by Jon Meacham
“Well, that’s the only and prime purpose of the National Revolutionary Party—to get jobs for everyone….
“This is our country and we must fight to keep it so. If America is ever again to be great, it can only be through the triumph of the revolutionary middle class.
“We must drive the Jewish international bankers out of Wall Street! We must destroy the Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all the alien elements and ideas that now infest her!
“America for Americans! Back to the principles of Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln!”
West was writing fiction, but only just. Perhaps the most consequential figure of the day, aside from FDR himself, was Huey Long, the former Louisiana governor who went to the U.S. Senate in 1932. Charismatic, wily, ambitious, and able, Long had a deep connection to poor voters who felt marginalized and to middle-class people who felt threatened. At lunch one day at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt family seat, the flamboyant Long arrived in a loud suit and a colorful tie. “Who is that awful man sitting to my son’s right?” Sara Delano Roosevelt asked.
Long was strikingly effective on the campaign trail. After watching him charm the farmers of the West and the Plains, five Democratic state chairmen sent word back to headquarters: “If you have any doubtful state,” they wrote party chief James Farley, “send Huey Long to it.” When Roosevelt lost the vote in Pennsylvania to Hoover in November 1932, Farley realized his mistake in failing to deploy Long to the depressed mining regions. “We never again underrated him,” Farley recalled.
Change—revolutionary change—was at hand, Long believed, and he saw himself as the tribune of the people. “A mob is coming here in six months to hang the other ninety-five of you damned scoundrels,” Long told a fellow senator, “and I’m undecided whether to stick here with you or go out and lead them.” Before a meeting with the president-elect himself, Long told reporters, ominously: “I’m going to ask him did you mean it, or didn’t you mean it?” By “it,” Long meant his own vision of the redistribution of wealth, which he believed key to saving capitalism itself. “Certainly we are facing communism in America,” Long said. “The country has been going toward communism ever since the wealth of this country began to get into the hands of a few people.”
In an April 1932 speech to the Senate called “The Doom of America’s Dream,” Long argued that both Democrats and Republicans had failed the country at one time or another. Power was concentrated in the hands of a self-serving financial and political elite. Only radical change, brought about by dynamic, unconventional leaders—leaders like Long—could make the nation the property of the people once more:
The great and grand dream of America that all men are created free and equal, endowed with the inalienable right of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness—this great dream of America, this great light, and this great hope—has almost gone out of sight in this day and time, and everybody knows it; and there is a mere candle flicker here and yonder to take the place of what the great dream of America was supposed to be….
Unless we provide for the redistribution of wealth in this country, the country is doomed; there is going to be no country left here very long. That may sound a little bit extravagant, but I tell you that we are not going to have this good little America here long if we do not take to redistribute the wealth of this country.
He focused not only on the poor. “Where is the middle class today?” Long asked in 1933. “Where is the corner groceryman, about whom President Roosevelt speaks? He is gone or going. Where is the corner druggist? He is gone or going. Where is the banker of moderate means? He is vanishing….The middle class today cannot pay the debts they owe and come out alive. In other words, the middle class is no more.”
Long was a master at generating headlines. “He delighted in starting a fight,” his biographer T. Harry Williams wrote. “Things are awfully quiet around here,” Long would say to his secretary, Earle Christenberry. “What have you got in your files that we can liven them up with?” A Democratic colleague said: “Frankly, we are afraid of him. He is unscrupulous beyond belief. He might say anything about me, something entirely untrue, but it would ruin me in my state….It’s like challenging a buzz saw. He will go to the limit. It is safer for me and the rest of us to leave him alone.”
One day in the Senate, much to the delight of the spectators in the galleries, Long was baiting Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar. The presiding officer tried to calm the crowd when Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky spoke up. “When the people go to a circus,” Barkley said, alluding to Long, “they ought to be allowed to laugh at the monkey.”
Writing in The Nation in 1935, the journalist and broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing took Long’s measure as candidate for the presidency. “He will be direct, picturesque, and amusing, a relief after the attenuated vagueness of most of the national speaking today,” Swing wrote. As long as Americans trusted FDR and believed in the New Deal, Swing wrote, all would be well. But if that faith were to collapse, Long might well be the man of that troubled hour. “Huey’s chances depend on those sands of hope and trust running out,” Swing wrote. “He is no menace if the President produces reform and recovery. But if in two years, even six, misery and fear are not abated in America the field is free to the same kind of promise-mongers who swept away Democratic leaders in Italy and Germany.”
As his “Share Our Wealth” message spread, taking political form in grassroots clubs, Long grew in popularity. A banker from Montana wrote to Roosevelt saying that Long was “the man we thought you were when we voted for you.” Louis Howe, FDR’s political adviser, told the president that “it is symptoms like this I think we should watch very carefully.”
There was much to keep an eye on. Lawrence Dennis, a native of Georgia and a former foreign service officer, wrote a pair of books in the thirties: Is Capitalism Doomed? and The Coming American Fascism. “I am in favor of a middle-class revolution,” Dennis wrote, arguing that the media of the age made Americans susceptible to suggestion. “We have perfected techniques in propaganda and press and radio control which should make the United States the easiest country in the world to indoctrinate with any set of ideas, and to control for any physically possible ends.” Diversity—political, racial, religious, ethnic—was the enemy. Talk of equality for women or for racial and ethnic minorities would give the fascist movement room to run. To Dennis, “undoubtedly the easiest way to unite and animate large numbers in political association for action is to exploit the dynamic forces of hatred and fear.”
Huey Long of Louisiana and Father Charles Coughlin of Royal Oak, Michigan, were influential voices of populist discontent in the turbulence of the Great Depression.
While Long politicked and Dennis wrote, Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who built a broadcasting kingdom on earth from the Royal Oak suburb of Detroit, was an influential voice over the airwaves. Coughlin started out as anti-Communist in the late 1920s; his populist message would morph through the years, settling mainly on a platform of anti-Semitism. In broadcasts, when Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, came up, Coughlin would say, as if in passing, “whose original name was Alexander Levine.”
“His impulse,” Winston Churchill had written of FDR in the mid-1930s, “is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land.”
To Lawrence Dennis, the Coughlin-Long flocks were the perfect vehicles for revolution. “I hail these movements and pressure groups,” Dennis wrote in 1935, “not because their members are as yet fascists or friends of fascism, but because they are making fascism the alternative to chaos and national disintegration.”
Hugh S. Johnson, a retired general and former head of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, lashed out at the president’s foes in March 1935. “You can laugh at Father Coughlin—you can snort at Huey Long—but this country was never under a greater m
enace,” Johnson said. President Roosevelt, Johnson told the nation, was “our sole hope.”
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That hope, the man chosen to rescue the nation from the abyss, Franklin Roosevelt, was hardly seen in a heroic light in the shadows of 1932. According to The New Republic, the New York governor was “not a man of great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina.” Walter Lippmann, the most important columnist of the time, wrote: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Oswald Garrison Villard, the NAACP cofounder, was harsh about the gentleman from Hyde Park. “He has spoken of the ‘forgotten man,’ ” Villard wrote of Roosevelt, “but nowhere is there a real, passionate, ringing exposition of just what it is that the forgotten man has been deprived of or what should be done for him….We can see in him no leader, and no evidence anywhere that he can rise to the needs of this extraordinary hour.”
Charming, cagey, and courageous, FDR would spend the next dozen or so years winning four White House terms and trying, with varying degrees of success, to prove his critics wrong. Americans in his time were questioning the very viability of the constitutional order and of capitalism itself. In his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July 1932, he addressed himself to the future. “Wild radicalism has made few converts, and the greatest tribute that I can pay to my countrymen is that in these days of crushing want there persists an orderly and hopeful spirit on the part of the millions of our people who have suffered so much,” Roosevelt said. “To fail to offer them a new chance is not only to betray their hopes but to misunderstand their patience.”
The forces of progress, Roosevelt believed, were not to cower or to lash out, but to engage. “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster,” he said. “Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.” He then introduced a crucial phrase: “I pledge you, I pledge myself,” FDR said, “to a New Deal for the American people.” The crisis was existential. “His impulse,” Winston Churchill wrote of FDR in the mid-1930s, “is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land, and which, as it glows the brighter, may well eclipse both the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia.”
Roosevelt was, it is true, an unlikely revolutionary. Born into enveloping privilege at Springwood, his family’s house at Hyde Park in New York’s Hudson Valley, Roosevelt was educated at home, at Endicott Peabody’s Groton School, at Harvard, and at Columbia law school. His mother adored him with an all-consuming, even suffocating, love (“Mama left this morning,” he wrote his father at age eight and a half, “and I am to have my bath alone!”). Theodore Roosevelt was his hero and role model. He married TR’s favorite niece, Eleanor, served in the New York State Senate, and went to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy (a post TR had also held) under Wilson. His marriage survived the discovery of a love affair with Lucy Mercer, his wife’s social secretary, in 1918, and he was nominated for vice president on the Democratic ticket with James M. Cox of Ohio in 1920.
It was by any measure a dazzling life—and then, in August 1921, at his family’s summer retreat at Campobello Island on the Bay of Fundy, Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with infantile paralysis. He would never walk unaided again. He was thirty-nine years old. A quarter of a century later, after Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, in the spring of 1945, Churchill, his wartime ally, rose in the House of Commons to pay tribute to the fallen American chief. An astute biographer and a discerning statesman, Churchill, who said that FDR’s death had struck him with the force of “a physical blow,” spoke about the great, if largely unmentioned, fact about the American president. “President Roosevelt’s physical affliction,” Churchill said, “lay heavily upon him.”
A man of courage, Churchill appreciated it when he detected courage in others, and he had seen it, intimately, in Franklin Roosevelt. “It was a marvel that he bore up against it through all the many years of tumult and storm,” Churchill said of FDR’s paralysis. “Not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion and of hard, ceaseless political controversy. Not one in ten millions would have tried, not one in a generation would have succeeded, not only in entering this sphere, not only in acting vehemently in it, but in becoming indisputable master of the scene.”
Lyndon Johnson wept when he heard the news from Warm Springs. “He was just like a daddy to me always,” Johnson, then a congressman from Texas, said. “He was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid. God, God—how he could take it for us all!” The New York Times wrote: “Men will thank God on their knees, a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and direction to the activities of their government, in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western World.”
How did he do it? How did the man scorned in the beginning die a hero, bringing innumerable ordinary citizens to tears in the streets and on the farms of the country he loved? How did he salvage what seemed unsalvageable, rising to lead a nation through depression and world war?
One answer—and there are more than a few; such is the complexity of history—lies in FDR’s sense of hope, a spirit of optimism forged in his own experience. For it is not too much to say that a man who had personally survived cataclysm and overcome paralysis was well equipped—perhaps uniquely so—to prevail over national cataclysm and political paralysis.
“This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper,” Roosevelt told the country at his first inauguration. “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”
By one account, FDR had drawn on his own reading for the most historically memorable line of the address—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Eleanor told Roosevelt adviser Samuel Rosenman that a friend of hers had given the president-elect a volume of the writings of Henry David Thoreau not long before the inauguration. “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” Thoreau had written in his journal entry for September 7, 1851. FDR had the book with him during his pre-inaugural stay in Suite 776 of the Mayflower Hotel. “Roosevelt frequently picked up a book at his bedside for brief reading before turning out the lights,” Rosenman recalled. “It may be that in this way he came across the phrase, it stuck in his mind, and found its way into the speech.”
To Roosevelt, faith—powerful, resilient faith—was key. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” Roosevelt said in closing his first inaugural. “The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.”
In that spirit he carried on. Privately he wondered if all would come out right. A friend told him he might well be remembered as the greatest of presidents if he succeeded, but that he would go down as the worst if he failed. “If I fail,” Roosevelt replied, “I shall be the last one.” Publicly
, though, he never wavered. Conservatives hated him; radicals thought him a milquetoast opportunist; liberals weren’t sure, from moment to moment, quite what to make of him.
Just as he had to balance himself with steel braces on his legs, a cane in one hand and an aide—often one of his sons—on his other side simply to force himself forward when he rose from his wheelchair (he called it “stumping”), Roosevelt maneuvered with care through the storms of the decade. “It was part of his conception of his role,” adviser Rexford Tugwell said, “that he should never show exhaustion, boredom, or irritation.” Or extremism of any kind. He had told Americans what to expect from him. Running for president in 1932, Roosevelt said:
Say that civilization is a tree which, as it grows, continually produces rot and dead wood. The radical says: “Cut it down.” The conservative says: “Don’t touch it.” The liberal compromises: “Let’s prune, so that we lose neither the old trunk nor the new branches.” This campaign is waged to teach the country to march upon its appointed course, the way of change, in an orderly march, avoiding alike the revolution of radicalism and the revolution of conservatism.
As one might expect, this course failed to please the loudest voices in the sundry camps of American politics. “Franklin, darling, why is everyone opposed to so much of your program?” his mother once asked him. “A number of people have told me that they don’t think it will work.”
“Mummy, I think I know who you have been talking with, and if I’m right, they are people who don’t understand the first thing about government, never having served in it, nor have they the slightest conception of the great problems facing the nation,” FDR replied. “Their only worry is that they might find themselves having to get along with two automobiles instead of three, but they don’t give a hoot for the man who not only can’t afford a car but is unable to feed and clothe his family. These are the people I’m concerned about and if I succeed in raising their standard of living, I won’t lose any sleep over some of our friends who are opposed to my Administration.”