by Sally Denton
Wall Street, bridling at the new securities regulations and distressed by the burgeoning federal expenditures, began rumbling about “dictatorial powers.” Much of the negative reaction swirled around the gold standard and a deep-seated belief—“rooted in suspicion,” as historian William Manchester put it—that gold and empire were synonymous. Gold was sacred, seen as the “hallmark of Western culture.” To rabid anti-Semites, Roosevelt, as a Wall Street puppet, had taken America off the gold standard to allow the Jews to control the world’s gold while the Gentiles were left with the less valuable silver.
If pundits and advisers were stunned by the swiftness with which the backlash took hold, Roosevelt saw it coming. The fissures in Congress were just beneath the surface in the special session’s waning days, but Roosevelt had managed to keep them from splitting open. Critics on both sides of the aisle had begun to question the constitutionality of NIRA, prompting Roosevelt to accelerate his timetable to send Congress home. “We’re going at top speed in order to adjourn early,” one Democratic senator confided to his sons. “Roosevelt wants the Congress out of the way. He is losing a little bit of his astounding and remarkable poise … There is a revolt in the air in the Congress, too. Men have followed him upstairs without question or criticism … These men have about reached the limit of their endurance. Roosevelt, clever as he is, senses that fact, and before there is an actual break, he wishes us out of the way.” FDR had rammed through his policies until his impeccable intuition told him it was time to stop. He possessed a heightened sense of timing and the practicality to stay apace with the populace, never getting too far in front at the risk of losing their confidence. He knew the necessity of appearing calm and assured, knew that projecting the image of serene leadership was as important as the policies themselves. He had successfully maneuvered the newspapermen at his twice-weekly press conferences to explain his reasoning for various ideas and to prepare the public to accept them.
Even as prices rose, purchasing power increased, homes were saved, bank deposits were restored, millions went back to work, and recovery was proceeding, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the country’s elite took hold. Contemporaneous observers thought the griping was really about jealousy of Roosevelt’s success, bitterness at having been manipulated, anxiety about the long-term results, apprehension of change, and an inherent resistance to government interference.
“Businessmen of 1929 had enjoyed privileges and were delighted to receive them in 1933,” wrote a historian of the period, “but did not like being told by Roosevelt that they must shoulder responsibilities, especially toward their workers.” A South Carolina newspaper editor had little empathy for their plight. “The ‘captains’ of finance and industry have been exposed as empty-pates … The ‘captains’ are bare in their nakedness as greater fools even than knaves.”
Elite extremists posing as liberty lovers and constitution defenders cropped up and became increasingly vociferous throughout the summer. “This is despotism. This is tyranny. This is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot … The President … has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom,” a U.S. senator wrote in an appeal to arouse his constituents.
One target of special enmity was Roosevelt’s close relationship with Sidney Hillman—a Jewish refugee from czarist Russia. The onetime rabbinical student had been a fabric cutter in what was known as New York’s “needle trades” and had gone on to form a new union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, to organize the nation’s most notorious sweatshops. Throughout America, women and children were being paid less than three dollars a week for a fifty-hour workweek; in New York City, the garment industry—which employed more than fifty thousand women—was sometimes paying as little as sixty cents an hour. Thousands of workers took home less than a dollar after a nine-hour day. As a Roosevelt insider, Hillman helped design the New Deal unemployment and public works policies, which were committed to transforming America’s benighted working class into a modernized workforce with economic security and fair labor practices.
The dissatisfaction vented by Wall Street was not felt by ordinary Americans, who rushed to hang portraits of Roosevelt over their fireplaces and proudly displayed the famous “Blue Eagle” NRA poster. With an insignia modeled after a Native American thunderbird—and a concept derived from a wartime patch by which soldiers could recognize each other—the poster bore the legend “We Do Our Part.” In his most soothing and convincing way, Roosevelt had launched the Blue Eagle during a fireside chat: “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. On that principle, those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance.” Effusive and grateful letters and telegrams poured into the White House by the truckload from poor Americans who saw their lives improving. While the Far Right and Far Left abandoned him, the “vast army of the center” was firmly in the president’s camp.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s us-against-them rhetoric and references to “comrades” inflamed the upper class, and the stirrings of anti-Rooseveltism, which had begun even before he had taken office, were escalating. Soon these sparks would ignite into full-fledged hatred, dividing the country and emboldening powerful enemies. “Through the channels of the rich—the clubs, the banks, the brokerage offices, the Park Avenue salons, the country club locker rooms, the South Carolina shoots, the Florida cabanas—there rushed a swelling flood of stories and broadsides, many unprintable, depicting Roosevelt as a liar, a thief, a madman given to great bursts of maniacal laughter, an alcoholic, a syphilitic, a Bolshevik,” according to Arthur Schlesinger’s account. It was from this fertile field of loathing that the “traitor to his class” epithet was born, and the publishers of the country’s most influential newspapers, themselves members of the noble class, eagerly fanned the flames.
The rapport between Roosevelt and the press was initially based on mutual benefit, in which he used them to disseminate his philosophy and float his designs and they relied on him for a steady stream of copy. But an element of wariness and suspicion existed, especially between Roosevelt and the wealthy publishers—as opposed to the working press, for whom he had respect. He thought the Chicago Tribune under the helm of reactionary Republican Robert McCormick “the rottenest newspaper in the whole United States.” He thought Arthur Krock, editor of the New York Times, “terrible” and consistently inaccurate, and he derided the Times newsroom as a “rarefied atmosphere of self-anointed scholars.” He reproached syndicated columnist Frank Kent for having both a “poison pen and poison tongue,” and considered Lippmann painfully out of touch with the reality of America. “I wish sometime that he could come more into contact with the little fellow all over the country and see less of the big rich brother!” He accused Time magazine’s Henry Luce of having a “deliberate policy of either exaggeration or distortion.” And he reserved a special animus for his onetime friend and promoter of dictatorship, Hearst: “I sometimes think that Hearst has done more harm to the cause of Democracy and civilization in America than any three other contemporaries put together.” He condemned the fat-cat newspaper owners for caring more about their personal social and economic status than about fostering an independent American press. He sympathized with the working journalists whose bosses ordered them to write certain stories and ignore others. “I think they [the publishers] have been more responsible for the inciting of fear in the community than any other factors,” Roosevelt said.
The feeling of distrust and animosity was reciprocal. In addition to Hearst, Roosevelt’s most vicious critics were McCormick and H. L. Mencken, who steadily portrayed the president and his advisers as “Reds.” The Roosevelt haters lapped up the visceral, often-illogical, and irrational attacks. Not since the hostility heaped on Andrew Jackso
n a century before had a president been so savagely pummeled by the press—their screeds betraying “a certain streak of madness in American political criticism,” as two twentieth-century scholars saw it.
“Colonel” McCormick rebuked Roosevelt for spending billions on “men who have been parasites their entire lives, have never produced anything and never intend to produce anything, who have always lived at the expense of others, and plot to live better than the others who support them.”
Likewise, the tremendously influential Mencken could not abide Roosevelt’s freewheeling spending on the nation’s indigent and unemployed. “The republic proceeds toward hell at a rapidly accelerating tempo,” Mencken wrote to a libertarian author when the New Deal was finalized in June 1933. “I am advocating making him a king in order that we may behead him in case he goes too far beyond the limits of the endurable. A President, it appears, cannot be beheaded, but kings have been subjected to the operation from ancient times.” While Mencken’s remark was certainly in jest, such chatter by respected pundits had the power of provoking deranged individuals into action. Loose and inflammatory talk of assassination and other violent acts became eerily prevalent, and the Secret Service went into high gear as threats multiplied. “What that fellow Roosevelt needs is a thirty-eight caliber revolver right at the back of his head,” a respectable citizen said at a Washington dinner party.
While Mencken thought the New Deal laboratory just that—a wild experiment that was unplanned, untried, and unwise—Hearst and McCormick saw a more sinister hand in it, subscribing to the theory that Roosevelt was the puppet for a Communist takeover. Both took seriously their mission to stop him, for only with a gullible public and a malleable press could Roosevelt’s coup be successful.
In addition to the mainstream establishment critics, there arose an extremist element with its own methods for propagating hatred, name-calling, and character assassination. One shadowy organization began spreading the canard that Roosevelt—on behalf of an international Jewish conspiracy—was protecting the Jewish killer of the “Lindbergh baby.” The toddler son of celebrity aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped from the nursery of his parents’ upscale New Jersey home on March 1, 1932—in what became known as the “crime of the century.” Footprints, a ladder, and a chisel were left beneath the nursery’s second-story window. A fifty-thousand-dollar ransom payment was made before the boy’s murdered remains were found three months later. The case came to epitomize the fears plaguing America’s ruling class—which Roosevelt had so legendarily betrayed—about an angry Jewish proletariat. In the convoluted, far-fetched scenario that would eventually find its way into a published pamphlet with nearly a million copies distributed, Roosevelt was a de facto collaborator with the kidnappers.
Much of the Far Right suspicion centered on the New Deal as being a Jewish conspiracy, and there developed a cottage industry for those determined to prove that Jewish blood coursed through Roosevelt’s veins. William Dudley Pelley and his legion of Silver Shirts worked feverishly to prove that Roosevelt was the installed head of a Jewish dictatorship. Pelley and others intent on exposing Roosevelt’s Jewish bloodlines inevitably trotted out the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the crackpot 1905 alleged transcripts from a secret World Zionist Conference, which were gaining popularity among American anti-Semites in 1933. “Often characterized as a blueprint for world domination by Jews,” wrote religious scholar James Carroll, “the Protocols is a mishmash of commentary on the press, finance, government, and history … The diabolical center of the plot, of course, was the international cabal of Jewish financiers, and world domination would be achieved by Jewish control of money.” It was published in the United States by the automobile titan Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line and an advocate of a “biblical capitalism” personified by German Fascism.
Citing the fact that Jews had received 15 percent of the senior appointments in his government, compared with a national Jewish population of only 3 percent, critics sought irrepressibly to tarnish Roosevelt by claiming he was pursuing international Jewish interests. The conspiracists might have been handily dismissed if not for Adolf Hitler’s disturbing machinations in Germany. The fanatics charged that Roosevelt was the head of a Communist conspiracy to take over the world. Such indictments would have been laughable if not for the suggestion of violence they contained and the unhinged population to which they appealed.
“If you were a good honest man, Jesus Christ would not have crippled you,” said a letter to the president that was typical of correspondence from the disaffected. In the whisper campaign of 1933, Roosevelt was denigrated as a cripple and falsely labeled a Jew, and zealots prepared petitions for his removal on the grounds of treason.
Chapter Twenty-nine
We Don’t Like Her, Either
“Peace time can be as exhilarating to the daredevil as wartime,” Eleanor Roosevelt told an interviewer. “There is nothing so exciting as creating a new social order.”
While Roosevelt set out to remake America, his wife led a parallel revolution. Eleanor fast became a political force in her own right, and a lightning rod as well: She would become the most controversial First Lady in the country’s history. Far more liberal than her husband, she focused her considerable energy on creating economic and political power for women. During the interregnum, while Roosevelt had been scheming with his Brain Trust and dodging bullets in Miami, Eleanor began writing two books: one about her father, Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman, and the other, It’s Up to the Women, intended to motivate her gender into the world of political activism.
Urging women to seize real power, to create their own political-machine bosses, and to boldly and courageously compete in that male-dominated sphere, Eleanor was the first straightforward feminist to operate from within the White House. Such blatant grasping for power by a woman was groundbreaking. Women had only had the right to vote in all states for a slight decade and had not yet fully embraced their individual or collective authority. If President Roosevelt was a threat to the American status quo, his wife was a terrifying specter.
Whatever the context and complexities of their marriage—their physical relationship had irretrievably broken off twenty years earlier when Franklin fell in love with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer—there existed between them an unbreakable bond. Eleanor’s manner with her husband was “at once intimate, informal, natural and deeply respectful,” one of her closest friends later wrote. By all accounts, he admired her intelligence and courage, relished her sense of humor, and remained devoted to her and their deeply unorthodox marriage even as he maintained his affair with Mercer. While their marriage was not conventional, it was one of Washington’s most successful. “Fueled by power,” wrote Eleanor’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, “they were each dedicated to making life better for most people. Together they did more than either could have done alone.” Evidence of the rather impersonal bond that existed between them can be glimpsed in a letter he wrote to her on March 17, 1933, their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, in which he directed her to choose her own gift.
“Dearest Babs,” he wrote, using his pet name for her. “After a fruitless week of thinking and lying awake to find whether you need or want undies, dresses, hats, shoes, sheets, towels, rouge, soup plates, candy, flowers, lamps, laxation pills, whisky, beer, etchings or caviar … I GIVE UP! And yet I know you lack some necessity of life—so go to it with my love and many happy returns of the day.” Included with the note was a personal check.
The head housekeeper made each of their favorite desserts that evening—angel food cake for Eleanor and fruitcake for Roosevelt—and, together with their guests, they watched Gabriel Over the White House. The film prompted an argument between those who admired the fictional president and those who admired real-life President Herbert Hoover’s aggression against the Bonus Army. They would call “soldiers out if a million unemployed ma
rched on Washington,” Eleanor said, summarizing the reaction of her guests, “& I’d do what the President does in the picture!”
Fiercely independent, strong-willed yet self-effacing, Eleanor realized straightaway that performing the role of official presidential hostess would not sustain her for long. “I’m just not the sort of person who would be any good at that job,” she told a friend. “I dare say I shall be criticized whatever I do.” Rebellious against protocol, which she found superfluous in a democracy, she made early headlines with her bold changes. First, she allowed women to smoke in the White House because she found it ridiculous that, in the modern decade of the 1930s, it was still considered an unladylike vulgarity. Next, though she had long been a Prohibitionist, she began serving beer as soon as Congress amended the Volstead Act, having come to believe that moderation in all things trumped abstinence. “She shattered precedent in ways that helped her husband dispel every last wisp of the gloom, the funereal formality, that had characterized 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue when Herbert Hoover lived there,” one historian said.
She did not arrive at the White House from a distant vacuum but as a fully formed forty-eight-year-old woman with an impressive set of accomplishments. She wrote a monthly column for Women’s Democratic News, had owned a crafts factory, co-owned and taught at a New York girls’ school, and had worked closely for many years with the women activists within the Democratic Party.
Americans who retained the belief that a proper First Lady was to be seen and not heard, to stare adoringly at her husband, to smile sweetly and withhold her opinions were in for a rude awakening. Eleanor was informal and active, teeming with ideas, thoughts, and judgments and eager to express them. She was informed and animated on subjects ranging from politics to the economy to the environment to child care to war. One of her earliest innovations was to institute her own press conferences—the first of their kind ever held by a First Lady. On March 6, 1933, a mere two days after her husband had taken office, she greeted thirty-five newspaperwomen in the Red Room of the White House. In stark contrast to Roosevelt, she set only one ground rule—that she would not answer questions of a political nature—and she agreed to be quoted directly. At a moment when Washington journalism was overwhelmingly a man’s domain, Eleanor’s press conference was a great morale-booster in addition to a radical change. She had hoped it would encourage newspaper publishers to hire more women reporters. As with all things progressive, it was not met with unanimous acceptance. One newspaperwoman snidely implied that the homely and oft-neglected Eleanor was seeking attention. “Mrs. Roosevelt doesn’t hide her light under any bushel; if she had a bushel she’d burn it to add to the light.”