by Adam Cohen
Getting Congress to approve deep cuts in the federal budget in the middle of a depression was an impressive political victory for Roosevelt. It was also a triumph for Douglas. Roosevelt’s admiration for his charismatic young budget director had reached new heights. In early April, Roosevelt told Colonel Edward M. House, a Democratic Party elder statesman, that Douglas was “in many ways the greatest ‘find’ of the administration.” In a letter to his father, Douglas expressed amazement at his new life. “It is so queer to telephone at any hour to a President, to go into his bedroom at one in the morning, in fact to have entree at any time and to be writing a Presidential message,” he wrote. “How strange,” he marveled, “for an insignificant young man from Arizona to be in such a position.”54
Douglas’s future looked bright. Roosevelt told Moley that one day Douglas would make “an excellent candidate for President.” It was the only time, Moley said, that he had ever heard Roosevelt mention a possible successor.
Douglas’s triumph on the Economy Act did not alleviate his anxieties about fiscal matters. After the bill passed, he wrote to an officer of the National Economy League that “there are a great many other items in the national budget that need tending to.” He was concerned not only about current spending, but about the new programs his progressive colleagues were working on to help the unemployed. The Economy Act, however, finally gave Douglas the power he had long sought to fight back against the tide of government spending. On March 31, he proposed new regulations governing veterans’ benefits. The new law gave the president considerable discretion about how much to cut, and many people had urged Douglas to be restrained, given the hard economic times. Douglas, however, did not hold back. He ordered all of the “presumptive” cases off the rolls, even though many veterans with legitimate service injuries would be affected. He also substantially cut the benefits of veterans whose injuries had occurred during wartime. The regulations called for closing Veterans Administration regional offices, and suggested that veterans’ hospitals would also be shut down.55
Members of Congress complained that they felt betrayed. “We who voted for the Economy Act were assured that it would be justly and liberally applied,” Park Trammell, a Democratic senator from Florida, protested. Trammell told of receiving a letter from a veteran who said he had only two comrades who could confirm when his injury had occurred, “one of whom is dead and the location of the other of whom he did not know.” There were, Trammel said, many similar letters in his files. Veterans also responded with outrage. Douglas’s secretary dutifully filed away the hate mail that poured into his office. One veteran sent a brief news item about a Spanish-American War veteran from Toledo, Ohio, who hanged himself after his pension was cut off. At the bottom, the letter writer had scribbled, “Gloat, you murderer, gloat.” Another clipping, of an Arkansas veteran who shot himself in the heart, came with the handwritten message: “This is the 10th suicide of a Spanish War veteran. What a glorious achievement.” Douglas was not deterred. He expected to be “much more unpopular by the expiration of two or three months than any other man that you can think of,” he told his friend John Gaus, a University of Wisconsin political science professor. “Incidentally, I do not exclude Herbert Hoover.”56
With the passage of the Economy Act, the administration had gotten off to an unexpected start. The first two laws Roosevelt presented to Congress had pleased the nation’s bankers and business leaders, but despite his campaign-trail promise to govern on behalf of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” he had still done nothing for the millions of victims of the Depression. That, however, would soon change. While Douglas was slashing spending, impoverished farmers, the unemployed, and ordinary workers would not be ignored much longer. The Hundred Days was about to head in a very different direction. 57
CHAPTER FOUR
“Good Farming; Clear Thinking; Right Living”
Henry Wallace had arrived at the Department of Agriculture on Monday, March 6, ready to get to work. The department was familiar terrain for Wallace, who had visited a decade earlier, when his father was secretary of agriculture. Wallace had renewed his acquaintance with the department more recently, the Friday before the inauguration, when he had stopped by and met with Arthur Hyde, the departing secretary, and introduced himself to the bureau chiefs. Wallace settled into the secretary’s imposing office, which looked out over the Mall and the Washington Monument, and began to make the room his own. He filled the table behind his desk with notebooks containing commodity price calculations that he had been compiling since his midtwenties, and he had an oil portrait of his father taken from a hallway and hung on one of the walls.1
Despite his inherited connection to the position, Wallace was an unlikely person to head up a department of over forty thousand people. He had never run anything larger than Wallaces’ Farmer, his family’s farm newspaper back in Iowa. At forty-four, Wallace was the youngest member of the new Cabinet, and he looked it. His wiry build, boyish face, and unruly shock of reddish-brown hair gave him, in the words of one journalist, the look of a “perennial farm boy.” Before the inauguration, Wallace had gone shopping for a new wardrobe at a Fifth Avenue store with Rexford Tugwell, an Ivy League professor with cosmopolitan tastes. The salesman, Tugwell later recalled, could hardly believe that his oddly clothed customer was about to join the president’s Cabinet. With Tugwell’s help, Wallace bought striped trousers and other fancy garb to wear in Washington, but the effect would be negligible. Wallace’s clothing “never fit very well to begin with,” Elks magazine observed in a profile, “and after a week or so, they look as if they had been slept in, and a hard restless night at that.” Old Washington hands considered Wallace’s appearance out of place for someone of his lofty status. “I could not but note that the shoes he wore were still the same as those worn by farmers in small towns in Iowa and that his hair was cut as the barbers in these towns cut hair,” a State Department official recalled of their first meeting. Life magazine noted that Wallace’s manner was “deceptively informal,” and that he “sat during important meetings with his feet propped on the rim of his wastebasket.”2
Wallace was taking over the Agriculture Department at a time when the state of the farm economy was grave. Commodity prices had fallen 50 percent from their prewar levels. Farm foreclosures were occurring at a record pace. Almost eight in one hundred farms were in foreclosure, compared to just five a year earlier. Farm communities were emptying out, as family farmers and sharecroppers abandoned the land and headed to places like California and Florida, in a desperate search for better conditions. Farmers who stayed on the land were responding to their bleak circumstances with extreme politics and lawlessness. In January, in Pilger, Nebraska, a crowd of hundreds of farmers had shown up to disrupt a foreclosure sale. At a foreclosure sale the same month in Le Mars, Iowa, a crowd had dragged a lawyer from New York Life Insurance Company down the courthouse steps. His life in danger, the lawyer had telegraphed his employer and asked for permission to bid the full amount the farmer was asking. Farmers were becoming more radicalized by the day. Edward O’Neal, president of the Farm Bureau Federation, warned Congress that “unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the country within less than twelve months.”3
Wallace was eager to begin helping these desperate farmers, but he was not sure how to get started. “What sort of a job is this, anyway?” he asked in his first few days. “All I do except talk to people is sit here and sign my name.” His first important decision was naming Tugwell assistant secretary. There was an element of gratitude in the choice of Tugwell, who had energetically promoted Wallace for the position of agriculture secretary, but it was also an obvious choice. The brilliant and charismatic Tugwell was a distinguished economics professor with a deep knowledge of agriculture, who had played a large role in the Brain Trust days of shaping Roosevelt’s thinking on the subject. Tugwell’s strengths neatly complemented his new boss’s. Wallace was a farm leader, wi
th decades-old friendships spread across the Farm Belt. Tugwell was a New York academic, with extensive contacts on the East Coast. Tugwell, a much-published economic theorist, had thought about agriculture in ways Wallace had not. In 1927, he had traveled to the Soviet Union with a trade union delegation and had seen collective planning up close. He had come back with ideas about how American agriculture could be improved through greater government intervention. Tugwell’s views would make him a favorite target of Roosevelt’s critics, who dubbed him the “Lenin of the New Deal,” and “Rex the Red.” The attacks, however, were misplaced. “Liberals would like to rebuild the station while the trains are running,” Tugwell explained. “Radicals prefer to blow up the station and forgo service until the new structure is built.” Tugwell was not a radical. He was a liberal who tirelessly preached reform. The journalist Ernest K. Lindley regarded Tugwell as “the philosopher, the sociologist, and the prophet of the Roosevelt Revolution, as well as one of its boldest practitioners.”4
In the first few days of the administration, it was hard to get Roosevelt’s attention for anything but banking and budget cutting. Once the Emergency Banking Act and the Economy Act were under way, however, Wallace saw an opening. He made an appointment to drop by the White House to see Roosevelt on the evening of March 8. Wallace brought along Tugwell, who knew the president better than he did. The scene in the White House was chaotic, with crowds of supplicants and reporters milling around. Wallace and Tugwell pushed their way through. In a brisk meeting, Wallace proposed quickly drafting a major agricultural bill, so they could start getting help out to the Farm Belt. Roosevelt agreed right away. Wallace’s timing had turned out to be excellent. It was already clear that Congress was moving rapidly on Roosevelt’s first two bills, and he wanted to introduce more.5
Roosevelt had many reasons for wanting act quickly on agriculture. He had a strong affinity for farmers, and based on his agricultural work at Hyde Park, considered himself one. Farmers had also always been an important but elusive part of his political base. That had been true in his first run for office, when he was elected to the legislature from a Republican district in large part by persuading farmers to vote for him. “You have no notion what early success means to a young politician,” Moley said of his boss’s affinity for farm issues. Republican-leaning farmers had come through for Roosevelt in the 1932 election, and he wanted to keep them in the Democratic column. And Roosevelt believed that reviving agriculture, which employed more than 20 percent of the workforce, was necessary to get the larger economy moving again. There were also agricultural reasons for acting quickly. The spring planting schedule was fast approaching. If Roosevelt delayed any longer, the impact of his agriculture program would be put off by a full year. Not least, there was the rising tide of radicalism. The talk of imminent revolution coming out of the Farm Belt was beginning to sound all too real.6
In the White House meeting, Wallace was hoping to get guidance about what kind of farm bill Roosevelt was looking for. Roosevelt’s instructions were simple: he wanted a bill the farmers themselves would support. That came as no surprise to Tugwell, who had observed weeks earlier in his diary that Roosevelt did not have “much judgment of a positive sort” about what approach he wanted to take, but was inclined to follow “the lead of the farm leaders.” Roosevelt told Wallace to summon farm leaders to Washington for a meeting at which he would be able to poll them about their preferences and lock in their support. Roosevelt turned out to be in an even greater hurry than Wallace. When Wallace suggested holding the farmers’ meeting on March thirteenth, Roosevelt said it should be on Friday the tenth, just two days later. In the meantime, he warned Wallace and Tugwell to watch out for the lobbyists who would descend. “You can send them over here if they give you too much trouble,” he said.7
Roosevelt wanted what the farmers wanted, but it was not clear what that was. Many farmers now supported “domestic allotment,” the approach Wallace and Tugwell favored, which called for increasing agricultural prices by paying farmers to grow less. But there was significant opposition to domestic allotment across the spectrum of farm opinion. Conservative elements in the farm community, including equipment makers and mill owners, still favored McNary-Haugenism, a 1920s farm movement that called for the government to boost prices by dumping crops overseas. At the other extreme, farm radicals were demanding “cost of production,” government price supports that would guarantee farmers a healthy profit no matter what price their crops sold for. To get a farm bill enacted into law, Wallace would have to forge a consensus among these and other fragmented farm constituencies, and then work with Roosevelt to maneuver the bill through Congress. That left the fate of a large swath of the nation in the hands of a remarkable scientist, journalist, and farmer the public knew little about.8
Henry A. Wallace, who had been born in a farmhouse in Adair County, Iowa, on October 7, 1888, was the third in a line of extraordinary Henry Wallaces. The first, known as “Uncle Henry,” had been born in Pennsylvania, the son of a Scots-Irish immigrant. Intent from a young age on becoming a minister, he decided at age eighteen to hop a railroad and head west. Uncle Henry, who was described by an Iowa reporter as “tall, bearded, with strong even features, and the glint of a Messiah in his eyes,” attended seminary in Illinois. Afterward, he became pastor of Presbyterian congregations on opposite sides of the Mississippi, one in Rock Island, Illinois, the other in Davenport, Iowa. When he came down with tubercular symptoms, Uncle Henry moved his wife and five children to the healthier environment of the Iowa countryside. He settled in Westminster, in Adair County, took up farming, and gradually recovered. Uncle Henry began writing for local newspapers. He proved to be a naturally gifted polemicist, railing against political machines and railroad monopolies. But after a series of run-ins with newspaper editors and owners who objected to his views, he lost his journalistic platforms.9
Uncle Henry’s oldest son, Henry Caldwell Wallace, was responsible for establishing the family newspaper. Harry Wallace, as he was known, had been born in Rock Island and grew up on the Adair County farm. He attended Iowa State, and after two years married a fellow student, May Brodhead, an Easterner from an old New England family who had been sent to live with an aunt in Iowa. When one of his father’s tenant farmers left, Harry took over the land. He farmed it for the next five years, while May gave birth to two children, Henry A. Wallace and Annabelle. Harry’s farming years coincided with a deep agricultural recession. Prices were so low, The Literary Digest noted, that “all around him farmers were working themselves into premature graves.” Harry sold his farm equipment and returned to Iowa State to get his degree. On the recommendation of “Tama” Jim Wilson, a prominent faculty member and friend of his father, Harry was hired as an assistant professor and put in charge of the Dairy Department. While teaching, Harry bought a small, semimonthly newspaper with a friend. He soon began working at the paper full-time. With help from his father and his brother John, Harry bought out his friend’s stake and changed the paper’s name to Wallaces’ Farmer. He offered his father the job of editor and stayed on as assistant editor.10
The tone that Wallaces’ Farmer strove for was expressed in its motto: “Good Farming; Clear Thinking; Right Living.” The editorial content was a mix of opinion on issues like tariffs, practical advice for farmers, and old-time religion. Wallaces’ Farmer managed the neat trick, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald once observed, of “being respected for the soundness of its views on infant damnation and on hog cholera.” Early on, the newspaper promised that its orientation would be populist. Its voice “would not be that of a corporation without conscience or soul, but of a living man responsible at once to public opinion and that higher law by which men are judged.” Uncle Henry, who still thought of himself as a Presbyterian minister, regarded Wallaces’ Farmer as his pulpit. His column, “Uncle Henry’s Sabbath School Lesson,” quickly emerged as the paper’s most popular feature.11
Uncle Henry became a powerful force in Farm Belt p
olitics just as William Jennings Bryan was making his first run for president. Bryan was an agrarian populist who championed farmers and insisted that the gold standard was at the root of their troubles. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country,” Bryan told the 1896 Democratic National Convention. He ended his address with one of the most famous declarations in American politics: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Much of the Farm Belt was swept up in Bryan’s fiery rhetoric. Farmers were convinced that abandoning the gold standard, which would pave the way for inflation, was their best hope of getting out from under their crushing debt loads, since it would allow them to pay off their mortgages with cheaper dollars. Unlike many of his neighbors, Uncle Henry considered inflation a threat to national prosperity, more damaging in the long run to the Farm Belt than the gold standard. Uncle Henry made his views, and his opposition to Bryan, known in the pages of the family newspaper. When William McKinley defeated Bryan, Uncle Henry was a leading contender for secretary of agriculture, but he did not want the job. He threw his support behind “Tama” Jim Wilson, who served as agriculture secretary under McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. Uncle Henry was seated in church in 1916 when he died suddenly and, as Wallaces’ Farmer put it, “in a moment the Grim Reaper had gathered in the richest sheaf in the harvest.”12
With Uncle Henry’s death, the editorship of Wallaces’ Farmer passed to Harry. Like his father, he was a loyal Republican. Henry A. Wallace’s first political memory was hearing his father say after the 1892 presidential election that hard times were coming because a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, had won. As editor, Harry fiercely championed farmers’ interests. He clashed over farm prices with Herbert Hoover, who was serving as the head of the U.S. Food Administration under President Wilson. In a series of editorials, Harry accused Hoover of trying to “bamboozle” farmers by promising them one price for hogs and giving them less when the hogs were actually brought to market. Henry Wallace was not involved in his father’s feud, but it left a strong impression on him. He took away from it, an editor at the paper said, “a profound distrust of the Hoover type of mind.”13