Messenger: “Mr. Litvinoff to see you, sir.”
President Roosevelt: “Show him in.”
London Daily Express, Fall 1933.
(Courtesy FDR Library)
Under one of the more antiquated rules of a stagecoach-era constitution, the new president could not enter the White House until four months after his election.
Who would lead during this transition period? Not Herbert Hoover—he had become a roi fainéant, a do-nothing leader, constitutionally responsible but politically impotent; not Congress, a lame-duck session convened in December, fragmented, rudderless, demoralized, many of its members repudiated by the November election.
In this vacuum, many turned to FDR to lead—and, indeed, to lead nobly. He himself had said, shortly after his election, that the presidency “is preeminently a place of moral leadership.” “Luckily for him,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “he has not made or had to make very many specific pledges to the voters which will rise to plague him. He has ample power. He is free to draw around himself the ablest and most distinguished men he can find. His goodwill no one questions. He has proved that he has the gift of political sagacity.
“If only he will sail by the stars and not where the winds of opinion would take him,” Lippmann went on, “he will bring the ship into port.”
Sail by the stars? The stars were silent and far away. The navigator lacked even a coherent political program for guidance, only a sheaf of promises. He had no grass-roots movement, with clear-cut goals, on which he could depend for direction and support. The very lack of “specific pledges” that Lippmann extolled robbed him of a policy mandate. The “pragmatism” of 1932 did not seem very relevant in the desperate climate of winter 1933.
The world scene had immensely darkened since the November election. On January 30,1933, President Hindenburg of Germany named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, in the wake of the Nazi leader’s failure to win a majority in Reichstag elections—but in the wake also of the failure of socialist and centrist leaders to rally Germans against him. The Nazis were already laying plans for systematic persecution of Jews. In the Far East the Japanese government, after seizing control of South Manchuria, fending off League of Nations efforts to conciliate the issue, and ignoring a groundswell of popular support by Americans for an economic boycott of Tokyo, prepared to pull out of the League.
The Depression at home was closer and direr. Even since the low point of early fall, business activity had slumped to a quarter, perhaps a third, below normal. The jobless now numbered between ten million and thirteen million, at least one out of every five workers. As winter deepened, so did the popular mood: despairing inertia on the part of most; bitter anger on the part of many; desperate street protests on the part of a few—united, massive action on the part of none.
During the transition period, President Hoover wanted President-elect Roosevelt to share some of the burden of decision making. Most immediately pressing in November was the long-festering war debt issue, which connected in turn with transatlantic economic relationships. Faced with British and French “bombshell” notes asking postponement of debt payments, Hoover hoped for support from Roosevelt. But FDR did not want to touch this sticky issue until he held office, for fear it might compromise his recovery program. Still, he accepted a Hoover invitation to discuss the matter in the White House.
Beneath a bipartisan array of presidential portraits, and amid a cloud of cigar and cigarette smoke, the two rivals and their aides somberly discussed the issue. For a time the men sparred over Hoover’s proposal to turn the bombshell over to a (reconstituted) debt commission. Hoover thought he had FDR’s agreement in principle; so the president reported to his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, adding that he had spent most of the time educating a very ignorant and “well-meaning” young man. Not enough time, perhaps: FDR shortly announced that responsibility for debt negotiations rested with the president. He would not touch this political tar baby.
Outraged, Hoover could find little solace in realizing that he had experienced what many others had and would—FDR’s tendency to be affable, to nod as though in agreement, when he was merely trying to convey that he understood. Relations between the two leaders were left embittered.
Bitterness smoldered among the people as well. In mid-February, during a stop in Miami on the way back from a cruise, Roosevelt had just finished a warm little talk from his car when shots rang out from hardly ten yards away. The shots missed FDR but mortally wounded Mayor Anton J. Cermak of Chicago, who was talking with him. Roosevelt, notably calm, had Cermak put in his car. “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt you if you keep quiet.”
“I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally,” cried Joe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer with a stomach full of ulcers and a gun bought at a pawnshop for eight dollars. “I hate all Presidents, no matter from what country they come, and I hate all officials and everybody who is rich.” FDR remembered Cousin Ted saying, “The only real danger from an assassin is from one who does not care whether he loses his own life.” Some weeks later, after Cermak died, Zangara was executed.
Drift, deadlock, defeatism, division within his own ranks as well as within the exiting Hoover administration, and now this act of violence. The four-month transition for Roosevelt was probably one of the most trying political phases of his life.
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There was one euphoric moment during the transition months: visiting the Tennessee Valley.
Roosevelt’s consuming interest in public power had not been limited to New York State and the St. Lawrence River. The potential of the Tennessee River had long excited him. He knew the tortuous political background: how Cousin Ted had vetoed a bill allowing private exploitation of power from the stretch of surging rapids at Muscle Shoals; how during the war President Wilson had authorized the building of a huge dam to generate power for producing nitrates for munitions; how the dam was uncompleted at war’s end and sat idle for years as progressives led by Nebraska senator George Norris fought for public use of the dam and against private developers, including Henry Ford, who sought to buy it; how Coolidge and Hoover had blocked Norris’s efforts, Hoover declaring that federal development of Muscle Shoals power would “break down the initiative and enterprise of the American people,” destroy “equality of opportunity,” and, indeed, negate “the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.”
FDR also understood—perhaps even more important—the ideas that lay behind comprehensive valley or regional development. Here again Theodore Roosevelt had taken the lead, convening a White House Conference on Natural Resources in 1908, asking Congress for a permanent commission that would coordinate the work of the government on waterways, and thinking in regional terms, especially about Appalachia. Another family member, FDR’s uncle Frederic Delano, in spring 1930 gave his nephew a copy of the “Appalachian Report,” urging him to read this study “prepared by your distinguished kinsman Theodore Roosevelt on the conservation and development of the Tennessee Valley.” In fact it was on Appalachia alone and not the whole valley, and the work of many hands, but it did emphasize the regional approach.
And FDR knew the valley itself, embracing 41,000 square miles—and hence larger than many European countries—divided between mountainous northeast sections, peopled mainly by miners and mountaineers, and a southwest lower section occupied largely by cotton sharecroppers on flat alluvial lands. If he did not know the precise living standards of the people, he would know the reality of their dire needs and crushed hopes—large families, unschooled children, low spendable incomes half the national average, wretched housing, appalling mortality rates. Grim reality made the challenge and the potential all the greater.
So it was with vast pleasure and excitement that FDR went to Alabama late in January to tour the area by automobile in the company of daughter Anna and Senator Norris, and with both hope and pain that he looked up at the huge Wilson dam with the water roaring unused through its spillways. He and Norris became more eager with every step. “This should be a happy day for you, George,” FDR said to the senator. Norris, tears welling in his eyes, responded, “It is, Mr. President. I see my dreams come true.”
But realizing the dreams called for political and legislative action. Knowing well the sensitivities of the South to outside—especially “Yankee”—interference, FDR spoke to valley crowds whenever he could. At the end of the day, in Montgomery, he made much of his family’s southern background—how one Roosevelt had married into a Georgia family, how some Roosevelts in the 1880s had called Confederate Navy veterans “pirates,” but all his children just laughed heartily at “hearing brave officers of the Confederate Navy” so stigmatized. And he made clear that he was proud to stand in the “sacred spot” where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as president of the Confederacy. But above all he wanted to explain his TVA idea to the South, and he did so in his usual simple terms.
“My friends, I am determined on two things as a result of what I have seen today. The first is to put Muscle Shoals to work. The second is to make of Muscle Shoals a part of an even greater development that will take in all of that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio and the Gulf.
“Muscle Shoals is more today than a mere opportunity for the Federal Government to do a kind turn for the people in one small section of a couple of States. Muscle Shoals gives us the opportunity to accomplish a great purpose for the people of many States and, indeed, for the whole Union. Because there we have an opportunity of setting an example of planning, not just for ourselves but the generations to come, tying in industry and agriculture and forestry and flood prevention, tying them all into a unified whole over a distance of a thousand miles so that we can afford better opportunities and better places for living for millions of yet unborn in the days to come.…”
Here was Roosevelt’s answer, conscious or not, to Hoover’s claim that federal development would mean destruction of “equality of opportunity.”
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A different set of satisfactions awaited Roosevelt in the final making up of his cabinet. Here he could indulge his penchant for rewarding friends —ignoring (and hence punishing) enemies—and for juggling and balancing, and at the same time seek to shape a competent ministry. But it was not to be a ministry of all the talents, for the new president would bypass some of the most experienced and highly regarded Democratic leaders such as Newton D. Baker, Norman Davis, Bernard Baruch, and John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee.
Like most presidents, FDR wanted his own men. His easiest reward for loyalty went to Jim Farley for postmaster general. Others, too, had been “FRBC’s”—For Roosevelt Before Chicago. His choice for secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was a Democratic party elder statesman, first elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives forty years earlier. A wily populist who had helped draft the federal income tax of 1913, Hull had served a stint as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the early 1920s and had proved himself a low-tariff stalwart. White-haired, courtly, and long-suffering in public, Hull was noted for blowing up in private, demonstrating both a mountaineer’s command of epithets and an inability to forgive or forget an enemy.
The second big cabinet job, treasury, went to William Woodin, another old Democratic warhorse, but one with extensive business as well as political experience.
The most daring and innovative appointment—a woman for the most “unwomanly” job of secretary of labor—was most put into jeopardy by the woman herself. Frances Perkins met every test of loyalty, competence, idealism, and commitment, but she believed, she wrote FDR, that the job should go to “someone straight from the ranks of some group of organized workers”—“to establish firmly the principle that labor is in the President’s councils.” But FDR insisted.
For secretary of agriculture, Roosevelt would dearly have loved to pick good friend and neighbor Henry Morgenthau Jr., but Tugwell—and, more important, the major farm leaders—favored Henry Wallace, with his family background in agriculture and commitment to aiding midwestern farmers. For interior, FDR chose a man he had met only briefly, a zealous, public-spirited, and stubbornly outspoken Chicago lawyer named Harold L. Ickes; his was to be one of FDR’s most durable—and perhaps most important—appointments.
In the end FDR’s cabinet, like most American cabinets, was more a collection than a collectivity. It was mainly Democratic except for nominal Republicans like Woodin and Wallace and progressive Republicans like Ickes and Perkins; heavily political, interest-group oriented, with representatives of farmers, businessmen, and workers; and ideologically some indefinable combination of centrist, liberal, and even radical. It was a cabinet that FDR could easily dominate. Even so, he also made personal appointments of men who would share power as assistant secretaries and advisers, men like an old friend, William Phillips, and brain-truster Moley in the State Department; Rex Tugwell in agriculture; Morgenthau and others who would have direct influence in treasury. And beneath these levels were the hundreds, even thousands, of continuing federal officials who would variously elevate, administer, impede, and sabotage New Deal programs.
The most notable of the carryovers was indeed a near-celebrity, J. Edgar Hoover. Whatever doubts FDR had about Hoover’s mixed record, his overzealousness, and his participation in the notorious Palmer raids on “reds” and “un-Americans” were overcome by the support Hoover could mobilize in high places—very high places. Supreme Court Justice Harían Fiske Stone, hearing that Hoover’s retention might be in doubt, wrote FDR’s confidant Felix Frankfurter virtually a panegyric to the man. FDR told Frankfurter that he could assure Stone that “it is all right about Edgar Hoover.”
The most influential holdovers were members of the old brain trust, especially Moley, Tugwell, and Berle, but no longer a “trust” as they were now ensconced in agencies. FDR’s correspondents widened even further after he entered the White House, to include a host of labor leaders, farm politicians, newspaper editors, academics, southern notables, and state politicos, as well as old friends like James Cox, Colonel Edward House, Frankfurter, Josephus Daniels, and Norman Davis; Daniels’s ambassadorial appointment to Mexico only seemed to enhance his cordial “Dutch uncle” relationship to “Franklin.” Moley was worried by FDR’s receptivity to ideas—many of them crank ideas, in Moley’s view—that flowed in from all directions. The boss, Tugwell said, had a flypaper mind.
The president’s advisers were conduits for countless other ideas and notions. Frankfurter and Berle passed on suggestions from Justice Brandeis, whose thoughts would become warnings as Roosevelt veered later toward “big government.” Ideas pouring into the White House became grist for FDR’s speeches. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who would brook little intervention in his speechwriting, FDR was heavily dependent on drafts written by a shifting array of in-house and out-of-house advisers that would later include the redoubtable team of Benjamin Cohen and Tom Corcoran, brilliant corporate lawyers from New York.
The president had a touching relationship with some of his advisers, notably Frankfurter; the two men visited often together and corresponded extensively, with unusual frankness—though FDR could depend on Frankfurter’s lawyerlike discretion. And, strangely, FDR allowed Adolf Berle to address him as “My Dear Caesar” long after he became president, evidently without fear that a misplaced letter might play into the hands of Republicans who felt he was really acting like Caesar. Berle’s claim that Caesar was “historically accurate”—a “supreme power, elective, subject to Senate and people”—would hardly have placated the critics. FDR counseled Berle as “your old Uncle Franklin.”
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Even as Roosevelt was making his final choices, events were moving ahead of him with shocking speed. Since November the economy had taken another sickening lurch downward, industrial production dropping to an all-time low. The most ominous signs, along with the ever lengthening lines of the jobless, were runs on banks, which began to close their doors, producing mobs of frantic depositors. By March 2, two days before FDR’s inauguration, twenty-one states had shut down or curbed banking operations.
In his last days in the White House, President Hoover, now desperate, became more brazen than ever in urging his successor to abandon campaign promises, on the grounds that it was now Rooseveltwho was causing the downturn. In a secret message to senators, Hoover admitted that he was calling on the president-elect for “abandonment of 90 percent of the so-called new deal.” To this chutzpah FDR reacted with contempt.
The East Front of the Capitol, Noon, March 4, 1933.
Bareheaded in the cold, his face set and somber, the newly sworn-in president looks out on the huge crowd below him. The family Bible lies open at First Corinthians, chapter thirteen: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
The people standing below him, strangely silent and unsmiling, watch the president intently as, with his head back and jaw outthrust, he begins to speak. Perched on the icy branches of gaunt trees under a leaden sky are some who lack tickets: an old man in ancient, patched-up green tweeds; a young woman with red hair in a skimpy coat; an older woman in ragged clothes; a college student.
“This is a day of national consecration,” the president said, having just scribbled these words into the start of the speech while waiting in the Capitol. He had sensed the lack of celebration as he waited outside the White House, which looked a bit seedy, its paint yellowing, for Herbert Hoover to join him for the trip to the Capitol; when he could not strike up a conversation with the glum president; when even the Marine Band seemed unable to evoke more than a few cheers from the throng.
“I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” In keynotes that would form headlines in newspapers across the country and around the globe, he spoke directly to the needs and hopes of the people.
Distress: The nation need not “shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today,” and the president spelled them out: values “shrunken to fantastic levels,” the “withered leaves of industrial enterprise” lying on every side, farmers finding no markets, family savings lost, jobless workers facing “the grim problem of existence,” others working for little pay.
Fear: “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.”
But now hope: “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.”
And even happiness: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”
Action: “This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.” The president reiterated his key campaign promises. “These are the lines of attack.”
Above all, leadership: “If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other.” Without willingness to move “as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline,” no leadership was effective. This would make possible “a leadership which aims at a larger good.” This he would offer, assuming “unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”
Was such leadership possible under the American constitutional system? The Constitution was so “simple and practical,” the constitutional system “the most superbly enduring political mechanism” in the modern world, that it would meet the stress of Depression as it had of foreign and civil war. He expected that the “normal balance” of executive and legislative authority would work.
But then a surprise: In the event that Congress failed to follow his leadership or failed to lead on its own, “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
A warning of dictatorship? “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. 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.” He would supply it.
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“It was very, very solemn and a little terrifying,” a somber Eleanor Roosevelt said at the end of the inauguration. More awed than exhilarated by the ceremony, the new first lady was startled by her husband’s warning that he might have to “wage war.”
The new president smiled his way through the hours of the inaugural parade, punctuated by tense conferences, as bulletins came in from the economically prostrate nation. But behind the laughter, behind the ever-resolute face, concealed from the inaugural paraders and cheering throngs, he had no false hopes about the burden he had just assumed. Four months earlier, after the evening’s celebration at his New York headquarters of his defeat of Hoover, he had returned to his East 65th Street home, where his son Jimmy helped him into his bed—the same bed he had lain in for months after his polio attack. In a display of religious feeling rare even within his family, Roosevelt told his son that he was afraid of something else besides his old fear of fire.
“Afraid of what, Pa?”
“I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do the job. After you leave tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that He will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and do it right. I hope you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.”
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On returning to the White House after the inaugural parade, the new president took instant command. Having already sent his cabinet nominations to the Senate for quick confirmation, he watched their swearing in by Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo upstairs in his study. In a warm talk to his official family, and perhaps in awareness of its diverse makeup, he urged his cabinet to work together, as a team without friction, for the good of the nation. Later, after Eleanor and their children set off for the inaugural ball, FDR met with Louis Howe in the Lincoln study. For many minutes they discussed the problems and prospects ahead, while fireworks burst over the Washington Monument and showered gleams of light onto the facade of the Lincoln Memorial.
Now came “action and action now.” The very next day, Sunday, March 5”, amid a flurry of anxious conferences, the president prepared a proclamation, effective two days later, declaring a four-day national banking holiday. He summoned the 73rd Congress to convene in special session two days after that. The proclamation embargoed temporarily the export of gold, silver, and currency. FDR conferred with his cabinet again and with his aides, congressional leaders, and Republican holdovers from the Hoover administration. The advisers had forgotten how to be Democrats or Republicans, Moley wrote later. “We were just a bunch of men trying to save the banking system.”
But no one really knew what to do—perhaps least of all Roosevelt—beyond halting the runaway financial situation. There was little thought of taking the banks over, nationalizing them, “socializing the banking system,” as some urged, nor was there any other grand strategy. There was no master chart for the crisis: no party plan, election promise, or economic doctrine. The emphasis was on “swift and staccato action,” in Treasury Secretary Woodin’s phrase, but at the same time, in Moley’s later recollection of the conferences, on the “stressing of conventional banking methods and the avoidance of any unusual or highly controversial measures.”
Looming over the frenetic meetings was the question, What were the people thinking out there? How would they respond to the closing of the banks, their citadels of security? In fact, the people were doing just fine. Despite all the inconveniences and disruption, the American people were in an almost gala mood, joking about their predicaments, finding that they could get along—for a time—without ready cash. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, short of cash to pay the family’s bill at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, decided not to worry. People were reveling in a new sense of hope about the economy and about leaders who appeared actually to be doing something. And Roosevelt, with his incomparable skill at communicating, was determined to tell them the truth about the crisis. A week after closing the banks he gave his first national fireside chat.
“I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking—with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks,” he began. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” He thanked his listeners for their “fortitude and good temper” during the bank holiday. He assured them that their money would be safe in the reopened banks, though there might be individual disappointments. And he thanked them for buoying up their president with their confidence. “Let us unite in banishing fear.”
And so began the celebrated “One Hundred Days”—in fact and in legend.
The legend began early, grew rapidly, took firm root with the aid of historians, and set some kind of model for later presidents. It told of a president who wielded power as no chief executive had ever done. Operating from a broad party mandate and vague economic strategy, he unfolded a master policy program. This he presented to Congress, which supinely bowed to his will. The president led the people along his sure path, sharing his ideas and hopes with them in bimonthly fireside chats, and reaching out to the public through set speeches.
The story grew taller. In a series of dramatic proposals and actions, the president brought about a virtual revolution, saving the capitalistic system while fundamentally changing it, setting a radical course not only for the New Deal but for the next half century of liberal thought and action. Out of this emerged a picture for some of “Rooseveltian leadership,” embracing and even surpassing the leadership heritage of Jefferson and Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson, but in the minds of others, “Rooseveltian dictatorship,” reminiscent of Napoleon or even Caesar.
A half century later the legend still lives—but now is challenged by the factual record, more prosaic yet ultimately more meaningful.
Roosevelt had no master plan, no grand strategy, aside from a belief in the crucial role of government in creating reform. On that score he was convinced that government must step in to help people where private enterprise had failed, and—because of the weakness and impoverishment of state governments—Washington must act. These recognitions were a big step forward, but the crucial question was, What would the federal government do?—and what it mainly did was to improvise a series of policies that had many consequences.
The chief result by far was to patch up failings and shortcomings in financial institutions and in their supervision by government. The bank holiday itself, which prevented further runs on banks and withdrawals of gold, was a rapid and dramatic but essentially preservationist cleansing of banks to rid them of their impurities and restore them in improved health to depositors. In one day, March 9, FDR presented to Congress—and Congress passed—his Emergency Banking Relief Act, which gave the president broad discretionary powers over transactions in credit, currency, gold, and silver and permitted sound banks in the Federal Reserve system to open only under licenses from the Treasury Department. The money panic was over.
FDR took other actions to strengthen—and in some cases reform—an ailing capitalism, in his effort to restore confidence to the business community at the same time as he sought to awaken hope among the people as a whole. His initial approach to public works was that they should be self-financing. His move to legalize beer and wine, greeted with an explosion of excitement and celebration in taverns across the nation, was designed also as a revenue act, imposing as it did a levy of five dollars per barrel. His proposals for securities regulation were widely viewed as reformist and even punitive, but they had the effect also of restoring confidence in the exchanges and exchangers.
The surest index to Roosevelt the conservative during the One Hundred Days, however, was his insistence on economy in government in order to “balance the budget.” In retrospect it seems almost bizarre that the president, in the midst of dramatic presidential statements and emergency actions, would insist on carrying out his promise, made in Pittsburgh during the recent election campaign, to balance the federal books. Some thought he didn’t mean it—just one more reckless promise—but the president was in dead earnest. He demonstrated this by selecting a zealous economizer, Lewis Douglas, as his budget chief. The initial approach to relief—the most human of problems facing the new administration—was to allot $500 million to be distributed by the states and municipalities. These were grants, rather than loans, and hence an improvement over the Hoover policy of loans, but the amount was minuscule compared to the dire wants and needs of the American people in the spring of 1933.
It was the veterans who took it in the neck. Lobbyists for the vets were eager to take the issue that had haunted Hoover back to the “more humanitarian” Roosevelt. The issue was non-service-connected benefits. All knew that tens of thousands more veterans received disability benefits than had actually been wounded; but these veterans, many of them hard up, believed the benefits were just compensation for all who had served. The Economy Act, given FDR’s second-highest priority after the banking act, was passed by Congress hardly more than a week after inaugural day. This bill not only cut veterans’ pensions and benefits but reduced up to 15 percent many federal salaries; it also reorganized federal agencies to save more money.
Why this emphasis on economy? It could not have been primarily its financial impact; the administration claimed only a half-billion-dollar saving, which turned out to be less than a quarter billion. The immediate reason was sheer political “practicality.”
Bounding from bill to bill, trying always to conserve his congressional majorities, fearing that even one defeat could jeopardize impending measures, FDR had to attract conservative Democratic and Republican votes. He not only wanted to hold the confidence of business in general, he had to hold the support of those members of the financial community who might try a desperate flight of capital, or a “revolt of the capitalists,” that could jeopardize the administration’s entire economic program. And he could never forget the final failure of Cousin Ted, who in 1912 had reached too far.
Beyond all this lay FDR’s temperament and intellect, in the early months of his administration. He was not in the mood to reconstruct or revolutionize, but rather to revise, reform, and restore. Restore what? Not the old dog-eat-dog individualistic laissez-faire capitalism of the past century, but twentieth-century capitalism as envisioned by TR and Woodrow Wilson. And he was still combining the TR and Wilson traditions: economic controls and conservation along with supervision and regulation of large corporations. Above all he was experimenting, “playing it by ear,” just as he had promised, as he navigated the churning political seas.
Congress was a junior partner in all this, but still a partner. Nor was it merely a conservative force; some members of Congress, especially the Norris-La Follette-Wagner progressives in the Senate, often ranged to the left of the president. The House of Representatives liberalized FDR’s home mortgage law, doubling the mortgage limit of $10,000, and Wagner amended the bill to provide a three-year moratorium on principal payments. Congress also exerted a form of pressure on the White House. Just as FDR had aroused hope and expectation among the people, so he did in Congress—and the members, expecting much of him, put pressure on him to deliver. The president timed some of his major proposals to meet the demands of a Congress hungry to act. When Senate Democrats had divided over the economy bill, he united them by a timely call for the immensely popular “beer bill” to legalize beer and light wines.
The president did not need to appeal to the people to put pressure on their senators and representatives. Indeed, contrary to the legend, he did not make a second fireside chat until eight weeks after the first. Nor did he tour the country stoking backfires for his friends and against his foes; he hardly left Washington during the first hundred days. He held twice-a-week press conferences, but early on he established a pattern of “press management,” doling out information exactly to the degree he wished, timing announcements for maximum impact, brushing aside correspondents’ questions with a casual “I don’t know about that” when he did indeed know all about it.
How, then, did Roosevelt give such a firm image of steady leadership, even when he hardly ventured out of the White House? By dominating the headlines with a seemingly nonstop flood of actions, some planned and some makeshift—executive orders, proposals to Congress for major bills, statements on pending measures, bill-signing ceremonies, press conferences. The president did not need to speechify; action, usually real but sometimes symbolic, was his version of TR’s bully pulpit.
Roosevelt directed his bully pulpit abroad too, but with far less positive impact than Uncle Theodore had. However absorbed in domestic needs and politics, he could hardly ignore the European scene. On the very day FDR took office, Adolf Hitler won election and promptly wiped out opposition parties, amid Nazi threats to annex Austria and the Polish Corridor, even at the risk of war. Already the Nazis were raiding and boy-cottingjewish shops, drivingjews out of the arts and professions, and beating up Jews and dragging them through the streets. Appalled, Roosevelt nevertheless took no public stand. Rather, he joined British and French leaders in a campaign for disarmament, on the naive proposition, as FDR stated to Congress, that “the way to disarm is to disarm. The way to prevent invasion is to make it impossible.”
The main concern of European leaders at the much-touted London Economic Conference was working on proposals for global economic cooperation, especially on proposals to limit production and stabilize commodity prices. To FDR’s annoyance, the conferees were focusing unduly on short-term currency stabilization. Then, from the Europeans’ standpoint, the president did everything wrong. He bargained on currency stabilization and then quit, he sent Moley to London with hazy instructions that conflicted with the equally hazy instructions Hull had brought earlier, and finally he sent a message harshly criticizing the diversion of the conference from its broader purposes.
This was the “bombshell message” that hit the world’s headlines and stalemated the conference. Why such one-sided intervention, which struck some as the kind of thing a moralistic TR would have done, not the negotiating FDR? Some explained that the president was at Campobello Island with his family, Morgenthau, and Howe. Perhaps, it was even rumored, he was on edge, for that very evening Eleanor had upbraided him for serving a cocktail to son Franklin, now a teenager. “You can’t scold me like that,” FDR had protested. But the main reason for the “bombshell” lay much deeper. FDR was still in a nationalist mood, he faced a powerful isolationist bloc in Congress—and he dared not risk losing votes in the United States by challenging the “international bankers” of Europe.
So the august ship of state—composed of one mercurial activist president, an ever-shifting network of crew members inside and outside the White House, overworked cabinet members operating in their own troubled waters, a permanent bureaucracy facing daunting new tasks, majorities in Congress fired up by the New Deal spirit, and millions of Americans transfixed by the new leaders in Washington—tacked across the uncharted seas, to starboard and port and back. A vector run through its zigs and zags would doubtless have pointed to the right, but the ship was moving too fast for anyone to gauge the basic course between conventional liberalism and conservativism.
And even though in retrospect FDR was largely following “a bit right of center” directions, especially in his financial policies, the New Deal president was always lurking just behind the reviser and restorer. Three measures in the first hundred days would become part of the New Deal heritage: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The first two were closest to his heart of all the dozens of initiatives during that period.
How could he not be captivated by the CCC concept? He hoped to move a quarter million young men from street corners and unemployment lines into the nation’s woods, to plant millions of trees, set up trails and fire lanes, and build protections against floods, soil erosion, pests, and diseases. Equally attractive to FDR the economizer, the young men would be paid only a dollar a day, and most of that would be deducted and mailed direct to their families; the whole operation, run by the army and financed out of existing funds, would not harm his economy drive. And by winning quick support from Congress, he could have the men in the woods by early summer.
The project had its own share of birth pangs. Secretary of Labor Perkins and some union heads objected to the dollar-a-day payment as undercutting local wage standards. Left-wing leaders objected to the military control. He could not believe the time had come, Norman Thomas declared, “when the United States should supply relief through the creation of a form of compulsory military service. Such work camps fit into the psychology of a Fascist, not a Socialist, state.”
That was just “utter rubbish,” Roosevelt told a press conference. “The camps will be run just like those in any big project—Boulder Dam or anything like that. Obviously, you have to have some form of policing. In other words, you cannot allow a man in a dormitory to get up in the middle of the night and blow a bugle.” The reporters roared. “You have got to have order—just perfectly normal order, the same as you would have in any kind of a big job.” But to mollify some of his critics he chose a Boston labor leader, Robert Fechner, as CCC director, who would work with the labor department (in charge of enrollment), the interior and agriculture departments (work direction), and the war department (outfitting and housing)—a typically Rooseveltian dispersion of functions.
Hidden away in the CCC measure was a provision that—fortunately for FDR—aroused little attention at the time but was a portent of intense governmental and political struggles to come. Proposed by the only African-American member of the House of Representatives, Republican Oscar De Priest of Illinois, the amendment read “that no discrimination shall be made on account of race, color, or creed” under “the provisions of this Act.” Acceptance of this amendment by both houses was further testimony to the significant role of Congress—and of Republicans in Congress—during the first hundred days.
Roosevelt and Norris had thought and politicked so much about the Tennessee Valley proposal that its passage through Congress was relatively painless. What might have been the most controversial proposal, the socialization of key sectors of a huge river valley, aroused little opposition as socialism. Yet the TVA squarely met the classic definition: governmental ownership of a huge operation and employment of its operators, and FDR had already intimated that he proposed to extend such planning to a “wider field.” But the people saw the TVA simply as a bold river valley development.
Perhaps the TVA, with its complex combination of development, conservation, flood control, power generation and transmission, diversification, and much else, simply defied easy definition, even short epithets. Norris asked the president, “What are you going to say when they ask you the political philosophy behind TVA?”
“I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl,” FDR responded, “but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”
“Neither fish nor fowl” but tasting good to people—perhaps that was the best interim sketch of the New Deal of the first hundred days.
The archpins of the early New Deal were, inevitably, agricultural and industrial policy, though these imperatives often seemed lost in the hullabaloo as the media played up the “beer bill” and such short-lived policies as budget balancing. At first, far more interested in farm programs than industrial ones, the new president had acted to “help farmers” within days of taking office.
The passage of his farm bills presaged the legislative history of many of the New Deal measures of the first hundred days. There was something old: a continuation of the Hoover administration’s effort to stabilize the buying and selling of cotton, grain, and other commodities. There was something new: giving direct benefits or rental payments to farmers in exchange for voluntarily reducing acreage or crops. There was something so conventional as to be widely accepted: providing cheaper credit to farmers by consolidating all government agencies lending to farmers and by refinancing farm mortgages at lower interest rates. There was something so controversial as to enflame major business interests: payment of the program not by general taxation but by levies on the processors of farm products. There was something so conservative as to win the support of the big farmers’ lobbying organizations: maintaining prices by reducing surplus crops of basic farm products and the setting of “parity” prices. And there was something that would become crucial in the passage of most New Deal measures: the inability of Congress to agree on key issues, followed by a wide delegation of authority to the president to make the necessary judgments.
But dominating the making of farm policy were two other forces: Roosevelt’s delire, based on a concern with farmers’ needs born in his state senate days, to do something quickly, effectively, and dramatically about the farm crisis in 1933; and the wider impact of the farm crisis itself. While Congress deliberated at a much slower pace than Roosevelt hoped, farmers were still confronting falling prices and fearing worse to come. Milo Reno, head of the Farmers’ Holiday Association, was threatening a farm strike. More radical farmers were dumping milk or burning corn, invading courtrooms to halt foreclosure proceedings, ganging up against eviction sales, coming close to actually lynching a recalcitrant judge. Iowa authorities placed half a dozen counties under martial law, sent in the National Guard, and collared over one hundred farm “rebels” in two counties.
It was not Milo Reno but Edward A. O’Neal, head of the Farm Bureau Federation, who warned earlier in the winter of “revolution in the countryside” unless something was done for the farmer. Alarmed by the tumult, unified by the president, pressured by farm lobbyists, and prodded by progressive senators like Norris, Congress finally passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act in mid-May, to Roosevelt’s vast relief.
By this time a problem even more serious than that of the farmers was looming: Roosevelt’s moderate financial efforts did not appear to be stimulating the national economy adequately. Unemployment remained critically high, and some even feared a new economic downturn, which would have struck a jarring blow to the New Deal program and hopes. Happily for the president, New Dealers and others both within the government and outside had been pondering a variety of proposals that could speed recovery. The thinkers and actors were so numerous, their ideas so eclectic and wide-ranging, their ideologies so diverse, their precise influence on thought and action so subtle and complex, that historians have been hard put to trace the origins of what became to FDR his most important measure, the National Industrial Recovery Act.
The ideas, in shifting clusters of combination and conflict, were coming to rough focus by May. A large number of industrialists, believing that “cutthroat competition” and depressed prices were the main obstacles to economic recovery, urged the suspension of antitrust laws so that “fair competition” codes could be drawn up by industrial trade associations in cooperation with the government. Approved by the president, these codes would be enforceable by law, with courts empowered to issue injunctions against violations. Doubtless each trade association, as Rexford Tugwell had urged in his 1933 book The Industrial Discipline, would have its own planning mechanisms.
FDR had good reasons to favor this notion. It resonated with Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas of the New Nationalism and a nationwide approach to economic problems; FDR was well familiar with the long history of the idea of “self-government in industry” and “industrial self-discipline” in America and abroad; and he himself had headed a trade association, the American Construction Council, in the early 1920s. Far more remarkable, even staggering, was the support by leading industrialists of what inevitably would be a huge governmental intrusion into the economy and into their corporations’ internal affairs. Men who in the 1920s had been uttering odes to laissez-faire, rugged individualism, and dog-eat-dog competition now were virtually begging government to help them stabilize production, sales, and, of course, profits in their industries.
A sharply contrasting idea had gained considerable momentum in the Senate: limitation of hours of employment to thirty hours a week. Backed by Alabama Democratic senator Hugo L. Black, this bill—essentially a share-the-work effort—was a significant counterpart to the efforts of the farm bloc to reduce farm acreage and production; it was the economics and politics of scarcity. Cool to the measure as too radical and too rigid, FDR nonetheless allowed Secretary Perkins to testify before the House Labor Committee in favor of the bill if it could be made more flexible. It had to accommodate rural industries, the man from Hyde Park reminded Perkins, and the special needs of canneries and dairy farms.
“There have to be hours,” he told her, “adapted to the rhythm of the cow.” Almost hysterical opposition from business to the measure, plus a reminder from the left-wing Nation that the workweek already had declined to about thirty-two hours, killed the proposal.
A better way of protecting the worker was already winning support in both Congress and the administration. If industry was to be given the right to organize, trade union leaders insisted, why should their employees not be guaranteed similar rights? A section of a draft bill numbered 7(a), stipulating that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing,” had the cautious approval of the president, but when spokesmen for the National Association of Manufacturers urged FDR to modify this potent provision, he replied that not he but Senator Wagner was sponsoring it and they should see the senator from New York. Wagner proudly stood his ground.
As recovery faltered, it became more and more likely in the spring of 1933 that neither industrial nor labor cooperation, nor most of the other panaceas floated by one group or another, would quickly provide massive numbers of jobs. Sentiment rose in Congress, spearheaded by Wagner, La Follette, and other progressives, for a huge public works program. Once again the president was cautious. Still on his “economy kick,” still pressured almost daily by Douglas to avoid unbalancing the budget, FDR resisted a Wagner plan for $5 billion in grants to public bodies. At a conference upstairs in the White House, the president, with Douglas by his side, went through a long list of proposed public works projects, dismissed most as unsound, and reduced the list to $1 billion. Within days, however, under pressure from Congress and from Perkins, Wallace, and Ickes, he accepted an overall figure of $3.3 billion.
During the first week of May, as feverish discussions rose to new heights of intensity at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the several policy ingredients of the National Recovery Administration fell into place, with the thirty-hour week now excluded. In his second fireside chat, on May 7, the president spoke reassuringly of his partnership with Congress, the support he had received in both parties, and his observance of the constitutional separation of power between Congress and the president. He spoke modestly of “mistakes of procedure.” What he sought, he said, was “the highest possible batting average,” not only for himself but “for the team.” Theodore Roosevelt, he said, had once told him, “If I can be right seventy-five percent of the time I shall come up to the fullest measure of my hopes.”
Ten days later the president proposed the National Industrial Recovery Act to Congress. His brief message stressed planning—“for a great cooperative movement throughout all industry”—and public works. Despite all the momentum, the bill faced tough sledding in Congress. Lobbyists representing veterans, business, labor, and other interests pushed for weakening amendments, relevant or not. Congress on the one hand agreed on general provisions by delegating specific decision making to the president, while on the other hand warning of excess presidential power under the act. For several days a determined president and a stubborn Senate were locked in battle, with the upper house finally approving the bill by 46 to 39 votes, on June 16. Eleven Democrats voted against the president.
“The latter part of this session has been terrible,” Senator Hiram Johnson wrote home. “We’re all tired and many are disgruntled.” But the president, tired but not disgruntled, had his bill, the archpin of recovery. Now he could head toward a vacation.
In the fall of 1932, as the Roosevelts were preparing to move into the White House, Eleanor had lamented the independent activist life she was leaving. “As I saw it,” she later wrote, “this meant the end of any personal life of my own.”
Uncertainties and questions gathered in her mind, but only once did she turn to Franklin for guidance. She meekly asked him if perhaps she might handle some of his mail, as Mrs. Garner would do for the vice president. FDR just looked at her “quizzically” and replied that the mail was Missy’s department, and she might not welcome help.
Little guessing what an enormous impact she would make in her new role, Eleanor felt hurt and excluded. “My zest in life is rather gone for the time being,” she dejectedly wrote Lorena Hickok, the reporter whom the Associated Press had recently assigned to cover Eleanor on a regular basis and who would become Eleanor’s most intimate friend. “If anyone looks at me, I want to weep.” As usual, her feelings of depression soon lifted.
Early in her husband’s first term, it became clear that this was a new kind of first lady—because she was reinventing herself. As a host of urgent issues came to her attention, she quickly discovered that she had new power. Far from being a prisoner in the White House, pouring tea for ambassadors, Eleanor seemed to be everywhere at once. Just by going to a place or investigating an issue she could bring it into the full glare of nationwide publicity. She toured Washington’s back alleys to publicize the conditions of the slums. Realizing that New Deal programs were geared toward men, she fought for the “forgotten woman”; she worked with Harry Hopkins to set up the women’s division of the Civil Works Administration, providing, by the end of 1933, CWA jobs for 100,000 women. When she heard that farmers were slaughtering piglets, she intervened with the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act) administrator to ask that surplus food be given to the hungry; she lectured and wrote articles; she helped start a CCC-type camp for young jobless women; she gave a civics course at the New York Junior League; and she continually—and effectively—prodded her husband to appoint women to high government jobs.
Nor did she need to do her husband’s correspondence. She found her own mail swelling to such proportions that it required the full-time attention of a large staff. In 1933 alone, she received over 300,000 pieces of mail, many of them personal requests for money, jobs, or used clothing.
Like the mail addressed to Franklin, each of Eleanor’s letters told a wrenching story of struggle and suffering. Joseph Blin Jr., at sixteen the eldest of fourteen children, wrote two days before Christmas 1933 from Keegan, Maine, that because his father earned only $14 a week, “we can’t spear any money to dress ourselves” and so his sisters could not attend school. The boy tried to get work but was turned away because so many married men couldn’t find jobs. He had read that Eleanor was saving clothes and toys for the poor. “I don’t ask you any toys,” he wrote, “but I ask you clothes that you have to spear. It makes three years that we didn’t see Christmas and my little sisters don’t know what’s Christmas.”
As with Franklin’s letters, the writers were proud people, bewildered by what had happened to their lives. A woman wrote, “Oh Mrs. Roosevelt we do not want charity. Now my husband is not lazy he has signed with PWA and a man who has never done any laboring work it comes very hard. But we are thankful for that but Mrs. Roosevelt you know $15 per week with 60 cents car fare is not much with six children to feed cloth and keep a roof over their head.” These writers believed that Eleanor would care. “Your the first president’s wife that looks for the poor,” wrote Joseph Blin. “We didn’t write to other president’s wife because they only try to owns money, but not you.”
Care enormously as Eleanor did, these letters were answered with regretful notes from her secretary. “There are certain persons to whom Mrs. Roosevelt sends the clothing for which she has no further use,” was the reply to Joseph Blin, “and she is very sorry indeed that she cannot comply with your wishes.”
The mail handling was soon systemized. Eleanor’s secretary, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, would go through the heaps of letters first and sort them, setting aside whatever should go to Eleanor. Edith Helm, the social secretary, then attended to social correspondence, while other letters were rerouted to appropriate government departments.
Eleanor and Tommy quickly threw out the form letters used by the Hoovers and previous presidents dating back to the Clevelands. Eleanor felt strongly that her letters should be dealt with on an individual basis, and she or Tommy tried to attend personally to each. This meant that a heaping basket of mail constantly lay at Eleanor’s elbow, and she and Tommy often worked long evenings to answer letters. Some answers Eleanor dictated; others she merely sketched out for Tommy to complete. A notable few found their way to a special basket at Franklin’s bedside.
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As first lady, Eleanor had made an impact from her first day in the White House, astonishing some elderly members of the staff by taking charge of her environment and her life. Decisive and energetic, she was too impatient to wait for someone else to run the elevator, preferring to do it herself. Pushing fussy furniture out of the way, she substituted sturdy pieces from the Val-Kill factory. In three days, wrote Associated Press reporter Bess Furman, she transformed the living quarters of the White House.
In the private wing on the second floor, suites occupied each corner, each comprising a large and a small room. Eleanor turned her large bedroom into a study and moved her bed into the small adjoining chamber, furnished in her favorite blue and looking out toward the Washington Monument. Franklin used the upstairs oval room as his study and slept in a small bedroom next to it. He liked having a lot of people around, and the White House was always full of the hubbub of family and guests. The recently separated Anna and her children, Louis Howe, and Harry Hopkins all lived with Eleanor and Franklin at different times, and the boys, at school or living independently now, were frequent visitors. Eleanor made one end of the grand hall into a cozy sitting room where the family and special guests had five o’clock tea. She wanted to make the White House a real home. “[I]t can be done in the White House just as well as in the plainest home,” she told a reporter.
Even more than her physical surroundings, she was transforming the role of first lady.
“I simply will not have it!” Eleanor snapped, when Franklin urged her to permit the Secret Service to accompany her when she traveled. She continued to move about as she always had: on ordinary trains between Washington and New York, on city buses, on regularly scheduled airline flights. “No maid, no secretary—just the First Lady of the land on a paid ticket on a regular passenger flight,” wrote humorist and social commentator Will Rogers in a letter to The New York Times. Plainly dressed in her typical “uniform” of tweed skirt, white silk blouse, and low-heeled shoes, unusually accessible and straightforward, proud of her “7-cent luncheons” of stuffed eggs, mashed potatoes, and prune pudding, Mrs. Roosevelt’s feelings of security in her own social status—combined with her inbred sense of noblesse oblige—raised her above any need for conspicuous shows of rank. “I always thought when people were given great power it did something to them,” one female reporter wrote to Eleanor. “They lost the human touch if they ever had it. To have been able to see you at close hand, demonstrating the exact contrary, means truly a great deal to me.”
Still, as much as this egalitarian woman disliked formality and protocol, there was plenty of protocol to oversee, such as arranging who would sit where at official dinners. On a typical day she shook the hands of 500 people at a four o’clock tea, and another 400 an hour later. She endured these mind-numbing receptions by studying the faces of the people who filed by her. Every morning after a brisk horseback ride and breakfast at eight-thirty she met with the head usher and the housekeeper to supervise the operation of the White House, before plunging into the day’s mail with Tommy Thompson.
Aside from protocol, the first months were uncertain. Nearly everything she was doing was tentative and exploratory. The purely ornamental role played by previous first ladies was not one in which she felt she excelled or could find meaning. Acting only as Franklin’s helpmate would be a charade; it would bore her to the point of depression. Instead she would use her strengths—her intellect, energy, and empathy. She would lean on Louis Howe, and she would connect with Washington women.
Her growing network of women strengthened her, and she in turn gave women opportunities and exposure. She made the obligatory White House social calendar more personal and political by mixing guests of varied backgrounds and adding a few parties of her own, for the professional and political women of Washington. The annual Gridiron Dinner, when Washington newspapermen hosted the president and the cabinet, still excluded women journalists—and now Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Eleanor responded by throwing a women’s party on the same night, for newspaperwomen and the wives of newspapermen and cabinet members. These “Gridiron Widows” parties became an annual tradition, including masquerades and satirical skits, and often lasted long after Franklin had come home from the Gridiron Dinner and gone to bed.
Even before the inauguration, Eleanor broke precedent by announcing that as first lady she would hold press conferences for women reporters only, an idea suggested by Lorena Hickok and seconded by Louis Howe. “Hick” had pointed out that this would help women hang on to their jobs, an argument that never failed.
Eleanor’s press conferences started within a week after the inauguration in March. “I really beat Franklin,” she said gleefully. “He isn’t holding his first press conference until Wednesday!” At first, her remarks were scoffed at by men as being purely social in nature, but they quickly became an important instrument for Eleanor. She steered clear of obviously political issues, to avoid embarrassing Franklin, but she did not avoid the controversial subjects that mattered to her—particularly peace, women, and labor. According to AP reporter Bess Furman, Eleanor discussed such issues as “subsistence homesteads, work camps for single women, National Youth Administration projects, the mattress making and sewing of the women on relief, the paintings of WPA artists, and the guidebooks of WPA writers.” Many of the sessions became educational in tone, as Eleanor held forth on how to serve frugal, wholesome dishes. She became friends with many of the reporters; she liked newspaper people, and these women were intelligent, energetic, and politically aware in the same way that she was. Throughout her years in the White House, until 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt would continue to hold women-only press conferences; the only man ever to attend one of them was the mischievous King George VI of England, in June 1939, who slipped in when no one was watching.
And there was time for fun: an Easter egg-rolling party for thousands of children and parents in the spring of 1933; a rose, a chrysanthemum, and a strawberry named after her; her friend Amelia Earhart piloting her to Baltimore. In contrast to her lifelong fear of the water, she adored flying.
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Franklin was sometimes said to have the “common touch,” but one of Eleanor’s first acts as first lady illustrates her ability, despite her shyness, to relate to people whose lives were very different from hers. In the spring of 1932 she had followed the story of the World War I veterans who were demanding immediate payment of their veteran’s bonus and living in squatters’ shacks in Washington. She was horrified when the government evicted them with tanks and tear gas. In May 1933, the “bonus army” returned to Washington to demand from the new administration immediate cash payment of their bonuses, which FDR opposed. Louis Howe, now the president’s secretary, took on the challenge, arranging for Fort Hunt, Virginia, an abandoned army camp twelve miles from Washington, to be spruced up for the bonus marchers.
The veterans arrived in rainy mid-May, in trucks and on foot, carrying knapsacks and suitcases, wearing pieces of old uniforms. They were transferred to Fort Hunt, where they were fed, put up in tents with electric lights and showers, furnished with blankets and mess kits, and given medical and dental care.
Howe talked daily with the leaders. FDR remained adamantly against paying a cash bonus but authorized Howe to offer jobs in the CCC forestry camps to 25,000 veterans. At first the marchers rejected this proposal because of the low CCC wages, a dollar a day. “To hell with the reforestation army!” one shouted.
To this tense situation Howe brought Eleanor, staying in the car while she ventured into the camp. The weary, cynical veterans squinted at the regal, willowy figure as she picked her way through the ankle-deep mud. They asked her who she was, and she told them, adding that she had wanted to see how they were getting on. The men guided her through barracks, hospital, and mess hall. She made an impromptu speech in the convention tent, first apologizing that she could not discuss the main issue of concern. Instead she reminisced about her work in the Union Station canteen in Washington in 1917 and her tour of the battlefields in Europe in early 1919. “I served many sandwiches and lots of coffee,” she said. “I saw the boys when they came back and often I went to the hospitals, so I saw two sides of the war.” This evoked a tremendous cheer from the men. “I would like to see that everyone has fair consideration,” she finished, “and I will always be grateful to those who served their country.” She and the men sang “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” and then she left.
“Hoover sent the army,” one veteran commented, “Roosevelt sent his wife.” A few days later the men drifted home, 2,600 of the veterans ultimately joining the CCC.
Although the police and Secret Service were vexed by her solo expedition, others admired her fearlessness. It wasn’t what she said, but the fact of her going to the veterans that impressed people. Even though Franklin’s way of dealing with the men was to drive by, wave his hat at them, and order up an unlimited supply of hot coffee, Eleanor’s presence in the camp demonstrated that the administration cared and wanted to understand. She, not Franklin, was sailing by the stars. Wrote Josephus Daniels from Mexico, “It is such fine things as that which bring you the admiration of the American people.”
Louis Howe’s respect and admiration for Eleanor continued to grow. Once he appeared in her sitting room. “Eleanor,” he said, “if you want to be president in 1940, tell me now so I can start getting things ready.” Howe believed that women’s increasing political experience and savvy over the previous ten years would allow a woman to be nominated for president in another decade. Eleanor, however, did not share his blithe optimism.
But she wanted to get out of the White House, to help bring change at the grass roots, to touch the lives of ordinary people. Franklin urged her to travel, to report back to him on conditions out in the country. She could not have found a more needy, a more challenging place than the mining hamlets of northern West Virginia. Of all her activities during 1933 and 1934, the one perhaps closest to her heart was her involvement in a remarkable experiment, the subsistence homestead projects, specifically the model community called Arthurdale.
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The bituminous coal industry, which had boomed after World War I, skidded into a steep decline years before the stock market crashed. Production of soft coal plunged by 100 million tons during the 1920s; employment dropped by almost 150,000 men.
Scott’s Run, Crown Mine, Bertha Hill, Pigeon Roost: the little hamlets straggled along the streams that carved their way through the coal-rich Appalachians. In the camps, listless adults drifted around like ghosts or drank to mute their frustration. Children grew up lethargic and half starved in shacks that were black with coal dust and overrun by rats, sharing one scant meal a day and a few pieces of clothing with numerous brothers and sisters.
The miners’ shacks, reached by goat paths, clung to steep hillsides; slag piles and train tracks took up any level ground by the stream. Sanitation was nonexistent: the streams carried human and industrial waste through camp after camp before reaching the river. In the view of Williams Brooks, a prominent Quaker who worked in West Virginia resettling stranded miners, only slavery exceeded the coal industry in its degradation of human beings.
FDR had long been interested in agricultural planning and decentralization—moving industries and workers out of the congested cities into more healthful rural areas. In April 1933 he wrote Norris, “I really would like to get one more bill, which would allow us to spend $25 million this year to put 25,000 families on farms, at an average cost of $1,000 per family. It can be done. Also, we would get most of the money back in due time. Will you talk this over with some of our fellow dreamers on the Hill?”
The money came through, and the president set up the Subsistence Homestead Division as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, assigning the division to the Department of the Interior under Harold Ickes. At FDR’s suggestion, Ickes appointed M. L. Wilson head, and Clarence Pickett as assistant.
Wilson was a rare combination of pragmatist and idealist, an Iowa farm boy who taught at Montana State Agricultural College and then became an administrator in the AAA. He disliked cities. “This is no way for people to live [in city slums]. I want to get them out on the ground with clean sunshine and air around them, and a garden for them to dig in.… Spread out the cities, space the factories out, give people a chance to live.” He envisioned a new world based on part-time farming; workers could produce food for their families on small farms while they earned cash wages in nearby factories.
Wilson and Pickett soon put specifics to their vision: The federal government would create “subsistence homesteads” where inhabitants could farm small plots and work in local industries. The government would purchase land and subsidize the building of homesteads; the settlers would purchase their homes over thirty years. In addition to the houses, the government would provide livestock, farm machinery, roads, water, clinics, schools, and sanitation.
The times seemed ripe for such a bold experiment, and preparations proceeded quickly. During the fall of 1933, sites were found for homestead communities ranging from a site near Dayton, Ohio, where the settlers would build their own homes, to Hightstown, New Jersey, where two hundred Jewish garment workers would move from New York City to establish a clothing factory. In Decatur, Illinois, an agricultural community comprised forty-six homesteads; in Georgia, farmers would be moved off worn-out lands to homesteads on better soil. Thousands of eager applicants were carefully screened for stability and responsibility. Because the first communities would serve as models, the first homesteaders had to have the potential to succeed—but could not, of course, be successful already.
Eleanor shared Franklin’s interest in planned communities, but for different reasons. While Franklin saw the practical advantages of decentralization, Eleanor viewed the homesteads in more personal and idealistic terms. Here, she believed, was a chance to restore spirit and dignity to broken human beings by getting them off relief and helping them help themselves. And here was a model for other communities of how to establish a better life for their citizens.
With Quaker workers Alice Davis and Nadia Danilevsky as guides, she and Lorena Hickok—who had resigned from the Associated Press to work for Harry Hopkins in the new relief administration—visited the mining hamlets near Morgantown, West Virginia, in August 1933. They traveled in a battered car, going from shack to shack, talking with miners’ wives and children about their health, their gardens, and their problems and taking detailed notes. In the idle, grimy camps Eleanor glimpsed a depth of degradation she had never imagined. “The conditions I saw,” she wrote later, “convinced me that with a little leadership there could develop in the mining areas, if not a people’s revolution, at least a people’s party patterned after some of the previous parties born of bad economic conditions.”
Eleanor told one story at a White House dinner, where a glistening table service and sumptuous food must have contrasted starkly with the scene she described. “In a company house I visited ... were six children in the family, and they acted as though they were afraid of strangers. I noticed a bowl on the table filled with scraps, the kind that you or I might give to a dog, and I saw children, evidently looking for their noon-day meal, take a handful out of that bowl and go out munching. That was all they had to eat.
“As I went out, two of the children had gathered enough courage to stand by the door, the little boy holding a white rabbit in his arms. It was evident it was a most cherished pet. The little girl was thin and scrawny, and had a gleam in her eyes as she looked at her brother. Turning to me she said, ‘He thinks we are not going to eat it, but we are,’ and at that the small boy fled down the road, clutching the rabbit closer than ever.” One of the guests at the White House dinner that night, William C. Bullitt, sent ER a check the next day, saying he “hoped it might help to keep the rabbit alive.”
Eleanor’s visit to Morgantown caused that area to be selected for a homestead. The government purchased the old Arthur estate just outside Reedsville, naming it Arthurdale. Eleanor became deeply involved in the subsistence homestead project as a whole, but by far most deeply in Arthurdale. It became an overriding interest over the next few years.
Louis Howe was another passionate advocate, and he pushed the model Arthurdale project hard. He may have felt the urgency of his own deteriorating health; by the next spring he would be almost completely bedridden. In addition he, like Eleanor and Clarence Pickett, felt it was imperative that the government act to relieve the misery, to prove it was not paralyzed in the face of this great crisis.
Much progress had been made by the time Eleanor again visited the Arthurdale site in late November. She declared herself “very much pleased.” That visit, however, was probably the project’s high point. Eleanor inspected the site of a planned factory where the homesteaders would be employed building post office furniture. The Mountaineer Crafts Cooperative was relocating at Arthurdale. Thirty-six families had moved into the old Arthur mansion to await the completion of their homes, and fifty prefab houses ordered by Louis Howe were due that week. Howe confidently promised that the first families would eat Christmas dinner in their new homes.
Then reality struck. The prefab houses turned out to be flimsy bungalows designed for Cape Cod summers, completely unsuitable for mountain winters. The first group of settlers spent the winter in the old Arthur mansion while the houses were refurbished at a cost that was twice what it would have been to build them from the outset of native stone. Critics seized the chance to jeer at the subsistence homestead scheme. Just when the government wanted to look competent, it looked inept.
Though Howe was blamed for the messy start, there were other mistakes. And because of the first lady’s close connection to the Arthurdale project, every problem was magnified in the press. Most significant was the failure of any industry—always seen as the centerpiece of the community—to take hold.
A bill to set up a post office furniture factory was killed; a vacuum cleaner assembly plant operated for a year and then closed; a shirt manufacturer appeared briefly, as did a factory to build radio cabinets. Small companies could not start up while the national economy was still so depressed. Not until wartime did even half of Arthurdale’s labor force find sustained work in private industry.
In the national press, attacks continued from both left and right. Communists claimed that the homesteads would institutionalize poverty. The United Mine Workers declared that miners would be “weaned” away, thereby weakening the union. Farmers who had spent their lives establishing their own farms resented the idea that coal miners and unsuccessful farmers should be given “completely cleared, stocked, and electrified farms.” The right-wing Saturday Evening Post exposed the high costs of the Arthurdale project in an August issue. To the charge that the entire project was “Communistic,” Eleanor responded heatedly. “Never in this country, to my knowledge,” she declared, “has it been considered Communistic for an opportunity to be given to people to earn their own livings and buy their own houses.”
Despite all the clamor, by the spring of 1934 the subsistence homestead movement was in full swing. Thirty projects had been approved. Former miners in the Appalachians, former steelworkers in Alabama and Ohio, farmers on worn-out Georgia farmland—all these were represented in the new homestead communities. And in the model Arthurdale community the rolling green hills were dotted with fifty new white houses by June 1934, already inhabited by former miners and their families. In front of each house was a newly planted garden, and in back was a barn for cows and poultry, with up to five acres available on each homestead for orchards and subsistence farming. Each house had four to six rooms, modern plumbing, electricity, a full basement, and a septic tank. A church, doubling as a community hall, occupied the village center. Near it were a library and a schoolhouse with playground and gymnasium. A few of the settlers worked at the craftsmen’s association; a few others were employed in construction of buildings, but most stayed on relief while they planted their first crops.
Would the resettlement concept succeed? Subsistence homesteads, confessed Tugwell, the head of the new Resettlement Administration, would never be more than “small eddies of retreat for exceptional persons.” The following spring he would tell the Senate Appropriations Committee that nine of the thirty-seven projects were financial failures.
Still, Eleanor would not give up. Despite all the problems, she remained deeply committed to the subsistence homestead idea. It was as if she believed the combination of money, creative leadership, and her own powerful will could fashion a new world. She made unannounced visits to the communities, intervened with Ickes and Hopkins, poured money of her own into Arthurdale, raised more funds among wealthy benefactors such as Bernard Baruch, and even went about pricing refrigerators for the miners’ homes. She helped set up a school that was also a center where the entire community—from nursery children to adults—could become involved in theater, music, gardening, canning, animal husbandry, poultry raising, handcrafts, industrial arts, health care, and more.
But, years later, Eleanor would have to concede that the subsistence homestead project, and Arthurdale in particular, had failed. “Only a few of the resettlement projects had any measure of success,” she wrote; “nevertheless I have always felt that the good they did was incalculable. Conditions were so nearly the kind that breed revolution that the men and women needed to be made to feel their government’s interest and concern.”
Like a boy bolting out of the last day of school, the president had signed the National Industrial Recovery Act and other bills in mid-June and immediately taken off to watch Franklin Jr. graduate from Groton and then to sail in the waters he knew so well and loved so dearly: from Buzzards Bay past Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Provincetown to Gloucester. From this tiny Massachusetts port, after meeting with his old friend Colonel House and with Budget Director Douglas, he and James sailed up the Maine coast to Portland, where they were joined by Franklin and John. Occasionally taking the helm, FDR and his sons navigated through well-known waters to Campobello, which he could now visit without reliving the nightmare of 1921. Later, as he journeyed back south on the cruiser Indianapolis, he could recall happy days in the navy department.
He returned to a Washington enjoying a New Deal delirium. Dominating center stage was a dazzling New Deal impresario, General Hugh Johnson. A key figure in drafting the NRA measure and nursing it through Congress, Johnson had caught FDR’s eye with his old cavalryman’s gusto, bluntness, and loyalty to the commander in chief. “Square-jawed, thicknecked, red-faced, profane,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later pictured him, “he combined the qualities of a top sergeant, a frontier editor, and a proconsul.” Like a good commander, FDR stood aside but saw everything.
And the general was a sight to see. Within days of taking over empty offices in the huge old Commerce Building that President Hoover had built as his showcase public work, the general was mobilizing public support through calls to arms, promises of victory, and denunciations of quitters, malingerers, and deserters. His enthusiasms spread through the country. Since the detailed work of drawing up codes proceeded slowly, employers were urged to subscribe temporarily to a blanket code pledging them to do business only with those displaying Blue Eagle signs reading WE DO OUR PART. To many Americans the NRA offered the excitement of war, with parades, banners, music; to others, it was a gigantic circus.
The NRA, as scholars have noted, came right out of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly’s New Nationalism. Just as the New Nationalism, in Croly’s words, meant “a drastic reorganization of the American political and economic system” that would substitute a “frank social policy” for the individualism of the past, the NRA too was founded on a new spirit of cooperation among government, industry, and labor.
It was Johnson’s task to draw up strong codes for specific industries. This was tricky business. In exchange for agreements establishing standards of fair competition with rival entrepreneurs and thus eliminating “chiseling competitors” and sweatshop owners, businessmen would agree to wage-and-hour standards and protection for employees. Such agreements could violate the cherished antitrust laws, over which populists and progressives long had stood guard. The big issue was prices: Would the coded industries gang up against the consumer? Other questions soon arose: How much compulsion could NRA use, how were industries defined, what was the role of labor and consumers in code-making? The supreme goal of NRA was balance among employers, workers, and consumers, but the balance could easily be upset in practice.
For a time, sheer euphoria seemed to carry NRA along and many New Dealers with it. Hopeful that democratic self-discipline in industry was proving itself, the president was especially pleased that NRA appeared to be raising wages above the starvation level, cutting overlong hours, and—especially in the textile industry—abolishing child labor. Mainly amused, though sometimes appalled, by Johnson’s flamboyant tactics, FDR didn’t mind at all the credit he was getting as commander in chief of recovery. When Postmaster General Farley put out an NRA postage stamp, picturing the “honest” farmer, businessman, and blacksmith working together, Roosevelt claimed that the farmer looked like himself. As for the woman pictured, “Heavens, what a girl! She is wearing a No. 11 shoe, also a bustle, and if recovery is dependent on women like that I am agin recovery.”
But as feelings both of economic crisis and of patriotic partnership ebbed, rips opened in the big NRA tent. Some businessmen never even went inside, most notably Henry Ford, who—typically—followed code provisions for wages and hours anyway. Some employers agreed to codes and then violated them. Most went along, but with increasing dismay, as competitors violated the codes and thus gained advantages. But the main problem still was prices. Long starved for profits, business now saw its chance at least to “stabilize” prices, which often meant boosting them. Achieving NRA’s aim—neither hiking nor lowering prices but stabilizing them—required a fine-tuning that Hugh Johnson and the employers simply could not master, or often had no wish to.
Unexpectedly, given the NRA’s central effort to recognize organized industry’s needs for stability and profits, it was organized labor that remained most hopeful about its benefits under NRA. Those benefits turned on the delphic little Section 7(a), which was becoming a magic recruiting device at the hands of trade union leaders. Section 7(a) not only granted employees organizing and bargaining rights “through representatives of their own choosing” but went on to grant workers freedom “from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor” in designing such representation, and provided further that “no employee and no one seeking employment shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.” Whether these provisions, which infuriated many corporation heads, could be turned into organizational power depended on the union leadership.
That leadership, especially in the person of John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, felt fully up to the opportunity, “LABOR MUST ORGANIZE,” read a labor handbill in Kentucky. “Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, blacklists, and the fear of dismissal.…ALL WORKERS ARE FULLY PROTECTED IF THEY DESIRE TO JOIN A UNION.”
In Lewis the employers—and Johnson too—met a man who would test their mettle. Elected head of the Mine Workers in 1920 at the age of forty, Lewis had established a reputation for militance, fortified by his massive figure, shaggy mane, Shakespearean rhetoric, and fiery face-to-face confrontations slyly mixed with pleasantries. He symbolized the new labor militance under NRA. Strikes almost doubled between July and August 1933; by September almost 300,000 workers were out, with thousands of militants manning picket lines. Johnson and other NRA officials stood aside, protesting neutrality, while unionists struck out on their own.
The president generally kept hands off worker-employer disputes. This was notably true when thousands of maritime workers on the West Coast, protesting antiunion activities, went on strike in May 1934. With the ports tied up, worker-employer relations hardened under the rival leaderships of the strong union leader, Harry Bridges, and an array of tough shipping magnates. The press played up the crisis, with the “communist” Bridges as a particular target. Vacationing at this time on the U.S.S. Houston headed toward Hawaii, FDR was happy to leave matters to his cabinet. Under rising pressure, Johnson, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and even Hull lost their heads and began to consider dire government action. Only Frances Perkins kept hers, skillfully fending off the extremists on all sides until longshoremen and employers agreed to arbitrate the issues and the strike petered out. The first woman cabinet appointee had brought a different kind of leadership to the world of industrial strife.
By mid-1934, only a year after NRA started, the Blue Eagle was fluttering amid heavy gales. Business was dissatisfied with prices and profits. Enforcement of code provisions was inadequate. Consumers felt left out. Small businesses saw large firms favored at their expense. Not only did big industry spar with “big labor,” but fights erupted within each of these domains. Finally, as NRA became big and cumbersome, Johnson & Co. lost control of the situation by trying to establish codes for too many businesses. And as NRA declined, so did General Johnson, into fits of hyperactivity interspersed with withdrawal and into invective, self-pity, and drink.
Many Americans—and to a degree FDR himself—were content to see NRA relinquish its role as the key to recovery. Yet there was something poignant, even tragic, in NRA’s decline. It had represented, after all, an effort to weld key economic groups into a great national partnership, to overcome despair and demoralization that had darkened the economic outlook, to plan ahead. It was an effort of the “ship of state” to move steadily through the currents and crosswinds, even to control the storms. It had curbed child labor and sweatshops, pressed for decent wages and hours. But it represented a voyage half completed; did it presage a New Deal half dealt?
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Millions of Americans could hardly care less about the shenanigans, fights, and claims of the recovery agencies. For them the test of the New Deal was their own individual recovery. And here too the record was mixed. For some months, recovery had proceeded strongly. The Federal Reserve Board’s index of industrial production almost doubled from March to July 1933 and then rested on a plateau for the next three months. Employment surged from almost 35 million in March to almost 39 million in October, with the number of jobless dropping from 15 to 11 million. But the rising indices appeared to become stuck in the autumn of 1933, according to economist Irving Bernstein; for months thereafter the economy seemed stagnant. From late 1933 until well into 1935, the index of industrial production bobbed up and down, but far below the base period of 1923-25.
Why this “boomlet and bust” during a time when many Americans felt a great and lasting surge of recovery? Part of that boomlet was illusion, rising from FDR’s vigorous efforts and optimistic speeches; much of it was real, but based less on NRA programs than on an increase in federal spending even at the same time that Roosevelt was preaching economy. That spending came largely through farm aid, jobless relief, and public works. Each of those spending programs, however, was limited in economic impact, with farm aid going to the larger commodity producers and relief constrained by FDR’s penurious spending policies early in the New Deal.
Public works spending was the acid test of recovery. New Dealers wanted it as a central recovery strategy; many Hoover Republicans backed major construction programs; members of Congress strongly favored public works, especially for their states and districts. NRA and PWA—Public Works Administration—had been married in the same June 1933 act that had appropriated $3.3 billion for public works. Johnson had ardently hoped and expected that he would run public works as well as the NRA, only to learn that the new secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, would administer the works program. The general had been so crushed by this decision that, flushed with anger, he had protested to the president, who in turn asked Frances Perkins to calm him down and keep him away from the press. She did.
Johnson’s behavior was so infantile as to be treated by historians as a sign of his later deterioration. But perhaps the general perceived that unless PWA spending was closely linked with NRA self-regulation, the impact of both would be sharply lessened. That is what happened, largely because of FDR’s choice of Ickes to head PWA. As FDR doubtless hoped and Johnson feared, Ickes was far more eager to spend money honestly and cautiously than quickly and lavishly. A longtime Chicago municipal reformer who had battled both private and public privilege, he gained in FDR’s eye by having supported Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive cause in 1912. His beady eyes mirrored his suspicion that in Washington he was entering a den of thieves. His bristling responses to project seekers and his obvious delight in his image as a curmudgeon led to suspicion that his main goal in Washington was to live up to his sobriquet of “Honest Harold,” despite his stated objection to the name.
Eventually PWA would create—or help create—some of the most enduring public works in the country: the Triborough Bridge in New York, roads and bridges linking Key West to mainland Florida, modernization of the New York-Washington railroad connection, the port of Brownsville in Texas, Boulder Dam on the Colorado, and Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams on the Columbia. PWA spent billions on educational buildings, roads, bridges, subways, hospitals, courthouses—all without apparent fraud. And, at FDR’s direction and to his infinite satisfaction, PWA built the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown, several cruisers, submarines, a veritable flotilla of heavy and light destroyers, and dozens of military airports, much to the annoyance of Senator Borah and other isolationists.
But the price of such major projects was delay, as Ickes laboriously reviewed major contracts and countless minor ones, shot back applications for revision, inquired into the financial lives of departmental employees as well as hopeful contractors. What should have been a heavy impact of these huge spending programs on relief and recovery was muted. Whilejohnson’s NRA moved forward headlong with agreements, industry improvements, and euphoria, PWA lagged far behind. Millions of Americans took part in the economic transformation; millions of others had no part, no benefit.
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New Deal euphoria—a melange of affection and admiration for the president, satisfaction over progress in reform and recovery, and high hopes for more progress to come—appeared to ebb during 1934. “Do you not know this?” a California woman wrote him in October: “The masses who really are the people of the United States are still supporting you because of what they hope you will do soon} So far we recognize absolutely no fundamental benefits from your policies.”
“By 1934, we really began to suffer,” Malcolm X remembered. “This was about the worst depression year, and no one we knew had enough to eat or live on.”
Increasingly, letters to FDR appeared to take a personal tone. “The Lord must have practiced making fools for a long time before he made you,” wrote an Ohio woman in August. A man who described himself as a small property owner got right to his point: “Expunge the brains trust.”
Even without reading such letters, Roosevelt knew, with his antennae always sharply attuned to public opinion, that for many Americans hope was giving way to the old depression feelings of fear, disillusionment, and emotions ranging from anger to a new passivity. How could he restore and maintain the momentum of 1933?
FDR was stymied by his own financial and political strategy, as well as by almost intractable economic and social conditions. He had been following a wavering, opportunistic strategy of “a little left of center,” trying to create a national partnership that would transcend the old divisions between right and left. This partnership was not working well, as shown especially by the NRA. With redoubled fervor, conservatives and radicals moved on the New Deal flanks.
“All the big guns have started shooting—Al Smith, John W. Davis, James W. Wadsworth, du Pont, Shouse, etc.,” FDR wrote to his friend William Bullitt late in August 1934. “Their organization has already been labeled the ‘I CAN’T TAKE IT CLUB.’” He had far more personal sympathy with adversaries on the left, such as Norman Thomas, but almost equally limited sympathy with their ideas. With his fighting instincts aroused, he knew he must continue to push his program forward.
“Duringjune and the summer there will be many new manifestations of the New Deal,” he had written Colonel House in May 1934, “even though the orthodox protest and the heathen roar! Do you not think I am right?” “We must keep the sheer momentum from slacking up too much,” the president went on, “and I have no intention of relinquishing the offensive in favor of defensive tactics.” Hence, to the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission, empowered to regulate the volume of credit in the trading of securities and to oversee the public disclosure of companies’ financial reports, FDR appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as the new chairman in the spring of 1934, remarking in private, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” “The days of stock manipulation are over,” announced Kennedy as he began, during his brief tenure, to place the SEC on a firm footing. But there would not be “many new manifestations of the New Deal” later in 1934. What fresh and effective course could the New Deal follow?
An answer—provocative, unorthodox, outrageous—blew in from a far-off source: Spend more money, much more money. This came from a British economist, John Maynard Keynes, whom FDR had never met but knew of favorably because of Keynes’s support for the president’s nationalist economic policies. In an “Open Letter to President Roosevelt” that Keynes wrote for the December 31, 1933, issue of The New York Times, the economist showed remarkable prescience in forecasting deepening economic troubles for FDR in 1934.
The letter was personal. “Dear Mr. President,” it began. “You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodox and revolution to fight it out. But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office.” That is why he ventured to write from such a distance and from partial knowledge.
The letter was pointed. “At the moment your sympathizers in England are nervous and sometimes despondent. We wonder whether the order of different urgencies is rightly understood, whether there is a confusion of aims, and whether some of the advice you get is not crack-brained and queer.” Almost everyone in London, he said, had a “wildly distorted view of what is happening in the United States.” Some of them were sitting back and waiting for Roosevelt to fail.
Keynes was explicit. “You are engaged on a double task, recovery and reform—recovery from the slump, and the passage of those business and social reforms which are long overdue. For the first, speed and quick results are essential. The second may be urgent, too; but haste will be injurious” and long-range purpose better than immediate reform achievement. “It will be through raising high the prestige of your administration by success in short-range recovery that you will have the driving force to accomplish long-range reform. On the other hand, even wise and necessary reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate recovery.”
He was prescriptive. As the “prime mover” in the first stage of recovery, “I lay overwhelming emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting from governmental expenditure which is financed by loans,” and not by taxing present income. “Nothing else counts in comparison with this. … In a slump, governmental loan expenditure is the only sure means of obtaining quickly a rising output at rising prices.” Then, in a remarkable reference to what would be a momentous testing of his theories, Keynes added, “That is why a war has always caused intense industrial activity”—and why not use economic methods for “peace and prosperity” instead of “war and destruction”?
“You can tell the professor,” FDR responded coolly through Felix Frankfurter, who was at Oxford and had sent him an advance copy of the letter, “that in regard to public works we shall spend in the next fiscal year nearly twice the amount we are spending in this fiscal year, but there is a practical limit to what the Government can borrow—especially because the banks are offering passive resistance in most of the large centers.”
It was FDR’s “practicality” against Keynes’s theory. Through most of 1934, Roosevelt would stick to his near obsession with cautious spending, with budget balancer Lewis Douglas still at his elbow preaching caution. A year later he was still skeptical of economists, complaining to Berle that “no two or two hundred or two thousand economists, businessmen, or politicians” could agree on anything except short-term policies.
Sail by the stars and not the winds of opinion, Lippmann had urged the president. But the helmsman was trying to find his way through stormy economic seas. Tacking back and forth, he was following known compass directions, familiar landmarks; he could not see much beyond the horizon. The seafarer would sail hour by hour, day by day. It was rather Eleanor Roosevelt who seemed to be guided by the stars, her own strong values of compassion and community. Both were now facing a mighty sea change that would emerge out of the wants and needs of the American populace.