Alice Roosevelt Longworth went still further. Her father had conquered his illness—childhood asthma—and therefore had championed the “strenuous life,” she said. But because Franklin remained in a wheelchair, he had become a “mollycoddle,” peddling a “mollycoddle philosophy.”
Eleanor Roosevelt rarely responded to criticism of herself, but this attack on her husband’s character was more than she could bear. “No one who really knew both men could make that contrast,” she wrote in her column. “No man who has brought himself back from what might have been an entire life of invalidism to physical, mental and spiritual strength … can ever be accused of preaching or exemplifying a mollycoddle philosophy.”
Nothing any critic said seemed to matter. “The forces of organized money are unanimous in their hatred for me,” he told a cheering New York crowd, “and I welcome their hatred.” Wherever FDR went, he asked the crowds if they were better off than they had been when he took office. They were: national income had now more than doubled; unemployment had nearly been cut in half.
Voices called out, “Thank you, Mr. President!” and “You saved my home!” Some people bowed their heads in prayer as his train rattled past. In Denver, someone scrawled in chalk on a boxcar “Roosevelt is my friend.”
Eleanor found it all overwhelming, as she said in a letter to Lorena Hickok: “I have never seen on any trip such crowds or enthusiasm,” she wrote. “If they really have all this faith I hope he can do a good job for them.… I realize more and more that F.D.R. is a great man, and he is nice to me, but as a person I’m a stranger and I don’t want to be anything else! P.S. How I hate being a show, but I’m doing it so nicely!”
At Springwood on the evening of election day, as the returns began coming in, FDR blew a big smoke ring and murmured, “Wow.” He would win 60.8 percent of the popular vote, the largest percentage anyone had ever won, and this time carried forty-six of the forty-eight states. FDR had forged a new Democratic Party—a “Roosevelt coalition”—that brought together western farmers and big-city industrial workers, immigrants and African Americans and the Solid South.
Lit by floodlights and waving his hat, FDR—accompanied by a phalanx of Secret Servicemen—rolls into Philadelphia’s Franklin Field past cheering Democratic convention delegates, eager to hear him rally them for the fall campaign. Moments later, out of sight of the camera but in full view of part of the crowd, his left leg collapsed beneath him.
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By 1936, FDR was dependent on far less cumbersome braces than he once had been, but unless the two locks on either side of each knee were snapped solidly in place, he ran the risk of falling.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Dusted off after his near fall, Roosevelt waves at the huge, enthusiastic crowd. The United States was engaged in a war, he said, “a war for the survival of democracy … for ourselves and for the world. I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.”
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Alf Landon button, featuring the sunflower symbol of his state of Kansas. Landon’s radio addresses were so uninspiring, Harold Ickes said, that “the Democratic Campaign Committee ought to spend all the money it can raise to send him out and make speeches.”
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With a Secret Serviceman standing on the running board of his automobile, FDR leaves the Knoxville, Tennessee, railroad station for a campaign appearance, September 9, 1936. “Four years ago,” one passenger aboard the president’s train wrote, “the people were quiet and undemonstrative,” hopeful but unsure anyone could help them. “This year, the crowds were larger … and … passed any bounds for enthusiasm—really wild enthusiasm.”
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There can have been few more ardent FDR admirers than the enthusiast who produced this crowded 1936 campaign placard. Perhaps he had admired TR as well, since he credits Theodore’s pledge of a “Square Deal,” not Franklin’s promise of a “New” one.
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An electric mantelpiece clock in the form of a ship’s wheel, made by the Gibraltar Electric Clock Company of Jersey City, depicts Roosevelt “AT THE WHEEL FOR A NEW DEAL,” 1936.
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Election night, Manhattan: New Yorkers gather at Rockefeller Center to watch returns come in on an electric map. By evening’s end, forty-six of the forty-eight states would light up for Roosevelt.
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Election night, Hyde Park: The Roosevelts greet their neighbors after the extent of his victory is clear. Left to right: Anna, John, the president’s mother, FDR, Franklin Jr., and Eleanor
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The Nine Old Men and the Roosevelt Recession
At Roosevelt’s second inaugural, held on January 20, 1937, under the brand-new Twentieth Amendment, he promised to finish the job he’d started. “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said.
But it is not in despair that I paint that picture for you. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice of it, proposes to paint it out.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
The Supreme Court seemed determined to block that progress. It had continued on its conservative course, overturning a number of New Deal statutes, including the NRA and the AAA. It seemed only a matter of time before it moved against the National Labor Relations and Social Security Acts. Future reforms seemed to be in jeopardy, as well.
Buoyed by his big victory, Roosevelt resolved to act. He had been reelected without the help of his old friend and closest adviser, Louis Howe, who had recently died. Howe’s political duties had been taken over by others, but no one had replaced him as the man who had felt free to tell FDR when he was about to be a “damned fool.”
The plan the president sent to Capitol Hill without any warning to the leadership stunned friends and enemies alike: he asked for the power to name a new justice for every sitting member of the Court who did not resign six months after reaching the age of seventy. Roosevelt claimed the retirement of elderly judges would improve the Court’s “efficiency.” Almost no one believed that was his real purpose.
Daisy Suckley asked the president to explain the plan during a weekend visit to Hyde Park. He did his high-minded best. When he was finished, she asked, “Don’t you mean that you are packing the Court?”
FDR roared, “I suppose you’re right, Daisy! I suppose you’re right!”
Many in Congress saw it that way, too. The Senate Judiciary Committee called for the plan to be “so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” Arkansas Senator Joseph Robinson, the majority leader who had reluctantly agreed to try to shepherd it through the Senate, suffered a fatal heart attack.
But then the Court itself began suddenly to shift, upholding a series of laws most observers had expected it to overturn. In the end, Roosevelt’s bill was allowed to die. Over the coming years, the president would be given the opportunity to replace eight members of the Court. He may have lost the battle, Roosevelt liked to say, but he had won the war.
Still, his Court-packing plan had made him a host of enemies within his own party, and strengthened a growing conservative congressional coalition that would make substantive new legislation far more difficult to pass.
In August of 1937, there was still more trouble. The economy had been steadily improving since 1933, so steadily that American output had finally begun to outpace 1929 levels. FDR and some of his advisers started to worry about inflation. In response, the president slashed funds for relief and public works, in the interest, he said, of balancing the budget. The result was a sudden, precipitous economic decline that continued for nine frightening months. Republicans called it the “Roosevelt Recession.” Industrial production
fell again by more than a third. So did wages. Widespread strikes by workers demanding union recognition slowed factories still further. Four million additional Americans found themselves out of work. The president, Harold Ickes confided to his diary, “is [getting] punch drunk from the punishment that he has suffered.”
FDR’s own advisers were divided as to what he should do. Some urged him to continue to hold the line on spending. Other, more left-leaning New Dealers, including his wife, wanted him to return to the stimulus programs that had seemed to be working earlier. “Like almost every woman I know of moderate means,” Eleanor wrote, “I am always terribly nervous until all my bills are paid and I know I still have a balance in the bank.… I do hope, however, that in this budget-balancing business we make our economies without making people suffer who are in need of help. There are wise and unwise economies, as every housewife knows.”
In the end, FDR sided with the liberals, persuading Congress to pump billions of dollars more into public works and public housing.
The decline halted. “We are on our way again,” Roosevelt said. And he won passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which for the first time set federal minimum wages and maximum hours.
Meanwhile, the midterm elections were approaching. Furious at the conservative members of his own party who had joined forces with Republicans on Capitol Hill, the president barnstormed the South during the primaries, championing liberal challengers and urging voters to oust the conservative incumbents he called “copperheads.”
The “purge” proved an embarrassment. Voters still admired Roosevelt but resented his intrusion into local races. All but one of his targets survived his assault.
“Roosevelt is his own worst enemy,” one triumphant southern senator said.
“Not,” said another, “so long as I am alive.”
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there had been no unemployment compensation or Social Security; no regulation of the stock market; no federal guarantee of bank deposits or labor’s right to bargain; no national minimum wage or maximum hours; no federal commitment to high employment; and no price supports for farmers or federal funds for electric power with which to light their homes. But for all the New Deal’s achievements, the American economy was still struggling. Many of those who most needed help were still not getting it, and Congress was increasingly unwilling to follow Roosevelt’s lead—and seemed intent, in fact, on dismantling much that he had done. It blocked appointments, slashed relief appropriations, and over the coming months would force him to end some of the least popular New Deal experiments.
FDR’s “iridescent dream of a perfectly pure liberal party untainted by conservatism and reaction,” wrote William Allen White, “has been knocked into a cocked hat.” Walter Lippmann predicted a Republican landslide in 1940.
Editorialists began writing that FDR was finished as an effective leader and had become a lame duck whose last two years as president were likely to be without real achievement. “President Roosevelt could not run for a third term,” one wrote, “even if he so desired.”
FDR did not then intend to run again, but he refused to say so, for fear of further undermining his own position, and at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in January 1939 he delivered a fighting speech. Recent Republican victories, he said, must serve to “bring us real Democrats together” with all those who “preach the liberal gospel” to defeat “the enemies of the American people—inertia, greed, ignorance, shortsightedness, vanity, opportunism.” Otherwise, he said, any Democrat who ran for president in 1940 was sure to lose.
The president concentrated on domestic politics that evening, but privately his attention was already beginning to turn away from reform toward readying a reluctant country for a new crisis that now threatened to engulf the world.
FDR delivers his second inaugural address in the face of a cold, steady winter rain, January 20, 1937.
“Qualifying Test for Supreme Court Jobs,” Edward S. Brown’s reaction to Roosevelt’s Court plan, ran in the New York Herald Tribune on February 12, 1937. “This is a bloodless coup d’état,” Walter Lippmann wrote in the same newspaper. “No issue so great or so deep has been raised since secession.”
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The “nine old men” of the Supreme Court whose power Roosevelt hoped to dilute. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes sits at the center. His was the oldest Court in history; the average age of the justices was seventy-one; five of the nine were seventy-four or older. The columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, who coined the phrase, described them as “aloof from all reality, meting out a law as inflexible as the massive blocks of marble that surround them in their mausoleum of justice.”
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“I Did Not Vote For That!” appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle a few days after the president’s proposal for expanding the Court was made public. “The people are with me,” the president assured James Farley, but as it became clear that FDR was seeking a fundamental change in the constitutional order, even many of his most enthusiastic supporters would have second thoughts.
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FDR and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson confer about the Court bill at Springwood. Robinson’s death on July 14 helped ensure the bill’s defeat. “You are beat, Cap’n,” Vice President Garner told the president afterward. “You haven’t got the votes.”
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On May 30, 1937, South Chicago police open fire on striking workers and their families at the United Steel works, killing ten and wounding thirty more, including a woman and three children. Remembered as the “Memorial Day Massacre,” it was only the most violent of dozens of confrontations that spring, as industrial workers in fourteen states staged sit-down strikes, demanding recognition of their unions.
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A seemingly chastened president leaves church the Sunday after four of his liberal Senate primary candidates were thrashed by senior conservative Democrats. In the elections that followed in November, the Republicans would pick up eighty-one House seats, eight more in the Senate, and thirteen governorships, as well. The Democrats still controlled Congress: “We have a large majority,” Vice President Garner said, “but it is not a New Deal majority.”
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Democratic Senators Millard Tydings of Maryland and Walter George of Georgia congratulate one another after easily winning primary victories over the president’s nominees.
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Sharing the dais, Vice President Jack Garner and Postmaster General Farley join FDR in enthusiastic applause. Since neither man thought FDR would run for a third term in 1940, each hoped to succeed him as president.
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Eleanor Roosevelt attended the dinner, too, and approved of her husband’s speech: “I’m not sure it was wise,” she wrote to a friend, “but it was honest & certainly fearless.”
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On the evening of January 7, 1939, photographer Thomas McAvoy captured the embattled president’s shifting moods as he presided over the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at the Mayflower hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.
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A Terrible Thing
Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany at almost precisely the same moment Franklin Roosevelt first became president. Americans had looked on with horror as he crushed his domestic opposition, persecuted German Jews, supported a fascist uprising in Spain, reclaimed the Rhineland from France in 1936, and annexed Austria two years later. Americans also deplored the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s brutal attack on Ethiopia and sympathized with China in her struggle against invasion by imperial Japan.
But most Americans also continued to see events overseas as none of their business. More than 116,000 American lives had been lost in the Great War, and few thought it had been worth it. In the intervening years, their representatives on Capitol Hill had worked to ensure that the United States
would not again become entangled in events overseas. They shrank the army, kept America out of international organizations, limited immigration, and enacted three Neutrality Acts barring arms sales to either side in any future war.
Franklin Roosevelt believed, as Theodore Roosevelt had believed, that the United States had an important role to play overseas. But he had been consumed with the economic crisis during his first years as president, needed the support in Congress of progressive Republicans who were also implacable isolationists, and for the most part had been willing to go along with public sentiment.
“What worries me,” he had told a friend as the violence increased overseas, “is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning thanking God for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”
At first, his efforts at informing the American public of the dangers it faced did not go well. When the president compared fascist aggression to a spreading disease that needed to be quarantined, pacifists charged that Roosevelt was starting America down the slope to war and isolationist congressmen threatened to impeach him. The leaders of his own party remained silent. The president offered no concrete proposal. “It is a terrible thing,” he told an aide, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”
The Roosevelts Page 28