The bill did of course result in some tax increases for many individuals and businesses; to that extent it was a drag on the economy. Politically, it stole much of Huey Long’s thunder and established Roosevelt as an enemy of a callous upper crust. As the historian Mark Leff puts it, the administration had enacted a wealth tax without sharing the wealth. At most, Roosevelt set in motion a trend in which the government would rely increasingly on personal and corporate income taxes and less on excise taxes invisibly added to alcohol, tobacco, and various luxury goods. At the time, however, excise levies remained the primary source of federal revenues.14
Other laws that in normal circumstances would have been considered of primary importance accompanied the five big acts of the second hundred days. The Motor Carrier Act subjected commercial passenger bus and trucking companies to comprehensive regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. (In 1938, Congress would establish a Civil Aeronautics Authority to perform the same function for the emerging airline industry.) A new Farm Mortgage Relief Act and a new Railroad Retirement Act sailed through Congress; both were purportedly tailored to meet Supreme Court objections. The Guffey-Snyder Coal Act baldly reinstated the NRA regime for the coal industry.
The Motor Carrier Act was firmly rooted in Congress’s power over interstate commerce. The other three bills, however, presented a direct challenge to the Supreme Court. As a group, they signaled a New Deal determination to bring government supervision of the economy to an unprecedented peacetime level.
Roosevelt did not get everything he wanted. By one count six “major” bills had failed to clear Congress. Nonetheless, one thing was certain: he was the dominant force in American politics. By about any measure, he had surpassed his two great exemplars, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, in personal popularity, the deployment of presidential power, and mastery of the legislative process. He seemed always on the offensive, constantly pressing for transformative reform. Charisma, charm, and above all a pervasive impression of his concern for the trials of ordinary people were his most prominent soft assets. He supplemented them as necessary with hardball tactics. The White House traded favors for votes freely, twisted arms when it could, and accepted half loaves when necessary. New York Times correspondent Arthur Krock stated it bluntly: “Civil service regulations have been evaded or ignored, and to the politicians have been given great bags of patronage. Politics has suffused every word and act.”15
Roosevelt likely read the Krock column with more amusement and satisfaction than annoyance. TR and Wilson had made their own compromises with the real world. He had achieved objectives in Congress that he believed were well worth whatever moral price they had exacted. He was ready to go to the source of his ultimate strength, the people, and begin his long fight for reelection.
A hard struggle seemed in the offing. At the beginning of August, the Democrats lost a special congressional election in Rhode Island. Republicans attacked the New Deal as a lawless failed recovery program. Herbert Hoover declared, “It would be better for Liberty to commit suicide in the open rather than to be poisoned by indirection in the Capital of the Nation.”16
In a process of bitter polarization, Hoover had moved well to the right, while Roosevelt had shifted steadily toward the left. Democrats painted Hoover, once widely thought a great humanitarian and a progressive advocate of an organized economy, as a coldhearted reactionary. Republicans saw Roosevelt, once considered a charming and relatively inoffensive lightweight, as a malevolent, psychologically unstable would-be dictator.17
Roy W. Howard, chairman of the important Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and generally supportive of the New Deal, wrote to Roosevelt on August 26, 1935, “Many business men who once gave you sincere support are now not merely hostile, they are frightened.” Business and the country, he declared, needed a “breathing spell.” Roosevelt responded with a firm but conciliatory communication, claiming a developing economic recovery. The administration’s program, he concluded, “has now reached substantial completion and the breathing spell of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.” It is impossible to know whether Franklin Roosevelt actually believed those words and necessary to remember that the phrase “breathing spell” implies a resumption of vigorous activity.18
As the congressional session ground toward its end, Harold Ickes visited the Capitol and watched Huey Long hold forth: “He waved his arms, he contorted, he swayed, and at all times he talked in a very loud voice. I must admit, however, that he was clever. . . . He has a sharp, quick wit, even though he is a blatant and unconscionable demagogue.” No senator posed a bigger political threat to the president. With the help of ghostwriters, Long had just finished a book-length manuscript forecasting a run for the presidency and titled My First Days in the White House.19
A week later, he was back in Louisiana tending to political business. Late on the evening of September 8, he walked through the state capitol building at the front of a retinue of aides and armed bodyguards. An inoffensive-looking little man in an immaculate white suit walked over to him, produced a small pistol, and shot him in the abdomen. The assassin, a dentist named Carl Adams Weiss, quickly lay dead in a pool of blood. Long lingered in the hospital for thirty hours. On the morning of September 10, he was pronounced dead.20
Roosevelt surely took no joy in the event. Still, he must have felt at least a glimmer of relief that the Louisiana senator would not be around to harass him in 1936. Father Coughlin and Dr. Townsend remained, but neither was a credible presidential candidate, and there was little likelihood that the more conventional progressives would mount a challenge from the coherent left.21
With Congress adjourned, the president followed what was becoming a natural pattern. First, he took a working vacation at Hyde Park. Next came a train trip across the continent, punctuated by major speeches and enthusiastic welcomes from large crowds. He proclaimed the success of the administration’s agricultural policy at Fremont, Nebraska; underscored the need for regional development and the benefits of public electrical power at the dedication of the Boulder Dam (without mentioning that Hoover had begun the project); and trumpeted a gathering economic recovery, which he linked to his reform program in addresses in Los Angeles and San Diego. Then he once again boarded the USS Houston for another leisurely cruise through the Panama Canal and around to the East Coast.22
By late October, he was back at the White House, ready to meet Canadian prime minister MacKenzie King and sign a trade agreement with his northern neighbor. Then he was in Warm Springs for the traditional Thanksgiving dinner with the polios, who remained so important to him. In the run-up to Christmas, he delivered speeches in Atlanta and Chicago, once again hitting the themes of recovery and reform. The presidential campaign of 1936 was on the horizon.
The president began the new year with his annual message to Congress, delivered once again in person and, for the first time, at an evening hour—9:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific—designed to capture a peak radio audience across the nation. Significantly, he devoted about half the talk to foreign relations, decrying “those nations which are dominated by the twin spirits of autocracy and aggression,” while promising to preserve America from war through “a well-ordered neutrality.”
Then he asserted that the forces of autocracy were at work in the United States. Small but powerful “financial and industrial groups,” dominant in the previous decade, were fighting his effort to achieve democracy at home. Seeking to subvert “the people’s liberties,” the money changers were back and strove for “autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment.” In thirty-four months, he declared, his administration had built new instruments of public power. The economy was recovering, and ordinary people were receiving protection. It was up to Congress “to wage unceasing warfare” against reactionary fearmongers.23
The speech, which the president renamed as his “message on the state of the union,” was unmistakably
the first shot of his reelection campaign. It revealed that the contest would be among the most polarizing in American history. Liberals and Democratic loyalists cheered him as “heroic” and “eloquent.” Conservatives and nearly all Republicans responded with “dirty campaign,” “cloud of propaganda,” and “wretched taste.”24
On January 6, the Supreme Court made itself part of the controversy with a devastating decision in U.S. v. Butler (also known as the Hoosac Mills Case). A six-justice majority—the four conservatives and the two moderates—ruled unconstitutional the federal tax on agricultural processors that financed the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) acreage-restriction program, primarily because the management of local agricultural production was a state responsibility, not a national one. The majority seemed to assume that it was of no consequence that a crop would likely enter the stream of interstate commerce once produced or that, in any case, a national market would set its price.25
The conservative justices had taken the narrow definition of interstate commerce enabled by Schechter and run with it. The decision suggested that Roosevelt now faced an opposition majority of at least five horsemen determined to strike down the New Deal. Writing for the dissenters, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone accused the majority of “a tortured construction of the Constitution” and declared, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” He undoubtedly spoke the feelings of the White House.26
The majority justices had struck at an unpopular target. The AAA enjoyed scant support except among the farmers who received its subsidies. For them, subsidized allotments spelled the difference between poverty and relative well-being. The Soil Conservation Act of 1936, signed by the president on February 29, perpetuated the crop allotment system under another rationale. But why would the Supreme Court consider soil depletion more of a national problem than agricultural production?27
It took little foresight to understand that if Roosevelt were returned to office, there would be a political showdown with the Court. Two and a half weeks after the Butler decision, Harold Ickes summarized Roosevelt’s remarks to a cabinet meeting: “He is not at all averse to the Supreme Court declaring one New Deal statute after another unconstitutional. I think he believes that the Court will find itself pretty far out on a limb.”28
With the processing tax dead, the administration had to find money to maintain the new soil conservation program. Revenue issues became even more pressing when, just weeks later, Congress responded to election-year exigencies by overriding Roosevelt’s veto of a new veterans bonus bill. Both the president and Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, moreover, were sensitive about the 30 percent increase in the national debt since 1933. They developed legislation primarily designed to tap undistributed corporate profits, which they considered yet another unsavory way in which the wealthy avoided taxes.
In June legislation emerged from Congress establishing a graduated tax of 7 to 22 percent on undistributed profits. New Dealers argued that the tax would actually stimulate economic recovery by forcing money (presumably unproductive) out of corporate coffers—a stance emblematic of the vast gulf in perception between New Deal liberalism and conventional business conservatism. Conservatives argued with considerable justice that businesses required large reserves for expansion and unforeseen contingencies. Producing approximately $800 million a year in new revenue, the bill met the government’s urgent fiscal needs. But how could pulling so large a sum out of the private economy contribute to the economic recovery that the administration still sought after three years in office?29
At least payment of the veterans bonus did put several hundred million dollars, most of which would be rapidly spent, into the economy. Harold Ickes’s Public Works Administration (PWA) continued in charge of expensive high-visibility, large-scale public works projects. The new Works Progress Administration (WPA), under Harry Hopkins, put as much as 90 percent of its funds into salaries; it would tackle thousands of small projects designed to generate maximum employment in about every locality and provide much needed assistance to millions of unemployed workers.
By mid-1936, the WPA would have nearly 2.25 million employees. The PWA and other federal projects employed another 1.4 million. The stimulus to the economy was impressive and rapid. In those days, most projects really were “shovel ready,” and laborers often actually worked with shovels. By then, Franklin Roosevelt was officially a candidate for reelection.30
The New Deal had been controversial. Signature programs like the NRA and AAA had drawn a lot of disapproval. Considerable concern existed within the middle class, still the center of gravity in American politics, about the cost of jobs programs and general relief. Nonetheless, the president was a strong personality, his agenda had helped a lot of people, and his radio talks had established a personal bond with a large segment of the citizenry.
Elmo Roper, one of the best practitioners of the new art of public opinion research, conducted a poll for Fortune magazine in late 1935. Nearly a third of the respondents were strong Roosevelt supporters; almost another third thought the president had done more good than harm. A sitting president with the approval of two-thirds of the country had reason for confidence. He may have been getting similar signals from Democratic National Committee pollster Emil Hurja. “We will win easily next year,” Roosevelt told cabinet members on November 9, 1935. “We are going to make it a crusade.”31
By the time the Democratic convention gathered in Philadelphia on June 23, 1936, the Republicans had already named Roosevelt’s opponent, Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas. A capable chief executive, Landon had roots in the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt, prospered in the oil and gas business, and effectively managed his state’s beleaguered finances. The Republican platform, moreover, was by no means a manifesto of rugged individualism. Denouncing many administration programs as egregious examples of government overreach, it declared its fealty to their objectives and contained some generalities that sounded positively New Dealish.32
Still, envisioning Landon as president required a hearty imagination. At his best, he was a down-to-earth everyman, a representative of Main Street whose nomination had been facilitated by the impossibility of a Hoover rerun and the reluctance of such GOP heavyweights as Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg and Chicago publisher Frank Knox to go head-to-head with Roosevelt. A Republican banner, attempting to take advantage of Jim Farley’s brush-off of the candidate as “a typical prairie governor,” bravely declared, “Abraham Lincoln . . . a typical prairie lawyer. Alfred M. Landon . . . a typical prairie governor.” The pitch was ludicrously counterintuitive. The upcoming campaign would show that the Republican Party had become, in reaction to the New Deal, a party of passive, minimalist government.33
On the heels of the Landon nomination, a new force announced its presence. Father Coughlin, Dr. Townsend, and the receiver of Huey Long’s Share the Wealth movement, Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, proclaimed a new Union Party. Its nominee, Representative William Lemke of North Dakota, was a neopopulist Republican known primarily for his sponsorship of farm mortgage relief. Earnest and plodding, Lemke was no Huey Long. The party leadership, moreover, was increasingly marginalized, Coughlin by overexposure, Townsend by the Social Security Act, and Smith by a vulgar anti-Semitism.
The Democratic Party’s well-scripted convention in Philadelphia went off without a major hitch, but certain blips revealed important transformations. Al Smith and four other party notables sent an open message to the convention urging it to repudiate the New Deal, pass over Roosevelt, nominate “some genuine Democrat,” and return to the principles of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland. Virginia’s two major Democrats, Senators Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd, ostentatiously refused committee assignments that would require them to endorse a New Deal platform. Senator Ellison D. (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina, declaring that he would not support “any political organization that look
s upon the Negro and caters to him as a political and social equal,” walked out after a black clergyman opened one of the sessions with a prayer.34
Roosevelt’s nomination was unanimous. He delivered his acceptance speech, scheduled for the prime radio time of 10:00 p.m. Eastern time on June 27, before a crowd of over 100,000 at Franklin Field. His motorcade entered the stadium at 9:37 and made its way to a platform erected at one end of the playing field. He exited his car, steadying himself on James’s arm, surrounded by guests and well-wishers. Suddenly someone lurched into him, a leg brace gave way, and he was on the ground. Aides quickly lifted him to his feet, recovered his speech, and brushed off his suit. He later recalled, “I was the damnedest, maddest white man at that moment you ever saw.” A scene that fifty years later would have replayed incessantly on national television went unnoticed in the relative darkness by everyone except those immediately around the president. Roosevelt was quickly composed, on his feet, and walking with James to the platform as the crowd delivered a thunderous ovation.35
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 34