The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  MacArthur, overwrought, apologized, offered his resignation as chief of staff, rushed outside, and vomited on the White House steps.34

  Openly opposing Wall Street and the military made for smart politics in 1930s America, and Roosevelt was nothing if not an astute politician. The 1934 midterm elections showed how far to the left the country had moved. In fact, much of the electorate was to the left of the New Deal. In a remarkable break with normal voting patterns, the party in power drubbed the opposition. The Democrats won twenty-six of thirty-five Senate races, giving them a 69–25 advantage over Republicans in the upper chamber, with one seat being held by a Progressive and one by a Farmer-Laborite. Their lead in the House jumped to 322–103, with seven Progressives and three Farmer-Laborites. The New York Times called it “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics[, giving] the President a clear mandate . . . and . . . literally destroy[ing] the right wing of the Republican party.”35

  Viewing the election as a wake-up call for Republicans, Idaho Republican Senator William Borah told reporters that “unless the Republican party is delivered from its reactionary leadership and reorganized in accordance with its one-time liberal principles it will die like the Whig party of sheer political cowardice.” He criticized his party’s leadership for opposing the New Deal “without offering a program of their own in place of it.” Borah complained that when Republicans around the country ask their leaders for an alternative to the New Deal, “they are offered the Constitution. But people can’t eat the Constitution.”36

  Radical ideas were in the air. Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, almost won election as governor of California with a campaign called “End Poverty in California” that proposed handing uncultivated farms to farmers and idle factories to workers for productive use. California physician Francis Townsend’s call for giving people over age sixty $200 a month to stimulate the economy won numerous adherents. And Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” program, with its “soak-the-rich” tax plan, offered another vision for redistribution of wealth and a more just and egalitarian society.

  The Soviet Union, which would later become such an albatross around the necks of American leftists when the almost unfathomable depths of Stalinist cruelty became known, actually strengthened the appeal of left-wing reform in the early 1930s. Soviet communism seemed to be producing a dynamic egalitarian society that offered a viable alternative to the moribund capitalist economic order. Soviet leaders sparked the interest of American intellectuals in 1928 by announcing their first Five-Year Plan, which promised a rational, centralized economy that would create abundance by unleashing science and technology. Socialists and progressives had long favored intelligent planning over a seemingly anarchic system in which individual capitalists made decisions based on maximizing profits. The concept of planning had inspired works as disparate as Edward Bellamy’s 1888 socialist masterpiece Looking Backward and Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift or Mastery, the bible of the Progressive movement. Many intellectuals agreed with editor of The Nation Oswald Garrison Villard, who, in late 1929, described the Soviet Union as “the greatest human experiment ever undertaken.”37

  The results seemed to justify that description. While the United States and the rest of the capitalist world plunged deeper into depression, the Soviet economy appeared to be booming. In early 1931, the Christian Science Monitor reported that not only was the Soviet Union the only country to have escaped the Depression, its industrial production had jumped an astronomical 25 percent the previous year. In late 1931, The Nation’s Moscow correspondent described the Soviet frontier as “a charmed circle which the world economic crisis cannot cross. . . . While banks crash . . . abroad, the Soviet Union continues in an orgy of construction and national development.”38 The Nation could be dismissed as a liberal publication, but similar reports in Barron’s, Business Week, and the New York Times were harder to disregard. As the U.S. unemployment rate approached 25 percent, a Times report that the Soviet Union intended to hire foreign workers caused desperate jobless Americans to stampede Soviet offices in the United States. Despite official Soviet disclaimers, Business Week reported that the Soviets planned to import 6,000 Americans and that 100,000 had applied. Soviet society seemed to be undergoing an incredible transformation from agrarian backwardness to industrial modernization before people’s eyes.39

  Many American intellectuals had also begun to see the Soviet Union as a place of intellectual, artistic, and scientific vibrancy compared with the United States’ stultifying bourgeois culture. In 1931, economist Stuart Chase wrote, “For Russians the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging.” The next year, he asked, “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”40 New Republic literary editor Edmund Wilson noted that when visiting the Soviet Union, he felt as if he were “at the moral top of the universe where the light never really goes out.” Socialized medicine for all, remarkable scientific breakthroughs, dazzling economic growth—Soviet progress, many Americans believed, was vastly eclipsing that of its economically struggling capitalist competitors.41

  Indications of Soviet success added enormously to the appeal of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) at a time when so many Americans were looking for alternatives. An invigorated Communist Party would contribute significantly to the growth of 1930s radicalism, but it was only one piece in a much larger puzzle. Many groups, some having nothing to do with the CP, became radicalized during this decade. Radicalization proceeded at different paces for different groups. The first to respond were the unemployed. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated for jobs and relief all over the country on March 6, 1930. Intellectuals followed suit, rejecting the shallow materialism of American life in the 1920s and the anti-intellectualism that had driven so many writers and artists to Europe for cultural salvation. Edmund Wilson captured this perfectly when he wrote in 1932:

  to the writers and artists of my generation who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism . . . these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden and unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.42

  The upsurge among workers started in 1933, as the economy showed early signs of recovery, and continued throughout the decade. The year 1934 saw major strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as a national textile strike as workers turned to Musteites, Trotskyists, and Communists for leadership. Unemployed Councils and Unemployed Leagues brought in jobless workers to support the strikes rather than take jobs as strikebreakers. With broad support from all sectors of the working class, these strikes often spread to other industries, even shutting down entire cities, as happened in San Francisco. The Los Angeles Times reported, “The situation in San Francisco is not correctly described by the phrase ‘general strike.’ What is actually in progress there is an insurrection, a Communist-inspired and led revolt against organized government.”43 The Portland Oregonian called for presidential intervention: “San Francisco, paralyzed, is in the throes of violent insurrection. Portland faces the practical certainty of a general strike within a few days that will similarly paralyze this city.” The San Francisco Chronicle complained, “The radicals have wanted no settlement. What they want is revolution.”44

  Unemployed march, Camden, New Jersey. The year 1934 saw major strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, as well as a national textile strike, as workers turned to radical groups for leadership. Unemployed workers supported the strikers rather than take jobs as strikebreakers.

  This was a welcome change after thirteen years in which the unions had taken a pounding and suffered sharp declines in membership. Aided by New Deal legislation that helped level the playing field between management and labor, the labor movement even began to penetrate heavy industry with the formation o
f the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935. Communists played a major role in the organizing. Corporate resistance often resulted in violent and bloody confrontations. But militant workers adopted new tactics like sit-down strikes that proved particularly effective in the right circumstances.

  Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri. During the Depression, African Americans’ economic hardship was exacerbated by racism and discrimination.

  African Americans’ economic hardship was exacerbated by racism and discrimination. Black unemployment skyrocketed as the Depression effectively eliminated an entire category of “Negro jobs.” Urban black unemployment reached over 50 percent in the South in 1932. The North was not much better; in Philadelphia, black unemployment topped 56 percent. Many blacks, struggling for both jobs and civil rights, thought the legalistic approach of the NAACP was too slow given the tenor of the times and turned instead to the CP and its front organizations. Though the national party leaders may have taken their marching orders from Moscow, that information often did not trickle down to the grassroots level.

  And scientists, who were among the most conservative groups in the country at the start of the decade—in 1933, sociologist Read Bain called them “the worst citizens of the Republic” because of their apathy and social irresponsibility—had been transformed into one of the most radical by decade’s end, standing in the forefront of the antifascist movement and questioning whether capitalism thwarted the socially beneficial application of science and technology.45 In the December 1938 election for president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest body of scientists, the five leading vote getters were leaders of the left-wing science and society movement and the winner, renowned Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, was one of the most openly left-wing scientific activists in the country.46

  During those turbulent years, many liberals began calling themselves socialists or radicals. Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson proclaimed, “I am not a liberal. . . . I am a radical.”47 For many on the left, even liberalism connoted a moderation that bordered on cowardice. Lillian Symes wrote in The Nation in 1934, “No worse insult [than being called a liberal] could be hurled at anyone’s mentality at a time like this.”48 Many felt the same way about joining the Socialists when the Communist Party seemed to offer a viable and more radical alternative. John Dos Passos explained his support of the Communists in 1932: “Becoming a Socialist right now would have just the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near beer.”49

  Ironically, during the 1935–39 Popular Front period, when the Communists garnered their greatest support, Norman Thomas’s Socialists were often to the left of the Communists, who deliberately toned down their rhetoric in hope of building a broad coalition against fascism. Hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the Communist Party or worked with its affiliated organizations. Among them were many of the country’s best writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, James Farrell, Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Henry Roth, Lillian Hellman, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, William Carlos Williams, Nelson Algren, Nathanael West, and Archibald MacLeish.

  But as the 1930s advanced, Western intellectuals’ early enthusiasm for Soviet communism began to wane. Encircled by hostile capitalist nations and fearing a new war, Josef Stalin embarked upon a policy of breakneck industrialization that would claim many victims. Reports filtered out of the Soviet Union of famines and starvation, political trials and repression, ham-fisted bureaucracy, secret police, brutal prisons, and ideological orthodoxy. Kulaks were slaughtered for resisting forced collectivization of agriculture. More than 13 million people died under Stalin’s despotic rule. Organized religion was stifled. Military leaders were purged.50 And even those who refused to believe the horrific reports filtering out of the Soviet Union were shocked by Stalin’s apparent treachery in concluding the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1939. Communists left the party in droves at that point, but diehards blamed Stalin’s about-face on Western capitalist nations’ refusal to assist the Soviet Union in stopping Hitler despite Stalin’s persistent calls for collective defense.

  The combination of a left-leaning Congress, an energized, progressive populace, and a responsive and caring president made possible the greatest period of social experimentation in U.S. history, especially after the upsurge in mid-decade radicalism drove the New Deal farther left. In December 1935, Harold Ickes told the president that he “believed the general sentiment of the country to be much more radical than that of the Administration.” Roosevelt agreed and sharpened his attack on the business community. He saved his heaviest artillery for his annual message to Congress on January 3, 1936, which he delivered at night over national radio. The only previous time that a president had addressed an evening session was on April 2, 1917, when Wilson read his war message to the House. Roosevelt lashed out at his enemies on the right: “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. They seek the restoration of their selfish power. . . . Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”51

  Having been pushed to the left by the progressive upsurge, Roosevelt kept up his harsh attack on business throughout the 1936 campaign. He trumpeted the list of progressive achievements. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other government programs put millions of unemployed back to work in government jobs. The economic and banking systems had been reformed. The government, for the first time, sided, however tentatively, with labor against the employers and nurtured the growth of unions. Social Security guaranteed a modicum of comfort in old age that few workers had previously enjoyed. The tax burden was shifted increasingly to the wealthy.

  On the eve of the election, Roosevelt took his defiantly antibusiness message to supporters at Madison Square Garden, declaring,

  We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob . . . They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.52

  When election day came around, the revitalized Democrats gave the Republicans the political thrashing of their lives at every level. Roosevelt defeated Kansas Governor Alf Landon 523–8 in the Electoral College, winning every state except Maine and Vermont. Democrats gleefully amended the old saying that “as goes Maine, so goes the country” to declare, “as goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”53 The Democrats controlled the House 331–89 and the Senate 76–16, after accounting for the Farmer-Laborites and George Norris’s switch to Independent.

  The Chicago Tribune saw the lopsided vote as an unambiguous endorsement of the president’s agenda. “The result of the election is a vote of confidence in Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . he will enter upon his second term with what amounts to a blank check signed yesterday by an overwhelming majority of the American people.” The conservative Tribune worriedly pointed to the coalition Roosevelt had formed with the Farmer-Labor, American Labor, Socialist, and Communist parties: “How Mr. Roosevelt will discharge his obligations to his radical partners becomes a matter of intense interest.”54

  But the near universal hopes for further reform would be frustrated by political and economic miscalculation on the part of the usually savvy president. Roosevelt lost momentum following the election with his ill-fated scheme to pack the Supreme Court with progressive judges out of frustration with the Court’s repeated vetoing of New Deal programs. If the New Deal stumbled over the Supreme Court, it was knocked flat by the economic crisis of 1937, which critics quickly dubbed the “Roosevelt recession.” Believing incorrectly that economic progress was self-sustaining and the Depression’s end in sight, admi
nistration officials decided to cut spending and balance the budget. Roosevelt particularly targeted the WPA and PWA for deep cuts. The economy plummeted almost overnight. In fact, the collapse was so stunning that Roosevelt and other administration officials believed it was deliberately staged by businessmen seeking to bring Roosevelt down. Stocks rapidly lost one-third of their value, and corporate profits fell by 80 percent. Unemployment skyrocketed anew as millions lost jobs.

  Reformers were now on the defensive. Despite that, many Americans realized that one essential human need had yet to be addressed and set out to correct that oversight. Few people appreciate how close the United States came to adopting a national health care program in 1938 and 1939. The Committee of Physicians for the Improvement of Medical Care, an insurgent group of progressive physicians, largely based at the nation’s most prestigious medical schools, acting in defiance of the conservative American Medical Association, sparked a national movement to create a sweeping national health care system. The administration threw its weight behind the effort, arguing that health care was a right, not a privilege, a position strongly supported by labor and a broad range of reform-minded organizations. In fact, administration support was so strong that the editors of The Nation were convinced that “no government would” so mobilize public opinion or “put such expert effort and the time and attention of more than half of its cabinet officials into the development of such a program and then abandon it.”55 In late February 1939, New York Senator Robert Wagner submitted his administration-backed bill for a national health program, claiming that no legislation had received “more widespread approval” from the American people.56 But faced with vehement AMA opposition and seeking to avoid a nasty fight with elections approaching, Roosevelt decided to abandon the effort. New Deal reform was over once and for all.57