The Townsend plan became a national movement with local clubs spanning the nation, a weekly newspaper with 200,000 subscribers, and its own anthem. Yet it did not stand up to close scrutiny. The transactions tax would have punished the poor while doing incalculable damage to any economic recovery. It probably would have been insufficient to finance a proposed benefit of $200 a month, a sum that exceeded the salaries of most workingmen. Still, Townsend’s sincerity came through and persuaded others. By early 1935, the Townsend organization, with about 500,000 dues-paying members, was a potentially decisive political force in California and a few other states.2
If the Townsend movement possessed the air of a Protestant revival, Father Charles Coughlin’s crusade had much of the flavor of a Catholic renewal. Based in suburban Detroit, Coughlin had begun broadcasting locally in 1926, then nationally on the fledging CBS network. Increasingly he talked about wider issues of “social justice” stemming from the Depression. In 1931, rejecting a CBS demand to review his scripts, he organized his own network. It reached millions of listeners from coast to coast, allowed him to shed whatever inhibitions he had possessed about speaking his mind, and made him a power in American politics.3
Vague in specifics, Coughlin stressed social harmony over class conflict and advocated a “Christian deal” for the benefit of all classes. He initially declared the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to be a step in that direction. In the atmosphere of the day, Coughlin seemed to point toward a benign form of fascism. Whether out of caginess or haziness, he rejected the term. He likewise rebuffed accusations of anti-Semitism. The ideological theme that he tapped into most clearly was a mainstay of the American populist tradition: a loathing of the “money power” that dominated the American financial system, a general distrust of all bankers, and a belief that a sharply inflationary devaluation of the dollar would take the country out of the Depression. During the first year of the New Deal, he differed little from Roosevelt, save in level of rhetoric and extremity of proposal. Two of his causes extended his appeal into the old populist areas of the West and Midwest: free coinage of silver and abolition of the Federal Reserve System in favor of one government-owned central bank with unfettered power to tinker with the money supply. He was, observers sensed, more “radical” than the president, but whether his radicalism was of the Right or the Left was unclear.4
So was his relationship with Roosevelt. The president had brought Coughlin into camp in 1932 and enjoyed his support during his first year in the White House. Their programmatic differences seemed reconcilable, but the clash of two large egos presented a fundamental problem. Roosevelt would brook overt political pressure from no one. Coughlin had surged to national importance as an oppositionist and could not remain a loyal lieutenant.
At the beginning of 1934, Coughlin seemed firmly in camp. He called the New Deal “Christ’s Deal” and told his loyal audience it was “Roosevelt or ruin.” In April, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., hoping to head off or soften the Silver Purchase bill making its way through Congress, published a list of major purchasers of silver futures contracts, speculators who would benefit from rising prices if the bill became law. Coughlin’s secretary and treasurer of his radio league figured prominently. Coughlin responded with a sharp attack against Morgenthau. He maintained contact with the White House but also appeared to outdo Roosevelt as an inflationist and insinuated that the New Deal was insufficiently radical.5
A break finally came on Roosevelt’s request for the Senate to ratify US adherence to the World Court. Depicting the Court as a vehicle for selfish foreign interests and an intolerable impingement on American sovereignty, Coughlin tapped into a powerful strain of traditional American isolationism. At his urging a deluge of telegrams descended upon Capitol Hill. Enough skittish senators voted in the negative to deny the two-thirds majority the administration needed. Numerous partisan Republicans, the Hearst press, and several isolationist progressives were also against the Court, but Coughlin’s big radio voice seemed to galvanize the opposition.
By 1935, Coughlin had established the National Union for Social Justice to promote his point of view. Contributions flooded in from tens of thousands of listeners, financing the radio sermons, a weekly newspaper (Social Justice), and a huge expansion of his parish church. Some Catholic prelates denounced him, but his immediate superior, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, tolerated and encouraged him. On March 3, 1935, in his regular Sunday afternoon broadcast, Coughlin made a clean break with Roosevelt, denouncing the New Deal as “two years of compromise, two years of social planning, two years of endeavoring to mix bad and good, two years of surrender, two years of matching the puerile, puny brains of idealists against the virile viciousness of business and finance—two years of economic failure.”6
The White House avoided a strong counterattack. Former NRA administrator General Hugh Johnson, apparently acting on his own initiative, delivered a counterblast. Coughlin called Johnson a “chocolate soldier” but also said that, while reserving the right to air constructive criticism, he supported the president. That September, Joseph P. Kennedy, by then chair of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, brought the radio priest to Hyde Park for an off-the-record lunch that Roosevelt later described to a press conference as a “nice visit.”7
For all the studied ambiguity, the president and the cleric were obviously veering away from each other. Increasingly, political observers speculated about the possibility of a third party, a grand coalition of the followers of Coughlin, Dr. Townsend, and the most impressive national rabble-rouser of them all, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana.
A product of Louisiana’s impoverished hill country, Huey Long was a force of nature, capable of extravagant oratory, possessing a genuine concern for his state’s underdogs, adept at class politics, and less prone than most of his southern colleagues to be a race-baiter. He expressed the bitter anger of poor whites against a political establishment that ran the state in the interests of big business, finance, and delta planters, while taking its own cut in the form of bribes and payoffs. Not just another redneck yahoo, he had argued legal cases before the US Supreme Court; Chief Justice William Howard Taft had deemed him a brilliant advocate.
As cynical and self-interested as he was altruistic, Long assumed that the ends justified the means and made sure he was taken care of. Elected to the State Railroad Commission (later the Public Service Commission) in 1918 at the age of twenty-five, he waged a one-man war on the objects of its oversight: railroads, oil companies, and public utilities. Ten years later, he won the governorship and embarked on a program to funnel large appropriations into education, good roads and bridges, and public hospitals, all to be paid for by a tax on the oil companies. Surviving an impeachment attempt, he used his control of the state police and judiciary to establish an effective dictatorship. Constantly surrounded by a retinue of armed bodyguards, he relentlessly intimidated the opposition. His mastery of the state was sometimes rough—serious observers questioned whether its people had been deprived of their constitutional right to a “republican form of government”—but did not differ much from the dominance of numerous other political bosses in the 1930s.8
Long was entertaining, whether as a governor spoofing Germany’s local counsel and the commanding officer of one of its warships by receiving them in pajamas, a dressing gown, and slippers or as partier about town getting into an altercation in a nightclub restroom by attempting to urinate between the legs of a customer in front of him. He adopted as his nickname “The Kingfish,” the sobriquet of a clownish character on the popular Amos ‘n’ Andy radio show. His entertainment value was a decided asset in a state that had never cottoned to straitlaced Puritans.
As governor, he delivered the benefits he had promised to an impoverished constituency: better roads, free schoolbooks, and charity hospitals. He produced increased funding that made Louisiana State University into a first-class educational institution, while
catering to a mass public by seeming to care only about the school’s football team and marching band. Although he was low-key about it, the state’s black population got a share of his beneficences. Some observers, then and later, saw him as a southern politician who had broken through the shabby romanticism of white supremacy to the underlying realism of economic politics.9
In 1930, his second year as governor, he ran for the US Senate and won handily, then proceeded to complete his four-year term as Louisiana’s chief executive before going to Washington to claim his seat at beginning of 1933. He left behind as his successor an obedient crony.
Long’s national vehicle was his Share the Wealth plan, a redistributionist scheme that theoretically amounted to a social revolution. It would provide every American family with a stake of at least $3,000, the money to be confiscated from the rich, who would be allowed to keep no more than $3 million of their wealth. The plan would also provide old-age pensions of $30 a month to every needy person over the age of sixty, prevent industrial overproduction by mandating a limited workweek, restrict agricultural output, provide for war veterans, and underwrite college, professional, and vocational education for all students. Like most plans for social amelioration, it grossly overestimated the amount of money that even the most draconian blueprints for taxation and confiscation could raise.
As a young man, Long had peddled patent medicine for a time. He liked to tell a story about a drummer who came into a small town, put on a little entertainment show, then launched into a pitch for his two all-purpose remedies, Highpapalorum and Lowpapahiram. When asked the difference between them, he explained that one was made from the bark at the upper end of the eucalyptus tree, the other from the bark at the lower end. Share the Wealth was the political equivalent.10
Long established his own national Share the Wealth Society and proclaimed as its slogan “Every man a king.” Share the Wealth soon claimed 27,431 local clubs with nearly 7.7 million members. The numbers were grossly inflated, but no one could deny that Long was emerging as a formidable national force. Using his Senate mailing frank, he sent copies of his speeches to each club, in effect forcing the postal service to distribute, free of charge, his campaign material for a possible presidential run.
Long had been crucial to Roosevelt’s nomination in 1932, when he prevented defections in the Mississippi delegation. In 1934, he had intervened in the Arkansas Democratic senatorial primary, campaigning decisively for Hattie Caraway, an inconsequential widow standing for her deceased husband’s seat. Huey made it no secret that he intended to target Arkansas’s other senator, Joe Robinson, the Senate Democratic leader, and Mississippi’s Pat Harrison, the Senate Democratic whip. Democratic National Chairman Jim Farley worried that he could attract 6 million votes if he ran as a third-party candidate for president.11
The administration investigated Long for income tax evasion. It secured several indictments against his associates but was unable to come up with anything on him. Inevitably, the attempts poisoned Roosevelt’s already deteriorating relationship with his onetime ally. The third-party candidacy seemed more likely than ever in mid-1935 and acquired increasing potency against the prospect of a floundering New Deal.
It was not uncommon to characterize Townsend, Coughlin, and Long as protofascists, but they were no more “fascistic” than the early New Dealers. They owed more to the sometimes unlovely heritage of American populism, with its sense of an intolerable gap between rich and poor, resentment of the “money power,” embrace of inflationary solutions, and fringe anti-Semitism. None of the three movements fit neatly into simple categories of “Right” or “Left”; nor did they develop anything that might be described as an ideology. Each offered a superficially attractive panacea, and each had real appeal to specific followings: Townsend to the elderly, Coughlin to Catholics, and Long to southern whites.
In the uncertainty of early 1935, speculation arose as to whether these three forces could combine to mount a credible third-party challenge to Roosevelt. Long would be the inevitable presidential candidate, Townsend being disqualified by age and Coughlin by his Canadian birth and priestly vocation. But how well would Long play to the ethnic big-city constituencies so vital to victory? What would the average middle-class voter make of a platform with the possibility of culminating in Weimar-style currency inflation? The only sure bet seemed to be that Americans would answer these questions in 1936.
Roosevelt had laid out an ambitious domestic program in his annual message to Congress at the beginning of January. Radio listeners and movie newsreel audiences across the country heard and saw a man concerned about an obstinately struggling economy with persistent mass unemployment and determined to remake America. Rejecting the distinction between recovery and reform, the president asserted that piecemeal reform led to confusion, frustration, and the loss of ultimate goals. Most fundamental among these goals was the eradication of “old inequalities.” Americans had to “forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power.” Without abolishing the profit motive or striving for absolute equality of condition, society should provide its members “a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life.” His legislative program would include conservation and development of the nation’s natural resources, jobs for the unemployed, social security against the major hazards of life, and better homes for the people. To the greatest extent possible, it would eliminate the character-destroying narcotic of direct relief payments to those who were employable.12
The speech was as radical as any that Roosevelt had ever given. It clearly anticipated the continuance of the National Recovery Administration and the agricultural program, while advocating a big new agenda: a massive work-relief bill, social security legislation, a banking bill that would enhance the power of the Federal Reserve Board and concentrate control of monetary policy in Washington, a holding company bill designed to break up large and putatively unwieldy electrical utility combines, a labor relations act that would give federal protection to labor unions, and a tax bill that would impact high-income Americans. That few mainstream observers saw all this as a sharp turn to the left says much about the political climate of the day. Walter Lippmann interpreted it as a move away from an overly ambitious effort to manage the economy in favor of “a system of free enterprise compensated by government action.”13
Lippmann was on to something. Of the original Brains Trust, only Rexford Tugwell was still in Washington, and he was increasingly at the margins of large-scale policy making. In the White House, two new advisers stood out: Benjamin V. Cohen, a modest Jewish bachelor, and Thomas Corcoran, a charming, dominating Irishman who was the life of every party and, when necessary, the president’s arm-twister with members of Congress or uncooperative bureaucrats. Sharing a house in Georgetown, they drew considerable attention for how their relationship reflected the uneasy Catholic/Jewish alliance that was part of the political coalition Roosevelt was building.
Their primary sponsor was Roosevelt’s old friend, cheerleader, and policy tutor, Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard. Frankfurter in turn was something of an agent for the great icon of American liberalism, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Progressive Era foe of corporate concentration and formulator of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” program. Widely admired for his rectitude and projecting a prophetic aura, Brandeis was known to Roosevelt and other admirers as “Isaiah.” Because he did not profit personally from his indirect relationship with the president, he saw nothing improper in it.14
Roosevelt likely did not see himself as making a sharp turn. In neither his public rhetoric nor his private attitudes, as nearly as they can be discerned, did he abandon the NRA and its ethic of organizing the private economy. The New Deal, as he and most of the people around him conceived it, was less about organization than about creating a society that distributed wealth more equally and circumscribed the abuses of large intere
sts (primarily corporations).
Roosevelt’s impulses took on various manifestations: a sense that the government had to control agricultural production in order to maintain farming as an occupation peopled by small to midsize producers; a sentimental bias for “the little fellow” in business, frequently with scant understanding of either his limitations or the problems he faced; a conviction that government could manage some natural monopolies, foremost among them hydroelectric power, more efficiently than private enterprise; and a romanticization of the working class as the truly productive segment of society and as an indispensible political ally. These attitudes more or less reflected Roosevelt’s personal thinking, but they fell well short of a blueprint for a socialistic state with comprehensive five-year plans. They were bases of a liberal belief that reform was the road to recovery, not a detour that might lead to a dead end.
Roosevelt also responded to a sense that the New Deal seemed in important ways to be coming apart at the seams. Internal divisions plagued the farm program especially. Social reformers in the Department of Agriculture were concerned primarily with the desperately poor; price stabilizers were attuned to the economic plight of middling to large farmers who produced for the market. In the end, the conflict came down to a question of political power.
The poor were most heavily concentrated in the South. Black sharecroppers or tenants had suffered seven decades of racial repression. Their white counterparts were often excluded from voting by the still common poll tax and scorned by the planter-landlord class. Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) payments went to landowners; toilers who complained could expect eviction. The picture was not pretty, but nor was it inconsistent with the ethic of capitalist enterprise, which accepted no obligation to support redundant workers. The major farm organizations represented the interests of landowners. AAA administrator Chester Davis needed their support and respected their clout.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 31