of three hundred million bushels of wheat and eight million bales of cotton, the raising of thirty million hogs, and the harvesting of 106 million acres of corn, also with a mandate of creating scarcity to drive up prices. “To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature,” Wallace said, but he was quick to blame the previous administration for the current disaster. He was equally reluctant to slaughter six million baby piglets but saw no alternative.