The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The southern part of Texas’ 200-mile-long Fourteenth Congressional District had been insulated throughout the 1920’s from the despair roaming the American countryside. The fall in cotton prices was cushioned by the quantity of the crop that could be produced in that four-foot-deep loam—in 1929, Nueces County, hub of the southern part of the district, produced 424,000 bales of cotton, more than any other county in the United States—and by the ease in getting it to market; since ships heading for Europe and the East Coast could dock, at Corpus Christi, within a few miles of the cotton fields, freighting costs and the cost in time were reduced to a minimum. “In many instances,” exulted the Corpus Christi Caller, “cotton has been picked and ginned in the morning and compressed and loaded for export the same day.” Even during the first year of the Depression, cotton buyers continued to crowd the seaport city with its row of tall office buildings along the bluff. But when the white bolls opened on the Gulf plain in 1931, warehouses throughout the world were still choked with unsold bales from the 1930 crop; few ships came, prices plummeted to six cents per pound, a level at which it didn’t pay to grow cotton, and even at that price, there were few buyers. Only 330,000 bales would be picked along the Gulf in 1931—and 56,000 of these bales remained unsold. Prices for the onions and tomatoes and watermelons produced by the area’s thousands of small truck farms dropped so low in that year that farmers let them rot on the vine.

  Human evidence of the Depression’s existence had begun to filter into Corpus Christi early, for railroads had laid tracks to the very beaches of the Gulf, and despite the railroads’ diligence—the Southern Pacific boasted that its dicks threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931—the long lines of freight cars from the north now often carried, huddled in corners, or riding the rails underneath, human cargo which debarked when it reached Corpus Christi because that was the end of the line. For a while, local residents seemed to regard the Depression as something that couldn’t happen to them; when it proved impossible to ignore the transients because of their number and importunity, they set up soup kitchens “for strangers seeking food … to keep [them] out of residential areas”; their attitude toward people who couldn’t earn a living was condescending.

  By 1931, however, with cotton unsold in the warehouses and tomatoes rotting in the fields, the lines at the soup kitchens were no longer composed entirely of strangers. Even prosperous Gulf Coast farmers were going into debt; by the end of the year, more than half of the 20,000 farms in the Fourteenth District were under mortgage. And now the debts were being called. Farmers saw SHERIFF’S SALE notices being tacked up on neighbors’ houses—on the houses of men who worked as hard as they did; they saw neighbors loading their cars high with their possessions and driving away with their wives crying and their babies looking bewildered, and their older children’s faces averted in shame. Some they never saw again; some they did, and wished they hadn’t: they saw former neighbors, friends, living in shacks in Corpus Christi or Robstown or Alice, and seeking day work. So desperate were these men that they were willing to pick cotton even in the rain and mud; in the past, because a man must pick cotton on his knees, picking had never been done—at least not by white men—when the fields were muddy. And evicted South Texas farmers couldn’t earn enough to support their families even by working in the mud; “My boy and I worked full nine hours Saturday and made ninety cents, or five cents per hour each,” said one man who referred to himself as a former member of the middle class. More and more had to go on relief; so hard was it for these proud Texans to seek charity that they did not do so until they had sold everything they could sell. Many showed up at the Red Cross or Salvation Army staggering from weakness; they had refused to come in until they were literally starving. (Some of the men, a Salvation Army worker reported, would never have come in at all had it not been for their inability to watch their wives starve.)

  With the approach of the winter of 1931–1932, the families living in the shacks needed heat and warm clothing as well as food. Appealing for donations of old stoves, Mrs. L. D. Berry, director of the local Red Cross, made clear that she meant wood stoves; “there is no need for gas stoves, as none of the families can afford gas,” she noted. The families in the shacks were luckier than some families: they at least had shelter. A growing number of evicted farm families did not; elderly men and women, afraid they would die of exposure during the winter, advertised their services in exchange for room and board. The Salvation Army set up fifty cots in an empty warehouse that would once have been filled with cotton; hundreds of persons lined up to use them. Not only the elderly but the young were in need: children were growing out of their clothes and their shoes. Then Mrs. Berry started asking children in school what they had had to eat that day; as a result of their answers, she announced that the Red Cross must immediately begin providing at least one meal a day for 500 schoolchildren.

  But the Red Cross had no money to do so. Relief funds were running out. Since President Hoover felt that any involvement in relief by the federal government would weaken the national character, relief remained the province of local municipalities and private agencies, and as winter approached, not only the municipalities of the Fourteenth District but its Red Cross and Salvation Army chapters and local relief committees were all running out of money. Bacon and onions were no longer ingredients in soup-kitchen meals; beans—plain beans—were what the hungry were given to eat. The Salvation Army had reduced its allocation for feeding each client to a penny per day. Its funds were virtually exhausted. And each day the soup-kitchen lines grew longer.

  BY THE TIME Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington, the district’s arrogance was gone; its people were asking the government for help now—for government participation in relief funding; for government refinancing of farm mortgages; for government support of crop prices; and, more and more, because “surplus is ruin,” for government-enforced crop controls. There was desperation in the mail sacks he opened each morning.

  There was desperation in the mail sacks of almost every Congressman, it seemed. Americans everywhere were asking their government for help. Despair was stalking city streets as well as the countryside. In Chicago, 600,000 persons were unemployed, in New York, 800,000; the total of unemployed men in America’s cities was between 15 million and 17 million, and many of these men represented an entire family in want. Witnesses were telling congressional committees that private charities had run out of money, that states and local municipalities which had attempted to shoulder the burden had run out of money—that, for want of federal assistance in relief, growing numbers of America’s people were, literally, starving. During that session of Congress, there were reminders of the nation’s plight not only in Washington’s committee rooms but in Washington’s streets—25,000 reminders: the penniless World War veterans who, in May, 1932, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, their faces set in concentration as they tried to march in step as they had marched when they were young, and who then encamped with their wives and children in abandoned warehouses and empty stores, and in tents set up in parks, so that “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state.”

  But little help came from the government. When its legislative branch, which had, in December, 1931, turned a deaf ear to suggestions that it forgo its usual two-week holiday, returned in January, it was to begin seven months of wrangling and delay, enlivened only by Congressmen’s near panic when they encountered Bonus Marchers; some Congressmen broke into a run when the ragged men approached. When Congress finally adjourned in July, 1932, the only substantial aid that had been given to farmers was a $125 million increase in the capital available for federal mortgages—an increase so far below the amount needed as to be all but meaningless, particularly since it was not accompanied, despite the pleas of farm organizations, by even a token easing in the onerous interest and repayment schedules. Despite the urgency of witnesses’ pleas for help with relief funding, the Congressmen who had heard those pleas squabbled over minor det
ails for weeks that turned into months—and the provisions of the bill that finally passed were so niggardly that the average relief stipend for a family of four would be fifty cents per day. As for the vital tax and tariff reform bill, special interest blocs squabbled over its provisions, and states traded tariff proposals back and forth until, in May, one Senator was moved to shout: “Have we gone mad? Have we no idea that if we carry this period of unrest from one week to another, a panic will break loose, which all the tariffs under heaven will not stem? Yet we sit here to take care of some little interest in this state or that. … ‘My state! My state!’ My God! Let’s hear ‘My country!’ What good is your state if your country sinks into the quagmire of ruin!” For months, the Forum magazine said, “the country [has] been looking on, with something like anguish, at the spectacle of the inability of the national legislature, in a time of desperate need, to take any action—good, bad or indifferent—for dealing with the crucial problem of national finance.” A columnist, more succinct, called the House of Representatives “The Monkey House,” and his sentiment was echoed by some of the congressmen themselves; declared McDuffie of Alabama: “representative government is dead.”

  AS FOR THE leader of the government’s executive branch, when the Bonus Marchers begged Herbert Hoover to receive a delegation of their leaders, he sent word that he was too busy. Reinforced police patrols surrounded the White House; barricades were erected to close nearby streets to traffic; a New York Daily News headline proclaimed: HOOVER LOCKS SELF IN WHITE HOUSE. And in July, the President had the Army, with fixed bayonets and tear gas, drive the veterans out of Washington.

  He handled the Depression with equal firmness. In December, 1929, he had said, “Conditions are fundamentally sound.” In March, 1930, he said the worst would be over in sixty days; in May, he predicted that the economy would be back to normal in the Autumn; in June, in the midst of still another market plunge, he told a delegation which called at the White House to plead for a public works project, “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over.” In his December 2, 1930, message to Congress, he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.” Asked why, then, so many unemployed men were selling apples on street corners, he said: “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” His secretary noted that the President was beginning to regard some criticism as “unpatriotic.” In 1932, his tune had not changed; in April of that year, a visitor was authorized to report that “Conditions are getting better. The President was in high spirits over the economic improvement.” When delegations came to the White House begging him to endorse direct federal aid for relief, or increased spending on public works, he refused; “As long as I sit at this desk, they won’t get by,” he said. He couldn’t bear to watch suffering, so he never visited a breadline or a relief station; as his limousine swept past men selling apples on street corners, he never turned his head to look at them. Even Time magazine, after more than two years of maintaining a fagade almost as cheery as Hoover’s, noted in 1932 that “the nation’s needy have gone through three hard winters without a dollar’s worth of direct aid from the Federal Treasury.” Said Hoover: “Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.”

  He wasn’t starving. Having decided that economy in the President’s kitchen would be bad for the country’s morale, he continued eating at the most elaborate table ever set in the White House. Even when the only other diner was his wife, Lou, dinners were always seven courses; while Hoover, dressed always in black tie, ate his way through them, the dress blues of the Marine duty officers in the doorways provided ceremonial trappings, and butlers and footmen—all of them the same height—stood as rigid as statues, “absolutely silent, forbidden to move unbidden.”

  When, after months of haggling, Congress finally passed a public works bill, the President called it “an unexampled raid on the public treasury,” and warned, “We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity.” When Congress attempted to add to his request for $25 million for the relief of animals in Southern drought regions another $35 million so that humans as well as livestock might be fed, he refused to allow the measure, saying: “Prosperity cannot be restored by raids on the public treasury.” When, finally, he became convinced that some government action was necessary, the action he selected was the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which critics called a “breadline for big business,” because of its emphasis on bailing out corporations, railroads, insurance companies and banks (big banks; in general, it would not help smaller institutions); the RFC’s attitude toward suffering on a human scale was revealed when Congress in 1932 pushed through against the administration’s wishes an act authorizing the agency to advance the states $300 million for relief; it deliberately dragged its feet, so that the states actually received only $30 million—exactly one-third of the amount the RFC’s president had loaned his own bank. Herbert Hoover, said Breckenridge Long, “has set his face like flint against the American government’s giving one cent to starving Americans.” And when, in the Autumn of 1932, Hoover went to the country to campaign for another term, crossing states he had never visited since he had been elected four years before, the reception that greeted him was one that had been afforded no previous American President—not even Lincoln in Richmond in the last days of the Civil War; as the President’s train was pulling into Detroit, the men on it heard a hoarse, rhythmic chant rising from thousands of throats; for a moment they had hopes of an enthusiastic reception—and then they made out the words of the chant: “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!” Mounted police charged the crowd, and the Secret Service hustled the President into a limousine for the four-mile drive to Olympic Stadium. And as the Presidential caravan sped past, those inside his limousine saw, through its thick windows, that the route was lined, block after block, with tens of thousands of men and women who were, in Gene Smith’s words, “utterly silent and grim save for those who could be glimpsed shaking their fists and shouting unheard words and phrases.” When, in St. Paul, the President defended his treatment of the Bonus Marchers, saying, “Thank God we still have a government in Washington that still knows how to deal with a mob,” the crowd responded with one vast snarl, a snarl so vicious that the Secret Service chief suddenly found himself covered with sweat. As the President’s train moved across his country, its people pelted the train with eggs and tomatoes. Four years before, he had carried forty of the forty-eight states; in 1932, he carried six.

  DESPITE HIS REJECTION by the people in November, 1932, Hoover was going to be President until March, 1933—March which lay on the far side of the winter ahead. Although no fewer than 158 Congressmen had been defeated in November, they were going to be Congressmen until March.

  That was a winter of despair. When, on December 5, 1932, the lame-duck Congress reconvened, those of its members who had hoped that the tear-gassing of the veterans had frightened the jobless away from Washington received a surprise; crowded around the Capitol steps were more than 2,500 men, women and children chanting, “Feed the hungry! Tax the rich!” Police armed with tear gas and riot guns herded the “hunger marchers” into a “detention camp” on New York Avenue, where, denied food or water, they spent a freezing night sleeping on the pavement, taunted by their guards. Thereafter, Congress met behind a double line of rifle-carrying police, who blocked the Capitol steps. And behind these bodyguards, as the weeks of the terrible winter turned into months, Congress dawdled and wrangled as it had been dawdling and wrangling ever since the Depression began; sullenly, it deadlocked over the scores of competing relief proposals, while spending hours and days squabbling over whether to legalize beer and what percent of it should consist of alcohol. As for the man in the White House, he spent the interregnum maneuvering to tie his successor to his discredited policies. The program of the “President-reject,” as Time called him, had the virtue of consist
ency; his State of the Union message called, as had his previous three messages, for economy in government and a balanced budget; the lone new proposal was for a sales tax that would fall hardest on those least able to afford it. With conditions worsening as rapidly as the weather, with the welfare rolls growing longer and longer, and the relief structure, so long crumbling, beginning to disintegrate, he continued to withhold federal help.

  As the people saw that their government was going to give them no leadership, there began to be heard throughout America the sound of hungry men on the march. In Columbus, Ohio, 7,000 men in ranks tramped toward the Statehouse to “establish a workers’ and farmers’ republic.” Four thousand men occupied the Lincoln, Nebraska, Statehouse; 5,000 took over the Municipal Building in Seattle; in Chicago, thousands of unpaid teachers stormed the city’s banks. A Communist Party rally in New York’s Union Square drew an audience of 35,000.

  IN THE CITIES, such outbreaks, while violent, were brief. It was in America’s countryside that rebellion began to flare with a flame that, while fitful, did not die out—in the countryside, among the descendants of the People’s Party, among the descendants of the Alliancemen. For half a century and more, America’s farmers had been asking for tariff reform, for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for silver remonetization—for help in fighting forces too big for them to fight—and for half a century, their government had turned to them a very deaf ear. Now, starving, they asked again—often in words that echoed those spoken in Chicago thirty-six years earlier before an audience bearing silver banners that fluttered in the breeze; an Oklahoma rancher told a House subcommittee: “We will march eastward, and we will cut the East off. We will cut the East off from the West. We have got the granaries; we have the hogs, the cattle, the corn, and the East has nothing but mortgages on our places. We will show them what we can do.” And this time, when their pleas were, as usual, unanswered, the House passed farm legislation; Hoover, calling it “wholly unworkable” (his Memoirs reveal that he had not taken the trouble to understand it), let it be known that he would veto it, and it died in the Senate—farmers reached for their pitchforks and their guns.