Next came a list of objectives: attention to the problems of the nation based on the assumption of an interconnectedness of economic interests, cutting the cost of government, repeal of Prohibition, full disclosure in the marketing of securities, widespread and large-scale public works, aid to agriculture, mortgage relief, and tariff revision to restart world trade. What did the American people want more than anything else? “Work and security—these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead.” He would not cast aspersions on the Republican Party, he told the crowd, but he would call out its leaders, who had demanded observance of sacred economic laws while men and women were starving. He would, he promised, bring America back from disaster: “I pledge you—I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. . . . Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”42
Eloquently crafted and forcefully delivered in that distinctive voice that bespoke authority and demanded respect, the rhetoric was that of a charismatic leader promising secular salvation. In Chicago, a partisan crowd roared its approval. Radio listeners across the country heard a formidable personality. A great campaign, near certain victory, and enormous challenges lay ahead.
Chapter 12
Much to Fear
Election and Interregnum, July 1932–March 1933
A dozen years earlier, Franklin Roosevelt had admired Herbert Hoover as a Democratic presidential possibility and indicated a willingness to run on his ticket as the vice presidential candidate. Hoover had maintained his family’s traditional Republican affiliation and, as “the Great Engineer” in the cabinets of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, had spearheaded efforts ranging from industrial planning to Mississippi River flood relief. He had won the White House easily in 1928 but struggled subsequently to deal with the Great Depression. By previous standards, he was an activist in his efforts to deal with an economic calamity. By Roosevelt’s standards, he was a clueless do-nothing. The two would face off in a bitter and intensely personal campaign fight.
An early indication of just how personal the battle would be came on April 28, 1932, when Hoover hosted a White House dinner for state chief executives at the conclusion of the national governors conference in nearby Richmond. Newspapers played up an impending confrontation. Rearranging the protocol for such occasions, the White House devised a seating order that put a wide distance between Governor Roosevelt and the president.1
Appearances meant even more than usual, making Roosevelt’s denial of his disability an urgent necessity. He arranged to use the south entrance to the executive mansion in order to avoid negotiating steps and to enter close to an elevator that would take him to the second-floor reception room. He requested a sturdy chair at the dinner table and a strong man to hold it as he took his seat. He and Eleanor approached the White House a bit early, posing for a photo in which he held a stylish straight cane in his right hand and steadied himself by unobtrusively holding Eleanor’s arm with his left hand. His big smile exuded relaxed joviality; Eleanor displayed the wide-eyed apprehension of a deer caught in the headlights.
The two joined a gathering crowd minutes before the president’s scheduled appearance—and waited, with everyone standing for twenty to thirty minutes. The experience strained Roosevelt’s fragile legs to the limit, and it showed. Twice White House servants offered him a chair. Twice he refused. Finally, the president appeared, and Roosevelt moved to his place at the table. White House butler Alonzo Fields held his chair at a prescribed 45-degree tilt. The sit-down, as Fields recalled it, was more a fall-down in which Roosevelt collapsed into the chair, legs straight out until he could unlock his braces. The White House subsequently attributed Hoover’s delay to Minnesota governor Floyd Olson’s unexpected failure to show up. Franklin and Eleanor suspected a dirty trick and never forgot about it.
Hoover himself thought that Roosevelt was neither physically nor temperamentally up to the demands of the presidency. He surely remembered the breezy young man in the Wilson subcabinet, attractive but lacking depth and oblivious to the experience of advancement through hard work. An orphan who had pulled himself to wealth and success, blunt and matter-of-fact, the president valued exhausting, incessant effort. He did not yet suspect that steel lay behind his rival’s soft, smiling exterior. Roosevelt more shrewdly intuited that Americans preferred a sunny optimist to a dour workaholic.
The downturn that began with the Wall Street collapse in October 1929 had become a full-fledged depression by the end of 1930. Waves of bank failures, collapsing prices, and accelerating unemployment had produced the worst economic catastrophe in forty years. The malaise was worldwide and especially bitter in the industrial nations. By 1932, international trade, hampered by unstable currencies, widespread tariff protectionism, and the evaporation of savings around the globe, was less than a third of its 1929 total, and US gross national product was down by about 40 percent. By the time Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination, unemployment had idled one in every four American workers—approximately 15 million people altogether.
Governments in the past had done little to deal with economic crises beyond taking measures to protect the dollar and maintain the public credit. President Hoover had, by those precedents, been unusually active. More than any of his predecessors, save perhaps Theodore Roosevelt, he believed the American economy could benefit from government organization. He stepped up federal public works, but the employment generated was small. He established a Federal Farm Board to boost agricultural prices by buying and storing major commodities, but endless surpluses overwhelmed the Farm Board’s appropriation. For a time he secured the voluntary cooperation of corporate leaders in maintaining employment, production, and capital expansion plans, but as the economy worsened, even the strongest corporations had to cut output and lay off workers. In 1932, Hoover established a Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to prop up shaky financial institutions, but its appropriation of $500 million and authorized borrowing authority of $2 billion, although massive by the standards of the time, were insufficient. Other administration policies—the high protective tariff, a sharp increase in income tax rates, higher interest rates—protected the dollar and contained the federal budget deficit but also got in the way of economic recovery.
What, then, to do about the armies of unemployed and the tens of thousands of farmers facing bankruptcy and foreclosure? Progressives called for big federal make-work programs, large agricultural subsidies, and, by one means or another, federal control of farm production. Perhaps out of a sense that the government simply could not afford such expensive ventures, or possibly out of a deeply held ideological conviction that they would be morally wrong, Hoover, the onetime progressive organizer, became a conservative rugged individualist. Relief, he insisted, was a local function that the national government might facilitate but could not, as a matter of principle, take over. Not until the eve of the 1932 campaign did he give in and sign a bill empowering the RFC to lend up to $1.5 billion to finance state and local public works. In the meantime, the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed grew frighteningly. On the fringes of one city after another, shantytowns began to appear, providing pitiable shelter for the broke and the evicted. The president’s critics called them “Hoovervilles.”
By the summer of 1932, the most nationally visible of these settlements was in Washington, DC, on the flats next to the Anacostia River, peopled by homeless veterans of the World War and their families. They were the remains of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), or Bonus Army, which had pressured Congress for early payment of a service bonus scheduled for 1945. The cause was dubious: the Depression affected veterans no more severely than it did other Americans. After an emotional debate, Congress rejected the request. Perhaps as many as 15,000 veterans stayed on in the fetid and hazardous encampment next to the river. Others took over two v
acant federal buildings, scheduled for demolition, on Pennsylvania Avenue. A few camped in DC parks.
In the context of the times, the BEF was a tempting propaganda target for both protofascist and Communist Party agitators, but they seem to have made few inroads. Only a fevered imagination would envision a coup d’état, but it was not unreasonable to see the displaced veterans as a disorderly, somewhat menacing element in the life of the city. On July 28, police evicted squatters from the Pennsylvania Avenue structures amid fighting and gunfire. Hoover ultimately agreed to call out the army. Personally commanded by Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, a detachment that included machine-gun-equipped infantry, mounted cavalry, and light tanks cleared the buildings and parks. As darkness fell, the soldiers attacked the Anacostia encampment; employing tear gas and fixed bayonets, they drove its inhabitants—men, women, and children—before them and burned their shacks.
The rout of the Bonus Army split the nation along class and ideological lines. Hoover justified the drastic action as a necessary suppression of “overt lawlessness.” Many Americans, quite a number of them Democrats, agreed, if samples of contemporary press commentary are representative. Many others were outraged.2
Roosevelt, Rexford Tugwell recalled, was privately furious. Hoover, he said, should have met with a BEF delegation. He should have sent the veterans coffee and sandwiches. Instead, he had harbored an absurd fear of revolution. He had once seemed a great man; now it seemed he had nothing left inside but jelly; maybe there had never been anything there. Having vented his feelings privately, Roosevelt made no public statement and spent the rest of the year dodging the issue of whether he favored payment of the bonus. Thus began a campaign to redefine the American future.3
First, however, Roosevelt had to deal with the festering sore of New York City corruption and the problem of its mayor, Jimmy Walker. For progressives of both parties, the Walker case would serve as a litmus test of Roosevelt’s courage. For Tammany, it would provide the ultimate indicator of Roosevelt’s party loyalty. The governor opted to preside personally over a public hearing on the many charges against the mayor, then decide whether to remove him. This was a bold course that at worst could alienate Tammany and lose him New York State in the general election. To a larger national audience, however, it could display him as a fearless, decisive chief executive.
The hearings began on Thursday, August 11, in the large paneled executive chamber of Albany’s old capitol building. Beneath the portraits of former New York governors, including Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt presided as judge-interrogator. Legislative investigator Samuel Seabury laid out the case against the mayor. Walker, assisted by his attorneys, proved an agile and articulate defendant. The proceedings lasted for two weeks, with Seabury and his associates laying bare the multiple ways in which Walker had received kickbacks and payoffs for official favors.
Roosevelt dominated the scene, displaying an especially firm hand with Walker’s counsel and not hesitating to speak sharply to Walker himself, as he probed, for example, the mayor’s apparent indifference to his personal accountant’s flight to Mexico. The proceedings dragged on, with the governor taking time off to give two major speeches. On September 1, Walker abruptly resigned his office and issued a bitter statement in which he depicted himself as the victim of an “inquisition.”4
Angry Tammanyites threatened to knife the governor and his preferred state-level candidates in the fall. In the end, the wobbling machine had to settle for blocking Sam Rosenman’s candidacy for the state supreme court, a move that required the organization to endorse its chief Republican critic, Senator Samuel Hofstadter, for the position. Whatever his intentions, Roosevelt had empowered the New York reform movement and fatally weakened Tammany’s grip on the city. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia and the civic reformers awaited the 1933 mayoral election with eager anticipation.
Vice presidential candidate John Nance Garner came up to New York in mid-August for ritual Democratic unity meetings with Roosevelt and Al Smith. Aside from renouncing religious bigotry and proclaiming support for repeal of Prohibition, he had one central piece of advice: “Sit still and keep quiet.” Widespread popular reaction against President Hoover’s failure to deal with the Depression would sweep the Democrats into power in November. Garner would follow his own advice and contribute little to the Democratic campaign.5
Roosevelt intended to do much more. He wanted to convince the electorate that he would be a strong, vigorous agent of change. He needed to persuade Democrats across the country that he had spearheaded their impending electoral victory and deserved their loyalty. Most of all, he wanted to redefine his party as more than an uneasy alliance of seamy northern urban machines and reactionary southern ruralists.
Moved in large measure by the example of Uncle Ted, through the 1920s he had advocated a party with a strong national organization, annual leadership meetings, and a continuing national platform that transcended the quadrennial convention document. He had argued for a reinterpretation of Jeffersonianism as faith in democracy and the common people. Perceiving that the shock of the Depression rendered ethnic rivalries and cultural issues largely irrelevant, he saw an opportunity to remake his party as an activist force and carve out a new political majority. He wanted the support, and eventual migration to the Democratic Party, of independent progressives, most of them nominal Republicans.
His first national campaign speech on July 30—a radio address delivered not in an arena to a cheering crowd but from the governor’s mansion in Albany, in, Roosevelt said, a “quiet of common sense and friendliness”—forecast the future not through its content but through its character. The talk itself was a bland exposition crafted to cast the party platform and the speaker as safe and moderate exponents of tight budgeting and sound money. What counted was the Roosevelt presence projected across the airwaves into living rooms across the country and the dual impressions of intimacy and authority it conveyed.6
Roosevelt’s first speech to a large campaign rally on August 20 in Columbus, Ohio, presented a nine-point program for reform of the financial markets that pretty accurately forecast what he would do in office. Once again, however, tone was the critical feature. He hit hard at Hoover and the Republicans, decried their alleged protection of selfish concentrated wealth, and reasserted his determination to champion “the forgotten man.”7
A week later, speaking to a crowd in New Jersey, he slammed Republican dithering on Prohibition, called for modification of the Volstead Act to permit the production of beer, and pledged himself to repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. He made his position more palatable to the party’s still substantial southern and western dry faction by stressing his belief that states and localities should enjoy a local option, and he sweetened the prospect all around by reminding his audience that the customary taxation of alcohol would yield much needed revenues for stressed government budgets.8
The campaign began in exhausting earnest after Labor Day. Roosevelt wanted to prove his stamina, and he quite simply enjoyed the train, the crowds, and the firsthand observation of the nation. He set out on September 12 for an 8,000-mile “swing around the circle” that took him through the American heartland, down the West Coast, then up through the mountain states and back to the Midwest before returning to New York on October 3. The schedule was grueling, but he thrived on it. All Americans knew that to some extent he was crippled, but he left behind an overwhelming impression of unquenchable vigor. It was easy to think that he had more strength and energy than the dour Hoover.9
He delivered his first important speech, on farm policy, in Topeka. Approximately 22 percent of the US population worked and lived on farms. Agricultural prices impacted perhaps an equal number in hinterland towns and cities. The Depression had dealt rural America a staggering blow. Iowa dairy farmers were dumping or giving away milk not worth the expense of bringing to market. For the same reason, wheat, corn, and other commodities rotted in
fields. Hoover’s attempts to prop up prices, although unprecedented, had failed.
Farm leaders and economists floated plans for massive export subsidies or acreage restrictions or ever-higher tariffs on foreign-grown commodities. As on most other issues, Roosevelt refused to make a firm choice. A presidential campaign was about getting elected, building coalitions, displaying concern, and showcasing leadership qualities. The development of specific, coherent public policy could wait.
Before audiences in Topeka and Sioux City, he touted his own experience as a farmer in New York and Georgia. Charging that Republican tariff policy had destroyed agricultural export markets, he talked generally about national planning, strong federal land-use policy, fairer taxes, farm mortgage relief, and reciprocal agricultural trade agreements. More vaguely, he suggested giving agricultural commodities consumed in the United States “a benefit equivalent to a tariff.” These addresses hinted at what he might do without making specific commitments. They showed his listeners that he felt their pain and intended to bring them relief.10
The other notable speech of the tour came in San Francisco, where he appeared before business and civic leaders at the Commonwealth Club. The talk dropped more clues as to his thinking about the Depression and his future course than any other pronouncement of his campaign. Primarily the work of Adolf Berle, the speech began with assumptions that Roosevelt may well have recalled from his Harvard course with Frederick Jackson Turner. It asserted that with the settlement of the West and the end of “free land,” an era of economic expansion had ended. It then moved on to the issues of corporate concentration and control that preoccupied his Brains Trusters. “We are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already,” he charged. The public good demanded a reappraisal of values. The day of the great tycoon who built industrial empires was over. The contemporary task was “the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand,” reestablishing foreign markets, dealing with underconsumption, adjusting production, and distributing wealth and products equitably. “The day of enlightened administration has come.” Signaling the uncertainty of the times, his audience of business leaders gave him a standing ovation for an address that clearly pointed toward unprecedented government control over their activities.11
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 22