by Amity Shlaes
When Stryker started out, he had trouble conceiving exactly what sort of pictures to commission. Tugwell coached him: “One day he brought me into his office and said to me ‘Roy, a man may have holes in his shoes, and you may see the holes when you take the picture. But maybe your sense of the human being will teach you there’s a lot more to that man than the holes in his shoes, and you ought to try to get that idea across.’”
If he could picture these forgotten men, Tugwell reckoned, the programs undertaken in their name would be allowed to continue. Indeed his whole department counted on that: the RA, Stryker later remembered, “simply could not afford to hammer home anything except their message that federal money was desperately needed for major relief programs. Most of what the photographers had to do to stay on the payroll was routine stuff to show what a good job the agencies were doing out in the field.” Stryker channeled Tugwell’s faith that agriculture was crucial to the future of the country, and would ask for a photo from Kansas sending the message that “there is nothing in the world that matters very much but wheat.”
As summer 1935 moved into fall, organized labor meanwhile took in the meaning of its legislative victory. The most excited—logically enough—was John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. He realized that with a single blow, Roosevelt had created one of the greatest power blocs ever to appear on the American stage—and one that he, rather than the American Federation of Labor’s Will Green, might lead. The moderate old AFL was not the right union for the wage worker. To allow Green to lead was to squander advantage.
On September 1, Lewis staged a giant outdoor meeting in Fairmont, West Virginia, with forty thousand coal miners and their families. The event celebrated not only the Wagner Act but also the just-signed Guffey Coal Act, which created a National Recovery Administration for coal mining. Lewis predicted Roosevelt’s reelection—a year early—and announced happily that “the era of privilege and predatory individuals is over.” The next month in Atlantic City, at the convention of the American Federation of Labor, Lewis walked along the boardwalk and, during a rain shower, ran into a union acquaintance. The acquaintance asked him whether he had been thinking of his old dream of a new kind of industrial unionism. “I have been thinking of nothing else for a year,” Lewis replied, grabbing the friend’s forearm. The same week, at the convention, the majority rejected a proposal led by Lewis to authorize a campaign to organize industrial workers, and Lewis decided to lead the workers out into a new institution, the Committee for Industrial Organization. It was time to part with the Will Greens and the Matthew Wolls.
Lewis was a theatrical man of the tough variety. To make the breakup more vivid, he provoked a quarrel with the president of the conservative Carpenters’ Union. The men began to shout, and Lewis walked over and punched the fellow in the nose. The man collapsed, and all eyes followed as Lewis left the hall, a symbol of the strength of the new more aggressive industrial unionism. The CIO was launched. The morning after the AFL convention adjourned, UMW leaders and others met for breakfast to plan. Among the planners was John Brophy, now working as Lewis’s arm at the UMW.
On the last day of September, Roosevelt traveled out to Hoover’s dam, now called the Boulder Dam. The project was finally—and splendidly—ready for dedication. Roosevelt noted that the dam’s construction created jobs for 4,000 men in hard-up years. Government had turned “unpeopled, forbidding desert” into something useful; the power generated here would increase the welfare of all, for, as he put it, “use begets use.” Hoover retaliated with a nasty speech in Oakland, California, before western Republicans a few days later, charging that Roosevelt was “joyriding to bankruptcy.” He also noted, accurately, that the Roosevelt administration had not brought unemployment back to anything near precrash levels. There had been make-work, such as the PWA or the WPA, but only 700,000 jobs had been created since 1932, leaving unemployment at one in five men. Hoover’s points were valid, but what came through was the stridency. He spoke past the end of the appointed hour, forcing the embarrassed radio network, the National Broadcasting Company, to switch him off before he finished.
In October, the WPA announced it would employ 26,000 idle artists, musicians, and actors—20,000 by November. At her theater, Hallie Flanagan would shortly produce Triple A Plowed Under, a play about the problems and courage of the farmer under the New Deal. As at the TVA or at Tugwell’s RA, responsibility within the WPA for supplying the jobs and overseeing the programs would be assigned regionally. The head of the program for New York City—the theater center—was to be Elmer Rice, a well-known and left-leaning playwright. The signal was clear: WPA product in the coming year would not necessarily be all pro-Roosevelt, but it certainly would be anti-Republican.
By November, the new CIO had opened an office in Washington. Its goal was “to foster recognition and acceptance of collective bargaining” in mass production industries. Lewis named John Brophy to head the office. The dreamer who had placed the last question to Stalin in Moscow had completed his transformation: he was now a lobbyist on K Street.
At the Supreme Court, the justices began to contemplate what they would do when the Wagner Act came before them, or if Roosevelt won a second term. After paying a call on FDR in November, Justice Ben Cardozo wrote to Felix Frankfurter of the president, “He seemed strong and happy. To have a picture of him talking with McReynolds would be precious.” Frankfurter carried this bit of humor to the President like a gift. In a Thanksgiving note to Roosevelt, he wrote: “Can we not have such a photograph!? It would be a superb campaign poster—or might McReynolds enjoin you from exhibiting it!”
At the TVA, things were also moving into high gear. Work on the Norris Dam was now scheduled to be completed in January, months ahead of the original schedule. More than a million cubic yards of concrete would be poured into the dam by New Year’s Day. Some 1,770 men worked in four 6-hour shifts. The TVA had bought out 3,000 families who lived in the basin behind the dam, now scheduled to become Norris Lake. Even the dead in the Norris basin were being removed; the bones of some 2,500 people, many early American settlers, were disinterred and reburied at a cemetery on higher ground. It was a gruesome thought, but one that seemed to underscore the inexorability of the institution.
Even those who did not like the new projects and new buildings often supported them. As the country told itself, there could always be something worse: if not Huey Long, then Father Coughlin, or the communists. That year Hitler was staging Germany’s first war games since its defeat in World War I and calling up its first draftees. And many of the writers of the period did their best to reinforce the impression that the United States was in a fragile state. Late in 1935, Sinclair Lewis, the author of Babbitt, produced a novel on the question. The premise of It Can’t Happen Here was that it could: Lewis pictured the nightmare of an America gone fascist. The country was run by “Corpos”; the thuggish police were called Minute Men. The point was not subtle: an America in trouble was readily capable of producing its own version of fascism. The novel was not wholly respectful of Roosevelt—a fictional leader in the novel appointed Roosevelt ambassador to Liberia, and Hoover ambassador to Brazil. But the novel’s effect was to make it seem as if Roosevelt stood for stability.
Also in December, a National Resources Committee put together by Roosevelt and chaired by Harold Ickes laid out the new plan for TVAs across the country. Roosevelt was finding Ickes remarkably efficient, and continued to reward him with projects. The plan suggested dividing the United States into twelve regions, with regional capitals: Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Knoxville, Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Dallas, St. Paul, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Duluth, and Portland, Oregon were mentioned. Each capital would then be able to serve its region with ample managers. After all, as Ickes had already said recently, the national capital was so full of New Deal projects that new offices would be necessary in Baltimore and elsewhere. The presenters of the program for
capitals took care to assure the public that their project would not infringe on the sovereignty of the states. But the implication was still clear.
Tugwell was finding his Resettlement Administration busy across the land. The goal of the administration was to help needy families and to improve land use across the country. If farmers lived on poor “submarginal” soil, they would be permanently in need, for they could not compete. Tugwell’s job was to retire land that needed retiring, move those who needed moving, and build new communities for those who were moved. All in all, the RA had four areas: suburban resettlement, rural resettlement, rural rehabilitation, and land utilization generally. Where Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal had Norris, Tugwell had “greenbelt towns,” planned suburbs for workers near centers of industry: Greenbelt, in Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore; Greenhill, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, in Wisconsin. Tugwell liked the greenbelt towns, but he was anxious about rural resettlement projects, for they gave the opportunity at once for the greatest experiments and the greatest failures. In his view the Roosevelts were being too romantic when they imagined successful little communities in the countryside. Where would the people work? Industry was more the future.
Overall for 1935, Washington’s spending was $5.6 billion, double the level for 1930. In the coming election year, 1936, Washington would spend yet more. In many towns, Roosevelt’s presence was signaled by construction work—local contractors and local labor pounding away at the town square or at a new school. From the swimming pool and pavilion in La Grange, Georgia—under thirty miles from Warm Springs—to a public library made of limestone in little De Pere, Wisconsin, to an eleven-story courthouse in Alameda County, to the already complete city hall of Brentwood, Missouri, the Public Works Administration seemed to be everywhere. There were also PWA zoos, PWA bridges, and PWA museums. The PWA buildings were for the most part good-hearted structures, often made of the slate or stone local to the area. They sent a message to the towns: Washington is there to help when the town is in trouble, and yet will not intrude on the community to do it. It was a relationship that the illustrator Norman Rockwell would depict and also sanction with his Saturday Evening Post covers. The WPA spirit was patriotic, and catching. In October, the artist gave a lecture at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Its title was “What Is Required of an Illustrator Today.” The tiny Washington of just a few decades ago, the Washington whose anxious politicians had placed height limits on construction in the District of Columbia to keep out the skyscrapers, now began to dominate the national landscape.
STILL, THAT WINTER, there was a familiar feeling in the country: the scenario of the midterms in 1934 was repeating itself. The politics was exciting, and the Dow was heading up again. But the index was not near old levels, and jobs were not materializing. Around the new year, Will Green took time off from his battles with John Lewis to make something clear to the press. People might be speaking about recovery, but business activity was still far below 1929 levels—and it was a jobless recovery: While “business has recovered half its Depression loss, only 30 percent of the Depression unemployed have been put to work.” Some 11.7 million Americans still had no job in November 1935.
An expert from a culture distant from that of organized labor—Benjamin Anderson at the Chase Bank—warned of trouble too. The new law raised taxes on several classes of taxpayer. But it targeted the rich. It might sound amusing to impose high rates on wealthy people. But such taxes also caused enormous damage. The thing to focus on was not that the economy might be improving a little bit, but rather that the country was not getting the strong recovery that it should expect. The New Deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery. The wealthy, after all, were in a position to take risks with new ventures precisely because they were wealthy—they could invest in several projects at once. Under the new 1935 law, a very wealthy man would see more than three-quarters of any profits from new ventures taken by income tax. Any loss, however, would be the same man’s to bear. This man would try to hoard his capital and wait—thus coming to fit the very stereotype of the idle rich man the New Dealers were hoping to propagate.
Father Divine, for his part, was still hoping for a chance to move the country into a new sphere, and influence Roosevelt as well. His modus operandi paralleled Coughlin’s: At a convention at Harlem’s Rockland Palace come January 1936—an event attended by representatives of the Communist Party, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party—an audience of a thousand or so would chant and speak about a day when he would be a power behind the U.S. president. Divine’s eclectic platform included an end to installment purchases for consumers, and a ban on tariffs. He also sought a ban on the salutation “Hello”; this should be replaced by “Peace,” and the phone company should be forced to comply. Most telling, perhaps, was the plank that called for “Enactment of laws against newspapers and publications which employ words designating the differences in creeds, races, and conditions of peoples.” Father Divine was an angler, just like Huey Long and Coughlin, and he had legitimate additional goals: an end to lynching, for example. He, unlike Norman Rockwell, feared that government help might make citizens more dependent. In 1936 he would write directly to Harold Ickes about a government law that required people to apply for relief before they could be hired for public works positions. Divine argued that the law damaged self-esteem and the will to work, and thus “lowers the standard of a person for the present, and for his future generation.”
Willkie for his part was aware that others in his industry had given up. Figures like Alfred Lee Loomis were long gone from the scene: Loomis was busy publishing articles on sleep patterns in the cerebral cortex in Science magazine. But Willkie persevered. Under the new utilities law, Willkie had a new, second regulator: Joseph Kennedy, the chairman of the young SEC. Within a month of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act’s passage, Willkie had been visiting with Kennedy. He still had hope for Arthur Morgan at the TVA. He thought Morgan retained some support from the president on a cooperative concept: the TVA and others, including Commonwealth and Southern, might create “power pools” and sell and buy electricity together. Willkie told reporters he wished he had the $150 back that he had given to the original Roosevelt campaign. Taking him up on his challenge, Akron Democrats wired an offer to pay up, writing: “Before you became a plutocrat you were a good Democrat.” Willkie also exhorted other “disgruntled Democrats” to speak out. Yet later in the year, in December, Willkie had been found rallying members of the Bond Club of New York to recognize the new Roosevelt campaigns for what they were, hate campaigns: “Surely,” he said, “the haters have occupied the stage long enough.”
Willkie’s battle was making him nationally famous for the first time, and that part of the story he enjoyed. He spent days and hours selling appliances to Commonwealth and Southern customers all across the South. He dined out often in New York, and read history, enjoying his encounters with other Wall Streeters and the editors of the Nation or Partisan Review with equal gusto. And for the first time he had a sense that he was being watched in a new way, both in New York and nationally. In the coming year, the Willkies would be listed in the Social Register for the first time.
People noticed that Willkie also loved helping his subordinates. One of them, an executive at the Georgia Power Company named John Marsh, was married to a Smith College dropout. The wife had written a 1,037-page romance novel about the Civil War. Willkie liked the book and the author so much he sent out a memo to Commonwealth and Southern employees, plugging it. Her name was Margaret Mitchell, and her book, Gone with the Wind, would go on to sell four million copies. Willkie believed such success created an unhealthy gap between man and wife. To make Marsh feel manly, Willkie promoted him at the power company.
In January at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, the Liberty League hosted an event that, it hoped, would reset the course of the country. The dining room seated 1,200, but the dinner sold out; some 800 guests would have to content
themselves with sitting in the next room. Republicans expected that they now might turn the tide. The guest was Al Smith. Smith argued fiercely against Roosevelt’s “arraignment of class against class”; of the brain trust he said, “the young Brain Trusters caught the socialists in swimming and ran away with their clothes.” Most outrageous of all to Smith was the rise of professors, the way Roosevelt had ignored others—himself, especially included—and constructed such a revolution with the brain trusters. Smith worked himself into a fury, and his rhetoric later would be even wilder. “Who is Ickes?” Smith would ask. “Who is Wallace? Who is Hopkins? And in the name of all that is good and holy, who is Tugwell and where did he blow from?”
The Republican Party was also in action. In February, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan—the state where the banks had failed so badly—tried to articulate what was wrong at the annual Lincoln Dinner, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Vandenberg said he was a liberal constitutionalist, something close to Willkie’s vision of himself. Roosevelt, however, Vandenberg said, was something else. A thousand Republicans listened as he laid out his arguments: Roosevelt was leading “a government by executive decree.” He was rejecting the old federalism and making the states his pawns. The country was ready for “restoratives rather than narcotics.” It was possible to be a liberal and not go the way Roosevelt had. Roosevelt was a hypocrite, a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Party.”
Nonetheless the anti-Roosevelt arguments were not taking. Partly this was because of their shrillness. The microphone had taught Roosevelt that moderate tones could be more convincing than loud ones, but his Republican counterparts still bellowed as they had in the days before electricity. They made their opponents sound reasonable—“No democratic European, whatever his party, can sympathize with the ear-splitting clamors of Tory Americans about measures most of us put through thirty-five or forty years ago,” the French writer Odette Keun would comment. In their frustration Republicans, especially the wealthy, were now becoming parodies of themselves. It was that year, 1936, that Peter Arno of the New Yorker published his famous cartoon of rich people in evening dress telling one another: “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.”