The presidential legislative agenda moved through Congress with more dispatch than might have been expected. A new Agricultural Adjustment Act cleared Congress in February, institutionalizing subsidies as a continuing essential of life for most medium- and large-scale farmers. A big Naval Expansion Act gave Roosevelt the increased defense capabilities he wanted, while supplying lots of jobs for shipyard workers. A Revenue Act established a basic corporate levy and abolished the much derided undistributed-profits tax. A Pure Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act strengthened existing statutes. The Fair Labor Standards Act established the wage and hour provisions Roosevelt had requested and definitively outlawed child labor. Executive reorganization remained stalled, and some of the other bills failed to provide everything the president had requested. He could easily have declared victory. Instead, openly affronted, he went to war with a substantial segment of his own party.
In mid-December 1937, the New York Times had reported that a group of conservative-leaning senators, mostly Democratic, had drafted a “manifesto” that criticized lavish spending. It advocated lower taxes, a balanced budget, an end to “coercion and violence” in labor relations, cessation of government competition with private enterprise, encouragement of capitalist investment, and extensive cutbacks in federal regulations. Hailing the “spiritual values” of democracy and capitalism, it asserted that only individual ambition and self-reliance could produce abundance, security, and happiness. The story associated six senators with the proposed statement: Josiah Bailey (D-NC), Harry Byrd (D-VA), Edward Burke (D-NE), Royal Copeland (D-NY), Millard Tydings (D-MD), and Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI).38
Although never signed or officially proclaimed by its drafters, the manifesto, which the Times published verbatim, was a telling indication of an uneasiness that knew no geographical bounds and was remarkably widespread among Capitol Hill Democrats. If almost all Democrats had voted for the greater part of Roosevelt’s program, quite a few had done so only on final votes after maneuvering to kill or dilute the president’s recommendations. Much of this sentiment stemmed from the instinctive reactions of men who had prospered politically under a traditional order that the New Deal challenged. Some of it was personal, however, reflecting resentment of a presidential command style that took loyalty for granted and seldom displayed appreciation. It was most discernible among southerners, who were deeply apprehensive about the administration’s tentative challenges to white supremacy and fearful that pro-union, high-wage policies would destroy their region’s one advantage in economic development.39
The president and his aides resented what they saw as an obstructionist effort to negate one of the greatest electoral mandates in human history. Roosevelt was especially offended that his executive reorganization bill remained stalled in Congress amid mutterings of his alleged dictatorial ambitions. On March 30, 1938, he released to the press a letter he had written to an unnamed friend. It began with a disavowal: “(A) I have no intentions to be a dictator. (B) I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator. (C) I have too much historical background and too much knowledge of existing dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship.”40
On June 24, just after the adjournment of Congress, Roosevelt delivered his thirteenth fireside chat. He blamed business leaders who kept prices high and wages low for the economic recession, then went after their allies on Capitol Hill. Congressional Democrats, he declared, had been elected on the liberal national platform of 1936. A few had given lip service to that platform while in practice embracing conservative principles that would take the nation back to the 1920s. “I feel I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear-cut issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my own name.”41
The president and his aides had already compiled a hit list of senators who had blocked or watered down important legislation and might be beatable in primary elections. Newspaper leaks appeared about the project’s initial scope, then gradual whittling down. Some right-leaning legislators, such as Pat McCarran of Nevada, Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, and Harry Byrd of Virginia, were too well entrenched to challenge. In the end, the hit list contained only five incumbents: Guy Gillette of Iowa, Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana, Walter F. George of Georgia, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Ellison D. (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina.42
Even in Britain, where parties were organized from the top down, prime ministers could not routinely jettison unreliable members of the House of Commons. In the United States, parties were organized from the bottom up; local politicians saw themselves as advocates for their districts, not for national platforms, and resented interference from Washington. In Iowa that June, Gillette cruised to a primary victory against a more liberal Democratic congressman. In normally Republican Indiana, which chose nominees at a party convention, the instincts of party regulars were for party unity. Van Nuys, who had incurred Roosevelt’s wrath mainly by opposing Court-packing, won easily at the state Democratic gathering in early July.
The president also endorsed some incumbents who faced primary challenges. His biggest and clearest win was Senator Alben Barkley’s solid victory over Governor A. B. (“Happy”) Chandler in the Kentucky primary. But accusations that Barkley’s organization had tapped WPA workers for contributions and campaign work would later besmirch even that victory. A Senate committee, headed by Morris Sheppard of Texas, documented similar abuses in several other states. Reminding Americans that in many areas the WPA was, in roughly equal parts, a relief agency and a political patronage vehicle, the controversy left the New Deal morally tarnished.43
By early August, with much of the nominating season over, Roosevelt was down to George, Smith, and Tydings. He had worked largely behind the scenes and accomplished little. He either had to abandon what observers were calling a purge (after Josef Stalin’s bloody remaking of the Soviet Communist Party) or double down and take an open lead. His combative instinct prevailed.
Dedicating a rural electrification project in the little town of Barnesville, Georgia, on August 11 before a crowd estimated to be in excess of 30,000, with Senator George just a few feet away on the platform, the president recounted his long association with the state and his commitment to the struggle against southern poverty. He assailed legislators who had “listened to the dictatorship of the small minority of individuals and corporations.” Walter George was “a gentleman and a scholar,” but “I am impelled to make it clear that on most public questions he and I do not speak the same language.” Neither did another candidate, the popular and demagogic Herman Talmadge, who “would contribute little to practical government.” The president openly endorsed Lawrence Camp, a capable and liberal former state attorney general. The cheers of the crowd conveyed goodwill for Roosevelt but also produced loud shouts of “Hurrah for Senator George!” The next day, speaking from the rear platform of his train in South Carolina, Roosevelt declined to directly endorse Governor Olin D. Johnston against Senator Smith but did ask the crowd to vote for strong supporters of the New Deal. A couple of weeks later, he proclaimed his strong preference for the South Carolinian who thought in terms of the present and future instead of the distant past.44
Roosevelt followed that pronouncement up with a press conference denunciation of the Democratic primary candidacy of Senator Tydings and added to it one important House race, that of Representative John J. O’Connor of New York, chairman of the House Rules Committee (and brother of FDR’s friend and collaborator in the fight against polio, Basil O’Connor). Both, he said in an on-the-record comment, had “after giving the New Deal lip service in 1936, turned around and knifed it in congress.” A week before the Maryland primary, he campaigned in the state for Tydings’s opponent.45
By then, the results were already in from South Carolina, which voted on August 30 for Smith, whose five-term incumbency, stout defense of cotton farming, and demagogic ap
peals to white supremacy brought him a strong victory. Two weeks later, Maryland decisively returned Tydings, and Georgia gave its vote to George, with Camp finishing third. In New York, O’Connor narrowly lost the Democratic primary, but his defeat could not obscure the other results. The most impressive leader and the canniest operator in American politics had displayed massive failures of judgment.
On November 4, just before the midterm election, Roosevelt went on the air pleading the case for a liberal Democratic Congress. His voice was, as always, strong and golden; more than ever, it possessed an undertone of passion. The Munich conference, at which Britain and France had effectively conceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler, was just five weeks in the past. A few days earlier, Alf Landon had asserted that the New Deal was leading the country toward fascism. The president linked “old-line Tory Republicanism” to both fascism and communism while asserting that the New Deal was the hope of democracy. But with the economy just beginning to recover, even FDR had to sound a little lame when he proclaimed that the business slump had “not become a major economic disaster.”46
The voters handed the president and the New Deal a stinging rebuke. Democrats still controlled the Senate 69 to 23, with four independent progressives; their House margin was 261 to 164, with four sympathetic independents. But the tide had run mainly against the liberals. The potential for cooperation between the large conservative Democratic bloc on Capitol Hill and the augmented Republican minority was immediately obvious.47
The new Congress that convened in January 1939 was less interested in undoing the New Deal than in containing it. In its first session, ending that August, it finally gave the president a much diluted version of his executive reorganization bill. He would use the authority to create an Executive Office of the President, into which he folded the Bureau of the Budget and several other agencies. The legislation also gave the president six new “administrative assistants.” But the important quasi-judicial regulatory agencies remained independent. Other executive agencies could be consolidated or reshuffled only subject to congressional veto.
Capitol Hill managed a few last gasps of New Dealism. Congress passed a food stamp welfare plan as a means of disposing of looming mountains of agricultural surpluses; it also sped up Social Security payments and made the program more generous. Nonetheless, an emerging congressional “economy bloc” made significant cuts in relief appropriations. Reacting to the WPA political scandals of 1938, Congress passed the Hatch Act, prohibiting civil servants from engaging in political activity. Even many supportive legislators were in revolt against the peremptory demands Roosevelt had once made freely. By 1939, moreover, the president was primarily concerned with mobilizing congressional support for an activist foreign policy.
The new congressional center of gravity, composed mostly of northern Republicans and southern Democrats, was more skeptical than ever and prone to fund investigations that harassed the administration. With the economy still mired in recession, the New Deal as an ongoing program was sputtering to an end. The Roosevelt presidency seemed likely to follow in the two-term tradition for chief executives.
Roosevelt, like most charismatic leaders, had generated intense emotions. Millions of Americans worshiped him; millions of others quite literally could not bear to speak his name. All but the most vehement haters conceded that he possessed outsized political skills and an imposing personality. What had brought his presidency to a seeming dead end? Both worshipers and demonizers agreed on a common theme: his persistent quest to increase presidential power and probe its limits. Where the admirers saw a leader of the people attempting decisive action in the cause of democracy, the haters perceived a drive toward dictatorship.
Less passionate observers had wavered between the two extremes. The Court-packing controversy, the executive reorganization fight, and the 1938 party purge forced them to take sides. Walter Lippmann provided a vivid example. In the crisis of 1933, he had told Roosevelt to act the dictator and praised him for doing so. But as the sense of existential crisis receded and the continuing Depression became more akin to a dull chronic ache, Lippmann increasingly became a critic, often exposing inner contradictions and palpable fallacies in the administration’s rhetoric and programs. Observing politics from a comfortable upper-middle-class perch, he seems to have possessed little sense of the continuing deprivation that characterized the lives of the bottom strata. He had also arrived at a not unrealistic assessment of the false promise of social engineering and observed the horrors being wrought in Europe by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Josef Stalin. In 1937, he published The Good Society, a critique of all varieties of planned collectivism and strongman rule. Delivering a lecture at Johns Hopkins University in April 1937, he asserted, “We are faced—now—with the choice between the restoration of constitutional government and a rapid descent into personal government.”48
Roosevelt had clearly overinterpreted his 1936 mandate, which in terms of percentage of the popular vote was no different from Warren G. Harding’s in 1920 and not much more than Herbert Hoover’s in 1928. He, like many of his enemies, tended to personalize political differences. Displaying a principled stubbornness in contrast to the facile opportunism so often attributed to him, he really believed in his program and his view of an American society split between the predatory few and the deprived masses. That he was at bottom a democratic leader no one could deny. Nor could one avoid the reality that the New Deal had failed to end the Depression. Still, Roosevelt retained the devotion of millions of Americans whom his programs had helped. The Gallup poll detected marginal drops in his appeal from its 1936 peak but found a majority of the nation behind him, disapproving of a third term yet likely to vote for him if he ran. He risked being remembered as an interesting reformer but largely unsuccessful economic manager. By early 1939, however, new and even more formidable challenges loomed from abroad. FDR was ready to take them on.49
Part III
The World at War
Chapter 19
Winds of War
1933–1939
Franklin Roosevelt had become president in 1933 just weeks after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany. At that point Benito Mussolini seemed the strongman of Europe but no threat to American interests. An aggressive, militaristic Japan appeared fixated on conquests in East Asia but unlikely to menace American positions in the Pacific. Well into Roosevelt’s second term, the Depression and efforts to restore prosperity at home were his first priorities, whatever the rush of events abroad.
By 1938, the scene had changed so much that John Maynard Keynes ended his response to Roosevelt’s brush-off of his deficit-spending advice with an allusion to foreign policy: “The tragedy is that the right-minded show no indication of supporting one another. You will be reluctant to support us; we are reluctant to support France; France is reluctant to support Spain. At long last we shall get together. But how much harm will have been done by then?”1
The president did not reply to Keynes’s accurate observation that the military and diplomatic challenges were becoming increasingly salient. In facing them, Roosevelt, as he largely had done with domestic issues, blended the realism of his cousin Theodore with the idealistic rhetoric of his World War I leader, Woodrow Wilson. Above all, he moved with the greatest care in a political environment that summarily rejected foreign entanglements.
In the 1930s, Americans possessed a firm foreign policy consensus: involvement in World War I had been a mistake. The peace arrangements had made a mockery of Wilson’s democratic goals. The United States had been tricked into saving the British and French empires. Arms dealers and bankers had promoted the war for their personal profit. Allied nations had defaulted on their war debts. The United States needed to concentrate on its own problems and keep the various European nations at arm’s length. Perhaps because this viewpoint was so starkly simple, it permeated all levels of American society and politics. Senator Gerald Nye, a progressive Republican from North
Dakota, promoted it as chairman of a special investigating committee that looked into the decision for war in 1917. So did influential authors.2
Especially significant to Roosevelt was the nearly unanimous rejection of international involvement by such independent progressive congressmen as George Norris and Robert La Follette Jr. He seems to have understood almost from the beginning of his presidency that the world had become a combustible place and that another great war would surely entangle the United States. But Europe was far away—four or five days by fast ocean liner and not instantly connected electronically until the advent of shortwave radio in the later 1930s.
Hitler and Mussolini might strike those who paid attention as potential adversaries, but Europe was mostly ruled by dictators, and the flare-ups of the 1930s were hard to connect to American interests. The Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935? Why get excited over the fate of a primitive nation that still practiced slavery? German and Italian meddling in the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War? It was a pox-on-both-their-houses conflict between rightist and leftist extremes. The German annexation of Austria in 1938? A unification of German-speaking people accomplished without resistance. The Munich Agreement and Anglo-French acquiescence in the German takeover of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland? The absorption of yet another predominantly German region. The German move into the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939? Not a threat to the United States. Mussolini’s seizure of Albania in 1939? Who cared?
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 38