Forgotten Man, The

by Amity Shlaes

  Still, Tugwell concluded in his childhood that the American game was rigged against farmers. They had so many poor neighbors, and so much chance of again becoming poor themselves; Tugwell’s mother had been born in a place called No God Hollow. The first big downturn in the Tugwells’ lives came in 1893, when Rex was two, and others followed with disconcerting regularity. The boom-and-bust cycle of New England agriculture was too rough.

  Farther north, in Maine, Douglas as a young man came to the same conclusion about life on the land. Douglas observed the struggles of lumberjacks sending timber south down Sebec Lake in the icy spring; each year, several drowned. What was the point of stingy New England, with the Great Plains turning out to be so easily fruitful? The New England of the Tugwells and young Paul Douglas was not quite the lawyer’s New England of Coolidge. It was more the New England that the poet Robert Frost wrote about—a rocky, small-scale place where the lawyer’s rigid insistence on tiny bits of private property and endless stone walls seemed to constrain the future. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poet would write about two farms. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out?”

  Tugwell and Douglas learned early that the plains that the New Englanders so envied had their own problems. The gold standard drove prices up and then down in a seemingly random fashion that sent punctilious farmers into despair. In the 1890s at Chautauqua, New York—a summer lecture resort not far from the Tugwells—the politician William Jennings Bryan captured the national rage by speaking of the “Cross of Gold” that burdened farmers by keeping prices down. Wallace’s Farmer, a periodical edited by Henry Cantwell Wallace, chronicled farming troubles in every issue. Harding had made Wallace agriculture secretary.

  Out in Elwood, Indiana, a German American schoolteacher named Herman Willkie had invited Bryan to teach his Sunday Bible class. Herman Willkie, like the Tugwells, had been through numerous downturns and had seen firsthand how the farms suffered. He watched Elwood rise and fall on the discovery of natural gas in the region. In 1892, a year after Tugwell’s birth, the Willkies had a son to whom they gave a name as ambitious as Rexford Guy Tugwell: Lewis Wendell Willkie.

  Tugwell as an adolescent extrapolated from the farm experience to a generalization: the world needed changing, and he would participate in making those changes. He made it to the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School. There, he discovered a magazine—the New Republic—and read it with increasing excitement; “as nearly as preachment could,” he would recall later, “it gave us a text to live by.” Unlike the doctrinaire Communist periodicals, the New Republic devoted itself to discussion and reform. It was truly liberal, liberal in the way Tugwell hoped he was himself. In his senior year, Tugwell taught sections for a Pennsylvania professor, Scott Nearing. He was horrified when Nearing was fired by the trustees for being a leftist who pointed out large disparities of wealth between Philadelphia’s rich and poor. When Tugwell married his high school sweetheart, Florence Arnold, he took her to visit Nearing on their honeymoon. And in 1915, the year the Russian Revolution was building, Tugwell penned his own poem for the student periodical Intercollegiate: “I am sick of a nation’s stenches, I am sick of propertied czars…I have dreamed my great dream of their passing…I shall roll up my sleeves—make America over!”

  Rural life had also made a radical of Douglas, who was a year younger than Tugwell. On the debate team at Bowdoin College, Douglas argued through questions such as the popular election of senators—then not yet law—the tariff, the income tax, and workmen’s compensation, also still just an ideal. Disgusted with the fraternities on campus, he also started a club for that minority in the class who had not made a fraternity. Douglas, who had vowed to serve the freezing logger, studied labor economics in graduate school before coming to the University of Chicago to teach. He was now in the process of splitting up with his wife, Dorothy Wolff Douglas, but the two shared a commitment to collectivism. He was greatly interested in pension plans—the image of the logger staying with him.

  At Indiana, Wendell Willkie, born the same year as Douglas, had for his part donned a red sweater in solidarity with Red Europe. He also asked the faculty in Bloomington to introduce a course on socialism and then pulled together the students to fill up the class. At graduation, Willkie gave “the most radical speech you ever heard,” the IU president later recalled.

  Another disillusioned Hoosier, David Lilienthal, from Michigan City, to the north of Elwood, was younger than both Tugwell and Willkie. As a child, David had seen his father, Leo, struggle in the drygoods business, from Morton, Illinois, to Valparaiso, Indiana, and then, yet again, to Michigan City. While David was attending high school, relatives had taken him to a Chicago labor meeting where he heard Emma Goldman speak “with a voice deep and strong, with a quick turn and a lash to it which was more of the type possessed by some sharp-witted man.” Lilienthal witnessed the men in Chicago torturing the drowning mouse around this time. After attending DePauw in Greencastle, he headed east to Harvard for law school. While there he learned that his father had lost $5,000 in business, the family fortune. Lilienthal felt moved to read John Reed, whose Ten Days That Shook the World had recently been published. He also contemplated foreign travel. But his father blocked it, warning that a trip to Russia might “make a goat” out of David. Lilienthal decided that he would stick to his old resolution of being “a student of the problem”—the italics were his. But he did not give up hope that in America there might still be a “happy orderly revolution.” He too began writing in the New Republic.

  Bryan’s heyday had passed by the time these youths became men. But farms, especially in the late 1920s, once again had the same problem—falling grain prices. Tugwell found himself making a career of economics and reform, even spending a semester at Amherst College in Massachusetts, the academic home of Robert Frost. Surely, he thought as he moved through his twenties and thirties, the solution had to be collective. The individual was an ungenerous figure from the past.

  Utilities were another area that concerned Tugwell and others. They noted that the prosperity seen in the cities was not as visible out in the country, and the rapid advance of utilities in the United States did not seem rapid enough to the farming crowd, for even in the 1920s, many farms did not have power. Wall Street’s capital might serve Campbell out in Montana, but could it reach the rest?

  One man who thought about the utility question continually was Bob La Follette. Another was George Norris, the senator from Nebraska, who vowed not to give up on Muscle Shoals. But yet another was an aristocratic young politician who lived south of the Tugwells, in Hyde Park, New York: Franklin Roosevelt, a cousin of the president. At Harvard as a young man, Franklin Roosevelt had taken History 10-B with a visiting professor who was an expert on the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner was developing a thesis that stuck with Roosevelt all his life: as the American frontier closed, the United States was entering into a period where the old rules did not hold. As an undergraduate Roosevelt had also studied with a monetary expert, Oliver M. W. Sprague, and at least thought about the money problem and the farms.

  Franklin Roosevelt too had observed that rural America was not always keeping pace with the city, and written a college thesis on the need for electricity. Roosevelt would later tell his speechwriter and friend Samuel Rosenman of a family who lived not ten miles from Hyde Park yet were without power. “Now they have been watching electricity come along in Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck and even in Hyde Park, more and more each year and they have tried to get electricity out where they are and they just can’t. They and other farmers are willing to pay but the damned old electric corporation won’t listen.” Roosevelt had a goal: “I want to get cheap electricity out to that farm.”

  The answer for utilities was wider government involvement in the power industry, nearly all progressives believed—both those who liked foreign models and those who did not. In the 1920s, Roosevelt had thought a l
ot about Georgia, for he traveled there so often for his cures at Warm Springs. To many southerners, the back-and-forth debates between Hoover and Coolidge on the one hand and the progressives on the other were not inspiring; they were frustrating. Wilson Dam, the original dam at Muscle Shoals, produced power in the 1920s. But not much of that power had made it to the locals around the dam. For years the town of Muscle Shoals tried to buy power for itself from Wilson Dam. Finally they would be allowed to, but at a higher rate than that charged to the Alabama Power Company. Frustrated town leaders would send a wire to their senator, Hugo Black: “Telegram you received from Muscle Shoals this morning framed by city fathers, in City Hall by light of kerosene lamps, though within 2 miles of tremendous power tumbling to waste over Wilson Dam with administration’s consent.”

  Factories were another area that might be improved by foreign study. From the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, in which close to 150 perished, to the sweatshops of the West Coast, American industrialization seemed to them not progress but proof that Thomas Hardy was right: factories debased. Stuart Chase, for one, was hoping Soviet industry might provide a model to solve some of these problems. Chase did not think that the American factory would continue to improve by itself.

  Chase believed it was the responsibility of the idealist to act. He had graduated from Harvard in the same class as the revolutionary John Reed, the class of 1910. Sitting in the economics section of the Boston Public Library in 1911, in the autumn after the fire, he wrote a note to himself: “Now I must choose my own path…from among the many and follow it in all faith and trust until experience bids me seek another.” Chase did not dislike big projects; he was something of a Taylorite, and in fact had worked at Hoover’s Food Administration. But he believed that government ought to involve itself with something stronger than a beneficent hand. In the mid-twenties he had published a book expressing his disgust at all the leavings industry seemed so thoughtlessly to produce; its title was The Tragedy of Waste. He did not buy some economists’ argument that increases in productivity were spontaneous. They had to be made to happen.

  And he ignored the overall improvement in wages to focus on groups that hadn’t seen great gains. Two years before Chase had written in the New Republic that “garment trades, the machinists, many miners and railroad workers have learned there can be no increase in wages until industrial waste is checked.” Differences among political regimes seemed to him irrelevant. What mattered to him, as to many Taylorites, was that all countries confronted the same problem, taking advantage of the economy of scale to be more efficient and less wasteful.

  The factory and city also obsessed James Hudson Maurer. Born in 1864, he had started life with a childhood so poor it made Tugwell’s look smooth. In the panic of 1873 his mother handed him a letter and sent him across the county in search of a relative who might take him in—his own grandfather handed the letter back, saying, “Don’t see how I can use you.” School when he attended it had been more about “whipping than teaching.” Maurer learned to read only just before age sixteen, when a fellow worker and member of the Knights of Labor handed him a political speech, and he saw a point to the whole exercise. Maurer was a socialist, but when he saw that socialism was not catching on in America, his reaction was to conquer his own territory for the socialists, however small: he had become the socialist mayor of Reading, Pennsylvania.

  John Brophy, for his part, was angry at the moderate progress of unionism. He was from Lancashire, in Britain, and wondered why the United States had not kept pace with the United Kingdom or Europe when it came to developing social models. Mellon’s Pennsylvania was not glorious; it was a Pennsylvania of brute exploitation.

  To these men the heroes of the factory were people like Goldman, and her banishment a sign that the country was unwilling to concede the truths she highlighted. Goldman was especially beloved because she had been so articulate in her speeches about America’s failings—Roger Baldwin would later remark on her fluency in English, rare in someone who had first come to the United States as a seventeen-year-old, as Goldman had. In her lectures she had pointed out that hunger was still a problem in the United States, that men still beat women, that Frick had his paintings while newcomers were without toilets. She accurately noted that the new industrial America had not yet found a way to take care of old people in the city, where no farmstead welcomed grandparents.

  The rights of citizens were a third area of focus. To progressives, the anti-Red actions of both Democratic and Republican administrations were evidence of a trend toward repression. Recently two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been sentenced to death for killing a company paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Many progressives argued that the men were innocent of the crime and had really been convicted because of their radical political beliefs. A Harvard law professor, Felix Frankfurter, bravely fought for the pair, even though the president of his university, A. Lawrence Lowell, had taken the position that justice was being served sufficiently.

  A number of the President Roosevelt travelers had also involved themselves in the Sacco and Vanzetti cause—Douglas, for example, had sent money for the defense. But the pleas failed, and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was expected to happen while the travelers were in Europe. This act seemed to confirm American barbarism. Roger Baldwin, especially, wondered whether Soviet Russia might have found a higher sort of freedom.

  There were no African Americans on this junket, but the travelers were aware that the year before, William E. B. Du Bois, a black leader a magnitude more prominent than an eccentric like Father Divine, had been inspired by a visit to Moscow: “I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me,” he wrote. “I may be partially deceived and half informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, then I am a Bolshevik.”

  Others too thought that Russia might have the answer to the race problem. There was a legitimate sense among them that legal change was too slow in coming, and that segregation was breaking down too slowly. The Ku Klux Klan was not going away; on the contrary, it flourished. Father Divine’s house-by-house gradualism seemed almost a parody. Coolidge’s general statements about equality and tolerance were no substitute for an explicit law to halt lynching.

  The social barriers of the 1920s were all the more insupportable because of blacks’ loyal service in World War I, and because so much time had now passed since slavery. The young Paul Robeson, for instance, in the 1910s received the third scholarship ever given to a black student at Rutgers, but other students trod on his hands when he was a football player. And now that he was out of Columbia Law School, in the 1920s, he could not practice law: a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. Robeson was turning to another of his many gifts—music—but it was a bitter turn because he had been pushed. He would later travel to Britain and meet with the miners; in the early 1930s, he would also start studying Russian, and travel to the Soviet Union in 1934. Of the travelers, Baldwin and Douglas were probably the most eager to find answers to problems like Robeson’s.

  Still, the expanding boom at home made these causes seem far weaker than they had even a decade or five years ago. When only two in a hundred men were out of work, it seemed absurd to preach radical reform. After college, many radicals gave up their causes, convinced that those causes were fading anyhow. That was what had happened to Wendell Willkie after the war. His solution to the problems of rural America had been to escape them. Following college and the military, he taught a bit, then turned to law school at Indiana University and life as an Akron, Ohio, lawyer for Harvey Firestone, who headed up one of the new tire companies. Like Tugwell a jovial man, Willkie had married a librarian named Edith Wilk—“How do you feel about adding a couple of letters to your name?” he had asked her. For Willkie, there was no more time to think about European socialism. Akron was growing so fast that the Willkies and their baby Philip had to share an apartment with anoth
er couple. Willkie was shortly earning thousands more than most people he knew back in the agricultural towns. Some of his work was in the utilities area, for power companies.

  With each year that passed, the radicals fell more out of step with the country. Tugwell, more honest than many, acknowledged that. “Life in the 1920s was often frustrating for those people of my political persuasion—political progressives or radicals,” he would later write. “We were, in fact, all but regarded as social misfits.”

  ABOARD THE PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, the travelers settled in. Tugwell would later write of the ship that to him it always seemed “homelike,” and the others likely had the same feeling. For the boat was a version of something that had become increasingly important to the American Left in the 1920s: a refuge. Rather than give up or bemoan their isolation, people like Tugwell simply redoubled their efforts to create a parallel reality of their own. The world shut them out, so they shut out the world—with a salon, a club, a ship, a trip. Or even a new identity: the 1920s intellectual.

  Just a few years before, in 1922, the author Sinclair Lewis had indirectly done much to establish that identity when he wrote Babbitt. Babbitt, Lewis’s protagonist, practiced a vague urban trade: he was a real estate broker. He had no high moral purpose, he “just got along” and lived a tedious life in the fictional yet typical neighborhood, Floral Heights, of a fictional yet typical American town, Zenith. He was annihilatingly provincial. The thinkers of the 1920s loved Babbitt because he supplied them with a goal. They would be everything that he was not: urban, bohemian, anti-money, idealist.