Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  The Democratic campaign’s distinction between politics and policy was pure Roosevelt. He worked seamlessly with Howe, Farley, and Flynn on strategy and dealt directly with Moley’s team on substance. Campaign headquarters was at New York’s Biltmore Hotel; the brain trusters were billeted at the Roosevelt. “The relations between our organization and Moley’s brain trust were always pleasant,” Flynn recalled, “for we attempted to keep a strict differentiation between the job of organization and that of policy-making as reflected in the speeches the candidate was to make.”16 Brain truster Sam Rosenman saw it the same way. “We did not attempt to participate in their political activity, and they scrupulously refrained from interfering with us in any way.”17

  Campaign finances were a problem initially, but as Roosevelt developed momentum the money poured in. The Democrats, who began the race still in the hole after 1928, raised a total of $2.4 million versus the Republicans’ $2.6 million.18* Expenditures followed roughly the same ratio, with both parties spending slightly more than they took in. Radio was the largest cost item. An hour of prime-time broadcasting over the combined CBS and NBC networks in 1932 cost $35,000.19 The Republicans spent $551,972 for airtime; the Democrats $343,415. Reflecting the nation’s depressed economy, the 1932 campaign was the least expensive in the twentieth century. The final figures filed by each party indicate that the Democrats and Republicans spent an average of thirteen cents for each vote cast.20 In 2004, the two major parties spent $547,966,644 and 115 million voters went to the polls; that translates into $4.76 per vote.

  Events broke for Roosevelt. Throughout the late spring and early summer of 1932, unemployed veterans from World War I flocked to Washington to petition Congress for early payment of wartime bonuses that were due in 1945.21 They set up a shantytown on the banks of the Anacostia River in southeast Washington and, when space there ran out, occupied several vacant government buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. At its height, the Bonus Army, as it was called, numbered more than 20,000. When the Senate rejected their petition, most went home, but many others, homeless and jobless, remained in the capital.

  Washington officials coped as best they could. Police Chief Pelham Glassford did his utmost to provide tents and bedding for the veterans, furnished medicine, and assisted with food and sanitation. Maintaining order was never a problem. The men were camped illegally, but Glassford (who had been the youngest brigadier general with the AEF in France) chose to treat them simply as old soldiers who had fallen on hard times. He resisted efforts to use force to dislodge them.22

  Hoover did not share Glassford’s equanimity. The specter of Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace soon dominated administration thinking. The president refused to meet with the leaders of the Bonus Army, ordered the gates to the White House chained shut, and reinforced the guard to contain any demonstration. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, convinced that the nation faced a Communist uprising of vast proportions, lamented that the veterans had been so orderly and longed for an incident that might justify the imposition of martial law.23

  On July 28, under prodding from the White House, the District of Columbia commissioners ordered Glassford to clear the abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans were squatting. Brief resistance followed, shots rang out, two veterans were killed, and Hurley had his incident. The commissioners asked the White House for federal troops to maintain order. Hoover passed the request to Hurley, who ordered Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur to take the appropriate action.24 That was at 2:55 P.M. Within the hour troopers from the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, led by their forty-seven-year-old executive officer, Major George S. Patton, clattered across Memorial Bridge into Washington. They were joined by elements of the 16th Infantry from Fort Washington, supported by tanks and machine guns.25 MacArthur, who normally wore mufti to the War Department, changed into Class A uniform (replete with Sam Browne belt, medals, and decorations) and took command. At his side was his aide-de-camp and military secretary, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, also in Class A.*

  By five o’clock Army units had surrounded the buildings in downtown Washington occupied by the veterans. Cavalrymen drew sabers and cleared the streets while infantry with fixed bayonets emptied the buildings. The air was saturated with tear gas. Prodded by horses and tanks the veterans fell back to their encampment on the Anacostia Flats. As evening fell, the Army troops paused to allow women and children to be evacuated. At 10:14 P.M. MacArthur gave the order to advance. After a tear gas barrage the cavalry swept the camp, followed by infantrymen, who systematically set fire to the veterans’ tents and shanties lest anyone return. Coughing, choking, and vomiting, the veterans and their families fled up Good Hope Road into Maryland and safety. “Had President Hoover not acted when he did,” said MacArthur at a War Department news conference afterward, “he would have been faced with a very serious situation.” The “mob,” as MacArthur saw it, was animated by the “essence of revolution.”26

  The nation’s press bannered the eviction across its front pages. A few, citing Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman strike in 1895, praised Hoover for acting decisively; most lambasted the administration for excessive force. “What a pitiful spectacle,” said the normally Republican Washington Daily News. “The mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”27 The New York Times devoted its first three pages to the coverage, including a full page of photographs. In the months ahead, the torching of the veterans’ camp on the Anacostia Flats came to symbolize the insensitivity of the Hoover administration to the plight of the unemployed.

  Rexford Tugwell, who was in Albany on a speechwriting chore, recalls entering FDR’s bedroom at breakfast and finding the morning newspapers spread all around. Pointing to the pictures in the Times, Roosevelt said they were “scenes from a nightmare.” He pointed to soldiers hauling resisters, still weeping from tear gas, through the wreckage to police wagons, while women and children, incredibly disheveled and weary, waited for some sort of rescue.

  Roosevelt told Tugwell he regretted having recommended Hoover for president in 1920. “There is nothing inside the man but jelly; maybe there never had been anything.” FDR said he might feel sorry for Hoover if he didn’t feel sorrier for the people who had been burned out, eleven thousand of them, according to the Times. “They must be camping right now alongside the roads out of Washington. And some of them have families. It is a wonder there isn’t more resentment, more radicalism, when people are treated that way.”

  “What Hoover should have done,” Roosevelt said, “was to meet with the leaders of the Bonus Army when they asked for an interview. When two hundred or so marched up to the White House, Hoover should have sent out coffee and sandwiches and asked a delegation in. Instead, he let Pat Hurley and Doug MacArthur do their thing.” “MacArthur,” said FDR, “has just prevented Hoover’s reelection.”28

  At lunch that day Roosevelt took a phone call from Huey Long, who berated FDR for playing up to the party’s right wing. Roosevelt placated the Kingfish as best he could and promised to bring him into the campaign. “Keep your shirt on. It’ll be all right.” When he hung up, FDR turned to Tugwell.

  “You know, that’s the second most dangerous man in this country. Huey’s a whiz on the radio. He screams at people and they love it. He makes them think they belong to some kind of church. He knows there is a promised land and he’ll lead ’em to it.”*

  Tugwell could not resist. “You said Huey was the second most dangerous person.”

  “You heard right,” smiled Roosevelt. “Huey is only second. The first is Douglas MacArthur. You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home.”29

  Roosevelt approached the cam
paign with his usual optimism, and his enthusiasm was contagious. “We had one tremendous advantage, even at the very beginning of the 1932 campaign,” wrote Farley. “This was the genuine conviction shared by Governor Roosevelt himself and those connected with him that his election to the Presidency was a foregone conclusion.”30 Farley said FDR had an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important. “He was one of the most alive men I have ever met. He never gave me the impression he was tired or bored. His ability to discuss political issues in short, simple sentences made a powerful impression. There was a touch of destiny about the man. He would have been a great actor.”31

  By contrast, Hoover was pessimistic and bitter. He exuded defeat. Not hangdog, whipped-puppy defeat but the vanquishment of the proud, done in by hubris and conceit. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson deplored Hoover’s preference “for seeing the dark side first.” To be in the same room with the president, said Stimson, “was like sitting in a bath of ink.”32 Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, observed that “if you put a rose in Hoover’s hand it would wilt.”33

  When Hoover asked Stimson to take to the hustings and attack FDR, the secretary of state declined. Stimson admired Hoover and believed his great intellectual gifts were not sufficiently appreciated. But he thought even more strongly that foreign affairs should be above partisan politics. “To use the great office of Secretary of State to launch a purely personal attack on Roosevelt is quite inconsistent with my dignity and that of the office,” wrote Stimson. “Two years ago I was dragged into an attack on Roosevelt in the [New York gubernatorial] campaign, and I have regretted it ever since.”34

  Colonel Stimson (as he liked to be called35) went not to Groton and Harvard but to Andover and Yale. Yet Endicott Peabody would have given him high marks for character. It is not surprising that he was venerated by a younger generation looking for heroes: men as varied as McGeorge Bundy, Lucius D. Clay, and George Herbert Walker Bush. Hoover never forgave Stimson for not participating in the campaign.36 Roosevelt never forgot. When war clouds gathered in 1940 and bipartisanship became essential, FDR reached out to Stimson and asked him to become secretary of war for a second time.*

  As the campaign progressed, Roosevelt demonstrated an uncanny ability to say the right thing at the right time to the right audience. Hoover, in a rare turn of phrase, called him “a chameleon on Scotch plaid.”37 Roosevelt traveled more than thirteen thousand miles, speaking to ever-increasing crowds. The rhetorical high point occurred in Baltimore on October 25, when Roosevelt castigated the Four Horsemen of the Republican apocalypse: Destruction, Delay, Deceit, and Despair.38

  Hoover’s voice found little resonance. He was so unpopular that it was unsafe for him to appear in public without heavy police escort.39 Isolated and out of touch, he came across as a master of malapropism. “Nobody is actually starving,” he told the Washington journalist Raymond Clapper. “The hobos, for example, are better fed than they have ever been.”40 It was difficult to credit a candidate who attributed the high unemployment rate to the fact that “many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”41 Or who asserted, as Hoover did on October 31 at Madison Square Garden, that if the sky-high rates of the Smoot-Hawley tariff were reduced, “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of a million farms. Their churches and school houses will decay.”42

  The message of fear was all that remained. As Hoover would have it, Roosevelt was the precursor of revolution. Speaking in Saint Paul three days before the election, an exhausted Hoover equated the Democratic party with “the same philosophy of government which has poisoned all of Europe … the fumes of the witch’s cauldron which boiled in Russia.” He accused the Democrats of being “the party of the mob.” When he added, “Thank God, we still have a government in Washington that knows how to deal with the mob,” an angry murmur rolled through the audience.43 Ashen and shaken, Hoover swayed on the platform. “Why don’t they make him quit?” a prominent Republican asked White House security chief, Colonel E. W. Starling. “He’s not doing himself or the party any good.”44

  On election day FDR and Eleanor voted at Hyde Park and then went into the city, where Eleanor hosted a buffet supper for family and friends at East Sixty-fifth Street. Early in the evening Sam Rosenman noticed two unidentified men in dark suits enter the house unobtrusively and take up positions near Roosevelt. When Rosenman inquired, he was told they were from the Secret Service.45

  The outcome was never in doubt. The turnout, almost 40 million, was the greatest in American history. The GOP suffered a crushing defeat. Roosevelt received 22,825,016 votes to Hoover’s 15,758,397 and carried forty-two states with 472 electors.46 The result was as much a repudiation of Hoover as it was a triumph for FDR. The president received 6 million fewer votes than he had in 1928 and carried only six states, all in the Northeast. The Democrats gained an unprecedented ninety seats in the House to give them a virtual 3-to-1 majority (310–117) and won control of the Senate, 60–36.

  At campaign headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel the celebration began early. Hoover, at his home in Palo Alto, conceded shortly after midnight. After receiving Hoover’s message Roosevelt made his way to the Biltmore’s grand ballroom, where he spoke briefly to hundreds of jubilant campaign workers. He singled out Louis Howe and James Farley as the “two people in the United States, more than anybody else, who are responsible for this great victory.”47

  Howe did not hear FDR’s tribute. Unwilling to be seen in public on election night, he tabulated the results at his hideaway office on Madison Avenue. Eleanor and Farley joined him shortly after eleven, only to find him, in Farley’s words, poring over the returns “like a miser inspecting his gold.” They tried to persuade him to come back to the main celebration at the Biltmore, but he declined. He extracted an ancient bottle of Madeira from his desk that he had put away after the fight against Blue-eyed Billy Sheehan in 1911. It was not to be opened until FDR was elected president. Carefully Howe filled the glasses and raised his own: “To the next President of the United States.”48 At the age of fifty, Franklin Roosevelt had become president. He would remain president for the remainder of his life.

  Eleanor, who did not work directly in the presidential campaign, continued to have mixed feelings about FDR’s election:

  I was happy for my husband, of course, because I knew that in many ways it would make up for the blow that fate had dealt him when he was stricken with infantile paralysis; and I had implicit confidence in his ability to help the country in crisis.… But for myself, I was probably more deeply troubled than even [Chicago Tribune reporter] John Boettiger realized.* As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own. I knew what traditionally should lie before me; I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect. By earning my own money, I had recently enjoyed a certain amount of financial independence, and had been able to do things in which I was personally interested. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night, and the next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.49

  Roosevelt was elected on November 8. Inauguration was not until March 4.* That four-month hiatus, coinciding with the fourth winter of the Depression, proved the most harrowing in American memory. Three years of hard times had cut national income in half. Five thousand bank failures had wiped out 9 million savings accounts. By the end of 1932, 15 million workers, one out of every three, had lost their jobs. U.S. Steel’s payroll of full-time workers fell from 225,000 in 1929 to zero in early 1933.50 When the Soviet Union’s trade office in New York issued a call for six thousand skilled workers to go to Russia, more than one hundred thousand applied. “No one can live and work in New York this winter,” noted Tugwell, “without a profound sense of uneasiness. Never in modern times has there been so widespread unemployme
nt and such moving distress from sheer hunger and cold.”51 From Chicago, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote, “There is not a garbage dump in the city which is not diligently haunted by the hungry.”52

  The situation in the countryside was equally bad. Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell—rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.53

  Children went hungry in every corner of the land. In the coal-mining areas of West Virginia and Kentucky, more than 90 percent of the inhabitants were suffering from malnutrition. In the nation’s major cities, only one out of four unemployed workers was receiving any relief whatever. In Philadelphia, those fortunate enough to be on the relief rolls received $4.23 per week for a family of four. Many state and local governments, including the city of Chicago, ran out of money to pay their teachers. In Alabama, 81 percent of the children in rural areas went schoolless. Georgia closed more than a thousand schools with a combined enrollment of more than 170,000.54 Homeowners were being foreclosed at a rate of well over one thousand a day. Farmers lost their land because they could not pay taxes or meet mortgage payments. On a single day in April 1932, one fourth of the entire state of Mississippi went under the hammer of auctioneers at foreclosure sales.55