Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  The deportation began when, at Walter Douglas’s request, the sheriff deputized a group that called itself the Bisbee Citizens’ Protective League. The Bisbee sheriff declared that if the Wobblies insisted on remaining in Arizona, it would be “up to the individual communities to drive these agitators out.” The Wobblies refused to leave, and on July 12, 1917, the citizens’ league took up the sheriff ’s invitation to drive out the agitators. League members spread out across Bisbee, arresting more than one thousand strikers and sympathizers and holding them downtown at gunpoint. When a train owned by Phelps Dodge pulled up, the prisoners were forced into twenty-three boxcars and taken to the New Mexico desert, where they were abandoned without food or water. The strikers and strike sympathizers remained stranded until state and federal authorities rescued them .17

  The Bisbee deportation caused a furor, particularly in the progressive press. The Nation called it unlawful and “practically foolish.” The muckraking New York World declared that “we have nourished a nest of vipers.” Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, protested to President Woodrow Wilson that “a group of capitalistic anarchists” in Arizona had gone “far from any warrant of law.” Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter, who was a member of Wilson’s Mediation Commission, went to Arizona to investigate. The commission declared the deportation to have been “wholly illegal,” and based on its report a federal grand jury indicted twenty-one people, including Walter Douglas, for violating the deportees’ constitutional rights. Prosecutors prepared an indictment for James S. Douglas, Lewis’s father, but never served it because he had moved to France to work for the American Red Cross. The case ran up against a court system heavily tilted against workers. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Bisbee Deportation had not infringed on anyone’s constitutional rights. Before the case was over, a miner reported that the copper bosses had already resumed “hunting out union men” and firing them.18

  Lewis Douglas was not living in Arizona when his uncle and father were waging their war on organized labor. He had been sent back East for school at the urging of his grandfather. Douglas attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, close to where his grandfather was living at the time. Hackley, which had been founded in 1899 to teach the children of Unitarians and other religious liberals, was closer to Lewis’s grandfather’s worldview than to his father’s. Rawhide Jimmy eventually transferred his son to the Montclair Academy, which was as strict as Hackley was permissive. Douglas did well in school, and despite spending his early years on the frontier, he was not intimidated by his prep school classmates. He left Montclair Academy with the medal for the upper-school student with “the highest attainment in character, scholarship, deportment, and manliness.”19

  In 1912, Douglas entered Amherst College, where he majored in economics. Even as a college student, he shared his father’s and uncle’s conservative, laissez-faire philosophy. Amherst’s most prominent economics professors were progressives, who believed that government should rein in the excesses of capitalism, but they were not able to win over Douglas.20

  When the United States entered World War I, Douglas volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force in France. He saw extensive battle, and was seriously gassed at Meuse-Argonne. At the war’s end, he returned to Amherst to work as a teaching assistant and recover from his injuries. The following year, he went back to Hackley to teach chemistry and to be closer to a young woman he had met at an Amherst-Smith dance. Margaret “Peggy” Zinsser, who lived a few miles away in Hastings-on-Hudson, was the daughter of a wealthy German-American chemist who ran a factory that manufactured poison gas during the war. Douglas married Peggy in 1921 and brought his new bride back to Arizona.21

  The Douglases moved to Jerome, the rough copper mining town in which Lewis Douglas’s parents were now living, and Douglas went to work for his father’s mining company. At his father’s insistence, he entered the business at the bottom, starting out as a “mucker,” or underground shoveler. Douglas found that he had little interest in mining, and although he had great respect for his father, he could not work for him. When Democratic leaders approached him to run for the state legislature, he agreed to let his name be put in nomination. Douglas’s prominent family, war service, and wealth more than made up for the fact that he had only recently moved back to Arizona. He won the primary and went on to face the Republican incumbent. Douglas had the advantage of running during a recession, when the Republicans who were in control in both Washington and Phoenix were being blamed. He had to run on a ticket led by George W. P. Hunt, a progressive former governor whose pro-union stands and support for higher mining taxes had made him an enemy of the Douglas family. Douglas put aside his negative feelings for Hunt and campaigned for the full Democratic ticket. On November 7, 1922, Hunt was elected governor and Douglas won his race 686-396.22

  In the state legislature, Douglas focused on government economy. He chaired a committee that identified waste in Arizona’s highway department, an agency that was certainly in need of greater scrutiny. At the same time, Douglas began to exhibit the sort of callousness toward the disadvantaged that he would frequently be accused of later in his career. He campaigned against increases in veterans’ benefits, and opposed a bill that would have given farmers, who had been hit hard by a postwar drop in commodities prices, relief from taxes and more time to pay off delinquent taxes. The bill was, he insisted, “vicious in principle.” Douglas supported some progressive measures, and introduced an anti-Ku Klux Klan bill, but he carved out a generally conservative record that often put him at odds with his fellow Democrats. He opposed most workers’ rights bills, including one to ban company stores, where miners were often coerced into spending their paychecks on poor-quality, overpriced goods.23

  After two years in the legislature, Douglas briefly left politics to go into business with a friend. In 1926, he thought about challenging Governor Hunt, but instead ran for Arizona’s at-large congressional seat. The thirty-two-year-old Douglas tirelessly traveled the state making speeches, often with Peggy at his side. The five other candidates in the Democratic primary tried to paint Douglas as beholden to the copper bosses—one opponent called him the “young man with the copper collar.” But once again, Douglas’s family name, war record, financial advantages, and campaigning skills were a winning combination. Douglas captured the Democratic nomination, and carried the state in November by nearly two to one.24

  Douglas moved his family to Washington, where they settled into a house at 1805 Nineteenth Street, N.W., from which he often bicycled to the Capitol. In Congress, Douglas turned out to be as out of step with the Democratic Party as he had been in the Arizona legislature. After two years of being an unreliable vote, Douglas was chastised by John Nance Garner, the Democratic floor leader. Garner accused him of betraying his fellow Democrats, but Douglas was unapologetic. Every American has three loyalties, Douglas declared. “The first is to his country, the second to his state and the third is to his party,” he said. “Whenever these three conflict, one with the other, his sense of responsibility compels him to resolve the conflict in favor of the higher loyalty.” Despite his occasional run-ins with his own party, the affable Douglas was well liked by his congressional colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and he and Peggy quickly became fixtures on the Washington social circuit.25

  Douglas was not greatly affected by the Crash of 1929. Compared to stocks, which had been devastated, the Douglas family’s mining interests held up well. Many of Douglas’s constituents back in Arizona were not so fortunate. As hard times swept the country, his fiscal conservatism stood out more. Democrats in Congress were calling for the government to help the victims of the Depression, but Douglas remained committed to the laissez-faire philosophy he had been raised on. He voted in favor of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Hoover’s program for bailing out failing banks and troubled financial institutions, although he confided to his father that he regarded even the RF
C’s program of loans as “hazardous.” Douglas strenuously opposed measures to help struggling farmers, as he had in Arizona, and public works programs for the unemployed.26

  Douglas believed the way to combat the economic crisis was through a balanced budget, a stable dollar, and government policies that bolstered business confidence. He shared Wall Street’s view that taxing the wealthy was counterproductive because it discouraged investment. Douglas argued instead for raising sales taxes, the burden of which fell mainly on the poor and working class. As the Depression wore on, progressives in Congress, led by Senators Robert F. Wagner of New York and Robert La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin—the son of the legendary “Fighting Bob” La Follette—pushed for a large-scale public works program, beyond the modest ones Hoover had put in place. Douglas viewed this talk of an ambitious public works agenda with alarm. If the government increased public works spending without offsetting it with increased revenues, he insisted, the result would be the sort of runaway inflation that had struck Germany. Douglas lamented in a letter to a friend that if “we proceed on a theory which history has demonstrated to be unsound I do not know what the future is going to be.”27

  While progressives argued for increasing spending on the unemployed, Douglas became Congress’s most outspoken advocate of budget slashing. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, he was in a good position to argue for reductions in spending, but he was continually frustrated. Most members of Congress resisted making the sort of wholesale cuts he was calling for during a depression. They “will make reductions, but not enough,” Douglas complained in a letter to his father in early 1931. A year later, Douglas remained just as discouraged. “Nothing is being done and it appears that nothing will be done,” he wrote his father. “Inflation is gathering more weight and momentum.” James S. Douglas told his son the problem was “organized minorities” who had too much influence over government spending. The solution, he argued, was repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, so senators would once again be chosen by state legislatures, as they had been up until 1914. On the matter of spending, father and son agreed. “I do hope that the lame-duck session will balance the budget by a reduction of expenses and not by unwise new schemes for taxation,” the elder Douglas wrote.28

  In February 1932, Douglas took a new approach. He proposed establishing a bipartisan congressional economy committee, which would make recommendations for how federal spending could be cut. Douglas’s resolution passed, and he was appointed to a seat on the new committee. Although John McDuffie, a probusiness representative from Alabama, was chairman, Douglas was by far the most energetic member. He pored over ledger books and interviewed federal bureau chiefs about their budgets. When the committee released its report, it recommended more than $200 million in spending cuts, with a particular focus on veterans’ benefits and federal workers’ salaries.29

  Veterans’ benefits quickly became the main point of contention. The $1 billion a year that veterans received was more than one-quarter of the federal budget, and the government economy bloc in Congress argued that their benefits had become excessive. Veterans’ payments had grown substantially since the World War ended, and part of the reason was the government’s increasingly expansive view of who was eligible. Payments to disabled veterans, which had once been limited to injuries incurred during wartime, had been extended to those that were merely presumed to have arisen from service. Veterans’ groups insisted that some disabilities only manifested themselves in later years, and that the victims were still entitled to be compensated. The economy bloc maintained, however, that most of these payments were only being made to appease the veterans’ lobby. In early May, Douglas rose on the House floor to deliver a rousing call for adopting the Economy Committee’s recommendations. It pained him as a veteran to say it, he declared, but the nation could not afford the level of benefit it was paying to veterans. As long as he was in Congress, he said, he would “oppose every organized minority that attempts to impose on the United States a burden which cannot be justified.” Douglas’s colleagues gave him a standing ovation, but moments later they voted overwhelmingly against the proposed cuts. Arthur Krock argued in The New York Times that by rising and cheering House members were “paying a tribute to honesty and courage,” and by voting against the cuts they were recording their “belief that these attributes in a politician do not pay.” There was, however, a good deal of compassion mixed in with the calculation. Many members of Congress agreed with Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, who called the proposed cuts “a most cruel way of economizing.”30

  The economy drive was, at least for the moment, dead. With the 1932 election approaching, Douglas did his best to inject government economy into the presidential campaign. When the Times asked seven “outstanding Democrats” to write short essays about what their party’s platform should emphasize, his response stood out. While the others talked about public works or opening employment offices, Douglas said, “the most fundamental object to be sought is the establishment, maintenance and stability of the credit of the government.” This required, he insisted, cutting spending, especially on veterans’ benefits. “Grateful as a grateful people must be to those who carried arms in times of national emergency,” he said, “we do not believe that gratitude should be carried to the extent of destruction.”31

  In July, Douglas attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He hoped the nomination would go to a fellow conservative like Albert Ritchie, Maryland’s patrician governor, who opposed unemployment insurance and believed the answer to the Depression was to let “natural forces take their course, as free and untrammeled as possible.” When Roosevelt was chosen, Douglas told a friend glumly “we made a mistake.” Douglas was heartened, however, that the delegates supported a platform plank calling for a 25 percent cut in federal spending, and he rallied to his party’s nominee. Douglas, who was up for reelection, campaigned alongside Roosevelt in Arizona, introducing him to an enthusiastic crowd at a rodeo. Because of its temperate climate, Arizona had the highest concentration of veterans of any state. At Douglas’s public appearances, hostile crowds of veterans showed up to pelt him with oranges and eggs. Douglas narrowly prevailed in the Democratic primary, and won more decisively in the general election, swept along by Roosevelt, who carried Arizona by a wide margin. “Sincere congratulations on your tremendous victory,” Douglas wired Roosevelt. “[A]m starting east soon and will call upon you.”32

  Roosevelt was also eager for a meeting. During his Arizona campaign swing, on a stop at the ranch of Isabella Greenway, a Roosevelt family friend, Douglas and Roosevelt had spoken about government economy. The two men found that they agreed on a great deal. After the election, Roosevelt invited Douglas to Hyde Park to continue the conversation. Rexford Tugwell, who was meeting with Roosevelt at the same time, was wary of the young congressman. He wrote in his diary that he found Douglas “very intelligent: liked him a lot.” Tugwell was troubled, however, by the way Douglas “lingered fondly over the possibilities of” budget cutting and “the almost vindictive way he spoke of bureaucrats.” Tugwell tried to convince Roosevelt that Douglas cared more about government economy than about governing, but Roosevelt was clearly taken by his charming guest. Tugwell could see how easily Roosevelt took on Douglas’s skepticism about the role of government, and it concerned him. “The federal government has no business to be doing research, for instance,” Roosevelt told Tugwell, repeating something Douglas had said. “Enough of that is being done by the universities. I think we ought to cut it out altogether.” Tugwell was starting to worry that Roosevelt was too impressionable, and that he would simply accept the advice of whoever happened to be around him at the moment—including Douglas, “whose counsel was certainly the worst of all.”33

  If Tugwell was afraid Roosevelt would be too aggressive about budget cutting, Douglas left Hyde Park with the opposite worry. Roosevelt was “flirting with the idea of funding a public works program,” Douglas complained in a letter to his f
riend William Matthews, the editor of The Arizona Daily Star. There was “no difference between funding public works and funding a deficit,” Douglas insisted. After the Hyde Park visit, Roosevelt invited Douglas to work with two other fiscal conservatives, J. Swagar Sherley, a former congressman from Kentucky, and Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, on a plan to reduce spending. The assignment allayed some of Douglas’s concerns about Roosevelt’s budgetary intentions, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Douglas was soon reporting to his father that he had identified close to $900 million in cuts.34

  Rumors were circulating that Douglas would have a prominent position in the new administration. The Washington Daily News’s “People and Politics” column gave him a rave review: “He is handsome, wealthy, personable and intelligent; it seems that all the good fairies were present at his birth.” It also reported that Douglas’s “ability is said to have made a great impression on Mr. Roosevelt and his professorial friends.” There were rumors that Douglas was being considered for budget director, but the rumors had gotten ahead of the reality. Roosevelt was looking for a budget director who would help him carry out his campaign promise to reduce spending, but Douglas was not his first choice. Roosevelt initially offered the position to Sherley, who turned it down for health reasons. On Sherley’s recommendation, he turned to Douglas.35

  When Roosevelt called on February 22 to make the offer, Douglas was uncertain about whether to accept. He thought he might be able to do more by staying in Congress. Douglas was also wary of the attacks he would be subjected to if he did the kind of budget slashing he believed was necessary. It was one thing to promote economy legislation in Congress, and quite another to be the administrator wielding the budget axe. Roosevelt insisted to Douglas that no one else could do the job the way he could, and he offered Douglas Cabinet status, something no budget director had been given since the position was established in 1921. After extracting a promise that Roosevelt would back him up when he pushed for serious cuts in government spending, Douglas accepted. In the end, he decided the nation needed him. “In times like these, even more so than in times of war, individuals cease to be significant,” he wrote to his boyhood friend Arthur Curlee. “Only the common welfare is important.”36