Powerfully delivered, his words echoed throughout the stadium and traveled across the country via perhaps 250 radio stations. The nation, he declared, had conquered the fear of 1933, but it still had far to go. Americans had to come to grips with a predatory economic royalism that exploited other people’s money, took the fruits of their labor, and denied them true liberty. The collapse of 1929 had exposed it. The election of 1932 had been a mandate to end it. He was struggling, however imperfectly, to achieve that mandate.
Governments can err—Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of others much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
. . .
. . . [H]ere in America we are waging a great war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is a war for the survival of democracy. . . .
I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.36
A roar went up from the crowd. The band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Joined by his mother, Eleanor, and four of their children, the president acknowledged the cheers. After several minutes, he called for “Auld Lang Syne.” He and James returned to his automobile, circled the field to “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and left the stadium in a state of exhilaration and optimism.37
The speech was more inspirational than instructive. Was it a declaration of class warfare? Just what was the rendezvous with destiny? Even many Democrats had their reservations, among them Raymond Moley, who had counseled a moderate and conciliatory tone and been derided unmercifully by Roosevelt at a White House dinner for the speechwriters. The president was determined to follow through on his resentment of the American elite and confident that he had found a winning issue.38
He faced the campaign with a different team. Louis Howe had died in April after a yearlong illness. The president had ordered a state funeral for him and traveled with his remains to their final resting place in Fall River, Massachusetts. Jim Farley mobilized state and local party organizations. Principal speechwriters included Sam Rosenman, Tom Corcoran, and liberal Republican Stanley High.
Eleanor, by 1936, was almost as prominent and controversial as her husband. Commuting to New York weekly, she continued to teach at the Todhunter School, but, devoted to interests far broader and more important than the instruction of daughters of the privileged, she was about to end her partnership with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. She had taken on a daily newspaper column and a weekly radio program. Much in demand as a speaker, she traveled extensively. She was also developing other close attachments—to her own private secretary, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, to journalist Lorena Hickok, and to dancer Mayris Chaney. Conservative Democrats grumbled about her; liberals increasingly saw her as an ideological lodestar. FDR probably viewed her, correctly, as a political asset.
Early polls, nonetheless, were not encouraging. Gallup gave Roosevelt just a 52 to 48 percent lead in national popular preference, listed only twenty-four states as safely Democratic, and put Landon ahead in the pivotal electoral states of Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. Landon, he proclaimed, was leading in electoral votes by a razor-thin tally of 272 to 259. Emil Hurja’s private polls for the Democratic National Committee were similar.39
Gallup’s July snapshot was probably not far off the mark. Many New Deal policies and outcomes—a restrictive agricultural program, all-embracing NRA regulation, debasement of the dollar, an increasingly cozy relationship with labor unions, big spending, handouts to WPA workers often unfairly typed as politically connected slackers, and a rising national debt—were broadly unpopular. Yet Roosevelt himself remained very popular. The country might take a look at Landon, but the charisma gap between him and Roosevelt was a yawning chasm. In the end, the election was about the president himself. As from the beginning, he was the New Deal, and he relished nothing more than a campaign built on that premise.
The president was content to let Landon, whom he thought a weak candidate, enjoy a mini-surge in the polls. He realized that genuinely undecided voters would not make up their minds until well after Labor Day. Avoiding overt political activity in the weeks after the convention, he spent much of his time outside Washington, boating with his sons off the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, spending a few days at Campobello with his mother, making a brief visit to Quebec City (exciting an audience by delivering his greetings in French), relaxing at Hyde Park, and inspecting Pennsylvania flood areas. In a “nonpolitical” address at Chautauqua, New York, he covered his foreign policy flank with assurances that he hated war.40
At the end of August, he began a train tour through drought-ravaged farm areas of the Midwest, where he delivered promises of federal assistance. He also found time to visit the still unfinished presidential shrine at Mount Rushmore. Back in Washington just before Labor Day, he broadcast his only fireside chat of the year, a nearly flawless talk in which he promised government aid for the needy. The American nation, he told his listeners, was built on principles of economic democracy that rejected the class conflict and consequent dictatorships that plagued much of Europe. “Labor Day belongs to all of us.”41
In September, Roosevelt made another foray into the Midwest to meet with drought-state governors (including Landon), then embarked on a “nonpolitical” trip south. Along the way, he announced federal awards, grants, and work projects, even as he proclaimed a rapidly returning prosperity. On September 30, he delivered his official campaign kickoff to a cheering crowd at the New York State Democratic Convention. He followed up by spending much of October on the road and delivering a series of hard-hitting speeches that drew huge, friendly crowds.
The esteemed Literary Digest poll consistently showed him trailing Landon, but in mid-October Gallup gave him 54 percent of the popular vote and 390 electoral votes. The steel and auto industries were running at near capacity; port facilities were at their busiest in years. Industrial and manufacturing cities were enjoying an economic boom. Agricultural prices were strong. Unemployment remained high but was expected to decline as factories returned to full schedules. The recovery, global in scope, could not simply be attributed to the New Deal, but the United States, more than any other nation, drove the world economy.42
Clearly, administration policies had contributed to the rebound. Yet an army of the unemployed remained; estimates of its size ran from 6 to 10 million workers. The American Federation of Labor, a widely accepted source, put the number at 8.2 million that October. (The government did not yet produce monthly employment statistics.) Pessimists, Harry Hopkins included, assumed these numbers would stay high. The WPA and other work-relief programs, which that October employed 3.3 million people, sustained many of the jobless. All told, an estimated 15.7 million Americans, about one-eighth of the population, were receiving some kind of federal relief benefit. Most were grateful and willing to acknowledge the president as its ultimate source.43
Roosevelt’s strong personality and the emerging recovery gave rise to a new and powerful political force that was transforming the Democratic Party: the “Roosevelt coalition.” The old party had been an amalgam of the (then) Solid South, nursing grievances against Republicans that went back to the Civil War, and northern big-city political organizations, most often headed by men with Irish names. Under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan, the party’s association with radicalism alienated patricians like FDR’s father. Woodrow Wilson had associated it with a more sedate, if still aggressive, brand of reform. From the 1890s onward, the party’s big-city constituencies ha
d grown with each wave of immigrants. In 1936, they and their children were disproportionately beneficiaries of the New Deal.
New Deal programs in fact dished out benefits to almost every group of Americans whose economic status was below the national median. Negroes were grateful for the First Lady’s open concern and for fairer treatment than they had received from the federal government since Reconstruction. The time had come, declared a prominent black journalist, to turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall. Labor unions, representing workers of diverse backgrounds, contributed heavily to the president’s campaign. The upstart Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), headed by the volatile mine workers leader, John L. Lewis, gave the Roosevelt campaign the then enormous sum of $500,000.
Roosevelt’s appointment to high office of Catholics and Jews, such as Joseph P. Kennedy to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and Henry Morgenthau Jr. as secretary of the Treasury, heartened relatively well-off elites among the minorities. (Morgenthau was only the second Jew to be appointed to the cabinet; Theodore Roosevelt had named the first.)
Although a powerful political force, the coalition was also filled with contradictions. It included Negroes and white supremacists; Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; and multiple ethnic groups that wanted little to do with each other. Some members were already reflexive Democratic partisans; many were direct beneficiaries of a WPA job, a mortgage refinancing, an acreage allotment subsidy, or support for labor unions. Others were simply ready to reward a radio-communicated expression of presidential concern. Their diversity guaranteed eventual internal dissention; for the moment, however, the coalition members shared a temporary solidarity.
To this polyglot amalgam, Roosevelt added an ideological grouping: independent progressives, many with Republican backgrounds. A National Conference of Progressives, chaired by Senator Robert La Follette Jr., made the endorsement official. Its personalities ranged from urban radicals such as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York to venerable agrarians such as Senator George Norris of Nebraska. Roosevelt himself would go out of his way to endorse Norris for reelection against a Democratic challenger. He wanted to make the Democratic Party the nation’s progressive party and indelibly brand the Republicans its reactionary alternative.44
If for the Democratic Party demography was destiny, Roosevelt’s overwhelming persona was a triumph of individual will. Of all the larger-than-life national leaders of the 1930s, he alone maintained himself in office by democratic procedures. Yet, for all his charm and appeal, he also displayed the off-putting characteristics of the charismatic leader: a palpable appetite for power, a resentment of restraint from such institutions as the Supreme Court, an ideological outlook that removed politics from the realm of divergent interests and compromise to one of grand principle, and a tendency to personalize differences of opinion and ambition. These attitudes, while reassuring to his followers, appeared autocratic and menacing to those who opposed him.
In the emergency of 1933, Walter Lippmann had encouraged Roosevelt to act the dictator. In 1936, Lippmann accused him of personal rule and an authoritarian temperament, worried out loud about the perils of an overwhelming Democratic victory, and pronounced Landon an acceptable alternative. The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, both usually reliable Democratic newspapers, withheld backing for either candidate. The Post gave Roosevelt credit for good intentions but warned of “dictatorship by default.” The leading voice of midwestern progressivism, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, charged Roosevelt with big-government overreach and endorsed Landon. In contrast, The Economist (London), published in a nation accustomed to big government and high tax rates, saw the New Deal as a moderate program led by a president addicted to extreme language. “The qualities which inspire loyalty in a crisis,” it observed, “are not those best calculated to inspire confidence in a calmer period.”45
The angry Right—typified by the Liberty League, the Hearst newspapers, and the Chicago Tribune—portrayed Roosevelt as a would-be dictator inspired by Stalin, predicted a regime that would require its citizens to wear dog tags engraved with their Social Security numbers, and warned that the American way of life was at stake. Landon, trying to get some traction, increasingly veered in the league’s direction.46
By the end of October, most seasoned observers realized that Roosevelt was moving toward a convincing victory, even if the Literary Digest persisted in predicting a Landon upset. Jim Farley predicted that the president would carry every state except Maine and Vermont.47
Roosevelt was riding a strong economy. He was the greatest popular communicator in the history of the office. His dominating personality contrasted vividly with Landon’s blandness. His party was sure to maintain control of Congress. In such circumstances, many leaders might have dialed down partisanship and talked of national unity. But charismatic leadership fed on conflict and crisis. It was, above all, personal.
On October 31, at the last big rally of the campaign, Roosevelt made his way to the rostrum at Madison Square Garden and reached for the flamethrower. He told his listeners that he and they stood at the head of an army that for four years had been fighting against the exploitative forces of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, [and] war profiteering.”
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration 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.48
The crowd, a Washington Post reporter wrote, seemed to sway expectantly, waiting for the next verbal body blow to the opposition. Then “their pent-up force would crash to the roof-footlights in terrific noise.”49
Three days later, the nation went to the polls.
Roosevelt waited for the election results at Hyde Park, surrounded by family and close aides. The first returns showed clearly that an epic landslide was in the making. He polled 60 percent of the popular ballot and ran 11 million votes ahead of Landon. The electoral college tally was 523 to 8. Lemke got less than 1 million votes. The Democrats won majorities of 331 to 89 in the House of Representatives and 76 to 16 in the Senate. The people had decided overwhelmingly that the president and the New Deal had more to offer them than did Landon and a return to yesterday.
Tommy Corcoran played his accordion for a joyful party. At Democratic gatherings all over the country, bands struck up “Happy Days Are Here Again.” No president since George Washington had received so overwhelming a mandate from the American people. For a brief moment, all things seemed possible.
Chapter 18
“Panic and Lack of Confidence”
The Economic and Political Consequences of the Second Hundred Days, 1937–1939
On January 6, 1937, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his annual State of the Union message two weeks before his second swearing in. The Depression, he declared, was rapidly coming to an end. An age of reform remained in its early stages. The economic crisis, he asserted, had laid bare a long neglect of the needs of the underprivileged. It thereby presented a challenge that American democracy had met with “first, economic recovery through many kinds of assistance to agriculture, industry and banking; and, second, deliberate improvement in the personal security and opportunity of the great mass of our people.”1
Roosevelt admitted that the National Recovery Administration had been too ambitious in its effort to manage the economy, but, he added, controlling the evils of overproduction, underproduction, and speculation, achieving decent working conditions for labor, and creating ju
st returns for agriculture remained necessary. Above all, “the deeper purpose of democratic government is to assist as many of its citizens as possible, especially those who need it most.” This goal required a national housing program, extensive assistance to the rural poor, and a far more comprehensive Social Security system.
In remarks clearly directed at the Supreme Court, Roosevelt declared that governments, prevented from meeting the necessities of the day, had been replaced by militaristic authoritarianism. The framers of the Constitution had possessed an expansive interpretation of its powers; contemporary judges should follow their example. He followed this assertion by signaling yet another departure: “This task of Executive management has reached the point where our administrative machinery needs comprehensive overhauling. I shall, therefore, shortly address the Congress more fully in regard to modernizing and improving the Executive branch of the Government.”
On January 20, Roosevelt took the oath of office, barely sheltered from a driving rain mixed with sleet, his hand on the two-hundred-year-old Dutch-language family Bible. Radio carried his inaugural address to tens of millions of listeners across the continent. Shortwave transmission conveyed it to millions more in Europe and Latin America. Firmly delivered against a background of pattering raindrops, the speech told the world that the New Deal was far from over.2
Utilizing quasi-religious symbolism to the utmost, the president recalled his determination, during his 1932 campaign, “to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it.” Evoking the Founding Fathers and the constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare, he pledged to use his office to consolidate a “new order of things,” characterized by social justice and economic morality, over the opposition of “private autocratic powers” and “heedless self-interest.” “One-third of a nation,” he estimated, was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” The democratic ideal demanded better: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. . . . Today we reconsecrate our country to long-cherished ideals in a suddenly changed civilization.”
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 35