by Amity Shlaes
Lange did not have her pictures alone in mind when she left the camp; her first move was to alert the newspeople she knew that the people there were starving. As her biographer Milton Meltzer reports, this did much good: officials rushed 20,000 pounds of food to feed the California migrants. Beside the story about this, the local paper published two of Lange’s photos of the thirty-two-year-old mother in her lean-to. A third photo—from the same shoot, but not in the paper at that time—would be the one later called Migrant Mother. It depicted a thin woman, almost recalling Mary Magdalene, holding her baby, with two others behind. The photo captured the despair of the Depression more than any Lange had taken.
In April, the unions paid Roosevelt back in a more formal fashion. George Berry of the printing pressmen’s union and Sidney Hillman created the Non-Partisan League, which was dedicated to electing Roosevelt, the unions’ answer to the Liberty League. That same month brought another achievement for the New Deal. Norris Dam’s powerhouse was up and running. Roosevelt himself, pressing a golden telegraph key in his office, sent the two dam gates down to hold back the water. Willkie had lost his bet. Alabama Power’s old contract with the TVA was now in jeopardy: from this date on, the TVA had leeway to sell power and find markets where it liked.
Meanwhile, Hopkins’s WPA was now operating all across the country. Within nine months of its establishment, it had increased its rolls to over three million. The Federal Writers’ Project in April employed a total of 6,686 writers. That February, Henry Alsberg, the director of the Writers’ Project, announced that his authors would produce a new guide to America, a giant project. Authors would résumé cultural activities and geography of each state, from the festival of Los Hermanos Penitentes in New Mexico to the islands off Georgia, where Norsemen were believed to have settled a millenmium prior.
Roosevelt for his part was watching the Court, but still silently. That spring, the justices rejected a New York State minimum wage law—a law that Frankfurter had had a personal hand in drafting. The case, Tipaldo, was remarkably reminiscent of Schechter. A Brooklyn businessman—this time John Tipaldo, a laundry operator—had paid his laundresses less than the minimum wage. Would the Court stop nowhere? the president and his allies wondered. Did the states have rights at all to pass social legislation? Tipaldo seemed to say that they did not. Only 10 of 344 newspapers liked the Tipaldo decision. This time, the nation seemed to share the White House’s sense of impatience. Hoover sided with Roosevelt, saying, “Something should be done to give the states back the powers they thought they already had.”
Roosevelt was also waging battles on the tax front, for Congress rejected the first version of the undistributed profits tax. Morgenthau weakened: “I have come to the decision that I cannot take the risk of giving up something that I have in hand, namely $1.13 billion in revenue, for the possibility of getting roughly $1.7 billion.” The administration then cobbled together, with lawmakers, a new plan: a graduated surtax on the corporate income tax—again, an antitrust measure—plus an increase on the intercorporate tax rate, as well as a new undistributed profits tax, albeit at lower rates than originally planned. Morgenthau later recalled: “Nobody in the Treasury wanted to testify. Everybody was frightened except Herbert Gaston, who wrote the statements I needed. I had to stand up like a column of concrete, but I had the backing of FDR. He wanted to wipe out special privilege.” In the end the tax did make it into a new bill, in a watered-down version.
These little details did not really do much damage to the Democrats, for the Republicans were flailing. At a fretful convention in mid-June, uncertain party leaders selected Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon as their candidate. But Landon failed to distinguish himself from Roosevelt. The telegram on policy he sent to the Republican convention before the roll call vote of his nomination differed, as he would put it much later, “not too much” from the Democrats’. In the nominating speech, John Hamilton of the national Republican committee spoke of the importance of combating “great combinations of wealth”—a Democratic theme.
To add to its woes, the Grand Old Party was also stuck in an awkward place on foreign policy. The old “stay out” position, which had seemed reasonable in the 1920s, was looking increasingly questionable in the context of the news reports from Europe. Mussolini had occupied Ethiopia, and that same month—June—Haile Selassie was begging the League of Nations for help in Geneva: “It is us today. It is you tomorrow.” Left-leaning magazines were carrying reports of the torture and murder in Germany’s early concentration camps, reports that were increasingly hard to discount as Marxist propaganda. Yet leading Republicans—Herbert Hoover being the prime example—were still interested in working with the Germans. Perhaps because Hoover himself had created what were called concentration camps in the United States during the 1927 flood, he could not fathom the German version.
Roosevelt, smelling victory, did not let up. He traveled to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to attack the “economic royalists” of American business for bringing down the economy. The government, Roosevelt said, had to help citizens “against economic tyranny such as this”—there was no other power. As for taxation, it was now crucial: Ickes would remark in his diary that “the fundamental political issue today is taxation.” A number of former Roosevelt allies spluttered with rage, including Warburg, whom Coughlin had so misleadingly assigned to the list of Roosevelt’s current allies. Warburg, still fuming, published yet another book since his breakup with Roosevelt, Still Hell Bent, a follow-up to Hell Bent for Election of the year before. But the Warburg household was not content to stop there. Warburg’s wife, Phyllis Baldwin Warburg, published New Deal Noodles, a book of alphabet rhymes about the New Dealers: “the whole new deal is full of hickies. One of these is Mr. Ickes”; “‘T’ stands for Tugwell and dear TVA; ‘T’ stands for the Taxes we’ll all have to pay.” Ray Moley was still moving from critic to opponent. The president did call on him from time to time, but he was refusing, as he later put it, to be a “jester” in Roosevelt’s court. Instead of talking with one another, the parties were now talking past each other. Moley warned of a devastating counterreaction.
To the incumbents that risk seemed small. Over the course of the summer, the effect of Roosevelt’s spending was still strong, and the jobs materializing seemed a wonder after so many years. The same Benjamin Anderson who had tracked earlier damage now recorded the upturn in his office at Chase in New York. Together he and Colonel Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company visited Landon in Topeka. They told him that the economy was moving up, and Landon later recalled, “I knew then that I was beaten.”
Even as Landon doubted, a new factor began to work in the Democrats’ favor. A drought worse than that of 1934 hit the land. Families in a thousand counties were affected, one-third of the nation.
The drought supplied Tugwell’s RA with new purpose. That summer the RA provided aid—from cash to short-term jobs—for 400,000 families. The RA had an enormous loan component, and it declared a one-year moratorium on payments and allotted millions in new loans. It was a legitimate high point for the RA. What’s more, the drought validated Roosevelt’s allegation that the country was still in “emergency.” It made a mockery of the “self-government” argument for localities by Republicans at the Cleveland convention, and it made the need for the New Deal seem permanent. Tugwell himself was to travel 2,000 miles, and to make a showing with Roosevelt in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Over the drought summer the writer John Steinbeck, already well known for Tortilla Flats, was traveling among the RA’s dusty demonstration camps for migrants. He made the acquaintance of Tom Collins, the RA employee who designed camp operations. Collins was creating a women’s club that would be a model for such a club in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Collins likely also introduced Steinbeck to Sherm Eastom, whose family was one of the models for the Joad family in the novel. Collins wrote lengthy reports to his employers—one appeared that summer in the San Francisco News—that later s
erved as additional material for Steinbeck. In the September 12, 1936, issue of the Nation, Steinbeck wrote a column that served as a nonfiction outline for his book. He commented that people like A. J. Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, or William Randolph Hearst, or Herbert Hoover, operated big farms. These farms, he said, were proliferating at the expense of the disappearing medium-sized farm. Then he went on to report, of the arriving Okie, that “in the state and federal camps he will find sanitary arrangements and a place to pitch his tent.” Conditions in the privately owned camps of farmers, Steinbeck reported, were by contrast horrific.
Meanwhile, too, Tugwell’s buildings, his towns and settlements, were coming along—both under his direct supervision and via his influence. Beltsville, Maryland, saw the erection of a structure dedicated to animal husbandry, one of his old favorite subjects. Tugwell’s greatest pride was Arthurdale in West Virginia: it had a vacuum cleaner assembly plant. The town also had a chicken farm run by a cooperative, a small-scale rebuttal to Schechter. Mrs. Roosevelt liked it, especially; later in the year she would note in her syndicated column that the chicken farm was “doing very well.”
Casa Grande would also have chickens. The builders had worked ahead, laying out two-acre plots. But as the year advanced, Tugwell and his advisers were still turning over the format of the farm in their minds. The individual farms would simply yield too little. What were title and ownership worth to a man just scraping by? On paper a co-op or collective looked much more efficient, yielding $19 an acre instead of $14. Assailing “bigness” was fashionable now—that is what they were doing at the White House, at the Treasury, and in Congress. John Steinbeck might also find large-scale projects evil; the author’s Nation piece in September criticized some of them. But election year or not, everything in Tugwell’s philosophy and experience told him that a large cooperative taking advantage of the economy of scale would make more sense: one tractor for all. There was a sense of urgency now; the gossip against him was hard to ignore. For as long as he stayed in government, Tugwell determined, he had to do what he believed. He made Casa Grande a cooperative. The farmers would share the land.
In September, Roosevelt spoke at Harvard, Felix’s home, his own alma mater, but also the institution of a man Roosevelt disliked—A. Lawrence Lowell, president emeritus, the man who had opposed Frankfurter on Sacco and Vanzetti. Bolder than ever, Roosevelt chose to omit the traditional acknowledgment of the host in his salutation. The audience was shocked, but Roosevelt enjoyed himself. Frankfurter telegrammed the president, IT WAS REALLY A GREAT TRIUMPH. YOU FURNISHED A STRIKING EXAMPLE OF THE CIVILIZED GENTLEMAN AND ALSO OF THE IMPORTANCE OF WISE SAUCINESS. Roosevelt, anxious for praise from his adviser, wrote back, “Did you really and truly like it—more important still, did Marion really and truly like it? Your expression of the ‘importance of wise sauciness’ is perhaps better than mine. I told the boys afterwards that I had stuck my chin out and said ‘hit me’—and nobody dared!” Even as Roosevelt drew closer to Frankfurter, he distanced himself from the others. Though Tugwell and Moley were doing productive things—Tugwell was at a high point—the change cast a shadow. Moley later wrote of Roosevelt: “He closed, one by one, the windows of his mind.” Perhaps, Moley went on, “this is a disease that haunts the White House. In any case, Roosevelt developed pernicious attacks of it, and this lessened his capacity as a political leader and statesman.”
That month, Migrant Mother was published for the first time. At the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur Morgan was still seeking a territorial truce with the private companies. To him the war with them was a distraction, perhaps even unnecessary. In August, however, the other two members of the TVA board had moved against him, resolving that “in future contracts the Authority will not agree to territorial restrictions on the sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority power to public agencies.” It was a public victory for Lilienthal. Roosevelt seemed to side with Morgan—at least until the election. Repeating his “breathing spell” action of a year earlier, he invited Willkie, the TVA, and a few others, including Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan, to a conference to talk about a power pool grid system.
Willkie, though suspicious, felt he had to go along with the administration, at least this last time. Whatever the status of corporate stock, there was plenty of hope for operating utilities companies. Commonwealth and Southern net earnings had headed up from 1935 to 1936 and they would be even higher in 1937. Roosevelt wanted his own breathing spell; he wanted the utilities businesses to end their interminable lawsuits. The utilities knew they could not win if the government continued to buy off towns by helping them to build their own distribution plants for TVA power. Perhaps Roosevelt would, after all, allow competition to challenge the TVA. Willkie felt, the New York Times wrote on October 11, that the White House willingness to talk about power pools was “an act of political statesmanship calling for an equal degree of business statesmanship on his part.” In that original first meeting, Roosevelt may not have charmed Willkie. But this time it seems the president succeeded. And it was a ruse, if Robert Jackson, the attorney, is to be believed. For, as Jackson later recalled in a memorandum in his papers, Roosevelt around that period “had a profound dislike for Willkie.”
Other utility executives, like Ferguson, did not even try to be agreeable. They had tired of Roosevelt’s cynicism, which was in evidence even in the context of the power pool negotiations: as his representative for these government-to-utility talks Roosevelt had chosen Louis Wehle, the nephew of Louis Brandeis, author of The Curse of Bigness. What’s more, Harold Ickes at the Department of the Interior was continuing to subsidize municipalities to build city-owned utilities to take power directly from the TVA—in October 1936 he announced a $3 million grant to the city of Memphis for precisely this purpose. This they regarded as a bribe. And of course, this was not all that Ickes was giving the towns; there were yet more pillared town halls and libraries. When it came to convincing towns that the federal government or the TVA belonged in their town, Ickes’s helpful buildings had more authority than any politician.
A speech that the president delivered just weeks later seemed to validate these executives’ fears—and reveal Willkie as naive. At Madison Square Garden, where Coughlin had stood, it was now Roosevelt’s turn to let the invective fly. “I should like to have it said of my first administration,” he told the crowds, “that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”
Now Wall Streeters had indeed become like the plutocrats featured in New Yorker cartoons—a few small men, isolated in an outsize ballroom. They knew that their fewness worked against them, especially as Roosevelt courted great swaths of society. Roosevelt had not pushed the antilynching legislation that Father Divine hoped for—it was the sort that southern lawmakers would filibuster. But that election autumn he dedicated one of three new buildings—“with more to come”—at Howard University in Washington, telling an audience there were “no forgotten men and no forgotten races.” Blacks were moving into Roosevelt’s fold. Father Divine would not be a power behind the presidency.
That autumn as well, something good was happening across the nation: Social Security was beginning to seem real. Sometime in the months before the 1936 election, millions of Americans found in their hands a small but riveting document known as an ISC 9. “There is now a law in this country,” the pamphlet from a new office in Washington, the Social Security Board, instructed, “which will give about 26 million working people something to live on when they are old and have stopped working.” The government would, it told the reader, “set up a Social Security Account for you, if you are eligible,” and into this account “You and your employer will each pay three cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year.” That amount, the circular added, “is the most you will ever have to pay.” Last came the promise: “From the time you are old and stop working, you will get a governm
ent check every month of your life. This check will come to you as your right.”
The message could not be clearer: people who opposed Roosevelt might stand in the way of American rights. Landon was fading as a candidate. Jobs seemed to be materializing at a heartening rate. Data compiled later would show that in November 1936, unemployment hit 13.9 percent, the lowest level since 1931. But while yet more hiring might materialize at some point, voters believed that at this moment their choice was between the gifts at hand and the uncertain possibility of prosperity.
There were those who still questioned the terms of that choice. In Harlem, at his headquarters at 20 West 115th Street, Father Divine issued a message in his typically meandering prose: “Not one of the major parties, officially and nationally, or conventionally, has come to me and accepted of my righteous government platform.” Father Divine therefore ordered his flock to “stay our hands,” not to vote, and reporters noted that the polls of Harlem were deserted. Father Divine told his followers the movement would wait until 1940, when, presumably, they would be even greater in number. But his boycott amounted to a footnote in the 1936 story.
On the eve of the election, Frankfurter wrote to Roosevelt of his campaign “the Nation will crown it with victory.” Many of the president’s opponents voted for him. In an era where nothing was easy, the helmsman who tacked left, and then right, and then left still seemed the better choice. Roosevelt took forty-six of forty-eight states. His was the wager of the century, and he had won it.